Leftist Mindrape Culture

A while back I read a book called The Rape of the Mind, by a Dutch psychiatrist named Joost Merloo. It was published back in 1956. It's a bit dated, but since we're on the subject of the abuse of language, I flipped through it again yesterday and found quite a few nuggets that help to explain the left's compulsive logocide (or verbicide and menticide).

I date the problem back to Genesis 3, when the serpent brainwashes the woman into accepting an alternate reality. Meerloo doesn't go that far down and back, but nevertheless

The rape of the mind and stealthy mental coercion are among the oldest crimes of mankind. They probably began back in prehistoric days when man first discovered that he could exploit human qualities of empathy and understanding in order to exert power over his fellow men. 

Whatever the case may be, it certainly seems that when we are being manipulated, it is in service to power. It's obviously not in service to truth, and when Truth leaves the building, the Will is left in charge.

But this doesn't necessarily involve coercion per se; for example, the Serpent did not force Eve accept the lie. Likewise, no one forced me to be a liberal back in the day, for the same reason that no one has to force one to eat junk food. Rather, junk food is designed to exploit our innate preference for certain flavors.

Applied to the mind, we have innate preferences for truth, justice, beauty, freedom, and equality. Therefore, it seems to me that the junk ideologies of the left are designed precisely (whether consciously or unconsciously) to satisfy these intrinsic appetites. 

When I was a Democrat, it wasn't because I preferred injustice and inequality!  But it took awhile to realize that a steady diet of the underlying ideology was causing me so much mental and spiritual flab. 

Also, I found myself in search of greater thrills -- I became habituated to the MSM, so I ended up getting high on people like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and thrice-great uncle William Godwin. 

Getting back for a moment to man's oldest and most primordial crime, it seems to me that this must involve the transformation from an open cosmos -- open to verticality -- to a closed one, or one that encloses us in ideology in one form or another. In olden times these ideologies took the form of myth, while nowadays myth takes the form of ideologies such as scientism, feminism, transgroomerism, CRT, et al.  

As a matter of fact, this is exactly how Voegelin describes it, which is why one of his central insights is that modern ideologies are the same old Gnosticism, which always involves the reduction of transcendence to immanence. This vertical closure in turn leads to an eclipse of reality and deformation of the soul. In case you haven't noticed.

It's just another way of saying that the Zombie Apocalypse is not only real, but has its reasons.

Now, truth is intrinsically related to freedom, since truth can never be coerced; rather, it must be freely recognized, accepted, and assimilated. Here again we see why the left is self-disqualified from the pursuit of truth, since it always involves coercion, punishment, and censorship. 

After all, no leftist is "free" to believe a man can be a woman. Joe Biden didn't wake up one morning and decide William is Lia or Bruce is Caitlyn. Rather, it became the new party line, such that everyone was compelled to pretend it is true, or else. They say the president is "the most powerful man in the world," but even he is powerless in the face of gender fantasists. 

You could say that truth doesn't exert its power through efficient, but rather, formal or final causation: we are not pushed into it but pulled toward it. Indeed, this is what it means to "teach a child to think": for the child to recognize and be attracted to the Light, in the face of the inevitable coercion, not just from ideology but from social pressure more generally. 

There was a time before time when this pressure was benign and even adaptive, since man is a social animal and groups with more social solidarity prevailed over those with more division and strife. Indeed, this is why China is not only laughing at us, but actively funds the division and strife.  

Over six decades ago Meerloo recognized that

A fantastic thing is happening in our world. Today a man is no longer punished only for crimes he has in fact committed. Now he may be compelled to confess to crimes that have been conjured up by his judges, who use his confession for political purposes.

Today the crimes are White Privilege, or Transphobia, or Trumpism, or Christian Nationalism. They are always thought crimes, since they do not involve any actual actions; it is why we can have "institutional racism" without any racists. After all, the left is in charge of nearly all the institutions. 

Brainwashing is "an elaborate ritual" of "systematic indoctrination, conversion, and self-accusation." How then is it different from an expensive college education? 

Yes, that was a rhetorical question. "One important result of this procedure is the great confusion it creates in the mind.... In the end, no one knows how to distinguish truth from falsehood," and the result is "widespread mental chaos and verbal confusion." 

Once we have reached this state of chaos and confusion, I suppose you could say that the average college-educated midwit does all of Satan's heavy lifting. Without being forced! Seems to me that this is an even greater trick than convincing the world he doesn't exist.  

I guess that's enough for today. The daily Wall of Text probably only drives readers away.

Leftist Mindrape Culture

A while back I read a book called The Rape of the Mind, by a Dutch psychiatrist named Joost Merloo. It was published back in 1956. It's a bit dated, but since we're on the subject of the abuse of language, I flipped through it again yesterday and found quite a few nuggets that help to explain the left's compulsive logocide (or verbicide and menticide).

I date the problem back to Genesis 3, when the serpent brainwashes the woman into accepting an alternate reality. Meerloo doesn't go that far down and back, but nevertheless

The rape of the mind and stealthy mental coercion are among the oldest crimes of mankind. They probably began back in prehistoric days when man first discovered that he could exploit human qualities of empathy and understanding in order to exert power over his fellow men. 

Whatever the case may be, it certainly seems that when we are being manipulated, it is in service to power. It's obviously not in service to truth, and when Truth leaves the building, the Will is left in charge.

But this doesn't necessarily involve coercion per se; for example, the Serpent did not force Eve accept the lie. Likewise, no one forced me to be a liberal back in the day, for the same reason that no one has to force one to eat junk food. Rather, junk food is designed to exploit our innate preference for certain flavors.

Applied to the mind, we have innate preferences for truth, justice, beauty, freedom, and equality. Therefore, it seems to me that the junk ideologies of the left are designed precisely (whether consciously or unconsciously) to satisfy these intrinsic appetites. 

When I was a Democrat, it wasn't because I preferred injustice and inequality!  But it took awhile to realize that a steady diet of the underlying ideology was causing me so much mental and spiritual flab. 

Also, I found myself in search of greater thrills -- I became habituated to the MSM, so I ended up getting high on people like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and thrice-great uncle William Godwin. 

Getting back for a moment to man's oldest and most primordial crime, it seems to me that this must involve the transformation from an open cosmos -- open to verticality -- to a closed one, or one that encloses us in ideology in one form or another. In olden times these ideologies took the form of myth, while nowadays myth takes the form of ideologies such as scientism, feminism, transgroomerism, CRT, et al.  

As a matter of fact, this is exactly how Voegelin describes it, which is why one of his central insights is that modern ideologies are the same old Gnosticism, which always involves the reduction of transcendence to immanence. This vertical closure in turn leads to an eclipse of reality and deformation of the soul. In case you haven't noticed.

It's just another way of saying that the Zombie Apocalypse is not only real, but has its reasons.

Now, truth is intrinsically related to freedom, since truth can never be coerced; rather, it must be freely recognized, accepted, and assimilated. Here again we see why the left is self-disqualified from the pursuit of truth, since it always involves coercion, punishment, and censorship. 

