The Economics of Interior and Exterior Poverty

Here's one for the Glass Bead Game: what does idiom -- the unthought language of the self -- have to do with economics?

This question occurred to me while reading this piece on the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto. The question occurred because I immediately recognized the implicit answer. Even now I haven't explicated it -- that's what the post is for -- and yet, I know the answer is there.

In fact, this is a kind of mini-example of idiom in action, or at least an analogous variant of it. It all has to do with recognition -- or re-cognition -- which is "the identification of something as having been previously seen, heard, or known."

Except that I hadn't previously cognized the connection, at least consciously. But the orthoparadoxical term "unthought known" precisely goes to this process of unconscious re-cognition. While it might sound annoying or cute -- like some overworked wordplay the B'ob might force into existence -- it's really the perfect way of expressing it: something we know in our bones but haven't consciously innertained in skulldom. You could call it the realm of the bone-known, but I think you'd agree that Bollas' term is preferable.

Let's start with a question; in fact, Shem's "first riddle of the universe,"-- "dictited to of all his little brothron and sweestureens,"-- "asking, when is a man not a man?" The winner gets "little present from the past."

Give up? "Shem himself, the doctator, took the cake, the correct solution being — all give it up? -- when he is a... Sham."

So, are you a sham or are you the real deal? And how would you know the difference?

Reality is usually thought of as what is outside ourselves. But we couldn't know that reality unless there were something equally real on the inside.

Let's discuss de Soto's view of economic reality; he speaks of how "the Third World's poorest are relegated -- banished from their nations' official economies to what he has called 'the grubby basement of the precapitalist world.'" Now, why are they so banished to this psychopneumatic backwater? Because of "a lack of enforceable property rights."

Now let's go back to idiom, that is, the private language of the self. How is this language spoken? Largely through objects in the external world. You might say that culture is the collective sum total of "psychicized" objects for personal expression.

In other words, culture is in one sense "out there," i.e., exterior to the self. And yet, cultural objects have only the meaning we lend them. If I were to drop you in, say, Saudi Arabia, or interior China, or UC Berkeley, there would be very few objects there -- a very limited vocabulary -- for the expression of your idiom. You would be unable to find -- forbidden from finding -- the objects to express your unique idiom.

Not only that -- and this is a key point -- but your idiom wouldn't even be yours. Rather, with no strictly private property, what's yours really belongs to the state, plus the state puts sharp limits on personal expression anyway.

To take an obvious example, suppose you were an artist working in the Soviet Union or in Nazi Germany. If so, your idiom would have been restricted to socialist realism or classical kitsch. In Germany, for example "modern art was [seen as] an act of aesthetic violence by the Jews against the German spirit." And only Hitler decided "who, in matters of culture, thought and acted like a Jew."

Thus the tyranny of aesthetic correctness, which is ultimately enforced by the absence of any inviolably private property, right down to the first property, which is your soul.

As our fathers told us, certain truths are soph-evident to anyman to the right of the left, that we are endowed by our Creator with the liberty to discover and appropriate our own idiom; and that this right co-arises with -- for it cannot be actualized in its absence -- the right to property.

Looked at this way, "private property" is a kind of language, the idiomatic language of the self. You want what you want, and I want what I want. Liberals hate this idea, because they want you to want only what they want. They want to restrict idiomatic expression to their own idiom.

Or just say PC, which is really a pre-emptive attack on personal idiom, on our cosmic right -- and for Raccoons, our coonstitutional duty -- to be different. Have you ever watched MSNBC? The reason why it is a failure is that it is so dreadfully boring, frankly as boring and didactic as Soviet or Nazi art.

To paraphrase George Carlin, my stuff is your junk, and your junk is my stuff. In other words, stuff I like -- objects that speak to my idiom -- might just be a collection of junk to you, like my shelf full of vintage Barbies.

But on an even deeper level, this is the source of the energy of the private economy: I will give you this for that because I want that more than I do this. Simple as.

Which is not so simple in practice, and can even get you killed in most parts of the world. de Soto himself survived the bombing of his office by socialist terrorists in 1992. As Fox Butterfield might say, "Economist Targeted for Assassination by Leftists Despite Helping Lift Millions from Poverty."

One thinker -- who uses his words instead of bombs to express his idiom -- praises de Soto "for demonstrating how property rights -- often disparaged by left-leaning intellectuals as an instrument of the privileged -- help the poor:

"He has helped explain to convincible [heh] readers how radically egalitarian the rule of law and property rights are. Plutocrats, strongmen -- they have their muscle. They can take what they choose in lawless situations. But the poor and weak are protected by the rule of law and property rights."

So the krugmaniacal Obama, that phony Shampion of the Poor, has spent the last six years undermining the very thing that relieves poverty, both exterior and interior. If he had his way, the whole world would be as financially and intellectually impoverished as MSNBC.

A Daze of Future Past

This idea of idiom -- of certain eerily specific aesthetic objects "speaking" to us in an unfamiliarly familiar way -- seems to have spoken to the idiom of the audience. In other words, this line of thought about interior resonance seems to be resonating with your interior(s), so we'll continue the investigation.

Several people spoke of this very blog speaking to their idiom. One -- and you are not aloon -- didn't even understand it at first, and yet, was ineluctably drawn into the One Cosmos web.

This is interesting, because it highlights the element of "vertical recollection." In other words, the exterior object resonates with some interior reality, or form, or archetype, that has been "forgotten," as it were. Yes, paradise has been lost, but perhaps in the same way that our idiom has been forgotten. It is a mythic way of describing a psychic reality.

But that's only an analogy, because chances are you were never consciously aware of it, so it couldn't have been literally forgotten. But it is buried, and the problem is that life can pile more dirt on it and bury it more deeply.

Or better, as Schuon has expressed it, it is as if there is either a thick sheet of ice or that our consciousness has become fragmented and dispersed. "Mistaking the ice that imprisons us for Reality, we do not acknowledge what it excludes and experience no desire for deliverance; we try to compel the ice to be happiness.” Ooh. That's good.

Conversely, postmodernity is like a caricature of dilation. It is ec-static to the point of total dispersion.

Elsewhere Schuon writes of how our subjectivity may become crystalized or dilated, and that each of these may be positive or "privative." What is commonly called "the ego" in spiritual circles is like a privative crystalization (likeways any mind parasite). But there are also privative dilations, like the liberal totolerantarian whose mind is so open his brains fall out.

When we speak of idiom, it seems to me that we are mostly talking about liberating crystalizations, whereas a liberating dilation is essentially slack, or an attitude of openness to the real.

Our soul is a "form" -- the form of the body -- but it is also fractally "structured" in such a way that it is constituted of other forms. Of course, the immaterial is defined as that which cannot be divided, but that doesn't mean it can't have it's own particular configuration. If "the soul is all it knows," then there is infinite room for differences... speaking of unique idioms, this makes perfect nonsense to me, or almost, anyway:

"For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hides and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined..." (JJ).

I'm consulting the arkive, trying to draw up some relevant material, and found this subjoycean nonsense:

"Ah, remama when you was older than abraham and young as a babe’s I AM and the world wiz fresh anew, when heaven touched the earth and angels whispered their psycrets through the wind, rivers, mountains and stars? I do. Who could forget our universedidsay?"

But then, "as we adapt to our baffling new conditions and lose our innocence, the world is increasingly demystified and we become subject to the brutal 'reign of quantity' inside the prismhearse of the senses -- or the senses prolonged into material space, i.e., materialism. Much of spiritual growth involves the reversal of this process, or what I call the remystification of the world. For if you're not amazed, you're just wrong.

"As we fall down & out, life at the center is exchanged for life at the periphery; or, we are booted from the spacious interior to the cramped and contracted exterior."

So, "As we dissipate outward, we gain a new 'center of gravity' and lose the old center of levity. Returning to this eurhythmic center of groovity is the goal of life, or the final coonsummation. To put it another way, God is always present. It is man who is absent. Which is why we say on our celestial birthday -- which is every day: Come in, open His presence, and report for karmic duty."

It never fails. I always end up getting distructed and hypnoteased when I dig down into the arkive, because it's like I'm reading it for the first time. However, I'm obviously repeating myself, because this idea of idiom is everywhere down there. If I am -- and you are -- a pattern, then if we examine our past, we should find its soulprints everywhere. For example,

"Now, the fact that we understand objects, i.e., The World, means that the world is made of 'communication.' It is full of messages of all kinds, just waiting to be decoded -- quantum mechanical messages, genetic messages, chemical messages, pheromonal messages, divine messages, signs from the third base coach, etc.

"Thus, prior to what appears to be the most obvious ontological fact of existence, i.e., the distinction between subjects and objects, there is something even more fundamental: communication. 'Comm-unication' is the prior oneness that bifurcates into subjects and objects, and without which objects could not be known and subjects could not know them."

