Memoirs of a Frivolous Man

Well, this is heartening: "I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account" (Lichtenberg, in Kimball). Therefore, when you keep a book in your library, it's like eating your cake and having it too.

I sometimes think I have too many books, but then it occurs to me that their presence is just a kind of accident of the medium.

For example, think of what your house would look like if you were physically surrounded by every movie and television show you had ever watched. It is a blessing that those generally weightless things disappear, for it would be depressing to be reminded of all that wasted time. It would be a monument to a misspent life, like a Grammy, or a Nobel Peace Prize.

At least my survivors will look at my liberatory and know that I tried, and as mentioned the other day, if you can't surpass even yourself, then you're not trying very hard.

What is a wasted life, anyway? One can only not waste it if it has an actual purpose. If life has no purpose, then the whole thing is just a profligate waste of time and energy, a meaningless blip amidst the entropy. Which is why Camus made that crack about suicide being the only valid philosophical question. If you say No to suicide, it implies a reason for living.

In reading this book about Israel, which followed the book on Churchill, I can't help thinking what a frivolous wastrel I am. It reminds me of Dr. Johnson's crack about how every man thinks badly of himself for not having been a soldier or at sea (I've been adrift, but it wasn't at sea).

I don't so much think about the latter, but when you read about real courage, it helps you understand why the left would vilify the military, the police, and past American heroes in general. Just as they don't understand evil, for the same reason they don't understand courage. Which is why leftists such as John Kerry or Dick Durbin accuse our soldiers of being terrorists and Nazis, while praising the incredible courage of Brucelyn Jenner. One of these is not like the other.

Having said that, there must be a place for the entirely frivolous man, for the same reason there is a place for music, comedy, art, and literature. A long time ago I came up with the brilliant rationalization that someone has to just enjoy life, otherwise what's all this fussing and fighting about?

In other words, assuming we're fighting -- whether militarily or politically -- for a purpose, then what is that purpose? What can it be aside from "living a good life"? If the good life is impossible for man, then why bother fighting for it?

I say, dammit, someone needs to prove that this so-called good life is actually possible, or else we're fighting over an illusion. Call it the Courage to be Frivolous.

Look at the left, for example. They never stop fighting, but are they ever happy? Of course not. Any victory only makes them hungry for more, since you can never get enough of what you don't really need. They won't rest until earth is heaven, which can only occur by turning it into hell. Call it the bad- or heteroparadox of the left.

I just read a biography of Giuliani that shows how he utterly transformed New York from the dangerous and increasingly unlivable hellhole it had become in the early 1990s to a once again thriving necropolis. I won't bore you with statistics, but suffice it to say that this didn't make the left happy. Miserable, rather.

Al Sharpton, for example, called Giuliani the worst mayor in world history -- as if anyone could know that -- because 1) he showed how liberal ideas created and maintained the mess, and 2) threatened to put people like Sharpton and Rangle and Cuomo out of business. Not to mention the thousands of black lives that were spared from black predators because of the incredible drop in crime. The left wants more crime, as in St. Louis and Baltimore.

Job One of the left is always about creating the misery from which they promise to rescue its victims with more of the same. It never works (in the world), but always works (at the polls). If nothing else, it sheds light on the deep structure of man's soul, since every generation falls for the same trick. To put it another way, to expose the trick is to illuminate man, naked and shivering, without so much as a fig leaf of tenure.

But we're getting off track here, because this current train of thought began with the intention of propagating a little joy in these trying times. Remember the reader who emailed me for advice on how to cope with the madness? One excellent way is to go on enjoying life despite the best efforts of these miserable bastards to immiserate us all.

This is what Dávila did, and this is the nonlocal source of the aphorisms. For example, I do not belong to a world that is passing away. I prolong and transmit a truth that does not die. We live in that sacred space into which truth flows like crystal waters, and we mustn't confuse this with the merely gross-physical world of the left.

And Christianity does not solve 'problems'; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level.