After all, no leftist is "free" to believe a man can be a woman. Joe Biden didn't wake up one morning and decide William is Lia or Bruce is Caitlyn. Rather, it became the new party line, such that everyone was compelled to pretend it is true, or else. They say the president is "the most powerful man in the world," but even he is powerless in the face of gender fantasists. 

You could say that truth doesn't exert its power through efficient, but rather, formal or final causation: we are not pushed into it but pulled toward it. Indeed, this is what it means to "teach a child to think": for the child to recognize and be attracted to the Light, in the face of the inevitable coercion, not just from ideology but from social pressure more generally. 

There was a time before time when this pressure was benign and even adaptive, since man is a social animal and groups with more social solidarity prevailed over those with more division and strife. Indeed, this is why China is not only laughing at us, but actively funds the division and strife.  

Over six decades ago Meerloo recognized that

A fantastic thing is happening in our world. Today a man is no longer punished only for crimes he has in fact committed. Now he may be compelled to confess to crimes that have been conjured up by his judges, who use his confession for political purposes.

Today the crimes are White Privilege, or Transphobia, or Trumpism, or Christian Nationalism. They are always thought crimes, since they do not involve any actual actions; it is why we can have "institutional racism" without any racists. After all, the left is in charge of nearly all the institutions. 

Brainwashing is "an elaborate ritual" of "systematic indoctrination, conversion, and self-accusation." How then is it different from an expensive college education? 

Yes, that was a rhetorical question. "One important result of this procedure is the great confusion it creates in the mind.... In the end, no one knows how to distinguish truth from falsehood," and the result is "widespread mental chaos and verbal confusion." 

Once we have reached this state of chaos and confusion, I suppose you could say that the average college-educated midwit does all of Satan's heavy lifting. Without being forced! Seems to me that this is an even greater trick than convincing the world he doesn't exist.  

I guess that's enough for today. The daily Wall of Text probably only drives readers away.

In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was Redefined

Strange things are afoot in the political cosmos, but there is nothing stranger than the brazenly logophobic attacks on language (of which attacks on free speech are but a subset) by Agents of the Matrix, AKA the managerial class. It's frankly disorienting, so I guess it's time to reorient ourselves. 

This morning we read that Agents have changed the definition of "recession" on the wiki page, and that corrections are not permitted. *Ironcially,* this was Winston Smith's job in 1984: to rewrite the past in order to make it conform to the needs of the present. Anything that contradicts the party line is airbrushed out and forgotten.

With extreme prejudice if necessary. In other words, there's an implicit threat that you had better forget it, or you become the problem that needs to be eliminated -- cancelled -- from history.  

I don't want to repeat what others are saying about this obvious phenomenon, but rather, try to dig a little deeper into the origins of this intrinsically violent impulse to rewrite history, which is to say, to exert magical control over reality by changing the words. 

Suffice it to say that something sinister is going on when George Floyd is a hero, riots are mostly peaceful, the Obamas are victims of white privilege, Brandon is a moderate, parents are terrorists, black lives matter to BLM, Ukraine is a beacon of democracy, J6 was an insurrection, William Thomas is a female swimmer, Monkeypox isn't spread by monkeying around with the same sex, Hunter's laptop is Russian disinfo, public schools should be safe for groomers, CRT isn't just academic racism, a teenage girl can prophesize what the weather will be like in a hundred years, etc., etc. 

Change the language, change the reality -- which reminds me of the etymology of abracadabra, which is said to be from the Aramaic avra kehdabra, meaning “I will create as I speak." Or at least that's too good to check. 

Whatever the case may be, abracadabra: inflation is transitory! Abracadabra! Trump is an agent of Putin. Abracadabra! Trump commandeered the Beast. Abracadabra! What insurrection on January 20, 2017?

It's really a kind of secular transubstantiation, isn't it? That is to say, the accidents remain the same, while the substance has undergone a transformation. Thus, the recession, for example, looks like any other recession, except that the Agents assure us that it is substantially different. 

It's the other way around with transgenderism, because in that case we are forced to believe that the person is born with the wrong accidents, so to speak. Therefore, a man with the substance of a woman cuts off his merely accidental johnson in order make perception line up with reality. Instead of transubstantiation, it's more like transaccidentality. 

Now, free speech is one thing, speech freed from reality another. And you will have noticed that the loudest voices opposing free speech are the same ones who insist that we can change reality by changing the word(s). 

Think of what has happened to academia in the span of a generation. Maybe it's because I was still a child of the left when I was in grad school between 1983 and 1988, but I don't remember it being anything like this. Back then you could still call a pervert a pervert and a man a man, and even diagnose and treat ego-dystonic homosexuality. 

Consider Josef Pieper's description of the purpose and function of a university: it is a "zone of truth,"

deliberately set aside in the midst of society, a hedged-in space to house the autonomous engagement with reality, in which people can inquire into, discuss, and assert the truth of things without let or hindrance; a domain expressly shielded from any conceivable attempts to use it as a means to achieve certain ends..., whether collective or personal, whether of political, economic or ideological import...

Good times. Nowadays, like journalism, it is (paraphrasing the above) 

a zone of falsehood deliberately set aside to propagate the systematic disengagement from reality, in which dissenters are silenced or punished and people are compelled to affirm that lies are true; a secular seminary that exists for the express purpose of advancing a political, economic and ideological agenda. 

Imagine a world -- it isn't hard to do -- where 

"academic" means, in effect, "anti-sophistical," and thus to be academic means... to resist everything which impugns or destroys the absolute candor of the word in its expression of the bond with reality and its character as communication (Pieper). 

The bond with reality. How quaint!

Nevertheless, if language isn't the bond between mind and world, intelligence and intelligibility, then human beings become untethered unglued, and unhinged. But only literally. Figuratively this is easy to overcome by simply redefining madness as sanity. 

Abracadabra! Brandon has all his marbles.

To be continued...

In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was Redefined

Strange things are afoot in the political cosmos, but there is nothing stranger than the brazenly logophobic attacks on language (of which attacks on free speech are but a subset) by Agents of the Matrix, AKA the managerial class. It's frankly disorienting, so I guess it's time to reorient ourselves. 

This morning we read that Agents have changed the definition of "recession" on the wiki page, and that corrections are not permitted. *Ironcially,* this was Winston Smith's job in 1984: to rewrite the past in order to make it conform to the needs of the present. Anything that contradicts the party line is airbrushed out and forgotten.

With extreme prejudice if necessary. In other words, there's an implicit threat that you had better forget it, or you become the problem that needs to be eliminated -- cancelled -- from history.  

I don't want to repeat what others are saying about this obvious phenomenon, but rather, try to dig a little deeper into the origins of this intrinsically violent impulse to rewrite history, which is to say, to exert magical control over reality by changing the words. 

Suffice it to say that something sinister is going on when George Floyd is a hero, riots are mostly peaceful, the Obamas are victims of white privilege, Brandon is a moderate, parents are terrorists, black lives matter to BLM, Ukraine is a beacon of democracy, J6 was an insurrection, William Thomas is a female swimmer, Monkeypox isn't spread by monkeying around with the same sex, Hunter's laptop is Russian disinfo, public schools should be safe for groomers, CRT isn't just academic racism, a teenage girl can prophesize what the weather will be like in a hundred years, etc., etc. 

