Wisdom Begins With the Fear of Fearlessness

Peaking up where we slacked off yesterday: taking either the ↓ or the ↑ route is less than optimal, although with important qualifications.

For example, a complete surrender to ↓ will get the job done, although the same cannot be said of a complete commitment to ↑, since man cannot pull himself up by his own buddhastraps. I mean, he's welcome to try, but just where does he think he's really going? He's going nowhere, but he only discovers that when he gets there. Then he and the roshi presumably have a big belly laugh at the folly of man's delusions.

According to Pieper, the "↑ is all you need" approach -- i.e., the sufficiency of the human will -- falls under the rubric of "pelagianism," which is "characterized by the more or less explicit thesis that man is able by his own human nature to win eternal life and the forgiveness of sins."

And "associated with it is the typically liberal, bourgeois moralism" that is often frankly antagonistic to dogma and various sacramental protocols. It comes down to "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, I'm saved!" But don't kid yourselves, for that kind of kooky talk is a Neddy no-no.

The converse form of presumption -- and you Protestants will want to discuss this quietly amongst yourselves -- is the idea of "the sole efficacy of God's redemptive and engracing action" and "the absolute certainty of salvation solely by virtue of the merits of Christ." (And please never forget that I'm hardly an authority in these matters, just a guy blogging it up as he goes along. If slide effects occur, consult your local holy man.)

It reminds me of what Dennis Prager often says about so-called liberals who personally lead very conservative lives, and yet, don't have a political philosophy in accordance with that fact. There is a weird disconnect between how they conduct their own lives and what they believe. The people who actually do live out leftist ideas are more or less the dregs of society. They are not following a recipe for personal success, to put it mildly, unless they are already wealthy, or pursuing a line of work in which depravity is a prerequisite, such as politics or the arts.

Just so, I find that most people who believe in the sole efficacy of salvation through Christ rarely behave that way. Rather, they are generally very much interested in ↑ to go along with the ↓, i.e., aspiration + grace.

Again, if they're not, then they tend to be insufferably smug and difficult to be around. Frankly, these are the types of people who give others the Jesus Willies, and rightfully so.

For if one has already achieved salvation -- neener neener neener! -- not only is there no need to aspire, but there is a kind of implicit invitation to moral license, since it's all forgiven in the end. It turns God into a kind co-depenent wife of an alocohlic. Every time she "forgives" her husband, that releases his guilt and sets the stage for the next transgression.

I have definitely noticed this pattern in certain patients from the south, and now that I think about it, you can also see it in that first generation of rock & roll pioneers, who were all from the south and had similar religious roots -- Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Johnny Cash. Each of them at times led lives of utter dissolution, but it tended to be a saw-toothed pattern of indulgence and repent, with no true forward movement. Rather, the repent just creates a clean slate for the next fall.

I remember a story about Johnny Cash, who had invited a couple of members of U2 for dinner. At the table they held hands in a circle while Johnny said a solemn grace. At the end, he pauses and says, "sure do miss the drugs, though, Lord." The film that came out a few years ago is rather misleading, since it implies that his drugging days were over by 1967, but that is not the case.

This type of person may even be happy to concede that he is "the biggest sinner of them all," but mainly as a way to unconsciously explain away the future sins to come. Ironically, it is a form of pride, as if to say, "my sins are bigger than yours, so look how much God has forgiven!" You might say it is a humble lack of humility.

Augustine said that "only to the humble is it given to hope" (in Pieper), so that the presumptuous person cannot even genuinely pray "because he fully anticipates its fulfillment."

Pieper makes the more subtle point that in tipping over into either despair or presumption, one eliminates the dialectical tension, as it were, between divine justice and divine mercy.

But in reality, in hope there should be no separation between divine justice and mercy; rather, we only create it by falling to one side or the other. From our standpoint, justice and mercy may appear to be at odds, but in God they "are actually identical."

One has only to think of one's child to understand this. Discipline is not an end in itself but a kind of mercy, precisely. The child may protest that you lack mercy in not allowing him to eat M&M's and Doritos for breakfast, but the opposite is true. It's nice to have all your teeth.

Remember that wise crack to the effect that wisdom begins with the fear of God. It is this fear that presumption eliminates. Pieper points out that Saint Thomas "lists not only disordered fear but also unnatural fearlessness" as Neddy no-noes to be avoided. Fearlessness is a form of immaturity and self-deception. Again, I have a child who happens to be rather fearless, so in his case, he needs to cultivate some rational fear in order to grow in wisdom.

I Am Not Him, Therefore God Is

Pieper says that of the two -- presumption and despair -- the former is less opposed to hope, for it is only a false similitude, or "fraudulent imitation," as opposed to a true antitype. In the same way, childishness and infantility are fraudulent imitations of the holy innocence of childhood, whereas its true antitype would be old age, or senility, or Larry King.

If one is a true and consistent existentialist/materialist/atheist, then neither hope nor presumption should ever enter the picture. Presumptuousness, yes, in that that adjective obviously applies to anyone who imagines himself to have understood the vast realm of spirit sufficiently to categorically reject it.

In ether worlds, it's more than a little presumptuous for a horizontal man to reject the vertical on the basis of the fact that this is what horizontal men do. It's analogous to rejecting things that children cannot understand, or a cat insisting that lettuce has no nutritional value.

The materialist is committed to the belief that the horizontal world is sufficient to account for man's origin, destiny, purpose, and cognitive abilities, which correspond to chance, nowhere, nothing, and accident, respectively. The only thing the troll can know with certainty is that he knows nothing, which is one of our rare points of agreement.

To say that man is "ordered to God" is one of those things that is fraught with potential misunderstandings, which is again why I prefer to use the empty symbols, or pneumaticons, in this case, O and (¶).

On the surface, it can sound tautological to say that if God didn't exist, we couldn't conceive of him. But it means much more than that, for what it is really saying is that the astonishing fact of the human subject, with all of its marvelous abilities, must have a sufficient reason, a cause proportionate to it.

As I mentioned in the wooly Coonifesto and would still weave today, man is by an order of magnitude the most astonishing fact of the cosmos. Not only is this something we should all be able to agree upon, but I believe it should be the starting point of any coherent philosophy, not just a bizarre and unexpected afterthought that defies explanation and is therefore explained away. You could even say that "Man is, therefore I AM," but that would be getting ahead of ourselves.

To say that man is the "image and likeness" of O is simply to affirm that he is in some sense proportionate to the ultimate Principle of the cosmos. Interestingly, this is something that the materialist/atheist/Darwinist not only believes, but insists, i.e., that man is capable of pronouncing on his own ultimate meaning(lessness). For to say, for example, that man is a result of random genetic mutations is still to affirm that the mind of man is proportioned to reality.

The problem is, Darwinism obviously cannot explain its own intrinsic exceptions, the biggest one being man's adequation to truth. No mere animal has anything approximating this, which is why the gulf between animal and man is infinite if considered from the bottom up -- for the same reason that the gap between Ø and O is infinite from the perspective of Ø.

However, if looked at from the top down, it is both understandable and even somewhat expected -- again, for the same reason that, viewed from the top down, Ø is simply the "further reaches," so to speak, of O, like rays from the sun.

This is by no means to suggest that man was "inevitable," which would be another form of presumption, plus it would deny the creative freedom of O. It simply means that since it is in the nature of the sovereign good to create, we shouldn't be all that surprised that he should create something as magnificent as man. Astonished, yes, but not surprised.

And this would also account for our disappointment in that habitual underachiever, Homo sapiens. In contrast, the Darwinian or secular humanist has no grounds whatsoever for being disappointed in man. For him, the mystery is why man should be anything other than a mindless animal seeking food, sex, and tenure.

Anyway, back to Pieper. He points out that the problem with presumption is that it engenders a "perverted attitude toward the fact that eternal life is the meaning and goal" of our terrestrial adventure. Again, man is only proportioned to O. He is not O.

But presumption fails to honor this distinction, and therefore "fails to accept the reality of the futurity and 'arduousness' that characterize" our journey in and toward O. It manifests in the attitude, for example, of those arrogant bumper snickers that say CHRISTIANS AREN'T PERFECT, JUST FORGIVEN, or something like that. I wouldn't be so sure about that, pilgrim. You are of course permitted to hope for salvation, but to simply assume it is the height of presumption. It is also to appoint oneself judge and jury over one's own case. It is a recipe for mischief, since you can essentially do whatever you want in this life, knowing that in the end you've got a get-out-of-hell-free card.

Presumption really detaches itself from O and thereby "destroys supernatural hope" by not acknowledging the transitional nature of life in the herebelow. Therefore, it regards "eternal life as something that is 'basically' already achieved, as something that is 'in principle' already given.'" No wonder such people are so boring.

Pieper adds that it is also a type of heresy, but I would expand upon this to say that it is one of those intellectual heresies that isn't only specific to Christianity, but to thought as such, for it ultimately means that in one way or another, one is collapsing that generative and transitional space between man and O, which is man's true habitat. This is why both the concrete atheist and the presumptuous theist are so tedious, for they are just mirrors of one another.

