Compulsory Utopia and the Lunar Eclipse of Reality

About the "inverse esoterism" of the left. In the real world, vertical space is characterized by the descending and ascending energies we call (↓) and (↑) -- or just say grace and effort, if you want to keep the arrows out of it.

But the purpose of the arrow symbols is to avoid saturating the space with concepts, so as to keep it clear for the acquisition of experience. In other words, the concept of "grace" is based upon an experience that billions of human beings have had. But if one concretizes the word, then one's preconceptions can actually interfere with, or eclipse, the experience.

More generally, everything about religion was originally rooted in experience. Or, put conversely, nothing about it should be inaccessible in principle to experience -- at least someone's experience.

For example, I am not personally a saint. But I am utterly convinced that some people are -- that they have undergone the process of sanctification to its further reaches. And even leaving the existence of the saints aside, we can all have the experience of the sacred -- or of purity, or of holiness -- so we have only to imagine what it would be like to more or less be in that space all the time.

Reality is what persists even if one doesn't believe it. Therefore, if the vertical dynamism of (↓↑) is real, it cannot disappear just because some ideologue refuses to acknowledge it. Thus, in the words of Niemeyer -- an acolyte of Voegelin who some say understood Voegelin better than Voegelin --

"Ideological activism, then, presupposes certain intellectual and spiritual movements which can be seen as two, going in opposite directions."

Fascinating. Tell me more.

"Ontologically, the first of these movements denies reality to the given world of experience and proclaims the reality of a phantasmal realm."

This is what we might call "false ↑," in that it is formally quite similar to the religious person's recognition that there is something wrong with the world, and by extension, himself. Thus, it sponsors the urge to transcend both self and world -- or to be in the world but not of it.

But the leftist reverses things: he is still proudly of the world, but no longer in it. Rather, he is now -- without realizing it, of course -- in philosophical fairyland, relaxing in the comfort and safety of his own ideological delusions.

Now, if he would only stay there, he wouldn't be such a pest. But just as comedians secretly long to do drama, tenured activists -- or the media-politico-academic industrial complex -- aren't content to orally gratify one another, but want to screw around with the rest of us.

In short, there is the matter of that second arrow, (↓). What happens to it? Niemeyer: "the second movement pulls norms pertaining to the phantasmal realm and its present unreality into the world of experience and orients activities by them."

D'oh!

It's the difference between evangelizing and compelling, or between religious freedom and tyranny. Say what you want about my jehovial witticisms, but when I knock on your door -- or rather, you on mine -- I don't drag you in and force you at gunpoint to accept my worldview.

Not so the meddling ↓deologue, who wants to rearrange your world -- and your head -- down to the last detail. Every hair on your head is counted -- and that's a threat!

You see, the leftist's (↑) has given him a special insight into the nature of reality and the destination of history, so it would be cruel and uncompassionate for him to deny us the benefit -- the grace (↓) -- of his vision.

Note that the leftist's orientation is the precise opposite of philosophy. True philosophy involves a love of both reality and truth, i.e., it is "philo-ontic" even prior to being philo-sophic.

But ideology is miso-ontic and therefore miso-sophic -- always involving hatred of the existing world and possession of its secret truth. And if you do not know the secret -- which you obviously don't, or you wouldn't understand this blog -- it is only because you have been brainwashed by -- by whatever is expedient, e.g., the patriarchy, white privilege, heteronormativity, imperialism, Christianism, etc.

In other words, the leftist -- as always! -- accuses others of precisely what he engages in, which is to say, eclipsing reality by escaping into ideology.

In the western tradition, politics is "a matter of action within a world which [man] knows not to have made himself" (ibid.). But the ideologue "fancies himself engaged in making a world that so far has not had any being. Teleologically speaking, political practice is switched from the time dimension of the present" toward "the making of a preknown future."

Therefore, from the warped perspective of these pestilent Emissaries of the Future, "the present is something to be removed" in favor of "the phantasmal future whose origin is in the maker" -- the human maker.

You can't say Obama didn't warn us: on the eve of the 2008 election he told us to prepare ourselves for a fundamental transformation of the United States.

Bottom line: we hold very different truths to be self-evident, i.e., those of the founders at the beginning vs. those of the gnostics at the end of history. For the gnostics, the founders are just old (and white and male and European and rich) and in the way.

As a last asnide, the idea that human beings may gang together in the form of a state and redeem history on their own might be the most impressively pathological one in man's cognitive toolbox. It has certainly been the most deadly.

Related: "There is a puzzle before us. We are at the beginning. What are the steps to re-instill an aspirational and moral culture to all our people?... And how do we keep the vandals from ever-scrambling our efforts?

".... [P]erhaps we will have to teeter at the abyss before there can be an American Awakening.... A rejection of the addiction of dependency. An embrace that all your neighbors and countrymen are at Liberty to pursue their own happiness without your interference...."

Bob's Famous "I Have a Reality" Speech

I am always struck by the inverse parallels between leftism and legitimate religion. Man's nature is to be religious, and he cannot rid himself of this orientation, any more than a fish can rid himself of water and still presume to swim. We've all got it in us, but it just comes out in perverse ways in those obnoxious, irreligious weiners.

To quote Schuon, just as "the wings of birds prove the existence of air," man's religious response "proves the existence of its content" (in a proportionate way, of course, conforming to the intrinsic nature of the Mystery; we are not suggesting that religion poses no challenges at all!).

For a normal person, the shadow of a cat will spontaneously "prove the presence of the real cat" -- even if the cat is not seen -- so the crank who demands proof is frankly a little off. He's missing something that is beyond obvious for the vast majority of human beings. But if he wants to spend his life trying to prove cats don't exist, go right ahead. After all, the creator gave us free will.

For example, who is more moralistic than the leftist scold who pretends all morality is relative? In Between Nothingness and Paradise, Niemeyer quotes Lenin, who wrote that for the communist, "morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle," and defined by "that which serves to destroy the old exploiting society..."

With these irreligious religious principles in mind, we can understand the inverted morality of the left, for example, vis-a-vis the George Zimmerman case.

For the leftist, morality is deduced from the class struggle -- or, in more contemporary terms, from the distinction between victims and white privilege. As such, the logic of deduction demands that the victim -- Zimmerman -- be transformed into an intrinsically guilty "white" person, and that the thuggressor -- Martin -- be transformed into an innocent child.

This is obviously a perversion of universal principles of morality, which apply to particular acts, not to universal groups. In other words, the left sneaks the principle of universality -- and absoluteness -- into the group (which doesn't even exist in any concrete or homogeneous way). I don't exonerate Zimmerman because he is a "white Hispanic," but because there can be no natural law more natural than defending oneself from a vicious human animal pounding one's skull into the pavement.

In the real world, the most dangerous place for a black child is in his mother's womb, and the second most dangerous place is among other black (male) children and young men. But these are empirical and statistical observations that cannot be deduced from leftist principles. Indeed, they are hatefacts (I believe coined by Greg Gutfeld), so to notice them is to expose oneself as a hater. It's so easy to be a leftist!

But this is what the ideologist does more generally: that is, deduce reality from his principles, instead of actually experiencing reality. This is a constant danger to human beings, because we are indeed situated in the space between the empirical world and general principles. It is easy to default in one direction or the other, but to succeed in doing so is to eclipse experience.

This applies not just to the left per se, but to all ideologies, say, Darwinism. Anyone can see the partial truth of natural selection, but what spiritually normal person can take the vast leap of faith required to elevate Darwinism to a total explanation and thereby contract the horizons of subjectivity to a virtual nothing? By comparison, faith in the Incarnation is just a step away, requiring no great leap over chasms of contradictory data and experience.

I was thinking too of how the left inverts the great Nothing at the heart of the cosmos. What this means is that the left doesn't just mimic the exoteric aspects of religion, but even -- or perhaps especially -- the esoteric.

In fact, one might say that genuine religion is esoteric by implication, whereas leftism is esoteric in principle, deriving its exoterism -- i.e., activism -- by deduction. This goes along with Voegelin's (among many others) observation that ideologies are modern forms of Gnosticism that always vouchsoph a hidden knowledge about the secret order of the world.

The progressive, for example, presumes to know the direction of history (even though his materialism forbids the existence of any transcendent goal or purpose). At any rate, the idea that one may tell truth from a calendar is so 19th century! Nevertheless, it doesn't stop the left from, for example, redefining marriage based upon their special insight into the direction of history.

Note also that the left, because it overvalues a narrow kind of surface cognition, relies upon the "ignorance" of realities so deep that it is difficult to put them into words. For example, until the last couple of decades, no one thought it necessary to explain why marriage is limited to members of the opposite sex.

If every cultural institution needs to be exhaustively explained and defended, then nothing can be so explained and defended -- certainly not "homosexual marriage"! But that is another hatefact, because leftist moral deduction again demands that existing structures of exploitation -- AKA the real world -- be abolished.

About that great Nothing alluded to above. Oscar Milosz had the proper sense of it, writing of how modern man has repudiated this transcendent No-thing, the "only intelligible container of a universe which is as free and as pure as God's thought, the Nothing superior to any notion of finite and infinite" (quoted in Caldecott).

For the apophatheads the left, the real being of the world is located in the future they wish to bring about. Meanwhile, there is just non-being and alienation from that blissful state -- e.g., the "black alienation" described by Obama in last week's infantile discourse on race (no offense to infants).