Change the language, change the reality -- which reminds me of the etymology of abracadabra, which is said to be from the Aramaic avra kehdabra, meaning “I will create as I speak." Or at least that's too good to check. 

Whatever the case may be, abracadabra: inflation is transitory! Abracadabra! Trump is an agent of Putin. Abracadabra! Trump commandeered the Beast. Abracadabra! What insurrection on January 20, 2017?

It's really a kind of secular transubstantiation, isn't it? That is to say, the accidents remain the same, while the substance has undergone a transformation. Thus, the recession, for example, looks like any other recession, except that the Agents assure us that it is substantially different. 

It's the other way around with transgenderism, because in that case we are forced to believe that the person is born with the wrong accidents, so to speak. Therefore, a man with the substance of a woman cuts off his merely accidental johnson in order make perception line up with reality. Instead of transubstantiation, it's more like transaccidentality. 

Now, free speech is one thing, speech freed from reality another. And you will have noticed that the loudest voices opposing free speech are the same ones who insist that we can change reality by changing the word(s). 

Think of what has happened to academia in the span of a generation. Maybe it's because I was still a child of the left when I was in grad school between 1983 and 1988, but I don't remember it being anything like this. Back then you could still call a pervert a pervert and a man a man, and even diagnose and treat ego-dystonic homosexuality. 

Consider Josef Pieper's description of the purpose and function of a university: it is a "zone of truth,"

deliberately set aside in the midst of society, a hedged-in space to house the autonomous engagement with reality, in which people can inquire into, discuss, and assert the truth of things without let or hindrance; a domain expressly shielded from any conceivable attempts to use it as a means to achieve certain ends..., whether collective or personal, whether of political, economic or ideological import...

Good times. Nowadays, like journalism, it is (paraphrasing the above) 

a zone of falsehood deliberately set aside to propagate the systematic disengagement from reality, in which dissenters are silenced or punished and people are compelled to affirm that lies are true; a secular seminary that exists for the express purpose of advancing a political, economic and ideological agenda. 

Imagine a world -- it isn't hard to do -- where 

"academic" means, in effect, "anti-sophistical," and thus to be academic means... to resist everything which impugns or destroys the absolute candor of the word in its expression of the bond with reality and its character as communication (Pieper). 

The bond with reality. How quaint!

Nevertheless, if language isn't the bond between mind and world, intelligence and intelligibility, then human beings become untethered unglued, and unhinged. But only literally. Figuratively this is easy to overcome by simply redefining madness as sanity. 

Abracadabra! Brandon has all his marbles.

To be continued...

The Dog that Caught the Ouroboros

At this point we're pretty much chasing our tail. If we don't finally catch it in this post, we'll move on and start chasing that squirrel over there. 

According to Schuon,

The Absolute and the Infinite are complementary, the first being exclusive and the second inclusive: the Absolute excludes everything that is contingent; the Infinite includes everything that is (in Laude).

Laude explains that

These principial dimensions, which are but two sides of the same Reality, offer keys for understanding the complementary polarity of the masculine and feminine over the whole range of reality.

Sun and moon have always been symbols of male and female, respectively: the bright and wideawake Light of day and the reflected Light that prevails in the nightwomb of darkness and dreams. Well, "As the projection of All-Possibility, the Infinite can be characterized as the 'mirror' of the Absolute." Which reminds us of how the feminine moon is the reflective mirror of the masculine sun.

Laude adds that "the Divine-Feminine is the boundless metaphysical space from and through which all of onto-cosmological Reality is unfolded" -- which really puts the womb in wom(b)an. There's an appreciation of this subtle point in the Tao Te Ching, where it says that

We shape the clay into a pot, / but it is the emptiness inside / that holds whatever we want.

Just wondering -- is that pot for sale?

We hammer wood for a house, / but it is the inner space / that makes it livable.

We work with being, / but non-being is what we use (tr. Mitchell).

This space or realm or dimension is a kind of ontological noplace-holder, because it is not susceptible to any clear -- or non-obscure -- definition. Mum is indeed the word, for this space

is hidden but always present. / I don't know who gave birth to it. / It is older than God.

Older than God? Yes: you might say that before God was, I, period. The AM comes later, with creation and manifestation. Which is reminiscent of what Eckhart says:

The Godhead becomes God in the flowing out of creation...

This prior ground "is transcendentally real as 'pure possibility,'" the "unmoving precondition of all activity" (Bernard McGinn).

This Essence, or womb, or space-beyond-space, "transcends all determinations and it can therefore never be an object of confessional faith, as it were" (Laude). In short, while it is possible to have a TV show about nothing, it is not possible -- or at least it is impractical -- to have a religion about Nothing, even though this big Nothing can never be excluded. 

Are we cranking up the tendentiousness to eleven? Or is this simply an implicit acknowledgment of how behind every Great Prophet or Founder of religion there must be a coequally Great Mother hiding in there somewhere? 

According to Laude, "Beyond-Being, the Essence, is Feminine as limitless indetermination." But

the Essence qua Essence is in itself beyond the polarity of the Masculine and the Feminine, while being eminently inclusive of both.... 

Let's think this through: the Son is eternally begotten outside time, whereas Christ is is born inside time via Mary; therefore, Mary is a kind of membrane or mediator between time and eternity, or between the created and uncreated. 

Beyond that is beyond language, so there's nothing left to say except caught it! 

The Dog that Caught the Ouroboros

At this point we're pretty much chasing our tail. If we don't finally catch it in this post, we'll move on and start chasing that squirrel over there. 

According to Schuon,

The Absolute and the Infinite are complementary, the first being exclusive and the second inclusive: the Absolute excludes everything that is contingent; the Infinite includes everything that is (in Laude).

Laude explains that

These principial dimensions, which are but two sides of the same Reality, offer keys for understanding the complementary polarity of the masculine and feminine over the whole range of reality.

Sun and moon have always been symbols of male and female, respectively: the bright and wideawake Light of day and the reflected Light that prevails in the nightwomb of darkness and dreams. Well, "As the projection of All-Possibility, the Infinite can be characterized as the 'mirror' of the Absolute." Which reminds us of how the feminine moon is the reflective mirror of the masculine sun.

Laude adds that "the Divine-Feminine is the boundless metaphysical space from and through which all of onto-cosmological Reality is unfolded" -- which really puts the womb in wom(b)an. There's an appreciation of this subtle point in the Tao Te Ching, where it says that

We shape the clay into a pot, / but it is the emptiness inside / that holds whatever we want.

Just wondering -- is that pot for sale?

We hammer wood for a house, / but it is the inner space / that makes it livable.

We work with being, / but non-being is what we use (tr. Mitchell).

This space or realm or dimension is a kind of ontological noplace-holder, because it is not susceptible to any clear -- or non-obscure -- definition. Mum is indeed the word, for this space

is hidden but always present. / I don't know who gave birth to it. / It is older than God.

