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.

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.

God's Own Dream

Never heard of him, but Pieper quotes the 18th century German philosopher Christian Wolff:

The truth that is called "transcendental" and is conceived as inherent in reality as such... is the ordered structure governing all existing things.

The transcendent Order from which immanent order flows is in contrast to the dream, which involves "inconsistency in the transformation of things. The truth implies order, the dream disorder."

Freud famously imagined he had discovered the implicit order, or deep structure, of dreams, and for awhile there I myself believed it. For the cult of psychoanalysis is exactly that: a cult, featuring a prophet, revelation, dogma, disciples, apostolic succession, sacraments, rites, purity tests, and of course, plenty of cash. 

Still, Freud's racket was better than what we have today in psychology, which isn't even a fairy tale. Speaking of which, if we ignore those transcendental principles referenced above -- should they 

ever disappear from the universe of all existing things, then the real world would dissolve into a fairy tale (mundus fabulosis), the equivalent of a dream (Wolff).

Obviously, we are there: western civilization has exchanged the order of truth for the disorder of the dream. But is it really a disorder, full stop? Just because Freud got it wrong, it doesn't necessarily mean that the dream has no order. Clearly, dreaming has some kind of order, or it would be a literal chaos with no narrative structure, characters, dialogue, scenes, themes, etc.

Thinking back on when I used to interpret dreams, I never did so in an "orthodox" manner that reduced them to some preconceived structure. Rather, I would approach them as one would a work of art -- a film or novel -- and try to discern the intent of the Dreamer, i.e., the underlying theme.

And as a matter of fact, I didn't come to post-graduate work in psychology in the usual way. Rather, my undergraduate degree was in film, of all things, more the artistic than technical side.

There has never been any conscious plan, but once I made the impulsive decision to veer into psychology, I couldn't help but see human life as a bad movie -- or a movie that is going badly -- and unhappy patients as being trapped in a plot unwittingly written by themselves: just like a horror movie, except the calls are coming from inside the head.

It was also during this time that -- unlucky for you -- I discovered Joyce, and more particularly, Finnegans Wake, which is what exactly? You could say it is the most complicated dream ever dreamt, which is to say, all of human history packed into one crazy dream in a single night of one individual, who is human nature writ large, AKA Here Comes Everybody. 

No one has ever come close to fully understanding the book, and no one ever will. However, the very idea of it drew me in like a moth to the flame. It didn't take much of a leap to regard it as literal, in the sense that history is indeed a nightmare from which we cannot awaken, and the more one studies history, the more evidence one finds for this endless nightmare. To study history is to float over a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat, a sewer called human nature.

I know, I know, there's plenty of good stuff down there, but it is clearly the exception, and it is always fragile and surrounded on all sides by the things one naturally finds in a sewer. Like today, for example. How insentient does one have to be in order to not smell it? 

Time out for some aphoristic back-up:

Civilizations are the summer buzzing of insects between two winters.

I'm an optimist. I say it's late autumn. 

History is a succession of nights and days. Of short days and long nights.

And the nights are, of course, when the most intense dreaming takes place, like REM sleep.

Our civilization is a baroque palace invaded by a disheveled mob.

Led by a dementia patient. 

What we call the "news" is really the Dream Police: it defines the parameters of the dream and marginalizes or punishes those who stray from it. For example, today's dream is that sending illegals to wealthy Democrat playgrounds that claim to welcome Diversity is a "political stunt." Okay dreamer.

Pulling out for a moment from this civilizational nosedive, it occurs to me that to become a Christian is to plug into God's own dream, so to speak. Thus, for example,

The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld in the world.

Or, you could call it a counter-dream to the nightmare of history. It resembles the transcendent order referenced above, except the latter is philosophical, or accessible to natural reason, whereas we can know nothing of God's dream unless he reveals it to us.

But like most dreams, it's definitely a strange one -- so strange that upon hearing it, many of his disciples said, This is a pretty weird dream. Who can accept it? But this is part of the appeal, for

Christian doctrines have the implausibility of objects that we do not construct, but that we stumble across.

Morevoer,

Certain dogmas of Christianity seem so evident to me that it is not difficult for me to believe in those that are difficult to believe.

Now, we've had plenty of morons in the White House, but not since Wilson have we had a frankly demented one. What does this imply for the nightmare of history? 

It's difficult to say at this juncture whether this is a cause or consequence of where we are in the nightmare, but it certainly seems like we've lost any connecting thread, and that we are now like a planet with no star, and therefore spinning out of control. Say what you want about the nightmarish tenets of the left, at least it's a structure. But this is madness.

Even so, the Central Sun is always here, at least for the individual. To be a conservative is to say that there is a transcendental order in things; that this order is discovered and not invented; and for this reason ought to be conserved, precisely. The things that are not of this order shouldn't be tossed aside lightly, but rather, thrown with great force.

God's Own Dream

Never heard of him, but Pieper quotes the 18th century German philosopher Christian Wolff:

The truth that is called "transcendental" and is conceived as inherent in reality as such... is the ordered structure governing all existing things.

The transcendent Order from which immanent order flows is in contrast to the dream, which involves "inconsistency in the transformation of things. The truth implies order, the dream disorder."

Freud famously imagined he had discovered the implicit order, or deep structure, of dreams, and for awhile there I myself believed it. For the cult of psychoanalysis is exactly that: a cult, featuring a prophet, revelation, dogma, disciples, apostolic succession, sacraments, rites, purity tests, and of course, plenty of cash. 

Still, Freud's racket was better than what we have today in psychology, which isn't even a fairy tale. Speaking of which, if we ignore those transcendental principles referenced above -- should they 

ever disappear from the universe of all existing things, then the real world would dissolve into a fairy tale (mundus fabulosis), the equivalent of a dream (Wolff).

Obviously, we are there: western civilization has exchanged the order of truth for the disorder of the dream. But is it really a disorder, full stop? Just because Freud got it wrong, it doesn't necessarily mean that the dream has no order. Clearly, dreaming has some kind of order, or it would be a literal chaos with no narrative structure, characters, dialogue, scenes, themes, etc.

Thinking back on when I used to interpret dreams, I never did so in an "orthodox" manner that reduced them to some preconceived structure. Rather, I would approach them as one would a work of art -- a film or novel -- and try to discern the intent of the Dreamer, i.e., the underlying theme.

And as a matter of fact, I didn't come to post-graduate work in psychology in the usual way. Rather, my undergraduate degree was in film, of all things, more the artistic than technical side.

