Evolution and Creation: Is this Really the Best God Can Do?

Yes, it's a serious question, and one that separates traditionalists such as Frithjof Schuon from evolutionary thinkers such as Sri Aurobindo or Teilhard de Chardin. The former believe in a static or deteriorating cosmos, while the latter believe in an evolving one. Not just Darwinian evolution, mind you. Rather, biological evolution would simply be an inevitable artifact, or side effect, of a cosmos that has in fact been evolving for 13.7 billion years, or ever since it banged into being.

Now, when I completed the first draft of my book perhaps a decade ago, I was absolutely convinced of this view. Perhaps "convinced" is the wrong word, any more than one is convinced that the sun rises in the east. Rather, science tells us that there was a time that the cosmos did not exist. Then, suddenly it did. Not gradually. Suddenly. It did not exist. Then it did.

Same with Life (I capitalize it when I am speaking of "Life as such"). The last time I checked with Petey, this was a supposedly dead -- or, to be precise, non-living -- universe until March 4, 3.85 billion years ago, when Life suddenly appeared, or moved from the implicate to the explicate order. Which is another way of saying that the universe revealed itself to be a living one after all.

In other words, from our vantage point, 10 billion years may seem like a long time, but from the Creator's point of view, we know that one day is an eternity and all of eternity is but a single day. If you cease anthropomorphizing the situation, then perhaps the emergence of Life was an overnight sensation.

Same with the emergence of humanness. No one knows with certainty when human beings arrived on the scene, but let's say that genetically complete humans appeared approximately 200,000 years ago, give or take. As I explained in the Coonifesto, our genetic endowment doesn't explain much in light of the fact that "humanness" doesn't appear until much later, only around 40,000 years ago. And I would go even further, and say that real humanness didn't emerge until the axial age, with the simultaneous downloading of all the great revelations. In the absence of these revelations, man isn't really man at all, just a cosmic freak, an animal-human hybrid like Bill Maher, Deepak Chopra, or Keith Olbermann.

Of course, you can argue against these facts in the name of "faith," but I do not believe that is the purpose of faith -- i.e., to help us disbelieve what is before our eyes. Rather, it is to help us understand that which is not before our eyes. And in the entire scenario I have just laid out, there is much that is not before our eyes, and which cannot be understood or illuminated in the absence of faith.

To take just the most obvious examples, how could a perfectly ordered universe suddenly appear out of nowhere? Why is it ordered at all? And why is it so ordered that it allows not just for the emergence of living things -- as we know, if you mess with just one of the knobs on the Creator's cosmic console, and change one of the mathematical parameters that undergird the physical cosmos, biological life would be impossible -- but also for the emergence of minds capable of understanding the truth of the cosmos and of their own origins? To express it as succinctly as possible, what kind of cosmos permits Truth, Love, and Beauty? To say that science cannot answer that question is a banality of the first rank.

Only after the first draft of my book was written, did I really immerse myself in the works of the traditionalists, e.g., Schuon, Guenon, Cutsinger, Nasr, and others. While I had encountered them before, I basically rejected them on a priori grounds, since I thought it absurd to suggest that the cosmos was not evolving.

However, in the mean time, a lot of spiritual growth had taken place, so, for the first time, I was actually able to penetrate and understand where the traditionalists were coming from. Or, perhaps I should say that they were finally able to penetrate my density. So for the past four or five years, as you may have noticed, I have been very much under their influence. Frankly, I can never repay Schuon for what he has given me. It's as if he put the finishing touch on my ability to think about spiritual things -- i.e., to engage in intellection and think vertically.

Nevertheless. I still feel as if Aurobindo and Schuon are talking about apples and oranges. Schuon has an absolutely vertical and static orientation -- like the Catholic church on stilts -- whereas Aurobindo is quite the opposite, and not only values the evolving world, but sees it as the very stage upon which the cosmic-spiritual adventure takes place. The world is here for a reason, and it's not just to wait for our death. But Schuon comes very close to saying that -- as do some Orthodox thinkers, for that matter.

The whole point about Aurobindo's philosophy is that the world is not only worthy of our being here, but that we are required to do the urgent spiritual work of uniting the above and below, in order to create the "life divine" on earth. This is obviously not in some pie-in-the-sky, youdopian leftist sense, but more in the Christian sense of bringing God's light into the world ("Thy will be done"), or in the Jewish sense of Tikkun, or helping to complete God's creation. Frankly, I see Aurobindo's philosophy as being quite compatible with Christian theology, but also with Americanism, which is optimistic and progressive, values the individual, and sees itself as engaging in a spiritual mission. Americans are idealists, in ways that the sophisticates of the international left simply cannot grasp because of their lazy cynicism.

(By the way, for anycoon who is put off by Aurobindo's metaphysics, please be patient, as I will eventually explain how all this comports with Judeo-Christian metaphysics.)

Schuon would say that the world is inevitably winding down through time, as it falls increasingly far from its timeless source. But I say, so long as single infant can grow up and know the Godhead, it is winding up. Schuon would say that human beings are well into the "beginning of the end," i.e., the "Kali yuga." Aurobindo might say that we are only just now approaching the end of the beginning, as mankind learns to colonize and expand its own psychic space, which converges upon the Divine mind. For example, in his own case, he wrote (in 1914, by which time he had realized all that could be realized from the standpoint of traditional yoga) that "what I thought were results are nothing more than a preparation. I feel as though I have done nothing yet, as though I have not lived the spiritual life, only entered the path that leads to it."

Aurobindo begins with the principle -- as indeed you must -- that all is one, and that that One is God, or Brahman. In other words, Reality is not a "sum" but a unity; all multiplicity, all differences and variations, exist within that prior oneness: "From that all variations begin, in that all variations consist, to that all variations return." God is the "Alpha and Omega," the "One besides whom there is nothing else existent." Only it is ultimately Real. To the extent that we really exist, it is only because we partake of that Being.

As such, it is an artificial distinction to radically separate being from becoming, as I believe Schuon does. For if God is one, then becoming partakes of being as well. True, there is a "dark and silent" aspect of God, that is, the Godhead that may only be unKnown in the luminous darkness of mystical union. But there is another side -- literally -- to the story, and that is the "active" aspect of God, part of which is this Creation. As Aurobindo writes, "The fundamental truth of Being must necessarily be the fundamental truth of Becoming. All is a manifestation of That."

This is simply another way of saying that the "becoming" represented by cosmic evolution is nothing but a necessary consequence of God's Being, as it is deployed in time, so to speak. Again, Schuon would say that the world of "becoming" is only becoming less and less as time goes by. Could this possibly be true? We really only have three choices: either it is becoming less, becoming more, or staying the same. The latter cannot be the case, since only God by definition "stays the same," being that he is eternal. But his eternity participates in time -- indeed, time is simply the moving image of eternity, or God in Motion, so to speak. And I just cannot accept the idea that time represents God's "deterioration." Rather, the specific reason why time is anti-entropic is because its substance is God. It's the reason why dust comes to life and monkeys compose symphonies.

Now, there are evolutionary worlds and non-evolutionary worlds, and it is critical to maintain their distinction. For example, the world of revelation is a non-evolutionary world. It is intended to help us understand the timeless truths of our evolutionary world, but that can hardly mean that the world itself is not evolving. Rather, that's the whole point. Precisely because the phenomenal world is changing, we need a way to understand its deeper truth, whether it is scientific truth or moral and theological truth. Again, the whole point, say, of Genesis, is not that it describes things that happened long ago and once and for all, but that it describes what happens every time, over and over. Likewise, creation didn't just happen 13.7 billion years ago or 6,000 years ago, but continuously.

Let us think of the Creation as a "bridge" between becoming and divine Being. Naturally, the bridge must be built in time. Furthermore, it goes without saying that this bridge could never be built "from the bottom up," like a Tower of Babel. Rather, the only reason it can be built at all is again because God is the material, the ladder, the rungs, and the destination. Looked at in this way, ours is not a "God of the gaps." Rather, precisely the opposite: God is a God of the gaplessness, specifically, the lack of any real gap between matter and life, life and mind, mind and spirit, and spirit and God. In the absence of God, this is indeed a gap-filled universe, with no way to account for the ontological discontinuities. In other words, the only way you can get from matter to life or ape to man is because of the very gaplessness of God.

You might say that evolution "presses upward," but that it could never arrive anywhere in the absence of God "pressing downward," so to speak. A quintessential example of this is Christ, or even the Christ principle, if you prefer. No matter how hard man "pushed against the sky," he could not have produced a messiah on his own. Rather, the ascending pressure must be met by a descending response, which creates a kind of "whirlpool" where spiritual activity takes place. This is why, in your own life, as you press upward, God pushes downward.

Looked at in this way, there are "avatars" at every stage of evolution. For example, that first living being was an "avatar of matter," a divine descent. Life is already Divinity. It is sacred. And it is One.

To be continued....

You Say You Want an Evolution

Well, when the pipeline gets broken and I'm lost on the river bridge
I'm cracked up on the highway and on the water's edge
She comes down the thruway ready to sew me up with thread
Well, if I go down dyin', you know she bound to put a blanket on my bed --Bob Dylan

I woke up at 1:30 and needed a dump truck to unload my head. I tried to remember it all before falling back to sleep, but I should have jotted down a few notes. Now I need a mental detector to find the little pieces strewn about the shore.

Which reminds me. I really did dream about the ocean last night. I was walking home along a boardwalk with an armful of books. The tide came in and began pulling me out. I lost the books, and then began to wonder if I would lose myself as well, the reason being that I always run my blood sugar pretty low. When you do that, you don't have much gas in your tank -- which is fine, so long as you're not suddenly sucked into the ocean with a handful of books, and need the energy reserves. It's just one of the spooky things about living with diabetes, with one foot in this world and the other on a banana peel. In other words, just like everyone else, only more so.