Or, just say Trinity. But "contrary to what atheists and other assorted morons are always saying, if this were a meaningless universe, no one could ever realize it.

"Now, interestingly -- this is getting a bit aheart of oursophs -- but what distinguishes the Trinity from those cheaply made bargain gods is that it is irreducibly communicative. Thus, this unique metaphysic renders what is otherwise quite problematic -- an intelligible cosmos that never stops communicating with its mumblers in goodsounding -- an inevitability.

"The cosmos 'speaks' because there are subjects; and because there is a Subject, the cosmos speaks. True, you are free to argue that the cosmos doesn't speak intelligibly, but not without sacrificing truth, freedom, and intelligibility. And since the substance of man is one part truth, one part freedom, the materialist commits ontological suicide.

"Which is fine. The immorality -- the unforgivable crime -- occurs when these undead body snatchers engage in the soul murder of others, especially the innocent kits. Which is why we say without exaggeration or hyperbole that the leftist takeover of the educational system is a kind of....

"Let's see, 'genocide' is already taken. Let's call it 'pneumacide,' i.e., the murder of the spirit. This is no joke, as anyone can attest who has recovered from the assault of these delumenationists. I know for a fact that I'm still recovering, and maybe always will be. It's somewhat analogous to nearly dying from some terrible illness, and then having some permanent residuals as a result.

"An image comes to mind. On the original Star Trek, they were beaming down some crew members to a particular planet. But in this case, there was a danger that they might rematerialize within solid rock, and then be unrecoverable. In so many ways, a secular brainwashing is to be beamed down into solid rock is it not? Or maybe ice.

"We must melt the ice, pulverize the rock, and regain our original fluidity. This can only occur in the Great Interiority of the subject, not by chasing phantoms in the object world, which reduces the subject to an effect rather than a cause. Freedom 'enters' in this space between subject and object, because, like truth, it is prior to both.

"But for the same reason, as Balthasar explains, man is the first entity that is freely capable of lying. That is, with the emergence of man, the Lie enters creation. In fact, if you remember your Genesis, the very first recorded statement of man is a lie to God: I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself.

"The Bible often makes a critical point by virtue of the order in which something occurs, so surely the first utterance of man is fraught with existential and spiritual significance.

"In this case, you could say that the Bible records the emergence of the first liberal, in that Adam immediately tries to excuse his culpability by depicting himself as the victim: hey, you scared me! It's your fault! But that doesn't fly, so next he blames the woman. In fact, there is also an oral teaching that has been handed down from generation to generation and which still lives today, in which Adam blames his malfeasance on conservative talk radio.

"Now, the Lie is the beginning of man's self-imprisonment under that sheet of ice alluded to above. It reminds me of when children used to get trapped in those old refrigerators that locked from the outside, for once man gets into the Lie, it is very difficult to get out. For inside it is as dark, cold and airless as the hole in a troll's soul.

"Truth, like love, radiates, whereas the lie compacts and restricts. Or, looked at another way, truth is like an infinitely hard jewel, whereas the lie disperses and dissipates. The left conflates all of these categories, resulting in faux beautiful 'radiant lies' such as socialism, or the 'hardened falsehoods' of political correctness. This results in a kind of perverse mirror homage to conservatism, because the left is not about 'progress,' but about conserving their 'permanent lies.' This is also why it is such a parody of religion, since, in denying the sacred, it confers sanctity on the profane.

"Because truth radiates, we have speech, or communication. If we didn't have speech, we would combust from the heat. As HvB says, in the absence of the gift of 'saying truth,' we would be 'burned up by an inward abundance that could not be expressed outwardly. It would be like a light that had to shine in itself without being able to emit any rays.' Most Raccoons are en fuego, and the only way to turn down the heat is to post about it and try to light up some other folks. Yes, we arsons of God.

"But this heat ultimately radiates from that burning bush that is never consumed. This is an irreducible mystery, for the more light we radiate, the more comes in -- like a brush fire that begins to generate its own wind. True, the Spirit blows where it will, but it blows even harder in certain self-generated weather patterns. This has been my experience of immersing myself in the world of HvB, which is like a tornado that lifts my little house over the reignbelow. Call it a Funnel of Love."

It is a fact that the gradual approach of these ontological levels of the spirit's form of existence is synonymous with an interior 'clearing,' irradiation, and illumination of being. The spiritual substance is light in itself.... Certain accounts of this fact suggest that the levels between matter and spirit are also levels of being's intelligibility. --Theo-Logic: The Truth of the World

Hey, sorry I got hypnotized by my own past. I promise to push this subject into the land of the new tomorrow...

Idiom, Resonance, and Destiny

It seems that the poetic mode of knowledge is very much tied in with the slack required to exercise it. Through it "we gain our first touch... of our final purpose, which is to experience happiness, a resting from activity, a return to where we began, to a state of repose: leisure" (Taylor).

Thus -- and this is impoïetant -- "the poetic precedes the scientific" as "the passive precedes the active."

I was reminded of this the other day in the account of the 12 year old Jesus hanging out with the teachers in the temple, "both listening to them and asking them questions" (Luke 2:46, emphasis mine). So, we would do well to remember that listening and inquiring are prior to teaching or evangelizing or bloviating. We should make ourselves as receptive as Socrates, who knows only one thing. However, unlike Descartes, who uses his One Big Think as a foundation to build upon, Socrates uses his only as a vast and fruitful space of unKnowing.

This is a resonant space; or in other words, truth seems to have a "frequency" or vibrational quality that stirs our inner tuning fork. Aristotle (in Taylor) compares it "to musical modes and rhythms," such that "some philosophers say that the soul is a tuning, others, that it possesses tuning."

Now, tuning is not the tune, but we cannot play the tune unless the instrument is tuned. Therefore, playing music or thinking truth requires the proper tuning. How do we tune the soul? In other words, what would be the mind-brain-relations analogy to tuning an instrument? Remember, proper tuning only "prepares" us to play something. It is not the playing itself.

Obviously -- whether or not the educrats would express it this way -- the purpose of a public education is to help tune the soul so that it resonates with truth.

How's that working out?

What does the barbarized and liberalized (but I repeat myself) soul resonate with, anyway? I don't really want to know.

We've discussed this subject in the past, in particular, with regard to some of Christopher Bollas's ideas of the destiny drive, psychic idiom, and the unthought known. These terms are all related, in that we become ourselves (via the destiny drive) by finding the objects and relationships (idiom) that somehow precede us (i.e., are known but unthought, the unthought known).

So: "Human idiom is the peculiarity of person(ality) that finds its own being through the particular selection and use of the object [which also refers to people, ideas, and relationships]. In this restricted sense, to be and to appropriate are one."

Although I did not know it at the time (this book I'm looking at, Forces of Destiny, was published in 1989), this comes very close to a trinitarian way of looking at things. Think about it: we cannot "find our being" within ourselves per se, only in relationship, whether with people, ideas, scripture, works of art, God, etc. When we hit on one that bangs the interior gong, this means that the object is resonating with our idiom.

In this regard, "idiom" may be thought of as our unique soulprint. Now, everyone is unique, but how do we know this, and how do we make it a reality? Consider, for example, the Islamic or Academist worlds, where everyone must think the same thoughts, regardless of personal idiom. Another name for this is hell.

Of course, the same thing can happen in families, and usually does to one degree or another. For example, I was born into a family that did not share my idiom, to put it mildly, so it took quite awhile to discover the objects that bang my gong.

In one sense I was "lucky," but if Bollas is correct, there was also a Destiny Drive at work, and in hindsight I can see how I was able to manifest it by passively surrendering to its higher wisdom (or stupidity, depending on how you look at it). In other words, I never "planned" my life in a top-down way, but rather, allowed it to play out in a spontaneous and organic manner.

Not that I am a model human or anything. But at least I'm myself, so I got that going for me.

I'm sure I must have quoted this resonant passage before, but in the introduction, Bollas talks about the birth of his son: "What struck me was how he was who he is from scratch. He seemed to be in possession of his own personality, his very own unique configuration in being (what I term idiom) that has never really changed in itself."

Megadittos.

Q: "But what is this idiom? How does one provide evidence for it?"

A: I would say, start by inquiring within. What moves your soul? To what are you spontaneously attracted? What lights you up inside? This vital work "is a form of play in which the subject selects and uses objects in order to materialize elements latent to his personality, akin to a kind of personality speech, in which the lexical elements are not word signifiers but factors of personality."

Example.

Okay, the other night I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for the hundredth time. While doing so I had a kind of flashback to when I saw it the first ten times in 1975, when I would have been 19 or so. Importantly, I was a complete idiot at the time, with no understanding of art & stuff (or of anything else, really). However, the film resonated deeply with me, but in a seemingly unusual way.

