Eh, Whatever

That kind of mood. So, open thread.

What Would Churchill Say?

Depressing. Now I know what Israelis must have felt like when one of their citizens opened fire in a mosque in 1994, murdering 29 Palestinians. The difference is that in America there is no us and them, except in the sense that the left wishes to force us to think in this debased and destructive way, instead of just thinking in terms of good and evil, decent and indecent. No doubt doing so would be considered an offensive microaggression toward indecent people who can't help doing evil.

Not to politicize the matter... In fact, not doing so is my whole point, because any decent person recognizes that nine of ours have been senselessly murdered, not nine of theirs. And not to in any way excuse the murderer -- indeed, I would like to see the monster hanged tomorrow after a thorough trial lasting for at least 15 minutes -- but I'm afraid such despicable actions are a mirror image of six years of relentless us-them thinking toward law enforcement and toward racial matters more generally.

Here again, the difference is that none of "us" will condone the actions of this depraved assoul, whereas the entire media-academic complex both condones and encourages race-motivated violence in the other direction. But once race wars are underway, I have been given to understand that they are difficult to stop.

Like I said, depressing. I need a lighthearted subject. Must everything be of cosmic significance, Bob? Why so serious?

One thing that comes through in reading this compendious compendium of Churchillania is his largeness of soul. Magnanimity. Broadmindedness. Not to mention incredible courage. As I mentioned in a comment yesterday, he makes me suspect we are well past Peak Leadership.

As an aside, I am also noticing an odd resonance with one of our favorite authors, P.G. Wodehouse. They were born within seven years of each other, and it is as if they draw upon the identical sources and deploy the same rhythms of speech, except of course in very different ways.

But interestingly, while Churchill was known to be a world-class wit in public, Wodehouse was said to have been utterly boring. Fans who bumped into him expected a stream of lively conversation and sparkling witticisms, but he was a bit of a flatliner.

Example.

When Churchill declares war on Japan, he cites their "wanton acts of unprovoked aggression, committed in violation of international law."

But then he signs off the communique with I have the honour to be, with high consideration, Sir, Your most obedient servant, Winston S. Churchill. While some questioned the appropriateness of his gracious manner, he explained that "after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite."

Wodehouse was able to take such high-flown rhetoric, and by tweaking it slightly, turn it to comedic effect. But in order to tweak it, he had to be totally familiar with, and comfortable in, that domain. Like Churchill he could effortlessly quote Shakespeare and other lumiaries. Both had huge literary accounts to draw upon.

One thing the Arab-Muslim world excels in is outlandish rhetoric about the enemy -- i.e., Jews and infidels -- that is so over-the-top, it's funny. But thanks to political correctness, we are not even permitted to name our enemy, much less describe him. Churchill was under no such restrictions, so his descriptions of the enemy provide a torrent of fine insultainment.

Remember how the left wetted itself over Reagan's crack about the "evil empire," or Bush's about the "axis of evil"? Churchill would never be so restrained. Rather, we were at war "against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime." Our task was to "rescue mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history."

And not only was he permitted to name and describe the enemy, but name what we were defending and why: "Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation." Should we fail, "then the whole world... will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."

He just described Iran.

You can't mention Christian civilization because CRUSADES. Besides, the left supports the enemy of its enemy, since they share the common enemy of Christian civilization. Leftism and Islamism are both motivated by hatred of precisely what Churchill so courageously defended. Now we have to apologize for it, which again goes to the symbolism of Obama exorcising the White House of that bust of Churchill. Al Sharpton? Bueno. Winston Churchill? Adios.

This would be fun. Take some of Churchill's statements about Germans or Japanese or communists, and insert "Islamists" or "jihadis" or "mullahs."

"We shall never descend to the [Islamist] level, but if anybody likes to play rough, we can play rough too. [Al qaeda and ISIS] gangs have sown the wind: let them reap the whirlwind."

"In spite of all their brains and courage, they worship Power..." "They do not value freedom themselves, and the spectacle of it in others is hateful to them. Whenever they become strong they seek their prey, and they will follow with an iron discipline anyone who will lead them to it."

Let's be fair: "All [the mullahs] ask for is the right to live and to be let alone to conquer and kill the weak."

You can't make nice with an Iranian tyranny "which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses... with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force." "Never forget that the [mullahs] are crocodiles.... I cannot feel the slightest trust or confidence in them."

"There is nothing they admire so much as strength, and nothing for which they have less respect than weakness." "You can only deal with them on the following basis... by having superior force on your side on the matter in question -- and they must also be convinced that you will use -- you will not hesitate to use -- those forces, if necessary, in the most ruthless manner."

In an arresting image, Churchill characterized Nazis as sheep, but carnivorous sheep. Could the same not apply to the ravenous sheeplings of Islamo-nazism? Although they are religious robots, they've forgotten allahbout the First Law.