This sets up the present world as a kind of bad nothing, for which reason, say, Michelle Obama could honestly affirm that her very first experience of being proud of America occurred with her husband's political success in 2008. Prior to that? Nothing.

But this is what happens when one rejects existing reality for possible ones. Martin Luther King had a dream. But he also had a reality.

For Marx, man is labor. This is a rather startling and nightmarish inversion of the Raccoon view that man is ultimately slack, which is at antipodes to labor. Rather, it is an end in itself, and therefore a means to nothing.

For the Raccoon, the most useful things are the most useless -- like this post -- having no purpose or utility but to perhaps dilate the present moment and open out into the great wide Nothing-Everything. I mean, if you can't enjoy the now, then what -- and when -- can you enjoy?

Which reminds me. They used to say the aristocracy lives for the past, the bourgeois for the future, and the lower classes for the now. But contemporary leftwing success depends upon alienating everyone from the now, and instead living for the impossible Sugar Candy Mountain of the future. Like Obamacare, the dream must be deferred, on pain of revealing itself for the nightmare it is in the present.

Oases of Slack in the Ideological Desert

I find myself in that neutral blandscape between what I had been blogging about and what I will be or could be blogging about, but with no impulsion to proceed one way or the other.

In fact, "impulsion" is the wrong word, because it only works when it is an attraction. Trying to push one's way in is like trying to press Jello through a small hole -- a hole called the present. I long ago gave up trying to do that. Much easier to be sucked up and in through the hole.

Also, we're still being plagued by the Great Remodeling. Might seem like a small thing to you, but I can't even enter my own liberatoreum today because the hazmat pests are removing the cottage cheese ceiling (which apparently contains an infinitesimal amount of asbestos). Had to remove every last object from the Divine Orifice -- the sacred omphalos of Upper Tonga -- which is beyond overkill, but this is California. I'm sure it's more dangerous walking to the mailbox and exposing oneself to the sun.

So I'm sitting here in utterly unfamiliar blogging territory, at the dining room table, and it's just not the same.

I know. First World Problems.

Every day I have to start all over, but at least there's a trace of continuity. Then again, this condition of wandering in the bewilderness is a permanent feature of human existence in tension toward the divine ground, as Voegelin puts it. I read his Autobiographical Reflections over the weekend, and he says that the essential task of philosophy -- real, literal philosophy -- is to live in the erotic tension toward transcendent wisdom:

"The center of consciousness I found to be the experience of participation, meaning thereby the reality of being in contact with reality outside myself." Thus, human consciousness "is neither in the subject nor in the world of objects but In-Between, and that means In-Between the poles of man and the reality that he experiences."

This obviously cannot be explained by -- or reduced to -- biology, because this mysterious "place" is nowhere to be found in the physical world. Rather, it is specifically in between a physical world and a world of pure transcendence at the other end. Thus the soul is the loving "sensorium of transcendence" (i.e., a love directed toward the transcendent ground).

In the past I have referred to this as the "transitional space" (coined by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott), and it is the discovery, colonization, and expansion of this space that characterizes our human journey -- or exodeus -- through the bewilderness.

The bewilderness -- the desert, if you like -- is this very space, and one cannot collapse this space without cashing in one's humanness to one degree or another. It is always "dehumanizing" to do so, but that hardly stops humans from doing it.

And in our day, the principle way to do it is via ideology, e.g., positivism, scientism, leftism, Darwinism, or any other dogma that freezes us at one end or the other of this Great Divide where all the light gets in.

One cannot turn this space into an object or system, as much as man tries to do so. Rather, it is "a flow of participatory reality in which reality becomes luminous to itself" (Voegelin). Nowhere else but here can the light be seen -- or participated in, to be precise.

What is so shocking is that this mysterious space is ordered. Why should it be ordered? I would say for the same reason we discover order at the levels of physics and biology. "By order," writes Voegelin, "is meant the structure of reality as experienced as well as the attunement of man to an order that is not of his making, i.e., the cosmic order."

To exist outside this order is to exist in a state of alienation, and the purpose of ideology is to "cure" this alienation in a way that only perpetuates itself (which is why, for example, leftism can never work, especially to the extent that it works). Alienation from the divine ground -- or logos -- is not only a "withdrawal from oneself" but "from reason in existence," so no manmade system can put the truthpaste back into the tube.

One who tries to do so must inevitably "arrive at the death of God, not because God is dead but because divine reason has been rejected in the egophanic revolt" -- the latter defined as "defiant self assertion claiming independence from a transcendent ground."

Which would be fine, if the ideologues would simply leave us alone. But "Anybody with an informed and reflective mind" can see that we are "hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language..."

And one "cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion" -- i.e., you can't reason with a liberal. Rather, one can only "make them the object of investigation" (and insultainment, I might add).

We may take comfort in the fact that this is hardly the first time in history that "language has been degraded and corrupted to such a degree that it can no longer be used for expressing the truth of existence" (ibid). Moreover, "there are always enclaves" where one may continue the journey despite "the intellectual terrorism of institutions such as the mass media, university departments, foundations, and commercial publishing houses."

To paraphrase Voegelin, no one -- at least in the west -- is obligated to participate in the aberrations, disorders, deformities, and perversions of his day. But it's a constant struggle against the hostile, infrahuman forces that would compel us to do so.

Circumnavelgazing Heaven and Hell

If "the kingdom of heaven is within," then it is our task to exteriorize and render it manifest. Perhaps we might say that the kingdom of heaven is THE within -- or withinness as such, bearing in mind that there can be no within without a without; or, to say within is to immediately say without, even if the within takes priority.

But the same within may manifest in different withouts. As alluded to yesterday, there is no reason why the soul cannot persist "in some other embodiment appropriate to the environment in which it is placed." Thus, "The spiritual body is not... some sort of ghostly double," but rather, "the whole Spirit-enlivened man in that other environment we call 'heaven.'"

We might say that heaven is the sensorium of God. A sensorium is essentially the totality of one's interior, everything one may perceive, know, feel, and imagine. When one performs a mental status exam on a patient, one occasionally sees what is called a clouded sensorium, which is an essential feature of delirium.

But in reality, our sensorium is always more or less clouded, isn't it? Perhaps not in the upper atmasphere, but herebelow there are winds of passion, fogs of war, icy glances, glacial progress, and many, many shitstorms.

The air is boiling -- sun on my back / Inside I'm frozen girl -- I'm about to crack / They may fix the weather in the world / Just like Mr. Gore said / But tell me what's to be done / Lord, 'bout the weather in my head --Donald Fagen, Weather in My Head

So, we are "enabled by grace" to actualize the divine intention, which is a willing on earth what must be accomplished "instantaneously" in heaven. In so doing, "we become instrumental causes in the matter of our own salvation, which is none other than the extension of his Kingdom," or a "'making outer' of what is 'inner.'"

I suppose it could work both ways. We can have the experience of heaven without -- say, in the beauty of the world -- and assimilate it to the within. Even so, to witness the beauty of the world in all its metaphysical transparency is already to be within the divine presence. Davie writes that the inward -- or vertical -- is not "somewhere else," but rather,

"a space that is cointensive with the outward spread" of the world of things. Thus, "corresponding to every point on the horizontal plane" is "a vital INNER axis."

These are those little wellsprings dotting the landscape, which call out and invite us to the other side. I was just reading yesterday in Voegelin's Israel and Revelation that these were among mankind's first spiritual discoveries. It is probably accurate to say that no culture has been unaware of them, and that we all -- even the most mushheaded atheist -- orient ourselves around them.

These two-way terrestrial power points have a funny Greek name that is just too obvious to merit a gag (for even I have standards): omphalos.

The omphalos is "the navel of the world, at which transcendent forces of being flow into social order." Everybody's got one! It is the "gate of the gods," where "the stream of divine being... flows from the divine source," the "civilizational center from which the substance of order radiates, with diminishing strength, toward the periphery." You might say that this navel is simultaneously an "innie" and an "outie" (okay, so I have no standards).

Really, it is the source of civilizational mojo, and to lose contact with it is to begin the slide into exhaustion, decadence, and auto-destruction. Although a *mythological* construct, like all true myths it illuminates a great deal about our contemporary crisis, because the left attempts to systematically bury, deny, denigrate, and destroy all our civilizational omphaloi and replace them with their own sacred cowpies, e.g., the right to marry one's double, or the right to a dead baby, or the right to beat a neighborhood watchman to death.

To be "in love" is, in a sense, to "share the same interior space" (Davie). Thus, perhaps heaven is "a community of love," characterized by "the mutual internality of those who love one another in God, and God in one another." Intersubjective, only transposed to the highest key.

But if there is heaven, there is hell. Which is what? Schuon has a plausible answer:

"Hell crystalizes a vertical fall.... Those who enter hell are not those who have sinned accidentally, 'on the surface,' so to speak, but those who have sinned substantially or with their 'kernel,'" e.g., "the proud, the wicked, the hypocrites -- hence all those who are the opposite of the saints and the sanctified."

The possibility of a vertical fall implies that the omphaloi run in two directions; or, that there are holes in the horizontal landscape that lead both up and down. I've been in both, so I'm pretty sure about this.