There has never been any conscious plan, but once I made the impulsive decision to veer into psychology, I couldn't help but see human life as a bad movie -- or a movie that is going badly -- and unhappy patients as being trapped in a plot unwittingly written by themselves: just like a horror movie, except the calls are coming from inside the head.

It was also during this time that -- unlucky for you -- I discovered Joyce, and more particularly, Finnegans Wake, which is what exactly? You could say it is the most complicated dream ever dreamt, which is to say, all of human history packed into one crazy dream in a single night of one individual, who is human nature writ large, AKA Here Comes Everybody. 

No one has ever come close to fully understanding the book, and no one ever will. However, the very idea of it drew me in like a moth to the flame. It didn't take much of a leap to regard it as literal, in the sense that history is indeed a nightmare from which we cannot awaken, and the more one studies history, the more evidence one finds for this endless nightmare. To study history is to float over a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat, a sewer called human nature.

I know, I know, there's plenty of good stuff down there, but it is clearly the exception, and it is always fragile and surrounded on all sides by the things one naturally finds in a sewer. Like today, for example. How insentient does one have to be in order to not smell it? 

Time out for some aphoristic back-up:

Civilizations are the summer buzzing of insects between two winters.

I'm an optimist. I say it's late autumn. 

History is a succession of nights and days. Of short days and long nights.

And the nights are, of course, when the most intense dreaming takes place, like REM sleep.

Our civilization is a baroque palace invaded by a disheveled mob.

Led by a dementia patient. 

What we call the "news" is really the Dream Police: it defines the parameters of the dream and marginalizes or punishes those who stray from it. For example, today's dream is that sending illegals to wealthy Democrat playgrounds that claim to welcome Diversity is a "political stunt." Okay dreamer.

Pulling out for a moment from this civilizational nosedive, it occurs to me that to become a Christian is to plug into God's own dream, so to speak. Thus, for example,

The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld in the world.

Or, you could call it a counter-dream to the nightmare of history. It resembles the transcendent order referenced above, except the latter is philosophical, or accessible to natural reason, whereas we can know nothing of God's dream unless he reveals it to us.

But like most dreams, it's definitely a strange one -- so strange that upon hearing it, many of his disciples said, This is a pretty weird dream. Who can accept it? But this is part of the appeal, for

Christian doctrines have the implausibility of objects that we do not construct, but that we stumble across.

Morevoer,

Certain dogmas of Christianity seem so evident to me that it is not difficult for me to believe in those that are difficult to believe.

Now, we've had plenty of morons in the White House, but not since Wilson have we had a frankly demented one. What does this imply for the nightmare of history? 

It's difficult to say at this juncture whether this is a cause or consequence of where we are in the nightmare, but it certainly seems like we've lost any connecting thread, and that we are now like a planet with no star, and therefore spinning out of control. Say what you want about the nightmarish tenets of the left, at least it's a structure. But this is madness.

Even so, the Central Sun is always here, at least for the individual. To be a conservative is to say that there is a transcendental order in things; that this order is discovered and not invented; and for this reason ought to be conserved, precisely. The things that are not of this order shouldn't be tossed aside lightly, but rather, thrown with great force.

The Bigger the Bang, the Bigger the Mystery

Time only for a brief one, but we'll do our best to pack in some concentrated vertamins.

Let's begin with the aphoristic stipulation that

Myths, like the aesthetic presentation, can be truths without being realities (Dávila).

Conversely, science can be true without being reality, to such an extent that

Science easily degrades into fools’ mythology.

And 

To believe that science is enough is the most naive of superstitions.

This reminds me of something I read the other day -- that some physicists are panicking because some of the new photos from deep space seem to imply that the Big Bang theory must be false. 

The google machine suggests this is fake news, but the Bang itself was considered fake news at first -- as are all truly revolutionary scientific discoveries. Just as somebody always gets hurt in a courtroom, every scientific discovery threatens the interests of the prevailing orthodoxy. 

In any event, the whole dispute is way below my post-academic pay grade. My point is that even I was a bit unsettled when I read an article by a physicist assuring me that the Big Bang couldn't possibly have happened. It was dis-orienting -- literally, since I had become accustomed to orienting the physical cosmos to this unimaginable "event" of 13.8 billion years ago. If it didn't happen, it's like our cosmic area rug has been stolen by nihilists.

Of course, this has no effect one way or the other on metaphysics or revelation, which are the real "controlling paradigms," so to speak. Still, it left me wondering: What other so-called "truths" are just a patch-up job on the matrix? Is the border really secure? Was the November 2020 election really the cleanest in history? Was January 6 really an insurrection? Does Joe Biden even know what day it is? So many questions!

In reality, despite any and all advances in science and technology, we are plunged into mystery at all the key places -- the joints and hinges, so to speak -- of the matrix. On these questions there has been no advance over what was known 2,000 years ago. These include

--Why is there something instead of nothing?

--What is life, and how did it originate?

--What is consciousness?

--Who am I?

--How should I live, i.e., what ought I do?

--Why is there evil? Or, come to think of it, goodness, truth, love, and beauty? 

You will notice that such questions always revolve around the mysteries of origins, present being, and ultimate ends. It's not that science has answered any of these, rather, it simply stops asking questions at a certain point, for 

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

But a vertical mystery is not the same as horizontal question. There is an "answer" to the mystery, but it's an even bigger mystery, indeed, the biggest one (in)conceivable, which is why we symbolize it O. 

Note that there is mystery at "both ends" of O, in that the infinitude flows in both directions, up and down. Thus, the only way we can approach it is by becoming infinite ourselves, i.e., via radical openness.

Here we link up to Celestial Central, which is the ground of what was said above about origins, end, and present being. This may be a little difficult to conceptualize, or, on the other hand, very difficult to conceptualize. Put it this way:

Every beginning is an image of the Beginning; every end is an image of the End.

The "Big Bang," for example, is but a scientific image of beginning-ness per se. It is not and cannot be The beginning, because that beginning is and must be metaphysical, not merely physical. Irrespective of whether we are living in the midst of this ongrowing bang, the banging is nevertheless contingent, and dependent upon something -- or someOne -- necessary.

This necessary mystery is O, and it is never going away. 

You know the old saying about how if you don't know both sides of an argument, you don't know either side? Likewise, if you don't know both sides of science, you don't know either side. 