In any event, this "gang of bandits.... shall themselves be cast into the pit of death and shame, and only when the earth has been cleansed and purged of their crimes and their villainy shall we turn from the task they have forced upon us..."

As to our contemporary leadership, "My parents judged that the [circus] spectacle would be too revolting and demoralising for my youthful eyes, [so] I have waited 50 years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting in the [White House]."

Advice to President Jello: "To try to be safe everywhere is to be strong nowhere." "Weakness is not treason, though it may be equally disastrous."

But why should America be the policeman of the world? "I answer: 'If we left off [policing it] you would soon find out.'" For "The victory of [America] means the welfare of the world."

The left? Its philosophy "has not one single social or economic principle or concept... which has not been realised, carried into action, and enshrined in immutable laws a million years ago by the White Ant." "The strangling of it at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race."

"One might as well legalise sodomy..."

Or better, one might as well redefine marriage. At this point what difference does it make?

The Church's Greatest Scientific Blunder Since the Galileo Affair

So, not only has Pope Francis bought into the most ginormous scientific bubble in all of history, but now he's doing his best to inflate it. Ironically, this may provide hope to the masses that the theory is near collapse, because when the last -- LIBSWE (let it be said without euphemism) -- dupe jumps in, it's time to cash out of the bubble.

The Pope is reducing the sacred deposit of faith to the status of any other vulgar end-of-times cult, from Seventh Day Adventurists to Hale Bopp necronauts. He will have a lot of explaining to do, unless the encyclical has the paradoxical effect of causing all of the usual suspects to actually check their math, because if this guy believes it, something must be wrong.

Remember the atheist maniac we linked to yesterday? There are plenty more where he came from, and if he is intellectually consistent -- I know, a tall order -- then he will naturally have to wonder how he could find himself standing cheek-to-jowl with Neanderthalic Pedophile Pulpiteers who are Enemies of Fact and who put their faith in Celestial Tyrants to protect them from Evil Genies and other Comic-book Bugaboos.

As histrionic as that is, there is actually a morsel of truth hidden away in there, because as it pertains to global warming, Pope Francis is an enemy of fact who is terrified by a commie book bugaboo, which is to say, freedom and free markets:

"First, the Pope has no idea what he is talking about. His letter is full of factual errors.... There has been no net global warming for something like 18 years, according to satellite data, the most reliable that we have."

Furthermore, "Sea level has been rising for approximately 12,000 years, first dramatically as the Earth warmed rapidly at the end of the last Ice Age, and much more slowly in recent millennia. Currently, the rate of rise of sea level is not increasing."

Moreover, "Extreme weather events are not increasing. This isn’t an opinion, it is a fact: there is no plausible empirical claim to the contrary. In fact, for what it is worth, the climate models that are the sole basis for warming hysteria predict fewer extreme weather events, not more, because the temperature differential between the equator and the poles will diminish."

So, what's the Pope's angle? "[A]pparently, hostility toward free enterprise and the prosperity that it creates. Francis has manifested such hostility in previous statements, and it comes through again in his anti-global warming letter. Francis sounds like just another leftist: the solution to global warming is more state control to dictate how people live, and new international organizations to direct vast transfers of wealth and power."

The lamentable fact "is that through human history, freedom has rarely been popular." Which is precisely why God must emphasize that it is his highest (supernatural) value, and that human beings need to man up and deal with it. If it came naturally, or if man valued freedom, God wouldn't have to go to the trouble of making it central to his meta-cosmic revelation.

Even worse, the enpsychloco borders on -- LIBSWE -- the frankly diabolic, because what else do you call intentional impoverishment and shortened lives for billions of human beings?

"[T]here is no prospect that leftist energy policies will help poor nations. The poor need, as much as anything, cheap energy, which frees resources for everything else. To deprive poor nations of cheap energy is to condemn them to long-lasting if not permanent poverty.... Jesus said, 'The poor you have with you always,' but he didn’t mean that we should conspire to keep them down" (above quotes from PowerLine).

I know we're supposed to hate the idiocy and love the idiot, but I'm not sure God had genocide in mind when making this recommendation, because dead men give no love.

Some things are intrinsically and self-evidently evil, or we couldn't have any moral compass at all. You might say that man has an inbuilt moral compass that points in the general direction of true north, but that God fills in a lot of the details between where we sit and the North Pole, or between heaven and earth, the terrestrial and celestial. And man should certainly know better than to put his faith in a god who is demonstrably less moral than he. This would be one of the hints that you are worshipping a false god.

For example, if your god requires the death of six million Jews, or a couple million Armenians, or numberless bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, or untold energy-deprived third-world denizens, then you might want to rethink your theology.

I heard an apt line last night in the Sopranos, when the boys are wondering why a Hasidic Jew doesn't just murder his troublesome son-in-law. One of them says something like, "eh, it's a taboo in their religion or something."