Imagine how much happier the left would be if they aspired to this instead of scouring the world for imaginary microaggressions. What a recipe for misery! Not only that, but they ignore the macroaggressions, like, I don't know, A GLOBAL FUCKING RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT THAT WANTS TO SHOVE YOUR GENITALS DOWN YOUR THROAT BEFORE CUTTING OFF YOUR HEAD.

When he died, Christ did not leave behind documents, but disciples.

In other words, what he left behind were dramatically and permanently changed individuals. The subsequent book is a consequence of the people, not vice versa. Or, its purpose is not so much to "learn" as to recapitulate the Personal Change -- the metanoia -- that brought it about. Thus, The Bible is not the voice of God, but of the man who encounters him.

About my abject cowardice alluded to above: just how would one go about proving one is not a coward? That is what Dr. J. means by the regret over having not been a soldier. Ultimately, the only way to prove one's courage is to look death straight in the eye without flinching.

Likewise, how would one express truly selfless love, in which there is nothing in it for the lover? Yes, by dying. Anything short of this might be suspected of self-interest, which is why Jesus in principle transcends any such self-interest.

Which is also why, as Dávila says, Man is only important if it is true that a God has died for him.

Wo. That is deep. For The importance it attributes to man is the enigma of Christianity.

So, cheer up. Life has a point and you actually matter. And remember,

Whoever is not ready to prefer defeat in certain circumstances sooner or later commits the very crimes he denounces. Or just say GOP, the Gratuitous Old Pussies.

Life Beside the Point

Retracing our steps back to where we started yesterday, we were discussing Dávila's Annotations on an Implicit Text, but couldn't get past the marvelous implications of a cosmic text which explicates the nonlocal implicate order. Or in other words, that we may know and talk about God, or the Ultimate Real, in a way that is both specific and inexhaustible, for it is like trying to map a hyperdimensional reality in 3D.

Just as there is an infinite number of points in a line, or an infinite number of lines in a plane, you might say there is an infinite number of aphorisms about the Creator. Theology is inexhaustible because its subject is.

An aphorism is a mode of expression that conveys the maximum with the minimum, and as far as I know, Dávila is the greatest of all aphorists. All others are number two or lower.

Lichtenberg said of his own aphorisms that if they "fall on the right soil" they "may grow into chapters and even whole dissertations" (in Kimball). That is certainly the case with Dávila. How does that work? How does one pack so much power into so little a space?

Most tenured babble is precisely the opposite: it requires whole books to convey a single pedestrian thought, and oftentimes not even that. You can always tell when a book is of this nature when it has a blurb from some mainstream figure such as Tom Brokaw, or a NY Times reviewer, or Katie Couric, or a politician. Such names guarantee banality.

On the other hand, not only does no one within the conspiracy know of Dávila, if he were known, he'd be treated like Donald Trump. For they wouldn't understand Dávila, but only know he is saying Forbidden Things that must be reflexively attacked.

"One commentator," writes Kimball, described Lichtenberg as a "spy on humanity," and you know what they do to captured spies. In Obamaworld it is as if we are spies exiled in our own land. Living as I do in the one party state of California, I am forced to supra-sist as a deep cover agent. Fortunately there are other agents whom we are able to detect through the operation of our regular-guydar.

Of Lichtenberg, Kimball writes that his aphorisms present "not so much a system as a sensibility, a take on the world." Same with Dávila. He is coming from the same place he is describing. I like to think I do the same thing, only ad nauseum.

Even so, I am always mindful of getting the strunk out of my white and Omitting Needless Words. I realize you folks don't have all day, and if I had all day, I could perhaps pack it all into an aphorism. My #1 excuse is that my primary audience is me, and that I simply allow others to spy on my improvisations. So you have no one to blame but yourselves.

"A man of prodigious but unfocused curiosity, [he] dabbled everywhere but persevered nowhere" (Kimball).

Hey, that's an insult! No, wait. He's talking about Lichtenberg.