Long story short, on one side of science is the material world, and in particular, its mysterious intelligibility. On the other side is the human being and our even more mysterious immaterial intellect. Science can only presume both, but never account for them with its own resources. Which is why

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.

And

He who understands the least is he who insists on understanding more than what can be understood.

What is the most that can be understood? I -- or , rather Dávila -- can answer that in four words, but you'll have to fill in some of the gaps, since I'm out of time:

Truth is a person.

Okay, here's a hint:

Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to meditating on minor problems.

The Bigger the Bang, the Bigger the Mystery

Time only for a brief one, but we'll do our best to pack in some concentrated vertamins.

Let's begin with the aphoristic stipulation that

Myths, like the aesthetic presentation, can be truths without being realities (Dávila).

Conversely, science can be true without being reality, to such an extent that

Science easily degrades into fools’ mythology.

And 

To believe that science is enough is the most naive of superstitions.

This reminds me of something I read the other day -- that some physicists are panicking because some of the new photos from deep space seem to imply that the Big Bang theory must be false. 

The google machine suggests this is fake news, but the Bang itself was considered fake news at first -- as are all truly revolutionary scientific discoveries. Just as somebody always gets hurt in a courtroom, every scientific discovery threatens the interests of the prevailing orthodoxy. 

In any event, the whole dispute is way below my post-academic pay grade. My point is that even I was a bit unsettled when I read an article by a physicist assuring me that the Big Bang couldn't possibly have happened. It was dis-orienting -- literally, since I had become accustomed to orienting the physical cosmos to this unimaginable "event" of 13.8 billion years ago. If it didn't happen, it's like our cosmic area rug has been stolen by nihilists.

Of course, this has no effect one way or the other on metaphysics or revelation, which are the real "controlling paradigms," so to speak. Still, it left me wondering: What other so-called "truths" are just a patch-up job on the matrix? Is the border really secure? Was the November 2020 election really the cleanest in history? Was January 6 really an insurrection? Does Joe Biden even know what day it is? So many questions!

In reality, despite any and all advances in science and technology, we are plunged into mystery at all the key places -- the joints and hinges, so to speak -- of the matrix. On these questions there has been no advance over what was known 2,000 years ago. These include

--Why is there something instead of nothing?

--What is life, and how did it originate?

--What is consciousness?

--Who am I?

--How should I live, i.e., what ought I do?

--Why is there evil? Or, come to think of it, goodness, truth, love, and beauty? 

You will notice that such questions always revolve around the mysteries of origins, present being, and ultimate ends. It's not that science has answered any of these, rather, it simply stops asking questions at a certain point, for 

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

But a vertical mystery is not the same as horizontal question. There is an "answer" to the mystery, but it's an even bigger mystery, indeed, the biggest one (in)conceivable, which is why we symbolize it O. 

Note that there is mystery at "both ends" of O, in that the infinitude flows in both directions, up and down. Thus, the only way we can approach it is by becoming infinite ourselves, i.e., via radical openness.

Here we link up to Celestial Central, which is the ground of what was said above about origins, end, and present being. This may be a little difficult to conceptualize, or, on the other hand, very difficult to conceptualize. Put it this way:

Every beginning is an image of the Beginning; every end is an image of the End.

The "Big Bang," for example, is but a scientific image of beginning-ness per se. It is not and cannot be The beginning, because that beginning is and must be metaphysical, not merely physical. Irrespective of whether we are living in the midst of this ongrowing bang, the banging is nevertheless contingent, and dependent upon something -- or someOne -- necessary.

This necessary mystery is O, and it is never going away. 

You know the old saying about how if you don't know both sides of an argument, you don't know either side? Likewise, if you don't know both sides of science, you don't know either side. 

Long story short, on one side of science is the material world, and in particular, its mysterious intelligibility. On the other side is the human being and our even more mysterious immaterial intellect. Science can only presume both, but never account for them with its own resources. Which is why

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.

And

He who understands the least is he who insists on understanding more than what can be understood.

What is the most that can be understood? I -- or , rather Dávila -- can answer that in four words, but you'll have to fill in some of the gaps, since I'm out of time:

Truth is a person.

Okay, here's a hint:

Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to meditating on minor problems.

Fairy Tales for the Tenured

Between truth and dream, I know what I want: a dreamy truth -- like truth as depicted in, say, myth.

I say this after having finally gotten around to watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy with Gagdad Jr. Myth is not truth, obviously. But equally obviously, there is truth in myth. Which isn't so strange when you think about it, for it turns out the same is true of history:

Truth is in history, but history is not truth (Dávila).

How can this be? I hate to give credit for anything to postmodernity, but it does at least appreciate the significance of narrative, even if it immediately throws away its deeper meaning. For it is as if they say: Truth is expressed in narrative, therefore, there is no truth. Rather, there are only competing narratives that mask the will to power. 

To put it in mythological terms, there is only the Ring of Power, and anyone who tries to pretend otherwise is either naive or trying to con you. But the truth of what they say isn't new at all, and what they say that's new isn't true.

It is interesting -- spoiler alert in case there's one other person who hasn't seen the movie -- that when finally faced with the choice of forsaking the ring, Frodo can't do it. Best he can do is prevent someone else from having it, Gollum. Frodo essentially murders his rival, and the ring goes down with him. 

Now that expresses a perennial Truth of human nature: if I can't have it, then no one else can, AKA, primordial envy.  

As we've discussed in the past, envy is not the same as greed, which merely desires the object. Rather, envy is much more pernicious, as it is driven to destroy the very thing that arouses its desire. Think of Hitler, who ordered his general to reduce Paris to rubble rather than surrender it to the allies: Paris must not pass into the enemy's hands, except as a field of ruins.

Ironically, the Nazi general who refused the order has sometimes been called the Savior of Paris.   

Say what you want about Hitler, at least he had a consistent ethos: with the allies closing in, he issued what is called the Nero Decree, which ordered the total destruction of anything of value before it fell into the hands of the enemy. Indeed, if Germany couldn't prevail in the struggle, then this only proved Germans themselves to be unworthy of life. Now that is pure envy. 

Reminds me of Hillary in 2016: if I can't have the ring, then at least I can destroy Trump and democracy. The spite continues. If they're going to lose in November, might as well cause as much chaos and destruction as possible -- to our cities, to the border, and to the economy -- and then blame Republicans for it. 