So yeah, I have a similarly superstitious taboo about intentionally harming innocent human beings. I've read many books on global warming, but the most powerful one is The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. I can't possibly summarize it, because the whole thing is highlighted. At the end I wrote down several questions to ask of global warmists, one of which is "How many billions of premature deaths due to decreased energy use would be acceptable to you?"

There is no linear relationship between CO2 and global temperature. But there is an incredibly strong correlation between energy use and life expectancy -- not to mention the quality of that life. Energy has been the key to unleashing man's potential, so the global warming hoax is nothing less than a conspiracy against the very purpose of existence.

As billions of human beings have been lifted from soul-crushing poverty thanks to fossil fuels, billions more will be plunged right back into it if the warmists have their way. For starters, good luck feeding the world without them. Sustainability is another word for global famine, and is utterly unsustainable. At least the worst ones are honest about this.

Destroy another fetus now / We don't like children anyhow / I've seen the future, baby: / it is murder --Leonard Cohen, The Future

The Wit and Wisdom of Churchill vs. the Twaddling Twititude of Obama

One last thing I want to say about bubbles, and then I'll move on. Wallison mentions a crack by Warren Buffet to the effect that you can't tell who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. Or in the case of the 2007 crash, until home prices stopped rising, which exposed all those subprime people victimized by the subprime ideas of the left.

However, there are two ways to inflate a balloon. The usual way is to increase the pressure inside, but another way is to decrease the pressure outside. Liberal bubbles rely more on the latter. If we think of the ambient political pressure as "truth" or "knowledge," then the left absolutely can't function except in a low-pressure environment.

It is the function of the MSM to keep the pressure low around liberal candidates (e.g., ignoring Clinton corruption and criminality), but absurdly high around a conservative one (e.g., Marco Rubio's secret history of exceeding the speed limit and being prosperous enough to afford a luxury dinghy).

Democrat ringmasters know there's a lo-fo voter born every minute, except not necessarily in this country. D'oh! Thus the desperate need to import them from south of the border.

Remember, Mitt Romney would have defeated Obama by a wider margin than Reagan beat Mondale if the nation's demographics in 2008 had been the same as 1984. If it hadn't been surrounded by the low pressure media and low-information voters, The Obama Balloon couldn't have expanded at all, let alone to such grandiose proportions -- for example, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "nothing," an apt symbol of what was actually inside the balloon.

In reading this magnificent compendium of the wit and wisdom of Winston Churchill, I am reminded that no one will ever issue such a compilation of Obama's literary and oratorical gems, because there are none.

To be clear, I am sure some publisher will try, but you can be certain it will nevertheless be as empty as, say, Bill Clinton's turgid autofellatiography. Or, it will be a cornucrapia of malevolent bullshit, which is even worse, i.e., occuping "negative space" instead of merely being as vapid as, say, the collected poems of Suzanne Somers.

It is right and fitting that the first thing Obama did upon occupying the Big Chair was to send the bust of Churchill back to the white racist imperialists who gave it to us.

Another name for this 600 page book could be What Churchill Knew that Obama Doesn't, but even then it can only skim the surface, since it only represents 0.2 percent of his 15 million published words. Edward R. Murrow famously observed that Churchill "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle" against our socialist enemies.

Conversely, our socialist enemies begin by mobilizing a battle against the English language. Ironically, there are even some passages in the book to that effect, in that Churchill recognized the PC virus long before it had a name, expressing the "hope to live to see the British democracy spit all this rubbish from their lips."

In response to the left's relativism, he might say "The propositions of Euclid would be no less indisputable were they propounded by an infant or an idiot." And in reaction to Obama's War-is-Peace Prize, he might remind him that "A sincere love of peace is no excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folk into total war."

How did we get here? We were discussing the human interior, which is an ontologically real space. However, sometimes this space can become "unreal," which is really another way of talking about what happens when someone lives in a real bubble.

For example, if global warming is indeed the greatest scientific hoax in human history, then its advocates are living in a bubble that must eventually burst because reality always gets the last word.

You can tell you're in a bubble if your knowledge diminishes the unknown instead of enhancing it -- if you entertain the unwarranted belief that reality just so happens to comport with your ideas about it, with no remainder; or in other words, if you collapse the space between immanence and transcendence. Being that this latter is the "human space" -- or divine-human space -- to do this is to abolish man by rendering him absurd.

Thus the orthoparadox that "the finitude of things is discovered only in the very conclusion that also establishes the infinite source of their limitation" (Schmitz) -- which you can be certain has never occurred to this unhinged atheist.

Could someone be less self-aware or more ignorant of history, science, and metaphysics? He is only right if human origins may be reduced to physics, in which case he can only be wrong. I mean, science can't even say where our thoughts come from, let alone everything outside them. Such simplistic theories can't even explain the simpletons who believe them.

There's a name for this: the Dunning-Kruger effect, "a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude." If you are a theological idiot, then you lack precisely the skills to appreciate the infinite magnitude of your idiocy.