I think the dream and the early morning influx of light speak to the current zeitgeist -- which is a German word that, roughly translated, means "spirit of the times." I'm not trying to be pedantic there. Rather, I am only trying to emphasize that spirit exists and that is inextricably woven into time, which is composed of the warp and weft of spirit and matter, or vertical and horizontal. It's not just a figure of speech. There really is a spirit of the times, and one of the gifts that routinely goes along with spiritual development is the ability to discern the "signs of the times." You -- yes you there, troll:

In the morning, it will be foul weather today: for the heaven is red and lowering. Ye know how to discern the face of the heaven; but ye cannot discern the signs of the times. That's why your comments are so appallingly stupid.

Now, the Sarah Palin pick has unleashed a tremendous amount of "energy." But that's just a banality if you don't know what energy is, especially as it pertains to the human realm. What is this energy? What is its actual source? And is she the actual source, or just the occasion for becoming aware it?

Regarding this force of energy, it has definitely affected this blog, along with everything else. Suddenly I'm getting betweeen two and four times the traffic. Why? It has nothing to do with me, but with this impersonal energy moving through people and affecting them in a variety of ways, both high and low.

It is fascinating that this force has conservatives feeling more or less "ecstatic," while it is affecting liberals in the opposite way. The most vivid example that comes to mind, since he is already such a caricature, is Keith Olbermann, who is so loosely put together to begin with, that it doesn't take much of this energy to make him disintegrate altogether.

And when I say "disintegrate," I again mean it literally, in the psychoanalytic sense of decompensating. Decompensation occurs when one's psychic defenses are overwhelmed, which then causes an uprush of primitive affect and ideation. In other words, all of the things one normally represses flood the ego, as in my dream.

So here is Keith, decompensating last night on live TV:



It has always been understood that the sudden ingression of spiritual force will make the unjust, impure, or unprepared person sort of disintegrate, which is why spirituality is no game. Think of what happened to St. Paul when the force suddenly entered: a pseudo-epileptic fit followed by blindness.

Do not think of this story as merely apocryphal, but as a lesson in humility as one approaches the Divine. If Paul hadn't been who he was, the Force may have killed him or affected him like a Keith Olbermann, or the other malignantly narcissistic pneumapaths of the left. Your body and mind are the very field of pneuma-cosmic evolution, an experiment in the possibility of a higher life in an essentially primate form. (More on which later.)

Judaism is very aware of this idea of the body-mind as spiritual battleground, as is Orthodox Christianity, but the same principle is present in all authentic revelations. For example, it's not just a politically correct meme, at least as applied to Sufis, who really do see jihad as a spiritual war on the lower self. Unfortunately, they probably represent only 1% of Muslims.

But a thousand years ago, perhaps the average Christian wasn't all that different, given the "spirit of the times," which may have encouraged a similar externalization of the spiritual battle. After all, if you don't have a highly developed interior to begin with, then when the force enters you, it has no place else to go but back outside. In turn, this is why it is so important for Raccoons to develop a capacious interior, which will be both a cause and effect of the spiritual ingression. It will always push against your existing limits until they are totally transcended, so be careful what you wish for. You really do have to say God-bye to both your past and to your existing self. At a certain point, you won't have the choice.

As Will has pointed out many times, consider what happened in the 1960s. Whatever you think of that decade, it was nevertheless a reaction to a palpable ingression of spiritual force that affected different people in different ways. For essentially "vital" (more on the definition of that later) people, it affected them in an essentially vital way, making them only more vital, but then confusing it with spirituality.

Man had in fact reached a certain evolutionary impasse, and the ingression of the force was necessary to break through it. In order for growth to take place, Catabolism must coincide with anabolism. But many people and institutions merely catabolized without bothering to anabolize to something higher. Metabolism obviously requires both. But only for the rest of your life, metabolism being indistinguishable from life -- including spiritual life (on our side of it).

I was only a kid during the 1960s, but especially in hindsight, I can see that I was quite sensitive to the spiritual powers that were swirling about everywhere, and I could also see how they affected essentially dark souls, who misappropriated that energy toward narcissistic, dark, self-serving, vital, and anti-spiritual ends. Can I get an amen? Yes, grace falls like rain from the sky, but the rain falls down on the good and wicked alike. For one person the rain assists organic growth, while for another it just makes them all wet.

Damn. I really do need a dumptruck to unload my head today. I'm barely getting started here. I feel as if I'm holding on to the tip of the tail of a large animal up in the sky, trying to pull it down.

One point I wanted to re-emphasize is that the sudden increased attention to this blog really has nothing to do with the blog or with me, but with the influx of spiritual energy coursing through, and focussed upon, Sarah Palin. If I could show you the spike in my site meter, you could see it as a kind of measure of that force. If I were more of what Sri Aurobindo calls a "vital mind," I could easily see myself getting caught up in it in a purely political way, which is what vital beings do, because they can't help doing it. They see the energy coming from "outside," when it is really coming from above. But when it mingles with what is below, watch out.

To put it another way, the reason why politics is dominated by vital beings is because they live in a realm of visceral "excitement" that prevents them from seeing or understanding what's really going on. The further leftweird one goes, the more vital it gets, but not always. There are many vital conservatives, and I also find them offensive if not repulsive. In turn, this is why I like, say, a Dennis Prager so much, because he is always able to translate what is going on from the perspective of the "mind of light," which is sattvic (ascending) rather then rajasic (expansive and passionate) or tamasic (descending). (Again, more on the "mind of light" in subsequent posts, but think of it as the first manifestation of the human station beyond ego.)

Believe it or not, all of this is still connected to the series of posts on Hitler a couple of weeks ago, but it might take me two more weeks of posts to explain how and why. I think I'll just move on for the moment and try to explain where this is all headed. One thing I think we need to bear in mind is that both Obama and Palin are responding to the same impersonal force, but obviously in diametrically opposed ways. One is personalizing the force, as it mingles with his immense narcissism, while the other is humbly submitting to it. It couldn't be more obvious.

Oh yes. That's another one of the things that popped into my melon in the middle of the night. I hope that Sarah Palin realizes what she is in for, because she will have to essentially die to her previous life and her old self, as she processes the various forces centered upon her. As I mentioned a couple of posts back, imagine the strength of character it would require to maintain your center while being psychically "used" and abused by so many millions of people, both friends and enemies. She must tolerate both the vile and hate-filled projections of the left, but perhaps even more problematically, the idealized projections of the right.

This is why, more often than not, celebrities essentially go insane, spiritually, morally, and intellectually. They are simply unable to metabolize and neutralize the idealizing projections that come their way. Instead, they inflate the ego and breathe life into all of their mind parasites below. The same obviously happens to all of the fraudulent gurus such as the Demonic Deepak. (You will notice in this latest piece how he precisely inverts some of the mechanisms and principles we are describing here. Fascinating. For him, Palin "is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses.")

Note how the cosmos looks when it is precisely inverted by someone as wicked as Chopra. For him, Palin stands for "small town values," "a return to petty, small-minded parochialism, ignorance of world affairs," "a repudiation of the need to repair America's image abroad," bogus "family values," which is just "a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice," "patriotism," which is really just "the usual fallback in a failed war," etc. I tell you, he is a monster in a way that only a "spiritual" person can be.

"It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in."

What a freaking ghoul. Some days you need a steam shovel to keep away the dead. (Get a load of some of the comments as well: "She's a cheerleader. A Stepford wife, an automaton who delivers speeches written by other people as if the words were her own.... And this pit bull metaphor, is perplexing. Do we love pit bulls now? We need owls in Washington, men and women of wisdom, not rabid dogs who chew up the Constitution and bite any person wearing a turban. Pit bulls aren't thinking animals."

Having owned one, pit bulls are actually wonderful animals. Like humans, it all depends upon their master. Anyway, this is again why it is so critical for the recipient of such projections to be free of both narcissism and insecurity, which is another way of saying "beyond ego." The problem there, of course, is that politics is like a Darwinian environment that pre-selects narcissistic people of both the left and right. It really is "show business for the unattractive." When you see the TV reporters mingling among the delegates and interviewing the typical Republican pol, you see the problem.

On the one hand, the masses must believe that Sarah Palin is "just like them." But on the other hand, she can really be nothing at all like them, or we're screwed. Rather, she must be vastly superior to them, part of which will involve being much more humble and non-narcissistic than they are, very much like Ronald Reagan. This why it is true what McCain says about the Reagan Evolution: "we came to change Washington, but Washington changed us." But it really only changed the narcissistic and vital types, of whom there are always plenty. It could not under any circumstance change me, and let us hope that it will not change Sarah Palin. True spiritual maturity is of the utmost importance.

Before proceeding any further, let's talk about some of the qualities of the vital mind. Satprem writes that it is a "source of both difficulty and great power; a source of difficulty because it tends to jam all the communications coming from outside or above, frantically opposing our efforts to silence the mind, bogging the consciousness down at its own level of petty occupations and interests, thus hindering its free movement toward other regions..."

You cannot merely perform "moral surgery" on the vital mind, as conventional religions tend to do -- i.e., repress or split it off. Nor can you just wallow in it, as the Romanticists of the left tend to do. Rather, you must transform it, which is not as easy as it sounds, as every seeker knows that there are adverse forces that protect the status quo, very much in the manner that our psychological defenses can prevent psychological growth.

Satprem continues, noting that "there is a kind of threshold to cross if we want to find the true life force behind the troubled life of the frontal man."

I guess I'd better stop now. The dump truck has barely emptied. I may need to continue tomorrow instead of taking the weekend off, but right now I need to get to work.

Well, you know I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead
I need a dump truck mama to unload my head
She brings me everything and more, and just like I said
Well, if I go down dyin', you know she bound to put a blanket on my bed. --Bob Dylan, From a Buick 6

The Metaphysics of Envy and the Revenge of the Left

I was going to discuss the tenth commandment later in the week, but since it illuminates the tempest of the day, I think I'll get right to it. In particular, I was reading an article at American Thinker, Sarah Palin and the Narcissistic Wounds of the Left, when an important point clicked into place. The click was so loud, it made my household gnome, Petey, jump out of his skinlessness.