That is -- and this is in hindsight, because I wasn't consciously aware of it at the time -- it was as if the film were comforting to me. In a weird way, it was as if I were "at home" (in a psychic sense). Hence the compulsion to repeat the experience, for reasons known but unthought by me.

I won't get into that for which I was searching. Probably just the person writing this. In any event, the point is that something about it spoke to my idiom, an idiom that I was years away from actualizing. Has anyone else had this experience with an object, work of art, idea, religion, person, etc.? I'll bet you anything Rick has. What about the rest of you?

(And I see that this post has come fullcircle, in that we are inquiring into that first touch of our final purpose, which is to experience happiness, a resting from activity, a return to where we began, to a state of repose...)

Barry & Bibi, Cain & Abel, Shem & Shuan

Not much time this morning if I'm going to lend an ear to the anti-Obama. Remember the old line, "peace will only come when Palestinians love their children as much as they hate Israel?" Well, Iran will be denuked when Obama loves America more than he hates Israel. Which will be never.

Let's continue with poetic knowledge -- which is also noetic and poietic, as in poïesis -- which is the handy Greek word from which poetry is derived, and means "to make":

"This word, the root of our modern 'poetry', was first a verb, an action that transforms and continues the world. Neither technical production nor creation in the romantic sense, poïetic work reconciles thought with matter and time, and person with the world."

Like I said, handy word. After all, if God is the divine logotect, then theopoiesis is surely one of his tools. I first ran across the term when I was writing my dissertation on psychoanalysis and chaos theory, the latter describing open systems that are autopoietic, or "self-creating."

Actually, such systems -- including human beings -- are more self-sustaining than self-creating, but then again, the sustaining can be accomplished in creative and uncreative, predictable and unpredictable ways, and I would say that to the extent that we cooperate with God, then the poiesis will be creative. That is, it will feature novelty, surprise, beauty, and renewal.

And when I say "renewal," I mean that it will be characterized by life. No, not necessarily biological life, but rather, the greater Life from which biology is derived, or of which it is a material echo. Life, among other things, involves continuous self-renewal. When the renewal ceases, that lets you know you are dead. But obviously, death can long precede the cessation of biological renewal. The whole point of a religious practice is to renew ourselves in order to prevent the death-in-life. L'chaim!

It must work in a way analogous to biology. I don't have time to look it up, but they say that it takes something like seven years for every molecule in our body to be replaced. Now, how long does it take to -- as Paul puts it in Colossians -- put off the old man and put on the new? This is actually a question that divides orthodox from Protestant, the latter insisting that it is a case of "once saved always saved." For too many reasons to list -- scriptural, experiential, metaphysical, etc. -- I cannot agree with that.

Hmm. Well, first of all, this post is heading off into completely unanticipated areas, but that's theo-pneumapoiesis for you. The whole point of verticalisthenics is to maintain a vertically open system by aligning ourselves with God. Then we just get out of the way and see what happens: let go and let Bob. Not Bob alone, of course, but a kind of Godbob hybrid.

What?

Excuse me, but I thought that was the whole point. Grandiose my ass. I'm not taking credit, I'm giving it. Unless I am completely in error, in which case I do take all the credit. All truth -- even the possibility thereof -- comes from God. Error is what human beings toss into the mix.

Anyway, in the wiki article on autopoiesis, there is an excerpt from the book in which the word first appeared in 1973, called Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living:

"It was in these circumstances... in which he analyzed Don Quixote's dilemma of whether to follow the path of arms (praxis, action) or the path of letters (poiesis, creation, production), I understood for the first time the power of the word 'poiesis' and invented the word that we needed: autopoiesis. This was a word without a history, a word that could directly mean what takes place in the dynamics of the autonomy proper to living systems."

But this question of action vs. creation is not really dichotomous. That is to say, there are obviously creative actions, just as there is uncreative production. What occurs to me is that this is one of the fundamental complementarities laid out in Finnegans Wake, the sibling rivalry between Shem the penman and Shaun the postman, the intellectual man of letters, and the worldly man of action.

I think that today we can see this rivalry playing out: Obama, the dickless "man of letters" (I didn't say they were good letters) and the man of action. Who is the more creative? Who is more open to and engaged with reality, both horizontal and vertical?

In FW, Joyce often makes fun of himself (the archetypal man of letters) for being so ineffectual and impotent. The writer envies his courageous brother, just as his hands-on brother would like to fancy himself a weighty thinker (either that or devalue the whole world of thought).

Let us consult the Key, and see if there is anything else worth considering, or whether this whole post is just a dry inkwell.

Ha! Page 21: "Shaun, now called Juan (Don Juan)," is "about to depart on a great mission."

P. 27: "The double note of love and war is to become the pervasive theme of FW.... continually outcropping in the struggles between Shem and Shaun" under various guises. "Love and war are the constant life expressions of that polarized energy which propels the universal round."

Does Shem teach us anything about Obama more generally? "The answer is not far to seek: of the two sons, Shem [the penman] is the mother's pet and Shaun the father's."

Here is Campbell's translation of Joyce. You decide: "There are a few who still maintain that Shem was of respectable stock; but every honest man today knows that his past will not bear description." Joyce: "Putting truth and untruth together a shot may be made at what this hybrid actually was like to look at."

However, Bibi is about to walk up to the plate and wake Barry to the plot, so finny for now...

God's Not Only Merely True, But Really Most Sincerely True

A few more words about Poetic Knowledge and the Recovery of Education. Bottom line: the former is possible while the latter is not. You might say that the education establishment is ineducable.

Worse, poetic knowledge is not just possible but necessary in order for a man to become one, while the education industry -- or industrialized education -- renders this impossible (unless you're very lucky).

But for the most part, if you're going to activate your poetic knowledge, or plot your gnoetry implosion, you're pretty much on your own, because the government has no interest in nurturing individuals, only mindless statebots.

But hasn't education always really been for the few? How many of the many do you meet who are actually educable? The majority are trainable, while a smaller portion are tamable. That's funny, because for the past fifty years or so we've been laboring under the delusion that everyone should attend college.

However, this doesn't make the tamable educated. Rather, it is more likely to merely tame or train the educable, or pacify the wild intellect and consign it to the secular ghetto. It's how we end up with all these credentialed yahoos who fill academia and run the government. They don't shed light, they extinguish it.

So, poetic knowledge is a retail thingummy, never wholesale. In fact, not even retail, more door-to-door, or maybe some guy selling it out of his trunk. Most people who have it don't even bother trying to sell it, because the demand is so low.

So, if you're not homeschooled, then you're probably not schooled at all. The most we can hope for in a public education is that it doesn't kill the natural desire to homeschool oneself, i.e., snuff out the naturally supernatural love of learning.

The philo-sophical life revolves around being in love with, and seeking after, Wisdom, forever. But not only do these blighted infrahumans not desire wisdom, they don't even desire the desire. In other words, they are not even aware of this death in their perichoretic family! This is not even poverty, let alone mourning, because they are so full of themselves, and IT besides. No Cross for you!

Not only has the vast majority of my education taken place in the post-postgraduate slackatoreum inside my cloud-hidden bobservatory, but I have had to simultaneously disabuse mysoph of so much of the abusive sophistry assumilated during my quote unquote education. Just yesterday I was talking to a newfriend about how shocking it is that we have a president who really believes the shit I believed in college. Perhaps you don't realize how frightening this is.

This weekend I was reading in a book by F.J. Sheed of the distinction between knowledge and understanding. Specifically, he talks about how understanding can obscure knowledge. I would put it the other way around, but it's the same difference: a premature understanding of the the world -- or of human beings, or of oneself, or of God, or of history -- serves to prevent new learning.

Again, take the example of our idiot president, whose Deep Understanding of the ways of the world was set in concrete by his mid-twenties. Since then the rest has been commentary -- and deception, since he at least knows enough that he cannot reveal his gnostic understanding to the masses.

In the book, I talked about how words can deceive, especially if they are saturated with premature and unevolving meaning. Sheen writes that if one wants to take theology seriously, "the intellect must go to work, pierce through the words to the meaning, and enrich the words with the meaning -- that they may be real words" (emphasis mine).

How do we make mere words real words? Via poetic knowledge. Through this the intellect is able to make "the reality its own, then the whole man takes over -- will, emotions, imagination" (Sheed). This is how we give birth to the word: a -- or the -- word is a womb for the growth of meaning. And when the word grows in this way, "It means making the truths our own, a living part of our being" (ibid.).

Yes, "it is in the taking possession of truth by the whole man that the whole man lives." Only through this does the otherwise one- or two-dimensional word become three- or four-dimensional (i.e., vital and/or mystical). This is real intimacy with truth, i.e., knowing knaked knowledge, knucklehead.

