Slack Liberation Theology and the Reign of the Anti-Bob

How time flies! It's already Antichrist Saturday. However, I think I'll change the name, since that one is too loaded, and bound to be misunderstood by all but our most fanatical readers. Therefore, we'll use the term anti-Bob to designate the Odious one who wishes to misappropriate our slack and reduce us to serfs of his levy-athon state. Instead of a nation of resourceful and individualistic rascals in charge of our own slack, the anti-Bob would turn us into a grey nation of pathetic sponge Bobs and splenetic bland beasts. Obama is the quintessential Slack Liberation Theologist, as he is all about liberating us from our precious, God-given slack.

But when the slackless have enviously confiscated all of the slack from the productive members of society, there is no slack left for anyone but the super-wealthy. Look at the present situation, in which the anti-Bob is even plundering the slack of future generations (at least the ones who will not be aborted, abortion being the ultimate in slack theft) in order to give a kind of "false slack" to his slack-jawed and open-handed mytho-flockers.

But any serious slackonomist knows that this will fail, as true slack can never be created or conferred in this manner. Our founding subgenii knew that our slack was a divine birthright, and that the state could not grant it, only protect it. The problem inevitably faced by the left is that eventually there is no more slack left to steal. Then, instead of being the beacon of slack for the world, we will be just like any other slackless hive of leftist rabble, climbing over each other like animals to fight over the few crumbs of slack granted by the state.

*****

It was like watching people letting themselves be hypnotized for the greater glory not of Christ but of men. It was like watching a generation willing to continue their enslavement to a self-imposed definition of inferiority rather than rise up in the liberation of truth faith and equality. I saw not a hunger for the glory of God, but a thirsting after the glory of a race to the detriment of all others. How weak, I thought, and how shameful. A Christ triumphant would drive these race hustlers from His temple. --Vanderleun @ American Digest

Yesterday I mentioned that one of the reasons the left gives Obama a pass on his membership in a religious hate cult is the soft bigotry of low or no expectations for blacks. Of course they hate us. Of course they believe crazy things. Of course they seek solace in bizarre conspiracy theories.

However, another big reason is that the left doesn't take religion seriously except for any version of "conservative" Christianity, which it takes as a serious evil. All other religions are simply harmless or neutral, no matter how harmful, Obama's Trinity Church being a quintessential example. Spengler quotes James Cone, one of its most prominent "theologians":

"Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community.... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love."

Spengler notes that in his recent defense of Rev. Wright, Obama made reference to the "academic prominence" of Black Liberation Theology -- which, translated, means the indulgence by white leftist intellectuals of this kind of abject kookery. Ironically, Obama's "faith in the white establishment is touching; [Wright] honestly cannot understand why the white reporters at Fox News are bothering him when the University of Chicago and the Union Theological Seminary have put their stamp of approval on black liberation theology."

Of course, white leftists do not put their stamp of approval on Black Liberation Theology because it is theology, but because it is Black, but more to the point, Marxist.

[Brief update: just yesterday I read a passage by Balthasar, who raised a point that I have discussed in the past, that Marxism represents a kind of radically upside-down and debased version of Judaism -- which would explain why, in the history of leftism, disaffected and sometimes frankly anti-semitic Jews have always played such a prominent role (think of Noam Chomsky, George Soros, Howard Zinn, Michael Lerner, etc.). It's just a brief footnote, but he reminds us of how any "liberation theology" is rooted in a utopian messianism, in which the object of hope is fully immamentized. In true theology, the messiah is outside space and time, even while drawing us toward him.

But the false messianism of the left takes the Jewish idea of the messiah, and politicizes it. This creates a "radical eschatology," in which it is believed that our existential alienation can be remedied by overturning the present order. This is why the left is always so reactionary, since they inevitably convert perennial existential / ontological / spiritual problems into political ones. In turn, they will always be attracted to false messiahs and anti-Bobs, whereas the spiritually normal person will be immune to the attraction. There are no political solutions to spiritual problems, whereas there is usually a spiritual solution to most politicized problems.]

All valid theology has to do with systematic distinctions between ego and Self on the one hand, and reality and illusion on the other. Ego is to illusion as Self is to reality. Human beings are uniquely and providentially situated in the cosmos so as to be naturally (horizontally) idolatrous but supernaturally (vertically) -- or "transnaturally" -- oriented to the Absolute. This is just another way of saying that human beings are mirrors of the Absolute, and potentially contain within themselves the entire scale of being, the whole existentialada.

For example, Schuon notes that the great Christian virtues, e.g., charity, humility, poverty, and childlikeness, have their final end in the transcendent Self, or in Christian terms, the nous. Each of these virtues represents a negation "of that ontological inflation which is the ego." Practice of them helps soften and dissolve this existential infarct that clogs up the arteries of being. Likewise, Christ represents "the Self holding out a hand to 'me'; man must lose his life, the life of the ego, in order to keep it, the life of the Self."

Black Liberation Theology precisely turns the cosmos upside down in the manner of all materialists -- which is another reason why it is embraced by left wing materialists. For it promises not any kind of universal transcendence of the ego, but a particular fulfillment of its demands for a "chosen" (in the pernicious, non-Judaic sense) people: "Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community." Here the "black community" is analogous to the rebellious ego, which makes its own intrinsically heretical demands upon God: "If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him."

Shelby Steele writes of Obama that "a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity," and that his tacit endorsement of "a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism" represents "a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness." Again, the source and outcome of this need are ego insecurity and "hardening," not spiritual aspiration and transcendence.

In genuine theology it is understood that "the world" -- and by extension, your very life -- are "on fire," so to speak. This is how many of Jesus' most extreme statements are to be taken -- as urgent calls to get a clue about the eternal order of existence, and to do something about it before it is too late. I would say "obviously," but I guess it's not, that Jesus was not referring to the political order of the world. Rather, he was speaking to Man as such about Existence as such -- not to this or that man in this or that situation, but about the way things always are for man as he always is.

But as Vanderleun notes in his essay, it's easy to confuse the manacles we forge for ourselves with the ones we imagine are placed upon us by others, and then rail against the others as a substitute for the universal call to self-betterment and transcendence. For as Schuon writes, "the man who does not know that existence is an immense brazier has no imperative reason for wanting to get out of it" -- which is why the beginning of wisdom is the awe of God, not the hatred of white people, or Rush Limbaugh, or "neo-cons," the latter attitude only plunging those who embrace it deeper into the flames.

I thought, watching these sermons, these crazed rants spouted in the name of God, "Don't they know.... Can't they see... They're not worshipping God or Christ, they are worshipping men.... racist men.... the very thing their forefathers suffered under and fought to get free of... and now they're back in the same place. --American Digest

Don't fwy off with my swack, Mr. Pwesident! It's not yours.

Getting Intimate with Sophia

I remember my first time. It's not the kind of thing one forgets. Suddenly I knew in my bones that

"The intimate character of being, which reaches its completed end in the conscious spirit, has its preliminary stages in unconscious nature. There is no being that does not enjoy an interiority, however liminal and rudimentary it may be."

Bear in mind that I am not talking about the first few fumbling attempts to pierce the veil of reality after getting hopped up on reefer pills with my buddies in the back of Lumpy's van.

Rather, this actually occurred in a state of sobriety while walking the dog on a warm summer evening. I was idly contemplating something Whitehead had said along similar lines, when the Gagdad coconut "snapped" in such a way that the inside was now out, and the outside in. I suppose you could say that it was like the sudden solution to a koan, which is not an intellectual affair, but more of a breakthrough into the ground of being.

In turn, once you have secured that realization, then so many other pieces of the puzzle naturally fall into place. In other words, once one understands that interiority is not somehow magically confined to animal brains in such a way that it defies all explanation, then the most intractable problems of philosophy more or less vanish. We see that these "problems" were just the inevitable residue of our defective mode of knowing.

Just a brief soph-reverential note about the circularity of the Coonifesto. When you first read chapter one, you may get an intellectual "feel" for this cosmic interiority. But after having broken through into cosmobliteration on p. 266 and returning to the ground on p. 6, the next journey through chapter one should be rather different, in that you are now equipped to "realize" what you could only "know" the first time around. I don't want to give away all of the jokes, but this is what we were driving at on page 264, where it is written,

O me ga! I can explain everything. I know this place. Been here before. Where we started. No it this time. A huge mythunderstanding. The word made fresh. Non-friction. Telos when its over. Now. It is accomplished. End of the piper trail. You're on your own.

This passage has more baggage than I can unpack at the moment, but "O me ga!" is the shocking realization of the end (omega), the telos, which tells us all about the beginning. Thus, we can "explain everything," but only in the eternal now, where there is no longer a radical disjunction between the "it" and the "I," or subject and object (no "it"). It's the same place, but now we know it in an entirely different, participatory manner.

However, this is not something any mortal can give to you, like a piece of information. You cannot follow me like a pied piper. Rather, you're "on your own" (O-->n). Well, not really. "It is accomplished" by the One who has already rejoined heaven and earth, inside and outside, man and God. And he's always happy to extend a little nonlocal assistance to get it accompliced.

With regard to scientific law, one could never say "it is accomplished," since the laws apply only to a finite realm that has already been unnaturally split into rigid categories of subject and object.