How does a human being pass beyond this thing called "nature" in order to get at this thing called "truth?" Schmitz provides a clue: personal presence -- or the presence of persons -- "is the immaterial coin of human spirituality, and perhaps the medium through which the anthropological circle can be enriched by being broken."

In short, being a person means being gratuitously free of any ideological bubble in which the left might try to imprison us. For the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, boom, there is liberty (2 Cor 3:17).

For that matter, in a letter to Lady Churchill after Winston's passing, the author wrote: That he died is unimportant, for we must all pass away. That he lived is momentous to the destiny of decent men. He is not gone. He lives wherever men are free.

Conversely, Obama lives wherever the state has a better idea of what to do with your freedom.

Subprime People and Intellectual Bubbles

There are two mysteries that loom above all others, God and person. This is because in their absence there would be no mysteries at all: no humans, no problems. And no God, no answers.

However, in the Christian view, these two mysteries may be reduced to one: persons. Note also that this latter cannot be reduced to first person singular, since the We must be prior to the I if personhood -- which is irreducibly intersubjective -- is our first principle.

For Schmitz, personhood is "a human reality in search of its appropriate name." We have devoted many posts to the subject of how our personhood has become more individuated over the centuries, mainly due to the influence of Christianity (cf. our long series of posts on Inventing the Individual). Under its influence, personhood deepened within the space of "an open intimacy with God" (Schmitz).

"Subjectivity," suggests Schmitz, "is the process of inward uniqueness outwardizing itself." I prefer the term exteriorizing, but I would also emphasize that there are two movements, for the soul interiorizes objects and relationships that speak to its unique idiom. Culture and history are in one sense the exteriorization of the soul, but once exteriorized, become material for interiorization. Or at least they used to, before the anti- and ahistorical left ruined everybody's lives and ate all our steak.

This goes to a rather largish subject, the notion of economic "bubbles." While reading the book Hidden in Plain Sight, on the government-caused economic crisis of 2007-20??, it occurred to me -- no great insight here -- that an economic bubble is ultimately a psychic bubble.

There can be no such bubbles in the biological world, because natural selection punctures them right away. For example, if there is a glut of rabbits, the coyotes quickly take care of the problem. And then, if there is a glut of coyotes, the shortage of rabbits takes care of that problem.

But an economic bubble is a runaway, pro-cyclical event fueled by human irrationality. Well, not exactly, for the players are actually acting rationally based upon the information available to them.

Thus, lenders were under government compulsion to reduce lending standards, safe in the knowledge that government-sponsored coyotes such as Fannie Mae would gobble up their subprime loans like a warren of rabbits. And the GSEs didn't let on that by 2007 over half of all mortgages were subprime (or "non-traditional"), 76% of which on their books (meaning our books, i.e., taxpayers responsible for the left's follies).

Thus, if we dig down to the bottom of it all, we find the government forcing lenders to issue subprime loans. But it isn't really the loan that's subprime, rather, the person receiving the loan. In other words, the real problem is subprime people who are more likely to default on their loans. As such, the so-called bubble was filled with subprime people.

In fact, traditional underwriting focussed on three factors: down payment (loan-to-value), ability to pay (debt to income), and character, i.e., one's "willingness or propensity" to honor debts, as reflected in the FICO score.

It turns out the latter -- "character" -- is by far the most sensitive of the three, and yet, the government forced lenders to ignore it, with (literally) predictable results. For example, the risk of default is 47 times greater with a FICO score of less than 621. But if banks failed to give loans to people with FICOs lower than 621, they would be harassed and accused of racism by government regulators. So, what would you do?

As such, we can't actually blame the bubble on subprime people; or rather, the subprime people are actually bubbleheaded leftists who insist that their fantasies of equality can trump the laws of economics.

I guess that's the point I wanted to get to. It's nice to have all the factual backing Wallison provides, but the real problem is that the left lives in an intellectual bubble inflated by with dreams, wishes, hopes, and more-or-less pure bullshit.

Obamacare is surely a bubble, and Instapundit (among others) has written at length on the Higher Education Bubble. I haven't read the book, but from the perspective we are discussing, the government is creating artificial demand by insisting that everyone should go to college, and here's some money to pay for it and keep you indebted to the government forever.

Thus, college is filled with subprime intellects, and not just the students! If. Only.

Global warming? Bubble. Feminism? Bubble. Keynesian economics? Bubble. What was Obama but a giant bubble inflated by the toxic fumes of the left?

Man: The Only Animal Obligated to Adapt to Himself

Whether we like it or not, we live surrounded by mysteries, which logically and existentially draw us toward transcendence. -- Schuon

"Haunted by transcendence," I suppose you could say. For if there is no transcendence there can be no hauntedness. In a pre-living cosmos there are no problems because there are no alternatives. And in a prehuman cosmos there can be no anxiety, no worry, no apprehension. Fear, yes, but it can't be like human fear, which lives in the imagination.