Interestingly, Pieper also touches on how liberal theology transfers the gap between man and O through activism, as if by stealing enough of one man's property and giving it to another, they can create the kingdom of heaven on earth, the old hate-and-switch "immamentization of the eschaton" routine, as Voegelin put it.

The cosmic truth of the matter -- or so we have heard from the wise -- is that neither grace nor aspiration, ↓ and ↑, are sufficient, only ↓↑. And I wish I could depict those arrows in a kind of open, upward spiral, because that would be more accurate. More like the image at the right, whereby the field created by the arrows is a kind of hologram. (And note how the point at the top is none other than ʘ.)

You could even create a pithy bumper sticker to reflect this truth, say, BELIEVERS AREN'T PERFECT, THAT'S HOW WE KNOW THERE'S A GOD, or I DON'T KNOW EVERYTHING, THATS HOW I KNOW TRUTH EXISTS.

Youthful Reagan and Old Man Obama

Speaks for itself: "By implanting in man the new 'future' of a practically inexhaustible 'not yet,' supernatural hope lays the foundation for a new youthfulness that can be destroyed only if hope is destroyed" (Pieper).

It's not so much that youth is full of hope. Rather, the reverse: hope is the essence of youth. Remama? The present wasn't just the present, but the continuous "harvesting" of an endlessly novel future. I remember always "looking forward" to things, not in the pathological manner that takes one out of the present, but adds to it.

In fact, it is precisely because of this gift or malady, depending upon how you look at it, that I never developed the usual ambitions which the Conspiracy expects one to have. I was already having such an excellent adventure, that I didn't really see how it could get any better. Rather, you'd have to be pretty bored to be enticed by what Conspiracy had to offer in exchange for your Slack.

In other words, I didn't hope for anything fundamentally different, and still don't. In thinking about it for the first time, I think I retained my innocent and youthful hope, and never replaced it with the kinds of artificial and convoluted hopes that haunt most people, i.e., a world-weary hope for some kind of fundamental change, or for some sort of future "excitement" that really just takes one out of one's center and makes it feel like the center for awhile. I knew by the time I was in my late teens that if I couldn't enjoy the present, then I wouldn't be able to enjoy the future, no matter what came along. I knew that fulfillment can only occur now.

This very much reminds me of how there is no such thing as an individual per se. Rather the person is always oriented to the other; he is always in communion, so that the substance of being, if you like, really is threeness: the I, the You, and the link between. There is nothing behind or beyond that, not even -- or especially not -- "in God," who "contains" his own Other, i.e., the Son.

(To be honest -- and with respect -- I don't always like the words "Father" and "Son" as theological placemarkers, since they are so saturated with other meanings and associations, only some of which apply to the interior of O, so to speak. Rather, I find it more helpful to contemplate the astonishing fact that the essence of being is not "one" but communion; or, that there is no One without his Second. It is in the very nature of One to give birth to the Two, which is why Eckhart said that "the essence of God is birthing.")

Just so, it is in the very essence of the now to "point toward" the future. In other words, just as there is no One without the Other, there is no now without the then. If there were no promise of a then, then hopelessness would be the proper orientation to the world. But the future is always flowing into the now, and furthermore, it is not just coming "from nowhere," but from O, precisely (the cosmic telovator or eschalator).

This is why such things as creativity, novelty, evolution and discovery are not just possible, but normative for the human being. It is because of this structure that existence isn't completely ruled by entropy. Obviously if entropy is the irony-clad law of the cosmos, then there is no reason whatsoever for hope. Hope resides in the fact that it transcends entropy, including that annoying state of entropy we call death. Remember: hope is eternal youthfulness (or vice versa), while hopelessness is senility and death.

Which is why America is still the youngest nation in the world, and why everyone wants to get out of their decrepit cultures and come here. America is not just the last, best hope of humanity, but a bulwark against hopelessness. It reminds me of how victims of the soviet Gulag were comforted by the moral clarity of Ronald Reagan, even while it annoyed the hell out of the hopeless and cynical progressives. Conversely, the appeasement of the left only added to their despair.

It is also why progressives may look immature, but they are really bitter old men, as you'll probably see in the comments today, except not now that I've mentioned it. But for Obama to peddle "hope" is like Forest Lawn selling vacation property. No matter how nice it looks, you'll be dead when you get there. And if we ever arrive where progressives want us to go, we'll also be dead, either literally or figuratively.

So as Pieper explains, youthfulness "can be destroyed only if hope is destroyed." But I would add that if one can manage to damage or destroy the state of innocent youthfulness, one can also undermine hope, and create a "hopeless" situation from which only the State can save one.

I don't think I need to chronicle the many ways the left assaults and undermines the innocence of childhood, but I would no more place my child in a public school than I would expose him to pornography or MSNBC. I am charged with protecting his holy innocence, not eliminating it. The point is not to produce a jaded cynic who is wise as a dove and innocent as a serpent.

For only with this reservoir of innocence can one remain an innocent child forever, instead of, say, a childish know-nothing such as Obama. Note how the latter is a corrupt version of the former. To be "innocent" does not mean being innocent of wisdom and self-understanding.

It is critical to bear in mind that there are two forms of hopelessness, despair and presumption. Again, both "collapse" the space between now and then, and now that I think about it, probably collapse the space between I and You as well, in that the I becomes a self-sufficient god, either for better or worse. But in each case, the present moment, which should be oriented toward the future, collapses to nothingness.

As Pieper explains, "the 'infantility' of presumption lies in its perverse anticipation of fulfillment," so that genuine hope "passes into the peaceful certainty of possession." What does this remind me of... Oh yes, "This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Really? Yes, he's a buffoon, but why is this so different from, say, the kind of hope promised by Reagan, e.g., "morning in America"?

The difference is that in the real morning that announces the day, it is the person who makes all the difference, not the state, since one man's morning is another man's twilight or Darkness. Remember, it was always morning in the Soviet Union as well, with the announcement of a new Five-Year Plan. When you give up your hope to the State, they just sell it back to you at triple the price.

Being's Flight From Being, or You Can't Outrun an Assoul

Acedia has a number of "friends and companions," including despair and restlessness. In a way, you could see restlessness as a defense against despair, so they are really just two sides of the same coin.

Pieper describes some of the variants of restlessness, which are interesting in and of themselves. But also, they demonstrate how perceptive a psychologist Saint Thomas was, long before there was even a word for psychology. For that matter, it also shows how anemic modern psychology is in ignoring the spiritual dimension of things (or, alternatively, taking it seriously only in a frivolous, new age, chopra-esque manner).

If one's depression is a result of spiritual disorder, then it's important to know that. It is very much analogous to how physical pain conveys important messages about our behavior and surroundings. Likewise, on a psychic level we have certain built-in mechanisms that convey pain, such as shame and guilt. A person with no shame and no guilt becomes a sociopath or even a Chicago politician.

There are few people who are born with no capacity for shame. More often than not, the dysregulation of shame is a result of having had one's "circuits blown" as a child -- of having been exposed to too much shame too soon. As a result, the person may grow up with a kind of "shame bypass" mechanism, or else be so vulnerable to shame that they are paralyzed for fear of triggering it.

But do note that shame is only thinkable in the context of the other. When we are shamed, it is a result of projecting our own judgmental eyes outward. Therefore, the shame-prone individual projects a pair of eyes that are particularly harsh and judgmental, even condemnatory.

In this regard, it is important to distinguish between shame and guilt, the former being more "ontological," the latter more "existential." In other words, when we feel guilt, it is over an action. But shame has more to do with our very existence.

In his books, Allan Schore does a wonderful job of describing the actual neurobiological correlates of shame. When shame becomes dysregulated, it actually becomes woven into our very neurology. Let me see if I can find an illustrative passage.

But before doing that, let me describe how it happens with my son. Of course, until a child is, what, three years old or so, they have no capacity for shame. They are quite literally shameless, which, of course, brings to mind the primordial state of Adam. But what is the first thing Adam experiences upon his eyes being opened? Correct. Shame. He saw that he was naked, and quickly covered up.

Anyway, so future leader is now capable of feeling shame, which is clearly a good thing, because if he weren't, I wouldn't say that there would be no way to control him, but we would have one less tool in our arsenal. But the key, of course, is to never shame the child in a way that is traumatic -- any more than you want them to feel any kind of pain to excess, even while retaining the capacity to feel it. Shame is like an unbidden stranger that lives within us. Quite literally, it is a "built in other" that ensures our harmonious relations with the group.

But again, dysregulated shame either paralyzes or "unleashes." This is why so-called shame cultures -- for example, much of Islamic world -- are so shameless. Or, precisely because they cannot tolerate the acute shame they feel for being such world-historical losers, they attack the nearest "eyes," which happen to be the Israelis. If not for them, they'd have to just murder and maim each other more than they already do.