Come to think of it, there is no question that people can mistake the one for the other. Each features a kind of transcendence, except that the downward path engenders the kind of reverse transcendence we see in ideology.

To take the most obvious examples, Marxism and National Socialism drew people into a kind of transcendence, resulting in the hypnotized mob as opposed to the community of love alluded to above. Call it hell on earth.

In this context, an Al Sharpton is indeed "reverend," but in an inverted manner. And his bloodthirsty community of hate is darkness visible.

Likewise, Obama is a transcendent genius.

Resurrection, Mind Parasites, and Transporter Errors

So, if you're still with us, you will understand how and why the Resurrection "is an event not wholly in history."

How is that? Well, "on the one hand, it is the limit of history, the frontier and boundary, the end and the beginning in one." But at the same time -- or timeless -- it must be "that very concurrence of End and Beginning 'entering the horizon of man,' appearing as the limit from which that new corporeality comes into being" (Davie).

Get it? In an analogy we have deployed before, think of a three-dimensional object passing through a two-dimensional plane. As it does so, what is a single entity in "higher" (i.e., 3-D) space will be transformed into a temporal event.

If the object is, say, a sphere, the two-dimensional event will begin with a point that then "grows" into an expanding circle. At its limit it will then begin shrinking back toward the point, before disappearing.

But the 3-D object hasn't actually gone anywhere or become anything other than what it always is: a sphere.

Likewise, God is by definition God. And if we stipulate that he is an object of "infinite dimensions," so to speak, then his passage through history is going to generate some *interesting* phenomena.

Among others (recalling the analogy above), some of his "spatial" dimensions will manifest herebelow in a temporal manner, e.g., "beginning" and "end." But as Jesus says, "I am Alpha and Omega." Down here, Alpha and Omega may appear distinct, but this is analogous to maintaining that the sphere's point and circle are separate events in time: just an uptical illusion.

Bearing this in mind, "if mankind, in all the stages of its evolution, is recapitulated in Jesus, as Iranaeus maintained, the implications of this doctrine are far-reaching and profound" (Davie), to put it mildly.

Profound because it would suggest that what we call "evolution" represents the passage of a hyperdimensional object through our 4-D world. Far-reaching because it would explain an awful lot of orthoparadoxes, wouldn't it?

One cannot help recalling John's remark that if one were to try to document the "many other things that Jesus did," "the world itself could not contain the books that would be written" (21:25). I mean, right? This is precisely what one would expect, given the principle involved.

Also, if evolution is ultimately conditioned by the top, it suddenly makes sense of a doctrine that is otherwise grounded in absurdity. We'll return to this idea later, if at all.

Ah, this I like, because it suggests that God is a little like Thelonious MOnk (or vice versa):

"Resurrection shows the power of God to bring forth harmony at the extreme limits of dissonance" (ibid). They say that MOnk could bend the notes of a piano, which is reminiscent of how God somehow writes straight even with crooked liars.

Another good one: "the final term in the redemptive progression of Birth-Death-Resurrection is not another embodiment in the same environment but the same embodiment in another environment (namely, that of heaven)."

It's kind of the opposite way in which the transporter works in Star Trek:

"Transporters convert a person or object into an energy pattern (a process called dematerialization), then 'beam' it to a target, where it is reconverted into matter (rematerialization)." The transporter creates a memory file of the person's pattern, thus making it vulnerable to various transporter errors.

For example, "Scramblers distort the pattern that is in transit, literally scrambling the atoms upon rematerialization, resulting in the destruction of inanimate objects and killing living beings by rematerializing them as masses of random tissue..."

But in real life, our soul-archetype, or form, or divine clueprint, is again conditioned from the top down. It is not, and could not be, the result of matter or energy patterned in a particular way, from the bottom up.

Rather, the soul is the form of the body, which is why, even if it must always have a body, it may have "the same embodiment in another environment." At least I see no reason why this could not be so. It's like a piece of music: it can be on tape, or in vinyl, or in digital bits, but it's the same musical information "embodied" in different media.

The notion of transporter errors also illuminates the human mindscape. If we begin with the idea that the soul is a kind of trans-energy pattern, the purpose of life would be to manifest this pattern in a resistant environment we call "the world." Mind parasites would represent viral forms that get mixed up with ours, interfering with the ability to "materialize" the soul (i.e., love and create) and interiorize or assimilate the world (i.e., learn and grow).

More generally, the world will throw up all sorts of obstacles to the soul's exteriorization and actualization. Which, within certain limits, is a good thing.

Think of the analogy of sports, which couldn't exist in the absence of the gravity we must overcome in order to run, jump, or throw. Trolls and assouls are like vertical gravity. Up to a point.

Thus the purpose of our daily verticalisthenics and gymgnostics. You may now take a rest. And stay away from the scramblers!

New School History: Imagine a Yout' Smashing a Human Head -- Forever

We left off yesterday in the moment of abandonment -- or eternity of surrender -- between crucifixion and resurrection.

Davie writes that even -- especially? -- an eye witness at the foot of the Cross would have "no answer to Pilate's question, 'What is truth?,'" nor would he have any idea that the question -- which implies a world-weary and cynical subjectivism -- was about to be answered in the most definitive way imaginable -- or broadest way immarginable (Joyce).

Only several days later does the disciple learn that the story hasn't ended (recall what was said yesterday, to the effect that we can never actually know what history is until we have seen its end):

"His senses tell him one thing: this is so. His preconceptions tell him another: this cannot be so. He has seen the humanity of Jesus as the vehicle of his divinity, and now he encounters his divinity as the vehicle of his humanity" (emphasis mine).

In other words, the vehicle of the divinity -- the body, the flesh -- "died." But the vehicle of the humanity -- its form or essence or something -- is here, reorganizing matter -- or something -- in its pattern. What is going on?

Remember, at this point there are no gospels to consult, no Bible to explain the matter. Rather, as alluded to in a comment yesterday, "the believer does not look to the Gospels to explain the Resurrection: it is, rather, the other way about. It is the Resurrection that explains the existence of the Gospels: it is the Resurrection that has become the central explanatory event..."

Again, we cannot know what history is until it has reached its end. Thus, in the absence of a vertical ingression -- something from outside or beyond history -- there is literally no possibility of understanding what it is (or was).

For Voegelin, all of the genocidal mischief of the 20th century was rooted precisely in this pneumopathic error: presuming to know the meaning of history, and then proceeding to make it happen.

Communists, progressives, and Nazis all know the purpose of history. Thus, if you have other ideas, you're just in the way of the future. Trayvon Martin's friend, the ridiculous Rachel Jeantel, couldn't have expressed it better: "The jury, they old. That's old school people. We in a new school, our generation."

This new school not only doesn't teach cursive, but ignores facts, logic, and evidence, none of which matter, since the progressive -- like the Islamist -- already has all the answers and knows the direction and destination of history.

George Zimmerman -- who voted for Obama -- nevertheless finds himself in the ruthless path of progressive history, which, ironically -- if you've ever tried to reason with a liberal -- is exactly like smashing one's head against concrete. The concrete wins every time, unless you have a deeper source of truth or are carrying.

(Recall Orwell's remark that if you want to understand fascism, just imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.)

Voegelin spent his life trying to understand the deep historical structure of such depraved thinking. Yes, we joke abut the media-tenured idiocracy complex (MTIC), but that is only to keep from crying. Here is how he described it in a letter:

"The liberal pastor who denies original sin, the... intellectual who asserts that man is good, the philosopher who argues for utilitarian ethics, the legal positivist who denies natural law, the psychologist who construes the phenomena of life as manifestations of the instinctual life -- they all do not commit crimes like an SS-murderer in the concentration camp -- but they are his intellectual fathers, a very immediate historical cause."

The MTIC may be childish, but they are far from harmless. Rather they are the collective expression of a "destroyed person" which attempts "to establish public, binding validity, which can only be done at the expense of the existing public order." This is where the permanent revolution comes into play, or in other words, the boot to the face forever.

I just flipped to another page, in which Voegelin points out that, in one sense, both Socrates and Jesus are judged guilty by the mob. But that is only in history. Outside history, the mob is forever being judged by Socrates or Jesus.

Likewise, the liberal mob has decided that George Zimmerman is guilty, just as they have decided the Constitution has no standing and God is dead (because they both old school and just impede new school History).

It isn't difficult to look at Obama and see a hand reaching into to your wallet -- forever. But Obamacare reaches directly into your body, just as the educational establishment reaches into the soul, the redefinition of marriage reaches all the way down to the foundation of civilization, and the ceaseless attack on religion reaches up and out to our source. That pretty much covers all the bases doesn't it? Inside and outside, up and down.

Nevertheless, Obama and his mob of wilding scribes and tenured mouthpieces are forever judged guilty by a higher standard.

Perfect (via American Digest):

At the Cutting Edge of the Cosmos, Where the Razoraction Is

We are now up to chapter IX of the book we've been deconscrewing around with, Jesus Purusha. It is here that Davie begins to lose me a little bit, either because he is too fast or too obscure or I am too slow or too dense.

But even if the latter, I agree with Don Colacho's advice to writers (paraphrasing): torture your sentences so as to avoid torturing the reader. Yes, I'm down with making the reader think, but there's a fine line between that and just being lazy, unclear, or confused. Schuon, for example, always leaves an unsaturated space for thought, despite his verbal precision.