Lewis notes how, for the left, Obama "is entitled to the presidency." You see, for them "It's only justice. Think about that word 'justice' and try filling in 'revenge.' 'Social justice' means the revenge of the poor against the rich, of the radical women against the men who've stood them up and hurt their feelings all their lives, and the revenge of black people finally doin' down the whites -- as Jeremiah Wright makes so abundantly clear."

What the left calls "social justice" is actually "the revenge of the psychologically oppressed against people who look happier and more satisfied with their lives." As such, it is intimately related to the psychoanalytic understanding of envy, which is an unconscious mechanism that goes about destroying what one does not have, in order to eliminate the emotional pain of not having it.

Frankly, that was such an important point that I didn't get any further in the piece: when the left talks about "social justice," what they unconsciously mean is social revenge. Ah ha! Suddenly their nonsensical economic proposals make sense! They're not supposed to make sense to the conscious mind, which demands logic and reason, but to the unconscious mind, which demands passion, instinctual release, and emotional satisfaction. Guffaw ha! It's like the keynes to their whole economic kingdumb!

As with the Islamists, the emotional thrill of hacking off someone's head is the sufficient reason for doing so. The rest is commentary and pretext. Likewise, the emotional satisfaction of "sticking it to the rich" is the sufficient reason for sticking it to them. Who cares if the economy will shrink? It feels good. The intellectual justification is just a thin veneer on the surface of the emotional drive, which is destructive, not creative. The same with such self-defeating policies as rent control, anti-free trade, a "living wage," socialized medicine, and "windfall profits taxes" (let's hope that Sarah Palin is not actually in favor of them, or that she will be quickly disabused once someone explains their folly to her).

Then it suddenly made sense to me why the Democrat base is composed of the under- and overeducated. Many if not most intellectual mediocrities with too much education -- New York Times idiotorialists and the like -- live in a kind of detached and abstract world. As such, they long for "authenticity," or some such replacement for actual being, the latter of which results from the higher unification of truth and action, or will and beauty, or virtue and truth.

This is why left-wing intellectuals identify on the one hand with the impulsive underclass (not so much the poor, but the depraved poor), but also why they patronize and defend the worst kinds of so-called art, which are really more about a flight from being, into a kind of human-animal mockery of it. This downward flight of intellectuals has been going on ever since the Romantic movement began its counter-revolution a couple hundred years ago. No matter how much they flap their lips it's a fall, not a flight, but it feels like one until you hit bottom. Unless you keep digging. Which is the job of liberal arts departments.

There is intellectual truth and emotional truth. Again, in a healthy -- which is to say, whole person -- these will converge and harmonize, but in the unhealthy person there will be a radical disjunction, which will cause one side of the union to atrophy. Thus, one can obviously be an emotional thinker with no real intellect. But one can also be an intellectual with no emotional (let alone, spiritual) intelligence.

An Al Gore comes immediately to mind, someone so caught up in his abstractions about the weather, that he has no idea how emotionally motivated they are. As such, he mainly communicates hysteria, but without even being aware of it. In other words, you can be sure that he imagines himself to be an "intellectual," when he is really more of a frightened child. If it weren't global warming, it would be something else -- something to organize and contain his emotions.

This is why communicating this hysteria to others is Gore's urgent "life's mission," and why it is so impervious to reason and evidence that contradicts his alarmism. He doesn't want to calm down, as the emotions make him feel alive. He needs everyone to feel as alarmed as he is, in order to "normalize" it. A large part of craziness involves the unconscious need to create a congenial environment wherein it will feel like normality. Think of college campuses, which have literally become a kind of psycho-emotional environment for the worst kinds of soul pathology hiding under the cloak of "education."

Lewis writes that the Left feels "entitled to power, because in their own eyes they have Truth and Morality on their side. They are Mahatma Gandhi, they are Dr. King, they are the vanguard of the marching proletariat. It's not just Big O who has the incomprehensible egomania. His inner circle and vast numbers of his supporters do, too. Entitlement, grandiosity, narcissism: In psychiatric thinking they all suffer from secret feelings of inferiority, narcissistic wounds to their self-esteem. Every time they lose, those nagging feelings come up again. So they are always overcompensating, trying to bully reality into the shape they need."

As a friend was reminding me the other day, the left cannot argue in good faith, since they do not see the political spectrum as a "polarity," so to speak, between left and right. Rather, they see it as a continuum, with the right as a kind of atavistic holdover from an earlier age. They are more sophisticated than we are, so they needn't bother even seriously contending with our arguments. Again, it is a breathtakingly transparent projection.

This is why the left is so hysterical about Sarah Palin. On the one hand, they flatter themselves with the notion that they represent the province of "strong women," but obviously the opposite is true. The left is the province of weak and victimized women who cannot get through life without Father Government protecting them. It is the same with blacks. They are the party of weak, dependent, and victimized blacks who cannot get by without the assistance of white liberals who can assuage their unconscious guilt by pandering to blacks. It's just an unconscious dance of mutual projective identification. Who said white folks can't dance?

It reminds me of a joke Louis Armstrong once made. Here was someone who had to deal with the worst kinds of actual racism, but was never a bitter or angry man. When asked about his secret, he said words to the effect that it was easy: just get some powerful white man to put his arm around you and menacingly say, this is my nigger. Armstrong was only half-joking. The racists of the contemporary left are dead serious.

Therefore, hell hath no fury like a leftist who encounters a female or African-American who doesn't need him. Thus, the high-tech lowbrow lynching of Clarence Thomas and the current unseemly attacks on Sarah Palin. How else to account for the shroud of discreet silence over the John Edwards affair vs. the airing of every possible rumor and smear about Palin and her children?

Now, what does this all have to do with the tenth commandment, “thou shalt not covet?” I'm tempted to just post it later in the week, since this has already gone on longer than anticipated. Yes, that's what I'll do. Class dismissed.

Related: Yearning for the Mud, @ American Digest. Reminds me of how the malignant narcissist confuses his feces with milk. So think twice before you rely upon the MSM to keep you abreast of the news, because that's no breast.

Lie With the Left, Wake up Fleeced

It's an annual tautology, isn't it? A holiday that celebrates taking the day off. Anyway, in keeping with the spirit of the holiday, I am doing so. Besides, I was a union member for over 12 years, from 1976-1988, during which time I put my college through me. Being a 10 year union veteran, I am also vested in the pension program, which, last time I heard, will entitle me to $237 a month when I reach retirement age. The bad news is that the pension fund is in a "critical state," which means I may have to start saving now for the beer fund.

I wanted to wrap up with the last two commandments, so here they are. These are the two that most distress the left, for where would they be without Lies and Envy? After all, speech was given to liberals in order to conceal their thoughts. And those hidden thoughts are, more often than not, rooted in constitutional envy. For example, I am certain that Andrew Sullivan is just envious of Sarah Palin's ruby slippers. What else can explain his vicious smears except perhaps AIDS-related dementia? Not that there's anything wrong with that.

****

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Live Them

That would be us. For, depending on how you look at it, God became man so that man might become God (so to speak). Or, Brahman became Maya so that Maya might become Brahman. Or perhaps Truth became falsehood so that falsehood might become Truth. Looked at in a certain way, lies are one of those things that must exist if we are to have a maninfestation separate from the Principle, a creation apart from the Creator.

The Christian esoterist Boris Mouravieff wrote that “We live in a world ruled by lies. Lying and stealing are the dominant elements of human character whatever the race, creed or caste. Whoever says that this is not true simply tells another lie. Man lies because in a world ruled by lies it is not possible to for him to do otherwise.... [T]he progress of this civilization, which is the fruit of an intellectual culture, considerably increases the need for lying.” (One of the great things about America is that it is still possible to get ahead by speaking truth. In most other cultures, one gets ahead by lying, and gets marginalized or killed by speaking truth. For example, it is not possible to speak truth in most of the Islamic world.)

I believe it was Burke who said that culture “reconciles a man to everything,” no matter how foolish or barbarous the custom. But some cultures are so immersed in the Lie that they cannot help producing lying liars, most dramatically in the Middle East, but obviously here in the United States as well, only in a more subtle form. For example, the pressure of political correctness is an instrument of coercion designed to reconcile you to the infrahuman lies of the left.

In conducting a psychological evaluation, patients are often motivated to lie -- to make it appear that they are either more or less ill than they actually are, or that one thing is responsible for their psychiatric problems when it is actually another. And yet, unless they are psychotic, a part of them always knows they are lying, and is ambivalent about it. Remember, the lie presupposes the truth, so a liar must be aware of the truth on some level.

In his heart-mind, even absent a divine commandment, man (a normal man, anyway -- someone who hasn't completely given himself over the lie and become its instrument) knows that he should not lie, and a part of him attempts to align itself with truth, and spill the beans on the internal liar. It's actually one of the fun parts of my job -- to try to conspire with the part of the patient that is desperate to get the truth out, despite flack from other parts of the personality that wish to prevent it.

We live in a world of forces, at every vertical level. Just as human beings are tripartite entities consisting of body, mind and spirit, there are physical forces, mental forces, and spiritual forces. In the spiritual-intellectual realm, truth is most assuredly a force, from which the materialist or metaphysical Darwinist willfully attempts to sever himself. There is a counter-force which we call "lying," which, if you think about it for even a moment, has probably had a greater impact and influence on the world than Truth. Or at the very least, it is a constant battle. Truth is always embattled on all sides, just as light is surrounded by darkness. Not for nothing did Jesus make the wise crack that the adversary “was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks of his own substance, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

This is an interesting statement, for it suggests that lies are somehow a "human substance," somewhat like a spider that spins a web out of its own body. It is a kind of dark substance that oozes from a real liar -- a Ted Kennedy, a Johnnie Cochran, an Obama. Truth, on the other hand, is not, and cannot be of human origins. It is somehow anterior to us, and it is only for us to discover or remember it -- what Plato called anamnesis. It too is a substance, the substance of light, which, to paraphrase someone, is as light as a gas but as hard as a diamond. It is of celestial origins, while the lie is of human origins (via Stan, if you like). The point is, only humans lie, since only humans may know truth.