For "Knowledge serves love, each new truth learnt is a new reason for loving God. Love craves knowledge, craves to know: it would be strange to love God and not want to know more and more about him." And "every truth revealed by God plunges deeper than [the] finite mind can follow it," but follow we must. Or are privileged to follow!

Blessed are the poor in spirit. The corollary of this is cursed are the asssouls who are wealthy in their own eyes. Or in other words, "There are three stages in spiritual growing:

"We begin from a condition of destitution, / pass from that into a second stage of true ownership, / and from that into a third, which seems to be a return / to the first, but no longer destitute" (ibid.).

To put it another way, "We begin with silence," then "progress from that into speech," and finally transition "into silence again, not a silence we lapse into but a silence we rise into..."

So with that I'll bow to the holy STFU.

[I]nfinite love has exploded into our universe; theology is an effort to diagram the explosion. --Sheed

The Institutionalization of Man's Depravity

Although Truth inheres in man -- in our spiritual substance -- it seems that this substance is susceptible to corruption. That would be the whole fall thingy. As a consequence, "there is a veil separating [man] from the inner light while nonetheless allowing a glimmer to filter through" (Schuon).

Or, maybe there's just this annoying veil between God and man, time and eternity, necessity and contingency, and we have invented myths and stories to explain why it's there: There extand by now one thousand and one stories, all told, of the same (JJ).

But in adam event, it's there alright -- more in some than others, granted -- and that's the main point. We forget it at our peril. And the left specializes in forgetting it.

You might say that denying the fall is the left's gnasty reason for beasting, or its first principle. Without this accursed principle it would never occur to anybully that the state can compel goodness instead of just preventing worse badness. Besides, who will compel the statist dogooders to do good?

Isn't this exactly what it is that makes Obama such an insufferable assoul? It is the very principle behind the diverse manifestations of his blinding assholiness. It is why Giuliani was wrong to call him unpatriotic, because he isn't even unpatriotic.

Being that he is a dick in "so many ways," it is tempting to point to this or that particular flacet, but Obama's asshattery is hierarchical in nature, which is why he is rotten from the tip of his ass to the top of his hat; in the distaunt tweet of the Iowahawk we have heard that the unicorn always rots from the horn.

But in turn, there is nothing new about Obama. He's just the same old slime mold, just a fadograph of a yestern scene (JJ). He's befouled this nest before and will be black this way again, who knows, maybe in two years if Nurse Ratched succeeds him.

Remangle the old testimony about pride before a slide and a haughtynaughty befalling a fool? This implied that pride and hubris sowed the slide of the humptydump that bumped our rump from its stump and into the sump. Thump!

Well smell, Schuon agrees that "pride is able to accommodate all the virtues so long as it can poison them, thus emptying them of their substance."

That's one of those cracks that maybe sounds abstracked or smackulative, but think of how the left can ape any virtue or good in the service of its opposite: democracy for tyranny, freedom for slavery, self-expression for self-indulgence, equality for discrimination, constitution for lawlessness, charity for robbery, justice for unfairness, nuance for having it both ways, etc.

Now, "under normal psychological and social conditions," writes Schuon....

Normal? Right there we've offended the left, for whom "normality" can only appear in scare quotes, and is always wielded in the service of abnormality anyway.

Nevertheless, under noumenal psychestances, "to have virtue is practically speaking to have faith, not necessarily a particular faith, but certainly faith as such."

This reminds us of what Kant said about his bewonderment at the starry heavens above and the moral law within, or in other words, about the miracles of existence and virtue, or truth and goodness.

For which we are not responsible. Therefore, the antinormal absurcumsdunces of the left profess "to have certain moral qualities, but at bottom it is to prove to oneself that one has no need of religion and that man is good by nature." Which means that the left denies man's fall while institutionalizing its depravitational force.

Which is ironic in a self-appointed community organizer, in that the very basis of community, or of the possibility of collective life, is grounded in adherence to virtues that precede and surpass us -- in the permanent things, not the progressive things that oppose and undermine them.

I Dream of Gagdad, Gagdad Dreams of Madonna

The ? in the margin tells me that this must be a place where I depart from Schuon. Either that, or it signifies an idea which requires further interrogation.

Hmm. Last night I was interrogating Madonna. In my dreams! No, really, in my dreams. I blame Drudge's headline that she had FALLEN HARD during a recent performance. In the dream she stuck out a leg and tried to trip me as I walked past her in the course of my cross examination. I jokingly raised the back of my hand toward her, and she smiled.

I remember about twenty years ago, reading something about a book that collected people's dreams of Madonna. Turns out I wasn't dreaming: I Dream of Madonna: Women's Dreams of the Goddess of Pop. Rather, a nightmare: "Lustily [?] conceived like a Dada art object... the dreams of fifty women reveal their nocturnal encounters -- by turns moving, bizarre, and erotic -- with the Material Girl and are accompanied by original collages that help illustrate the dreams."

Good news for me: the authors argue that Madonna has invaded our collective psyche "as a symbol of fearlessness, sexuality free of shame, and self-realization." So I got that going for me.

However, I'm not sure that shamelessness and self-realization covary. Indeed, if I were a psychologist, I might venture to say that exhibitionism is a primitive defense mechanism against shame.

I don't know if I have sufficient fearlessness to check out the reviews; or, if I can handle the vicarious shame. But I will summon my inner Madonna and forge ahead anyway!

Proving that a man with a Ph.D. in anything other than a hard science is 1) easy to obtain, and 2) hard on the rest of us, Dr. Trivino says the book "captures the inner perspective of so many devotees to this pop icon," leaving "no taboo unturned and yet expos[ing] an innocence of a different time.... The dreams and devotionals in this book will make you want to pull out your Madonna tunes and celebrate the angst of a time when anything was possible."

Celebrate the angst of a time when anything was possible. Except angstlessness, I guess.

Another so-called man writes that "in a world where traditional spiritual & mythic images have lost much of their power for so many people, new ones arise to fulfill the same function. And why not a figure like Madonna, who embodies sexuality, creativity, individuality, and the spiritual through her songs & ever-changing public persona?"

Really? Why not? Why not build a religion out of Madonna? It's like he's never even heard of Obama.

Here's a thought. Given how easy it is to end up in someone's dream, I'll bet you anything that more than one of you has had a dream in which I appeared. Next time it happens, leave an anonymous comment describing it. Eventually we'll have sufficient material to produce a book called I Dream of Gagdad: Raccoon Dreams of the Titan of the Internet.

Okay, back to the ? at hand. Schuon actually draws a distinction between the Absolute and God, suggesting that the former "has no interlocutor." Rather, he is eternally all by his (l)onesome.

First of all,

Second, I think I've caught Schuon in a rare contradiction, for he writes that "God is Divinity that personalizes itself in view of man," thus becoming "a partner or interlocutor" with us.

Excuse me, but "personalizes itself?" Isn't that a soph-tautology? For what is a self if not a person? In the Christian view, the OneGod is person, or, more to the point, three persons, for there can be no person -- or self -- without the other. Self-and-other are built into God, or rather, vice versa (same difference). There is no prior non-personal something that needs to somehow personalize itself.

Having said that, is it possible that there is something of the non-personal in God? Or better, how do we account for the millions of souls who not only claim that ultimate reality is impersonal, but have had the experience?

I would suggest that what they have actually experienced is anOther side of their own selves; note that this is a side, not the ground, for the ground is divine personhood.

However, I am of the belief that there must be a "dark side," so to speak, of this personhood, otherwise eternity would be a very tedious place.

In other words, surprise, creativity, novelty, etc., all emanate from this dark side, or rather, from the complementary and fruitful play of the divine persons. If "other" is built into God, then it is also built into us. As such, it is incorrect to suggest that creativity is an outcome of our engagement with some unconscious cauldron of primordial urges and instincts.

Rather, creativity results from our own trinitarian nature. It is very much as if there is another person or two down there. To cite one particularly obvious example, our Dreamer is not the same as our conscious self, and yet, it clearly behaves like a very creative, perceptive, and even weird person. It wasn't me who inserted Madonna in my dream, but there she was.

To be continued...

God is Proof that Man is Intelligent

I don't like to read more than one chapter a day with Schuon. Not that he's difficult per se, just that it's too rich. Dense. Pregnant. Full of implications. You have to allow the time and space, or silence (---) and openness (o), for the spontaneous occurrence of vertical resonance, AKA (≈).

Meanwhile, I started reading Poetic Knowledge, so I can't help drawing it into today's game. In fact, the title of the first chapter of The Face of the Absolute, The Decisive Intuition, goes exactly to what Taylor means by poetic knowledge (and to what I generally mean by [n] as opposed to [k]).

The decisive intuition must ultimately be intuition of God, and this intuition is always of a poetic nature (although it is possible to later work out the logical proof, just as, say, Einstein first had the vision of relativity before working out the math).