True, we're dealing here with ultimate issues -- technically beyond the limits of the cosmos -- so that is a valid excuse. Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Anamnesis, i.e., vertical recollection of the first two, to the point of re-Incarnation. Is it even possible to com-prehend such mysteries, or is it only possible to part-icipate in them via the mode of faith? How much can we know before the living knowledge begins congealing from a fragrant encounter to a smelly little ideology?

In his last book -- appropriately dictated on his death bed, at life's limits -- Voegelin addresses just this problematic:

"As I am putting down these words on an empty page I have begun to write a sentence that, when it is finished, will be the beginning of a chapter on certain problems of Beginning.

"The sentence is finished. But is it true?

"The reader does not know whether it is true before he has finished reading the chapter.... Nor do I know at this time, for the chapter is yet unwritten.... [T]he story has no beginning before it has come to its end. What then comes first: the beginning or end?"

Voegelin answers his own question with the only possible orthoparadoxical response:

"Neither the beginning nor the end comes first. The question rather points to a whole, to a thing called 'chapter,' with a variety of dimensions."

Among others, a chapter has "a dimension of meaning, [which is] neither spatial nor temporal, in the existential process of the quest for truth in which both the reader and writer are engaged. Is then the whole, with its spatiotemporal and existential dimensions, the answer to the question: what comes first?"

We'll come back to that question, but note how the sentence points to the incomplete chapter, the chapter to the unfinished book, the book to the unknown -- or is it somehow known? -- whole, which must be "present" to both writer and reader.

This actually goes to the whole structure of being-consciousness in its relation to the thing we call "history" -- the latter of which being the human stream of being-consciousness as it reveals itself in time.

You could say that the (human) beginning begins precisely with this recognition of participation in the greater whole. For example, where in Genesis it says: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, this is not about God's beginning, but about our beginning in relation to him, or to O, if you prefer. It is a statement about the absolute limit of what we may know about the "beginning." Attempting to go beyond it will only generate paradox and absurdity, i.e., "what was before time?", or "what is outside space?"

So, when Jesus affirms that he is Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, he is suggesting something fraught with metaphysical implications. In a way, he is providing the answer to -- or at least way to think about -- the question, "what is before the beginning and after the end?"

With this prelude in mind, perhaps we are in a better position to understand Davie. For example, we could say that Incarnation represents a beginning of sorts, a horizontal beginning that ends in Crucifixion.

However, these then point before and beyond themselves, to pre-existence on the one hand ("before Abraham was, I am") and to Resurrection. But what comes first? Or is it a single flowing whole vertically encompassing self-sacrificing generation and rebirth?

Don't ask me. The post isn't finished.

Maybe this passage by Davie will illuminate the discussion: in the Crucifixion, "where Jesus hangs, the true center lies. In the pause between upward and downward breath, we are being created: in the pause between Crucifixion and Resurrection there is a cessation, a suspension, of creation. And in that pause, God is abandoning his very Self, abandons the universe to the internal collapse which it must suffer in his absence: for Jesus knows, in the cry of dereliction from the Cross, what it would be like if there were no God."

Or, to put it another way, if this were the END, full stop. If it is the end, then this confers absolute meaninglessness on everything that has preceded it and everything that will follow. It is absolute nihil, nada, zilch, bupkis. A cosmic shutout, with no runs, no hits, and no errors (for there can be no errors in the absence of God).

Thus, "Jesus consents to die in order that our humanity shall no longer be separated from his. In the cry of dereliction from the Cross," Jesus throws himself on the live grenade and "suffers the death of all men, the death of the universe. He takes the supreme risk of love, and that risk is the 'awful daring,' not of a moment's, but an eternity's surrender" (emphasis mine).

Why my emphasis? Because it goes precisely to our question of what is before the beginning and after the end, and therefore reveals the wholeness that conditions both of these human limits.

So: "Must we not say that there is an eternal Passion of Creation enacted in the unfolding drama of the universe, and a temporal Passion of Redemption which is the enactment in time of that eternal Passion; and yet that there are not two Passions, but one?"

I don't know. The book isn't finished. Or is it? You might say that the end occurs somewhere in the suspended tick of time between p. 266 and p. 7.

Which is pretty much where the previous 2,186 posts have come from. Yeah, born again, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

It's a Boy, By Jove!

If any of you were able to unravel yesterday's post -- which I shouldn't have tried to write with one ear on the Zimmerman trial -- you will see how it segues seamlessly into Davie's next chapter, called Purusha-Jesus-Christ (recall that Purusha is the "cosmic person").

We began tapping into this cosmic artery almost exactly a month ago, with a brief reflection on how Jesus might have been understood had he appeared in India instead of Palestine:

"Imagine him surrounded by his Indian disciples on an occasion corresponding to that in which Peter made his confession of faith.... What would an Indian Simon Peter have said in answer to the question, 'Who do you say that I am?'

"I ask you to suppose that the reply would have been, 'Thou art the Son of the living God.'" However, in an Indian context, this would have been understood as Purusha as opposed to Christ (i.e., messiah); instead of Christ-Jesus, the confession (and revelation) would be of Purusha-Jesus.

Of course, in Indian metaphysics, the local self IS (or is not other than) the nonlocal Self, even if few people actually real-ize this experientially. However, Davie suggests that the very possibility of this realization is predicated on the ontologically prior existence of Jesus -- of Jesus Purusha. Thus,

"the primary question is not whether the identity of Atman [read: Son] and Brahman [Father] is personally realized in anyone, but whether it is uniquely dependent on Jesus for realization anywhere. And this can only be so if Jesus is Purusha, and Atman is his very Self..."

It just occurred to me that if we really want to tie this all together, we might relate it to another excellent book, Christ the Eternal Tao. Not sure if I'll have time to do that, so perhaps my prolific colleage, Professor R. E. Viewer, can be of assistance. In one of his nine brief treatises on the subject, he writes

"'Jesus is more Eastern than Western,' said my religion teacher many years ago. That truth rested in the back of my mind for 25+ years. Recently, after three or so years of exploring writings on Orthodox Christianity, this book came under my radar. It carefully presents the idea that the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching) intuitively gained insight into a compassionate, self-giving God -- an inkling into what would later be clarified through the coming of Christ.

"The book is a very thorough presentation of the history of the development of human understanding of God and the fulfillment of this understanding which came with the incarnation of Christ. The second portion of the book is a fascinating, calming journey of poetry in which some of Lao Tzu's ideas are echoed or answered by some of the words of Christ. The similarities are striking!"

"'In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God.' That sentence, the opening of the Gospel of John translated from the Chinese version into English, says it all. Hieromonk Damascene does here what the Church Fathers of the first through fourth centuries did with their ancient Greek heritage: he takes up the ancient spiritual wisdom of the Chinese and uses the insights of long ago to illuminate the New Covenant of the coming of Christ -- the Tao, the Logos -- in the flesh."

The point is, there was (obviously) a historical context for Jesus's appearance, and we have to -- to the extent that it is possible -- separate the merely historical from the truly essential expressed through history. There are times that God makes a vertical ingression and bursts into history, other times when history is just history.

The official Catholic view is that Jesus's appearance in a Greco-Roman context was no accident, but based upon the ideas we're discussing, we could widen this out and place him in a truly world historical context. Looked at in this way, we could stipulate that there exist other revelations, but that Jesus furnishes the missing key that unlocks them.

After all, this is precisely how Jesus is understood in relation to the Hebrew scriptures. For the Christian, these do not stand alone, but are the backward shadow cast by the Omega. Although they existed in some form or fashion long prior to the terrestrial appearance of Jesus, he is nevertheless their explanation, that toward which -- or whom -- they are converging. Only in behindsight could it be seen that Jesus is all over the OT.

(No disrespect to Judaism intended here -- just explicating Christian doctrine; in fact, Voegelin was of the opinion that Christianity actually has two Old Testaments, the Jewish and the Greek.)

Regarding the Greco-Roman OT, consider old Vergil's famous prophecy:

Now a virgin returns, the golden age returns; / now its firstborn is sent to us, down from the height of heaven. / Look kindly, goddess of childbirth, on the birth of this boy; / for him shall the people of iron fail, and a people of gold arise in the world.... / Come soon (for the hour is at hand) to the greatness of your glory, / dear offspring of the gods, great child of Jove himself!

As Balthasar writes, "In Vergil, the subterranean stream flowing from myth into revelation becomes visible for a brief instant" (quoted in Beckett).

Back to Davie: "Thus where Self = Atman and Person = Purusha, the gospel according to Hinduism declares that Jesus is God's Self-in-Person." Furthermore, "if the identity of of Atman and Brahman is actualized historically in Jesus, then the interiority of the godhead is made visible in him."

This would explain how "the self-consciousness of Jesus was such that there is nothing incredible about the statements attributed to him on the subject of his pre-existence," i.e., that before Abraham was, I AM, because before Atman was Purusha IS.

But it probably has nothing to do with the phonetic similarities between Jove and Jehovah, Abraham and Brahman, AUMMMMM & I AMMMMM, or Coon and koan.

The Flowing Flux of a Roiling Donut

Davie uses the analogy of a sphere to illuminate the distinction (or separation) and the relationship (or inseparability) between man and God, subject and Subject, relative and Absolute, (¶) and O:

"[A] sphere has two limits, an outer limit, its circumference, and an inner limit, its center."