Older than God? Yes: you might say that before God was, I, period. The AM comes later, with creation and manifestation. Which is reminiscent of what Eckhart says:

The Godhead becomes God in the flowing out of creation...

This prior ground "is transcendentally real as 'pure possibility,'" the "unmoving precondition of all activity" (Bernard McGinn).

This Essence, or womb, or space-beyond-space, "transcends all determinations and it can therefore never be an object of confessional faith, as it were" (Laude). In short, while it is possible to have a TV show about nothing, it is not possible -- or at least it is impractical -- to have a religion about Nothing, even though this big Nothing can never be excluded. 

Are we cranking up the tendentiousness to eleven? Or is this simply an implicit acknowledgment of how behind every Great Prophet or Founder of religion there must be a coequally Great Mother hiding in there somewhere? 

According to Laude, "Beyond-Being, the Essence, is Feminine as limitless indetermination." But

the Essence qua Essence is in itself beyond the polarity of the Masculine and the Feminine, while being eminently inclusive of both.... 

Let's think this through: the Son is eternally begotten outside time, whereas Christ is is born inside time via Mary; therefore, Mary is a kind of membrane or mediator between time and eternity, or between the created and uncreated. 

Beyond that is beyond language, so there's nothing left to say except caught it! 

Flapping Our Wings and Gums into the Infinite Godhead

We mentioned in a comment yesterday that the soul is always feminine in relation to God -- as is the Church herself. Active and Passive. They say God is "pure act," but now I'm wondering if act and potency might not be complementary at every level, up to and including in divinas, AKA in the Godhead. 

According to Laude,

the Virgin makes herself passive in relation to the Divine fiat by surrendering to its Will. Her "be it unto me according to your Word" is a response [ I would say "parallel"] to "Let there be light!" Paraphrasing the Patristic formula [God has become man so that man may become God], it could be said that the Essence has made itself "nothing" so that "nothing" could be made the Essence.

We know about reductio ad absurdum. I suppose that paragraph is an expandio ad absurdum. That doesn't make it wrong, just above our praygrade, AKA unthinkable for anyone short of an extreme seeker and trans-logospheric pneumanaut. 

Let's try this on for size instead. Laude explains that the distinction between Essence and Virgin can be approached via masculine and feminine; that is to say,

In Schuon's idiom, this refers to the distinction between the Absolute and the Infinite. These two dimensions are the highest modes of reality of the Masculine and the Feminine, from which all other degrees and aspects of existence are derived.

Well, that's a bold statement. I'm thinking of how we can begin with the Absolute and regard the Infinite as its first entailment, so to speak -- which reminds me of how Eve is taken from Adam's rib. 

On a more mysterious -- and esoteric -- plane, we can invert this and begin with Infinitude, and regard every instance of Absoluteness as a kind of specification of this Divine Plenitude. 

Now, the Abrahamic traditions all begin with the Absolute-Father and go no father. And yet, they all must somehow make room for Mother. For example, consider all those odes to Wisdom contained in Proverbs that place her right there at -- and even before -- the beginning:

I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep...

Not only is this a long time ago, it is clearly anterior to the creation of time.

Another proverb adverts to the dark side of Maya, and advises us to steer clear of her wily and seductive charms, so the Feminine -- like the Masculine -- cuts both ways: reality veiled, or reality as veil. Your choice.

Now, it seems to me that the non-Abrahamic traditions -- eg., Taoism, Vedanta, and Buddhism -- make room for this idea that even God has a mother; or, looked at in purely metaphysical terms, there is a Primordial Infinitude that is beyond specification and gives birth to any and every specification. 

A couple of posts back we cited numerous examples from the Tao Te Ching. Here is an example from the Mundaka Upanishad:

Out of the infinite ocean of existence arose Brahma, first-born and foremost among the gods. From him sprang the universe, and he became its protector. The knowledge of Brahman, the foundation of all knowledge, he revealed to his first-born son, Atharva.

It seems that there is no google-translate into plain Coonglish, so I'll have to take a stab at it myself:

Out of the infinite ocean of Beyond-Being arises the Father-Being, the Absolute God. From him the universe is created, and he is its protector. The knowledge of the Father, the Logos, is eternally begotten in the Son.

More about that Infinite ocean, or ocean of Infinitude:

The Imperishable is the Real. As sparks innumerable fly upward from a blazing fire, so from the depths of the Imperishable arise all things. To the depths of the Imperishable they again descend.

Self-luminous is that Being, and formless. He dwells within and without all. He is unborn, pure, greater than the greatest, without breath, without mind.

Speaking of mind, bear in mind that Up Here, nothing can be taken literally, not even nothing. For we are in a realm that is beyond and before speech, and gives rise to speech (Logos). 

Eckhart tried to speak of it -- or unspeak of it, to be precise -- and found himself in a bit of hot water for the trouble, because it is so difficult to understand and easy to misunderstand. Really, for my money, it's just plain old apophaticism which is always complementary to cataphatic theology, otherwise you end up conflating your necessarily limited ideas of God with God himself, which is idolatry.

Objective Doctrine and Subjective Mystery are brother and sister. Not only that, they are like Siamese twins that can't be severed from one another.

God is nothing. No thing. God is nothingness; and yet God is something.

God is neither this thing nor that thing that we can express. God is being beyond all being; God is beingless being (Eckhart).  

If yesterday's post was surrounded by heterodoxy, this one is plunged into straight-up orthoparadoxy. I guess I'll just shut up, because

The most beautiful thing which a person can say about God would be for that person to remain silent from the wisdom of an inner wealth. So be silent and quit flapping your gums about God (ibid.).

Understood. Or rather, not-misunderstood. 

Flapping Our Wings and Gums into the Infinite Godhead

We mentioned in a comment yesterday that the soul is always feminine in relation to God -- as is the Church herself. Active and Passive. They say God is "pure act," but now I'm wondering if act and potency might not be complementary at every level, up to and including in divinas, AKA in the Godhead. 

According to Laude,

the Virgin makes herself passive in relation to the Divine fiat by surrendering to its Will. Her "be it unto me according to your Word" is a response [ I would say "parallel"] to "Let there be light!" Paraphrasing the Patristic formula [God has become man so that man may become God], it could be said that the Essence has made itself "nothing" so that "nothing" could be made the Essence.

We know about reductio ad absurdum. I suppose that paragraph is an expandio ad absurdum. That doesn't make it wrong, just above our praygrade, AKA unthinkable for anyone short of an extreme seeker and trans-logospheric pneumanaut. 

Let's try this on for size instead. Laude explains that the distinction between Essence and Virgin can be approached via masculine and feminine; that is to say,

In Schuon's idiom, this refers to the distinction between the Absolute and the Infinite. These two dimensions are the highest modes of reality of the Masculine and the Feminine, from which all other degrees and aspects of existence are derived.

Well, that's a bold statement. I'm thinking of how we can begin with the Absolute and regard the Infinite as its first entailment, so to speak -- which reminds me of how Eve is taken from Adam's rib. 

On a more mysterious -- and esoteric -- plane, we can invert this and begin with Infinitude, and regard every instance of Absoluteness as a kind of specification of this Divine Plenitude. 

