How to Create and Maintain Your Own Psychic Imprisonment

The Devil Card, writes Tomberg, shows how "beings can forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity which makes them degenerate by rendering them similar to it."

Which is precisely why leftists have degenerated into the demons they have created: they fear fascism but they are the fascists; they detest racism while being race-obsessed; they hate intolerance while being absolutely intolerant of dissent; they attack misogyny while devaluing womanhood; they clamor for unity while sowing division; etc.

The lesson of the card revolves around "the generation of demons and of the power that they have over those who generate them." It is a kind of inverse analogy of the Creator who is sovereign over his creation, such that the creator of artificial beings becomes "a slave of his own creation."

You might say that the higher man rises (in his own estimation) the farther he falls. Isn't this just Genesis 3 all over again? You have to pay the cost to be the boss, and the cost is measured in our depth of fallenness.

Show me a leftist and I will show you a slave. The black who is persecuted by "white privilege" is simply forging the chains of his own imaginary enslavement. Likewise women who fancy themselves victims of the "patriarchy," or an "LGBTQ community" that imagines we think about them at all, unless they are doing distasteful things in public or in front of the children.

Anyone can be free, but there is a cost. One of the costs is personal responsibility, which is too high a price for most people, certainly on the left. There you find people for whom merely purchasing birth control -- "controlling your own body" -- is too much of a burden, or school choice an intolerable imposition.

Tomberg properly characterizes these demons as semi-autonomous "parasitic entities" that "are to the psychic organism what, for example, cancer is to the physical organism." What is cancer? It is an autonomous, runaway order within one's own order, so to speak. The body can have only one order. Introduce a second order, and chaos is generated.

It is the same with the mind. I am reminded of a crack by Schuon to the effect that "The noble man is one who dominates himself; the holy man is one who transcends himself. Nobility and holiness are the imperatives of the human state." I ask you: when is the last time you saw a leftist who dominates, much less transcends, himself? Rather, we see (as discussed in yesterday's post) intoxicated counter-inspiration.

It really comes down to what the mind is for, doesn't it? Which is really another way of asking what man is for. Which is what? I would suggest that the purpose of man is to think, for if he can't properly do that, then he's not good for much else. But thinking presupposes a great deal, including freedom, responsibility, and a love of truth. Eliminate truth, then thinking is pointless; eliminate freedom and it is impossible; eliminate responsibility and it becomes passionately egotistical.

While looking up that Schuon quote I found some others that go to our subject: "The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute." Leftists are, of course, moral relativists and multiculturalists. Which means they are worthless men, precisely -- not because I say so, but because this is the verdict they have rendered upon themselves. "Absolute relativism" equates to total stupidity and redounds to unfettered depravity.

"The paradox of the human condition is that nothing could be more contrary to us than the requirement to transcend ourselves, and yet nothing could be more essentially ourselves than the core of this requirement or the fruit of this self-overcoming."

Self-overcoming. This goes to one of the essential divides between left and right: the conservative blames himself for his failures, while the leftist blames "the system" or "white privilege" or some other imaginary construct. The whole purpose of leftism is to externalize agency, in such a way that one's own freedom is projected into malevolent others. For the left, the only truly "free" people are the ones controlling, dominating, and oppressing them in their imaginations, the "one percent," or "corporate America," or whatever.

Last night I heard a bit of a talk by Dennis Prager and Adam Corolla. As we know, for the left, all people of pallor are racist. Corolla equated this to saying that "all people are arsonists." Well, that may be true, but what we care about are people who actually set fires, not people who might theoretically want to set them.

The latter drains the term of all meaning -- as does the left's absurd definition of racism. If everyone is a racist then no one is a racist. As such, Corolla pointed out that there has never been a better time to be an actual racist (or Nazi), since the real racists are lumped in with some of the finest and most decent people in the world.

What essentially happens with the fall? Well, one thing is that the will dominates the intelligence. We "know better," but our willfulness hijacks the intellect and down we go. In the properly ordered soul, the will is "a prolongation or complement of the intelligence." And the intellect must be oriented to, and grounded in, the Absolute, without which it is just a planet with no sun (which is no planet at all, just a wandering fragment of space junk).

Thus, "The way towards God always involves an inversion" (of the willful plunge alluded to above): "from outwardness one must pass to inwardness, from multiplicity to unity, from dispersion to concentration, from egoism to detachment, from passion to serenity."

Basically this means that we operate from the center-out rather than vice versa (and our center is a vertical reflection of the Center). "The greatest calamity is the loss of the center and the abandonment of the soul to the caprices of the periphery." But -- to get back to our main subject -- this is precisely the meaning of Diabolos, which is to divide and scatter; and then accuse and slander.