Poetic knowledge does not refer to poetry as such. Rather, it is a mode of cognition, "a spontaneous act of the external and internal senses with the intellect, integrated and whole, rather than an act associated with the powers of analytic reasoning" (Taylor). It is pre-analytical, but I would emphasize that it is equally post-analytical, in precisely the way we've been discussing in recent posts.

That is, even if we only regard the neurology as a metaphor, it is very much a kind of inspiraling journey from right brain to left and then back to right, the latter of which being able to integrate the fruit of left brain analysis into a higher and deeper synthesis. This doesn't make the truth of the Decisive Intuition any more true, but it does make it more robust and more intellectually satisfying -- if you have an intellect in need of deep satisfaction, which most people don't, whether religious or secular.

Briefly violating our one chapter at a time rule, in chapter two Schuon mentions how conventional religiosity (or exoterism) "has to take into account the weaknesses of men, and thus also, be it said without euphemism, their stupidity."

But as we alluded to in yesterday's post, the same principle applies no less to the secular world. A conventional university education has to take into account the stupidity of men, especially now that all men are absurdly thought to be fit for college.

As a consequence of this very real limitation, the teaching "must itself take on something" of the intellectual shortcomings alluded to above, "or at least it must allow them some room, on pain of not being able to survive in human surroundings."

So interestingly, truth must be mixed with falsehood -- in a manner of speaking -- in order to reach the average man, again, whether we are talking about religious or secular thought. This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless you want millions of people who are incapable of thought thinking for themselves. That's how we end up with an Obama.

Poetic knowledge is perhaps better thought of as a verb than noun. As a matter of fact, it is the very activity required in order to be a Glass Bead gamer, as it encompasses "religion, art, literature, music, architecture, manners, economics, leisure, and politics" (and more). These things don't just integrate themselves! Hence the sufficient reason of the Mystic Circle of Cosmic Raccoons, who do not shirk the liborious play of total integration.

Schuon writes of how certain religious imagery, "contradictory though it may be at first sight, nonetheless conveys information that in the final analysis is coherent and even dazzlingly evident for those who are capable of having a presentiment of them or of grasping them" (emphasis mine).

For example, "the story of Adam and Eve may clash with a certain need for logic, but we bear it deeply within ourselves..." It inheres in the very nature of intelligence; or better, it is a symbolic expression of a prior truth that "is to be found in the deepest layer of our consciousness or of our being."

If you need "proof" of this statement, the proof is in the fact that we are still talking about it 3,000 (or however many) years later! Furthermore, man -- so long as he remains one -- will always be talking about it, or else about the same truths in another form. Such truths are simply part of our standard equipment.

But the truth can become obscured. Here we can't just blame stupidity, but rather, a kind of willful stupidity that is wrapped up in pride. As Schuon says, this is not a fault of the intelligence per se -- for how could it be? -- but "from a fault of character, of pride above all." It is hard to imagine a proselytizing atheist whose mind hasn't been poisoned by pride, or who embodies the virtue of humility before the Mystery.

Why? Because the Mystery communicates itself, otherwise we wouldn't even have the name.

From humility follows other virtues, and these virtues, you might say, are both cause and consequence of poetic knowledge and decisive intuitions. "In this sense, virtue is a proof of God, as is intelligence" (ibid.).

Or in other words, if you're trying to prove the existence of God with your intelligence, you're going about it backwards; rather, much easier to prove that intelligence is only intelligent because God exists.

After all, it is "intelligence which is capable of conceiving the Absolute," and "virtue which permits man to surpass himself." An "unvirtuous intelligence" is an abomination, as Obama proves every day, and as the Clintons would like to verify for another eight years. Be it said without euphemism.

[W]ithout this poetic sensibility toward things, life deteriorates into brutality and chaos; what is also revealed is the upward movement of the senses and emotions with the intellect that sees the invisible meaning of things. --Taylor

If Atheists are Correct, Only God Knows

Seems like most people who encounter Schuon either accept his program entirely or else reject it out of hand. There's very little middle ground.

For example, a commenter named John recently criticized the B'ob for "taking what he likes from [Schuon] and rejecting the rest," arguing that "with some authors, Schuon being chief among them, the smorgasbord method is a priori disqualified."

He didn't explain why this is so, but in my experience, it is indeed tempting to place him above criticism, because he writes with such intrinsic authority. By which I mean that he doesn't have to appeal to anyone or anything to make his case. Rather, he writes in such a way that he bangs my interior gong in a direct and unmediated way. It is very much as if the proof is in the writing, more on which as we proceed.

Religion is a field in which it is notoriously easy to pose as a false authority, or to write with a certitude that isn't difficult to see through and pick apart. This kind of childish authority is not at all similar to Schuon. Such rhetoric doesn't convince like a perfectly forged key fitting into a lock, but rather, is more like a blunt instrument, or wet blanket, or cloud of verbal smoke. At the same time, it is fragile, like those religious solicitors who are trained to ignore all objections and stay rigorously on script. Belief for them is indeed a matter of will, not intellect.

Which is fine for some people. There's even a word for it: voluntarism. Which is perfectly respectable, within limits. After all, not everyone is cut out for intellection -- i.e., vertical cogitation and recollection -- and God has no desire to exclude them from the festivus.

We have much more in common with a simple fideist who believes (and loves) the truth with all his heart, than with some self-styled intellectual who believes falsehood with all his mind. Note that this is what the journalistic inquisitors are after vis-a-vis Scott Walker: do you believe in the god of matter with all your heart, mind, and strength?

"The content of religions and their reason for being is the relationship between God and man; between Necessary Being and contingent existence" (Schuon). Is that not refreshingly straightforward? Not blunt, mind you, but sharp. Truly truly I say to you, he slices like an effing hammer.

See, you can't joke around with Schuon, either. That last little comment makes me a vulgarian of the first rank.

Nevertheless. Let's continue.

For Schuon there is an orthoparadox at the very heart of religion, being that only religion-as-such can be absolute. It is only conformity to this "that gives [to particular] religions all their power and all their legitimacy," and yet, "it is their confessional claim to absoluteness that constitutes their relativity." In other words, for Schuon, such-and-such a religion can only be an outward mode of the inward principle.

Here again this is an appealing idea, because it can easily be deployed against atheists and other idiots who are more literal than the most literal believer, not in the service of faith, but rather, in order to justify rejecting the whole thing out of hand. Over the years we've had many trolls -- old William Femboy Catsnuggler comes to mind -- who know how to use the google machine to find this or that scriptural passage that makes no sense if taken literally and out of context.

Of note, one could do the same with science, for example, How can you say there was a big BANG, when sound waves would have been impossible? Or, how can RNA read DNA when it's so dark in there?

For Schuon, metaphysics is prior even to revelation, so, to the extent that revelation harbors and conveys truth, it is because it is in conformity to Truth as such.

I would rate this as mostly true, allowing for some things we could not possibly know with certainty outside a positive revelation from God -- for example, God as personhood, Trinity, love, and relation. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that Schuon would regard God as ultimately one and impersonal. He certainly allows for the personal God, but places him below the impersonal.

In contrast, I place them side-by-side, in that they are complementary, not hierarchical.

But in any event, irrespective of whether the absolute is personal or impersonal, metaphysics can easily knock down any secular argument, and indeed, the idea of an impersonal absolute will probably be more persuasive to the average flatlander. This is why westerners flock to Buddhism and yoga, because they reject the idea of God as an "old guy with a white beard." Note again how their childish literalism interferes with vertical perception.

So, "different types of religious imagery inevitably provoke doubts and protests in the absence of a sapiential esoterism" which can "bridge the gaps and bring the accidental dissonances back to the harmony of the substance" (ibid.).

In other words, we can integrate the dissonances with our intellect (AKA nous). We don't have to force the issue with the will, which just alienates the typical secularist who is so proud of his intelligence (even while holding to a Darwinism that utterly devalues it).

Ironically, "the reactions of the unbeliever and the esoterist may coincide," except that for the latter, this is the beginning of the journey, not the end. Thus, "the man who rejects religion because, when taken literally, it sometimes seems absurd," essentially blinds himself to the deeper truths that would speak to him directly -- i.e., bang the interior gong referenced in paragraph #3 above.

Out of time. To be continued....

A Science of Religions?

I'm reading this new translation of Schuon's In the Face of the Absolute. I've read all of his books, but these new editions -- which are reissued about one per year -- give me an excuse to reread them. Like MotT, it's always a new experience anyway.

In order to understand any thinker, you have to immerse yourself in his world. At least the first time around, you have to suspend criticism in order to sympathetically enter that world and check it out. It's like music or movies that way: surrender first, evaluate later.