Let us call the latter ʘ, the former O (although one must imagine the outer circle without boundaries, so it is technically an unprintable kind of Y@H*V&H?! that must be rendered in invisible and indivisible ink).

We should also stipulate that this center is, of course, everywhere; or everyone, to be precise. In other words, God is only consciously real-ized in human beings. We are somewhere on the radius, although nearer or farther, depending.

O is the ultimate transcendent principle, while ʘ is the ultimate immanent principle. In fact, I would say that they are not even principles, because this would tend toward Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness, or in plain terms, spiritual rockheadedness.

Rather, I would suggest that these two are simply directions, or orientations; you might say they are the "last terms" in vertical space, while understanding that they can never actually be reached -- as if they were a kind of geographical space. Rather, this is not geometrical space but pneumagraphical space, analogous to the space of ideas, only transposed to a higher key.

Thus, O is like a flowing sphere that eternally transcends itself by radiating down- & outward; while ʘ represents the flow toward an orthoparadoxically "limitless inner limit," so to speak. In this context, the outward radiation is analogous to Brahman, while the inward radiation is Purusha, the cosmic Person.

Translighted to trinitarian terms -- and this is only for the limited purpose of illustration -- we might say that Brahman is analogous to Father, Purusha to Son. Thus,

"creation will have one source, but two directions; it will proceed from Brahman to Purusha as from outer limit to inner limit, and from Purusha to Brahman as from inner limit to outer limit" (ibid.).

What has been outlined above applies to the ontological Trinity, that is, to the interior life, or inner activity, within the hidden ground of the Godhead.

What about herebelow? That would be the economic Trinity. Herebelow, each person is a reflection of THE Person, i.e., the Purusha or Son. Our own inner life is again along the radius between O and ʘ, so

"there will be as many radii as there are subjects of consciousness; but however many radii there may be, there is only one center, one inner limit -- the Person at the heart of the cosmos, in whom the identity of Atman with Brahman is realized, namely, Purusha."

Again, to translate the above paragraph into more familyar terms, terrestrial children may become adopted celestial sons via identification with, or inCorporation into, THE Son -- the Sonly ʘne who is fully identified with the Father, or Onely One.

The similarity to Vedanta is striking, whereby "Brahman eternally generates Purusha because Brahman receives back, through Atman, the very deity given to Purusha." Brahman is "the one who utters and receives, posits, through his self-communication, his real distinction from the one who is uttered, Purusha..."

Thus "we have a heavenly paradigm of earthly meaning, in which the divine Subject (Brahman) makes itself Object (Purusha) through the energizing Verb, or passage of force between them; or we may say that Purusha answers as Thou to the eternal I of Brahman, with Atman as the we between them" (ibid).

"We" refers to our part-cipation in the whole existentialada, which takes place via the Spirit. Specifically, via the Spirit, we participate in the relation between Father and Son.

The world is a problem; its meaning is the solution. But where is the meaning? It cannot be within the world, as the world cannot explain itself. I would reverse the terms, and say that since there is obviously meaning, there is God. The converse is literally impossible, for:

"if we question the intelligibility of the world, not only do we have to assume its intelligibility in order to answer the question, we have to assume its intelligibility in order to ask it in the first place."

In other words, "We cannot meaningfully ask a question that calls in question what it needs in order to be the question that is being asked" (T.F. Torrance, in Davie).

I would suggest that O is the answer to ʘ, just as we are God's question. Thus, "the intelligibility of the world is seen to be consequent upon Brahman's being its Source."

I will conclude by pointing out that there is a perverse version of the above, which we know of as ideology, or leftism. Here is how Niemeyer describes it:

"Ideological activism, then, presupposes certain intellectual and spiritual movements which can be seen as two, going in opposite directions.

"Ontologically, the first of these movements denies reality to the given world of experience and proclaims the reality of a phantasmal realm.

"The second movement pulls norms pertaining to the phantasmal realm and its present unreality into the world of experience and orients activities by them."

Again, the left attempts to make exist what has never existed and what cannot exist. In short, you have to break an awful lot of eggs in order to make an impossible omelet.

However, on the positive side, one broken egg is a tragedy, but a billion is just a statistic.

A Religion Fit for the Secular Anthill and Progressive Hive

As we've mentioned before, there is more than one form of Vedanta. For our purposes, we are interested in the differences between Shankara and Ramanuja. Why do we always hear about the former, but not so much the latter? It just occurred to me over the weekend that there are several reasons for this.

First, the Upanishads weren't translated into english until the 19th century. More generally, we mainly learn of the Vedanta through its western interpreters, so if those interpreters have a particular bias or interest, then the interpretation will be filtered through that prismhouse.

Now, the discovery of, and interest in, the Upanishads coincides with several pathological trends in western civilization: the rise of scientism, the general hostility toward traditional religion, the search for a replacement for Christianity in particular, and the alternative gospel of progressive leftism.

It now occurs to me that these scholars idealize Shankara because his nondual approach is much more compatible with the unsophisticated monism of scientism and the illiberal anti-individualism of the left -- which explains why people such as Deepak Chopra and Ken Wilber are always men of the left. I know of no exceptions, although I'd be happy to hear of one. It can get a little lonely here.

Conversely, no one who actually understands Christianity could ever embrace leftism, scientism, or any other ideology. Rather, properly understood, it is the penultimate inoculation against such spiritual cancers and metastatic ideologies.

I say "penultimate" because it is possible to understand the ultimate principle by virtue of which Christianity effectively thwarts ideology. This principle has to do with the fact that the human drama always takes place in the space between immanence and transcendence.

Ideology of any kind collapses this space, which always leads to human catastrophe, because it forces immanent reality to conform to the eschatological fantasy, as we have most recently seen in Obama, e.g., the healthcare system isn't perfect, therefore it must be destroyed.

The goal of history is beyond history, but the left is defined by the absurd attempt to place the goal within history. This naturally redounds to absolute meaninglessness, but the leftist "cures" this with the intellectual swindle of forcing his idiosyncratic meaning upon history.

This has always been the Marxist strategy, i.e., to destroy existing institutions because they do not adequately reflect paradise on earth. In Niemeyer's succinct formulation, it is either nothingness or paradise.

Which makes it quite easy to be a leftist: since reality isn't paradise, their critique thereof is self-evident and self-validating -- an infantile strategy if ever there was one. Radicals such as Obama always appeal to an unarticulated but implicit order that never was and never will be -- except in the valid form of vertical recollection (or an eschatological memoir of the future, if you prefer).

This denial of existing reality is just part of a deeper "ontological negation" (ibid.), beginning with "the annihilation of God" and moving on to the eradication of the moral order, the destruction of human nature (which follows logically from the murder of God), and the effacement of both boundaries (e.g., male-female) and hierarchy (e.g., adult-child).

In short, the PermaRevolutuon of the left is founded upon a prior "metaphysical revolution" (ibid.).

Which is just one more reason why you cannot reason with a leftist. This is because the prerequisite of rational dialogue is "a common universe of reason, which is precisely what the ideologists have demolished." No nous is bad news, to put it wildly.

"A 'creatively destructive' activism," writes Niemeyer, "presupposes an intellectual destruction of present reality, as a result of which the believers of such ideas orient themselves no longer toward 'real possibilities' but rather toward 'possible realities.'"

One is reminded of what appears to have been the Kennedy brothers' favorite crack, to the effect that Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?

Indeed. What an astonishing admission. Mental hospitals used to be full of such dreamers, at least until liberals deinstitutionalized them. Some schizophrenics are homeless and ask why? Others imagine the park is their home, and ask why not?

Oh, and from whom did the Kennedy's lift that line? Appropriately, it was originally "delivered by the Serpent in Shaw's play Back To Methuselah."

And while looking up the exact wording of that quote, I found another doozie by RFK, reflecting the same florid pneumopathology: Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.

Really? So, if, say, some creepy-ass cracka' is being assaulted by one of Obama's stoned and hoodied bastard sons, he deserves it? Come to think of it, RFK was murdered by a Palestinian activist, his brother by a leftwing radical. Oh well. Every society gets the kind of assassin it deserves.

Returning to the actual subject of our post, if one is looking for metaphysical support for the left's radical critique of existence, one could do a lot worse than Shankara, for whom existence is just maya, or illusion, anyway. Only Brahman is real, and you're not it -- unless you eliminate your individual self.

Reminds me of something Woody Allen once said: death doesn't bother me. I just don't want to be there when it happens. Likewise, for Shankara, you can know God. You just can't be there when it happens.

But for Ramanuja, "the highest kind of unity" would not be "the static unity of a solitary self-centered, self-determined Absolute, but a dynamic unity of a society of souls realizing their highest perfection in love and in mutually enriching fellowship."

And "this is only possible where each has a unique inner life of his own and respects the individuality of others, but yet where each does not lose but finds himself in others" (Davie).

Therefore, union with God is associated with both "increasing differentiation" and "increasingly intensive community and unity." Call it the Body of Christ, which can only be an interior body, nothing that could ever be accomplished -- which is to say, externally forced -- by the state. That would be an anonymous hive, not a unity of souls.

Subjects in Mirror May be Larger than they Appear

The man who says "I" doesn't choose the mouth which says it. --Wittgenstein

Okay, what's that supposed to mean?