Note also how the general emotional immaturity of the Islamic world causes men to locate their shameful sexual impulses in women, so that by covering them up, they can tamp down their libidos; or how our own ridiculous troll hides his shame behind a cloak of anonymity, as if that prevents us from remembering his numberless follies!

Eh, forget about Schore. We're getting way too far afield. Let's get back to Pieper/Aquinas and the many defenses against despair, which include loquaciousness, excessive curiosity, "an irreverent urge to pour oneself out from the peak of the mind onto many things," "interior restlessness," and "instability of place or purpose."

Each of these could be confused with garden-variety anxiety, but Aquinas is talking about something deeper, about being's flight from itself. But, to quote the wise words of Beavis, it is absurd to imagine that you can "run away from your bunghole." Rather, wherever you go, it goes there too.

There are other ways to flee from being and to manifest the "sluggish indifference toward those things that are in truth necessary for man's salvation," for example, "pusillanimity toward all the mystical opportunities that are open to man.'' Another --a veritable peter pandemic on the left -- is "irritable rebellion" against those who serve as a reminder of one's higher purpose (thus, for example, the truly inevitable attacks on the Pope and on Jews). For what did the Master say about being hated by the world?

The last and most noxious and destructive defense against despair goes all the way in converting defense to offense, to actual defiance; it is the "conscious inner choice and decision in favor of evil as evil that has its source in hatred for the divine in man."

To pick a low-hanging fruitcake that is always near at hand, our own perpetually irritated and rebellious troll makes no attempt to conceal his belief that it is necessary for God to have an adversary, and that he considers his presence here to be the reflection of a "very fundamental principle of the universe," that is, "the tendency of any force to give rise to its opposite."

There is some garbled truth to this notion, except that it is critical to bear in mind that while light necessarily gives rise to shadow, that hardly means that light "wishes" for shadows to exist.

Rather, shadows are entirely "parasitic" or "reactionary." Only in this sense do we give rise to our opposite in Anon. It would never occur to us to seek out this anonymous darkness, much less create it! Nevertheless, in throwing out the light, we have indeed done so, in a manner of speaking. My bad. (Remember, never get angry or impatient with him, as I sometimes see some of you doing, for he is always here to teach.)

Some of the above defenses are probably not self-evident, for example, "excessive curiosity." What could this mean? Obviously there is nothing wrong with curiosity. It is how we learn. It is the empty space we must tolerate in order for knowledge to occur. As Bion was fond of saying, "the answer is the disease that kills curiosity." But what is excessive curiosity?

I think it manifests in various ways, for example, in a kind of seemingly innocent but bovine lack of certitude about certain fundamental questions, without which thinking isn't even possible -- for example, in questions of whether truth, or free will, or moral absolutes actually exist. To even ask such questions, one must either be stupid or malicious, but in any event, such an insane quest can only result in ignorance chasing its own tail and calling it "philosophy," i.e., tales told by the tenured and troll tales of the tin-eared.

Another manifestation of excessive curiosity involves "overrunning" the truth long after it has already been found.

And with that, I am abruptly out of time. To be continued.....

Get Out of My Life, God! But First Could You Drive Me & Dawkins to the Mall?

Wait, don't go away! Acedia is actually very interesting. And important.

After all, if it's a capital sin, there must be a reason. And a capital sin is...

Hey, what is a capital sin, anyway? I'm assuming that it involves choosing a course of action that places one's soul in real danger, ultimately running counter to one's very reason for being. These sins lead to spiritual suicide, if you will -- a self-administered celestial abortion and an in-your-face rejection of O. It is not just the flight into Ø, but the prideful celebration of it.

Again, since there is no adequate translation of acedia, it has become associated with "the middle-class work ethic" -- as if the latter could have anything to do with spiritual perfection. But if anything, acedia is at a right angle to the work ethic, in that Aquinas associates it with forgetting the sabbath, "by which man is enjoined to 'rest his spirit in God'" (Pieper).

And if you will turn your new testavus for the rest of us to page 236, you will see that Toots Mondello enjoins us to observe the sabbath speed limit, which does not mean putting your pedal to the metal, but rather, slowing down, precisely. To quote ourselves, it involves "turning toward what is 'behind' and 'above' the external world and its nihilocracy of urgent nonsense." Furthermore, it is simultaneously a "memoir of the future" and a return to "the unmanifest paradise of Eden."

One might say that the paradoxical "work" of the sabbath involves internalizing its essential contours and rhythms, so that there is a peaceful "zone of silence" between oneself and the world. The work of the sabbath is not "not doing" -- which is only the opposite of doing -- but non-doing, as per our friend, the gentleman from China, LaoTsu.

We prefer to call it non-doodling, because it may look like we are just doodling around doing nothing, but it's true. We are indeed doing nothing, which requires the effort of no effort. In fact, I'm not doing it right now.

Speaking of this return to the vertical source, I just want to share something that ba-lew my mind, as they used to say. This weekend I was reading this fine little book on Aquinas, by Josef Pieper. I am embarrassed to admit that I've never actually read the Summa Theologica, a failing I am about to rectify.

Anyway, I get to the bottom of page 101, and Pieper says that in order to understand the structure of the Summa, one must imagine "a circular diagram, in a ring returning back upon itself."

What the!

And here is Aquinas' bottom line, which turns out at bottom to be a metacosmic circle: "In the emergence of creatures from their first Source is revealed a kind of circulation, in which all things return, as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin in the beginning."

Who knew? Aquinas was a Raccoon!

Where were we? Yes, back to acedia, which, in a way, can be thought of as the perverse struggle to convert the above-noted circle into a straight line. Doing so automatically takes one off the path, and prevents one from floating upstream on the cosmic winds.

Acedia fundamentally involves choosing worldliness over spirit; it is to commit oneself to the horizontal over the vertical. Thus, it "lacks courage for the great things that are proper to the nature of the Christian" (Pieper), so that the acedic man hasn't "the will to be as great as he really is. He would prefer to be less great in order thus to avoid the obligation of greatness" (ibid).

One can well understand how acedia represents a kind of "perverted humility"; Pieper aptly compares it to the neurotic patient who consciously wishes to get better, but unconsciously resists it because of the responsibilities it will bring in the future, not to mention the regrets about the past.

Resistance is ubiquitous in psychotherapy, if only because any dynamic system first and foremost wishes to go on being. But there's more to it than that, as genuine growth is always a double-edged sword, as is seen quite vividly in developing children. Every major movement toward individuation and autonomy brings with it a little separation anxiety that needs to be tolerated and worked through. To put it simply, gaining individuation means losing mommy.

I might add that we never truly resolve this dialectic between merger and autonomy, a topic I will be posting on in the near future. It's just that instead of fleeing back and dissolving into the loving arms of mommy, we regress in different ways, some healthy, others pathological.

For example, it's no secret that for the Raccoon, the Beer O'clock slackrament is a kind of dissolution into the arms of the cosmic mother, but there are many other examples. Always there is the father principle of doing and the mother principle of being. Obviously there are many ways for pathology to enter into the marriage, but that's a subject for a different post.

Pieper goes on to say that acedia can go from mere passive drifting to "an actual fleeing from God. Man flees from God because God has exalted human nature to a higher, a divine, state of being and has thereby enjoined on man a higher standard of obligation."

Again, man is condemned to transcendence. But to paraphrase Pieper, acedia ultimately expresses the wish that God would just leave us alone and stop pestering us with these annoying calls to dignity, nobility, and greatness. Go away, God! I'm not your baby anymore! I can do it myself!

Loafing and Laughing Our Way Toward the Real Singularity

Who is that motherhuckster that propagates nonsense about the "singularity," about living forever, and about recreating human minds with AI (not just the body, but the actual "person")? Kurzweil?

He is a prime example of despair masquerading as hope, of extreme materialism masquerading as transcendence, and of grandiosity masquerading as magnanimity. Not to mention abject foolishness masquerading as wisdom. No wonder he has so many honorary doctorates. Then again, one more and he gets a free carwash.

Suffice it to say -- as we have discussed before -- man is born with a religious instinct; or, as Schuon ironically expressed it, he is "condemned to transcendence." But just as our sexual instinct can become disordered, so too can our religious instinct. Indeed, this is such a truism that it hardly needs to be said. Just as there are sexual perversions (although in the polticially correct world of clinical psychology they are now called "paraphilias"), there are religious perversions (metaphilias?).

Although the list of man's sexual perversions has become shorter with his "evolution" and sophistication, the current resumé includes Exhibitionism, Fetishism, Frotteurism, Pedophilia, Sexual Masochism, Sexual Sadism, Transvestic Fetishism, Voyeurism, and attraction to Rosie O'Donnell. With further evolution, I would expect Transvestic Fetishism to soon be stricken from the list, followed by the sadomasochistic tango.