At this point I could veer into a post on Chesterton and Lewis to flesh out the notion of dreamy truth, but that's been done. At One Cosmos we prefer to employ strange words to seek out old civilizations, and to blog where no blogger has blogged before. 

Let's start with some additional aphorisms before we light out for the territories. Or head off to Trader Joes, whichever comes first. 

Just as there are truths that can only be painted, so there are others that are only expressed in legends.

The bridge between nature and man is not science, but myth.

Man often believes he is exchanging a fable for a truth when he is merely exchanging one fable for another fable.

What I want to say is that man cannot avoid myth, because he is a historical -- which is to say, temporal -- being. Not to champion the obvious again, but we simply cannot avoid stories and narratives to structure the deployment of truth in time. Now,

Nothing is explainable outside of history, but history is not enough to explain anything.

Read "narrative" for history, and you get the point. However, not all narratives are created equal, and many are created specifically to deceive, beginning with the narrator. 

A myth is a narrative, but not all narratives are myths. Rather, there are rules, i.e., a hierarchy of truths, and if you confuse the top with the bottom, or vice versa, you are surely entering a world of pain. We'll just end with this aphoristic truism and pick up the thread tomorrow:

News stories are the substitute for truths. 

Fairy tales for the tenured -- for educated white women, the low information crowd, the envious, the corporate gollums, the groomers and other deviants, etc.

Fairy Tales for the Tenured

Between truth and dream, I know what I want: a dreamy truth -- like truth as depicted in, say, myth.

I say this after having finally gotten around to watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy with Gagdad Jr. Myth is not truth, obviously. But equally obviously, there is truth in myth. Which isn't so strange when you think about it, for it turns out the same is true of history:

Truth is in history, but history is not truth (Dávila).

How can this be? I hate to give credit for anything to postmodernity, but it does at least appreciate the significance of narrative, even if it immediately throws away its deeper meaning. For it is as if they say: Truth is expressed in narrative, therefore, there is no truth. Rather, there are only competing narratives that mask the will to power. 

To put it in mythological terms, there is only the Ring of Power, and anyone who tries to pretend otherwise is either naive or trying to con you. But the truth of what they say isn't new at all, and what they say that's new isn't true.

It is interesting -- spoiler alert in case there's one other person who hasn't seen the movie -- that when finally faced with the choice of forsaking the ring, Frodo can't do it. Best he can do is prevent someone else from having it, Gollum. Frodo essentially murders his rival, and the ring goes down with him. 

Now that expresses a perennial Truth of human nature: if I can't have it, then no one else can, AKA, primordial envy.  

As we've discussed in the past, envy is not the same as greed, which merely desires the object. Rather, envy is much more pernicious, as it is driven to destroy the very thing that arouses its desire. Think of Hitler, who ordered his general to reduce Paris to rubble rather than surrender it to the allies: Paris must not pass into the enemy's hands, except as a field of ruins.

Ironically, the Nazi general who refused the order has sometimes been called the Savior of Paris.   

Say what you want about Hitler, at least he had a consistent ethos: with the allies closing in, he issued what is called the Nero Decree, which ordered the total destruction of anything of value before it fell into the hands of the enemy. Indeed, if Germany couldn't prevail in the struggle, then this only proved Germans themselves to be unworthy of life. Now that is pure envy. 

Reminds me of Hillary in 2016: if I can't have the ring, then at least I can destroy Trump and democracy. The spite continues. If they're going to lose in November, might as well cause as much chaos and destruction as possible -- to our cities, to the border, and to the economy -- and then blame Republicans for it. 

At this point I could veer into a post on Chesterton and Lewis to flesh out the notion of dreamy truth, but that's been done. At One Cosmos we prefer to employ strange words to seek out old civilizations, and to blog where no blogger has blogged before. 

Let's start with some additional aphorisms before we light out for the territories. Or head off to Trader Joes, whichever comes first. 

Just as there are truths that can only be painted, so there are others that are only expressed in legends.

The bridge between nature and man is not science, but myth.

Man often believes he is exchanging a fable for a truth when he is merely exchanging one fable for another fable.

What I want to say is that man cannot avoid myth, because he is a historical -- which is to say, temporal -- being. Not to champion the obvious again, but we simply cannot avoid stories and narratives to structure the deployment of truth in time. Now,

Nothing is explainable outside of history, but history is not enough to explain anything.

Read "narrative" for history, and you get the point. However, not all narratives are created equal, and many are created specifically to deceive, beginning with the narrator. 

A myth is a narrative, but not all narratives are myths. Rather, there are rules, i.e., a hierarchy of truths, and if you confuse the top with the bottom, or vice versa, you are surely entering a world of pain. We'll just end with this aphoristic truism and pick up the thread tomorrow:

News stories are the substitute for truths. 

Fairy tales for the tenured -- for educated white women, the low information crowd, the envious, the corporate gollums, the groomers and other deviants, etc.

Brandon Version 1.0

Truth is a property of being because being is an entailment or radiation of the principle of creation. Or, you could just say that the Creator cannot not create; moreover, since we are in the image of the principle -- its prolongation herebelow -- it explains our own boundless creativity. Creativity ultimately exists for the same reason as do truth, beauty, and virtue: the conformity of reality to the Principle. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

But of course, man is free, so he is free to ignore or deny the universal principles that govern things -- including even the principle of freedom itself. 

However, doing so involves exchanging reality for fantasy, and we all know people who prefer to live in the comfort and safety of their own delusions. Living where I do, I am surrounded by these drones. Some of them even notice the ongoing descent into barbarism, but they see no connection between this and the one party rule they support. The hivemind by its nature has no insight into itself.

"The opposite of transcendental truth," writes Pieper, "would be a dream mistaken for reality." But a single dream isn't enough to cover the whole of reality, which is why the left has had to invade everything in academia, even areas you'd think would be unnecessary, such as sports, weather, and experimental vaccine mandates.  

For it seems that the opposite of "universal" is "totalitarian." Both approaches endeavor to account for everything, the former in an open-ended, spontaneous, and harmonious manner, the latter in a rigid, closed, and top-down manner. The university used to be a place to nurture open minds, whereas now it actively bans and persecutes them. Progress! 

Way back in the day, my doctoral dissertation was on the idea of the mind as a quintessentially open system. Open to what? Since publishing a couple of articles from the dissertation in 1991 and 1994, I've refined my thinking on the subject, but I don't recall ever having packed it all into a single post. Rather, it's more of a background assumption that colors my approach to everything, up to and including God.