Well, first of all, it goes to the miracle of subjectivity, through which each of us can honestly say "I" without starting an argument over who patented the name.

Only a human being -- or person, rather -- can say I AM. (A human being is a type of person, whereas a person is not a type of human being, just as "life" is not restricted to biology, nor substance restricted to physical matter.)

Even leaving Jesus aside, it would appear that I AM represents a collision between the highest and the most inward, or the deepest and most expansive.

This is the essential experiential realization of the Upanishads, an "illumination accompanied by the profoundest penetrative insight, when the mind, at a flashpoint," Iquates "the identity of the absolute subjectivity behind the objective world" and "the inmost ground of that subjectivity which is its Effect..." (Davie).

Yes, our I is an effect; but it is not essentially an effect of matter, of culture, of history (although these things may of course affect it). Rather, in essence it can only be the effect of another I.

This firstandlast guffah-ha! experience represents not a union, but a realization, "of the ultimate with the most intimate," whereby we apprehend the vertical reality of a "single axis, running from microcosmos to macrocosmos, on which the whole creation turns" (ibid).

Thus we make the final deuscovery and solve the last equation -- that in the selfsame text "outside ourselves we decipher at astronomical distances" what is "written on a microscopic scale in the further depths of the heart" (Claudel, in Davie).

Outside in, brightside up, last one first, I-I, sir, this is THAT!, etc.

At this point the only thing left to say is: Can I buy some pot from you?

I've got something better: some unfiltered, high potency Eckhart. Because it's not just a Hindu thing.

The Meister speaks of placing a mirror before the sun: "The sun sends forth its rays both from the ground of the sun and from the [mirror], and thereby loses nothing." The sun's reflection in the mirror is the sun, and yet, "the mirror is what it is."

"Thus it is with God," who "is in the soul..., and yet he is not the soul." Just as the mirror is still the mirror, the soul is still the soul.

Yes, the light is the reflection and God the creature; but the reverse is not true: the reflection is not the sun and the creature is not God. It is the distinction between identity vs. inclusion, respectively.

You might say that God is at one with us, but that we are included in God. To the extent that we are at one with God, it can only be a posterior realization of his prior at-one-ment with us. Thus it is our task to at-one for God's at-onement.

Or is it God's task -- a task he has set before himsoph -- to at-one for our at-two-ment?

This would be the Christian premise, that God atones for humanity by at-one-ing with humanity on the most intimate terms imaginable -- by transitioning through our every evolutionary-developmental stage from blastocyst to embryo to fetus to infant to child to adolescent to adult, and every phase in between.

Recall the wise crack from a few days ago, that Eternity obtains in time reversed divinity. A mirror reflects the object, only in a reversed image.

Just so, time -- developmental time, specifically -- reflects the eternal subject, only in reverse, as exemplified in Jesus' temporal journey from cell to hell and back, or from womb to tomb and beyond.

So remember: subject in mirror may be larger than it appears.

The End. Or Beginning, rather.

My mind has often dwelt on the enigma of "I."
Why is it I who thinks himself "I,"
And not another? Why is the world
Divided into many thousand mirrors? --Frithjof Schuon, I-ness

And

We are Ones again back before the beginning,
Before old nobodaddy committed wholly materimany
And exwholed himsoph into a world of sorrow and ignorance.
Back upin a timeless
With the wonderfully weird Light with which everything was made,
A Light no longer dispersed and refracted
Through so many banged-up and thunder-sundered images of the One.
Back at the still point between the vertical and horizontal,
Where eternity pierces the present moment
And we are unborn
Again. --The book of I Still Can't Believe they Published It

I Am a Revelation. Up to a Point.

Time only for a short post. Got caught up watching the Zimmerman trial at the excellent legal insurrection.

The entire spectacle is an absolute horror -- a sort of concrete universal, or objective correlative, of the same retaliatory statism that drives the IRS. The final common pathway of endstage leftism is the institutionalization of persecution for thoughtcrime, or the criminalization of politics.

I often think about the problem of how, once contained by the mind, revelation loses its power to shock -- to creatively disassemble, rearrange, and reconstitute. Instead, it just becomes routine, part of the endless horizontal stream of information, when its whole purpose is to verticalize its recipient.

It is as if, although man is surely born with an implacable sense of wonder, he does everything within his power to nullify it and render himself just a blah-blah-blasé commonplace.

Oddly, humans also have a tendency to elevate the commonplace to the wonder-full, e.g., Obama. But this always ends in dis-enchantment. Hence Iowahawk's immortal tweet that The unicorn rots from the horn.

Along these lines, there must be a constant dialectic between fact and experience, and by extension, dogma and gnosis (i.e., between (k) and (n).

Voegelin is of the belief that this balance was upset by what we might call a new irruption of spirit -- of direct mystical experience -- in the 13th century.

Ultimately the Church was unable to contain this irruption, which led directly to the Protestant rebellion, and, by extension, the secular materialism that dominates the contemporary mentality. (We will return to this idea in a later post.)

It is cosmically ironic that the last word in both word and wordlessness appeared in the 13th century, in the form of Thomas and Eckhart, respectively. Thomas's rational-ization of revelation has never been surpassed, nor has Eckhart's revel-ization of the ratio.

If you don't grasp that last formulation, I mean by it an experiential plunge into the very nature of the human subject, which turns out to be a living revelation of God.

To back up a bit, there is more than one form of revelation. In its narrow sense it is scripture. However, in the Judeo-Christian view, history is a revelation, as is the cosmos itself.

But the subject to whom the revelation occurs is also a revelation, which both follows from and leads to the mirroraculous doctrine of man's deiformity. Yes, You -- or I, rather -- are a revelation.

Davie writes that "the eye through which we see is not part of the visual field, but a limit of it." Just so, the I "is not a part of the world, but a limit of it."

What would life be like without this limit? I don't really know, but it seems that LSD could occasionally obliterate all limits, leading to a state of blind terror. Then again, maybe it's like a panic attack, in which case I do know.

I'm sure Schuon never ingested LSD, but then, he didn't need to. In a memorable passage, he suggests that if we weren't contained and restricted by the body -- in particular, within the five senses -- "objective reality would tear through us like a hurricane." The world "would rip us into pieces and at the same time crush us."

Exactly. Like being swallowed by a hippo.

The absence of containment -- of a skin-boundary frontier -- would expose us to a God's-I view of the world, which would be approximately like a visit to the interior of the sun:

"we would become transparent; we would be as if suspended over an abyss or rushed through an incommensurable macrocosm, with its entrails exposed, so to speak, and filled with terror."

I know. I hate when that happens.

So, our embodiment is a mercy, compared to the alternatives. In its absence "we would find ourselves ceaselessly faced with a totality of spaces and abysses and a myriad of creatures and phenomena, such that no individual could endure the experience."

It would be nominalism on stilts: a trillion billion particulars, with no possibility or reduction by containment. A bewildering eternity of catastrophic novelty.

It seems to me that our sense of wonder is like the residue, or a vertical recollection, of this ontological situation. We have just enough wonder to destabilize any pat answer to life's enigmas, but not enough to obliterate our very selves.

Stupid Burns but Intelligence Incinerates

Just as "the existence of a visual field presupposes an eye," writes Davie, "the existence of a world presupposes an 'I,'" that is, a subject. Thus, to say "world" -- or, better, cosmos, order -- is to say I and all this implies.

And it implies a lot, not the least of which being a kind of irreducible bipolar field of order, one exterior and objective, the other interior and subjective. Very much like form and substance, you will never find one without the other, that is, a world without a subject or a subject without a world.

It also means that every person is a world, which should not be confused with relativism, since it is an objective statement about the truth of things. Just because in a roomful of people, each person will have a different view of the room, it doesn't mean that the room has no objective existence.

One could also say immanence and transcendence. God exists both within and beyond this polarity, whereas man always lives within it. Or perhaps we should say a normal man, for the essence of pneumopathology involves the collapse of this space.

I've been reading a lot of Voegelin lately, and he reminds us that virtually all political pathologies -- i.e., ideologies -- result from a de-differentiation of this space. It was a singular evolutionary achievement for man to differentiate the two spheres, so to re-collapse them is a definite step backward.

At the very least, it represents the move from a sophisticated theology to an unsophisticated one, e.g., the pure transcendence of Islam or the pure immanence of scientistic atheism.

Thus, progressives aren't only fellow traveling in reverse, but they "start" their retreat approximately three or four thousand years ago, certainly before the Hebrew discovery of the transcendent God. Prior to this, God is thoroughly con-fused with the world, hence the barbarism of pagan polytheism, which is just a fractured, personified, and immanentized projection of the psyche.

I might add that the same accomplishment occurs on an individual developmental basis. We all must proceed from a state of fragmentation to unity, and with each conquest of unity there is a deepening of our subjectivity. Human psychospiritual growth and the achievement of depth are covariant.

Bion called this the PS <--> D dialectic, and it is fair to say that this is a permanent feature of our existence, short of mystical union. You may think of PS <-->D as analogous to the breakdown and synthesis of catabolism and anabolism, respectively. Too much of either -- an unbalanced state -- is pathological. For example, if I don't inject insulin, I will enter a state of pathological catabolism, as my body starts to consume itself. And we all know about pathological anabolism, e.g., Barry Bonds, Ryan Braun, and Alex Rodriguez.

