Progressives & Other Humanized Personifications of the Subversive Aspect of the Centrifugal Existential Power

More of the same, this one on the relation between politics and devilry:

What the devil?

Good question. According Schuon -- and this sounds plausible -- the devil may be thought of as

the humanized personification -- humanized on contact with man -- of the subversive aspect of the centrifugal existential power; not the personification of this power in so far as its mission is positively to manifest Divine Possibility.

(This implies a non-subversive or legitimate aspect of this existential power. We don't have time to trace the implications, but this would go to all those obstacles, trials, and sundry Crosses to Bear that are necessary for our growth and maturity, and without which we would be too comfortable and complacent for our own good.)

In other words, the Absolute, insofar as it manifests in time and space, radiates from a cosmic center to the periphery ("the centrifugal existential power"), somewhat like a series of concentric circles with God at the center. God's energies are like radii emanating from the center outward (or top down), while the different concentric circles are the various levels of being, or the cosmic hierarchy. (You can also picture it as a cone, with the "point" of God at the top, degrees of manifestation below.)

Therefore, although everything is ultimately God, not everything is equally God. The idea that everything is equally God leads to pantheism, which is an indiscriminate flatland philosophy no more sophisticated than bonehead atheism. Call it a metaphysical heresy, one of those possibilities we can eliminate at the outset, like "there is no such thing as truth."

In any event, nothing is that simple, let alone everything.

Yes, ultimately everything "is God" in some sense, but God is not the sum total of everything. Things vary in their proximity to God. You yourself know when you are closer to, or more distant from, God, even though God hasn't gone anywhere. Even a child can see that, say, Notre Dame cathedral is (was) closer to God than the UN building. Come to think of it, the cathedral could be burned to the ground and would still be closer, since the UN building exists in a negative existentiating space.

At any rate, the greater cannot be derived from the lesser, and no merely scientistic theory will ever account for the miracle of the human subject, which represents a miniature "cosmic center" within the whole of existence.

And like the cosmic center of which it is a mirror (the "the centrifugal existential power"), the individual center has a natural tendency to radiate outward and lose itself in the playful phenomena of its own creation, or the form of its own sensibility, as Kant would have it.

However, in its properly balanced way, this radiation leads to further centration, not dissipation. For example, when we love what is beautiful, we identify the soul's "within" by locating it in the without, which has the effect of strengthening our central being. (This is what it means to "form the soul" of the child, which is the whole point of parenting.)

Conversely, if we love that which is ugly or "know" what is false, this has the effect of diminishing our center -- which, at the same time, necessarily pulls us further from God, the cosmic center.

The periphery must be -- i.e., there must be things that are more or less distant from God -- but it doesn't follow that they must be evil. Nevertheless, as Schuon implies, the divine radiation inevitably results in "cosmic interstices," so to speak, where evil enters the picture. This is where the soul-cancers arise and take root. It is one of the inevitable, even though unsanctioned, possibilities of the Divine radiation, somewhat like an existential blood clot. If you will the circulatory system, you may end up with blood clots, even though they aren't the point of the system.

The cosmos is permeated with arteries that carry "oxidized" energies away from God and veins through which creation returns to its source. Only human beings may partake of this vertical circulatory system in a conscious way, and become co-partners in the divine plan. It's an offer we can and do refuse, although no one in their right mind would do so.

On the one hand, creation is already "perfect," being that it created and sustained in, through, and by God. Nevertheless, by virtue of it not being God, it cannot be perfect, but can only "become" perfect (which is to say, move toward its archetypal telos) through man's conscious participation (i.e., cooperating with grace).

Or let us say that perfection is only a possibility because it is woven into the very warp and weft of creation. If it weren't, we wouldn't even have the word. Nor would we have words for truth and beauty if they were not coursing through the arteries of existence as divine possibilities. Truth is either "invented" or it is "discovered." If invented, then it isn't true. And if discovered, then it is of God -- or at least underwritten by God, the Absolute. Truth or atheism: take your pick.