A key point, I suppose, is that the mind is analogous to a biological system that maintains itself via openness to the surrounding environment, accompanied by an exchange of matter, energy, or information. This is obvious on the purely biological level, but it is equally true on the psychic level, and it is precisely this mechanism that is exploited by the media-academic totalitarians, who never stop farce-feeding us a stream of lies, especially in the post-internet "information age."

Information in-forms, meaning that its recipients take on the very form of the in-formers, i.e., media and academic gaslighters. As it so happens, Z Man touched on this subject this morning, and his reflections may even have provoked mine: 

From the point of view of the managerial class, it is perfectly sensible for the tech oligarchs to censure speech. It is the responsible thing to do. They are baffled as to why anyone is upset by this. Not only are they not offended by censorship, but they would also be shocked if these firms were not coordinating their efforts. It is why they mount pressure campaigns against holdouts. Teaming up to suppress speech is really just a good example of political unity when you think about it.

When you step back and look at what is happening, it is remarkable. Managerialism in the West has achieved something that the Bolsheviks and Nazis were never able to accomplish at their peak. The operation of the managerial class is entirely informal, a habit of mind, rather than a set of rules. The communists and fascists had to rely on physical compulsion to maintain control (https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=28250).

The other day I read a book called 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder. Nothing new, it turns out, but it does have helpful review of Wilson's totalitarian sentiments and policies. You could call him Brandon v1.0, or you could call Brandon Wilson v2.0; but really, it's just the same old nightmare of progressivism. 

Remember Brandon's Disinformation Governance Board, headed up by that ridiculous woman who mindlessly propagated every word of leftist disinformation? Nothing new. Wilson created his own Committee on Public Information in April of 1917. And just like today, the purpose was to Save R Demokrisy! Its first head, George Creel, helpfully said that

It remains to be seen whether the people of the United States prefer facts to clamor, fairness to betrayal, and democracy to oligarchy; in a word, whether they are able to think for themselves.

Sounds good! Except, just like today, "It was precisely to ensure that the American people didn't think for themselves that Creel would throw himself into his job" at CPI, via propaganda and censorship:

America's media became the obedient conduit for the CPI's Division of News, which bombarded the public with six thousand press releases a week.... on any given week, more than twenty thousand newspaper columns carried material that the Division of News deemed fit to print. 

So, just like today, they had their own gaslight media. They also knew that politics is downstream from culture, so they didn't take any chances with the primary entertainment medium of the day: the Division of Films "turned to the motion picture industry" in order "to mobilize pro-war, anti-German sentiment," and "Hollywood jumped in with both feet."

Recruiting moviemakers was a farsighted policy, not unlike recruiting social media or Instagram to carry government propaganda today.

Progressives would never forget to pander to emotional woman and malleable blacks: there was 

an effort to recruit African American speakers, especially clergy, to carry the messages to their communities, and a Woman's Division to promote the same thing...

The result was a media-storm that was coordinated, comprehensive, and virtually around-the-clock.

The invention the 24-hour news cycle, or an unending Two Minutes Hate. Putin is the new Kaiser, as Trump is the new Debs, or at least will be when they indict him (Debs actually ran for present from behind bars in 1920, so Trump won't be the first).

The Espionage act of 1917 "gave government officials wide latitude in limiting the spread of undesirable opinions -- otherwise known as limiting free speech," as the Sedition Act of 1918 "made it illegal to speak, print, write or publish" any "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government." It was "the single most restrictive gag on free speech and freedom of the press in U.S. history."

Until today.

There were even versions of Antifa back then, semi-vigilante groups such as the American Protective League and American Defense Society. 

The more things progress, the more they stay the same: the actions of Wilson and his henchmen

highlight the curious self-righteousness of the American Progressive mind, and the belief among Progressives that their views once arrived at were beyond criticism; as with Wilson, opposition itself became a sign of disloyalty, even of evil.

To bring the post full circle, this is not a dream mistaken for reality, but a nightmare propagated and enforced from on high. I mean, if I am a fascist, then Progworld is truly upside down and inside out.

Brandon Version 1.0

Truth is a property of being because being is an entailment or radiation of the principle of creation. Or, you could just say that the Creator cannot not create; moreover, since we are in the image of the principle -- its prolongation herebelow -- it explains our own boundless creativity. Creativity ultimately exists for the same reason as do truth, beauty, and virtue: the conformity of reality to the Principle. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

But of course, man is free, so he is free to ignore or deny the universal principles that govern things -- including even the principle of freedom itself. 

However, doing so involves exchanging reality for fantasy, and we all know people who prefer to live in the comfort and safety of their own delusions. Living where I do, I am surrounded by these drones. Some of them even notice the ongoing descent into barbarism, but they see no connection between this and the one party rule they support. The hivemind by its nature has no insight into itself.

"The opposite of transcendental truth," writes Pieper, "would be a dream mistaken for reality." But a single dream isn't enough to cover the whole of reality, which is why the left has had to invade everything in academia, even areas you'd think would be unnecessary, such as sports, weather, and experimental vaccine mandates.  

For it seems that the opposite of "universal" is "totalitarian." Both approaches endeavor to account for everything, the former in an open-ended, spontaneous, and harmonious manner, the latter in a rigid, closed, and top-down manner. The university used to be a place to nurture open minds, whereas now it actively bans and persecutes them. Progress! 

Way back in the day, my doctoral dissertation was on the idea of the mind as a quintessentially open system. Open to what? Since publishing a couple of articles from the dissertation in 1991 and 1994, I've refined my thinking on the subject, but I don't recall ever having packed it all into a single post. Rather, it's more of a background assumption that colors my approach to everything, up to and including God.

A key point, I suppose, is that the mind is analogous to a biological system that maintains itself via openness to the surrounding environment, accompanied by an exchange of matter, energy, or information. This is obvious on the purely biological level, but it is equally true on the psychic level, and it is precisely this mechanism that is exploited by the media-academic totalitarians, who never stop farce-feeding us a stream of lies, especially in the post-internet "information age."

Information in-forms, meaning that its recipients take on the very form of the in-formers, i.e., media and academic gaslighters. As it so happens, Z Man touched on this subject this morning, and his reflections may even have provoked mine: 

From the point of view of the managerial class, it is perfectly sensible for the tech oligarchs to censure speech. It is the responsible thing to do. They are baffled as to why anyone is upset by this. Not only are they not offended by censorship, but they would also be shocked if these firms were not coordinating their efforts. It is why they mount pressure campaigns against holdouts. Teaming up to suppress speech is really just a good example of political unity when you think about it.