You'd think it would be uncontroversial to utter a simple truth, but you'd be wrong, wouldn't you? If you don't believe in the force of falsehood, try sharing a controversial but banal truth at one of our elite universities, such as "men and women are fundamentally different and, on average, excel at different things," or "children do better with a mother and a father than with two mothers and two fathers," or “racial quotas hurt blacks," or “some, if not most, cultures are patently sick." It seems that to carry Truth is to pick up a cross and paint a target on one's back.

Animals cannot lie. While they can have certain naturally selected mechanisms of deception, they cannot live a lie (actually, as an astute commenter mentioned the other day, it might be possible if the luckless pet has a particularly nutty owner, like James Wolcott). But living a lie is in the normal course of events for human beings. Interestingly, this problem is fully recognized in scripture, as the very first conversations recorded in the Bible are a tissue of lies. The serpent lies to the woman, the woman transmits the lie to the man, and the man lies about it to God. The very emergence of self-consciousness seems to be inseparable from lying. The Lie banishes us from paradise.

A cursory glance at history -- or at the idiotorial pages of the New York Times -- establishes the fact that lying is absolutely fundamental to human existence, even though the idea wasn't systematized until the early 20th century, in the works of Freud (the good Freud) and his followers. In particular, the psychoanalyst W.R. Bion developed a sophisticated epistemology (say that fast three times) showing how a vital lie is at the basis of most all forms of psychopathology. He made the provocative observation that the lie requires a thinker to think it, whereas the truth does not, for it simply is. We discover truth, but it takes a thinker to concoct the lie (and, I might add, a "gifted" thinker such as Marx or Chomsky to create the most grandiose and elaborate lies). And once the lie is in place, it causes the psyche to enter a sort of parallel universe, for it constructs itself on the foundations of that primordial lie.

In my own colorful terminology, I have called these internalized lies "mind parasites." I believe the term is an accurate one, for it is meant to convey the idea that a vital lie that lodges itself in the psyche is not static, but takes on the characteristics of the host, so to speak, thereby disguising itself. I remember once discussing this with my analyst. I don't remember the exact context of the problem I was whining about (or if I’m lying about not remembering) but he said words to the effect of, "What do you expect? It's as smart as you are."

Ah ha! In other words, the mind parasite has at its disposal all of the marvelous hi-tech wetware of the psyche -- like a rogue state that acquires nuclear weapons. Therefore, it can easily justify itself, elaborate itself, gang up on the truth, intimidate healthier parts of the psyche. Think of a dictator who uses legitimate means to come to power, but then corruptly uses all of the levers of power to stay there and eliminate opponents -- similar to how liberalism gradually morphed into the twisted leftism which now controls the Democrat party.

Just as freedom and truth are necessarily linked -- i.e., no one who is living a lie is actually free -- those who are in thrall to the lie are slaves. While they may enjoy a subjective sense of freedom, it is an illusion. In fact, they have forfeited their freedom and are attached to a spiritually suffocating demon generated out of their own dark psychic substance.

Think of a vivid example that comes readily to mind -- the Islamists. Is it not obvious to one and all (er, no) that they are absolutely enslaved by artificial beings of their own creation? And that they want everyone else to be enslaved by the same demon? Does this not demonstrate the insane power of demons and the lies they propagate? And how the liberal media simply treats the lie as another variety of truth? You know, who are we to judge? The Middle East is just too complex. The Palestinians are victims too. We deserved 9-11.

There are personal mind parasites and collective mind parasites. Many cultures revolve entirely around monstrous entities that have been engendered by whole communities, such as the Aztec. Here again, it would be wrong to say that the Aztec had a bloodthirsty god -- rather, it clearly had them. Thousands upon thousands of human beings sacrificed to satisfy this imaginary god's appetite for human blood, elaborate mechanisms set up to supply fresh bodies, the heart of the sacrificial victim cut out by the officiating priest who would himself take a bite out of it while it was still beating. A whole society of Jeffrey Dahmers trying desperately to allay their existential and ontological anxiety by vampirically ingesting the life force of others. The head-chopping Izlambies are just the latest edition of this primordial anti-religion. But you undoubtedly know some people in your own life who do the same thing -- hungry ghosts and Rays of darkness who feed on the light (or the blog) of others.

In all times and in all places, human beings have looked for ways to objectify, worship, and appease their self-created demons. This is preferable to having them run around loose in one's own psyche. Take again the example of the typical beast of Islamist depravity. How would one even begin to tell him: "Listen, buddy. You have a persecutory entity inside of you that your life revolves around. You have placed it outside of yourself, in the 'infidels,' so as to make your life bearable, for the lie conceals a truth that is too painful to endure. Would you like to put down that meat cleaver and talk about it?"

To a large extent, this dynamic is at the heart of more mundane politics as well. For those who do not experience George Bush as a demon, it is almost impossible to understand those who do, any more than we can really understand the motivations of the Aztec. The collective mind parasite has a grammar and logic all its own, inaccessible to all but initiates of the Lie.

You don't actually want to get that close to an intoxicating Lie of that magnitude. It's not safe. Better to observe it from a respectful distance. Otherwise, you will find yourself pulled down into a false world of counter-lying rather than simple truth. You cannot create an artificial "good demon,” which is what secular leftists are trying to do when they aren't creating bad ones. Those critical critics who criticize my "negativity" probably think I am engaging in the former -- heatedly countering the lie -- when I am calmly engaged in the latter -- simply reaffirming the truth. This is the inner meaning of "resist not evil." Resist it in the wrong way, and you come into its orbit. The Raccoon way is never to resist a troll, but to ridicule them from above.

For a demon operates through a combination of will and imagination. You may think of perverse will as the male principle and perverse imagination as the female principle. Together they beget the demon child that then controls the parents, taking over both will and imagination. Consider how so much art and academic nonsense is nothing more than the elaboration of the lower imagination -- ideological superstructures giving cover to lies of various magnitude. Think of how much "activism" is simply the angry agitation of the perverse will.

Truth is a living thing, a consciousness -- and therefore a Being -- that cannot be reduced to the idolatrous systems of men, especially corrupted men who do not honor Truth to begin with. Most modern and postmodern ideologies and philosophies are opiates for elites too sophisticated for such nonsense as Truth. But like all misused drugs, “Lies gravely affect our mind; they distort the undeveloped organs of the Personality, upon which depends the effort that must lead us to the second Birth.... Even more, lying makes the man who aspires to evolution go backwards” (Mouravieff).

The saving manifestation of the Absolute is either Truth or Presence, but it is not one or the other in an exclusive fashion, for as Truth It comprises Presence, and as Presence It comprises Truth. Such is the twofold nature of all theophanies; thus Christ is essentially a manifestation of Divine Presence, but he is thereby also Truth: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” No one enters into the saving proximity of the Absolute except through a manifestation of the Absolute, be it a priori Presence or Truth. --F. Schuon

Well, I said I was going to post the last two commandments, but this has gone on long enough already. We'll do the last one later in the week.

On Keeping Body and Soul Together While Treasuring Your Eccentricity

We are now up to commandments six and seven (or seven and eight, depending upon your mythsemantics). Maybe I'll repost the last two commandments on Monday, so I can take a day off. That will also allow me to finish up our Saturday review of the best of August 2006, so we can then move into September '06 next week.

***

Let the truth of Brahman be taught only to those who are devoted to him, and who are pure in heart. --Mundaka Upanishad

“You shall not commit adultery.” Like the other commandments, this one has an outward, exoteric meaning as well as an inner, esoteric one. After all, adultery is related to adulterate, which means to corrupt, debase, or make impure by the addition of a foreign or inferior substance. In this case, we are talking specifically about the intrinsic purity of the soul, and avoiding activities that corrupt it.

This commandment goes directly to the heart of the mysterious bond between body and soul, that which distinguishes us from the beasts. In Meditations on the Tarot, our Unknown Friend writes that “the power of mutual love unites soul and body. Life, which consists of the union of soul and body, is the marriage of soul and body. For this reason the commandment: ‘You shall not commit adultery’ follows from the commandment: ‘You shall not murder.’ For adultery is essentially a form of killing -- of separating soul and body, whose union is the archetype of marriage.”

Jewish tradition regards the bond between Israel and YHVH as a marriage covenant; likewise the covenant between Christ and the church, or the mystical union between the soul and Jesus, or Shiva and Shakti.

Soul and body form a harmonious union, and the separation of the two in any sphere of activity is a kind of murder, since the higher life is not possible without their union. When we talk about the culture of death, we are really talking about the soulless culture, because so much of our culture has become spiritually barren and soulless. As such, it is both inhuman and antihuman.

In adhering to the soul in all we do, we remain “faithful” to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Conversely, if we transfer our loyalty to that which corrupts us, we will soon discover that it clings to us as much as we adhere it it. The death culture begets death. If we are "in" that culture, it is soon in us. Then there's no escape, since the inscape is blocked.

As we have mentioned before, depth is a dimension of soul, so that achieving depth is a pathway toward recognition of the soul’s existence. In the absence of soul, the world has no depth -- everything is of equal importance, or else simply has the importance our feelings, our genes, or our cultural programming attach to it.

This is why the postmodern strategy of deconstruction is not just bad philosophy. Rather it is murder, specifically, soul murder. And this is why, to paraphrase Richard Weaver, all attacks on religion inevitably result in attacks on the mind itself. Deconstruction is “intellectual crack,” as someone once put it. Likewise philosophical Darwinism. It is pure murder of the human being and the obliteration of his cosmic station and environment.

In fact, any kind of radical skepticism represents nothing more than (in words of Schuon) an "esoterism of stupidity": the lower mind’s ability to doubt anything is elevated to the central truth of our existence. It is the worst kind of soul betrayal, because it operates under cover of a counterfeit pursuit of truth, while simultaneously destroying its very possibility.