Thus, at their margins, both science in general and the scientific method in particular generate metaphysical absurdities that can never be resolved within the realm of science, since it assumes up front what it tries to eliminate at the back. This is strictly impossible, but don't tell the tenured. It would be cruel to deprive a primitive people of their comforting myths.

Suffice it to say that Sophia never makes passes at scientistic asses, despite the latter's "never-ending attempt to woo the core of the material world" (and remember, matter is related to mater and maya, or the primordial feminine). While the physicist no doubt "thinks" he understands the charming ways of mamamaya, so long as he is stuck in his fully masculine mode of thinking, he won't get to first base.

Rather, as Balthasar notes, the scientist's "perplexity about the ultimate essence of matter" is a permanent fact, whereas "living being, to whose realm we ourselves belong" may "in the end [be] better known to us than inanimate nature."

This should by no means come as a surprise to senior Raccoons, who know that metaphysics is the only truly "exact science," whereas everything else is more or less opinion. And one of these metaphysical laws is that the realm of matter, "not merely by reason of some accidental circumstance, but by reason of intrinsic necessity, must always remain richer than any cognition of it and that the truth of the lowest level of being contains a richness that so utterly eludes exhaustive investigation that it can continue to engage inquirers until the end of time..." This is the nature of Sophia: veils upon veils upon veils.

The interiority of the cosmos is an irreducible fact (or principle), but it obviously becomes more concentrated and expansive as we move up the vertical, and therefore gain greater access to the Mystery of it All:

"Even on the lowest level of life, the living entity already irradiates such plenitude and power from the hidden core of its interiority that we should fall back, blinded, before every one of its outward forms." Any scientific inquiry that clams to explain the Mystery of Life is "simply absurd." It "touches the the sacred core of life with profane fingers" and "covers the unknown with names and concepts but does not see that it has only glued a mere label onto a container of unknown content."

I discussed this problem in my book -- how science begins with the real world, constructs abstractions from that world, and then proceeds to confuse the abstraction for the reality, so that anything falling outside the abstraction is no longer real! It is definitely a kind of madness.

We can see this madness in the global warming hysterics, for whom a speculative weather report 100 years into the future is more real than the living people who are freezing their asses off today. And we obviously see the same thing in the metaphysical Darwinists, for whom theories of life are more real than Life Itself. (And as Dennis Prager mentioned yesterday, this is also the perennial pathology of leftist thought, which habitually regards its theories as more real than the reality they are supposed to describe.)

What is the Mystery of Being? It has to do with the fact that Being is "permanently concealed," and yet, "permanently divulged," like an "intimate-public secret." And as Balthasar emphasizes, in a certain very real way, we know more about this "secret" if we accept its testimony "as it is," rather than trying to peel away the endless layers in a futile effort to find its "essence." One will never find the essence of so much as a single tree by that route. Rather, the essence of the tree may be in its majesty, its dignity, its beauty, its strength, its generosity. As such, "no one who has witnessed the unfolding of a plant's life ought to say that he has seen 'only' the appearance of life, not its essence."

Again, the essence is the appearance, only not in any exhaustive way. Rather, the essence is a kind of plenitude that displays itself in the endless play of appearances. We know by looking at the manifestation "that the possibilities of life are infinitely more abundant than what is actually on display." This only becomes more apparent as we move up into the higher realms. For example, this blog and my essence are "not two," even while not being identical. I do my best to reveal my essence, and yet, there is no end to it.

And being that we are in the image of the Creator, I think that pretty much sums up one aspect of his creative activity. Just as his transcendence is necessarily immanent, his immanence is necessarily transcendent. Thus, his inside is everywhere outside (and vice versa), which is one more reason that the outside is so permeated with infinitude. Manifestation is a kind of gift of the inexhaustible divine essence, but only if we open his presence.

(All quoted material playgiarized from Theo-Logic: The Truth of the World.)

Truth as Freedom (3.12.12)

Truth as Freedom. For those of you scoring at home, that's the title of the next chapter of the Theo-Logic, and it will do perfectly as a title of this post, the substance of which we are about to freely discover. I hope.

Who could argue with the following proposition: "The actualization of truth is no mere natural process but a spiritual event, which takes place only in the lightning-like encounter and fusion of two words -- the word of the subject and the word of the object. Outside of this event, there is truth."

Thus, if you do not understand that truth is a supernatural thang, then buddy, you've got some catchin' up to do. Nature may embody truth, but it takes a supernatural act to pull a truthy rabbit out of a material hat, to quote Aquinas on one of his rare "off days." No: "The truth of the object exists only so long as infinite or finite spirit turns to it in an act of knowing; the truth of the subject exists only as long as it abides in this act" (Balthasar).

So truth is implicated in both subject and object, but only their mutual encounter "activates" the truth between them, sort of like the erotic spark between male and female. I know you know I know you know what I mean, because the love of truth cannot be separated from its own distinct version of eros, which the psychoanalsyt Christopher Bollas has called the "eros of form."

This is a particular kind of encounter with objects that releases the truth of the self into being. This is why we all respond to different objects -- and subjects! -- which have a way of giving birth to a latent part of ourselves. If you think about it, this has mulch in common with the fertile Platonic idea of education, the purpose of which is more to draw out what is within than to stuff other people's notions of sexy ideas into us. Some people are turned on by the strangest things!

Was that clear? For example, in my case, I rarely encountered any kind of personally engaging pneuma-cognitive spiritual form throughout all of my schooling, at least until my last two years of college, when something fortuitously began to ring a bell, and then my voice started to change. You could say that this was the dawn of my intellectual clueberty, which is also when I began to have terrible crushes on various ideas and thinkers -- including many leftist soul-crushing thinkers such as Chomsky, Zinn, The Nation, and all the rest of that promiscuous crowd. It's a wonder I didn't die of one of their spinereal diseases!

But of course, it was only puppy love. As is usually the case, I was merely "in love with love," that is, the thrill of encountering illicit ideas that the mass of Americans knew nothing about. For example, our empty ravin' kosbags have nothing on me. I knew that America was a torture state way back in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president. I knew full well that we were no better than the USSR, and that by opposing communism, we merely reduced ourselves to their mirror image, just as we do today with the Islamic supremacists. Furthermore, we had just as many "political prisoners" as the Soviet Union, but we just called them "blacks."

In the spirit of fool disclosure, I must also admit that I actually attended a Noam Chomsky lecture some 20 years ago. I remember it well, because he assured the lunatic crowd that George Bush was poised to invade Cuba and oust our beloved comrade Fidel! In fact, I'm guessing that the only reason we didn't do so is because Chomsky blew the whistle on those fascists.

Enough about me and my sordid infidelities. But another reason why I do not argue with leftists is that I have only to mentally travel back to that hellseein' daze, and imagine how I would have reacted if a so-called conservative had presumed to instruct me about anything. I was 100% unreceptive, and would use the occasion merely to enlist them into my persecutory fantasy world. Because I was just as intelligent then as I am today -- maybe even more so, given the inevitable loss of brain cells -- I was virtually always able to run circles around my interlocutor and prove my demonic superiority.

Shame on me. There is no end to the damage to truth caused by the abuse of intelligence. I am not one of those people who is impressed by Obama's intelligence. Indeed, for those of us who have been there, it is a sorry sight to watch this cognitively arrested boob in action. This is not just an insult, because it is quite obvious that Obama is not free to discover truth, since he is laboring under the oppressive weight of systematic falsehoods he has passively absorbed throughout his friction-free life. Being good at articulating lies in charcoal activated cigaret-burnished tones should not be confused with being "articulate."

One cannot get to the freedom of truth unless one first appreciates the "unfreedom." The spirit must first apprentice itself to the object world before it can "attain to itself." This is very similar to the manner in which one must first master scales and chords before one is truly free to play a musical instrument. In fact, for a true master, the unfreedom and freedom will live side by side for the remainder of one's life. John Coltrane used to practice eight hours a day long after he was considered the greatest living master of the tenor sax.

Things are more than things, and facts are more than facts. If that weren't the case, then we would all be identical, in the way that animals and the tenured are. If you've seen one radical squirrel you've seen them all, because they are all operating from the same facts, like "Fox bad, ACORN good."

But for human beings, facts are always enshrouded in mystery, for they are an occasion to know the great Mystery of Withinness. Facts speak to humans, again, in ways that engage us in particularly intimate ways. Take the simple example of this book we're talking about here. Not a single person in the world would have highlighted the same passages that I have. So are the facts in the book? Or in me? Or in the space in between?

Actually, when I highlight a passage, it is never because it is merely some "fact" of which I was unaware. Rather, I have a system that allows me to go back to a book and revisit passages that gave me that erotic charge.

As I have mentioned before, this was actually the basis of my book. I keep meaning to digitalize the photos, so I can show them to you, but the first thing I did was remove all of the books from my shelves that spoke truth to me in this intimate way, irrespective of discipline -- physics, biology, anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, historigraphy, psychoanalysis, theology, mysticism, etc. I placed them all on the floor, and stared at them until they reveled to me their hidden unity.