Now, the Abrahamic traditions all begin with the Absolute-Father and go no father. And yet, they all must somehow make room for Mother. For example, consider all those odes to Wisdom contained in Proverbs that place her right there at -- and even before -- the beginning:

I was there when he set the heavens in place, when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep...

Not only is this a long time ago, it is clearly anterior to the creation of time.

Another proverb adverts to the dark side of Maya, and advises us to steer clear of her wily and seductive charms, so the Feminine -- like the Masculine -- cuts both ways: reality veiled, or reality as veil. Your choice.

Now, it seems to me that the non-Abrahamic traditions -- eg., Taoism, Vedanta, and Buddhism -- make room for this idea that even God has a mother; or, looked at in purely metaphysical terms, there is a Primordial Infinitude that is beyond specification and gives birth to any and every specification. 

A couple of posts back we cited numerous examples from the Tao Te Ching. Here is an example from the Mundaka Upanishad:

Out of the infinite ocean of existence arose Brahma, first-born and foremost among the gods. From him sprang the universe, and he became its protector. The knowledge of Brahman, the foundation of all knowledge, he revealed to his first-born son, Atharva.

It seems that there is no google-translate into plain Coonglish, so I'll have to take a stab at it myself:

Out of the infinite ocean of Beyond-Being arises the Father-Being, the Absolute God. From him the universe is created, and he is its protector. The knowledge of the Father, the Logos, is eternally begotten in the Son.

More about that Infinite ocean, or ocean of Infinitude:

The Imperishable is the Real. As sparks innumerable fly upward from a blazing fire, so from the depths of the Imperishable arise all things. To the depths of the Imperishable they again descend.

Self-luminous is that Being, and formless. He dwells within and without all. He is unborn, pure, greater than the greatest, without breath, without mind.

Speaking of mind, bear in mind that Up Here, nothing can be taken literally, not even nothing. For we are in a realm that is beyond and before speech, and gives rise to speech (Logos). 

Eckhart tried to speak of it -- or unspeak of it, to be precise -- and found himself in a bit of hot water for the trouble, because it is so difficult to understand and easy to misunderstand. Really, for my money, it's just plain old apophaticism which is always complementary to cataphatic theology, otherwise you end up conflating your necessarily limited ideas of God with God himself, which is idolatry.

Objective Doctrine and Subjective Mystery are brother and sister. Not only that, they are like Siamese twins that can't be severed from one another.

God is nothing. No thing. God is nothingness; and yet God is something.

God is neither this thing nor that thing that we can express. God is being beyond all being; God is beingless being (Eckhart).  

If yesterday's post was surrounded by heterodoxy, this one is plunged into straight-up orthoparadoxy. I guess I'll just shut up, because

The most beautiful thing which a person can say about God would be for that person to remain silent from the wisdom of an inner wealth. So be silent and quit flapping your gums about God (ibid.).

Understood. Or rather, not-misunderstood. 

There's Something About Mary, and it's Nothing

There's definitely something ambiguous about Mary's role in the economy of salvation, surrounded on all sides by heterodoxy. 

Protestants, for example, often accuse Catholics of worshipping her. Catholics, for their part, affirm that she is indeed blessed among women, first among saints, Mother of the Church, and Queen of Heaven, for which reason they claim to venerate the Theotokos but draw a line in the sand before worshiping her. 

As a witch once put it, at this point what difference does it make?  

Well, there's an inevitable overlap between Christology and Mariology: exactly who are they, and why? Addressing questions with regard to One has necessary implications for the (M)other, and early church councils dealt with both; for example, if Jesus was more of a ghost than a man, then he didn't come into the world in the usual way. 

If we pull back to gain a larger perspective, 

The contrast between the old creation, whose head is Adam, and the new creation, whose head is Jesus, led to many connections and comparisons between Mary and Eve, claiming that, as it was Eve who brought Adam to the tree, it was Mary who brought Jesus into the world, and eventually to the tree on Calvary (Justo Gonzalez).

I think one reason Mary's role may be ambiguous is because it is unique; in other words, if something is unique, then it doesn't fall into any intelligible form or category: it is not the example of a higher principle, but is its own principle, so to speak. 

Because of this apparent uniqueness, explanations of her role can have an ad hoc quality -- for example, reading back her immaculate conception, which is said to be a consequence of the Incarnation, even though it it is temporally prior to it.

But if we pull back even further for the deepest and widest possible perspective, then I think we see that Mary must be ambiguous because she represents something that is in its very nature ambiguous. Moreover, any attempt to render the principle less ambiguous does violence to the principle hersoph.  

This is all just a hunch on my part. In any event, I've dug myself a hole. Let's see if I can dig my way out.

Putting on my old psychologist's hat, let's stipulate that on the basis of psychology alone, there can be no category more primordial than Mother. 

I don't want to get sidetracked into a pedantic discourse on attachment theory and developmental psychology, but one can look at development as a kind of gradual emergence and crystallization of the ego out of a prior union with the deep and formless infinite ocean of the primordial mother. Remama? 

This is the reason why D.W. Winnicott remarked that "there is no such thing as an infant," because at first there is only the mother-infant dyad out of which the baby's self-awareness will gradually emerge. But never completely, for that oceanic field of unconscious energy will haunt -- or bless -- us forever.  

Now, what if that infinite field is the prior reality, and the Great Mother is simply the formless-form it takes for us? 

In fact, there was a famous book on the subject by the Jungian Erich Neumann, called The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. I haven't read it in over 30 years, but the official description says Neumann

shows how the feminine has been represented as goddess, monster, gate, pillar, tree, moon, sun, vessel, and every animal from snakes to birds. Neumann discerns a universal experience of the maternal as both nurturing and fearsome, an experience rooted in the dialectical relation of growing consciousness, symbolized by the child, to the unconscious and the unknown, symbolized by the Great Mother.

That sounds about right, except that Jung and his acolytes were stuck on the level of myth rather than pure metaphysics, and what if the myths are but exemplars of an even deeper perspective? 

In other words, a Jungian would reduce Mary to an instance of a mythological archetype, but what if she's the instantiation of something higher, not something lower?

Let's get back to the essay we were discussing yesterday, The Divine Feminine, by Patrick Laude. In it he specifies why She should be ambiguous by nature, for whereas the masculine is associated with the formal dimension -- e.g., Logos, law, institutions, Wait Until Your Father Gets Home, etc., -- the feminine "pertains to the informal, or rather supra-formal, realm" (emphasis mine). Thus,

the Feminine refers, at its highest level, to the Essence that transcends all relativities.... [It is] an inward space of freedom vis-a-vis the theological crystallization of a tradition. Issuing forth from this supra-formal and feminine dimension of the Logos, every masculine manifestation of this principle tends to embody the very form of the tradition that the Logos brings into the world.

Hmm. I'm stroking my chin. If this is true, or something like truth, it implies that our egoic emergence from the primordial realm of the Great Mother is something like God's own emanation or crystallization or something from a realm that is Beyond-Being. And this realm can never be mansplained: no man can see it and live.  