I remember (I think) Alan Watts using the example of a rabbit. To us the rabbit looks a bit ill-at-ease as it listens and looks around for predators. But from the standpoint of the rabbit, it might be analogous to a crosswalk with a flashing red light saying DON'T WALK DON'T WALK DON'T WALK or you'll get run over and killed! Yes, there is potential danger, but no one is freaking out about it.

But humans are always haunted by an Otherness which is built into us. You see it right away in prehistory, from the moment there is evidence of humanness. In the book I spookulated that this must have something to do with adapting to the strange new condition of "mindedness." One reason I say this is because man is still adapting to mindedness, so it must have been all the more baffling 50,000 or 100,000 years ago, when the space was all new -- or we were new to the space, rather.

One thing we have to make clear at the outset is that this space is ontologically real. Or at least that is our hypothesis. After all, if it isn't real -- i.e., just a kind of transient and meaningless blip amidst the flow of entropy -- then everything falls apart and human existence is indeed an absurd space between two infinite slabs of darkness. Could be. We don't want to exclude that possibility a priori. But then this really would be a haunted universe, or rather, man would be both the haunter and the haunted.

My belief -- similar to Ken Wilber -- is that there are different degrees and dimensions of reality. Everyone recognizes this, even if they don't admit it to themselves, for there is the material/empirical world, the rational/linguistic mental world, and the immaterial/contemplative spiritual world. In his book Eye to Eye, Wilber talks about the different "eyes" necessary to perceive these worlds, i.e., the eyes of flesh, reason, and contemplation, respectively. (And Corbin calls our multidimensional psycho-spiritual spatiality the imaginal realm.)

Animals have the eye of flesh, but the best among them have only attenuated versions of the higher two, and even then, mostly because of contact with humans (e.g., dogs). Higher primates have tried to teach sign language to the subprimes, but the latter can only get so far before they hit a ceiling. We might think of this as a literal ceiling, only an immaterial one. For humans there is no ceiling, as our space opens all the way out and up. It is what makes us human.

But since this space is infinite, perhaps you can appreciate how it can provoke a kind of agoraphobia, so to speak. Agoraphobia is fear of open spaces, just as claustrophobia is a fear of jolly fat men with white beards. No, wait, it is a fear of enclosed presences. All punning aside, both are pathological endeavors to manage psychic space, only projected outward. But why must space be managed at all?

Because it's haunted, that's why. There was a time -- a long time, meaning most of history -- when this was much more experience-near. Now we psychologize and medicalize the space. Instead of saying you're haunted by ghosts and goblins, we say you're haunted by global warming, or structural racism, or white privilege, or the patriarchy. These poor souls are just trying to manage their anxieties. But anxiety is just a word, whereas the ghosts are real.

The first book I ever read that discusses this subject was The Phenomenon of Life, by Hans Jonas. The first essay is called Life, Death, and the Body in the Theory of Being, and it goes exactly to this subject of adaptation to our haunted space. (I'm sure I have blogged on this before, somewhere in here.)

From previous posts; and I apologize in advance for the length, but I kept finding interesting stuff. Interesting to me, anyway:

"[I]t is in the dark stirrings of primeval organic substance that a principle of freedom shines forth for the first time within the vast necessity of the physical universe -- a principle foreign to suns, planets, and atoms.... [T]he first appearance of this principle in its bare, elementary object-form signifies the break-through of being to the indefinite range of possibilities which hence stretches to the farthest reaches of subjective life, and as a whole stands under the sign of 'freedom'.... even the transition from inanimate to animate substance, the first feat of matter's organizing itself for life, was actuated by a tendency in the depth of being toward the very modes of freedom to which this transition opened the gate" (Jonas).

"But already the simple observed facts sketch an image of nature which advances by successive explosions in the manner of a rocket... from the hands of its Creator [comes] the spiritual form of man to which nature has been destined and in which she is liberated. In this new order, evolution is pursued always in the very interior of humanity. Moreover, evolution which continues in humanity has taken on a different color.... We find ourselves from now on on a spiritual plane where plasticity is infinitely greater... (Charles DeKoninck).

Jonas writes that "When man first began to interpret the nature of things -- and this he did when he began to be man -- life was to him everywhere, and being the same as being alive" (emphasis mine).

Thus, "Animism was the widespread expression of this stage.... Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things. Bare matter -- that is, truly inanimate, 'dead' matter, was yet to be discovered -- as indeed its concept, so familiar to us, is anything but obvious" (Jonas).

As Jonas argues in The Phenomenon of Life, the "discovery" of a non-living cosmos is a very late one. Rather, for primordial man, life was the general rule, death the exception, the very thing that Lucy and her astoneaged friends needed to 'splain.

