The Rupture

The following may be THE principle that divides left and right: "Each of us carries in himself the Image of his own world," projecting "it into a more or less coherent universe, which becomes the stage on which his destiny is played out" (Corbin, in Cheetham).

However, to the extent that we are not conscious of this process of projection, we are likely to experience this self-imposed world as having been imposed by others, or as something concrete and oppressive instead of being a stage of liberation and ascent. Life becomes a grim slog instead of a metaphysical joyride.

Obviously this can only truly apply in a free society, as there are places where one has no choice but to adapt to an imposed world, as in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or academia. At the same time, it is only in a free society that one can vividly see how so many people enclose themselves in various pseudo-realities.

For example, think of the millions of people who believe the "hands up don't shoot" narrative, or that "Bush lied about WMD," or that the 2008 crash was fundamentally caused by "corporate greed" instead of government policies. I mean, I'm as greedy as the next guy. How come I'm not rich?

These and similar worlds are pure projection, for which reason they are impervious to fact, because they are coherent (if narrow) worlds, not theories. They "make sense" to the person who lives in them, even if they cause pain. Or at least they provide a pseudo-explanation for the person's pain. As I said in a tweet, if those Baltimore rioters think they're angry now, wait until they find out they were abandoned by their fathers.

To recognize that we are the author of our own world is a revolution -- a big bang -- as consequential as the prior bangs into matter, life, and mind. But to re-emphasize, this does not in any way equate to subjectivism or relativism.

There is a Real World. It is just that, since each person is unique, so too is their world. It is very much like the idea that there is no such thing as a baby: likewise, there is no such thing as a world, only a world-human dyad.

As Cheetham explains, "philosophy, and indeed rational thought, only reaches its proper culmination in a 'rupture' of plane, a profound event of the soul in which the image of reality so carefully and reasonably established is seen finally to be a product of the soul -- the soul's own projection of its inmost reality."

It is not so much that we abandon the image as transcend it; or, instead of being contained by it, it is contained in us: "It turns the world inside out" (ibid.), such that Person truly becomes the final, unsurpassable, and uncontainable category.

This is what the Raccoon calls "vertical graduation." Conversely -- to paraphrase Don Colacho -- the horizontal world is a school one attends forever without ever obtaining a degree.

You could say that the further leftward one proceeds, the less likely one is to experience the Rupture. At the extreme left, the only possible rupture is Revolution, as in the French revolution, the communist revolution, the Iranian revolution, or the Hopenchange revolution. This is the collective-exteriorization of what is supposed to be an individual-interiorization.

This is what makes the American "revolution" so unique, for it wasn't a revolution at all, rather, the establishment of an "empire of liberty" through which each person was free to pursue his own personal rupture. The left has been trying to clamp down on it ever since.

I mean, look up there at the top of the blog. What does it say? That's right, THE RELIGION THE ALMIGHTY & ME WORKS OUT BETWIXT US. As such, there is no such thing as a Bob, only the GodBob hybrid. I can't tell you what's going to come out ahead of time, because there's another person involved.

Which maybe sounds... I frankly don't know how it sounds, but how could it be otherwise? No human relationship is predictable, nor can it be identical to any other.

What horizontaloids refer to as "the world" is actually contained in another world, a transcendent and immaterial world to which the soul has access. To be in the former world is to be more or less out of the real(er) world. However, the converse is not true, as the higher world contains the lower, just as biology contains physics, not vice versa.

Corbin would say that, to the extent that the higher world is lost, abandoned, or yoinked away from us, we will find ourselves gnostalgically longing for it. Could this be what that mess in Genesis 3 is all about? If it ain't, it'll do until the real mess gets here.

But to mess this up is to mess up the primordial unity of the world -- specifically, the dynamic and creative unity of vertical and horizontal. Then we start looking for the Lost Unity, or in other words, History. History is what happens when you're busy looking for the absent God.

When you reconnect with the missing God, history still happens, only on a higher plane and in a higher key. Again, this is the Rupture, and it works both ways. Christ, for example, is the Rupture of ruptures, crashing so hard into history that the damage is irreparable.

Then, as if that weren't enough, he crashes back out the other end, causing permanent damage to the annoying veil that separates man and God. Thanks to him, we have only to hang on to his coattails, through which we have our own unique relationship with this so-called Father person. Cheetham:

"God is the Unique because God singularizes each thing He touches -- He is unique in the sense that He makes each thing and each person unique." Or, if you want to turn it around, man's uniqueness -- his individual personhood -- is again only conceivable in light of the low & hibrid worked out betwixt this man and that God. This is the opposite of any oppressive, one-size-fits-Allah conceptualization.

Call it polymonotheism.