As I said at the top, we are surrounded by heterodoxy. Is there a way to make the Christian shoe fit this metaphysical princess? Or is it enough to say that Mary is this princess, and be done with it?

It seems that there is something about Mary, and that this something is nothing, in the apophatic sense of the term. 

Now, just what is that supposed to mean? We'll say more in the next post, but recall what was said yesterday about the Tao being a kind of plenitude of nothing that gives birth to everything -- which sure reminds me of Eckhart's once-upin-a-timeless dream:

I once had a dream. I dreamt that I, even though a man, was pregnant, pregnant and full with Nothingness like a woman who is with child. And that out of this Nothingness God was born.

In a more lucid dream, he once claimed that

From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth. The essence of God is birthing. 

Well, we've only managed to dig a deep hole in these even deeper waters. Will we find our way out before drowning in nonsense? Stay tuned!

There's Something About Mary, and it's Nothing

There's definitely something ambiguous about Mary's role in the economy of salvation, surrounded on all sides by heterodoxy. 

Protestants, for example, often accuse Catholics of worshipping her. Catholics, for their part, affirm that she is indeed blessed among women, first among saints, Mother of the Church, and Queen of Heaven, for which reason they claim to venerate the Theotokos but draw a line in the sand before worshiping her. 

As a witch once put it, at this point what difference does it make?  

Well, there's an inevitable overlap between Christology and Mariology: exactly who are they, and why? Addressing questions with regard to One has necessary implications for the (M)other, and early church councils dealt with both; for example, if Jesus was more of a ghost than a man, then he didn't come into the world in the usual way. 

If we pull back to gain a larger perspective, 

The contrast between the old creation, whose head is Adam, and the new creation, whose head is Jesus, led to many connections and comparisons between Mary and Eve, claiming that, as it was Eve who brought Adam to the tree, it was Mary who brought Jesus into the world, and eventually to the tree on Calvary (Justo Gonzalez).

I think one reason Mary's role may be ambiguous is because it is unique; in other words, if something is unique, then it doesn't fall into any intelligible form or category: it is not the example of a higher principle, but is its own principle, so to speak. 

Because of this apparent uniqueness, explanations of her role can have an ad hoc quality -- for example, reading back her immaculate conception, which is said to be a consequence of the Incarnation, even though it it is temporally prior to it.

But if we pull back even further for the deepest and widest possible perspective, then I think we see that Mary must be ambiguous because she represents something that is in its very nature ambiguous. Moreover, any attempt to render the principle less ambiguous does violence to the principle hersoph.  

This is all just a hunch on my part. In any event, I've dug myself a hole. Let's see if I can dig my way out.

Putting on my old psychologist's hat, let's stipulate that on the basis of psychology alone, there can be no category more primordial than Mother. 

I don't want to get sidetracked into a pedantic discourse on attachment theory and developmental psychology, but one can look at development as a kind of gradual emergence and crystallization of the ego out of a prior union with the deep and formless infinite ocean of the primordial mother. Remama? 

This is the reason why D.W. Winnicott remarked that "there is no such thing as an infant," because at first there is only the mother-infant dyad out of which the baby's self-awareness will gradually emerge. But never completely, for that oceanic field of unconscious energy will haunt -- or bless -- us forever.  

Now, what if that infinite field is the prior reality, and the Great Mother is simply the formless-form it takes for us? 

In fact, there was a famous book on the subject by the Jungian Erich Neumann, called The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. I haven't read it in over 30 years, but the official description says Neumann

shows how the feminine has been represented as goddess, monster, gate, pillar, tree, moon, sun, vessel, and every animal from snakes to birds. Neumann discerns a universal experience of the maternal as both nurturing and fearsome, an experience rooted in the dialectical relation of growing consciousness, symbolized by the child, to the unconscious and the unknown, symbolized by the Great Mother.

That sounds about right, except that Jung and his acolytes were stuck on the level of myth rather than pure metaphysics, and what if the myths are but exemplars of an even deeper perspective? 

In other words, a Jungian would reduce Mary to an instance of a mythological archetype, but what if she's the instantiation of something higher, not something lower?

Let's get back to the essay we were discussing yesterday, The Divine Feminine, by Patrick Laude. In it he specifies why She should be ambiguous by nature, for whereas the masculine is associated with the formal dimension -- e.g., Logos, law, institutions, Wait Until Your Father Gets Home, etc., -- the feminine "pertains to the informal, or rather supra-formal, realm" (emphasis mine). Thus,

the Feminine refers, at its highest level, to the Essence that transcends all relativities.... [It is] an inward space of freedom vis-a-vis the theological crystallization of a tradition. Issuing forth from this supra-formal and feminine dimension of the Logos, every masculine manifestation of this principle tends to embody the very form of the tradition that the Logos brings into the world.

Hmm. I'm stroking my chin. If this is true, or something like truth, it implies that our egoic emergence from the primordial realm of the Great Mother is something like God's own emanation or crystallization or something from a realm that is Beyond-Being. And this realm can never be mansplained: no man can see it and live.  

As I said at the top, we are surrounded by heterodoxy. Is there a way to make the Christian shoe fit this metaphysical princess? Or is it enough to say that Mary is this princess, and be done with it?

It seems that there is something about Mary, and that this something is nothing, in the apophatic sense of the term. 

Now, just what is that supposed to mean? We'll say more in the next post, but recall what was said yesterday about the Tao being a kind of plenitude of nothing that gives birth to everything -- which sure reminds me of Eckhart's once-upin-a-timeless dream:

I once had a dream. I dreamt that I, even though a man, was pregnant, pregnant and full with Nothingness like a woman who is with child. And that out of this Nothingness God was born.

In a more lucid dream, he once claimed that

From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth. The essence of God is birthing. 

Well, we've only managed to dig a deep hole in these even deeper waters. Will we find our way out before drowning in nonsense? Stay tuned!

The Mother of All Mothers

We've spent enough timelessness on witches, who, to the extent that they exist, must be a deviation from (or privation of) some proper quintessence or prototype; they must exist as a kind of negative archetype that is parasitic on the positive. Which reminds us of a passage in the Tao Te Ching that asks,

What is a good man but a bad man's teacher? What is a bad man but a good man's job?

Likewise, what is a miserable feminist witch but a good gal's teacher? 

And while looking up the exact wording of those quips, I found some passages that go to the deepest cosmic principle of metaphysical motherhood, which can never be strictly defined but only alluded to. Try as we might to nail down a cutandtry definition, IT'S NOT ABOUT THE NAIL!:

There was something formless and perfect / before the universe was born. / It is serene. Empty. / Solitary. Unchanging. / Infinite. Eternally present. / It is the mother of the universe.

The Tao is called the Great Mother: / empty yet inexhaustible, / it gives birth to infinite worlds.

All things are born of being. / Being is born of non-being.

The Tao gives birth to One. / One gives birth to Two. / Two gives birth to Three. / Three gives birth to all things.

There are some more passages about what to do about this Great Mother of all mothers and Womb of all Being:

I am different from other people. / I drink from the Great Mother's breasts.

Know the male, / yet keep to the female: / receive the world in your arms. / If you receive the world, / the Tao will never leave you / and you will be like a child.