Perhaps it should be emphasized that this commandment does not imply some sort of dry, austere, or anti-pleasure approach to life. Quite the opposite. In fact, in Jewish tradition, it is said that the first thing God will ask upon your death is why you didn't partake of all the permitted pleasures He so generously bestowed for your enjoyment.

The point is that existence is embodied, but not only embodied. There are two false paths; one is the descending path into hedonism, distraction, and other various soulless activities. But the other false path is the purely ascending one: going up the sacred mountain with the soul, but leaving the body behind.

This is a persistent message of both Judaism and Christianity. Both, in different ways, stress the embodied nature of existence, and the problem of how to sanctify our lives by re-membering the soul in everything we do.

But clearly, if one stands back and looks at the historical situation from the widest possible vantage point, we can see a problem. Because the Judeo-Christian tradition regards the world as real and worthy of our attention, it can lead to an exteriorizing tendency that ends up severing soul and body.

On the other hand, if we look at the philosophies of the east, they have tended to regard the world as illusory, or as maya, unworthy of being taken seriously. Historically they have made the opposite mistake of becoming too interior: “Brahman alone is real.” Thus, Buddhism and Hinduism have a bit of an interiority complex.

I do believe that the evolutionary task of our age is to bring these two extremes back together -- to fully reconcile soul and body and achieve the Life Divine in a monkey body. In truth, it is merely a matter of emphasis, for there is no question that this is at the heart of the uncorrupted Christian message: body and soul in a higher union.

Likewise, although Sri Aurobindo is responsible for correcting Shankara's overemphasis transcending maya, he too was simply going back to the original message of the Upanishads: “To darkness are they doomed who devote themselves only to life in the world, and to a greater darkness they who devote themselves only to meditation,” says the Isha Upanishad. Rather, “Those who combine action and meditation cross the sea of death through action and enter immortality." This again takes place through the sacred union of soul and body, spirit and matter, male and female, mamamaya and papurusha (for those who know their punskrit).

I once had a psychotic patient who took one look at my name -- Godwin -- and blurted out, “Godwin -- is that like a combination of God and Darwin?” I thought about it for a moment and knew that he was right, for while he might have been crazy, he wasn't stupid. Because the whole bloody point of the living Raccoon philosophy is to marry Adam and Evolution in such a way that they live happily ever after, both aspiring to the same nonlocal goal 'til death do us part.

***

“Thou shalt not steal.” Why not? As always, the left has found a fruit loophole in this commandment by questioning its premise, i.e., the existence of private property. For one way to eliminate theft is to eliminate or at least question the legitimacy of private property -- which naturally ends with one big thief called “the government.” When liberals talk about "tax cuts for the rich," or "windfall profits," what they really mean is that no one has the right to interfere with their monopoly on theft.

Property, according to Richard Pipes, is “the key to the emergence of political and legal institutions that guarantee liberty.” Look at most anyplace in the world where there is an absence of liberty, and you will find weak property rights.

Liberals -- classical liberals, anyway, not the misnamed leftist kind -- have always understood that property is much more than property. Rather, it is the cornerstone of freedom, its very enabler and protector. And underneath property is the use of legitimate violence to protect said property. For if ever there were “sacred violence,” it is the violence that ensures the protection of property, for without property, humans cannot become fully human and thereby know the sacred. To a leftist, nothing can actually be sacred except false idols such as "diversity," or "social justice," or whatever else is convenient to achieve their worldly aims

For one thing, property is simply a free expression of “what people want,” and to a large extent, what you want is who you are, for better or worse. Therefore, property is an extension of the person. I once read a description of this by the outstanding psychoanalyst and writer, Christopher Bollas, who notes that the self can never be perceived directly, only indirectly, largely through its use of objects:

“Perhaps we need a new point of view in clinical psychoanalysis, close to a form of person anthropology. We would pay acute attention to all the objects selected by a patient and note the use made of each object. The literature, films, and music a person selects would be as valued a part of the fieldwork as the dream.” In so doing, we may “track the footsteps of the true self.”

As I have mentioned before, if I go to someone’s home, there are two things I am most curious about: the books and music it contains. And the medicine cabinet. Likewise, I should think that after I am gone, a psychoanalytic fieldworker would be able to construct a fairly accurate representation of me by merely rifling through my library. A name whose person escapes me referred to reading as “the mystery school of individuation.”

Just consider the odd assortment of books in my sidebar [that used to be there, anyway; the present list is slightly more uniform]. I am quite sure that no one else on the planet has a matching list. There may not be another person in history who has read and assimilated those particular books. I am not saying that to boast, only to emphasize the amazingly unique alchemy of choices we all embody when given the opportunity to freely exercise those choices. As Petey once said, “freedom is eccentricity lived,” and he has a point. Remember the Raccoon credo: if you're not eccentric, you're wrong.

At the very least, freedom is individuality lived, and it is very difficult to live out your individuality without a range of choices before you. Paradoxically, you can only become who you are in the context of liberty. Therefore, culture can only become what it is supposed to be in that same context. And this is again why we so strenuously bobject to the illiberal left, which is necessarily antihuman in elevating multiculturalism over the individual.

In a properly functioning human environment, culture will embody the exteriorization of the soul, while the soul will be assisted on its journey by the interiorization of culture. But to interiorize the culture of death is to.... Well, to paraphrase someone, "nature makes no provision for the death of the soul." Never wonder why the left abounds with so many gangrenous souls, since the "spiritual capillaries" that are supposed to nourish the soul have become completely sclerotic and blocked, so their minds become a dead tissue of lies.

I realize it’s politically incorrect to say this, so that's reason enough to say it. But in the course of my work, I have had the opportunity to evaluate many people from second and third world cultures, and what always impresses me about them is their essential sameness. Their life stories are all remarkably similar, almost as if they were the same person.

And in a way they are, for they were not brought up in a cultural (or economic) space in which they could articulate their own unique metaphysical dream. Instead, their life is dreamt by the collective, either vertically by a ruling class or horizontally by their dopey culture (which psychologists are supposed to "respect," on pain of being called a racist, or imperialist, or Republican). What Bollas calls the person’s “destiny drive” -- the spiritual drive to become oneself -- has been almost entirely squelched. They do not live in a space of infinite possibilities, only a sort of invariant and unchanging now, projected backward and forward and giving the illusion of an actual history.

Pipes notes that “while property in some form is possible without liberty, the contrary is inconceivable.” And this is one thing that again frightens us about the illiberal left, for as we have said many times, if you scratch a leftist, he will probably sue you. But underneath the scratch, you will discover a conviction that your property doesn’t really belong to you, but to the collective. It is simply a variation of the bald-faced assertion that “private property is public theft,” itself the absolute inversion of the seventh commandment.

Our most precious property is, of course, our own body-mind. However, it is amazing how late in history this idea emerged. For example, the Islamic beasts we are fighting have no such notion. In their cultures, your body and mind belong to the religious authorities, and only they can dictate what you can and cannot do with them. For example, a woman’s body is not her own. She has no choices (or only a narrow range of choices established by others) of how to express it, how to adorn it, and with whom she may share it. (Memo to trolls -- please don’t even bother. The moral issue behind the abortion debate is not whether a woman has a right to do whatever she pleases with her own body, but whether she has that right over another’s body. That’s the whole point.)

Slavery was still legal in parts of the Arab world as late as the 1960’s, and widespread virtual slavery still exists today. This is the penultimate theft (murder being ultimate), the theft of a human soul. But that is hardly the only sort of soul-theft that goes on in the Islamic world. Again, the idea that children are autonomous beings with their own inherent rights and dignity is a very late historical development that has yet to appear in most human cultures. Rather, children are “owned” by their parents, which is a great barrier to psychohistorical evolution. As a parent, your job is to create a space for your child’s true self to emerge, not to enforce your version of whom your child is and what he should become. It goes without saying that this does not exclude boundaries, discipline, and values, but the point of these is to facilitate true spiritual freedom, not to suppress it.

Most religions conceive of a mythical Golden Age, an edenic past in which there was no private property. Likewise, they may speculate about a hereafter in which there is no need for private property because there is no lack of anything. But in between, in our embodied state, there is a me and therefore a mine, a you and a yours. And just as the development of individualism is facilitated by property, property benefits from the arrangement as well. That is, most people do not take proper care of things that do not belong to them. As they say, no one ever took it upon himself to wash a rental car. Likewise, “primitive people are prone mindlessly to exterminate animals and destroy forests, to the extent that they are physically able, without any thought of the future” (Pipes). There is an obvious reason why the most affluent countries with the strongest property rights also have the best environmental records.

Similarly, only when is master of oneself will one feel compelled to make improvements. Here again, we see the left undermining this fundamental assumption, with disastrous consequences. For the entire basis of leftist victimology is that you are not sovereign over yourself and are not responsible for your destiny. Rather, the doctrine of victimology maintains that your life is really directed by others. If you are a woman, you are controlled by men. If you are black, you are controlled by racist whites. If you are gay, you are controlled by “homophobes.” If you are a Democrat, you are controlled by Karl Rove.

In each case, personal agency is undermined and replaced by a collective that, in the long run, will further erode the liberty it claims to advance. Racial quotas simply displace the ceiling further down the road. For example, a recent study proved that easing the standards for admitting blacks to law school simply results in black lawyers with dead-end careers in which they never make partner. The fundamental difference between a leftist and conservative comes down to collective identity (and therefore victim) politics vs. individual (and therefore agent over one's destiny) politics. So it's humans vs. ants, really.

There are many “social justice” or “liberation theology” Christians who maintain that Jesus was a sort of proto-communist, what with his counsel to give to the poor. But there is an infinite moral distinction between voluntary renunciation of one’s wealth and government seizure and redistribution of one’s wealth. Just as one must first be a man before becoming a gentleman, one must first have sovereignty over one’s property before choosing to give it away. And as a matter of fact, statistics demonstrate that there is an inverse relationship between high taxes and charitable giving. Those states with the lowest taxes give the most, while those with the highest taxes -- ”liberal” places such as Massachusetts -- give the least. There is a reason why America is the most generous nation the world has ever known, both in terms of blood and treasure.