"Aphorisms are insights shorn of supporting ratiocination" (ibid). Think about that: they are the direct transmission of an insight. Therefore, they are like ex-sights dropped into your head.

Kimball says that when Bertrand Russell told Wittgenstein to, hey, feel free to provide an actual argument for what you just said, LudWitt "replied that arguments spoil the beauty of insights and that 'he would feel as if he was dirtying a flower with muddy hands.'"

I heard that. Is that what I'm doing by blogviating on Dávila's aphorisms, as I am no doubt about to do? Am I defeating their purpose by explicating what is implicate?

For "A ponderous aphorism is a failed aphorism." And "like an electric flash on a camera, they require time between discharges if they are to be fully illuminating" (Kimball). You have to allow them to sink in and do their work. Example:

"With most people disbelief in a thing is founded on blind belief in something else" (Lichtenberg).

Now, I could go on and on about that one, but the arkive reveals that I already have, so I'll let it go.

"Having a low opinion of human nature may not be a prerequisite for being a good aphorist. But it helps" (Kimball).

I don't know about that, for if you don't have a low opinion of human nature, it is doubtful that you have any wisdom to convey. After all, thinking well of human nature is among the most catastrophic principles of the left: you know, they love mankind. It's individual human beings they hate.

"Aphorists are by profession debunkers" (ibid). Here again, this is why members of the conspiracy cannot be good aphorists. Think of a Bill Maher. He's got the cynicism and the brevity, but they are in the service of rebunking (e.g., AGW, Christianity, redefinition of marriage, etc).

Not to sound like a leftist, but you could almost say that power makes a poor aphorist. Imagine Hillary making a witty comment. Debunking power is the power of the aphorist. Or one of them, anyway.

Question and answer: Lichtenberg: When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it have always come from the book? Dávila: The collision with an intelligent book makes us see a thousand stars.

Now, watch how quickly I can assemble a few of Dávila's aphorisms that express everything in this post in concentrated form:

To write honestly for the rest, one must write fundamentally for oneself.

Check.

For The first step of wisdom is to admit, with good humor, that there is no reason why our ideas should interest anybody.

Double check.

Words do not communicate, they remind.

Ever gnosis that? It's why arguments are not necessarily necessary, and may just obscure the insight.

Clarity is the virtue of a man who does not distrust what he says. Think of the clarity of a Thomas Sowell vs. the tortured and torturing obscurity of the tenured.

For The writer who has not tortured his sentences tortures the reader. And Prolixity is not an excess of words but a dearth of ideas. Boy is that true of the left! Ever notice how they go on and on without saying anything substantive? To be a leftist is to be entirely beside the point.

The fewer adjectives we waste, the more difficult it is to lie. Here again, if you remove the hysterical adjectives from a leftist's speech, there is nothing left. A lie surrounded by a bodyguard of adjectives doesn't make it true.

A very consoling one for these endarkened times: I do not belong to a world that is passing away. I prolong and transmit a truth that does not die.

Boom!

Besides, When one century's writers can write nothing but boring things, we readers change century.

And Unless what we write seems obsolete to modern man, immature to the adult, trivial to the serious man, we must start over.

I can only hope this post was obsolete, immature, and trivial enough for you.

Non-doodling in the Margin between Man and God

Dávila called his aphorisms Annotations on an Implicit Text; "annotations" is a much better translation than "scholia," but unfortunately, this is the only authorized English edition of Dávila's works, and it is filled with similarly negaesthetic translations. For in addition to the wisdom, irony, and humor, the aphorisms are often clothed in pure poetic beauty, and there are much better translations floating around the ether.

I remember Roger Kimball discussing another aphorist, G.C. Lichtenberg, in his Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse. Which is not to say I remember anything about what he said. That's what highlighting is for. Or my annotations to Kimball's explicit text. While I'm warming up here, let's learn a little something about the whole genre of aphorisms.