When you step back and look at what is happening, it is remarkable. Managerialism in the West has achieved something that the Bolsheviks and Nazis were never able to accomplish at their peak. The operation of the managerial class is entirely informal, a habit of mind, rather than a set of rules. The communists and fascists had to rely on physical compulsion to maintain control (https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=28250).

The other day I read a book called 1917: Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder. Nothing new, it turns out, but it does have helpful review of Wilson's totalitarian sentiments and policies. You could call him Brandon v1.0, or you could call Brandon Wilson v2.0; but really, it's just the same old nightmare of progressivism. 

Remember Brandon's Disinformation Governance Board, headed up by that ridiculous woman who mindlessly propagated every word of leftist disinformation? Nothing new. Wilson created his own Committee on Public Information in April of 1917. And just like today, the purpose was to Save R Demokrisy! Its first head, George Creel, helpfully said that

It remains to be seen whether the people of the United States prefer facts to clamor, fairness to betrayal, and democracy to oligarchy; in a word, whether they are able to think for themselves.

Sounds good! Except, just like today, "It was precisely to ensure that the American people didn't think for themselves that Creel would throw himself into his job" at CPI, via propaganda and censorship:

America's media became the obedient conduit for the CPI's Division of News, which bombarded the public with six thousand press releases a week.... on any given week, more than twenty thousand newspaper columns carried material that the Division of News deemed fit to print. 

So, just like today, they had their own gaslight media. They also knew that politics is downstream from culture, so they didn't take any chances with the primary entertainment medium of the day: the Division of Films "turned to the motion picture industry" in order "to mobilize pro-war, anti-German sentiment," and "Hollywood jumped in with both feet."

Recruiting moviemakers was a farsighted policy, not unlike recruiting social media or Instagram to carry government propaganda today.

Progressives would never forget to pander to emotional woman and malleable blacks: there was 

an effort to recruit African American speakers, especially clergy, to carry the messages to their communities, and a Woman's Division to promote the same thing...

The result was a media-storm that was coordinated, comprehensive, and virtually around-the-clock.

The invention the 24-hour news cycle, or an unending Two Minutes Hate. Putin is the new Kaiser, as Trump is the new Debs, or at least will be when they indict him (Debs actually ran for present from behind bars in 1920, so Trump won't be the first).

The Espionage act of 1917 "gave government officials wide latitude in limiting the spread of undesirable opinions -- otherwise known as limiting free speech," as the Sedition Act of 1918 "made it illegal to speak, print, write or publish" any "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the government." It was "the single most restrictive gag on free speech and freedom of the press in U.S. history."

Until today.

There were even versions of Antifa back then, semi-vigilante groups such as the American Protective League and American Defense Society. 

The more things progress, the more they stay the same: the actions of Wilson and his henchmen

highlight the curious self-righteousness of the American Progressive mind, and the belief among Progressives that their views once arrived at were beyond criticism; as with Wilson, opposition itself became a sign of disloyalty, even of evil.

To bring the post full circle, this is not a dream mistaken for reality, but a nightmare propagated and enforced from on high. I mean, if I am a fascist, then Progworld is truly upside down and inside out.

Monotheism and Monohumanism

We call monism the vain attempt to assemble the broken fragments of the universe. --Dávila

Schuon, in one of his abstract moods, wondered if Unity "is really a number"; for if you want to be pernickety about it,

number begins only with Duality, which opens the door to that projection of the Infinite which is the indefinite. Nonetheless, to say Unity is to say Totality; in other words, Unity signifies the absolute Real, and likewise with Totality, which represents the Real in all its ontological "extent"; Reality and All-Possibility meet.

Mono-theism. Despite being mono, it seems that it's not exactly a quantity, being that it signifies a reality that must be ontologically prior to number. For even to say "one" implies a containment of what is in principle uncontainable. 

Two comes "after" One, only at which point can the One be apprehended and reduced to a concept. Thus, prior to Two there can be no number per se. Which immediately brings to mind male-and-female He created them, or they shall become oneflesh. Monohumanism? How?

While two is the "first" number, it also signifies the quality of duality or of division, and thus the "desire" to transcend this division and return to Unity. At least this is what would be suggested by pure logic, i.e., the urge to merge, to reduce multiplicity to Unity, whether through love, truth, or beauty.

However, revelation suggests otherwise, in that it surprises us with a Three! that is not a consequence of Two, but rather, the source or ground of the One and Two, of monism and dualism. 

Apparently, what comes before One isn't zero, but Three. Or at least One and Three are complementary and irreducible to anything else. Which further implies that Primordial Relation is coequal with the Relata.

One can appreciate how early philosophers ended up with the One; again it is where logic inevitably leads. The problem, rather, is the possibility of diversity in the face of this One. What is its ontological status? Is it real, or only an illusion, AKA maya? Is it just an extension of the One, thereby losing its own freedom, dignity, and reason for being? Or is it radically separate from the source, as in deism or existentialism? 

It's easy enough to claim to be a relativist, but relative to what? How is relativity even possible in the absence the Absolute? That's like starting to count with two instead of one, when we already concluded that numbers as such are multiples of One. Dávila:

The rationalist calls "absolute" the shadow that his body casts one day under a passing cloud.

Let's conclude this annoying prologue and stipulate the following: one can try to think this through on one's own, but how many people are capable or even interested in doing so? Or, one can take it on the authority of a trusted source, and move on. Me? I enjoy lounging in the shade of insoluble problems, but most folks aren't like that.

Let's think about "multiples of one," or of unity, rather. Let's start with, say, Life Itself. What is it? Seems to me that it is an exercise in the binding of space and time. Despite all the parts, Life has a wholeness and unity to which the parts are ordered; likewise, although the organism lives in "instants," these instants are bound together in a lifespan. 

How is this even possible unless this prior Unity is in the nature of things? In other words, Unity can't be a "result" unless it's already present. Metaphysically speaking, if you start with duality, there's no "returning" to Unity. One invents Two, every time. 

It's the same with Mind: what is it? Obviously, the very possibility of knowledge rests upon an implicit unity of knower and known, or of Intelligence and Intelligibility. Speaking of the One Philosophy, if yours doesn't begin with some version of this Principle, then there is again no returning to it: there is no intelligibility in the universe, and besides, no universe. Man is submerged in permanent tenure.