If we were to compile a list of religious perversions, what would it include? We could say obvious things such as Islamism, except that it is by no means clear whether or not the Grand Jihad that motivates the Islamists is actually normative for their religion. I don't want to say it. Or draw a picture. You do the myth.

But I don't want to get into specific cases anyway, only the more general cat- and dogmatories. To a certain extent we've already covered this ground in our recent posts about intrinsic intellectual heresies. Furthermore, acquaintance with the debates of early Christianity provides a useful education in the delicate balance required in order to avoid these various pitfalls through which one really does fall into the pit.

Let's just focus on the theological virtue of hope, along with its corollary, hopelessness. Why would hopelessness be a sin and a heresy? Indeed, our reader Anon informs us that depressed and hopeless people are actually more in touch with what he calls "reality," because a couple of the tenured said so. In his upside down world, the disease is the cure. But how do we know for sure if those two are really depressed and in touch with reality, or just faking it? Anyway, some books are written with the assistance of psychoactive drugs; this one could have been avoided with them.

According to Pieper, there are two kinds of hopelessness, despair and what we will translate as presumption. Both involve a kind of anticipation: the former is "a perverse anticipation of the nonfulfillment of hope," while the latter is "a perverse anticipation of the fulfillment of hope." And I didn't expect him to use the word "perverse," but there it is. We are on the same cosmic page.

But why are these perversions? Because man is again always on the way. You might say that just as God's essence is his being, Man's essence is his becoming. God is who he is -- his name is I AM THAT I AM -- while man is who he is to become. His orthoparadoxical name is I AM THAT I WILL BE.

Both despair and presumption therefore undercut man at the very root, since they "destroy the pilgrim character of of human existence" and are "opposed to man's true becoming" (Pieper).

Note that the substance of real hope "flows" -- can only flow -- between (•) and O. Despair is to live only in (•), while presumption is to assume the acquisition or conquest of O; it is to conflate (•) and O in such a way that (•) is expanded to O.

Man is only in the image of the Creator. He is not the Creator. While the human station uniquely allows him both to create and to know, this conceals the fact that man cannot actually create or know the essence of a single thing.

In other words, both knowledge and the limitation thereof are a result of the same ontological reality, the very structure of being. Because we are an emanation of O, we may truly know; but because we are not O, knowledge is literally inexhaustible.

The same may be said of our creativity. Although it too is inexhaustible, man clearly cannot create something from nothing, which is the true essence of creativity that only God possesses.

Now, as mentioned in the book, man is a uniquely open system, both vertically and horizontally. Therefore, in order to "grow" in either direction, he must remain an open system at disequilibrium.

Both of these are fundamental, i.e., openness and disequilibrium. For example, there is a word we use when your body has reached equilibrium: death. Likewise, there are a number of words for a system that has become closed: starvation is one that applies to the horizontal, while sin is a word that applies to the vertical (i.e., rejection of an open relationship to God).

The kind of hope being peddled by Kurzweil is really just despair mimicking hope. You might say that it recapitulates man's original creation of a closed system that excludes God, in that it elevates man to God (both Kurzweil and the serpent agree that "you shall not die").

But any way you cut it, life in a purely horizontal world is already a kind of death. Kurzweil cannot really promise life forever, only death forever, with no real reason to hope for anything. Please note that Kurzweil is full of hope. But I can guarantee him that he will soon be dead, and that his childish (not childlike) hope is entirely misplaced.

One way we maintain vertical openness is through the virtue of humility. But this can go awry in two directions, not just one. Obviously, grandiosity and presumption run counter to genuine humility.

But Pieper notes that despair can represent a kind of false humility that makes it impossible to maintain a vertically open system. He discusses this in terms of the capital sin of acedia, which has no precise translation, so that it is generally thought of as "sloth," which is quite misleading, since it has nothing to do with laziness per se.

For example, as Pieper explains, it is entirely possible -- likely even -- for a workaholic to indulge in acedia, the real meaning of which is a kind of "sadness in view of the divine good in man," and a rejection of the "God-given ennobling of human nature."

You might call it spiritual laziness, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the divine Slack required to properly contemplate and abide in O. Slack is only the true Slack if it is oriented toward its proper spiritual end. Yes, the Raccoon is not just some kind of loafer, but a gentleman loafer. Furthermore, he loafs in God's vertical bakery, where the bread is baked fresh daily.

To be continued....

Obama and the Hope-a-Dope Strategy

Pieper discusses the quite natural relationship between hope and youth, noting that the two are "ordered to one another in manifold ways."

This almost requires no explanation, and yet, is quite important -- and now that I think about it, undoubtedly helps to explain certain well known psycho-spiritual political pathologies of youth, which generally occur when their abundant hope is combined with their lack of wisdom and experience to produce... well, you name it. Obama is only their latest gift to the world.

Why anyone would place their hope in politics and politicians is quite beyond me; then again, I have only to think back to my own youth to realize that it's actually quite behind me. After all, my first vote was for Jimmy Carter, and in 1980 he was too conservative for me, so my preferred candidate was Barry Commoner of the illustrious Citizens Party, a socialist front that mainly spread hysteria about nuclear power plants.

Pieper writes that "natural hope blossoms with the strength of youth and withers when youth withers." Again, no doubt true. This is obviously a depressing reality, but again, I think it explains why older people who should know better cling to the callow political enthusiasms of their youth. How could a grown man be taken in by Obama's vacuous hopey-changey rhetoric?

It seems to me that one explanation might be the attempt to revive the kind of exciting hope for the future they once had as adolescents. As they say, when you see an old man with a young woman, it's not her youth he's after.

Likewise, when you see an old fart like Chris Matthews getting all tingly upon hearing his boyfriend speak, the real source of the excitement is obviously not Obama's vague future but Matthews' own specific past. Thus, the recent disillusionment with Obama is just the other side of hisillusionment. He has awakened to his own projection, and yet, has learned nothing, since he now blames Obama for dissing his beautiful illusion!

Being that politics is a substitute religion for the left, it is understandable that they would be prone to creating earthly messiahs. In reality, the entire process obviously took place in Matthews' own fat and spluttering head, that is, the illusion followed by the inevitable disillusion. (And to be clear, I would say the identical thing of a "conservative" who placed this kind of inappropriate hope in a politician.)

Now, the loss of natural hope brings with it the growth of what we might call "natural despair." This only makes sense. In the absence of any transnatural form of hope, it is simply an ironclad law of nature that when we are young the past is essentially irrelevant while the future is virtually unlimited.

But as we age, the past grows long while the future inevitably shrinks to nothing. How could one not be quite literally dis-illusioned? As Pieper describes it, the "not yet" of youth "is turned into the has-been," and we become a kind of bittersweet repository of "memories of what is 'no more.'"

Perhaps you have to be of my generation, but for me, there is nothing quite as pathetic as when cadge-drive time comes around, and PBS digs out some old hippies to sing the same songs they sang 40 or 50 years ago, in the same way, hopefully kindling the same rancid emotions.

Can you imagine having to sing something you wrote at the age of 20, while expressing the same emotions you felt then with conviction? It is no wonder then that these people literally haven't taken a new political imprint since 1967. Ironic too that this desperate flight into the past is called "progressive."

This whole sad spectacle can be avoided with properly ordered hope. Pieper is at pains to emphasize that hope in and of itself is no kind of virtue. Rather, it only becomes a theological virtue when it converges upon its proper transnatural target.

Likewise, hopelessness and cynicism would be quite appropriate in a wholly materialistic worldview, for what is there to hope for aside from maximizing pleasure and delaying death as long as possible?

This very different type of transnatural hope is by no means tied to natural youth. However, consistent with Jesus' statements regarding the importance of holy childlikeness, this hope "bestows on mankind a 'not yet' that is entirely superior to and distinct from the failing strength of man's natural hope."

Looked at in this way, adolescents are more than a little hopeless before they gain real wisdom, and especially hopeless, or pathetic, if the condition persists well into adulthood, as it generally does in the tenured retardentsia.

Now interestingly, properly ordered (supernatural) hope has the effect of re-infusing, so to speak, natural hope, hence, the cheerful optimism of the Raccoon. We have discussed in the past how (↓) has a kind of "rejuvenating" effect, and how, for example, people literally feel "lighter" after attending a religious service. Indeed, if I wake up feeling "heavy," I always feel lighter after a post, which is one of the reasons I persist in these verticalisthenics -- to keep the existential pounds off, so to speak. I would no more give up the habit than I would stop exercising.

Pieper writes of "the enchanting youthfulness of our great saints," for "nothing more eminently preserves and founds 'eternal youth' than the theological virtue of hope. It alone can bestow on man the certain possession of that aspiration that is at once relaxed and disciplined, that adaptability and readiness, that strong-hearted freshness, that resilient joy, that steady perseverance in trust that so distinguish the young and make them so lovable."

Which is why we may say with Pieper: God is younger than all else.

And why we may say with Petey: Too old, older than Abraham, too young, young as a babe's I AM. The circle unbroken by and by, a Divine child, a godsend, a touch of infanity, a bloomin' yes.