Before getting to Kimball, think about that title: annotations on an implicit text. What is this text? You could say it is the Transcendent Real, or the nonlocal object to which the intellect is strangely proportioned. There's a lot of weird stuff going on down here, but that has to be among the weirdest.

Because it is nonlocal, the text cannot be seen or touched, and yet, it can easily be sensed, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation (for the past ten years), nor would religion converge upon anything. Rather, as the atheist believes, it would be just nonsense about nothing instead of non-sensuous intellection of the implicate metacosmic order.

Forgive this brief bit of gnostalgia, but one of the first books that opened my eyes to the wider world was Wholeness and the Implicate Order, by physicist and FOE (Friend of Einstein) David Bohm. You see, at the time, science was the only vertical gate available to me, so thank God for rebellious scientists who think outside the tenured box of settled science.

Lng stry shrt, I went on to write my dissertation on the freakish commonality between Bohm's vision of the cosmos and psychoanalyst W.R. Bion's vision of the psyche, and here we are, pretty much engaged in the same oldenpneumagain verticalisthenic gymgnostics every morning. The annotations change but the text remains the same. You could say that both macrocosm and microcosm are implicit, and that it is our task to explicate the fractal links between.

No, seriously. That's what it is. I can't help how I talk.

Now that I think about it, life would scarcely be worth living without links to the Nonlocal Text, for truly, it is these links and nothing else that separate us from the beasts, both human and nonhuman. Are modern and postmodern barbarians losing the ability to intuit and forge the links?

Adoy.

Therefore, man is only forgoing his reason for being. Instead of a being of reason, he is rendering himself an unreasonable being of nonbeing, which is simply what sub-Marxist existentialism does. It is how marriage or gender or even truth itself become just anything instead of specific things.

Note that the word "religion" literally means to "bind," and the binding in question goes precisely to the links between local and nonlocal, macro- and microcosm, heaven and earth, man and God, (¶) and O.

I'll give you a very brief but concrete example. A friend of ours and her 10 or 11 year-old daughter spent last week volunteering at a Haitian orphanage. The mother sent a photo of Julianna holding an adorable baby. But the first thing that occurred to me is that Julianna did not resemble the girl she had been just a week ago. She looked decidedly different -- older, more fully formed, more maternal (but those adjectives are poor substitutes for What I Saw). It wasn't just her expression, mind you; rather, something about her whole being, only transmitted through the photo.

Lng stry shrt, we were babysitting the other children yesterday. When the dad came by to pick them up, he revealed independently that he had seen the identical thing in the photo, to such an extent that he was moved to tears. That is what you call independent convergent testimony of a nonlocal reality. If it were my daughter I would surely have shed a tear as well. The point is that we were both godsmacked by a reality that can only be seen with eyes not made by Darwin.

Or as Dávila himself says, To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place about which the poet sang.

Which is also why it is impossible, try as you might, to photograph a "gay wedding," because such a thing does not exist. Rather, that would be the annotation of a nonexistent or fantasized text, now enforced by the state. In shrt, the state is compelling its subjects to bow down before a completely unreal world which, at the very least, violates the separation between crotch and state.

"Coincdentally," this book by Lings says pretty much the same thing, minus the gratuitous vulgarity. When Churchill discovered that someone before him had stolen his ideas, he called it "anticipatory plagiarism." So somehow, Lings hacked into the future of my blog. Either that or he is annotating the same nonlocal text.

Remember, for Lings, an authentic symbol is a link between worlds, man as such being the quintessential symbol this side of heaven, or perhaps the symbolizing symbol. The Fall means that the link has been severed -- or damaged rather -- with the result that we have been grounded. However, there are heavenly answers to our "wingless predicament," such that we may fly on wings of symbolic slack, so to speak.

"They could be defined as symbolic acts or enacted symbols, providentially endowed with wings for return to their Source..." You might say they are like vertical OMing pigeons, so perhaps the dove in Matthew 3:16 is just an infelicitous translation. In any event, doesn't everybody know -- from the trashman on up -- that this bird is the Word? Or better, the Holy Third, b'atman!