And there is also a reason why, say, China, has no qualms whatsoever about stealing billions of dollars per year in American intellectual property, for they now want the benefits of private property without the sacred duty to protect it. For a Marxist, private property is again public theft, so when they steal American music, DVDs, and computer programs, they’re just doing what comes naturally to them: “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine as well.”

Well, I can see that I’ve run out of time before I could come up with any snappy ending. Let’s just say this: in order to create a properly functioning society and a spiritually balanced person, “thou shalt not steal” (i.e., private property is sacrosanct) must be reconciled with “thou shalt not covet” (property isn't everything). We'll get to that one in a couple days, assuming I can steal the time that I so enviously covet.

The Fantasy-Based Community and their Messiah

So much for the Supercilious Bowl. The only way to make Obama's otherwise vapid speech interesting is to perform a Fantasy Analysis on it, a technique invented by psychohistorian Lloyd DeMause to supposedly reveal "hidden emotional messages embedded within seemingly bland and boring speeches and press conferences of leaders." Its purpose is to "capture how it feels to be part of a nation's emotional life" by focusing only upon emotionally charged "fantasy words" that resonate with the unconscious mind. It operates under the assumption that any leader is also a fantasy leader who necessarily answers to the group's unconscious emotions, needs and impulses.

A leader who fails to resonate in this unconscious manner simply will not be perceived as an effective leader, no matter how competent he is. For example, from even before Day One, because of resentment over Al Gore's unsuccessful attempt to exploit the judicial system to overturn the 2000 election, President Bush has been unable to use language in such a way as to bind up the anxiety and hatred of liberals. As has been evident for all to see, their raw hatred has been completely unbound for nigh on eight years. Truly, they're like fatherless children.

In order to perform a fantasy analysis on a text, one records all strong feeling words (including anything related to the family, e.g., mother, father, baby) regardless of context, plus any unusual metaphors or gratuitously repeated words. One also eliminates negatives, because of the symmetrical logic of the unconscious, which converts a negation to an affirmation (for example, the more Obama insists his forbears were from Kansas, the more it emphasizes that he grew up in Indonesia, or the more he complains about people questioning his patriotism, the more it emphasizes the lack thereof).

If you found yourself dozing off during Obama's speech, it's because, as DeMause writes, "most political meetings are usually held not to make decisions but to deepen the social trance, to switch into political alters, and to entrain the group's unconscious emotional strategies for handling the inner emotional problems of its hidden world." Because Democrats are by nature such emotional creatures who project so much undisguised emotion into politics, they are much more transparent in their fantasies (indeed, as is true of any more primitive group).

So without further ado, here's what Obama was transmitting to the Democrat underworld, unconscious-to-unconscious (I've inserted paragraph breaks where there was a lengthy stretch with no new material, or else a sudden change of emphasis):

profound gratitude... great humility... inspiration... love... love... proud... sacrifice... dreams... dreams...

jeopardy... courage... war... turmoil... lost... plummet... beyond your reach... broken... illness... disaster... chokes... drowns before our eyes... enough! enough... bravery... gratitude... respect... broken... strong anxiety... suffering... whiners... whiners... burdens... whiners... tough luck... failure... strength... sick... strength...

protect us from harm... provide every child... safe... help us... not hurt us... cut... cut... security... dependence... dying... sick... sick... sick... ailing... protected... strength... crime... despair... children... war... threats... stubborn... threats... strained... harm’s way... war... fight... conflicts... aggression... threats... genocide... disease... died... abortion... gun plagued... violence... criminals....

love... passions... mother... separated from her infant... child... undercuts... strength... happy talk... firmer... abandonment... scare... people should run... hopes have been dashed again and again... something is stirring... children losing a limb... floodwaters rise... powerful ... strong... envy... anger and discord... fear and frustration... cried... children...

First of all, we should probably ask the question: does fantasy analysis actually work?

I have no idea. It sounds good on paper, but it can obviously be subject to abuse. Plus, in the hands of an unskilled person, I suppose they could prove anything they wish. It's very much analogous to free association, which is the cornerstone of psychoanalysis. In that case, the therapist is "listening with the third ear" to what the patient is saying, in that one part of the mind follows along with the explicit words, while another part must always be attentive to the subliminal message and emotional undercurrents. Very much like being married to a female, actually. No, I didn't say that.

Furthermore, as the patient begins to surrender conscious control over speech, it is assumed that another Subject begins to organize the material, very much in the manner which (as Grotstein calls it) the Ineffable Subject of Being -- the Dreamer -- organizes our dream material. But once you start to appreciate this alter Subject, you begin to realize the extent to which it has been pulling the strings of your life all along. Yes, life is but a dream, dreamt by the vast Subject beneath, behind, and above your little ego-object.

Oh, forget about Obama and the Democrats. Those sleepwalkers are entirely predictable. I could have written the speech myself, and done it in half the time. First, I'd spend maybe ten minutes putting the delegates into a light trance, and then utter the following, in rhythm with their breathing:

children... babies... mommy... security... mmmmmm... love... milk... warmth... happy... mmmmm...

danger! daddy! violence... abortion... abortion... abandonment... separation... independence... be a man, Fredo!... welfare cuts... safety net... social justice... turmoil... walmart... haliburton... katrina... gitmo... torture... torture... scared... what happened to the breast... suffering... victim... victim... victim... whiner... whiners... whining... victim... victimizing... victim... I blame Bush...

mommy!... drowning... help!... powerful... powerful... rescue... safe... government... breast... government... breast... breast... breast... mommy...

Okay, moving on. As we were saying yesterday, you can learn a lot about the sane by studying the insane. I don't know how effective fantasy analysis is with relatively normal people, but it wouldn't be difficult to do on Hitler, since his fantasies were so close to the surface anyway. For example, Mein Kampf is like one long fantasy. Hitler is such a pure case, in that he lived in an explicit fantasy world, and yet, expressed the fantasies so directly (e.g., racial "pollution," the "Jewish bacillus," the "Aryan race," etc.).

Conservative texts are boring (in terms of fantasy analysis) for another reason, which is that they are so rational and straightforward. It's very easy for a conservative to just come out and say what they are for: limited government, low taxes, judges who do not legislate from the bench, school choice, religious freedom, etc.

But for an American liberal, they can never just blurt out what they believe, on pain of never winning an election, or of getting no ratings. Air America is a case in point. Like Hitler, they make no attempt to conceal their liberal agenda, so it is deeply unpopular, except I suppose in crazy places such as San Francisco.

So the liberal -- if he wishes to gain power -- must necessarily revert to either conscious or unconscious distortion and trancemission. It reminds me of what movies were like before the sex could be shown explicitly. Instead, everything had to be suggested and implied. This can be done in an artless manner or in a masterful way that is obviously more powerful than contemporary films, because of the unconscious resonance. Most people will agree that the sexual tension between, say Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, or Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, is much more interesting than that between... I don't know, you name it. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. {shudder}

Now, the most primitive psychological defense mechanisms are 1) denial 2) projection 3) splitting, and 4) projective identification. All are related, and are actually necessary conditions of each other. For example, what is denied doesn't just disappear, but is split off and projected, usually into other people. Likewise, what is projected is necessarily split off. The group unconscious relies upon all of these mechanisms -- for example, scapegoating is just group projection.

When one engages in projective identification, one is necessarily in denial. (As the wiki article states, projective identification involves projection into another, followed by behaving toward the recipient of the projections in such a manner as to invoke in the other person precisely the thoughts, feelings or behaviors projected.) For example, the primitive Palestinians project all of their sadism into the Israelis, and then, when Israel responds, it "proves" to the Palestinians how sadistic and oppressive the Israelis are. Or, closer to home, the left projects so much hatred and viciousness into President Bush, that most anything he does or says is proof of his hatred and viciousness.

One of the fascinating things about watching the train wreck over at MSNBC is how unhinged and undefended Keith Olbermann is. The more slack he is given and the more power he gains, the less he needs to conceal his evident madness. So it is a sight to behold, very much like the old days of the Jerry Lewis telethon. You just never knew what a drug-addled and disinhibited Jerry might say or do after Hour 23.

So, what have we learned in today's rambling and disinhibited post? I have no idea. Perhaps someone should perform a fantasy analysis on it.

Demasking the Messiah on the Road to St. Paul

National Socialism was a religion and Hitler was its Christ. --John Toland

One of Bion's central ideas was that each of us has a part of the mind that is psychotic. Therefore, people who are actually psychotic are not so different from you or I. It's just that they have no sane part. Others seem only to have a sane part. They're the most insane, since they can get more done.

A corollary of this is that you can learn a lot about the sane by studying the psychotic mind. This is because the psychotic person uses all of the same defense mechanisms as the normal person, except that they are grotesquely exaggerated, distorted, and hypertrophied. As a result, these mechanisms become quite vivid and easily discernible, whereas for a normal person they will be more subtle and hidden -- even (or especially) from the person employing them.

Let's take an obvious example, projection. We all project. In fact, we can't help it, as it is one of the necessary (but not sufficient) conditions of our humanness. For the infant, projection is one of the primary means they use to manage their psychic contents. For example, they can use it to "expel" uncomfortable or frightening thoughts and emotions, but at the same time, employ it as a means of "connecting" with mother. The fact of the mater is, in the absence of projection, you would be all alone in this world. It is as necessary to the mind as the immune system is to the body. To extend the analogy, mental illness often comes down to an autoimmune disorder in which the immune system (i.e, psychic defense mechanisms) goes haywire and turns on the host, and either can't recognize real enemies or attacks the wrong entities.

Look at the Democrat convention. A big part of it involves a bunch of losers who don't feel so alone because they are able to share the experience of similar "good" projections into Obama or the Clintons on the one hand, as well as bad projections into President Bush, or Dick Cheney, or Evil Corporations, or Global Warming Hoax Deniers, or God knows what. Nothing unites a people so much as fear around an identical demonology. You know, the same way that conservatives such as you and I are so afraid of homosexuals, negroes, furriners and revinooers.

