Catch of the Day: The Moon in the Man

My deep dive into the archive may or may not result in a book. But perhaps I can make mysoph useful by reposting essays that meet the Current Standard. I try to review about two weeks of posts per day, and the following from 2011 is the best of today's batch:

Whereas the Moon has to do with reflected, i.e., lunar, knowledge, the Sun has to do with direct perception of truth or reality (which are two sides of the same goround). Obviously, we can see much better when the sun is out and shining.

Or can we? If the sun is too bright, we cannot see at all, as in snowblindness. At the very least, it overpowers more subtle sources of light -- other heavenly bodies that are present but hidden.

After all, it is not as if the cosmos is simply divided into God/not-God, or Creator/creature. Yes, you can certainly look at it that way, and it is not absolutely false to do so. But in so doing, you will miss all the gradations and details of the cosmic hierarchy.

In a way, this is the inverse error of positivism or scientism, whereby the person accepts only empirically verifiable statements or acknowledges only material reality. Do this, and you cut yourself off from the wealth of truth that may be found in literature, art, music, poetry, and religion.

You might say that "religionism" focuses on the absolute sun to the exclusion of the relative moon, while scientism focuses on the relative moon to the exclusion of the absolute sun. The latter can have no real truth, since lunar light obviously presupposes the sun. Science cannot furnish its own light, any more than can the moon.

One can even extend this into politics, in that moonbats need conservatives, whereas conservatives have no need of moonbats. It is not a reversible relation, since moonbats need the wealth of productive citizens in order to "redistribute" it, whereas productive citizens do not need unproductive parasites in order to create wealth. The left eventually runs out of other people's money, but we will never run out of people who want other people's money.

Likewise, the left is every bit as dependent upon truth as we are, otherwise they wouldn't know what to suppress or ban.

Regarding those lesser cosmic lights between sun and earth, you may recall that in the bʘʘk I made reference to "the helpful nonlocal operators standing by, ready to assist you." How does that work? Our Discarnate Acquaintance explains how in the following passage:

You venerate (i.e., love and respect) a non-incarnated being -- a departed person, a saint, a hierarchical being -- in a disinterested manner. Your veneration -- which includes love, respect, gratitude, the desire to conform, etc. -- cannot fail to create an invisible link of sympathy with its object. It may be in a subtle and dramatic way, or rather in a slow, gradual and almost imperceptible way -- this does not matter -- the day will come when you will experience the presence.

This is nothing like a "phantom," "ghost," or some other apparition, but rather, is "a breath of radiant serenity, of which you know with certain knowledge that the source from which it emanates is not at all in you. It influences and fills you but does not take its origin in you; it comes from outside you. Just as in drawing near to a fireplace, that the warmth you feel does not arise from you, but rather from the fireplace, so also do you feel that the breath of serenity in question is due to an objective presence."

Once this nonlocal rapport is established, "it is up to you to remain silently concentrated so that the relationship established is subsequently developed, i.e., that it gains in intensity and clarity -- that it becomes a meeting in full consciousness."

Recall what was said yesterday about the person internalizing a relationship between two poles. For just as a relationship can be mediated by love, two can be bound by hatred. Just as, say, a sexually repressed man may chose to be around women who reject him (so as to externalize the conflict), a dysfunctional people, such as the Palestinians, have formed a truly unbreakable bond with Israel. Hatred makes one believe insane things [think, for example, of all the insanities Democrats believe about Trump; we might well envy them their childlike faith, just not its object.]

For the neurotic person, such an unhealthy bond can be every bit as robust and enduring as a healthy one; in fact, in a sense even stronger, since healthy love eventually transcends its immediate object and points to its divine source, whereas the unhealthy kind is solely focused on its local object, which leads to all sorts of other secondary and tertiary pathologies.

For If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

And The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human. --NGD