Obviously, no other person ever has or ever will do this in the way I did, but that doesn't mean that the exercise was (merely) eccentric or idiosyncratic. Obviously no single person can know "all truths," but we do the best we can with the materials available to us. The point, I believe, is to try to inflect the universal through the lens of the particular, which is what really makes truth come alive -- alive in us! Anything less than this living process tends toward pedantry and tenure.

Theological mind jazz, daddy-o. That's what it is. If it weren't for the wonderful erotic mystery that enshrouds truth, we'd all be singing from the same boring hymnal. "The event of knowledge would cast a cold, pitiful, shadowless light into every corner, and there would be no possibility of escaping this scorching sun. Being, stripped of mystery, would be, so to speak, prostituted" (Balthasar).

And if one more troll equates what I do with relativism or deconstruction... This is the precise opposite of those cynical and spiritually barren approaches. Rather, that sort of "radical cynicism only becomes possible wherever man no longer has a flair for the central mystery of being, whenever he has unlearned reverence, wonder, and adoration, whenever, having denied God, whose essence is always characterized by the wonderful, man also overlooks the wondrousness of every single created entity."

There is a perverse joy in this radical cynicism, and I again remember it well. Nor is it difficult to trace its roots, now that I have a four year old boy who likes to build things, but not nearly as much as he enjoys tearing them apart, knocking them down, or disassembling them to see "what's inside." But of course, there is no inside without the outside. The outside is the manifestation of the inside, just as the inside is the invisible "essence" of the outside. Jettison either, and the cosmos is reduced to a flat and empty place.

The outside reveals the inside, just as the downside reveals the upside.

Picking Up the Pieces After Discovering the Repulsive Truth About God

The creative side of human knowledge is therefore the creature's analogical participation in the act by which God's archetypal, productive knowledge creatively metes out truth. By a kind of grace, knowledge draws the other into the properly spiritual sphere, thus giving it the opportunity to unfold therein by the power, and the light, of the subject -- before it has to become, in its objectivity, the object of knowledge. --Balthasar

Allow me to explain. While knowledge begins in perception, it does not end there. Rather, "sensory intuition can do no more than introduce the image into the space of the subject" (Balthasar). But then what? How is it that human beings are able to escape the immediacy of perception and rise above it into the realm we call knowledge? -- which, if it is not objective, is no knowledge at all, just opinion at best (and often anti-knowledge or -K).

Furthermore, it is one thing to accomplish this "distancing" with material objects, much more tricky to do so with one's own mind. In other words, for all of us, our consciousness is simply "given" to us, as in any animal.

But man -- potentially anyway -- possesses a "double consciousness" that allows him to distance himself from the objects of his own mind and to analyze and judge them. In short, man is able to attain to objectivity toward himself and the world, which is synonymous with truth.

Which, when you think about it, is a little odd, because it means that, in becoming objective, the subject is back to being a kind of object, as it were. This is confusing, because your typical village atheist or bonehead materialist would claim that he is the one who is being "objective," whereas the Raccoon position maintains precisely the opposite: that the materialist is lost in his ethereal, subjective, and manmode abstractions, whereas only the Man of Spirit dwells in the Real.

Now, the question is, who is right -- besides me, that is?

This reminds me very much of psychoanalytic therapy, which does not just consist of two objects hashing things out for an outrageous fee. Rather, first of all, you must imagine a "bi-personal field" that is co-created by analyst and patient. Everything that occurs in therapy will actually take place in this field, not in one or the other of its constituents per se.

In my mind, I picture a couple of children at play. One of them (the patient) comes in and dumps his bag of toys on the floor. The two of us proceed to play with them. Why this toy? Why not that toy? Hmm, you seem overly attached to this one here. And why is that one always turned upside down so no one can see it? Any ideas why? And why can't I touch that one over there? Why are you hiding it? And why do you keep playing the same game over and over, even though you never win? Or always win in a predictable game that is too easy? And you seem to think I want to steal your toys, even while you are envious of the wonderful toys you imagine I have stashed away somewhere. Etc.

I remember one patient whose transference to me was so intense, that it was impossible to conduct therapy. She essentially "fell in love" in the first session, not in a therapeutic way, but in the usual way. There was no "space" in which to interpret her feelings, because they would simply be met with words to the effect of, "no, you don't understand. I am in love with you. You are perfect." So in this case, what she called "love" was actually a defense mechanism against knowledge. Many women with histories of abuse do this, i.e., disable their objectivity with a kind of intoxicated auto-hypnosis that feels like love, but is in reality surrender to a powerful predator. If I were the predator type, I would have no problem getting dates with this type of woman.

Back on track. Now, there is obviously a world of difference between objectivity toward matter (or the physical world) vs. objectivity toward Mind or Spirit, and if we fail to appreciate the differences, much mischief will ensue. For in reality, science is irreducibly subjective, whereas only religious metaphysics discloses the objectively real, i.e., a realm of perennial truths that simply cannot not be -- for example, the idea that truth exists and is anterior to man. If this is not true, then there is no truth, period.

As usual, Schuon had many useful things to say about this subject. And when I say "useful," I am being coy, for what I actually mean is "true beyond the shadow of a doubt." For unlike the typical pagan logician, he is employing what might be called transcendent logic, or "the logic of logic."

For example, "By 'objectivity' must be understood not a knowledge that is limited to a purely empirical recording of data received from outside, but a perfect adequation of the knowing subject to the known object.... An intelligence or a knowledge is 'objective' when it is capable of grasping the object as it is and not as it may be deformed by the subject."

Even more, we could say that objectivity implies a more general “conformity to the nature of things,” which surely includes the "inner space" of the subject, on pain of eliminating the one place in the cosmos where Truth may be known and loved. For this is none other than "the contemplative withdrawal into the 'heart,' given that 'the kingdom of God is within you.'"

So we should not confuse subjectivity with any kind of sentimental or romantic "perception-is-reality" nonsense. Rather, it is again the expanding space where reality -- which can only mean "truth" -- may be known and loved for its own sake, not for ours. And of course, we must be willing to "die for love," or it's not much of a love, is it? Schuon:

"Objectivity is a kind of death of the subject in the face of the reality of the object." However, "the subjective compensation of this extinction is the nobleness of character," among other things, i.e., serenity, centeredness, radiance, the "peace that passeth understanding," etc.

Not only that, but in the final Oquation, "the transcendent Object is at the same time the immanent Subject, which is affirmed in the knowing subject, to the extent that the latter is capable of objectivity. Objectivity is none other than the truth, in which the subject and the object coincide, and in which the essential takes precedence over the accidental -- or in which the Principle takes precedence over its manifestation -- either by extinguishing it, or by reintegrating it, according to the diverse ontological aspects of relativity itself."

Here again, I think this goes to the very heart of a trinitarian view of things. For this is not to say that in knowledge of God I am identical to God. Again, we are talking about a "non-dual trinitarianism," in which -- in some sense -- we might say that "I and the the Trinity are not-two."

Therefore, to trancelight what Schuon just said, God is a kind of Subject that is purely objective; or, an Object who is transcendently subjective. In God there is no "potential," for he always Is Who He Is. And yet, he eternally generates what he is not (so to speak), which would of course include us. As such, the knower who knows is made of the most precious substance in all of creation, a spiritual substance that is a spark of truth itself -- not the central fire, but then again, not radically separate from it, either.

Thus, looked at one way, we are obviously "not God." But to the extent that God became man (and not just a man, but Man as such), then we may share in God's objectivity and Truth, and therefore, eternity. Again, the “Kingdom of God” is “within you,” but this hardly means it is "subjective," even though it requires a subject to get in -- the subject being "inwardness as such." No subject, no "in." But what we want to enter is the Transcendent Object. As Balthasar explains, "The object's immanence in the subject's consciousness is the prior condition for understanding its transcendence."

Is any of this making sense, or am I just rambling to a polite but uncomprehending choir?

Without the subject, there can be no unity in the cosmos, most particularly, the unity of subjects and objects. Only the subject can heal the ontological wound of subjectivity, not by immolating itself in the world of physical objects, but by its higher flight to their very source. This is not an escape but a spiraling inscape where unity flows into multiplicity and back again.

And this is why perfect objectivity would also have to be perfect nonsense of the type spewed by any great mystic, because only this type of nonsense is "adequate" to an object that always transcends what we can say about it. You could say that human speech will pour off the Logos like water off a duck's back, but that's okay, for if words could actually contain the Divine, then I would be God, and this would be a very boring cosmos. You know how it is -- "Words crack and sometimes break under the burden" (Eliot). But in so doing, we understand that there is a Mighty Big Object against which our words are shattering into pieces -- as in the case of this shattered piece I just wrote.

Really, it's quite a thrill and a privilege to be constantly repulsed by God. It very much reminds me of my son, who, when he greets me, takes a running start and tries his best to crash into me. In turn, I will use his momentum to lift him up in a kind of spiral around my vertical axis.

That image will do nicely.

All the World's a Stage, and Each of Us Plies a Part and Whole

All right then, little lambs, the stage is set for us to engage in the ancient Drama of Knowledge. We have a subject. We have objects. And we have a transitional space in between for them to establish their various links: (L), (H), (K), (-K), etc. But nothing has happened yet: "It is not until the other enters into the space of the subject that, like Sleeping Beauty, it [the subject] awakens from its slumber -- at once to the world and to itself" (Balthasar).

