The Divine Sitcomedy

The prime directive for the interpretation of dreams in psychoanalysis is free association:

patients are invited to relate whatever comes into their minds during the analytic session, and not to censor their thoughts (Prof. Wiki). 

In order to get along socially, we have to activate the Filter without which others would endure the horror of seeing us as we are. 

Interestingly, now that I am retired, it seems that my filter is growing feeble due to nonuse. This must be one of the causes of the phenomenon of Grumpy Old Manhood. You no longer have to please anyone, or try to "pass" in the Conspiracy. You can be as weird as you want to be. I find that I've pretty much lost my tenuous grasp of unreality.  

If the content of the blog is getting more peculiar, obscure, and eccentric, I suppose this is why. At this rate, the blog will eventually become my own personal dream, inaccessible to anyone else. Well, not really, for reasons we'll get into.

At any rate, I finally understand what Davila means when he says... can't find it at the moment, but something like The only honest dialogue is between two solitaries. Why? Because only the solitary can arrive at knowledge without the ubiquitous pressure to conform. 

This pressure is pervasive, and we are constantly adjusting to it. It's obviously one of the principle explanations for the existence of the left, which is nothing if not mimetic, since it is composed of ideas so detached from reality that no one could arrive at them independently.

The perfect conformist in our time is the ideologue of the left.

So,  

If one does not wish to be a conformist, one must not be a progressive.

But merely opposing the left is a kind of trap, a mirror image of their knee-jerk opposition to reality:

Conformity and nonconformity are symmetrical expressions of a lack of originality.

Rather, one must be motivated by a disinterested love of truth into which one is drawn, never compelled. Philo-sophy: it is primarily a verb -- a lifestyle -- and only secondarily the content per se. 

Here's a good one:

The recluse is the delegate from humanity to what is important. 

True, but he can also be the delegate of what is totally insane or evil, like the Unabomber typing his manifesto, or Hitler kampfing away in his jail cell.

Philosophy is a solitary attitude. The adherence of any crowd to a doctrine converts it into a mythology.

There's safety in numbskulls, which is one of the appeals of ideology, being that it shelters one from reality. These collective delusions confer a ready-made defense against unpleasant existential truths. Ideologies are always incoherent or inconsistent, but that's the price of denial.

Now, what prevents Bob from totally spinning out of control? How are his flights of funzy any different from the Oozlum bird disappearing up his own aseity?

Since we're free associating, a number of principles come to mind, for example, that

All truth goes from flesh to flesh.

Which means that while I may look like an impervious hermit or nervous wreckluse, I am in constant dialogue with various luminaries who keep me in check. This is indeed a "society," but it is an eternal fraternity that very much includes the technically no-longer-living, but only biologically. I want to to say that truth and life are synonymous on the pneumatic plane.

Back to my controlling authorities. There are some good passages on this in The Shape of Catholic Theology, by Aidan Nichols. First of all, I'm obviously not a trained theologian, just an amateur. Therefore, instead of having been "shown the ropes" ahead of time, I've had to discover them on my own, which has resulted in a lot of zigs and zags and nul de slacks. Now, I would agree with the following:

Unless we inherit a spiritual tradition to interpret it, the experience of life teaches us nothing.

And you have to enter the tradition from the inside, otherwise you're like a deaf man pretending to describe music. You could spend your life studying Christianity

from a purely descriptive standpoint, in what may be called an empirical way, amassing facts about Christianity: its origins, history, and present diffusion.... Such a person may be enormously erudite but could never become a theologian (Nichols).

Mere objectivity would be "epistemologically defective," indeed fatal -- no more appropriate or generative than studying rocks by interviewing them.

Nevertheless, there is an objective content, but it must be entered and engaged via the subjective plunge. You can't ask for a bath -- or to be baptized -- without getting wet. Above we referenced the "flesh to flesh" transmission, but what is transmitted is immaterial. Thus, "tradition is more a medium than it is an object." Real theology is always a vertical contact sport.

This post is getting overlong without ever having gotten to the main point. I wanted to say that free-associating on the word "dream" prompted the recollection of Balthasar's Theo-Drama, which is a very long meditation on what we were discussing in the previous post, of the dreamlike narrative that ensues when the Creator makes a visit herebelow and submits to his own creation. The Divine Sit-Comedy?

Well, that's my dream and I'm sticking to it, but we'll continue interpreting it in the next post.