In any event, it is "a life-line thrown down from Heaven; it is for the worshipper to cling to the life-line," but much (or all, depending on how you look at it) "is in the hands of the Thrower," the "Supreme Archetype."

Look, if I can't even surpass myself, that's not saying much, is it? Well, the same applies to you and everyone else. Failure to do this makes you an ambient human, a blob of refried ectoplasm subsisting at cultural room temperature, like the Rainbow People who imagine that all you need is human love.

Which is of course necessary but not sufficient to leave the ground or decipher the text.

Rather, we cannot do it without a Divine Intervention. I mean seriously, who would even attempt to do so without the aid of heaven?

Our nonlocal lifelines "amount to an other-worldly intrusion" manifesting "a real presence of the Infinite in the finite, or the Transformal in the formal."

These come to us fresh every morning, straight from the source, although you might say they are providentially a little half-baked so that man may learn to do a little baking on his own. If they were fully baked, this would, among other things, deprive us of our freedom to eat or not eat the manna. You know what they say: teach a man to bake, and he eats forever...

Returning to the Kimball from whom this post has badly deviated, he cites one of Lichtenberg's more famous aphorisms about certain works -- the type we have been discussing -- being mirrors; when an ape looks into them, no apostle looks out.

Boom! Likewise for the troll, the tenured, the tyrant in robes, who see only the dreary architecture of their own beshriveled souls.

Tough Times Call for Tough Aphorisms

To be born in the United States is to have won the cosmic lottery. However, the left is not only oblivious to this pleasant fact, but determined to do something about it.

When a leftist begins a sentence with the lamentation that We're the only industrialized nation that..., it's time to reach for your revolver. It never occurs to them that we are the greatest nation that has ever existed because we are the only one that doesn't do that retarded shit. But the left won't be happy until we are as miserable as Greece.

Tough times call for tough aphorisms. Either because I am lazy or ambitious, I'm going to review my lengthy collection of Don Colacho-isms, with a particular focus on how to survive our Fundamental Transformation from the only industrialized nation that doesn't to the last one that did. The aphorisms are in italics, my commentary isn't.

Liberty is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different

Or just say Diversity, for what is diversity but mandatory consent to left wing twaddle? Liberal equality used to mean the same rules apply to all. But that naturally results in unequal outcomes, so now they insist on unequal rules in order to ensure equal outcomes. But giving a college degree to a person with an IQ of 85 doesn't magically increase it to 115. Nevertheless, we must pretend it does.

The bourgeoisie is any group of individuals dissatisfied with what they have and satisfied with what they are.

Boom. Here again, the left has no interest in maintaining standards of achievement, because that would result in low "self-esteem" for those who cannot meet the standards.

This is the basis of Justice Kennedy's extra-constitutional whim to redefine marriage: people falling outside that definition might feel bad, so we have to change the standard. They still can't be married, but at least they now have the word, just as Cornell West has a Ph.D., and people on Medicare have a theoretical "access to healthcare." They may die trying to find a doctor who will accept Medicare, but the boost to liberal self-esteem is incalculable.

The United States is the only industrialized nation that maintains a relationship between wanting and achieving! We have to give people what they want without forcing them to actually earn it. Conservatism is fascism! No, wait. It's just liberty.

Authentic intellectual seriousness does not frown, but smiles.

Entirely true. It is why leftist "intellectuals" are such a dreary bunch of church-lady scolds. Churchill made many statements to the same effect. For example, one thing he dreaded about Nazis was the absence of humor. It seems to me that if they had only been capable of laughing at themselves, we could have avoided unspeakable horrors, as in "look at these silly uniforms. They are so gay!" Likewise, I challenge anyone to find a witty comment by an ISIS member.