Oh yeah. That just reminded me of our subject: one philosophy because one cosmos and one mankind. Or just say oneness, a oneness that permeates things and is consciously present only in man. Man is consciousness-of-unity in both space and time. 

Unity in space is a prerequisite of science (or of any real knowledge, or knowledge of the Real), as unity in time is a prerequisite of history, whether personal or collective. Only God can say I AM. The restavus can only Become, but the very possibility of this temporal becoming abides in the atemporal Subject of subjectivity.

This aphorism may seem like a sudden left turn, but it isn't:

Faith is not knowledge of the object, but communication with it.

In other words, faith presupposes an implicit unity of God and man. To have "faith in God" is to posit a unity that is given by God, without which Two can never return to One, as we already established above. Schuon has some important points on this subject as well, for example, faith "is to see concretely what apparently is abstract," and "is like an ‘existential’ intuition of its ‘intellectual’ object."

Well, that's about the size of it this morning. We'll end with this pleasantly inspiraling thought:

The dialectic of love is not an irreversible process of ascent but an infinite series of returns.

Monotheism and Monohumanism

We call monism the vain attempt to assemble the broken fragments of the universe. --Dávila

Schuon, in one of his abstract moods, wondered if Unity "is really a number"; for if you want to be pernickety about it,

number begins only with Duality, which opens the door to that projection of the Infinite which is the indefinite. Nonetheless, to say Unity is to say Totality; in other words, Unity signifies the absolute Real, and likewise with Totality, which represents the Real in all its ontological "extent"; Reality and All-Possibility meet.

Mono-theism. Despite being mono, it seems that it's not exactly a quantity, being that it signifies a reality that must be ontologically prior to number. For even to say "one" implies a containment of what is in principle uncontainable. 

Two comes "after" One, only at which point can the One be apprehended and reduced to a concept. Thus, prior to Two there can be no number per se. Which immediately brings to mind male-and-female He created them, or they shall become oneflesh. Monohumanism? How?

While two is the "first" number, it also signifies the quality of duality or of division, and thus the "desire" to transcend this division and return to Unity. At least this is what would be suggested by pure logic, i.e., the urge to merge, to reduce multiplicity to Unity, whether through love, truth, or beauty.

However, revelation suggests otherwise, in that it surprises us with a Three! that is not a consequence of Two, but rather, the source or ground of the One and Two, of monism and dualism. 

Apparently, what comes before One isn't zero, but Three. Or at least One and Three are complementary and irreducible to anything else. Which further implies that Primordial Relation is coequal with the Relata.

One can appreciate how early philosophers ended up with the One; again it is where logic inevitably leads. The problem, rather, is the possibility of diversity in the face of this One. What is its ontological status? Is it real, or only an illusion, AKA maya? Is it just an extension of the One, thereby losing its own freedom, dignity, and reason for being? Or is it radically separate from the source, as in deism or existentialism? 

It's easy enough to claim to be a relativist, but relative to what? How is relativity even possible in the absence the Absolute? That's like starting to count with two instead of one, when we already concluded that numbers as such are multiples of One. Dávila:

The rationalist calls "absolute" the shadow that his body casts one day under a passing cloud.

Let's conclude this annoying prologue and stipulate the following: one can try to think this through on one's own, but how many people are capable or even interested in doing so? Or, one can take it on the authority of a trusted source, and move on. Me? I enjoy lounging in the shade of insoluble problems, but most folks aren't like that.

Let's think about "multiples of one," or of unity, rather. Let's start with, say, Life Itself. What is it? Seems to me that it is an exercise in the binding of space and time. Despite all the parts, Life has a wholeness and unity to which the parts are ordered; likewise, although the organism lives in "instants," these instants are bound together in a lifespan. 

How is this even possible unless this prior Unity is in the nature of things? In other words, Unity can't be a "result" unless it's already present. Metaphysically speaking, if you start with duality, there's no "returning" to Unity. One invents Two, every time. 

It's the same with Mind: what is it? Obviously, the very possibility of knowledge rests upon an implicit unity of knower and known, or of Intelligence and Intelligibility. Speaking of the One Philosophy, if yours doesn't begin with some version of this Principle, then there is again no returning to it: there is no intelligibility in the universe, and besides, no universe. Man is submerged in permanent tenure.

Oh yeah. That just reminded me of our subject: one philosophy because one cosmos and one mankind. Or just say oneness, a oneness that permeates things and is consciously present only in man. Man is consciousness-of-unity in both space and time. 

Unity in space is a prerequisite of science (or of any real knowledge, or knowledge of the Real), as unity in time is a prerequisite of history, whether personal or collective. Only God can say I AM. The restavus can only Become, but the very possibility of this temporal becoming abides in the atemporal Subject of subjectivity.

This aphorism may seem like a sudden left turn, but it isn't:

Faith is not knowledge of the object, but communication with it.

In other words, faith presupposes an implicit unity of God and man. To have "faith in God" is to posit a unity that is given by God, without which Two can never return to One, as we already established above. Schuon has some important points on this subject as well, for example, faith "is to see concretely what apparently is abstract," and "is like an ‘existential’ intuition of its ‘intellectual’ object."

Well, that's about the size of it this morning. We'll end with this pleasantly inspiraling thought:

The dialectic of love is not an irreversible process of ascent but an infinite series of returns.

Gravity and Levity

Our subject is both -- or "both" -- oneness and the One, i.e., the unity of the cosmos. As alluded to in the previous post, not everything that counts can be counted:

The Pythagorean numbers prove that number in itself is not synonymous with quantity pure and simple, for they are essentially qualitative; they are so to the degree that they are close to Unity, their point of departure (Schuon).

This p. of d. is the Principle, don't you know, and this same pattern is fractally present in any ordinary principle, i.e., that from which something else proceeds, and those things it entails. We are always chasing our entailments, i.e., arguing to or from principles, otherwise argument would be impossible -- as it is when arguing with an unprincipled leftist. 

Not to descend immediately into insultainment, but this absence of principles -- or constantly shifting ones, which amounts to the same thing -- is precisely why debating a leftist is like playing chess with a pigeon. 

Again, this is not mere hypocrisy, because hypocrisy requires a principle to violate, when the left's only consistent principle is power; if one's ontology begins with diversity instead of unity, there is no principle with which to arbitrate between diverse truth claims: relativism in, tenure out. Hence,

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.