There is another complication for the immanentizing ideologues, at least in the Judeo-Christianized west. That is to say, once discovered, the eschaton cannot be undiscovered -- you can't put the truthpaste back into the rube -- hence the ubiquitous apocalypticism of their programs, pogroms, schemes, and scams.

As Voegelin puts it, "The apocalyptic movements have become socially dominant to such a degree that today we are living in an age of apocalyptic politics." Indeed, "We are submerged with apocalypses of all sorts in the newspapers, the college textbooks," and other media. The Obama cult of 2008 was a recent example. The irony is that these apocalyptarians always manage to bring about a real apocalypose - not the apocalypse of God, of course, but the apocalypse -- the unveiling -- of Man.

When fallen and unredeemed man is unveiled, we don't even see a trousered ape, again, because the man-ape lives in a pre-differentiated world, and is therefore not susceptible to immanentized myths of messianic salvation. An Obama is only possible in a Judeo-Christianized culture that has moved back to de-differentiated pseudo-messianism.

To put it another way, no one aware of an actual transtemporal savior could possibly confuse him with Obama -- or confuse salvation with politics more generally.

Davie makes the important point that the Immanence <---> Transcendence dialectic cannot be infinite in both directions. Rather, it is only infinite vis-a-vis the rightword term, which goes to the very nature of transcendence. In short, "there is a limit of contraction..., but no limit of expansion." That being the case, "there is a limit of opacity..., but no limit of translucence."

Which is why you could say that stupidity always has its limits, whereas intelligence has none. Whatever is knowable may be known by human intelligence, and the "adventure of intelligence" is never over -- unless we artificially and arbitrarily stop with some limiting ideology. But doing this renders intelligence stupid, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the current state of academia.

Having said all this, there is another twist, and it goes to the infinite difference between revelation and ideology. That is to say, an unlimited intelligence -- not limited by any boundary -- can easily become a kind of runaway catabolic process, with no end. Schuon speaks of this in terms of the qualities of fire and water, or of the "dry path" and "wet path."

Intelligence is related to both fire and light, but also "includes an aspect of agitation and destructiveness." And "Even the most penetrating intelligence, if it relies too much on its own strength, runs the risk of being forsaken by Heaven: forgetting that the knowing Subject is God, it closes itself to the divine influx," i.e., (↓). We must remember that "fire illuminates, but it also consumes and destroys" (emphasis mine).

I guess no one says it anymore, but the media-academic rabble used to insist that Obama was unusually intelligent. Even if true, it only makes matters worse in a man who recognizes no extrinsically transcendent limits to his ambition, his authority, and his self-regard -- or to his monomania, egomania, and pyromania.

You're Nowhere Until You're Wondering in the Bewilderness

If you've been following the argument -- or preferably unwrapping its presence -- you will recall that -- to put it in extremes -- self-love (i.e., narciss-ism) redounds to metacosmic obliteration, which is to say, "forgotten by God." Conversely, self-giving, or -abandonment, or -forgetfulness results in what we are calling "re-membered by God."

This doesn't yet amount to an explanation, but it creates a useful schematic or dialectic to understand human action and its real consequences. And, being that it is true, it should be true across all domains, not just vis-a-vis God. Thus, a normal person -- or a person raised by normal parents -- is taught from the youngest age to be caring, compassionate, generous, each of these being an example of "self-giving."

And "taught" isn't quite the right word, since these are things no one could teach if they weren't already in us, so to speak, just waiting to be actualized. One cannot teach a reptile to be compassionate. (Insert Al Sharpton or Harry Reid joke here __________ ).

Thus, if we should choose "the way of self-love," then we pursue "an illusion, since the assertion of 'my solitary subjectivity' involves me in the contradictions of solipsism, 'my subjectivity' having meaning only in relation to centers of consciousness other than my own" (Davie).

As such, we have a useful way to understand various orthoparadoxical remarks by Jesus to the effect that "Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it."

Or in his sermon on nature of the spiritual mount, he suggests that “You are the light of the world" and that "A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven."

Now, what is light but the first and last word in "self-giving"? In other words, light cannot not radiate, because radiation is not what it "does" but what it is.

Which is why light is the most adequate analogy to spiritual energies, which, by their nature, radiate. Likewise, consider the sun, which gives and gives and gives, to the just and unjust alike. But who receives it, and who just takes it?

As alluded to above, an individual subjectivity makes no sense whatsoever, as it always implies an other. I've mentioned before that this "discovery" was a major breakthrough in psychoanalysis, when it transitioned from a one-person psychology to a two-person psychology.

This is captured in Winnicott's remark that there is "no such thing as an infant." Rather, there is the infant-mother dyad -- or even prior to that, the mouth-breast relation. That last one might sound a little odd, but it conceals a profound truth, that even human instinct is related to another subject (which is what makes us human).

In a more sophisticated culture this would go to the intrinsic absurdity of homosexual "marriage," since man's sexual instinct is related to its complementary opposite. This also explains why such a union could never be sacramental, because it is deprived of spiritual efficacy at the very root.

A homosexual relationship can be many things -- including things a heterosexual relationship cannot be -- but it obviously cannot be a marriage. Unless you are just oblivious to anything more psychically subtle than a flying mallet. Or just say leftist.

Speaking of which, too bad it's so expensive, but this massive book of Voegelin's letters is la bamba. Lucky for me, I was able to defray the expense by using the modest monthly amazon gift certificate that accrues from you folks clicking through and making purchases. But consistent with the above, helping me is about to help you, because now I'm going to talk about the book the coonosphere gave me, and for which few if any of you would shell out 64 bucks. Even Steven! What goes around comes around, yada yada.

I'm going to need to occasionally take a little time to blog about the book, because there's no way I'll be able to tackle it from the other end of its 941 pages. But through the medium of Coon Magic, whatever I'm reading in one book is always relevant to the other. And if not, we can always use Coon Muscle to force the issue.

I'm trying to read one year of letters per day, which means it will take about a month to get through. Although some letters are relatively banal, others are quite insultaining. Recalling what was said above about spiritually insensate leftists, Voegelin says of the tenured that

"once they have gone through the process of college and graduate school, they are sufficiently brainwashed and morally debased to hold their positions with sincerity, and for the rest of their lives never have a critical doubt."

You all know the type, because the problem is so much worse today than it was in 1954. Indeed, it has become institutionalized, and not just in academia, but anywhere the left has extended its tentacles.

He adds that such individuals "will never achieve the full unfolding of their talents, because too much of their energy is lost overcoming the handicap of their environment." This very much reminds me of Obama, who is an oblivious and completely un-self-critical creature of this dysfunctional environment.

Thus, the crisis is infinitely worse today than it was in the early 1950s, because now the disease doesn't just affect academia, but has spread to the very height of state power. The "leader of the free world" is now the leader of the project to roll back freedom. It would be chilling if it weren't so mortifying.

As we speak, there is a shamful show trial going on because someone had the effrontery to defend himself from one of Obama's depraved spawn -- his self-described image and likeness -- and you can indeed draw a straight line from Obama to Trayvon, from sociopathy in the highest of places to sociopathy in lowest of lives. Not the fruit of his loins, but worse, the rotten fruit of his ideology. (And in any event, only the race-obsessed left believes blood trumps values.)

Voegelin even suggests that it is short-sighted for people to focus only on communist infiltration, because communism is not the only ideology that can be deployed for the destruction of the West. Rather, "Our home-grown varieties of progressivism, pragmatism, instrumentalism, positivism, operationalism, behaviorism, and so forth, do the job quite well."

Indeed. That was in 1954, so we can see how prescient he was.

We've spoken before about the time it takes to undo the spiritual and intellectual damage of an extensive public edu-doctrination. Of this struggle, Voegelin writes that "I would not complain too much about the time lost. We all lose time, for we have to disengage ourselves from the creeds of a dying world."

He adds that he "lost more years than I care to remember with Neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology, before I dropped the nonsense." But we should be consoled by the fact that struggling in this way to shed illusion and find truth makes the path more certain than "if somebody had placed you on it right from the beginning."

So true. The one thing I can always say to any liberal at any time on any subject is, Yeah, I used to believe that. But

"life begins with the Exodus from the civilizational realm of the dead, and the beginning begins with the discovery of the world as the Desert" (ibid.).

Yup. You're precisely nowhere until you're wondering in the desert bewilderness, in an open relationship with the O-asis that transcends you, both above and ahead.

Out of this World: Ideology Eclipses I-AMology

Davie quotes an obscure line by Emily Dickinson: Eternity obtains in time Reversed divinity.

Now, what could this possibly mean? For we disagree with the man who said that poems are just "gay sentences." Maybe it has to do with this obscure footnote on p. 96 of Splendor of the True, on the nature of "inverse analogy":

"When a tree is mirrored in a lake, its top is at the bottom, but the image is always that of a tree; the analogy is inverse in the first relationship and parallel in the second. Analogies between the divine order and the cosmic order always contain one or the other of these relationships."

I know. Don't bother asking how he knows. He just does. He's a little like Petey in that way, who is all-knowing but quickly becomes either all-bristling or all-evasive when you try to find out how that's possible. Can't tell you how many times I've heard the word IMPUDENCE!