For in the end, hope is nothing more or less than a trusting and childlike Yes! to the Creator, and the faithful certainty that his creation is indeed good.

Little Big Man: The Humble Aspiration to Greatness

Continuing with yesterday's post, hope is "the steadfast turning toward the true fulfillment of man's nature," or the essence of (•) --> O. But Pieper adds that hope is ordered to two additional sub-virtues, as it were, magnanimity and humility.

I found his analysis here to be particularly fascinating, for at least a couple of reasons. First is the recovery of original, subtle word meanings that have become buried under centuries of use; and second is the way these words have a sort of geometrical relationship to one another, as I will proceed to explain.

I don't know about you, but in their contemporary usage, I wouldn't have seen any overt relationship between magnanimity and hope, or humility and magnanimity, but this is a fine example of how spiritual reality can become obscured when our words cease to effectively map it.

As mentioned in a recent post, magnanimity is "the aspiration of the spirit to great things." It is not only the "courage to seek what is great" -- and do remember the actual meaning of courage, as per our recent posts on that subject! -- but also to become worthy of the greatness one seeks.

In turn, this all speaks to the special nature of spiritual development, in which who one is is far, far more important than what one knows. Or, to put it another way, who one is places an upper limit on what one may know; in short, know-how is posterior to be-who.

I might add that this adage doesn't just apply to the spiritual dimension, but to the psychic realm as well. It first occurred to me early in my psychoanalytic training. Indeed, it is a thread that runs through Bion's works, and now that I think about it, it explains why it was so natural for me to simply apply Bion's ideas to spiritual reality -- to transpose them one Octave up, as it were, from psyche to pneuma.

The point is that you really cannot become a "healer of souls" unless you have recognized and healed your own soul-wound, otherwise you are just a pretender. You can have all the theoretical knowledge in the world (k), but that doesn't necessarily add up to an ounce of (n). This ultimately means that your theory must flow from genuine experience, or it is just words. And once the theory is severed from emotional/spiritual reality, it begins to drift away from the reality it is supposed to map.

Anyway, back to magnanimity, which Aristotle characterized as "the jewel of all the virtues," since at any particular moment it turns toward "the greater possibility of the human potentiality for being" (Pieper).

Having said that, if magnanimity is detached from humility, it can tend toward grandiosity, presumptuousness, and a promethean glorification of man only. Put it this way: if man is capable of great things, it is only because he is endowed by the Creator with a soul and spirit to aspire to truly great things (aspire is related to spirit).

Excuse me a moment.....

Little insulin reaction there. D'oh! That's the last time I'll take humalog (rapidly acting insulin) first thing in the morning. I've been fooling around with my regimen, seeing if I can get my A1c (the best measure of diabetic control) even lower than 5.3, which is probably impossible. Anyway, back on the record.

Here is how Pieper describes it: "Man's worth, as that of being possessed of a soul, consists solely in this: that, by his own free decision, he knows and acts in accordance with the reality of his nature -- that is, in truth." So the loss of supernatural hope entails the loss of O.

You might say that faith and hope are the penumbra of O. They are "implanted in human nature as natural inclinations," -- although I suppose it would be technically more accurate to say that these are transnatural inclinations, or tacit foreknowledge of the as-yet-undiscovered reality of O. Faith and hope are like "empty categories" to be filled by experiential knowledge of O, or what a Raccoon calls (n).

If magnanimity is working as it should, and our aspiration to great things is resulting in "closer proximity" to the Great Thing, or O, it should automatically result in humility, since one recognizes, first, that no genuine progress is possible in the absence of O, and second, the inconceivable distance between man and God, or (•) and O. Truly, the closer one is, the further away.

If humility is not operative, then pride and hubris come to the forefront, and then comes the fall, all over again. But to paraphrase Unknown Friend, when we fall in this manner, it is only back down to the ground, our ground, that is, the human station, which we never left anyway. And which is great enough as it is without making oneself a god.

So, it is no paradox at all to affirm that hope involves the humble aspiration to to greatness -- or to be a little big man.

Great Danes are like this, which is a big part of their charm. Simultaneously majestic, and yet, oh-so humble, even verging on low self esteem. Little Big Dog:


We are not worthy of a belly rub from the Master!

The Crude Psychic Maps of Postmodern Barbarians

One of the underlying themes of Pieper's Faith, Hope, Love is the loss of meaning that has occurred with respect to certain words that are of critical importance to the spiritual journey (which we touched on in last Wednesday's post). When this happens, it is analogous to certain features of a map being erased, or perhaps like a painting that gradually begins to fade.

Conversely, thanks to language, the map of (•) --> O can be as detailed as a google map that shows the address of every saint and sage along the way. Christianity has been here for a long time, and Western civilization even longer. And the Transdimensional Order of the Cosmic Raccoon is so venerable that it disappears into the mists of the mid-twentieth century.

That's a lot of map making. But with the gradually increasing materialization and quantification of our culture over the past several centuries, it is very much the case that our exterior maps are more detailed than ever, even while the interior ones have become sketchy and impoverished at best.

I say "at best" because when a map loses its features, it becomes a kind of canvas for the psyche to project upon. Prior to the development of systematic scientific discovery -- the discovery of discovery -- the situation was the reverse, in that our exterior maps were vehicles of psychic projection. People projected all sorts of mind parasites in the form of mythical beasts beyond the boundaries of the known world. It is similar to how liberals imagine that anyone outside their familiar territory is a greedy, racist, and homophobic monster, as seen below in the depiction of conservatives swimming beyond the shore of academia and the MSM:


I remember Terence McKenna discussing this in a lecture. He said that early spiritual adventurers were analogous to worldly explorers, in the sense that their first reports are very empirical, and discuss the flora, fauna, and climate of the region. Only with repeated testimony are we able to put the reports together and create something like a useable map. In other words, if one explorer has described the landscape of El Salvador, it won't be helpful to the person who lands, say, at Plymouth Rock.

Obviously, the problem is only more complex in the multidimensional world of the human subject. Here we confront Hayek's "knowledge problem," in that we are also dealing with a non-linear system that has an infinite amount of information. Imagine trying to "map the economy." We can do it, but only with very crude statistics such as GNP, or money supply, or rate of inflation. And no one can say how the variables will interact in real time, so the system is fundamentally unpredictable. Nor do these statistics say anything about particular individuals, and certainly not about their interior states.

People who are "surprised" that Al Gore should leave his wife are simply naive about the unpredictable nature of the complex system of the psyche -- very similar to those loons and crackpots who think they can predict what the weather will be like in a hundred years.

Now, it is impossible to navigate in the absence of a map, of some kind of representation of reality, even it is just the sun or stars. In the absence of a map, one can only wander this way and that. This is doubly true of a human life, in that, if you don't know where you're going, you're sure to get there. Alternatively, if you don't change directions, you're likely to end up where you're headed.

In space there are six directions, north, south, east, west, up, and down. In psychic space, all orthodox traditions testify to the existence an enduring world of vertical space that has an up and down, which is represented on our map by Ø <-- (•) --> O. But there are many well known features between (•) and O, on the one hand, and between (•) and Ø on the other.

The problem is, modern man has tossed aside the most useful maps of this territory, which condemns him to drifting around in hyperspace like a born again caveman following his appetites. In so doing, he is "discovering" things that were well known by our furbears, and, more often than not, confusing these mere features of the landscape with the destination. Not only that, but the postmodern neanderthal, or proglodyte, often confuses a psychic hellhole with a vacation spot, or even a place to set up permanent residence.

The modern university is testimony to this kind of perverse mapmaking. At the very least, spending four years at one of these institutions should result not just in a diploma -- or license to steal -- but in an adequate map of reality in order to conduct safe passage on the human journey.

But again, more often than not, the university graduate emerges with a map that is even worse than the one he came in with (cf. Obama). He will quite literally not know up from down or inside from out or Israel from Iran. For example, to internalize deconstruction is to say that there are really no objective maps, that all the maps are based upon power, and that the map means anything one wishes it to mean.

Or, to internalize materialism is to say that there are no interior maps at all. Rather, if we can only obtain a detailed enough map of the exterior, that will automatically map the interior as well. Multiculturalism insists that the human map has no up or down, while moral relativism says that one man's map is another man's toilet paper (and vice versa).

As the old wise crack goes, the leftist dreams of systems so perfect, that no one will need to be good. This is no joke, for the essence of their pneumapathology resides in their defective map making -- the belief that all human problems can be located on their exterior map, and have nothing to do with morality. Problem with capitalism? It's a few greedy fat cats on Wall Street, as Obama said a couple of days ago. Problem with poverty? It has nothing whatsoever to do with the behavior of people who remain in poverty. There is no "map to success," such as staying in school, avoiding illegal drugs, and not having children out of wedlock.