Or Obama, for that matter (not his teleprompter, mind you). The left doesn't do understatement. Rather, the insane rhetoric is always turned up to eleven. I remember what Tip O'Neil said about President Reagan: "The evil is in the White House at the present time." (No, not the Soviet Union, because you can never be too far left.) "And that evil is a man who has no care and no concern for the working class of America and the future generations of America.... He's cold. He's mean. He's got ice water for blood."

Never mind that the working class did much better under Reagan -- our most conservative modern president -- than under Obama -- our most far left ever. The left doesn't judge outcomes, only its own pure intentions. They frankly can't judge outcomes without ceasing to exist. Thus, judging outcomes is racist-sexist-homophobic. They cut you off before you can even point to them. "But homosexual behavior leads to..." HOMOPHOBE! "But affirmative action only causes..." RACIST! "But lowering standards just to have a Navy SEAL with a vagina will..." SEXIST!

Revolution is progressivist and seeks the strengthening of the state. Rebellion is reactionary and seeks its disappearance.

This is appropriate, with July 4th coming up, for ours was no progressive revolution, but the quintessential reactionary rebellion. It was not to establish new rights but to preserve ancient ones, in particular, from the state. But that won't do, because it puts progressives out of business. Thus, ever since Wilson the left has been trying to eliminate the separation of powers so the State might speak with a single voice and represent the Will of the People.

The Führer Principle. Is there anything it can't solve?

The left's ideas produce revolutions; revolutions produce the right's ideas.

This is because conservatism has no content per se. It depends on what one is conserving. In our case, we specifically wish to conserve the classical conservative liberalism of our founders.

Which is why modern conservatism really didn't become an articulate movement in the United States until the mid 1950s. Prior to the statism of FDR, it really wasn't necessary. Most of Wilson's damage was undone by Coolidge, but the left -- never missing an opportunity to exploit a crisis -- used the stock market crash of 1929 to create an extended depression which it then proposed to cure. Forever.

Thus, we are all forced to live with 1930s solutions to 21st century problems, e.g., social security. But that is very much like suicide, another permanent solution to a temporary problem. Now we have a permanent problem with no solution, i.e., trillions of dollars of unfundable mandates because of the left's extravagant generosity with other people's money.

With the categories admitted by the modern mind we do not succeed in understanding anything but trifles.

Boy and how. Or as they say in Colombia, aye mamacita! Reduced to thinking within the lines of modernity, I couldn't think at all. Very shortly after receiving my Ph.D., I realized that the rest of my life would simply be more of the same. It is the "last degree," meaning that it is not so much an attainment as confinement. Forced to think in terms of modern psychology, life would hardly be worth living.

For There are no ideas that expand the intelligence, but there are ideas that shrink it. Intelligence is what it is, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Our intelligence is always condemned to transcend the intelligible, which is why it is here.

It reminds me of the volume knob on a pre-amplifier. It doesn't actually "turn up" the volume. Rather, it is a limiting device that turns it down. You could say that academia is a giant volume knob deployed to turn down intelligence. It is why conservatism is not permitted there, because it would interfere with all the beautiful diversity of monotonous opinion.

Besides, the fool calls conclusions he does not understand 'prejudices'. You don't believe the constitution doesn't grant the Supreme Court the power to redefine marriage? Bigot! Why understand arguments when you can condemn motives?

And the antepenultimate aphorism above goes immediately to this next one: If we could demonstrate the existence of God, everything would eventually be subjected to the sovereignty of man. You might say that because God, we are always free of the left's ideology. Without God, we are trapped inside some hideous ideological gulag with no vertical escape hatch.

That's about it for today.

Dispassionate Hatred

Picking up the theme from yesterday's brief post, it is not as if life without the left would somehow be paradise. Rather, the problem is man, and man only. Thus, the left is just like man, only worse. It simply exaggerates what is worst in man -- envy, ingratitude, entitlement, pettiness, perversion, dishonesty, etc. -- and then turns it into virtue before going on to subsidize it.

