Naughty Self-Esteem vs. Nice Self-Objectivity

Just a short post. Still recovering from this cold...

Where the Conspiracy teaches self-esteem, the Raccoon practices self-objectivity. Imagine, for example, if for just one moment Obama could be objective toward his (false) self instead of in love with it.

Does anyone think he could tolerate the shame? In fact, shame-intolerance is at the heart of narcissism; the false self of the narcissist is specifically erected in order to bypass shame. The shame is still there, only denied and projected.

For example, when Obama claimed that his political opponents treat him like a dog, that is projected shame. At the same time, shame is easily fungible to racial terms; in other words, the interior shame is projected into fantasized racial animus. It is far less painful to be persecuted by imaginary racists than to endure dysregulated shame.

Mouravieff discusses this from a number of angles. For example, he says that it is necessary to "go back carefully through the film" of our lives, in order to 1) "distinguish objectively... between permanent, eternal elements and temporary karmic ones"; and 2) "stimulate a strong desire to cross" what he calls the "second threshold" (which basically involves freeing ourselves of those worldly and horizontal 'A' influences discussed in last Thursday's post).

The person who attempts this "will see himself objectively, as he is, with no make-up, without the least justification or compromise, and with no possibility of evasion."

You could say that this is analogous to how God sees us, without so much as a fig-leaf of self-deceptive auto-pullwoolery. Consistent with what was said above about Obama, Mouravieff suggests that "For the unjust... this vision of oneself seems terrifying."

All of our customary defense mechanisms and rationalizations and self-justifications are stripped away: "all the buffers, all the auto-tranquilizers must be broken and thrown away. All debts must be paid in the proper coin."

So, it's a dark night thingy. But "If he runs away from this monster -- in which he must recognize himself -- this will be the fall, full of the worst dangers."

I'm pretty sure that every man is given the opportunity at least once in his life to visit this crossroads and make his adjustments accordingly. You can run away, but please be aware that you will be chased. And if caught, you will actually be given another opportunity to repent.

I suppose most people will simply project their demon, as does Obama: "Weak and pitiful, yet demanding and cruel, exterior man always blames other people or circumstances for his lack of success. Everybody and everything are at fault except himself."

This is the inevitable result of the left's victim culture, in that the victim always comes for the weakness but stays for the cruelty, e.g., the campus crybullies (who likewise start with the crying and end with the bullying). All tyrants start with victimhood -- by Jews, by the bourgeois, by the Patriarchy, by White Privilege, whatever.

Such an exterior man is "only a child," and "in most cases, a naughty child." And you don't really leave the naughtiness behind until you extricate yourself from the 'A' influences and rise into the orbit of the 'B.' This is the only real revolution, because again, it represents a reversal of the original Fall.

Perhaps "revolution" is the wrong word, since a revolution is simply a circle, whereas what we want is the spiral: "The curve of life, which for exterior man does not in practice differ from a circle, transforms itself into a spiral and does not end..."

This is the achievement of vertical liftoff, whereas the exterior man simply changes the sets and rearranges the furniture in his film in order to give himself a temporary feeling of being alive with novelty.

Interestingly, we often have to live out our movie until it ends, in order to see its futility. Lucky is the man who can look ahead and see where the script is leading!

I've always remembered one line from this book -- that man must "go in search of the being without whom he is not real." Just as the baby is "made real" by the mother's loving smile, you could say that a man is only made real by his relationship to the nonlocal Father.