Anyway, back to Pieper. In discussing human virtue, he is really describing the landscape between (•) and O, using detailed maps that have been preserved and developed over the past 2000 years or more. Again, virtue is "the steadfastness of man's orientation toward the realization of his nature, that is, toward good" and "an ennobling of man's nature that entirely surpasses what he 'can be' of himself."

To say that our orientation to the transcendental good allows us to surpass ourselves, is another way of saying that human beings are uniquely privileged to participate in the divine nature, so that the human adventure is ultimately a journey from image to likeness. This is where virtue, truth, meaning, happiness, and joy are all situated.

To be continued.....

Setting Up Camp On the Sacred Mountain and Enjoying the View

Now that this post has been written, it seems to me to be more of a summary and consolidation of our little journey so far. It is as if we have set up camp and are enjoying the view, as we rest in preparation for our next assault upon on the summit. So get a good night's rest, and we'll break camp tomorrow.

As we have been discussing, the now-and-not yet of (•) --> O maps the human journey from outer to inner and existence to essence, toward the Being without whom our life is not real. It is why we're here, because in the absence this sufficient reason, there is no other way to explain why this journey exists, nor why it is so universal (cf. The Spiritual Ascent: A Compendium of the World's Wisdom).

To try to account for this trajectory on wholly naturalistic grounds is analogous to affirming that eyes exist but that vision doesn't. But if vision exists, it is surely in order to see. And if (•) --> O occurs, it is in order to evolve, specifically, in faith, hope, and love toward the true, good, and beautiful, respectively (although the categories are all interlinked in an organic manner).

The very possibility of truth, love, and beauty only exists because O casts a shadow back in time (or down in vertical space, if you prefer). These three transcendentals (the good, true, and beautiful) -- or their "degrees," to be precise -- are all located on the right side of our Ø <-- (•) --> O schematic. Conversely, sin, falsehood, ugliness, Helen Thomas -- each of these may be located on the left hand side. Human choice, i.e., free will, is located at that vertical innersection between O and Ø.

This is simply a truism, even for the atheist, for surely the atheist -- we're being charitable here -- wishes to move "closer" to truth and to avoid "falling" into error? Or to be a "good person," not a flaming assoul? This is not something that can be said of any other animal, which simply is what it is, a stationary point in the fabric of existence. No pig fails to achieve the essence of pighood, not even Rosie O'Donnell.

Now, as Pieper explains, "the 'way' of man leads to death." You could even say that death is his ultimate meaning, since it is where he accidently came from and where he necessarily returns at the conclusion of this fleeting absurdity known as Life. There is simply no avoiding the fact that the life of natural man bears upon death and therefore nothingness.

That being the case, there is no rational basis for hope, faith, nobility, justice, or anything else, really. I don't mind the atheists who are honest about this. It's the ones who try to wrench truth, goodness or beauty from Ø that are so annoying and childish. But as a psychotic patient of mine once said, "you can only get so much blood from a turnip." And you can get bupkis from Ø, precisely.

Even the atheist must concede that the life of the believer bears upon something transcending death, even if he insists that the latter isn't real. The believer sees this target and tries to hit it, while the atheist insists that there is no target to hit (even while absurdly maintaining that atheism is the only real target, and that those who fail to hit it are in error).

Man's journey is rooted in the reality of time. If, as some physicists say, time were just a "stubborn illusion" or a mere quantitative measure, then (•) --> O would not be possible. But as Pieper explains, "man's 'way' is 'temporality.' Time, in fact, exists only in reference to the transitoriness of man." And we can only know this because a part of us -- our spirit -- stands "above" time.

I should immediately amend that statement, because in reality, spirit is not a "part," but our essence. In an analogy used by Steinsaltz, the soul is not a point, but a "continuous line of spiritual being" that stretches from the general source (O) to "the specific body of a particular person," (•).

You could say that this is the lifeline that God tosses down into our existence. It is not only the source of our wholeness, but its very ground and possibility. An assoul is precisely someone who is not a whole but an a-hole. Nor is he the existential hole that only spirit can fill, but already full of himself.

You could say that O is Absolute Being, where essence and existence are one (or not-two). In contrast, man is "not his own essence." Rather, "his essence is 'in the process of becoming."

But there can be no real becoming for the man oriented to Ø , who is "imprisoned in nothingness." Even so, being that man is condemned to freedom, turning toward death and nothingness is a choice -- a choice which, ironically, wouldn't even be possible unless its alternative were a real possibility as well. To say that "free will exists in order to choose nothing" is really to say that free will doesn't exist in any meaningful sense.

Here is how Pieper describes the human situation, as we hang suspended between O and Ø : "The whole span of creaturely existence between being and nothingness can never be understood, then, as though the relationship to nothingness were simply to be assigned equal rank with the relationship to being -- or were even to be ranked before or above it" (Pieper).

Rather, Ø is only even possible because it is a function of O, just as falsehood cannot exist in the absence of truth, or ugliness without beauty. Ø is "parasitic" on O, so to speak, as death is parasitic on Life.

Therefore, the human adventure "is not a directionless back-and-forth between being and nothingness." Rather, "it leads toward being and away from nothingness; it leads to realization, not annihilation, although this realization is 'not yet' fulfilled and the fall into nothingness is 'not yet' impossible" (Pieper).

Which is why both existential despair and its useless sister, certainty of salvation, "are in conflict with the truth of reality" (ibid.), and not befitting the magnanimous gentleman who is going places in this life. With the fear and trembling appropriate to such a steep climb.

Spiritual Words and the Realities To Which They Refer

In the Book, I addressed the problem of language vis-a-vis Spirit, something that doesn't seem to trouble my competitors. But ultimately, this is the reason why I came up with those annoying pneumaticons, so that we don't pretend we know what we're talking about just because we have a word for it; or, alternatively, to avoid distorting the reality in question because of accretions and associations that eventually change or saturate the original meaning of the word -- the way the left, for example, has totally distorted the plain meaning of the Constitution.

Because of the fluid and dynamic nature of language, this happens all the time. Language is constantly adapting to new realities as they emerge. In a metaphor Terence McKenna once used, it is as if mankind pours language over the world it encounters, so there is a constant dialectic between language and world. But we can be forced to adapt to a world in such away that it eclipses other worlds.

This is especially problematic for domains that transcend the senses, since language is not necessarily well adapted to them. It is potentially well adapted (or at least adequately so), but again, it is entirely possible for a person to deploy religious terms and concepts without having had any experience whatsoever of the realities to which they refer.

And critically, this doesn't only apply to atheists, but to theists as well. For example, any yahoo can attend a theological seminary and learn the lingo -- i.e., memorize the map. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the person has actually experienced the realities to which the map refers.

Alternatively, it is possible for a person to have genuine contact with higher worlds, but to lack a stable and specific language to communicate it to others. When this happens, you can end up with occultists and cranks who come up with their own eccentric system to map the spiritual realm. There is often some truth to these maps, but they usually die with the person who came up with them, although a small and devoted cult may linger on. (Or sometimes they can just make the shit up, a la L. Ron Hubbard, in order to dupe people who know no better.)

In our materialistic and quantitative age, we see how language has adapted to this new reality to the exclusion of the real and enduring world of perennial human values. And while religion is supposed to be the guardian and transmitter of these values, it too has become increasingly materialized along with the culture, so that religion ends up in the polarized, worldly forms of "liberation theology," on the one hand, and a literal minded fideism on the other. Each of these is a result of the materialization of the psyche, so that this type of religion no longer refers to the transcendent source of religion (nor does it adequately map the familiar signposts and landmarks of the spiritual journey).

The symbolic scheme we have been discussing in recent posts -- Ø <-- (•) --> O -- goes directly to this issue. As I mentioned yesterday, the two sides of the schematic represent two completely different (but interpenetrating) worlds, Ø and O. You could say that science and logic map the left hand world, while theology, mysticism, ethics, intellection (gnosis), and aesthetics map the right. Naturally, a complete account of reality requires both sides. But unfortunately, most people seem to come down on one side or the other, and then use one side to map and describe the other.

Again, this generates foolishness for both atheists and theists. In short, materialists try to reduce O to Ø, while certain religious types try to map Ø with O, which just doesn't work -- cf. the Islamic world.

Having said that, the (sane) theist is always closer to Reality than the atheist, since the atheist doesn't even acknowledge Reality in all its fullness. Furthermore, to suggest that O could be derived from, and fully explained by, Ø is philosophical and metaphysical nonsense. Rather, Ø is clearly a creation -- or prolongation, if you like -- of O, although, at the same time, it is a relatively autonomous domain that is governed by its own set of rules.

But it should go without saying that these rules are not absolute, otherwise there would be no way to "escape" them. In other words, the cosmos would be a closed system with no interior. But because Ø is a prolongation or involution of O, the cosmos is a vertically open system that bears upon its transcendent source.

If this were not the case, then religion -- not to mention self-consciousness, truth, beauty, virtue -- would all be strictly impossible. Ø is ultimately in O, not vice versa. Or, to be precise, O is immanent in Ø, while simultaneously transcending it. Things can be no other way and still be.