For the spiritually awake, one of the most subtly dangerous aspects of the left is that it makes it so easy to feel superior. I alluded to this in yesterday's post, and it's a real temptation. When Jesus enjoins us to love the enemy, he is conveying a deeper lesson than just Unreasonable Niceness.

Rather, if not done in the proper spirit, criticism can become a covert vehicle to elevate and exalt the self. Hatred would be just an extreme case: it is as if by hating the object, we unconsciously justify ourselves, such that God's forgiving grace is not needed.

I would even go so far as to say that -- so long as we have deeply internalized the lesson above -- we are free to hate what is properly hateful. But few people can pull this off without the thrill of auto-salvation. It is analogous to, say, a saint being able to sleep in a bed full of naked supermodels and not have a lustful thought, even while appreciating their beauty. The point is, the spontaneous aversion of hatred can be a kind of dispassionate discernment, but it rarely is.

I have only to think back on my own irrational hatreds of the past to see how this works. I suppose I hated Reagan at the time. Certainly I agreed with all the hateful things the left said about him and about conservatives more generally, which automatically placed me on a plane of completely unmerited, even delusional, superiority -- as when, say, a squalid creature such as Al Sharpton rebukes an Antonin Scalia.

So, it's preferable to just hate without being hateful, i.e., to not enjoy that secret thrill of hating. In ten years of blogging, I can't recall ever making an angry comment to a troll. Rather, I find a way to make them appear ridiculous.

What was the real Last Temptation of Christ? Perhaps it was the temptation to hate his executioners, otherwise why ask the Father to forgive them? Likewise, forgive Justice Kennedy, because he is utterly without a clue.

One book that really gets deeply into this whole discernment-of-hatred business is Christ the Eternal Tao. The key principle, if I recall correctly, is that we all have a higher and lower nature, and that it is the task of the higher to detach -- or distance, rather -- itself from the lower, so as to observe it without being caught up in it.

In a certain sense, this goes to the distinction between our animal and properly human natures. For example, why do we wear clothing instead of going about naked, as they do in San Francisco? What's the big deal? What's your hang-up? In the Jewish tradition, the purpose of clothing is to elevate us above the beasts. Which is why San Francisco is so bestial.

Man is composed of body, soul, and spirit; or soma, psyche, and pneuma. It is possible for one's being to be conditioned from the bottom up, when the whole freaking point -- at least in the Judeo-Christian view -- is to be conditioned from the top down so as to humanize the animals we are (not to animalize the human, which is literally the project of the left. Which I can affirm with no hatred whatsoever).

As we have discussed in the past, man has two sets of defense mechanisms, one against the lower, the other against the higher. Few animal types can successfully sink all the way down to animality.

Take the example of an ACLU lawyer, defending the right of a high school student to wear a t-shirt saying SUCK MY DICK. I am waiting for the day one of these pasty-faced legal adventurers has the courage of his convictions and wears such shirt to court. But most liberals do not practice what they preach, or they would be as dysfunctional as the people who actually live liberal ideas, as in the inner cities.

You could say there are three main attractors in the human state: call them unconscious, ego, and supra-conscious. In Vedanta they are called sattva, rajas, and tamas (the gunas), for these are an expression of universal metaphysics. In short, there are luminous and "ascending" types, just as there are tenebrous and descending types. The middle area is not necessarily "bad," as these can be positively expansive types. Furthermore, everyone has a mixture of the three, with one guna typically predominating.

People who are spontaneously attracted to God are likely of an ascending nature. Conversely, most people who are spontaneously attracted to politics are of a rajasic nature -- say, Bill Clinton, who is rajas-tamasic all the way down. There is no higher in him, only its facsimile. Obama is an even more dangerous case, for he was elected on the basis of a kind of meretricious sattva ("the Lightbringer"), which is an inverse analogy of hell. Which I say with no hatred in my heart.