All things have their backs to the female / and stand facing the male. / When male and female combine, all things achieve harmony.

Most mysterious indeed.  I can't help thinking of an equally mythterious passage from Finnegans Wake:

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be rung, unhemmed as it is uneven!

Her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest has gone by many names at disjointed times.

Names such as Great Mother, Tao, Shakti, Prakriti, Maya, Ground, etc. 

This is convenient: I just read a chapter called The Divine Feminine, from Keys to the Beyond, by Patrick Laude. The first point to bear in mind is that "the Feminine takes us, in a metaphysical context, radically beyond the realm of human sexes and genders." What we know of as "masculine and feminine" down here are but reflections of 

a polarity governing the whole of creation; it is but one of the things constituting the masculine or feminine genders, which in their turn, apply to levels of existence where sexual polarity has no role, except in a symbolic sense (Hani, in Laude).

So,

while the terrestrial experience of the Feminine is a direct manifestation of Divine Femininity, the latter remains completely independent of the limitations inherent to human sexual differences (Laude).

For Schuon, Mary represents "the epitome of the Feminine in divinis," which means that he takes things a bit farther than most Christians do. Analogously, as there are high and low Christologies, one might say that he articulates a high Mariology -- or, to rejoyce what was said above, a mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest. 

Therefore, Mary isn't just the one "chosen among all women," but an exemplar of "the Divine Essence in its super-ontological Mystery." 

Super-ontological, as in "There was something formless and perfect / before the universe was born" that gives birth even to being. In other words, the Divine Essence must be Beyond-Being. She is indeed the Everliving Bringer of Plurabilities, the O prior even to One.

Or so it seems. We'll continue up this trail in the next post.  

The Mother of All Mothers

We've spent enough timelessness on witches, who, to the extent that they exist, must be a deviation from (or privation of) some proper quintessence or prototype; they must exist as a kind of negative archetype that is parasitic on the positive. Which reminds us of a passage in the Tao Te Ching that asks,

What is a good man but a bad man's teacher? What is a bad man but a good man's job?

Likewise, what is a miserable feminist witch but a good gal's teacher? 

And while looking up the exact wording of those quips, I found some passages that go to the deepest cosmic principle of metaphysical motherhood, which can never be strictly defined but only alluded to. Try as we might to nail down a cutandtry definition, IT'S NOT ABOUT THE NAIL!:

There was something formless and perfect / before the universe was born. / It is serene. Empty. / Solitary. Unchanging. / Infinite. Eternally present. / It is the mother of the universe.

The Tao is called the Great Mother: / empty yet inexhaustible, / it gives birth to infinite worlds.

All things are born of being. / Being is born of non-being.

The Tao gives birth to One. / One gives birth to Two. / Two gives birth to Three. / Three gives birth to all things.

There are some more passages about what to do about this Great Mother of all mothers and Womb of all Being:

I am different from other people. / I drink from the Great Mother's breasts.

Know the male, / yet keep to the female: / receive the world in your arms. / If you receive the world, / the Tao will never leave you / and you will be like a child.

All things have their backs to the female / and stand facing the male. / When male and female combine, all things achieve harmony.

Most mysterious indeed.  I can't help thinking of an equally mythterious passage from Finnegans Wake:

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be rung, unhemmed as it is uneven!

Her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest has gone by many names at disjointed times.

Names such as Great Mother, Tao, Shakti, Prakriti, Maya, Ground, etc. 

This is convenient: I just read a chapter called The Divine Feminine, from Keys to the Beyond, by Patrick Laude. The first point to bear in mind is that "the Feminine takes us, in a metaphysical context, radically beyond the realm of human sexes and genders." What we know of as "masculine and feminine" down here are but reflections of 

a polarity governing the whole of creation; it is but one of the things constituting the masculine or feminine genders, which in their turn, apply to levels of existence where sexual polarity has no role, except in a symbolic sense (Hani, in Laude).

So,

while the terrestrial experience of the Feminine is a direct manifestation of Divine Femininity, the latter remains completely independent of the limitations inherent to human sexual differences (Laude).

For Schuon, Mary represents "the epitome of the Feminine in divinis," which means that he takes things a bit farther than most Christians do. Analogously, as there are high and low Christologies, one might say that he articulates a high Mariology -- or, to rejoyce what was said above, a mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest. 

Therefore, Mary isn't just the one "chosen among all women," but an exemplar of "the Divine Essence in its super-ontological Mystery." 

Super-ontological, as in "There was something formless and perfect / before the universe was born" that gives birth even to being. In other words, the Divine Essence must be Beyond-Being. She is indeed the Everliving Bringer of Plurabilities, the O prior even to One.

Or so it seems. We'll continue up this trail in the next post.  

Divine and Anti-Divine Comedy

I was about to say there's nothing funny about witches, but that would be inaccurate; rather, they are often inadvertently humorous, but they themselves are incapable of genuine humor. I will stand corrected if Hillary Clinton, Liz Warren, or AOC ever utter a spontaneously witty comment. 

I stumbled on a good essay on this subject, called Guerrilla Comedy, by Emina Melonic, who is either not a witch, or one of the good ones (https://americanmind.org/features/court-jesters/guerrilla-comedy/):

any ideological and authoritarian system abhors humor. State appointed writers, tasked with the grave responsibility of disseminating state propaganda, are almost by definition humorless except as the butt of jokes themselves...

Know them by their fruit, and their bitter fruit is a disapproving scowl that warns you to Think before you laugh. 

Which is why "Finding a state-appointed comedian throughout the history of totalitarianism" is difficult if not impossible. Note that throne-sniffing anti-clowns such as Stephen Colbert and the rest of the late-night castrati have internalized "the regime’s censorship: put bluntly, they are letting the bad guys win." Thus,

Plenty of entertainers masquerade as comedians, but in reality they are doing something like anti-comedy -- not subverting but reinforcing dominant modes of thought. (Ever since Barack Obama was elected president, this has been the state of basically all mainstream late-night shows...)

Nothing funny about that vacuous, jug-eared tower of pomposity. As it pertains to these predictable assouls, you will have noticed that

their routines boil down to using mockery as a strategy for reinforcing a list of leftist ideological points, and forbidding a list of disfavored right-wing thoughts.... The jokes are rarely smart or incisive, and have instead the character of schoolyard taunts: they are social cues for distinguishing the ingroup from the outgroup. 

It reminds me of how the Demon understands evil, but does not and cannot understand good; rather, he can only understand the good in terms of some ulterior motive, which is precisely how the left pretends to understand us. 

For example, if we are opposed to state imposed racial quotas, it is because we are racists, or if we don't see anything about abortion in the constitution, it is because we want to KONTROL WIMMINZ BODYS!

Think of leftists making fun of conservatives. Very rarely do they know their subject well, and thus, the comedy act has nowhere else to go but to retreat into full-blown mockery. What is lacking is intelligence, and a clear sight of human absurdity in the everyday.