Along these lines, Walt referred me to a statement by J.G. Bennett that conforms to this line of thought. He notes that in contemporary times, many people have lost their innate sense of the vast difference between Ø and O, and how our whole life depends upon whether we -- or (•) -- are oriented to one or the other. What this ultimately means is that contemporary horizontal man has lost the very point of his life, its sufficient reason.

Anyway, Bennett wrote that "I suppose this is not a very serious conflict for most people," and that "they do not feel it matters one way or the other because life has to be lived just the same."

But (•) is confronted with this very choice; before him "there are two very different kinds of lives. Man is just a machine among machines, but a machine that can be free, can be not a machine. This would not be possible if there were not different levels of existence. On one level of existence, man is a machine living among machines; on another level of existence, there is the possibility of freedom. There are two worlds open to man -- not one world far away and one here, but two worlds both here."

This is why the theological virtues we have been discussing -- faith, hope and love -- only apply to O, not to Ø. Indeed, applied to the latter, they are no longer virtuous; and not just because horizontal man collapses spirit to matter, but because it represents a kind of ontological insanity to place one's hope in matter, or to have faith in natural man, i.e., the human animal.

Also, to collapse O to Ø is the end of the human journey, period. Of course there will still be "movement" -- or agitation -- but it would be absurd to suggest that it's ultimately going anywhere but sideways. Progress of any kind implies a nonlocal end, or telos, that guides the constituent parts toward their purpose, or reason for being.

For a proper human being, O is his telos, and life is unthinkable without it. All of the most interesting and rewarding -- thrilling, even -- features of reality are situated on the (•) --> O side of the oquation (living there also makes everything down in Ø much more interesting and meaningful). I can't even imagine what it would be like to be exiled from O and condemned to Ø . What a grind that would be, with no way to breath the cool, spacious, celestial mountain air of heaven.

But to paraphrase Schuon, it is as if modern man is compressed and frozen under a thick sheet of ice; or alternatively, his essence is dissipated outward toward the periphery. The only way out of this dilemma is to fasten the will to one's highest aspiration and to become a truly free and magnanimous spirit, a Cʘʘn among men.

To be continued....

The Almighty B'ob, Master of Trolls

I dreamt that the Celtics thumped the Lakers tonight. Let's hope that this was not a pre-cognitive dream, and that Petey was just messing with me again. I actually woke up with a lump in my throat. I'm still bitter about Don Nelson's shot in game seven of the 1969 finals.

One other trivial item I want to mention. The other day I read a review of Christopher Hitchens' new memoir, in which it mentioned that he writes 1,000 words a day. That got me to wondering. How many words does Bob write? I checked a few of my posts, and they all came in at over 1,000 words. Being that I have written some 1500 posts, that means well over a million words.

And now you know why the arkive will never be organized, and why a second book is probably impossible. Unless I can find a way to cap this underwater gusher, but I have no idea how to do that. First I need Dupree to tell me whose ass to kick.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program. If we're going to seriously or even jocularly employ the Ø <-- (•) --> O schematic, the first thing we need to recognize is that (•) --> O is impossible and even unthinkable in the absence of the reverse flow of (•) <-- O, or grace. In fact, to think otherwise is one of those intrinsic heresies we've been gabbing about. And when I say "intrinsic," I mean that it is an error not just for a theology, but theology as such.

To put it another way, to the extent that one imagines that one can successfully approach God unaided and on one's own, this represents the most rank form of cosmic chutzpah and spiritual grandiosity, because it is really just a roundabout way of saying that you are God -- which, in a certain sense, you are (as is everything else, so it qualifies as a truism).

But this hardly means that the converse is true, that God is you. To paraphrase something Schuon said, before you can declare "I AM THAT," you had better realize the extent to which DUDE, NO WAY AM I THAT! Communion is only possible in separation, just as ignorance is a prerequisite of knowledge. Spiritually speaking, the peace, quiet, and openness of (o) and (---) are prior to (n). Or, first faith, then knowledge, faith being a kind of preconceptual foreknowledge.

The left and right sides of my schematic are literally different universes, which is why to be born again from above only changes everything.

Speaking of which, would it not be accurate to say that those readers who fundamentally mis- and disunderstand what I'm saying have not been so reborn, and that they are therefore trying to understand O through Ø -- that the left side doesn't know what the right side is doing? If this is the case, it would certainly explain the intrinsic stupidity of their questions and observations, would it not?

(And as always, I mean this literally, not as an insult. If you are being cosmically stupid, it is an act of mercy for someone to point it out to you. You needn't get sore about it. No one knows who you are. We're just goofing on you for the purposes of higher insultainment. Whack!)

Imagine, for example, a devoted reader who obsessively pores over each and every post, and still cannot penetrate the hull and reach the kernel. He says -- oh, I don't know, "but Bob, that's illogical!" What's really going on here? What if this person isn't only a malevolent, parochial, joyless, and ill-tempered troll, but is honestly confused. What to do? How to help him?

Well, first of all, is it not obvious that Bob cannot help such a person, since Bob may be qualified to be a nursemaid or au pair for a short time but certainly not your cosmic midwife? In a manner of speaking, of course. In other words, exactly who vested in me this power to awaken others from their spiritual slumber? I have never represented myself as some kind of "guru" or "spiritual master," and never will. All I know for certain is that some people say they benefit from these public verticalisthenic exercises in self-help. And that some say they don't benefit. But why the latter keep coming back is a bit puzzling.

For those who do benefit from my improvisational cogitations, I think we would find that, to a person, it is because they have already been -- however you wish to coonceptualize it -- "born again from above," so that their principial orientation is to O, not Ø (and certainly not to me, God forbid!). So for a premetanoiacal troll to ask me for answers I can never provide is a priori evidence of a problem I can't help them with, since -- for the benefit of morons and imbeciles, not regular readers -- I am not O. Rather, for the Raccoon, vertical re-orientation and grace are everything. We are not deus-it-oursophers.

I've mentioned this before, but I'm thinking of when a Christian student came to Schuon for guidance. He said words to the effect of, "fine. But just remember: Christ is your Master. So in response to that flurry of asinine questions and comments yesterday, I suppose my first question to them would be, "who is your Master?" The answer to that question should automatically provide answers to the others.

It's a little startling to me how Pieper's and Zizioulas' books are lining up on this discussion. I keep going back and forth between one and the other, and it's as if the two are conversing in my head. I find it fascinating that one of our trolls persistently mischaracterizes our position as one of certitude and finality, when precisely the opposite is true. Only the atheist has that kind of bovine certitude. Again, for the person in (•) --> O, we are always on the way, never at our final deustination.

In this regard, Pieper has a fascinating discussion about the delicate balance required of the already but not yet, and the various vices and sins that result from over- or underemphasizing one side or the other. In other words, the "already" implies a kind of certitude, while the "not yet" implies imperfection, progress, doubt, "seeing through a glass darkly," etc.

He begins by defining the nature of virtue, which is "the enhancement of the human person in a way befitting his nature." Virtue involves "the most a man can be," but again, it is always more of an orientation than an accomplishment. It is "the steadfastness of man's orientation toward the realization of his nature, that is, toward good." I cannot imagine a clearer description of (•) --> O.

But again, as alluded to above, (•) --> O is impossible, precisely. Rather, "theological virtue is an ennobling of man's nature that entirely surpasses what he 'can be' of himself" (emphasis mine). It is "the steadfast orientation toward a fulfillment and a beatitude that are not 'owed' to natural man," a transnatural "potentiality for being" that is "grounded in a real, grace-filled participation in the divine nature..."

Although Pieper is, of course, speaking in a Christian context, it is difficult to imagine a better description of the (•) <-- O that must complement (•) --> O if we are to get anywhere, vertically speaking. (Alternatively, one could simply say, no ↓, no ↑.) And memo to trolls: stop trying to make me your ↓, and get a Master -- and a clue. Then perhaps you'll understand what's going on here.

That's 1150 words. To be continued tomorrow....

This is important enough to embed. It describes what happens when a nation loses contact with O:

Atheism: There's Nothing To It!

No one commented on my little schematic the other day, but it really does tell the whole story about faith, hope, and love, and about man's ontological situation in general. To simplify it, we could just say (and please don't be put off by the symbols, which shouldn't be difficult to understand, but which will accumulate meaning through their use):

O
↑
(•)
↓
Ø

That's you in the middle (•), right between Nothing (Ø) below and the Absolute (O) above. But existence is never static, therefore you are always moving in one direction or the other, even if you're not trying. (One thinks of the three gunas of Vedic metaphysics, which convey the idea that human beings are always rising, falling, or expanding with the cosmic winds; it is also interesting to note that these correlate with creation, destruction, and preservation -- i.e., the trinity of Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu, respectively.)

