Escaping into Reality

Do you sometimes want to just leave politics behind and escape into reality? 

I know I do, but let me first get some aphorisms off my chest: 

God gave man the miraculous power to name things. True, but Satan gives progressives the magical power to rename them. 

"Hate speech," "spreading disinformation," and "community standards" are to language as the Fugitive Slave Act was to freedom.

The materialist can never make ends meet. 

You can't fix your own life by meddling in other people's lives. Progressive: hold my cruelty-free nonalcoholic soybrew!

In four months, Biden has proved himself unfit to conduct peace.

The credo of the left: in weakness, victimhood; in strength, revenge. 

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the authority of the progressive State, the right of George Soros to fund BLM and AntiFa shall not be infringed.

Man is a political animal. The progressive tribalist is an animal with politics.

Intersectionality is an analytical framework for understanding the oppressive dialectic between indoctrination and stupidity.

Africans live in a world of pure black privilege. Unless they can escape to a place with white privilege.

A decadent paradigm becomes more complex in order to account for its lack of explanatory power. Anti-racism is the search for epicycles within epicycles to account for black failure. 

Social and economic problems are answers to the left's solutions.

The left says Israel's response to the Palestinians is disproportionate. True, but do they really want Israel to commit genocide? 

Reality. See sidebar for details. I'm reading it at a leisurely pace because I am a Man of Leisure, and Leisure isn't just anything, let alone nothing, but perhaps -- now that I think about it -- the key to Reality, but only literally. 

Business is to Isness as is Toil to Leisure, the latter being the telos of the former (which is one way to make ends meet, alluding to the cryptic aphorism above). Not for nothing is Leisure the very Basis of Culture.

I'm referring of course to Josef Pieper's koon klassic, Leisure, which I haven't flipped through in years, but I'll bet has something to say about this post. From the Amazon page (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1586172565?ie=UTF8&tag=onecos-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=1586172565):

Leisure is an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to perceive the reality of the world. Pieper.... points out that religion can be born only in leisure -- a leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture. 

Pieper maintains that our bourgeois world of total labor has vanquished leisure, and issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture -- and ourselves (emphases mine).

That little passage has a bit of everything: mind, soul, culture, perception, God, world, reality, contemplation, silence, insight, and non-doing, and/or their destruction. In short: Slack and the unending conspiracy against it.   

"But I'm a novice at this reality isness. Where do I begin?"

Are you a troll? Because I don't troll on Shabbos. 

I don't know. What would Jesus do?

Wrong question. Rather, who would Jesus be.

Now interestingly, Pieper begins with a slightly tweaked quote from the Bible: Have leisure and know that I am God. 

And who is God but I AM? Which is precisely who Jesus would be, irrespective of whether he is doing or non-doing. 

In fact, I would say that the goal (for us) is to bring non-doing into doing, so that we're always doing a bit of nothing even in the midst of doing it. Like Yin and Yang, the Siamese twins of ontology: they can't be separated without killing them.

And speaking of ontology, this is the subtitle of the very next section of Reality. Metaphysics is the science of reality; it is

conceived as wisdom, science pre-eminent. Now science is the knowledge of things by their causes. Metaphysics, therefore, is the knowledge of all things by their supreme causes.

All sentient humans can agree that being is. Everything that isn't God has a cause, and being is no exception. Being is intelligible reality; it is the cause of our knowing it. Fr. Reginald speaks of the contemplative life, AKA the life of leisure:

the deepest joy arises from the activity of man's highest power, namely, his mind, when that power is occupied in contemplating its highest object, which is God, the Supreme Truth, the Supreme Intelligible.

If knowing truth is nice, being it is even better. Now, Jesus makes the startling metaphysical claim that I am the truth, the way, and the life. In other words, "I am the living truth and the way to it."

You know how with the left everything comes down to Who and Whom? With us it all comes down to I AM and We Are.