It is only with modernity that this perspective is reversed, so that death becomes "the natural thing, life the problem." Now that the universe is regarded as a kind of lifeless machine, life becomes a huge conceptual problem, because it must somehow be explained in terms of the lifeless. Could this attitude be one of the metaphysical tributaries to the death culture of the radical secular left? Jonas implies as much: "Our thinking today is under the ontological dominance of death."

One doesn't have to read too many existentialist writers -- e.g., Sartre, Camus, Kafka -- before one realizes that they really do regard life in this deeply pessimystic way -- as a plague or prison with no exit, into which human insects are thrown upon birth, and from which we are then nauseatingly alienated once we realize this is indeed our fate. Just the other day, some profoundly sick feminists celebrated "abortion pride" day. Why not? If our life is just an absurd and meaningless prison house, then surely abortion is a mercy. Why not nip life in the bud?

Jonas was surely converging upon the same Raccoon attractor when he wrote, "Perhaps, rightly understood, man is after all the measure of all things -- not indeed through the legislation of his reason but through the exemplar of his psychophysiological totality which represents the maximum of concrete ontological completeness known to us: a completeness from which, reductively, the species of being may have to be determined by way of progressive subtraction down to the minimum of bare elementary matter."

That last crack comports perfectly with Schuon, who writes that "Man is made for what he is able to conceive; the very ideas of absoluteness and transcendence prove both his spiritual nature and the supra-terrestrial character of his destiny.... The paradox of the human condition is that nothing could be more contrary to us than the requirement to transcend ourselves, and yet nothing could be more essentially ourselves than the core of this requirement or the fruit of this self-overcoming."

And transcending oneself "is to remove the layer of ice or darkness that imprisons the true nature of man.... [O]nly the 'divine dimension' can satisfy the thirst for plenitude in our willing or our love" (in Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, his most aphoristically bite-sized work).

Indeed, you could even say that the cosmos overcomes itself in the form of man:

Man is upright and he is bipedal; upright because he spans all of the vertical degrees of being; bipedal because he has a foot in both realms, the worldly and the celestial, heaven and earth, slack and conspiracy. He is not a dead man walking to his own godless wake, but a live wire waking to his own walk with Wakan Tanka.

Imagine alien explorers discovering earth:

"Our explorers enter a cave, and on the walls they discern lines or other configurations that must have been produced artificially, that have no structural function, and that suggest a likeness to one or another of the living forms encountered outside." Even "the crudest and most childish drawing would be just as conclusive as the frescoes of Michelangelo."

Conclusive of what, exactly? Of a relation to ideas that have no direct bearing upon purely biological ends. Here is evidence of an exit from the world of mere life, and entrance to the world of mind.

Thus, "just as a footprint is a sign of the foot that made it," a picture is not a sign of the hand that made it but of the mind that conceived it -- and that abstracted some essence from the object before representing it. In order to depict the essence one must first perceive the essence. This implies the ability to distinguish form from substance or mind from matter.

Painting involves a transformation and preservation of essence from one plane to another. Obviously, no animal can do this. Rather, they confront only a world of objects. To the extent that they perceive interiors, it is only through invariant signs, not symbols -- and a sign is really closer to an exterior (like a stop sign, which doesn't reveal anything about the person who made it).

Now, to know the distinction between form and substance is to be capable of distinguishing between appearance and reality, or surface and depth. And as mentioned the other day, to know that appearances are deceptive is to know that truth exists, for truth is simply the splendor of the Real (just as beauty is the splendor of the true).

Clearly, in order to distinguish between appearance and reality, there must be a kind of "space" in between. This is the middle earthspace inhobbited by human consciousness. Just as animals live in a world of appearances, God is the being who lives in truth and reality -- or is not different from them. And the human station is in between these two, God and nature, the One and the many.

Note that in Genesis man is given the power to name the animals. As Jonas explains, "the giving of names to objects is here regarded as the first feat of the newly created man and as the first distinctively human act." It is a "step beyond creation," or liberation from being plunged solely into the world of matter. In order to name something, we must be above it, and be capable of perceiving the unity beneath the multiplicity (which is another way of saying the reality behind appearances).

As usual, quoting old posts takes as much time as building new ones.

I Live in a Haunted House!

It seems that the Great Nothing at the heart of things is related to their being created and not self-existent and self-explanatory. Everything is "open," but not in the usual sense of being a process-structure or dissipative system -- like a whirlpool or organism. Rather, this openness and dependency goes deeper; it is an "ontological openness," as it were. It is not empirical but metaphysical. It can surely be "seen," but not with the eyes of the flesh.

It can be seen because it's Pretty Damn Obvious. Clearly, the biosphere below us is completely entangled, such that nothing is merely what it is. For example, flowers cannot be exhaustively explained without recourse to bees, and vice versa. Who are we to say a bee isn't just an "external organ" of the flower? Nature is filled with such symbiotic arrangements. When you pet your dog, your blood pressure goes down. Chickens and cows would likely be extinct if they weren't so tasty.