In the Wholly Coonifesto, I was interested in identifying the precise moment when the curtain opened on this play of knowledge, which simultaneously ushers subjects and objects onto the stage.

Ever since that moment, the two have been quarreling over top billing, but one could no more have a subject without an object than form without substance or inside without outside. True, the wise men & guys of the east talk about a type of consciousness-without-object, but they do always come back on stage to talk about it, proving that it is more a trick of the senses than any permanently inhabitable state.

The plain fact of the matter is that if everyone lived in a world without consciousness of objects, mankind would soon enough become extinct, which would solve the problem once and for all. Frankly, the world would be better off if all self-proclaimed gurus just got real jobs and manifested their so-called enlightenment in slightly more challenging circumstances than lecturing groups of starry-eyed and adoring dupes.

That's the easy way out. A while back, one of those genial new-agers wrote a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, about this very topic. I didn't read the book, but I did thumb through it at the bookstore several years ago, so I believe I am entitled to a possibly mistaken impression, but I think that the essence of the problem is that he had great difficulty reconciling subject and object -- i.e., "enlightenment" and reality -- after coming down from his lengthy solitary ecstasies.

Let's put it this way, and then move on: there are ascending spiritualities, and there are descending spiritualities. Raccoons are emphatically in the latter camp (or, to be precise, we harmonize the arrows of (↓) (↑) within our being). For example, we do not wish to escape from the body, but to divinize it. Even more than that, we feel we are here to divinize the very cosmos, and then hand it back to the Creator, which is none other than cosmotheosis. God pours himself out in the kenosis of creation. It's the least we can do to return it to him unharmed. Rememeber the Kit Scout rule: always leave the cosmos more sacred than you found it.

I'm confusing volumes here. We'll get more into this subject when we move on to volume 2, but the point is again that objects are real, for the very reason that God eternally creates his own "Other," i.e., the Logos, or second person of the Trinity, so wherever there is one there are actually three (and vice verse; where there are the Three there is the One).

In turn, this is why human beings can never find their true unity in either the object world (which science attempts to do) or in the subject world (as ascending spiritualities and idealist philosophies attempt to do). Such an approach does not heal this cleft in existence, but merely exaggerates it by imagining that the other half has gone away. But it always returns, often with a vengeance.

Christ, however, is the very archetype of the simultaneous healing and preservation of this cleft, the very cleft that makes existence possible. In Christ, God and man are "united without division and without confusion." The incarnate Logos is "the unifier of all that is divided, whether by nature or by sin." He "equally indwells -- and transcends -- both poles of creaturely unity" (i.e., existence and essence).

And as we are sons "through adoption," we too are called upon to repeat this feat, only from our side of the maninfestation, to carry out the unification of the cosmos in ourselves, to rejoin heaven and earth, to reconcile spirit and matter, and "and to present the world thus unified to God." When you do that, then you can say with Christ that it is accomplished, the difference being that we must accomplish it continuously until checkout time.

Only in this way is the Great Circle unbroken: "the creature's procession from God" is balanced by his return, but with brother ass in tow, for "the indestructibility of the body"-- the resurrection of the flesh -- "is the end of the works of God."

Put it this way: there is no better temple to encounter God than in the human form. You will not find superior lodging elsewhere in the cosmos. Is this not again the point of God becoming man, rather than a temple, a book, or a mountain? For one thing, only man can consciously evolve toward his source, and have "unKnown knowledge" (i.e., faith) of the end toward which he tends: his being is in his becoming, like a melody that cannot be reduced to its notes.

Sidetracked! As I was saying, in the Coonifesto, I attempted to pinpoint that glorious moment when the cosmos as we know it actually came into being some 35 to 40,000 years ago, with the "big bang" of humanness. However, it also occurs on a micro, individual basis each time a baby awakens to the world he co-creates in his own transitional space.

We can say that there were two necessary stages for the cosmos to come into being, first Life, then Mind. With regard to the former, the book talks about that "luminous fissure that was about to break open in this heretofore dark, impenetrable circle. Here, the dawning of an internal horizon in a universe now divided against itself, the unimaginable opening of a window on the world." This represented an ontological rupture in the cosmos, with only two ways to heal it: up or down, that is back to matter or up into the mind and eventually spirit capable of encompassing the whole.

Regarding the healing of this ontological rupture, this is the secret meaning of Toots' cryptic mantra, in God we truss.

But this takes time. In fact, you might say that time is the time it takes for time to return to eternity. For as Balthasar explains, "The subject's subjectivity is not a finished product" that "merely awaits the arrival of the object to come into appearance." Rather, "the subject comes to itself only through the construction and completion of the world that [goes] on inside it." Without the world of objects, we remain "an unformed ego" with "no form, no contours, no definite lineaments, no character. It becomes formed in the measure that it takes the world in and helps it take place."

This is why we say that the Way of the Raccoon is only for mature adults who have already become Masters of Their Domain. Unlike, say, Ken Wilber, we will never start a children's crusade of empty-headed 20-somethings to try to trigger the Revolution. Rather, we would advise such saps and saplings to stop running away from life and to get a real job, maintain a healthy marriage, be a good parent, etc. Bring Spirit down into that world, rather than escaping it into new age fantasies that elevate you above the people who actually make your comfy world possible.

"Thus, it is only by toiling away at sifting and analysis, division and composition, that the subject gradually regains its freedom. It begins totally expropriated by the world, and only by performing the work of the subject does it get its recompense for its labor, which is its character as a well-rounded, formed and masterful self." In so doing, the subject becomes increasingly "cosmoform" (Balthasar), and fit for handing back to the God who did all the heavy lifting anyway.

Love and Knowledge at the Leading Edge of the Cosmos

We're still dwelling in the space between subjects and objects, without which truth would be in-conceivable, since this transitional space is the womb where the truth of spirit and spirit of truth are nurtured and given birth herebelow in the fertile egghead. (New reader(s) will have to go back to Friday's post in order to see where we left off, specifically, the part about trees and the qualities without which they are not trees -- qualities that can only reveal themselves in a human subject.)

It is not as if the world consists simply of objects that impress themselves upon subjects, like a seal in hot wax. That is too "bipolar" and ultimately static, and places too much emphasis on the object side of things. For if this were the case, then the subject would reduce to the object, even while providing no reason why this mirrorculous subject should inhere in here at all.

Not only that, but as we have mentioned before, the fact that the object has qualities waiting to be "unpacked" by subjects means that there is already an implicit subject in the object. Objects "speak" their qualities to subjects, but not all at once. Rather, it is literally a kind of endlessly recursive con-versation ("flowing-togther"), for in the final analysis we cannot fully know the essence of so much as a gnat.

Truly, we cannot "contain" a single object -- again, thank God! For if we could, the mystery of being would be nullified, and we would live in a brightly lit hell, which is the end result of the naive demystification of scientism.

"In reality, the objects of this world need the subject's space in order to be themselves" (Balthasar). It reminds me of how it is only human convention that separates the bee and the flower, when they are so interior to each other that the one could not exist in the absence of the other. Each is an "external organ" of the other, so to speak.

As Balthasar explains, the object "needs the sensorium as a space in which to unfurl itself. It unveils its color within an eye that sees color; it whispers only in an ear that hears sound; it presents its unique flavor only in the mouth of another capable of tasting. It makes use of the space furnished for this purpose just as surely as it makes use of the soil and the ambient air in order to develop." "[S]ubject and object expand within each other, thus helping each other in a common discovery of truth."

Wind that speaks to the leaves / telling stories that no one believes / Stories of love / belong to you and me --Antonio Carlos Jobim, Dindi

Just so, human beings are irreducibly intersubjective. Take away the Other -- and the love in between -- and no I comes into being. As we will later discuss, this goes to the very heart of the eternal dynamism of the Trinity, as it manifests its image or echo in the herebelow.

There are many fruitful ways to think about this, but I-magine the intra-trinitarian life as a kind of perpetual giving birth to its own Other (the Son), who is actually none other than itself. The Father bears witness to the Son and the Son bears witness to the Father in the love that flows between them -- which is also why love is prior to knowledge. There is no is that can be reduced to anything less, i.e., to any kind of static, loveless monism or narcissistic dualism. In other words, we are intrinsically trinitarian because God is. (I probably just said something heretical, but don't worry, I'm sure I can fix it later.)

Or again, think of a smiling face, which we can only artificially separate from the joyful interior state it radiates to the world: "A smiling face is not simply a dull reflection of inner joy but rather its embodiment, its communication, its formation, its liberation."

I will never forget the first time my baby smiled at me, for it was a communication of a kind of infinite joy that crashed through to my deepest essence. So, was it about him, or about me? As I have said before, we raise our children, but not nearly as high as they raise us! Only now do I realize that my parents got a much bigger kick out of me than I ever will. People who cannot get over themselves, or who are joylessly ambitious, are in a way forever trying to look at themselves through the eyes of their adoring parents, instead of looking outward and adoring something or someone else.

In this regard, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the damage done to the soul by the assimilation of crude materialism, for it is ultimately the very death of the soul. The soul is "all it knows," and in materialism, the soul not only knows nothing (by definition) but is violently uprooted from the creation.