One danger in doing this, of course, is that once inside, you may never get out. For example, think of the millions of people who "try on" liberalism as a worldview in college, and then never remove it. They accept it uncritically, often without even knowing they have done so. These idiotic journalists, for example, who want to know if Scott Walker "believes in evolution," have no idea that they are simply enforcing a dogma called scientism.

At PowerLine they have some examples of good responses to such clown questions. To the question of evolution:

"Evolution is a tremendously interesting subject. There are multiple theories of evolution, but none of them has been able to command a scientific consensus because they all have problems. It would be a full-time job to keep track of all of the scientific literature on evolution, and since I have been busy as Governor of Wisconsin [or whatever], I haven’t had time to do that. There are a lot of scientists who could give you better answers to such questions than I can, if you are really interested in the subject. Which I doubt."

Or, to the question of science more generally: "You just used the word 'science,' but I don’t think you know what it means. Science is a method, not a body of dogma. 'Science' doesn’t take positions on issues of public policy. So if there is a particular set of data that you want to ask me about, you need to be more specific."

Better yet, an all-purpose response: "you ask that question because you are a Democrat and you are trying to help your party. But your question contains an assumption that isn’t true."

To the debate about whether Obama is a Christian, I have a question for him: "Before Joe Biden opened his big mouth, you repeatedly lied about opposing the redefinition of marriage because of your so-called Christian beliefs. Does Christianity permit this kind of deception in order to advance an anti-Christian agenda? Or are you maybe thinking of taqiya?

Back to matters at hand. Although I still regard Schuon as one of the greatest religious thinkers of all time, now that there is some distance between us, I'd like to consider some of his ideas from a more critical perspective.

Let's begin with the foreword, in which he encapsulates a few of his key principles, most notably, that there is a distinction between "religion as such" and "such and such a religion."

What this means -- in my own words -- is that there is really only one religion, but that it is nonlocal, so to speak, and requires a local form, or a system of symbolic expression, in order to manifest to this or that cultural group. This is another way of saying that "all religions are the same," or at least have the same teaching beneath the outward multiplicity.

Is this true? Is there really a "transcendent unity of religions"? It's an appealing idea, especially in a modern world in which the diversity of religious belief is one of the main excuses for rejecting it. Can we really blame the village atheist who notices that religions posit seemingly contradictory beliefs that can't be verified anyway, so why believe any of them?

Schuon suggests that "religion as such" may be thought of as vertical, whereas such-and-such a religion is more horizontal. The former is the warp, or "fundamental doctrine," while the latter is the weft, which "consists in applications or in illustrations" of the doctrine. Therefore, every dude's area rug is going to look different because of the differing wefts.

In the past I have used the analogy of jazz improvisation, through which the soloist improvises over the chord changes. Many bebop compositions, for example, are based on the same chords as Gershwin's I Got Rhythm. Thus, each one is unique while sharing the same underlying structure.

For Schuon, the vertical component "possesses a crystalline homogeneity." It is absolute where the horizontal can only be "relatively absolute." Looked at one way, the latter is in the world of maya, or appearances. Even so, these ultimately contain the seeds of the absolute, or point to it.

More generally, Schuon says that "To speak of religion is to speak of a meeting place between the celestial and the terrestrial," or "between the divine and the human."

I can endorse this notion much more wholeheartedly, because I would agree that there is God -- or O -- and there is man -- or (•) -- and that "religion" is simply what takes place in the space between O and (•). This seems to me undeniably true, just as science is what takes place between man and world.

Therefore, "the two poles of a true 'science of religions'" must be "metaphysics and anthropology." Or, there is Truth at one end, man at the other. But a Raccoon takes seriously the principle that man is in the image of the Creator. This being the case, you can know a lot about the Creator by knowing what man truly is, and vice versa.

Schuon agrees that "In order to understand what religion is, it is necessary to know not only what the Message is but also what man is."

This is especially so because the Message is obviously tailored to man -- not to machines, or goats, or martians. In some sense, this message must be "prefigured" in man, otherwise we would have no way of recognizing it. It would be as irrelevant to us as, say, music to a dog.

If you've followed the argument thus far, it requires just one more leap to say that metaphysics -- which is on the divine side of the God-man divide -- "refers essentially to the mystery of the Intellect and thus to intellection." And our job is "to know the Absolute from the standpoint of the contingent, and to manifest the Absolute within the contingent."

Or in other words, there is knowing the truth, which is vertical; and then being, or embodying, or "doing," this truth in the world.

To be continued...

Three Shades of Magic

In Letter III, our Vertical Pal (VP) says that "magic" may be understood as "the power of the invisible and spiritual over the visible and material."

Thus, neuroplasticity is a form of everyday magic, in that it most certainly involves the exertion of spiritual and psychological power over the brain/body. Siegel defines neuroplasticity as "The overall process with which brain connections are changed by experience, including the way we pay attention" (emphases mine). (By the way, I don't want to pretend Siegel would endorse Raccoon orthoparadoxy -- he has a reputation to think about.)

It is important to emphasize that from the standpoint of neurology, this magical power is strictly impossible. Indeed, how, within a naturalistic paradigm, could it be explained? To the extent that the brain changes -- which it obviously does -- it would have to be explained in such a way that the mind is only a passive bystander or side effect of purely physical changes.

In fact, this is precisely how the tenured generally explain the "illusion" of free will. For them, the notion of freedom is a retrospective construct, in that we engage in the act and afterwards imagine that we were "free" to have done so.

I say: someone needs to get out of his mom's basement, or at least leave the campus once in a while. Reality is a big scary place, and you can't just tame it with language -- which is, not coincidentally, what our president is trying desperately to do vis-a-vis ISLAMIC terror.

What is it with liberals and language? On the one hand, secular folks insist that they don't believe in magical things such as religion, and yet, what is liberalism but a giant exercise in magical thinking?

Now Bob, that's a little bombastic. Would you like to take that back? In the words of Rudy, "No, not at all. I want to repeat it."

Just consider some of the magical ideas that are central to contemporary liberalism: global warming, command economics, sexual equivalence, the normalization of sexual perversion, etc. Plus, the ranks of the so-called New Age are filled with liberals who believe in everything from healing crystals to aromatherapy to reincarnation.

Here we need to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate, or white and black, magic. First of all, thats raciss! Leaving that aside, UF says that there are actually three kinds of magic. Looked at vertically, there is the sacred magic that descends from above, and demonic magic that ascends (or is invoked) from below. In between there is "personal magic," whereby "the magician himself is the source of the magical operation."

I would place personal charisma in this latter category, in that it is indeed a mysterious process through which some people are able to exert an immaterial influence on others for good or ill -- say, JFK, whose charisma is such that it completely overwhelms the critical faculties of the average low information voter. Because of this political hoodoo, he always appears in the top ten greatest presidents.

It seems to be the same with Obama, who is the most polarizing president in our nation's history (or at least since they've been doing surveys). This can only mean that he continues to exert his magical charismatic influence over liberals, with some 88% still approving of his "performance." In reality, it cannot be the performance of which they approve; rather, something immaterial must have possession of their souls.

All magic, according to UF, involves putting into practice the following principle: "that the subtle rules the dense." And "It is only magic crowned from above which is not usurpatory." This makes perfect sense, and applies to every virtue, every human capacity, every activity.

Take, for example, freedom, or free will. You could say that freedom is both the ground and goal of magic; again, free will itself is "already" a kind of magical, vertical irruption in the cosmos, but we don't leave it at that. Rather, freedom has a goal, a vector, a purpose. Which is? It is, in the words of UF, liberation in order to ascend.

Now, the difference between Gnosticism and Christianity is that the former falls into the whatchamacallit heresy whereby the human being is able to achieve earthly perfection in a do-it-yoursoph manner, without the assistance of grace, i.e., without surrendering the ego to what surpasses it.

Thus, real magic, according to UF, involves the integration -- there's that word again -- of two wills. It is a we not an I, for which reason UF says that "Magic is the science of love."

Does this imply that science is the love of magic? Oh, I think so. It speaks to the whole poetica scientia thingy we were discussing the other day.

All of this ultimately goes to the Incarnation itself, which is the "supreme work of divine magic," i.e., the complete cooperation of God and man: "the work of the Redemption, being that of love, requires the perfect union in love of two wills, distinct and free -- divine will and human will."

Note that this marriage requires "two united wills," which "are not manifestations of an all-powerful will ordaining, but are due to a power which is born whenever there is unity between divine will and human will." And this brings us full circle, back to "the power of the invisible and spiritual over the visible and material" (VP).

This could hardly be more different from, say, the Religion That Shall Not Be Named, which involves the exertion of one will -- that would be Allah/Muhammad's -- over everyone, which will in turn trigger some kind of magical end to the world.

This is precisely what ISIS wants; as Wood explains, their theology is Islamic right down to the last jot and tittle:

"The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.... the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam." These assouls "will not -- cannot -- waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers."