Davie suggests -- and Schuon would agree -- that there can be "only one sovereign subjectivity," a single I AM at the heart of things, and in which our own subjectivity must be grounded.

This parallels the idea that there is but one material world with diverse manifestations -- a view that is much easier to accept thanks to quantum physics, which reveals the field-like nature of material existence.

Looked at this way, we must, as it were, reverse figure and ground, and regard objects as analogous to, say, clouds, which are just local manifestations of a global order of weather.

So, let's posit the idea of a global climate of subjectivity, shall we? Just as in the film Avatar, when we are conceived, we plug into this matrix, not with our hair, but with filaments of desire, love, curiosity, and probably some other things I'm underlooking at the moment.

Bearing in mind Dickinson's poem and Schuon's footnote, Davie says that our subjectivity is actually the reverse of the sovereign subjectivity. That being the case, there will be parallels with God, but also "inverse parallels," so to speak; or just say "image and likeness," both operative simultaneously in vertical space and horizontal time.

For us it takes time to ascend in timeless vertical space, and the drama of our lives has to do with the choices that confront us on the way up -- or down.

Davie: because "it is man's power of self-determination that constitutes both his likeness to God and his unlikeness," the local self "must be capable of orienting itself... either towards self in forgetfulness of God, or towards God in forgetfulness of self..."

This sets up an interesting dynamic, i.e., self-love (or narcissism) = forgotten by God, versus self-abandonment (or -forgetfulness) = remembered by God.

Only one of these can be "real," even though the self-lover is always utterly convinced that he is following the only realistic path, and that the other path is for the credulous and weak.

I used to "think" that. But in hindsight it is clear to me that I only thought this because of a hypertrophied precritical pridefulness aggravated by years of more intense indoctrination in graduate school. Ideology eclipses IAMology.

By extension, I think we could say that the people who are most convinced that they are merely "of" the world are completely out of this world, in a kind of "inverse transcendence."

It is obviously not genuine transcendence (↑), but it also ceases to be mere immanence when it makes such a sweeping characterization of the nature of reality. Mere immanence could make no such statement, because it cannot take an objective stance toward anything.

But in a way -- and Schuon has spoken of this -- the miracle of objectivity is even more miraculous than the miracle of subjectivity. After all, all other animals -- and it can be argued objects -- contain an element of subjectivity. But man alone is capable of objectivity, of standing "outside" or "above" his subjectivity in a disinterested way.

As a matter of fact, Splendor of the True includes a (typically) profound essay called Consequences Flowing from the Mystery of Subjectivity. Reviewing this essay, I see that it flows right along with what we have thus far said about the subject.

The following is both lucidly and beautifully expressed, without a wasted word:

"The first thing that should strike us when we reflect on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of the miracle called intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and hence its incommensurability with every material object..., or any creature whatever as an object of the senses."

He then speaks of "the absolute Consciousness, of which our thought is a distant reflection" -- which ought to be sufficient proof "that in the beginning was the Spirit."

And "an evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be." You need to take that quite literally, because it is strictly impossible for intelligence to conceive of its absolute negation (for to imagine it is to exercise intelligence).

This should be axiomatic even to the tenured. Which leads us to ask: just what kind of blindness afflicts them? For it isn't just sightlessness, but a substitution of illusion for vision -- which means a substitution of will or passion for intelligence. Which is again none other than the pride at the heart of man's Primordial Calamity (c.f. Obama).

Which in turn helps us understand the nature of this fall, and exonerates our intelligence as the culpable party (which some fideist approaches come close to blaming, or actually do blame). Yes, intelligence may choose -- hence our freedom -- and therefore choose wrongly. But there are usually identifiable reasons for this, which lie outside intelligence -- which is and must be a reflection of the truth it apprehends.

Schuon concedes that "intelligence can in fact fall into error," but that "for this to happen a volitional factor must intervene -- or more precisely a passional factor, namely, prejudice, sentimental bias, individualism in all its forms."

In short, instead of a humble adequation to reality, the will enlists the intelligence to produce and substitute its own version.

But if we examine these specious specimens, we will notice that they always "proceed from 'hardenings,'" from "forms of dryness," and from "intoxications." Thus, modern man is alternatively dense, desiccated, and/or drunk. He is either a buzzkilling, purse-lipped teetotalitarian know-it-all or just wasted on pride. A dry drunk or a wet drunk. You know them well: let's call them scientistic and pseudo-rational man and political-ideological man, respectively.

Hazy Cosmic Jive

I know. What else is new?

However -- fool disclosure -- I never pretend the haze is supposed to be helpful to anyone other than its jive author.

Davie draws the critical distinction between a garden variety mangod -- of whom there have been many, both genuine and fake -- and the one possible godman. Recall that this is the same distinction I made with the following two pneumaticons, the first signifying human ascent, the second signifying divine descent:

Note that I said one possible godman. Why only one? I would say because God is one, and because his absolute unicity is sufficiently revealed in this single Incarnation. It must somehow be complete in itself, so there can be nothing that could possibly be added to it: ∞ + ∞ = ∞.

One might say that in Christ, God says everything he wants to say to man -- while knowing that it might take centuries or even millennia for us to unpack the message. After all, we're still trying, aren't we? And has anyone really wrapped his mind around it yet? I don't think so -- which is one of its allures, so to speak. It's a feature, definitely not a bug.

True, there are plenty of explanations, but I have yet to discover one that fully satisfies. Which makes sense, because if we could "contain" this mystery -- or Mister O -- it wouldn't contain Mister I or U. Or in other words, we would be God.

It reminds me of a crack by Schuon to the effect that "the unicity of the divine Object requires the totality of the human subject" -- which is another way of saying "you shall have no other gods before me," and that one oughtta "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" -- i.e., with emotion, will, and intellect, respectively.

Or just say totally. Accomplish this and you will be a certified (↑), but it would be a fundamental error to imagine one is therefore (↓). The former is sanctity -- sainthood -- the latter is the spiritual inflation of a malignant cosmic narcissism. (There is no key for the circle with the arrow, so assume for the purposes of this post that the parentheses above are closed).

Elsewhere Schuon suggests that "knowledge saves only on condition that it engages all that we are."

In other words, at the very minimum, knowledge must partake of being, else it is mere surface chatter, just more words. It must penetrate our every dark corner and infuse the will with its light (for the will itself has no light of its own, or perhaps only the "natural light" of survival and pleasure).

The real Word of God -- ironically -- "is not a word that can be pronounced" (Voegelin) -- at least by us. Rather, it is a Word that only God can speak.

Thus, not surprisingly, this nonlocal Word is going to be more "dimensionally dense" than anything a human can come up with, which is why it is accurate to say that no man could invent a religion, or even a good myth. The real myths are written by both no one and everyone, hence their power, their universality, and their timelessness.

Elsewhere Voegelin makes the gnomic remark that "the fact of revelation is its content."

Wha? This very much reminds me of another comment by someone -- can't recall who -- to the effect that all revelation is exodus -- or that the exodus embodies all revelation. This makes sense to me, because the exodus involves -- depending upon how you want to formulate it -- being lost, or fallen, or enslaved, or confused; and being found, redeemed, freed, or enlightened, respectively.

It happens. Nor can there be an effect without a cause. Therefore the cause of our redemption/salvation/freedom/illumination/sanctity is.... let's just call it O, for now.

Now, it is easy enough to destroy man. In order to do so, you need only remove the possibility of the prior term (O) in the causal equation. If there is no O (in the sense used here), then there is only permanent bewilderness, with no rational hope of exitus.

According to Cutsinger, a genuine religion involves "a salvific descent of the Real into the illusory," which for us redounds to a "discernment between the Real and illusory and a contemplative concentration on the Real." Doing so requires -- or results in -- a kind of "leaping spark," a "direct apprehension of being as object by virtue of being as subject..." (ibid.).

Thus, in the timeless vertical, Revelation = Exodus. Conversely, Ø revelation = Egypt in all its ghastly forms. That is to say, a sophisticated and complex mental slavery is no better than a simple and straightforward one. It's the same pasture. The fences are just spread out a little further. But in our day and age, "an extreme mental dexterity goes hand in hand with a no less excessive intellectual superficiality" (Schuon, ibid.).

The alternative to O is ideology. Not this or that ideology, but ideology per se. All ideology is Death. Voegelin makes the excellent point that ideology is hardly a nontoxic gastime for the tenured, but a disorder, a vice, and a deviance (from human nature). Ideology is an early symptom of what later occurs in death camps and IRS offices. One might say that the 19th century was a prodromal symptom of the 20th.

Why does ideology fail? First, because it is in no way adequate to the Absolute. Second, because it doesn't even try to be, denying it a priori. Which ends as "a psychological game without any relation to the unfolding of our higher states" (Schuon, in Cutsinger).

Nevertheless, (paraphrasing Schuon) to pretend to know the limits of knowledge is to have transcended those limits. Doy!

I'm out of time, so we'll wrap up this hazy cosmic jive with further testimony from today's star witness, Schuon:

"There is in every man an incorruptible star -- a substance called upon to become crystallized in Immortality and eternally prefigured in the luminous proximity of the Self. This star man can set free only in truth, in prayer, and in virtue."

There's a starman waiting in the sky / He's told us not to blow it / Cause he knows it's all worthwhile --David Bowie, Starman