Surprisingly -- especially to materialists -- it's the same with physics, which has proven beyond doubt that everything is likewise entangled at the quantum level. There are no unambiguous objects over there or right now. Rather, everything blends into everything else because mass is energy, and energy is whatnow?

A word. As they say, physics can tell us everything about energy except what it is. Likewise biology and life, psychology and mind, theology and spirit. Just because we have a word for something doesn't mean we know what it is. Analogously, Europeans had a name for Africa before any of them set foot inside.

"Each creature wakes up and is stunned at the news of its own existence. It's the kind of news you never really get over" (O'Herron, in Schmitz). That's a bit of an exaggeration, for this is true only of conscious creatures, AKA, man. And even then, it seems that many people quickly get over the shock and pretend everything is normal. BUT IT'S NOT! I don't mean to shout, but THIS IS REALLY WEIRD, OKAY?

I guess there are two types of humans: those who appreciate the weirdness, and those who sleep right through it, AKA the Normals (and now the plague of Subnormals).

Here is a rock-bottom truth: "consciousness becomes self-consciousness when one looks into the eyes of another who looks back" (ibid.). Absent this intersubjectivity, man would not be man, regardless of how "intelligent."

Indeed, human intelligence -- as discussed in yesterday's post -- is always intersubjective and object-related. Objects "give" their intelligibility, just as we "receive" it with our intelligence. Intelligence is to intelligibility as... bee is to flower. It completes the cosmic circuit, at least in potential.

Any difference implies difference as such. To recognize difference is to be alive, for the very first itsy bitsy that teenies its little weenie has a boundary -- a semi-permeable membrane -- between inside and out, self and other. Life, you might say, is the recognition of otherness. Absent life, it's All The Same, just an undifferentiated blob. True, life can at times be a bit too exciting. But without it the cosmos is a complete snooze.

To paraphrase Professor Ibid, does a painting or song give us any more enjoyment if we give it a name? Does Will explain Why if we shake his beard? No! The supposedly solid morphyl man is inunderated and disselves unto the swimminpull of divine otherness.

Whatever.

Recall that life starts with boundary and difference. Transposed to the key of persons, it is the Face that serves this purpose: "only human beings have faces. This is because the face is a structure that shows forth meaning" (Schmitz).

Note also that every non-liberal person is different, so one of the intrinsic meanings conveyed by facehood is uniqueness and individuality, from which it isn't a great leap to dignity and intimacy (for our deepest selfhood can only be given, never stolen or taken forcibly).

"A person's face is meant to be the signature of the character within; one cannot disengage the face from a certain interiority. A face has depth; it is not all surface" (ibid.). And yet, "depth is not a thing at all," just a vector, so to speak. It is a "direction" which travels both in and out. Thus, the face doesn't just convey individuality as such, but interiority as well. "In philosophical terms, the face displays a spiritual reality" (ibid.).

For the baby, the mother's face is the first map of the world, except this is not a geographical map but a pneumagraphical one. We call a person who cannot read the interior map autistic.

This also goes to why for most of western history, actors -- because of the ability to deceive with the face -- were considered suspect, whereas now we are more tolerant and just think of them as crazy.

So, Person means a great deal. When you say it, you've said a mythfull, for example, Narcissus, who fell in love with his own face, meaning that he was confined in a closed system of self-regard. Likewise the dunce abane acrime president who was sunk in an offal orifice of hypertrophed self-regard, where no one else could enter but his talking jarrot.

But personhood really means "the manifestation of meaningful depth, the distinctiveness of the individual, the intimacy of direct personal encounter, and the dignity associated with the divine and with the specifically human." We are "haunted by uniqueness, intimacy, and dignity" (ibid.).

Betwixt & Bewildered between God & Nothing

There is the blind nothingness of nihilism and the Higher Nothingness of man in relation to God, and I think we can agree it is important not to conflate these "two." I say ""two"" because nothing -- in the absence of the prior One -- cannot be a unit of addition. To even give it a word is to tame and contain it under a form of unity it couldn't possibly have.

You could say that in relation to animals -- or to Gaia, or biology, or physics -- man is Everything, since the whole exercise of existence is absolutely pointless without us. But the same applies to our relation to God. In its absence, we are as absurd and superfluous as testicles on a liberal.

How to eliminate the lesser nothing and illuminate the greater? The lesser bupkis is explicitly articulated in all forms of existentialism, which is the conscious philosophy of the null-de-slack; and implicitly unarticulated in scientism, leftism (which is just warmed over marxist materialism), and any other ideology.

Thus, Cheetham begins with a friendly reminder from the Orthodox theologian Panayiotis Nellas: Fear a system, say the Fathers, as you would fear a lion (in After Prophecy).