Who can say what goes on inside the head of someone who idealizes these phonies, knaves, liars and and con artists? The key point is that these processes primarily take place in the head. But when you're in a group of thousands of others sharing the identical projections, it no longer feels as if it's in the head. Rather, it feels real. And the whole point is to make the fantasy seem like reality, which is why people get so glassy-eyed and ecstatic at these events. But enough about the MSNBC hosts. (Although I can't wait to see their heads explode next week, when they have to enter the "hell" of St. Paul.)

The projectors obviously felt that Joe Biden delivered a wonderful speech last night. But if you apply even a rudimentary degree of skepticism -- i.e., if you analyze the speech with the sane part of your mind instead of the psychotic part -- you're left with nothing but a lowly plagiarist and his imaginary world. What do you call someone who steals his delusions from someone else? A coprophagic psychic vampire, I guess.

I think you can apply this same idea to Hitler. That is, it is not as if he were analogous to a psychotic person whose symptoms seem to make no sense. Rather, what if we look at him as Bion would, and consider the possibility that he was engaging in the identical processes as the "sane" politician, only in an exaggerated, distorted and hypertrophied form? Because Hitler used the usual psychic processes so vividly, perhaps they can reveal something about the dynamic between so-called normal groups and their politicians.

The most prominent pre-existing template Hitler relied upon was that of the "messiah" and the "group." Obviously Hitler invented neither of these categories. Looked at in a certain way, the group is a function of the messiah, and vice versa. (I'm using "messiah" as a psychoanalytic term of art, not in a specifically theological sense; it would be even better if I could develop abstract symbols for group and messiah, as in the new testavus for the restavus.)

On the one hand, the messiah is produced out of the collective longing of the group; but on the other hand, the group coalesces and organizes itself around the nonlocal axis of its founding messiah. All cultures -- even wholly secular ones -- will have a messianic figure at their foundation (a culture is always a cult). Look at what the Soviet Union did with Lenin, the Chinese with Mao, or Cuba with Castro. At some point, the human slides off into the messianic, just as reality shades off into fantasy and projection.

For example, in the Islamic world, Mohammed serves the messianic function. Obviously Mohammed is a very different sort of figure than Christ, and was "conjured," so to speak, by a very different mentality (i.e., Jews vs. pagans). But once in place, the messiah exerts an enduring influence on the group. As a result, Muslim values are very different from the Judeo-Christian values that hold our culture together from within.

Look at America. Our messianic figures are the founders, or Abraham Lincoln, or a few others. Our country -- half of it, anyway -- is still unified around those figures. But the other half either distorts those messianic figures (e.g., they were nothing but slaveholders, or self-interested elites), or else creates new messiahs around which to coalesce.

Who are the messiahs of the left? Frankly they are too numerous to mention. Remember what I mentioned about how genuine religions serve as a kind of absolute defense against bad ideologies? For example, yesterday a friend asked if perhaps Ronald Reagan wasn't a savior to conservatives. Yes, to a certain extent. But no conservative would confuse him with the actual Messiah. Rather, one of the things that made Reagan so great was that he humbly conformed himself to our actual messiahs, both religious and political. In fact, you might say that this constitutes the essence of that which the conservative wishes to conserve: the proper messiahs! We want to worship and revere only that which is worthy of it.

By definition, the left is going to be more prone to messianic fantasies (as opposed to messianic realities). Which is highly highly highly ironic, being that the realitybasedcommunity likes to flatter itself about being so realitybased. But one cannot be rooted in reality if one is a materialist who denies the very basis of the Real. And a (or "the," if you prefer) messiah comes down precisely to reveal the nature of the Real, in a way that unaided reason never could. The messiah is a person first, an argument second. Or the argument is a Person. Which is why you can't argue with an Obamaniac, since Obama is the argument. Either you "see" Him or you don't. I don't see him at all. To me, he's just an unsuccessful community agitator.

Coonsider the demonic Deepak, who ardently wishes to purge politics of religion (by which he means Christianity); but at the same time, he is one of the most strident useful idiots trumpeting the arrival of the Obamessiah and the "quantum leap" of "evolutionary consciousness" he represents. This makes sense, for again, Christianity is an absolute defense against the false messianism of an Obama.

It is surely no coincidence that Obama was a member of a deeply false and heretical Christian church for all those years, so he has no psychic defense against his own ridiculous grandiosity. You will have no doubt noticed that the Reverend Wright's sermons are most memorable for their crude demonology, which is entirely consistent with the abiding demonology of the left. As such, it is clear that Obama hasn't left that particular church at all, but is running for its messiah. Biden is also a member of that church, as he mentioned all the familiar demons in his speech last night: torture, Bush, tax cuts for the rich, Bush, global warming, Bush, Gitmo, Bush, Katrina, Bush, fortymillionuninsured, incomeinequality, etc. (Here is the actual recipe.)

And liberals like to say conservatives "play on our fears." Ho! Leftism is nothing but a coalesced group projection around Fear Itself.

This post was supposed to be about Hitler, wasn't it? I should probably stop now and continue tomorrow. Well, just a little more.

It so happens that Hitler was very interested in religion, spirituality, mysticism and the occult. What survives of his library contains many such books. He clearly read them carefully, as they are filled with underlining, exclamation points, and margin notes. In one of them, he underlined the following passages:

Where did Jesus derive the power that has held his followers for all eternity? Through his absolute identification with God.... God and I are One.... His life is mine; mine is his. My work is his work, and his work is my work.

Watch the new messiah become one with his entranced, teary-eyed, and drooling people tonight. But enough about MSNBC.

Hitler and Radical Darwinism: As Below, So Above

Genuine religion is a kind of absolute defense against bad ideologies, from the violent aggression of Nazism to the passive aggressiveness of blind Obamism. Conversely, virtually all bad ideologies -- the ones that do real damage -- become pseudo-religions, drawing on religious energy and emotion in the absence of religion.

Genuine religion puts one in touch with first principles that define man qua Man, and allow one to understand the adage, "as above, so below." But false religions such as Darwinism or Leftism always either obscure their first principles or fail to draw them out. As a result, they can't help lying, whether consciously or unconsciously. The dim ones -- which is most of them -- lie unconsciously, whereas the bright ones do so consciously and disingenuously. In fact, that's one of the difficulties in assessing a liberal. For example, Obama or Hillary are so "cosmically ignorant" (as PowerLine put it) about economics, one necessarily wonders: do they actually believe what they say? Or is it just demagoguery to stir up the masses? In short, are they stupid or evil?

The Darwinist cannot or will not see the reality of "as above, so below." Not only does he deny it, but to the extent that Darwinism reveals the truth of man, then the opposite must be true: "as below, so above." In other words, there is absolutely nothing -- not love, not truth, not art, not virtue -- that cannot be reduced to a battle down below for genetic survival. Translated to field of politics, it is reduced to a fight for power. People say it is unfair to blame Darwin for social Darwinism, but... well, Dupree calls bullshit, to put it indelicately. For again, to the extent that Darwinism reveals the truth of man, what on earth prevents us from applying the doctrine to the conduct of our lives?

This is most certainly how Hitler felt about it. Furthermore, he was at least clear-sighted enough to know who the real enemy was: the religious, beginning with the devils who were responsible for the whole thing, the Jews. In order to apply his new anti-religious religion, he had to extirpate the old religion root and branch. Jews were the root. The branches would come later.

Notice how Queeg, the radical Darwinist, has had to go about purging his blog of the religious. The underlying pattern is identical, again, because religion is the inoculation against bad or evil ideologies, so the battle against religion will always be at the front line of Cosmic War I, AKA the Forty Thousand Year War. This is what groups such as the ACLU are all about, regardless of what they say they are about. Again, many of its members are just stupid, like Queeg, while others are disingenuous. But underneath it all, they know that in order to advance their inhuman and anti-human agenda, they must eliminate the one force that would prevent it: religion.

Oddly enough, Hitler was actually more crafty and subtle than the ACLU. One of the things that marginalizes the ACLU in America is that they attack religion so brazenly. In Hitler's case, he knew that he had to progress in stages in order to gradually "Nazify" Christendom. If he had gone after Christianity more directly, more resistance would have arisen. And he didn't go after the Jews on the basis of religion. Rather, he first converted them to a race, again consistent with the principle of "as below, so above." In other words, their "evil" ideology could be reduced to a kind of genetic defect, and thus eliminated from the body of man.

One author has defined fascism as the violent resistance to transcendence. As such, the ACLU, or a person such as Queeg, is not a fascist, since they engage in non-violent resistance to transcendence. And yet, the distinction is not so clear cut, since the ACLU wants to use the law to gain a monopoly on religion (the religion of materialism), and the law is always backed by state violence. For example, school prayer is now against the law, meaning that, at the very least, you will lose your job if you violate the law. So that is certainly a kind of coercion that is backed by potential violence.

But at the same time, it's not so easy to say that fascism represents resistance to transcendence. Rather, it simply inverts it, so that transcendence will be sought from "below," in the emotions, instincts, and senses. What the Nazis sought was a kind of irrational religion, or religion purged of any kind of hierarchical ascent. A large part of this necessarily involved a disabling of the conscience, which is to the individual what real religion is to the collective.

Hitler was well aware, for example, of how the Ten Commandments represented a very real barrier to what might be called "transcendence through descent." He wanted to breed a new "race" of ecstatically violent men who would have no such scruples -- authentic born-again pagans with no "impure" Jewish conscience to get in the way. In this alternate religion, man could be totally fulfilled here on earth by transcending individuality from below. As Van Vrekhem writes, Hitler believed he

"had been sent, and was constantly guided, to change the conscience and morality of man into something like the opposite of Christianity." This would be "a new system of values based on brutality and violence." Hitler actually saw Christ as his precursor, in that he would be the "link," so to speak, between the Volk and their most primitive instincts. It was very much as if he were "word made flesh," except that in this case, the word was the primordial lie from below. Hitler said that,

"Providence has predestined me to be the greatest liberator of humanity.... I liberate man... from the foul and humiliating pangs of a chimera called 'conscience' and 'morality,' and from the demands of a liberty and personal independence of which anyway only a few are capable." To the Christian teaching about the infinite value of the individual soul, "I oppose with icy clarity the liberating teaching of the nothingness and insignificance of the individual and his development within the concrete immortality of the nation." The Fuhrer would release "the mass of the believers from the burden of the free decision."

