Cosmic Sane-itation and Waste Management

This is a pretty wild and wooly post. Some woolliness is inevitable given the nature of the subject. 

However, I do believe there's a coherent way to untangle this yarn, which we will further unknot in a subsequent thread. For now, just go with the flow, because this is not an exact science, rather, a science of the inexact. 

Why do ideologues cling to their ideology despite its proven failures? The psychologist in me suspects it must be for the same reason mental illness persists despite the fact that it doesn't make the mentally ill person happy:

[S]ometimes we wonder about an ideologue's resistance to rational argument. The alternative to life in the paradise of his dream is death in the hell of his banality (Voegelin, emphasis mine).

It seems that ideology elevates an otherwise dull and trivial life into an intense, readymade psychodrama starring the ideologue. 

For example, the other day Rachel Maddow suggested that if Trump wins this November, he will consign her to one of those MAGA gulags that were so common back between 2017 and 2021. Imagine thinking you're that important! She may be living in sheer terror, but at least she's not bored.

But why is she -- and others like her -- so boring? 

That is a serious question, and one we have delved into in the past. I won't go into details, but it has to do with a psychoanalytic mechanism called counter-transference, in which the analyst registers various projections from the patient, one of which is boredom. 

For D.W. Winnicott, this experience of boredom in the analyst is actually pathognomonic, meaning that it discloses important information about the pathological mental state of the patient. The boredom signifies a kind of psychic deadness in the patient which is what needs to be healed (or brought back to life, precisely). That's all I'm going to say about that, but suffice it to say, boredom is not boring if you exhumine it from a meta-level.

Back to the subject at hand, ideology and religion should be at vertical antipodes, but, just as ideology is a political religion, there's a great deal of dysfunctional religiosity that is more ideological than religious in the proper sense of the term, political Islam being only the loudest example, and how tedious is that! Nevertheless, how exciting for its votaries to be involved in a cosmic struggle against the evil Zionist Entity. 

Same with the Hitler youth on our college campuses, who are boring but not bored by their own banality.

For Voegelin, the ideologue "tries to pull the timeless into identity with the time of his existence" via "the dream act of forcing the two poles into oneness." 

Which is not possible. Except maybe once, for what is the Incarnation but a union of the two poles -- of time and eternity, immanent and transcendent, Alpha and Omega -- into oneness? 

Are you asking me?

No, more of a rhetorical question that we will soon circle back to, since I recently read a book on that subject, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics, and am working on another hefty volume called Christ the Logos of Creation: An Essay in Analogical Metaphysics. Too much to digest at the moment, but both books are very much relevant to the present post.

Scientism is another tedious ideological pseudo-religion that misappropriates science to deny the real existence of the scientific knower. What could be more boring than not existing, or existing as a mere epiphenomenal illusion?

If boredom is pathognomonic, is its opposite a sign of health? 

Are you asking me?

No, not really. Just throwing it out there. I don't doubt that my writing would be boring to the vast anti-Bob contingent out there, so maybe I'm the sick one. Back to Voegelin:

I shall use the term presence to denote the point of intersection in man's existence; and the term flow of presence to denote the dimension of existence that is, and is not, time.

Presence and flow, in and out of time. If we are on the right track, then the ideologue is in need of a cosmic plumber to unblock and open the vertical pipe that connects him to O. 

This is the legendary "golden pipe" that Toots Mondello would speak of when he'd had one too many tokes. It also reminds us of an Aphorism which we will allow to speak for its elf:

The sewers of history sometimes overflow, as in our time.

While looking up that aphorism, I was reminded of this one:

History is the series of universes present to the consciousness of successive subjects.

 Concur. And

History is not cleared of its miasmas except in the brief periods in which Christian winds blow.

Or except in brief periods when we have a Christian plumber on speed dial.

But let's get back to the flow of presence characterized by the intersection of time and eternity, or vertical and horizontal. What makes it flow, and what unblocks the stoppage? Where is the cosmic plunger? 

If there were only horizontality, there could be no awareness of time, no history, no now, and no humanness. We inhabit an I-ambiguous space indeed, where time passes and we are aware of its passing, but which can only be recognized from above, beyond, or outside time.

No wonder humanness cannot be described without this ambiguity or ambi-valence, without a "nevertheless" or "having said that": mortal and immortal, animal and divine, earthy and celestial, body and soul, intellect and passion, etc. 

Why, it reminds us of God himself, about whom nothing can be said without immediate qualification, since he is beyond any univocal or mono-logical attribute. This actually goes to the two books referenced above, since an analogical metaphysics occupies a kind of middle ground between uni- and equivocivity, in that everything is an analogy of God. 

You might even say that everything is God, even while God is not everything, rather, radically transcending it. More to follow.

As we've iterated and reiterated any number of times, man is composed of irreducible complementarities, male and female being only the most obvious. Or used to be obvious before the alphabet Nazis got ahold of it.

The first and last cosmic complementarity is is between the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. Is this not the deepest metaphysical statement we can make?

You asking me?

No, just putting it inhere. For example, the Father is mysteriously "prior" to the Son, but certainly not temporally, since there was never the Father without the Son. Moreover, they are coequal branches of the Godhead, sharing the identical substance.

Now, the Second Person, who incarnates in history, did not do so for the sake of Christians, since there weren't any, rather, for the sake of Here Comes Everybody. Originally, the people insultingly called Christian called themselves practitioners of the Way.

What Way is that? Well, it is also a Light that lights the very Way it discloses, as described by John. The Logos is precisely that which illuminates the space -- the presence -- where eternity bisects time. John says as much, about the true Light which gives light to every man who comes into the world.

Do you have a better explanation for all this Light? Where do you think it comes from? Physics? Chemistry? Natural selection? If that's what you think, then you haven't yet begun to think, and certainly not about thinking.

Christ is both the "historical Christ," with a "pre-" and "post-" in time, and the divine timelessness, omnipresent in the flow of history, with neither a "pre-" nor a "post-" (Voegelin).

Elsewhere Voegelin says something to the effect that our quest for truth in the luminous in-between is ultimately penultimate; the moment we default to ultimate ultimacy -- i.e., collapse the vertical tension -- we descend into ideology.

So many of the early church councils accomplished precisely this: the specification of ambiguity with great precision, e.g., one God in three persons, two natures in one person, one scripture and multiple authors, etc. -- all simultaneously clear and ambiguous, AKA clearobscuro. With this in mind, we see

God reaching into man and revealing himself as the Presence that is the flow of presence from the beginning of the world to its end. History is Christ written large.

A bold statement, but certainly not boring. The inter-mediate nature of consciousness itself allows us to think about the inter-mediate nature of everything else, in that everything is mediated by vertical and horizontal. 

Another way of saying it is that everything unspools between two intellects, one infinite, the other a finite image of the first. Further deusuntangling to follow.