Now, a witch needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Indeed, what is toxic femininity but the feminine detached from its complementary pole and therefore spinning in darkness into a parallel looniverse? So, 

Much of it has to do with an attack on masculinity.... The differences between male and female are not acknowledged, and neither are the aspects of masculine and feminine personalities. A huge portion of true humor comes from the reality of these differences -- and the inherent absurdity of inverting them as in the case of drag and now transgenderism. Since these subjects are now effectively off-limits, comedy is increasingly forbidden.

In this unhappy world, there is NOTHING FUNNY about the ridiculous Corporal Klinger in the sitcom MASH. Rather, his crossdressing character is there for DRAMATIC RELIEF from all the lighthearted gaiety of war.

I never imagined I'd live to see the day when laughter is a revolutionary act, but here we are.

Every time we tell a joke, even to only one person, we are renewing pleasure and joy. Humor will endure, if only as a form of ideological guerilla warfare: too makeshift, too decentralized, and too natural to its environment, for any clumsy totalitarian invasion ever truly to wipe out.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a lame joke followed by forced laughter -- for ever. Because if they can make us laugh at what's not funny and stifle our laughter at what is, then we've surrendered our nature to these spiteful mutants.

Speaking of witch, we're almost done with this book, so let's wrap it up. 

I suppose laughing at what's not funny is a subset of the larger postmodern project of accepting false as true, because there are no absolutes; in other words, the tyranny of relativism 

demands that you accept that things you know to be lies are, in fact, truth. Witches were always understood to be in league with the Devil, who is described as the "father of lies".... By contrast, God is understood to be the truth and to value truth (Dutton).

Thus,

accepting postmodernism, and especially transgender ideology, can be seen as a rejection of God's Creation -- or of objective reality, to put it another way -- in favor of an alternative reality in which Man is God.

Consider the infamous DON'T SAY GAY! bill in Florida. In reality, it is simply a law to protect children from being indoctrinated into an ideology that tells them men can be women because there is no such thing as empirical reality. But for the groomers, "believing in the empirical truth, and asserting that you believe in the empirical truth" is no defense, because reality is hateful.

One of the phenomena that the transgender movement has led to is, in effect, the serious abuse of children, something with which witchcraft was also associated. Children are being raised in an environment in which parents, social workers, and teachers are positively encouraged to accept at face value any confusion they may experience about their gender-identity (ibid.).

Sowing seeds of chaos into the very ground of reality. It's what the Evil One does. But one of the most effective ways to piss him off is to laugh at the absurd spectacle.

Divine and Anti-Divine Comedy

I was about to say there's nothing funny about witches, but that would be inaccurate; rather, they are often inadvertently humorous, but they themselves are incapable of genuine humor. I will stand corrected if Hillary Clinton, Liz Warren, or AOC ever utter a spontaneously witty comment. 

I stumbled on a good essay on this subject, called Guerrilla Comedy, by Emina Melonic, who is either not a witch, or one of the good ones (https://americanmind.org/features/court-jesters/guerrilla-comedy/):

any ideological and authoritarian system abhors humor. State appointed writers, tasked with the grave responsibility of disseminating state propaganda, are almost by definition humorless except as the butt of jokes themselves...

Know them by their fruit, and their bitter fruit is a disapproving scowl that warns you to Think before you laugh. 

Which is why "Finding a state-appointed comedian throughout the history of totalitarianism" is difficult if not impossible. Note that throne-sniffing anti-clowns such as Stephen Colbert and the rest of the late-night castrati have internalized "the regime’s censorship: put bluntly, they are letting the bad guys win." Thus,

Plenty of entertainers masquerade as comedians, but in reality they are doing something like anti-comedy -- not subverting but reinforcing dominant modes of thought. (Ever since Barack Obama was elected president, this has been the state of basically all mainstream late-night shows...)

Nothing funny about that vacuous, jug-eared tower of pomposity. As it pertains to these predictable assouls, you will have noticed that

their routines boil down to using mockery as a strategy for reinforcing a list of leftist ideological points, and forbidding a list of disfavored right-wing thoughts.... The jokes are rarely smart or incisive, and have instead the character of schoolyard taunts: they are social cues for distinguishing the ingroup from the outgroup. 

It reminds me of how the Demon understands evil, but does not and cannot understand good; rather, he can only understand the good in terms of some ulterior motive, which is precisely how the left pretends to understand us. 

For example, if we are opposed to state imposed racial quotas, it is because we are racists, or if we don't see anything about abortion in the constitution, it is because we want to KONTROL WIMMINZ BODYS!

Think of leftists making fun of conservatives. Very rarely do they know their subject well, and thus, the comedy act has nowhere else to go but to retreat into full-blown mockery. What is lacking is intelligence, and a clear sight of human absurdity in the everyday.

Now, a witch needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Indeed, what is toxic femininity but the feminine detached from its complementary pole and therefore spinning in darkness into a parallel looniverse? So, 

Much of it has to do with an attack on masculinity.... The differences between male and female are not acknowledged, and neither are the aspects of masculine and feminine personalities. A huge portion of true humor comes from the reality of these differences -- and the inherent absurdity of inverting them as in the case of drag and now transgenderism. Since these subjects are now effectively off-limits, comedy is increasingly forbidden.

In this unhappy world, there is NOTHING FUNNY about the ridiculous Corporal Klinger in the sitcom MASH. Rather, his crossdressing character is there for DRAMATIC RELIEF from all the lighthearted gaiety of war.

I never imagined I'd live to see the day when laughter is a revolutionary act, but here we are.

Every time we tell a joke, even to only one person, we are renewing pleasure and joy. Humor will endure, if only as a form of ideological guerilla warfare: too makeshift, too decentralized, and too natural to its environment, for any clumsy totalitarian invasion ever truly to wipe out.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a lame joke followed by forced laughter -- for ever. Because if they can make us laugh at what's not funny and stifle our laughter at what is, then we've surrendered our nature to these spiteful mutants.

Speaking of witch, we're almost done with this book, so let's wrap it up. 

I suppose laughing at what's not funny is a subset of the larger postmodern project of accepting false as true, because there are no absolutes; in other words, the tyranny of relativism 

demands that you accept that things you know to be lies are, in fact, truth. Witches were always understood to be in league with the Devil, who is described as the "father of lies".... By contrast, God is understood to be the truth and to value truth (Dutton).

Thus,

accepting postmodernism, and especially transgender ideology, can be seen as a rejection of God's Creation -- or of objective reality, to put it another way -- in favor of an alternative reality in which Man is God.

Consider the infamous DON'T SAY GAY! bill in Florida. In reality, it is simply a law to protect children from being indoctrinated into an ideology that tells them men can be women because there is no such thing as empirical reality. But for the groomers, "believing in the empirical truth, and asserting that you believe in the empirical truth" is no defense, because reality is hateful.

One of the phenomena that the transgender movement has led to is, in effect, the serious abuse of children, something with which witchcraft was also associated. Children are being raised in an environment in which parents, social workers, and teachers are positively encouraged to accept at face value any confusion they may experience about their gender-identity (ibid.).

Sowing seeds of chaos into the very ground of reality. It's what the Evil One does. But one of the most effective ways to piss him off is to laugh at the absurd spectacle.