Thus, "Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people." They know better than our theologian-president that "The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam," and "instructs Muslims to fight Christians and Jews 'until they pay the jizya [tax] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.' The Prophet, whom all Muslims consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slaves."

In hindsight, this rambling post has explicated the three forms of magic: there is the legitimate magic of the divine-human partnership, AKA (⇅); there is the dopey human magic of liberalism; and there is the demonic magic of apocalyptic Islamists.

***

Via American Digest, communist magic:

"No man [more than Lenin] personifies better the replacement of the religious impulse by the will to power. In an earlier age, he would surely have been a religious leader. With his extraordinary passion for force, he might have figured in Mohammed’s legions. He was even closer perhaps to Jean Calvin, with his belief in organizational structure, his ability to create one and then dominate it utterly, his puritanism, his passionate self-righteousness, and above all his intolerance."

There's a Party in My Brain!

We're discussing practical means of achieving vertical and horizontal integration. Importantly, these are things we should take the time to do every day.

Yesterday we focussed on Focus Time. Turns out that concentrating real hard changes the structure of the brain. But again, mind/brain/relationships is an irreducible trinity, so each one always affects the others.

We've also been weaving some MotT into the cosmic area rug, and isn't it interesting that the very first arcanum -- of which all the others are fractally related -- is all about concentration?

To con-centrate is to gather all of oneself into a kind of central point -- as in how a magnifying glass can gather the rays of the sun into an intense point of light and heat, or maybe how the stylus of a record player is a tiny thing, and yet, exerts hundreds or pounds of pressure per square inch at the business end.

Next up on Siegel's list is Play Time. It's pretty much the best news I've heard since wine as a replacement for working out; that is, "spontaneously engaging in novel activities that capture attention" releases "chemicals that support brain growth."

(Looking back, I should have majored in leisure studies, but I thought Radio-TV-Film would be more leisurely.)

This is not the same as playing an organized sport or having a real major; rather, "the emphasis is on new and creative forms of interacting with oneself, others, and the world." That's what I told my parents, anyway.

Yesterday I suggested that following these posts requires intense concentration. But today I'm suggesting that writing them requires a high degree of playfulness. What gives? Aren't those opposites? No! Go back to Letter I. Its tykeaway is concentration without effort, you know, like a child:

"The little child does not 'work' -- he plays. But how serious he is, i.e., concentrated, when he plays! His attention is still [---] and undivided..."

And we have it on good authority that Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.

Receive? Enter? Aren't those opposites again? Only in asymmetrical leftbrain world. In the bi-logically integrated world of symmetrical consciousness, what is inside is out, and what is outside is in. We can be contained by what we receive or "take in" -- which very much goes to communion, among other things.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is purported to say that "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner," "then you will enter [the kingdom]."

This also goes to what we were saying yesterday about parasitical ideologies. Back in college (or whenever it was) Obama took in an ideology that now has him by the basal ganglia. Notice also how grimly unplayful Obama is. He makes Hillary look like the fun girls from Mount Pilot.

But with real playfulness, "our minds can become vulnerable and take risks as we push the envelope to go beyond our usual ways of being and of doing, and our brains can try out new combinations of firing patterns."

Moreover, we can "explore new ways of knowing and exciting and unpredictable things to be known," which helps us "to create higher degrees of integration with new levels of complexity..."

So, yeah,

The Pocket Guide to Magically Rewiring Your Brain and Knowing God

Our vertical friend suggests that what we call "tradition" is the residue, so to speak, deposited by mystical experience.

Thus, while mystical experience is intrinsically unitive, "the death of [a] tradition manifests itself in the degeneration of its constituent elements, which become separated." This is because tradition is more like an organism, a dynamic whole. Just as in the case of a human being, when the soul departs, the body disintegrates.

Contemporary liberalism is a quintessential example of the disintegrated parts of a more integrated tradition living on as detached parasites. Like any ideology, it is "a parasitic system of autonomous thought" which "bewitches or enslaves human consciousness and deprives it of its liberty." Which we wouldn't really mind if they weren't so adamant about depriving us of ours.

A person under such a spell -- our president being a prime example -- "can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events as they are." Rather, "he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed." As such, "a Marxist today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the 'class struggle.'"

Which is why the Obama administration thinks the problem of ISIS can be solved by a job fair and maybe a little counseling on how to get that résumé in shape. Like, don't say "spent two years decapitating infidels in the desert." Rather, something like "two year program of medieval studies with subspecialty in penal justice."

Ideologies, or philosophical systems, or even theologies "separated from the living body of tradition [become] parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings." They "play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession."

This is absolutely the case. Why? Because back off man, I'm a psychologist.

I would say that a successful ideology is a kind of readymade, or "off the rack" mental illness. An all around ideology will have various compartments in which to "plug in" one's complexes, drives, and conflicts, e.g., rage, envy, greed, the will to power, sexual confusion, desire to control others, inferiority, meaninglessness, etc. No matter how crazy you are, liberalism has a place for you. It's a big tent!

The bad news: its "physical analogy is cancer." Why cancer? Because cancer involves a revolutionary part that declares independence from the whole, and presumes to be the whole. 'Til death do you part. A cancer is ultimately suicidal. As is liberalism. It is unsustainable -- fiscally, morally, economically, spiritually, educationally, environmentally, aesthetically, demographically, etc.

A whole tradition requires whole persons to embody and vivify it. It doesn't really matter how integrated the system if the system fails to reproduce itself via integrated beings. The whole person, for VF, "is religious, contemplative, artistic and intelligent." Or, he must think truth (inwardly and outwardly), be creative, and "do" virtue. This unified wholeness exists in each of us in potential, but the (magical) trick is to actualize it.

How does one go about accomplishing this? VF highlights a couple of methods, the cultivation of silence and vertical openness, or what I symbolize (---) and (o), respectively. This facilitates vertical recollection, as it is difficult to integrate what has been forgotten. In any event, it is this "empty silence which serves to mirror the revelation from above."

Interestingly, in the Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiololgy, Siegel has a chapter on some of the necessary conditions of psychological integration and actualization. Being that these are necessary and not sufficient, they don't guarantee integrated wholeness. It is more the case that their absence will more or less engender fragmentation, dis-integration, and dissipation.

He lists seven mental activities (and perhaps "nonactivities") that need to take place on a daily basis: Focus Time, Play Time, Connecting, Physical Time, Time-In, Down Time, and Sleep Time. To exclude or overemphasize one or another will result in an imbalance, like lifting weights with only one side of your body.

Focus Time is closely paying attention. I am reminded of those studies showing that people who strenuously exercise their brains on a daily basis avoid the cognitive deterioration that comes with age.

This is an example of the brain's neuroplasticity, in that we can engage the will to actually change the structure of the brain: "When we focus on one thing at a time with interest and energy, we engage circuits in the brain that enable neurochemical releases locally and globally to initiate neuroplastic changes in the brain" (Siegel).

Maybe you haven't noticed, but these posts require a kind of sustained attention in order to understand what they are about. They cannot be skimmed, not necessarily because they are difficult, but because they are intensely focussed, and I want you to see what I am seeing.

Focus Time also allows you to grab the reins of your genome. Yes, really. True, you can't make yourself taller or grow a third eye. It's better than that! Via neurochemical mediation, Focus Time "supports the activation of genes necessary to create protein production and structural changes that underlie memory encoding and learning." It also "supports gene activation and synapse formation among the neurons that are activated with attention."

And if you fail?

We've all seen them: "After they complete formal schooling, many individuals stop closely paying attention. This may be a risk factor for developing dementia..."

Which is why "low information" and "liberal" are synonymous terms. Or maybe you haven't seen Watters' World on the Factor.

Original Syntheses and the All of Man

Now that I'm playing the Glass Bead Game between interpersonal neurobiology and Meditations on the Tarot, I see that there are links everywhere. No doubt because I am looking at it from a certain angle, I'm seeing the word "synthesis" all over MoTT.

On p. 20 our unKnown friend mentions Friedrich Schiller, who "advanced a doctrine of the synthesis between intellectual consciousness" (what with its "heavy burdens of duties and rules") and "the instinctive nature of man" and his "urge to play."

This sounds similar to what we've been saying about the synthesis of left and right hemispheres, as well as that between neocortex, midbrain (play) and limbic system (instinct). He was hoping to find that childlike balance in which "duty becomes a delight," concentration becomes effortless, and work is transformed to play.

In short, he was fumbling around for the secret of SLACK. But he was probably just a Freemason, not a Raccoon or Subgenius. Unless the records have been lost.

The idea of play is critical, because one of the things that makes man unique is that he never stops playing. Or at least he is not supposed to stop playing.