Today (as always) we find ourselves in a struggle of truly cosmic proportions between forces representing the human personification of the Subversive Aspect of the Centrifugal Existentiating Power -- which is a very real, even if derivative and parasitic, power -- and those representing the center (or evolutionary return to the center).

It's funny where one can pick up important ideas, but a couple days ago I heard a promo for the new Dennis Miller radio program. In reference to the weather hysteria of Al Gore, Miller said words to the effect of, "hey, I'm not worried about the earth -- I'm worried about the world."

Exactly. The earth is simply a physical object deposited somewhere at the periphery creation. It is both anywhere and nowhere. The human world, on the other hand, is very near the top -- or at least the bottom of the top. If you imagine the earth is a fragile and delicate thing but the world is not, then you are quite naive, and possibly on the way to becoming a Humanoid Personification of the Subversive Aspect of the Centrifugal Existential Power.

Now, the cosmo-political battle in which we are (always) engaged is ultimately between forces who deny hierarchy and those who affirm it; and those power-mad drunks who ride the centrifugal waves to the periphery, vs. those who soberly partake of the centripetal return.

Importantly, those who deny hierarchy do so -- either consciously or unconsciously -- with the intention of replacing our naturally supernatural hierarchy with their own illegitimate, infra-natural one. This is where all the false absolutes of the left enter the picture and set up shop (remember those cosmic interstices alluded to above). Left alone they become cancers, which means that, as they grow in strength and intensity, they actually begin to take on a gravitational attraction of their own. It's why, say, AOC has become so popular: she is a personification par excellence of the Subversive Aspect of the Centrifugal Existential Power.

You might even say that these idols participate (or graft themselves to the vine of) an alternative cosmic center that sets itself against the real one. It opposes and arrests progress -- the cosmic return -- by pulling both the innocent and guilty into its dark principalities. Its methods are moral relativism, multiculturalism, and "critical theory," or deconstruction; its defender and guarantor is the coercion of political correctness rather than the "lure" of Truth; and its goal is the reversal of the cosmic order, the institutionalization of the Fall, the obliteration of the vertical, and the exaltation (and therefore bestialization) of man, thus sealing his spiritual fate and ending the possibility of divine co-creation and theosis, or God-realization.

It is appropriate that these cosmic tyrants are called "Democrats," for democracy is a system of information flow that can lead to the higher or to the lower. In fact, it will inevitably lead to the lower if we do not acknowledge at the outset that there is a higher toward which democracy must orient itself (for example, the preservation of our natural rights, including of course freedom of speech). In other words, in the absence of hierarchy, demo-cracy will become exactly what the word implies, which is to say, tyranny of the horizontalized masses, or demo-crazies.

The crazies of the left are half correct, in that we are ultimately faced with the choice between democracy and theocracy. Our founders, in their infinite wisdom, chose theo-cracy, in the sense that the only legitimate purpose of democracy could be to preserve and protect the spiritual freedom -- the complementary rights and obligations -- of the properly theocentric individual. In short, they created a benign theocracy that would be mediated not from the top down -- which is never a real theocracy, but man-archy -- through thousands and now millions of individual godlings, or "divine centers." But a democracy mediated by mere animal-men will sooner or later lead to the Reign of the Beast. The Founders were well aware of this and wrote of it at length (i.e., the need for virtuous citizens oriented toward transcendence).

In the specific sense we are using the word, theocracy is "the only guarantee of a realistic liberty" (Schuon). Otherwise, the centrifugal riptide in which secular man stands soon leads to the following ideas: that "truth amounts to the belief of the majority," and therefore, that the majority for all intents and purposes creates the truth, which is one of the explicit assumptions of the left -- i.e., "perception is reality."

The adage vox populi vox Dei has no meaning except in a religious framework which confers a function of “medium” on the crowds; they then express themselves not by thought but by intuition and under the influence of Heaven..., so that the feeling of the majority coincides in any case with what may be called “the good".... --F. Schuon

Here begins the gospel of Hell: In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing. --NGD