Don't let this happen to you! Our recent trolls stand as living witnesses to what happens to a person who is biologically alive while remaining spiritually dead. Intrinsic falsehood, intrinsic amorality, intrinsic ugliness, and intrinsic violence -- a kind or rooted rootlessness, which also results in their absence of coherence or consistency. Zombies.

From a God's-eye view, mankind is more like a single entity in both space and time -- like a single "substance" that is stretched through history to serially reveal its inexhaustible essence in the play of forms. This is how, for example, we are able to be "one" with great souls who preceded us, because there is a non-local interconnectivity within this temporal substance, just as there is within space. Someday this will be obvious to more people, instead of only being so at the leading edge of that stretchy cosmic substance.

Again, think of truth as a "joint operation of subject and object," not a property inhering only in one or the other. There is no "discovery" that isn't simultaneously an "unveiling of the object" in the space between them. A human being who is not ushered into this transitional space is not really human at all; again, he will be either a kind of autistic "object," or else a new-age narcissist who imagines he creates reality -- or that reality is a kind of magical projection of the subject. Both are states of human non-being.

In truth -- again, as in the Trinity -- there is a kind of mutual surrender, or self-giving, between object and subject, which is why knowledge touches on the sacred. Not for nothing does Genesis talk about Adam "knowing" Eve, thus emphasizing the intimacy and love that are prior to knowledge. For is it possible to know existence without first loving it? Yes, I suppose so, if you reduce knowledge and sexuality to the friction between a couple of objects.

Here is the passionate witness of a true lover of his mamamaya: Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn.... you who by overflowing and dissolving our narrow standards of measurement reveal to us the dimensions of God (Teilhard de Chardin).

You see? It is possible to lose the soul in its objects or to be "saved" by them, depending upon one's attitude toward this oneish world of holy matterimany, toward this manifestivus for the rest of us. For "God's idea is indivisible, even though it needs both the knowable object and the knowing subject in order to reveal itself in its unity" (Balthasar).

Amen for a child's job!

De-mask Us On the Road to God: How an Appalling Saul became the Apostle Paul

A rewritten post from two years back for your Sunday coontemplation.

***

Reader Brian asks, "You've alluded to this before -- and may have dealt with it in the comments when I wasn't looking -- but I am incredibly interested in your take on Saul of Tarsus becoming Paul. His mindset was quite hostile to Christ, yet he had an almost involuntary conversion. Or was it involuntary? So many who wish to serve their Creator fall short because of internal divisions, etc., but Saul absolutely wanted the opposite, yet he became the man who spread the Gospel more effectively than anybody. Did God reach out to him, or did he reach out to God, or is there even a difference?"

As a matter of fact, I was thinking about this subject just yesterday. For in a certain way, the story of Saul-->Paul is as central to the Bible -- and to the arc of salvation -- as several other scriptural "centers," or "axes," each of which seems to parallel or reflect back and forth upin the others. For example, one obvious center is in Genesis 1:1, with the creation (a Raccoon would say "origin") of the cosmos.

This cosmo-scriptural center is deliberately paralleled in John 1:1, which even begins with the same three words, In The Beginning. In both instances, "beginning" superficially refers to the "horizontal" beginning, as in the beginning of a sequence. But the deeper sense of the word has to do with the "vertical" beginning, which equates to the ontological center.

This center is not in space or time per se; rather, space and time are reflections of the center. "In the beginning was the Word" does not (just) mean "a long time ago," but in the center represented by each now -- the now being the horizontal center of time. This center is the "light that shines in the darkness," since light is precisely that which radiates through the now from the center to the periphery.

Now, a man was sent by God -- i.e., the center -- "to bear witness of the Light" -- i.e., the radiation from the divine center. His name was John. He was required because, although the light shines in the dark, the dorks don't get it, so they need a pretty in-your-face kind of guy to grab them by the tunic and point it out to them. John was just that man. As such, he represents another important center, a sort of "reflected center" who was not the light but who could see the light.

Jesus obviously represents the full embodiment of the center at the periphery. A couple of days ago we spoke of black holes, and how they pull everything into their vortex, so that nothing escapes. In a certain sense, Jesus might be thought of as the opposite, as a sort of "white hole" as it were, that pulls all of creation into its wake. You have heard of the esoteric tenet, "as above, so below," or, to be precise, "That which is below corresponds to that which is above, and that which is above corresponds to that which is below, to accomplish the miracles of the One Thing."

Another fundamental axiom is the greater the cause, the greater the effect. Thus, if Jesus is who he says he was, then it should be no surprise whatsoever that his effect continues to ripple through existence down through the centuries, like a depth charge dropped from heaven into the ocean of existence. It is not "speaking poetically" to say that we are surfing one of those little waves right now, no? If not, what are we doing? Just sitting here making stuff up at 5:00 in the morning? Er, I don't think so. If that were the case, you wouldn't understand what I'm talking about. It would be perfect nonsense instead of perfect nonsense.

The Mystery of Golgotha represents an exact analogue of the mystery of creation itself. For if creation is God's kenosis, or self-emptying (and spontaneous and unnarcissary self-giving), then Jesus' work on the cross represents a parallel kenosis, a complete self-emptying, even into the "negative existence" of death.

For Jesus does not merely "die," but takes on the mantle of Death in order to join ranks with the great "brotherhood of the dead." As Balthasar has written, when it is said that Jesus descended into hell on Holy Saturday, "descend" (in his opinion; others may disagree) should not be understood in its active sense, but the strictly passive sense. He fell and fell and fell, just like humans, to the very periphery of existence, the furthest point from the light of the radiant cosmic center. Only once he hit bottom could the "fall" be reversed, the rock bottom nihil of dark death being the "relatively absolute" separation from God.

Now this is all well and good for God, Sons of God, Light, Logoi, hand-selected apostles, and the like. Where do we fit in -- regular guys and gals, ordinary stumblebums, rank and foul earthlings?

Here I think that Saul serves as an archetypal illustration of the divine center as it manifests in fallen man. For just as Jesus represents the center crashing into the periphery, Saul ultimately represents the perpiphery making its way back to the center.

In fact, Saul is not just an ordinary peripheral man who is ignorant of the Light, i.e. luciferian. Rather, he is like the ACLU or the MSM or the Democrat party. He is specifically at war with the light. He is "breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord," perhaps even threatening petty lawsuits to demoralize the decent. In fact, Saul is the patron shitheel of the ACLU, since he didn't have to be a sneaky weasel with a briefcase, but could directly make "havoc of the church, entering every house and dragging off men and women, committing them to prison." If Gitmo were in existence back then, he would be fighting with all his strength for the release of the Christian killers.

Thus, Saul represents another kind of center, a perverse center, even the "center of perversity." He is the "center of (not at) the periphery," so to speak, at war with the true center. Paradoxically, he must obviously be quite full of himself, the opposite of the self-emptying, radiant center. But his fullness does not bring peace but persecution, just like anyone with too much self esteem and time on their hands.

As we have been reading lately, psychologists are finally catching up to the self-evident truth that "self esteem" is neutral at best, but usually destructive. Most of the problems in the world are caused by people with too much self esteem -- dictators, criminals, politicians, newspaper editors, etc. Because they are so full of themselves, there is no space for God, which requires self emptying of one's own (false) center. As Paul would later say -- I'm paraphrasing here from memory, "It is not I who live any longer, but Christ in me" -- i.e., the real center at his center, rather than the bogus center of the hypertrophied ego. One or the other must go.

Since the false center of the ego represents an ontological nothingness, its resultant darkness envies the light. This envy is the dreary joy of the joyless, who simply spend their petty lives grinding away at truth, beauty, and virtue, as do so many lie-roasted academia nuts. Nowadays they might call it "speaking truth to power" in order to elevate themselves in their own eyes. Or they might give each other academy awards, or Pulitzers, or Nobel prizes, or even Daytime Emmys.

These external supports are all necessary to prop up peripheral man and disable his consciousness of guilt. No doubt if Saul were alive today, he would have been given a Nobel Peace Prize for his important work in combating extreme Christianism. He would join the ranks of other recent winners -- men and institutions at war with the center such as Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, Mohamed El Baradei, the U.N., Al Gore, etc.

But then, on the "road to Damascus," as the cliche goes, Paul has a profound experience that unmasks and violently pulls him from the periphery to the center. In its own way, this event is as principial as its reverse, when the center emptied out to the periphery in Genesis I and on Holy Saturday. For quite suddenly, in an instance of true "quantum change," someone who had been at war with the center snaps like a rubber band into its opposite. If you can imagine the big bang as an infinite point radiating outward to the periphery, this would represent the opposite of that movement: a deusorienting implosion as dramatic as an underwater volcano in Upper Tonga.

The first and last step (and every step in between) on the spiritual path is "repentence," which actually comes from the Greek metanoia which is simply to "turn around." Instead of turning our back to the central sun, we look around and see it face-to-facelessness. Instead of running away from it, or struggling against it, we embrace it, like flowers that naturally orient themselves to the sun and open up or "surrender" in its presence.