This is because, unlike other mammals, man's neoteny is not a temporary condition, but permanent. We never stop learning, growing, creating -- and therefore synthesizing. Play is how a child synthesizes. Synthesis is how an adult plays. Hopefully this will become more clear as we proceed, just in case it isn't obvious. (Hint: the Glass Bead Game never ends. Except in sudden death.)

On the next page, UF outlines what might be called the credo of the magician, or Man of Play: we only truly know "that which is verified by the agreement of all forms of experience in its totality -- experience of the senses, moral experience, psychic experience, the collective experience of other seekers for the truth, and finally the experience of those whose knowing merits the title of wisdom and whose knowing has been crowned by the title of saint."

Do this and you'll be a child, my man! (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling.)

Agreement of all forms of experience in its totality. This includes both vertical and horizontal, subjective and objective, beings and things, ontology and existence. The ONE COSMOS is both the Alpha and Omega of this journey, because again, we begin in relative fusion, move through the bewilderness of diversity and multiplicity, and end in the higher synthesis. Or just say one --> two --> three.

And no, I'm not going all Hegelian on you. This is quite different, in that we must accomplish it, as opposed to it being done through us via some abstract metacosmic geist of pure reason. Nor do I mean it in a pantheistic way when I say that the One Cosmos is alpha and omega, because I mean it in a much more integral way that includes God. I don't just mean the material cosmos.

This is also the principle way to avoid being an infertile egghead. Infertility results from a failure of union and synthesis. It is why the tenured are feckless and not fecund.

In Letter II, UF discusses "the reintegration of the two constituent elements of consciousness as such," i.e., "the active element and the passive element."

Here again we are talking about the fecundity that results from the proper marriage and union of male and female, or sun and moon, or left and right hemispheres. "There is no consciousness without these two elements," just as there is no picking stuff up without an opposable thumb.

Notice how thumb and fingers deploy a kind of force against one another for the higher purpose of grasping. Likewise, we grasp things via the "opposition" of various psychopneumatic complementarities. In turn, every orthoparadoxical complementarity is an important reveilation (in terms of what we were saying yesterday about the veils that reveal).

Another key idea: "Christian yoga does not aspire directly to unity, but rather to the unity of two." Which is what makes it Christian and not yoga (except in the generic sense).

What this means is that the oneness is both anterior and posterior to the twoness. However, this is not a unity of substance, but rather, of essence. And this essence is called Love, baby. Thus, as UF says, it is a non-substantial but essential unity."

Which is precisely what Norris Clarke says in his concise and lucid Person and Being. In it he proposes an "indissoluble complementarity of substantiality, the in-itself dimension of being, and relationality, the toward-others aspect." Ultimately this applies to both God and man because Trinity. Or perhaps better, because Trinity is in-carnated, making possible the journey from unoriginal sin to original synthesis and fruitful union.

UF makes the important point that there is legitimate and illegitimate twoness. I would say that this is because the latter is a vicious (because unresolvable) duality whereas the former is a blessed and fertile complementarity. UF goes so far as to say that evil is a result of illegitimate twofoldness. I'll have to think about that one, but it sounds about right.

Consider, for example, how Job One for the left is to sow illegitimate divisions. I think this is why they are always more comfortable hating than loving. Obama-love could only satisfy them for so long. It is much more natural for them to hate Bush, and now a Scott Walker. They are much more animated by Walker's failure to graduate college (we would say success in avoiding it) than they are by the Islamic State decapitating Christians.

We're out of time. To be continued...

It Takes One(ness) to Know (the) One

Well, it's President's Day, a quintessentially postmodern helliday in which the federal government compels schoolchildren to conflate evolutionary cosmohistorical lightbringers such as Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan with smallminded and malevolent assouls such as Carter and Obama.

That is a perfect example of the very opposite of what we've been discussing for the past week or so: fusion as opposed to integration. The same proglodytes lump all religions together, as if Christianity and Islam "worship the same God."

Likewise, these vertically challenged spiritual dwarves conflate freedom and democracy, as if the latter somehow assures the former. (Remember when the press jumped all over Rumsfeld for suggesting that democracy is overrated?) But a Raccoon would much prefer to live in a monarchy with secure civil liberties than in a moonarchic 'batocracy in which our liberties exist at the pleasure and whims of the prince and the drooling mob that made him one.

Thus far we have covered the vertical integration of brainstem, midbrain, and frontal cortex; and the horizontal integration of left and right hemispheres. Siegel mentions several other biggies, such as memory, narrative, state (meaning temporary states of mind), interpersonal, temporal, and "transpirational" integration, the latter being the closest to what a Raccoon would regard as proper vertical integration, AKA the divine-human nexus.

We will get to all of these in due time, if ever, but over the weekend it occurred to me how compatible all of this is with one of our foundational texts, Meditations on the Tarot. Any Raccoon who hasn't read this book cover-to-cover at least twice probably isn't one. Why twice? Because by the end of the book you won't be the same person, so the second -- or third or fourth -- time around it will be a "new book" for this new man. Hello, noumena!

It's all as clear as day in Letter I, The Magician. Note that this arcanum is a fractal of all the others. In other words, while a "part" of the book, it contains the whole in essence. Therefore, the rest of the book will be a reworking of the same themes, just as in a symphony. I was just reading how old Beethoven would take "a piece of material, an idea," and transform it "into new passages that share an underlying essence but sound different." It "is a matter of contrast and diversity founded on unity and invention: fashioning many things from one thing."

Just so, we can say that the subsequent twenty one arcana are all "in" the first, for as our unKnown Friend says, the Magician is "the key to all the other Major Arcana."

First of all, what is an arcanum? It is a symbol -- an authentic symbol. Which is whatnow? Etymologically speaking, a symbol is something "thrown across." It is a means of getting from here to there -- in this case, a vertical there. As such, "they conceal and reveal their sense at one and the same time according to the depth of meditation." For which reason we invented the term reveil: any religious symbol reveils, meaning simply that it simultaneously veils and reveals (or, more to the point, veils so as to reveal).

This is similar, say, to a veil over a statue. But in the vertical world, without the veil we cannot perceive the underlying essence at all. You could say that we cannot "see" God, but we can certainly see his veils, more on which later. But there are two errors to avoid: trying to strip away the veils in order to see God directly, or elevating the veil to God. The former is barbarism (whether primitive or postmodern), the latter idolatry.

The arcana do not provide us with cutandry & wideawake answers, but rather, render "us fertile in our creative pursuits.... An arcanum, is a 'ferment' or an 'enzyme' whose presence stimulates the spiritual and the psychic life of man." As such, these symbols are what we call essential vertamins to aid in our spiritual metabolism.

In order to integrate and assimilate the influx of vertical forces, we must attain openness (o) and silence (---). Doing so involves being "one in oneself" so as to be "one with the spiritual world."

Now, to say "one" is to say integration. You could say that the spiritual life is essentially the exercise (or verticalisthenics) of practical unity, or of putting "unity into practice." That is, the Raccoon begins with "the basic unity of the natural world, the human world and the divine world." Indeed, without this prior unity, "no knowledge is conceivable." Period.

In short, "The tenet of the essential unity of all that exists precedes every act of knowledge, and every act of knowledge presupposes the tenet of the unity of the world." That latter is especially important, because to truly know anything is a key to the whole existentialada. Nothing would be knowable in the absence of this prior unity.

Having said that, we are again talking about a circular movement that begins in unity (or better, fusion), proceeds to differentiation, and returns to unity, only on a higher level (or in a higher key). It is precisely what the Poet means with that crack about rearriving to where we started and knowing it for the first time, or that metamagical transition from p. 266 to p. 6, AKA the endless riverrun to and from evenadam & backagain.

Think about that one once again: it takes one to know One. Or, it requires integration in order to approach the Source of integration. This implies, among other things, that our vision of God is a qualitative matter that varies with the integral width and depth of the subject.

How could this not be the case? Any perception or knowledge of God must be inflected through the human subject. An unintegrated subject is going to have a more or less narrow and/or shallow conception of God.

Think of the Islamists. How do they have such a dis-integrated conception of God? In a way, it is a perverse mirror image of Obama's undifferentiated, fusionist God. Both are primitive, but in different ways. For postmodernists such as Obama, they invert the words of the Poet by arriving where man started and not knowing it for the first time ever (since man has always known of God); this represents omnipotent ignorance upon omniscient stupidity, or tenure².

Our unKnown friend says some things that sound very much like what we said in the previous post about the integration of left and right hemispheres. In fact, he is saying the identical thing, only with a different vocabulary:

"The Magician [i.e., integrated person] represents the man who has attained harmony and equilibrium between the spontaneity of the unconscious [read: right hemisphere]... and the deliberate action of the conscious [left hemisphere]." Thus, "His state of consciousness is the synthesis of the conscious and unconscious" -- except to emphasize that this latter is not really "un-," but rather, quite oneconscious.

To be continued...