From Christ the Eternal Tao: the wrong kind of condemnation "is a kind of mechanism which the ego uses in order to immediately exalt itself over something or someone..." But "When we are truly humble and in submission to God, it is possible to discern right from wrong without judging or condemning."

In other words, it is possible to be godly without presuming to be God. This egoic judgment is wrong to the extent that it is "made in order to feel more right than the person whom we have judged." It blocks the path to God, as opposed to dilating it via humility.

Metanoia -- the second birth -- is really a reorientation to the Great Attractor. "Along with this comes the yearning... for that which separates us from Him to be removed..." And "We know that our metanoia is genuine -- that is, that a Divine change has really occurred in us -- when we have a revulsion for what before appeared sweet to us."

I don't know about you, but my old self not only nauseates me, but I am always mindful that there but for the grace of God...

Which is what occurs to me when dealing with a troll, as in yesterday's post. "[W]e still carry within ourselves the inclination and habit to return to our former condition." For example, I could have a head injury, or a stroke, and somehow regress to my former self, and I don't think it would be right to hate me for that, but rather, to have compassion.

Looked at this way, it is as the Tao says -- something to the effect of, "What is a bad man but a good man's teacher?" Each one is a kind of object lesson which we should learn in all humility. Trolls are stepping stones to our better selves. When Jesus says "resist not evil," I don't think he means to just "let it go," but rather, to rise above it, i.e., do not engage it on its own level.

Here again, this is one thing that really impresses about Churchill. He did what was necessary to eradicate evil without getting caught up in the pleasure of being superior to fascists. But now we are denied not only the pleasure, but even the superiority over our Islamic enemy. For the left, the only permissible pleasure is the participation in our own well deserved destruction.

How to Survive the New Dark Ages

A longtime reader has asked me for advice on how to cope with the new Dark Age we are living through. I am sure he speaks for dozens when he describes the president as "that shameless, lying con-man" who "goes on about how 'love wins' when in 2008 he claimed that same love to be a bit more restricted."

Actually, he claimed that as recently as three years ago. And it is not so much love that won, but greed, being that millions of dollars from Hollywood bundlers was at stake. Money talks, sodomy walks.

But the following plea pierces the Gagdad heart:

"Since I last wrote to you I have been through a lot of twists and turns came back to God, to Christianity. I've had moments where I thought my heart would float out of my chest; I can't get enough. But so much hate has come to the surface in the last two days that I think I may as well throw in the towel in regards to friendship with God. He tells me to love my enemies when in fact I HATE them, lying sacks of shit they are. I feel I have no way I can call myself a Christian with this in my heart, and the ease in which it bubbles up" (italics mine).

It is the italicized part that most troubles me. Who ever said we are not supposed to hate evil? To the contrary, God hates evil, and wishes for us to burn it from our midst. It's just that it costs nothing to be polite while doing so. When Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down this fucking wall, did he sound angry to you? No, of course not. Resolute, maybe. Unambiguous. But he was just transmitting the gift of truth, which must occasionally be delivered at the end of a hammer. That's not hate, even if it leaves a few lumps.

The key, I think, is that you have to learn to be dispassionate about it, or else you run the risk of living like the perpetually self-righteous leftist who actually enjoys being sunk in his hatreds. This is why they can never be satisfied, and why victory only causes them to be more frenzied, since you can never get enough of what you don't really need.

A leftist can always find a way to be be miserable, if only because that is what envy does. Envy is one of the two or three keys to unhappiness. Ingratitude would be another. And let's not forget hope for the world (or, God forbid, hope for man, of all things!).

Conversely, a Christian can always find an excuse to be joyous. Remember the martyrs? Besides, You will be persecuted for my sake. That's just the terrestrial cost of doing isness with God. Be prepared for more, since this is not about love for homosexuals but hatred of the divine order, AKA reality.

On the positive side, light shines all the more brightly in the dark.

To help this reader and perhaps help ourselves, I would like to throw this subject out to the wider coonosphere: how are you dealing with the madness? What's your secret, you unreasonably happy bastards?