Saul "opened up," and in so doing died to himself, in the same way you would die if you opened up your abdomen with a bowie knife. At once he was in the presence of the central light which "shone all around him" (for how could it not, if one's eyes are open?), and fell down like Saul t' the earth. Yes, in such circumstances we all fall what seems like a long distance. But in reality, it's just back to the ground, the same ground you were crawling on to begin with.

"Saul, why are you persecuting me? You're acting like a freaking ACLU goon. What's up with that?"

"Homina-homina-homina.... I was scared about the imminent Christo-fascist takeover, like I read about on dailykos... But w-what do you want with me?

"Before getting into that, why don't you just assimilate what's happened so far? Go have a little clubhouse meeting with yourself. Walking on water wasn't built in a day."

"B-b-but I'm blind. I can't see anything."

"Yes, I know that. This is not in the Book I've been sketching out, so you'll have to read between the lines. The point is not that you are blind. Rather, the point is that you can no longer "see" your previous world. It no longer exists because it never really existed. It is gone. Finished. No more. Ceased to be. You are now in the land of the Real, but you do not yet have the extrasensory organs to see it. You are like unto someone who is snowblind. The problem is not darkness, but too much light. Now get lost for a few days, unplug, chill, relux and call it a deity. And turn off your cell phone! If any Romans call, you're not home, got it?"

We are then told that Saul spent the subsequent three days without sight, without food, and without liquid -- i.e., closed to the horizontal -- and simply shut up in his existential darkness. One cannot help but compare this with Toots' "long weekend" in the drunk tank. While some blasphemers suggest that the visions were a result of delirium tremens, we know better.

This, of course, parallels the Jews' 40 years of wandering in the desert, Jesus' 40 days of fasting in the bewilderness, and ultimately the three days of the passion. In each case, "emptiness" at the periphery (i.e., "wilderness," "desert") is a prelude to "fullness" or "resurrection" at the center. Specifically, Saul's emptiness is filled with the Holy Spirit. He is charged with a vertical mission, for if Jesus took care of the R & D, then surely Paul was the marketing department. He is to spread the good news of the center to the periphery, to "bear My name before Gentiles, kings, and the children of Israel."

Paul has a new name and new vocation (which means "calling"). His earth name is gone, as is his sickular mission. Now he has a divine name and a divine mission. His sight is restored, but it's not like the old sight. Rather, he is granted the gift of 20/∞ cʘʘnvision, as "the scales fall from his eyes." Then he arises and stands in the divine ground as a truly Upright, Tripedal Man, an I-AMissary of the center instead of a bipedal beast of the periphery.

Antichrist Update Vol. 4: Light Therapy for Electile Dysfunction (1.22.10)

Once again I have descended below dreck into the living hull of the Knowa's Arkive and pulled one out of my assortment for your Saturday gnostalgia.

*****

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.... The tens of thousands of new voters Obama brought to the polls tonight came because he wrapped them in that experience, because he let them touch politics as it could be, rather than merely as it is. --Ezra Klein

A black man with a white mother became a savior to us. A black man with a white mother could turn out to be one who can lift America from her fall.... This young man is the hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better.... If you look at Barack Obama's audiences and look at the effect of his words, those people are being transformed. --Calypso Louis

Continuing with our analysis of the Devil Card, our Unknown Friend (UF) writes that the excesses of the left are always "owing to an intoxication of the will and imagination which engenders demons."

For example, if Marx and Engels had merely behaved as good Jews or Christians and "simply defended the interests of the industrial workers without having let themselves be carried away by their intoxicated imagination," then their ideas wouldn't have been so apocalyptically destructive. After all, every normal person wants to help the poor and needy, but it is axiomatic that helping the human animal while killing the human soul renders any spiritual benefit inoperative for both parties.

Further, as Schuon commented, "Progressivism is the wish to eliminate effects without wishing to eliminate their causes..." To paraphrase him the leftist wishes to make himself as useful as possible to a collectivity which renders the individual as useless as possible in the process. But

"one must never lose sight of the fact that there exists no higher usefulness than that which envisages the final ends of man. By its divorce from traditional truth... society forfeits its own justification, doubtless not in a perfunctorily animal sense, but in the human sense. This human quality implies that the collectivity, as such, cannot be the aim and purpose of the individual but that, on the contrary, it is the individual who, in his 'solitary stand' before the Absolute and in the exercise of his supreme function, is the aim of purpose of collectivity. Man, whether he be conceived in the plural or the singular, or whether his function be direct or indirect, stands like 'a fragment of absoluteness' and is made for the Absolute.... In any case, one can define the social in terms of truth, but one cannot define truth in terms of the social."

Moreover, the left always couches their supposed empathy for the downtrodden in fantastically broad and sweeping generalizations of historical "and even cosmic significance, such as the statement that God does not exist, that all religion is is only the 'opium of the people,' [and] that all ideology is only a superstructure on the basis of material interests." UF wrote that in the early '60s, but it is no different today, with the intoxication that fuels and pervades the Obama campaign:

"What we hear from Obama is the eternal mantra of the socialists; America is broken, millions have no health care, families cannot afford necessities, the rich are evil, we are selfish, we are unhappy, unfulfilled, without hope, desperate, poverty stricken, morally desolate, corrupt and racist. This nihilism is the lifeblood of all the democrat candidates.... When Michelle Obama claims she is only newly proud of her country, she does not exaggerate. In her world as in Obama's, they believe we are a mess, a land filled with the ignorant and unenlightened, filled with despair" (Fairchok).

Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes, not divine, but demonic. --Pope Benedict XVI

As UF writes, it is always a "matter of excess -- a going beyond the limits of competence and sober and honest knowledge," which the left never doubts, "having been carried away by the intoxicating impulse of radicalism, i.e. by a fever of the will and imagination to change everything utterly at a single stroke."

It is this fever dream of sweeping existential change that animates the left no less than the Islamists, since both deny the possibility of real spiritual change, which is an individual matter; in contrast, man's existential situation cannot be altered, only transcended.

As Lee Harris has written, a fantasy ideology such as Islamism is obviously not a rational response to the world arrived at in a logical, sober manner. Rather, it is a transformative belief, meaning that its primary purpose is to psychologically transform the person who believes the fantasy. And believing the fantasy is an end in itself -- it has no purpose other than to make the fantasy seem like reality -- like it might actually be true. Therefore, the real reason for 9-11 wasn't actually to bring down western civilization. Rather, it was for the Islamists to deepen their trance.

Likewise, anyone with a basic familiarity with economics knows that leftist ideas don't just fail, but backfire. They cause all sorts of unintended consequences that the leftist never connects to the original policy -- e.g., how the welfare state eroded the structure of the black family, how racial quotas inevitably harm blacks, how rent control causes housing shortages, how subsidizing higher education simply drives up the cost, how nationalized health leads to rationing, and how forcing banks to make bad loans to unqualified people is at the epicenter or today's economic problems.

Now, UF explains that the virtue of temperence protects us from the intoxicating counter-inspiration of radical fantasies -- including religious fantasies, which are not actually religious but manmade. As such, it is foolish to blame God or religion for things that emanate from the lower vertical in man.

UF makes the subtle point that one cannot engender a positive collective mind parasite. This is related to the principle that the mind parasite is an effect of "congealed" or "coagulated" psychic energy. As a result, it always "enfolds," whereas the good radiates. The former is an inward, contracting movement, whereas the latter is an expansive, radiant movement. This may sound overly abstract, but we are all familiar with the ontologically closed world of the left, whether it is their elite university campuses or the op-ed page of the New York Times. If you approach these things with your activated cʘʘnvision, you can literally experience them as a sort of dense, black hole of "inverse radiation."

Now, why did people respond to, say, Ronald Reagan? For the opposite reason -- the radiant positive energy of which he was a mere vehicle. This only became more apparent when placed side by side with Jimmy Carter's withered and constipated presence.

I suppose the novel thing about Obama is that he is selling the same constipation, but with a kind of cheap and meretricious radiation that one must be intoxicated to appreciate. Indeed, as Fairchok writes,

"That is his appeal; he is [ironically] an actor, a performer, a cinematic presence that stirs simple emotions, emotions that have little grounding in truth. His speeches are the inane lyrics to a popular song that endures only because it has a great beat. One must not think too deeply on what Obama says, for it turns to smoke and disappears in the light of day. Ezra Klein is correct, Obama's speeches do not inform, they pander, they propagandize, they harmonize with the mythology of despair and the chimera of entitlement. As his hagiographies proclaim, he represents a new Camelot, but one that does not hold America quite so precious, a Camelot of globalists, moral relativists and communitarians."

Now, how to drive out a demon? Easy. As UF explains, "Light drives out darkness. This simple truth is the practical key to the problem of how to combat demons. A demon perceived, i.e. on whom the light of consciousness is thrown, is already a demon rendered impotent.... A demon rendered impotent is a deflated balloon." And the most recent Rasmussen survey indicates that this balloony tune is on a flaccid trip from omnipotence to impotence in record time.

The lords of Falsehood hold, at present, almost complete sway over poor humanity. Not only the lower life-energy, the lower vital being, but also the whole mind of man accepts them. Countless are the ways in which they are worshipped, for they are more subtle in their cunning and seek their ends in variously seductive disguises. The result is that men cling to their falsehood as if it were a treasure, cherishing it more than even the most beautiful things of life. Apprehensive of its safety, they take care to bury it deep down in themselves; but unless they take it out and surrender it to the Divine they will never find true happiness.