You see? Like nature herself, Hitler cared for the survival of the species, not the individual. Like a multiculturalist, he believed that eternity was concretely located in the group's essence, not in the fanciful individual soul: "Hitler saw the human individual as nothing more than a cell in a body, an ant in a nest." Hitler wrote that "the life of the individual should not be given such high value. A fly lays a million eggs, they all die. But flies survive." As Van Vrekhem notes, "the perspectives this opens reveal something of the real dimension of the evil to be discovered behind all the destruction and slaughter caused by this German Messiah."

At its very core, Hitler's vision was radically anti-Christian, anti-Enlightenment, anti-modernity, and anti-progress. Rather, his goal was to create a "Spartan totalitarianism, in which people would be smiling, healthy, fanatical, and soulless robots, totally integrated into the common body of the Volk and disdaining individual dignity as a kind of psychological leprosy." This new man would place will above intellect.

Here again this is the precise inversion of the religious man, for whom will is a prolongation of intellect, or "truth in action." But for the Nazi (or the Darwinist, for that matter), there is no truth. Rather, "truth" is just the prolongation of will into the illusory area of the "mind." Truth is a function of power, as any good deconstructionist knows. Thus, Hitler was in complete accord with your average de-Christianized leftist professor, that "the propaganda which produces the desired results is good and all other propaganda is bad."

*A reminder to the stupid: when I refer to "Darwinism," I am always talking about philosophical or metaphysical Darwinism, not the actual science. And before you get all sensitive and defensive, remember that the radical Darwinists such as Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris do not hesitate to call religion evil. I am merely responding in kind, for if one of these metaphysics is true, and you value Truth, then the other must inevitably be evil.

to be continued....

Lies and Other Parasites on Truth

So, the point I was attempting to make yesterday wasn't really an aesthetic one but an ontological one. I was trying to use an experience-near example to think about evolution, discontinuity, and higher spaces; or, to be precise, the discontinuous evolution into these higher worlds.

Just like Darwinian evolution, this process cannot be reduced to a single level, flatland cosmology, on pain of rendering the whole cosmic system nonsensical. For example, to place humans and animals on the same level merely obliterates the space where truth can be known, and a truth-bearing animal is infinitely higher than one without this capacity. Looked at this way, the distance between man and animals is as discontinuous as the gap between truth and falsehood, since no animal can know truth. Darwinists may insist that apes gradually shade off into humans, but a lie doesn't gradually shade off into the truth, so the distance between man and apes is likewise infinite.

As a matter of fact, the lie is obviously entirely parasitic upon the truth, whereas truth is independent and autonomous, and is by no means dependent upon the lie. It stands alone and endures, even if not a single human being believes it. But a lie can only exist if someone knows the truth. Therefore, a liar is someone who knows truth but places other things above it.

For example -- and I don't want to get sidetracked, so this will be brief -- if you watched any of the Democrat infomercial last night, you could see how much of it revolved around truths that are known but must be denied. Looked at this way, a lie is just an inverse way of illuminating a truth. It is a kind of "luminous darkness."

The PowerLine boys addressed this subject, noting that Michelle Obama's speech "all but shouted: We are normal! We are like you!" The whole exercise was a result of the urgent need to remake her into someone who wasn't ashamed of her country until a few months ago. That wasn't the Michelle Obama I know, the one who bitterly clings to her dreary leftist ideology and paranoid church.

When someone is shouting at you for no apparent reason that they are patriotic and normal and just like you!, you can probably take it to mean that they are anything but -- that their words are simultaneously concealing and conveying the opposite sentiment.

I'm very accustomed to this sort of thing in conducting psychological evaluations, during which you must always assess a patient's credibility for the quality of information they are providing you. (Yes, you too can earn cash money by developing your very own bullshit detector!) In that case, if the patient starts insisting upon how abnormal they are before their seat is even warm, that's usually a clue that you're dealing with a malingerer. The craziest people often don't even feel their craziness; rather, you feel it for them. In other words, mind parasites, by their very nature, are projected into other people, and you can feel the projection when it's taking place (this is called "projective identification").

Anyway, once you realize that truth is both higher and discontinuous (if you try to understand it from the bottom up), the whole materialistic paradigm -- including Darwinism -- falls apart. Let's even accept at farce value the Darwinist's claim that the human being has evolved toward Truth. If that is true, then we can never embrace the sterile idea that evolution "ain't goin' nowhere."

Rather, if truth exists and humans may know it, then evolution can be nothing less than a gradual unveiling of reality. And this unveiling is synonymous with what is called the spiritual ascent. Evolution = the irreducibly spiritual ascent into higher degrees of reality. In so doing, the nonlocal ladder is anterior to us, even though we must paradoxically build the local rungs as we make the climb.

Darwinists claim that "all is flux" and that is surely a partial truth. But to make such a banal claim is to insist that at least one thing is not subject to change, and that is the truth that "all is flux." And once you realize the full implications of this, then you understand -- well, as Petey expressed it in a koan the other day, you understand that Man is a diaphanous / gem of light suspended on / a fine web of truth.

Now, you may ask yourself: why is Bob bringing this up today? I thought we were talking about Hitler. Then we're suddenly talking about the Beatles. What's going on here? This is not my beautiful post.

Right. Your point is well taken. As I have mentioned, Hitler & His God spends the first 522 pages discussing the Nazi phenomenon from every possible conventional angle, before making a sort of discontinuous leap, at which point it looks to the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo to make sense of it all.

Why are people so fascinated by World War II in general and Hitler in particular? I think part of the reason is that it is a kind of numinous experience to contemplate that level of evil, which "surpasses" (I suppose "subpass" would be a better term) all our faculties.

Remember, "numinous" does not necessarily have positive connotations, for it mainly signifies confrontation with an object that is strange, mysterious, and "other." An encounter with God is always numinous, but so too is a brush with Death. For those of you who have lost a loved one, you are familiar with that experience of being ushered into an eery, numinous space. People are simultaneously attracted to, and repelled by, this space. It is why, for example, we enjoy horror movies. Much of the romantic movement was explicitly infatuated with Death, which I suppose is why so many of those poet-johnnies committed suicide. Will will know.

During the course of 522 pages, Van Vrekhem provides the testimony of any number of historians, who have conceded that, in the end, Hitler and Nazism simply exceed our ability to understand them. On the one hand, history is there to teach us "what happened." And yet, in this case, we can know exactly what happened "on the surface," and yet, don't truly understand it at all. I'm guessing that there are more books on Hitler and World War II than most any other subjects, and yet, what do we really know?

Van Vrekhem begins with the modest proposal that in attempting to wrap out minds around an "effect" of such magnitude, there must be a cause of equal magnitude. Looked at this way, then Hitler can't possibly be explained by such comparatively trivial causes as resentment over the Treaty of Versaille, or economic hardship, or even rabid nationalism. Any number of countries have been humiliated in war, but they don't start putting people in ovens to cope with their bruised feelings.

So we are confronted with a mystery. Yesterday I was attempting to use an experience-near example to talk about another mystery, that being the obvious discontinuity between even the greatest virtuoso and the true genius. Genius clearly transcends mere virtuosity, and can never be reduced to it. Rather, the musical genius partakes of and transmits a kind of palpable mystery, through which we may have the experience of entering a higher world that is shockingly different from the ordinary musical space. As a number of people pointed out, one can say the same of Van Gogh's paintings. If you are open to them, they truly are shocking, even breathtaking. Why is that? How can that be?

In my opinion, it is because Van Gogh introduces us to the real world. His paintings are particularly vivid examples of how great art is not on the same plane as "reality," and surely not a lower dimensional representation of it. Rather, it is a higher dimensional representation, so to speak. Yes, Van Gogh was an artist, but he was also a seer, or perhaps you might say a "visual prophet," just as Beethoven was an "aural prophet," transmitting information about higher spaces with pure sound. Again, how can such a thing be possible? What kind of cosmos is this, anyway?

Back to Hitler. To begin at the end, Van Vrekhem demonstrates how Hitler's ideology was in many cases a mirror image of Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary philosophy. Again, I don't want to get sidetracked, but I don't think it would be particularly difficult for some enterprising theologian to recast Christianity in evolutionary terms. In fact, I am quite sure it's already been done, not just by Teilhard de Chardin, but, for example, by this guy, about whom I know nothing.

I don't intend any scurrilous attacks on Darwinism, but Van Vrekhem quotes one prominent Nazi who said that National Socialism is applied biology. Think about that for a moment. If someone is foolish enough to believe that biology reveals the truth of man, then exactly what prevents him from drawing the ultimate implications from this: that nothing is absolute and everything is permitted?

It doesn't bother me that simpleminded Darwinists such as Queeg exist. What I do mind is that they try to pretend they're something other than what they are, which is intellectual barbarians. Such offenses must come, but we don't need to participate in their absurd self-flattery to the effect that the lower one falls, the higher one is. These liztards all clamor to the bottom, proud to declare the truth of no-truth, the virtue of indecency, and the beauty of ugliness.

Again, the Lie is parasitic on Truth. That's just how it is. As a result, you might very well say, "the greater the Truth, the bigger the Lie." But conversely, you might also say, "the bigger the Lie, the greater the Truth it is attempting to deny and conceal." Feel free to take this as a metaphor, so long as you understand its higher truth: Satan is first and foremost a parasite on Truth, Light and Beauty. Second, little parasites are everywhere. Oh, and you can learn a lot about God from a demon like Hitler.

In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility. --Adolf Hitler

to be continued....