Now, as we were saying yesterday, the Raccoon lives in the Light of the already but not yet. In contrast, the existentialist, the village atheist, the materialist, the secular leftist, the troll -- all try to live and navigate their lives in that beam of darkness we call Ø.

And please note, this is not some kind of insult or jab, but an objective account of their own acknowledged metaphysic. Any variety of materialism obviously reduces to nothing, unless you're just too stupid, frightened, or dishonest to draw out the ultimate implications of your first principle.

For a Raccoon, being is dependent upon O. Therefore, all reality is infused with the light and truth of O -- not to mention the beauty which is its penumbra.

Furthermore -- and we'll get more into this later -- just as truth is the light of O, I think we can all agree that love is its "warmth." But where there's heat there's light (and vice versa). Not for nothing does Genesis characterize carnal love as knowledge. Oops! He said a dirty world! But not really. Only if you forget about O. Indeed, you might even say that pornography is the sexuality of Ø.

Unless you are severely retarded and completely stuck in the now, your life is either oriented to O or Ø. To be oriented toward the former means to live in faith and hope, while to be oriented to the latter means to live in concrete. By definition it means that life is hopeless, and that there is no reason whatsoever to have "faith." You already know your future and final end, which is death and nothing more.

But since you know the future, the future infuses the now, which is why you have that damned hellhound on your trail. Everything you do and think is just a distraction from the reality of Ø, and you know it. You are constantly receiving "visitations" from your hopeless future, from the black angel of Death, which is why you have created your Death Culture (in other words your frantic denial of Death always contains traces of Death, precisely.)

I hope this isn't going too slow, but I can only proceed at the rhythm of O.

Everything in the cosmos -- with the exception of the human being -- simply "is what it is," and nothing more. But a human being always lives in the "not yet." Only a human being is aware of time, and therefore stands outside or above it (while still being in it, of course). Thus, as Pieper explains, this "not yet" is a janus-faced thingy which "includes both a negative and a positive element: the absence of fulfillment [Ø] and the orientation toward fulfillment [O]."

Pieper further explains that the former orientation results in a closer "proximity to nothingness that is the very nature of created things."

In other words, the Raccoon is quite aware of Ø, which is a necessary condition of existence, of a creation separate from the Creator. This is important to appreciate, because while horizontal man does not recognize O, the Raccoon actually acknowledges the "reality" (so to speak, i.e., the relative reality) of the materialist's god, Ø.

To put it another way, you could say that Ø is simply the ultimate destination of man's fallenness. Zizioulas explains this well, noting that the state of fallen existence involves "the rupture between Being and Communion," or between O and ʘ, and therefore resulting in (•) and even worse.

Let me explain in more detail, or put some flesh on those bony pneumaticons. Zizioulas notes that "the fall of man -- and for that matter, sin -- is not to be understood as bringing about something new," since "there is no creative power in evil."

Rather, this fall -- and it really is a "fall," from verticality to horizontality -- should be understood as "revealing and actualizing the limitations and potential dangers inherent in creaturehood, if creation is left to itself." This is because if man denies O, he makes himself "the ultimate point of reference in existence," which is to say, he will "become like God," authorized to determine for himself what is good and what is evil. In merging with Ø, he is the god of all nothingness, or a king in hell.

And that's how you end up at MSNBC.

Now any form of materialism -- I hope this isn't too obvious -- necessarily makes Ø the ultimate frame of reference, but this ends -- and must end -- in fragmentation, the impossibility of truth, and hatred of the Other (who also rightfully claims to be God, the bastard!). Why is this? Because "the fall consists in the refusal to make being dependent on communion, in a rupture between truth and communion" (Zizioulas).

In order to understand why this must be so, you must see that Truth is prior to Being. If Being is prior to Truth -- as existentialists believe -- then the simple fact of your (•) becomes the ultimate substance of truth. In other words, your so-called truth actually emanates from Ø. And you don't "commune" with this truth so much as sink into it and dissolve, nothing to Nothing. You are just one fragmented object among an infinite number of others. Frankly, you're a leftist, but we won't get into that. I just want to make sure Stevenonymous is paying obsessive attention.

But if the essence of existence is communion -- and therefore Love -- then your union with truth and reality, O, is prior to your alienation, or fall, from it.

Which is again where faith and hope -- and, of course, love -- come in, which are nothing more than orientation toward reality, or O.

The Future is Now Because Now is Not Yet

Continuing our discussion of the theological virtue of hope. As we mentioned yesterday, hope is thoroughly entangled with the idea that we are on a journey. But this journey is obviously not to a physical destination. Rather, "it refers to the innermost structure of created nature," and is the "inherent 'not yet' of the finite being." Human being means being on the way to humanness -- or to fully realized human personhood, to be precise.

This gets a little complicated, but the fact that we are created simultaneously introduces the possibility of hope and of hopelessness, depending upon whether we turn toward or away from our source. Ironically, the man who imagines himself to be wholly self-sufficient turns away from this source and necessarily falls into a kind of loveless nihilism (or at least that is its tendency and end). The existential price for this denial and refusal is what we might call hell.

Let me see if I can back up and explain this more clearly. As it so happens, I'm reading another important book at the same time, Being as Communion. Pieper's Faith, Hope, Love was so fraught with implications, that I needed to put it down for awhile and assimilate what I'd read so far.

But this book is equally profound, plus it is resonating with the other one in such a way that they are feeding off one another and creating a luminous arc in the space between them, i.e., in my melon. Thus the need to post on Saturday and Sunday to try to keep up with the flow of (n). As always, this verticalisthenic exercise is as much for me as it is for readers. It's probably a little sloppy as well, but at least it's completely half baked.

Anyway, Zizioulas writes that "the being of God is a relational being," so that "without the concept of communion it would not be possible to speak of the being of God." It seems that many theologians have failed to properly draw out the implications of the Trinity, for its immediate implication is that God cannot be a "substance"; or, to be precise, the substance would be posterior to the essence, which is pure relation -- a relation that ultimately reduces to love.

I remember when I was a child and forced to attend Sunday school, on the wall in large gold letters was the statement GOD IS LOVE. Of course it made no sense to a child, and as I grew older it just seemed like sentimental nonsense.

But in reality, this conclusion was a result of the daring and sophisticated thinking of the early fathers, which transformed God from a remote and abstract substance to the very essence and possibility of personhood. The latter is in sharp contrast to mere biological humanness, which is given to us by nature. Real personhood is intrinsically transnatural and can only be conferred from on high (which is why in order to progress along the path, one must be "born again from above").

I'm not sure if Zizioulas' ideas are controversial, but they absolutely resonate in me, vis-a-vis my own ghostly spookulations regarding the intersubjectively trinitarian nature of the developing psyche. A human being is irreducibly intersubjective. I'm not going to make a rehash of the entire argument here, as it is covered in detail in the book. Suffice it to say that our own mysterious intersubjectivity is an analogue of God's interior life, so that to be means to be in relation. There is no being without relation, not even in God:

"There is no true being without communion. Nothing exists as an 'individual,' conceivable in itself. Communion is an ontological category" (Zizioulas).

To turn it around, to deny this ontological communion is to eradicate the person at the root. Thus, any kind of materialistic metaphysic that crudely regards man as a self-enclosed thing is nothing less than ontological genocide. There is no scientistic way to get from the biological human to the unique person whose being is loving interior relation.

The latter conception frees man from the "ontological necessity" that bounds him in the closed system of biology, and instead renders him an open system, both horizontally and vertically. Again, the Person is not "an adjunct to being, a category we add" to a supposedly more fundamental biological entity.

Rather, Personhood is itself the substance of being, both its principle and its (vertical) cause. Our substance -- and God's substance -- "never exists in a 'naked' state," the result being that we may affirm that real personhood is an uncreated mode. It is intrinsic to God, and given to us -- if we accept it. (Interestingly, Zizioulas derives our own absolute uniqueness from the uniqueness of the only begotten Son.)

If we choose not to accept it, we are essentially choosing our own ontological self-sufficiency. But again, the existentialists are correct that this radical freedom necessarily ends in nihilsm, so that the person becomes the negator of his own ontology, which is ultimately loving relation. Zizioulas:

"It thus becomes evident that the only exercise of freedom in an ontological manner is love.... Love is not an emanation or 'property' of the substance of God," a "secondary property of being." Rather, love constitutes God's being, and is his very "mode of existence." Which in turn introduces the human dilemma, which is "either freedom as love, or freedom as negation."

So, what is the proper relation between the biological human and the post-biological person, or between the old man and the new? As Zizioulas suggests, it implies a "movement, a progress toward realization" rooted in hope.

You might say that for vertical man, his personal roots are aloft, his biological leaves and branches down below. Thus, the person is "maintained and nourished, by the future. The truth and the ontology of the person belong to the future," and "are images of the future."

This speaks to the paradoxical position of vertical man, that of "already but not yet." For to draw our substance from the above is to draw it from the future, so that both are in a sense already here -- as they say, the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, but men do not see it. Not with their biological eyes, anyway.