Indeed the very act of bringing it out and showing it to the Light would be in itself a momentous conversion and pave the way to the final victory. For the laying bare of each falsehood is in itself a victory -- each acknowledgment of error is the demolition of one of the lords of Darkness. --The Mother, Conversations on Yoga

Nothing-Buttery vs. Everything-Andery

It is a truism that the postmodern mind specializes in the neo-barbarism of nothing-buttery, in that it is compelled by a force it does not understand to reduce the human dimension to something other than what it is. If you want to be considered sophisticated, you must be among their rank and foul, even though it requires no wisdom, discernment or intelligence, any more than it requires great intelligence to blow up a building. For the left, it is both their creed and their knee-jerk reaction to everything except their own sacred cowpies.

For example, it is true that affirmative action is nothing but government mandated racial discrimination, but the left conceals this behind a penumbra of sanctimony, which is just sanctity with a lot of money behind it. Likewise, liberals are all for the sacred principle of "choice," except when it comes to education, retirement, self-defense, health, political speech, talk radio, union membership, property rights, energy, and transportation.

I believe this infra-human mechanism is at the very heart of the soul-pathology of the psycho-spiritual left. You might say that it is the nuclear physics of the group fantasy that holds them together, the unified field theory that explains so much else about them. I don't want to say that it is synonymous with cynicism, because that is at once self-flattering and too saturated a word, with connotations of its own. Rather, it is much closer to what Bion called "attacks on linking," which is a primitive psychological defense mechanism that does away with unwanted meanings and ultimately exiles qualities from the cosmos.

Clearly, meaning -- any meaning -- exists on a higher plane than that to which the meaning gives meaning, i.e., the "facts" or "data." Thus, to affirm any meaning at all is to have left the world of mere facts behind; indeed, a fact is only a fact by virtue of its participation in a higher narrative, so to speak. Absent the narrative, it is not a fact, just a kind of isolated particle of meaninglessness in search of a thinker to baptize it into the community of the meaningful.

This is as true of science or history as it is of religion, for surely there are scientific facts, historical facts, and religious facts, except that they are all on different planes. Or, to be precise, they become facts by virtue of their participation in a higher meaning. For one person, the human genome is proof of his own existential meaninglessness (or proof that proof does not exist), while for another it is the inevitable side effect of a logocentric cosmos.

For example, it is a fact that human skulls are shaped differently. Not too long ago this was considered a scientific fact, but now it is just a meaningless... what? What do you call a fact that has been ousted from the realm of meaning, besides "John Edwards"?

Likewise, it is a fact that when I woke up this morning my blood glucose was an excellent 87. But is this a historical fact? Of course not. Any real historian can only be guided by a preconceptual understanding of what is to be regarded as a fact, or "unit of meaning." Otherwise, the field of potential historical facts is literally infinite (in the negative sense of a "bad infinite").

How does the historian even recognize a fact unless he already has an idea of what is meaningful? Much more than they realize, historians are like frogs, for whom a moving fly is of utmost existential import, whereas a dead fly doesn't rise to the threshold of gustatory significance. Likewise, for one human being a frog is a delicious appetizer, while for another it is a backstabbing popinjay in need of a bath.

Now, the leftist prides himself on being a member in good standing of the "reality based community." What he means by this is that he rejects the reality of any reality above the narrow one he inhabits, mostly consisting of a mixed bag of sensations, vital emotions, empirical facts, and an aesthetic that exists for its own sake, and does not bear on any higher transcendental dimension.

While the leftist is often interested in "religion" -- or "spirituality," to be precise -- "religious facts" are inevitably co-opted into their ultimately meaningless narrative, which produces the whole sinister firmament of narcissistic gurus, from Deepak to Tony Robbins to Al Gore to Barack Obama. Whoever or whatever the left "worships," you can be sure that it is not something actually worthy of worship, for worship implies "higher," and that is specifically what the flatlanders of the left reject upfront.

So anyway, back to Balthasar, who is always operating from a dimension that is unknown and unknowable to the true leftist, who preemptively attacks the link between relative and Absolute, atman and maya, God and man, and any other intrinsic hierarchy you care to name. As Balthasar writes, "All of the perversions that human freedom can inflict upon being and its qualities always aim at one thing: the annihilation of the depth dimension of being." This is a critical point, for this is the first act of ontological violence that opens the floodgate of leftist violence on the physical plane.

With regard to the spiritual pathology of nothing-buttery, Balthsar notes that "The formula 'A is nothing other than...' typifies this perversion, whatever the transcendental it affects. It is much rather the case that A is always 'something other than...' Neither goodness nor beauty nor truth is exhausted by any de-definition; the multi-dimensional reality of the transcendentals can never be flattened out by any kind of reduction, and there is no way to capture the mystery either of their existence or their essence in a formula" (emphasis mine).

Now, is what HvB just said a statement of fact? No, of course not! It is the True Story which brings the cosmic facts into being; or brings them "out of being," so to speak, instead of being buried there in the airless sarcophagus of matter.

So the most coonsequental decision you will make in your life is this: up or down. Essence or existence. Truth or matter. Mind or neurology. In or out. God or man. Slack or conspiracy.

Here is how Balthasar expresses it: "When inquiring into truth, one could hardly make a more fateful assumption than to suppose that objects form a self-contained world that has no essential, and at best only an accidental, need of the world of subjects." Depending upon which side you come down on, you will enter either a human world overflowing with truth, beauty, glory, harmony, and unity; or a kind of cold and lifeless scaffolding without roof, floor, or walls, just a dark weigh station to enjoy your animal sensations while trying not to think about the death that elevates you above them.

Balthasar: "A tree without its green, its autumnal variety, the pink and white display of its spring blossoms, its fragrance, its hardness and tenacity, its size, its relation to the surrounding landscape, in short, without the thousand qualities that make it what we know it to be, is simply not a tree" (emphasis mine).

Shorn of its qualities -- qualities that only come into being in the human subject who can know and love them -- the tree has no meaning. In this way, the radical secularist robs existence of its intrinsic dignity and mystery, even while indulging in the crude romantic sentimentality of an Al Gore, who, in his inverted psyche, makes the lower the meaning of the higher.

Human beings are not just the coonsummation of the cosmos, but the very space in which the cosmos may display its divine qualities. And if this is true of objects, how much more so of subjects! For beneath the individuality and autonomy of the human subject is a vast field in which we are members of one another, to such an extent that we require the other to bring us into being and to complete ourselves. There is a Talmudic idea that every person has a "missing piece" that is located in another person. That person may not value or even know of the piece, but it is precisely what the other needs to complete himself.

It took me a long time to locate my missing pieces -- which I could only find as a result of others recognizing and valuing them. Therefore, when I get an email from someone thanking me for helping them find their missing piece, I always let them know that that is only half the story, for one of my missing pieces seems to be located in the few people who appreciate my writing. Without them, I truly wouldn't know of its existence, much less any "power" it might have.

My point is that this power is irreducibly intersubjective, and takes place in the space between you and I. Clearly, you bring as much to the exercise as I do, or else everyone would understand me, instead of just a ruggedy remnant of ringtailed misfits and outsiders in revolt against the conspiracy. I'm pretty sure this is what is meant by such phrases as "body of Christ," or Toots' teachings about members of the Scattered Brotherhood who always find a way to locate each other in this life, like cosmic oming pigeons.

I suppose you could say that we simply help each other re-member and assimilate the truth and beauty that are beyond us.

The Naked Truth (For Spiritually Mature Audiences Only)

Just warming up here. I was just watching this clip of Laura Ingraham, when I realized why I don't like to argue with leftists. The problem is, it's like a monster movie, or a nightmare, in which you keep pumping bullets into the demon, but it has no effect. And where's the satisfaction in that?

The leftist doesn't have the common decency to die when killed. In giving it some thought, this may be because they are already dead on some level, if not intellectually, then spiritually. But if truth is Life -- which it is -- it makes sense that they would not know what it means to "die to truth," for to paraphrase Schuon, to assimilate a truth is for the ego to die a little. The ego detests objectivity, and always takes refuge in a false subjectivity that can distort any truth and turn good to evil and evil to good.

We had this problem with our most recent troll, who would no doubt use the above paragraphs to prove that I am a "conservative fascist" (an oxymoron) engaging in "eliminationist" rhetoric. Yes, I do love the clean kill. But in my case, I am specifically trying to kill the demon, not the person, by shooting my eros straight through the willing heart. If the heart is not willing, then I suppose it feels like a rape. At best, it is tossing the family jewels before swine.

Not only that, but this is a kind of "little death" out of which life blossoms, and without which, life -- the life divine -- is actually impossible. I am quite sure that when Christ said that he did not bring peace, but a revolver -- or was it a sword? -- this is what he was talking about. As the above clip demonstrates, you cannot make peace with these entities. And only a culture that is already quite sick -- and perhaps on life support -- elevates them to positions of power, status, and influence.