You will have noticed that this post-philosophical (and therefore post-reality) absence of principles is both convenient and effective in getting what they want. They run circles around those of us with principles, because they possess an absurcular "freedom" entirely lacking in someone whose intellect is ordered to the One. 

Of course, this is but an inverted caricature of actual freedom, but those have been Famous Last Words ever since Socrates gulped the hemlock. We have Aphoristic confirmation:

As long as they do not take him seriously, the man who speaks the truth can live for a while in a democracy. Then, the hemlock.

Or cross, gulag, firing squad and other methods of Power.

Truthlessness is at once another word for nihilism, but it is implicitly in service to the power and self-interest that is its downward telos. Which is why leftists are always so fired up with pseudo-meaning -- i.e., the Drama of Activism -- because it is a frantic defense mechanism against the unconscious (but necessary) absence of meaning. 

In other words, no one gets excited about 2 + 2 = 4, or supply and demand, or men aren't women. But people are insanely passionate about Math is an oppressive tool of white patriarchy!, or Printing more money will cure inflation!, or Cutting off my johnson makes me a woman! (whatever that is).

Arguing will get you nowhere, because

A few lines are enough to demonstrate a truth. Not even a library is enough to refute an error.

Yesterday I read a horrible story about a young Mexican psychologist who is getting his license yanked and his PhD revoked for merely defending the traditional values that all sane human beings held until about five minutes ago. 

I can sympathize, because there is simply no way I could pass the oral exam today. Or, I could, but I would have to lie through me teeth. Think about that: you can only be granted a license to treat souls in California if you take a pledge to deny reality!

You're probably thinking Bob is exaggerating to make a point or a joke, but Bob never exaggerates, nor does he have a point (truth being its own point). I just checked the website of the California Psychological Association, which would require a library to refute, but this gives a flavor of the evil and insanity:

We believe that Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, where the therapist's intent is to direct, redirect, or influence an individual's sexual orientation, are potentially harmful and have no place as a part of legitimate psychological practice. 

In other words, they want it to be against the law to help some lost soul figure out why he thinks he's a she. But once you've ditched the principle of identity -- AKA non-contradiction -- then all things are possible. No biology, no problem!

Damn. This post is slipping away from me. UNITY. According to Schuon,

Unity is the first principle that penetrates and regulates universal Manifestation, in the sense that on the one hand it projects its reflections everywhere, and on the other hand brings phenomena back to Unity.

How does this Unity get so messed up? That's actually a good question, and I think you'll agree that there is only one conceivable being in all of creation who could possibly mess it up. I want to say that only a disordered will could fracture the unity of things, and maybe that's what it means to be "fallen."

I promise to maintain my focus in the next post, and not fall for the low-hanging fruitcakes.

Gravity and Levity

Our subject is both -- or "both" -- oneness and the One, i.e., the unity of the cosmos. As alluded to in the previous post, not everything that counts can be counted:

The Pythagorean numbers prove that number in itself is not synonymous with quantity pure and simple, for they are essentially qualitative; they are so to the degree that they are close to Unity, their point of departure (Schuon).

This p. of d. is the Principle, don't you know, and this same pattern is fractally present in any ordinary principle, i.e., that from which something else proceeds, and those things it entails. We are always chasing our entailments, i.e., arguing to or from principles, otherwise argument would be impossible -- as it is when arguing with an unprincipled leftist. 

Not to descend immediately into insultainment, but this absence of principles -- or constantly shifting ones, which amounts to the same thing -- is precisely why debating a leftist is like playing chess with a pigeon. 

Again, this is not mere hypocrisy, because hypocrisy requires a principle to violate, when the left's only consistent principle is power; if one's ontology begins with diversity instead of unity, there is no principle with which to arbitrate between diverse truth claims: relativism in, tenure out. Hence,

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.

You will have noticed that this post-philosophical (and therefore post-reality) absence of principles is both convenient and effective in getting what they want. They run circles around those of us with principles, because they possess an absurcular "freedom" entirely lacking in someone whose intellect is ordered to the One. 

Of course, this is but an inverted caricature of actual freedom, but those have been Famous Last Words ever since Socrates gulped the hemlock. We have Aphoristic confirmation:

As long as they do not take him seriously, the man who speaks the truth can live for a while in a democracy. Then, the hemlock.

Or cross, gulag, firing squad and other methods of Power.

Truthlessness is at once another word for nihilism, but it is implicitly in service to the power and self-interest that is its downward telos. Which is why leftists are always so fired up with pseudo-meaning -- i.e., the Drama of Activism -- because it is a frantic defense mechanism against the unconscious (but necessary) absence of meaning. 

In other words, no one gets excited about 2 + 2 = 4, or supply and demand, or men aren't women. But people are insanely passionate about Math is an oppressive tool of white patriarchy!, or Printing more money will cure inflation!, or Cutting off my johnson makes me a woman! (whatever that is).

Arguing will get you nowhere, because

A few lines are enough to demonstrate a truth. Not even a library is enough to refute an error.

Yesterday I read a horrible story about a young Mexican psychologist who is getting his license yanked and his PhD revoked for merely defending the traditional values that all sane human beings held until about five minutes ago. 

I can sympathize, because there is simply no way I could pass the oral exam today. Or, I could, but I would have to lie through me teeth. Think about that: you can only be granted a license to treat souls in California if you take a pledge to deny reality!

You're probably thinking Bob is exaggerating to make a point or a joke, but Bob never exaggerates, nor does he have a point (truth being its own point). I just checked the website of the California Psychological Association, which would require a library to refute, but this gives a flavor of the evil and insanity:

We believe that Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, where the therapist's intent is to direct, redirect, or influence an individual's sexual orientation, are potentially harmful and have no place as a part of legitimate psychological practice. 

In other words, they want it to be against the law to help some lost soul figure out why he thinks he's a she. But once you've ditched the principle of identity -- AKA non-contradiction -- then all things are possible. No biology, no problem!

Damn. This post is slipping away from me. UNITY. According to Schuon,

Unity is the first principle that penetrates and regulates universal Manifestation, in the sense that on the one hand it projects its reflections everywhere, and on the other hand brings phenomena back to Unity.

How does this Unity get so messed up? That's actually a good question, and I think you'll agree that there is only one conceivable being in all of creation who could possibly mess it up. I want to say that only a disordered will could fracture the unity of things, and maybe that's what it means to be "fallen."

I promise to maintain my focus in the next post, and not fall for the low-hanging fruitcakes.