Enough of that. We have a limited amount of timelessness, and we have bigger fish to free. For those of you keeping score at home, we now move to a section of the Theo-Logic called "Subject and Object" (pp.61-78). Obviously, a deep analysis of the nature of subject and object must be at the heart of any ontology and epistemology, for any comprehensive account of existence must concede that it is most assuredly a beast with two backs, interior and exterior.

Furthermore, absolutely everything depends upon getting this relationship right. One false move, and you will spend the rest of your life in an infertile universe founded upon a lie. Indeed, you may well perform a celestial abortion on yourself. So let us proceed cautiously, for you know what they say, little lambs: lie with beasts, and wake up fleeced.

I briefly undressed this subject in the beginning of the Coonifesto -- for where else can one do so but in the beginning? If you wait until the middle or end, then it is already too late, for the distinction between subject and object is the prerequisite not only of any kind of knowledge, but rather, as we said yesterday, of there being a cosmos at all. Viva la difference!

Nevertheless, most all secular misosophies -- including, quintessentially, scientistic materialism -- begin in the middle, with no foreplay at all, oblivious to the metaphysical absurdity of such an approach.

In contrast, the Bible addresses this issue in its very first sentence. In the beginning -- or at the origin, the center -- is the perpetual separation of heaven and earth, the celestial and the worldly, the sacred and the profane, the upper waters and lower waters, the Subject and the object, the Slack and the conspiracy. If it were not for this original fissure in the heart of being, then we couldn't fish at all. As Big Joe Turner lamented, the crawdad hole would be entirely dry.

Like Schuon and Big Joe, Balthasar notes the obvious sexual element in all of this: "Such an enquiry resembles an investigation of the masculine and feminine that attends mainly to the functions and inclinations that predispose them to their union." Or, as expressed in the equally sex-obsessed Coonifesto, the molten infinite pours forth a blazen torrent of incandescent finitude, as light plunges an undying fire into its own shadow (oops! a dirty world and... Well, you know the restavus in the testavus.

Balthasar continues: "The subject is ready to receive the object in itself, but what will issue from this reception cannot be calculated in advance." Not to keep referencing my own sexual fantasies, but this is precisely what I was referring to on p. 16, where it is written, A little metaphysical diddling between a cabbala opposites, and Mamamaya! baby makes Trinity.

You see, the baby produced by the union of subject and object is a third thing that is entirely new and novel. Mrs. G. and I had no idea that Future Leader would be so different from us, but there you go. As Balthasar writes, "In the same way, the object is ready to reveal itself in the space that the subject has placed at its disposal, but it is impossible to guess or gauge from the object alone how it will unfold in this space" (emphasis mine). For no longer does it belong solely to the world of the object or subject. Rather, "intellectual knowledge is an unexpected [and blessed!] event that surprises both [subject and object] and cannot be deduced from them in any way."

Or again: "the subject does not know what the adventure of knowledge will bring it," nor does the object know any more "what to expect in the space opened within the subject than a guest knows how he will be received and hosted in another's home." Look how shabbily the object is treated by the left -- like a common whore!

You see, "both subject and object will be fulfilled by coming together," pardon the French, "but the fulfillment will be a wonder and a gift for both," at least if yr doin it rite. "Their encounter will reveal them to each other, even as the revelation of the other will contain, for each, the revelation of itself, which can come about only in the other."

So the subject, the space, the ♀, must be willing to surrender to the ♂, but this self-giving is in truth a self-finding for both, 'til death do them part. For the sacred space that is nurtured by ♀ and ♂ "can no more unfold by itself than a seed can develop without sunlight." There is a friction that occurs when subject and object interact and when two tingles intermingle: "Without the resistance of the object," the subject "could never transform its possible light into actuality, just as sunlight only becomes brightness when it enters the medium of air."

Thus, "only in going out of itself, in creatively serving the world, does the subject become aware of its purpose, and, therefore, its essence." In short, twoness becomes oneness in threeness. In contrast, materialism is a form of spiritual birth-control that is 100% effective.

The Secret Life of Objects and the Cosmic Strip Show

What is an object? I can tell you right off the bat that they aren't what most people think they are. Not just any old thing is qualified to be an object of knowledge. Rather, objects must have very special qualities in order for them to exist at all. For one thing, they must be knowable. And in order to be knowable, a subject is required.

In other words, the object serves as an occasion for our knowledge about it -- without which, neither the object nor the subject can ever emerge from the background of being. Or so it says in my margin notes. But what the hell was I talking about? That is the question.

Here's the problem. I think. On the one hand, we have the Kantian tradition that says that we can't even really know objects at all, only forms of our own sensibility; in short, we are like people inside of a submarine who only interact with various screens and gauges (i.e., our nervous system and its innate categories), but never actually touch the water. Whatever reality is in itself, we haven't a clue. Rather, we have access only to appearances, the phenomena, while the noumenon is forever dark and silent.

On the other hand, we have the naive "realists" (who should really be called "sub-realists") who conflate perception and reality without ever contemplating the metaphysical problems that arise from such a view -- for example, the relationship between mind and matter, and what kind of ontology permits the former to possess valid knowledge of the latter, or how object and subject become "one" in the act of knowing. The problem here, as described by Wolfgang Smith, is that this form of crude realism

"has no place for man, the human witness," so there is no explanation for "even the humblest act of perception." What is implicitly denied is "the very essence of man, which is the Intellect, the faculty by which he knows. If there were not within man something that transcends the cosmos in its entirety, something literally 'not of this world,' he would not be the witness in relation to whom the cosmos exists as an object..."

In fact, oddly enough, the scientistic world can never actually be known at all, for the simple reason that, once sundered into the cartesian categories of res extensa (the physical world) and res cogitans (the thinking being), there is no way to join them back together. But thankfully, as explained in the Coonifesto, modern physics has finally put this dysfunctional worldview to rest, for as Smith says, the so-called paradoxes of quantum mechanics are "simply Nature's way of repudiating a spurious philosophy."

Smith references Whitehead, who pointed out that knowledge is ultimate. If it isn't, I dare you to try and prove it with knowledge, knave! It's as if the materialist has his nose pressed against a black wall, behind which is "reality." Which is an absurd proposition.

No. We cannot make this knower and its knowledge go away that easily, unless we attend college. And even then, it usually requires several years of graduate school to complete the job.

I'll get back to Balthasar in a second, but Smith makes the utterly sound point that to absolutize the cosmos -- as materialists do -- is to exile the knower from the world, precisely. And there is no way to get him back in.

But the Scattered Brotherhood of the Eternal Wisdom -- i.e., Coondom -- does not see it this way. Rather, where the postmodern barbarians see either irreconcilable duality or a naive material monism, we see a sempiternal complementarity in which world and witness co-arise and mutually deepen one another. Anything short of this will be an incomplete cosmology, for it will exclude the very means by which the cosmos is known to itself!

Ultimately, the cosmos cannot be more real than our knowledge of it. Rather, it is that knowledge. This does not mean that we open our eyes and magically create the physical world, as the spiritually retarded Deepaks of the world believe. Rather, what it means is that there are various worlds implicated in the cosmos, and that only an act of knowing can "draw them out," so to speak; a way of knowing brings a world into being. (And as I have mentioned in the past, an authentic religion is most definitely a valid means of knowing worlds that transcend the senses. In fact, that is what they are here for.)

This is why I can affirm with complete confidence that, for example, the leftist inhabits a very different world than the one I inhabit. However, my world easily transcends and contains his little world, which is why my world is the more real. I know this because I once inhabited that little world, just as I once inhabited the world of the fetus, the toddler, the adolescent, the adultolescent, back to the adolescent, the angry leftist (I know, a distinction without a difference) and eventually the adult.

Anyway, back to Balthasar. Just remember, "We know the cosmos to the extent that we know ourselves; we are able, indeed, to know the outer world precisely because it corresponds to the inner" (Smith). And the inner world contains layers and levels unknown to the village atheist.

For Balthasar, truth is the unveiledness of being, which surely implies "a relation to the subject to which it is in fact unveiled." This amounts to the same thing I discussed above. Thus, it is only when this unveiling has occurred, "that being is inwardly illumined and measured." Furthermore, "measure and light are the two properties of truth, and they are inseparable."

You might say that we can only measure objects because they have already been measured within the infinite Subject. Thus, "a being that was not known by God could not be known by a finite subject, for the simple reason that it would not exist in the first place.... [B]eing unknown by God, it would have no measure for its being and thus no truth."

As above, so below. The same way that a cosmos comes into being for us through an act of knowing, it is precisely God's knowing-in-truth that is the origin of this hierarchical, many-layered, glass-onion cosmos, so that things and facts are always more than themselves. You might say that the cosmos stands naked before God, whereas for us it is veiled and reveiled in an endlessly O-luring manner. Thank God! For as Alan Watts once said in a slightly different and probably drunken context, when the stripper removes the last veil, she has surrendered what is left of her erotic mystery.

Nothing is knowable that doesn't already stand in the weird light that shines in the dark but which the dorks don't comprehend. Again: we do not measure God; rather, God is the measure of us, and of everything else. And the measure of a human being is uniquely located and disclosed in time, which is the time it takes for us to become who we are, which, if you are following me, has already been "measured by God." We just have to know into it. To conform ourselves to our divine essence is to live in a portion of the divine light that has been made-to-measure just for us.