How is a system different from a dogma? We'll get to that in a minute, but while every system is a dogma, not every dogma is a system. For example, the dogma of Christianity is ultimately a person and a relation, neither being antecedent to the other, because each implies the other. A system, on the other hand, pretends it can exist without the person entertaining it, which is to put the parasite before the host or the ass before the horse.

Put it this way: almost 3,000 posts now, and do you see a system? I sure don't. Sometimes I wish I did, and each post is in its little way an attempt to nail one down, but in the end the system is just... me. Well, not just me, but me-in-relation. As promised at the very top, this is The Religion the Almighty & Me Works Out Betwixt Us. So, I do have a... method.

The Good For Nothing is the "metaphysical state of mystical poverty," such that "all things derive not from themselves, but from a source that is the grantor of Being to everything" (Cheetham). Thus, "each and every thing has nothing in itself, [and] is nothing in itself."

Any thing exists in a state of irreducible dependence on this prior Being, so it is appropriate that all human beings start out in a state of absolutely helpless dependence upon the kindness of strangers. Many people spend their lives trying to forget or deny this state, but it can't be done except at the cost of one's personhood.

And even then, man is always relating, even if only to his own internalized objects. This is why modern psychoanalysis, which is rooted in attachment theory, is called object relations. Even thinking itself is an object relation, because thoughts are prior to the thinker who must think them. And we can't think at all without the mother-object who first helps us think our thoughts in that state of total dependence.

Bion called this alpha function. Where I differ with Bion -- or at least extend his horizon -- is in explicitly applying this concept to the upper vertical, not just to the Freudian unconscious. In his defense, if he had done this, he would have been excommunicated and exiled from the Church of Psychoanalysis. He would have been outside the System (and some colleagues thought he was outside the System anyway, AKA, insane).

Not sure if this will be helpful but here is an extended passage from the above-linked article:

Bion took for granted that the infant requires a mind to help it tolerate and organize experience. For Bion, thoughts exist prior to the development of an apparatus for thinking. The apparatus for thinking, the capacity to have thoughts "has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts." Thoughts exist prior to their realization. Thinking, the capacity to think the thoughts which already exist, develops through another mind providing alpha-function -- through the "container" role of maternal reverie.

To learn from experience alpha-function must operate on the awareness of the emotional experience; alpha–elements are produced from the impressions of the experience; these are thus made storable and available for dream thoughts and for unconscious waking thinking... If there are only beta-elements, which cannot be made unconscious, there can be no repression, suppression, or learning.

Alpha-function works upon undigested facts, impressions, and sensations, that cannot be mentalized -- beta-elements. Alpha-function digests beta-elements, making them available for thought.

Er, what? It's really not that complicated, and is actually quite experience-near. Applied to religion, for example, God is by definition prior to our thoughts about him. Furthermore, religion is here to help us organize religious experience, which is also prior to our actually thinking it.

We do not, nor could we, consciously will spontaneous experiences of the sacred, the holy, the numinous, the preternatural, the mysterious, the venerable. Rather, these things just "happen." They are, as it were, unmetabolized spiritual "beta elements," the raw material of theological alpha-function. To "learn about God" is literally to metabolize experiences of him.

Yeah, you can ignore the beta elements of primordial spiritual experience. Who hasn't? But as Cheetham says, "To cover over this terrible wonderment is to block access to an Absence that is not the empty Nothing of nihilism, but the unknown and unknowable source of everything; the necessarily Hidden God beyond all being." Of course, Christians believe that this HGBAB God did and does come out from hiding, partly in order to show us that there is no System, only a Person and a Relation.

The Principle of the world cannot be in the world; the world is not self-explanatory. This Principle is "at once 'all' and 'nothing,'" but a "nothing from which all things are derived. This is the Nothing of the Absolute Divine, superior to being and thought" (Corbin, ibid.). Again, it is prior to our thinking about it.

I can't improve on this, so I'll just steal it: "The Giver of being can never be an object, a thing. In its infinite fecundity and mystery, its forever-receding depth and absolute Unity, it is unifier, the guarantor of the individuality of every being. As such, it is the archetype of the Person, and the interiority that infuses all beings..." (Cheetham).

You might say that, to the extent that we are one -- we call this one a person, an individual -- then we cannot be a nothing. Or, in the absence of the One, then our individual personhood is just a big nothing, a meaningless bit of undigested potato. And if this were so, then the left would be correct that identity follows class as essence follows existence, which we know is impossibly stupid, i.e., both stupid and impossible.

Bottom lines for today:

It is the mystery of this primordial Darkness that it establishes the substantial reality of the human person and yet simultaneously renders us transparent.... The presence of this pregnant darkness is immanent, shimmering through the face of the beauty of the world.... A degree of poverty is a prerequisite for the experience of the fullness of the world. --Cheetham

Liberalism: Come for the Hope, Stay for the Destruction

We left off yesterday with Cheetham's description of artistic creation, which is the precipitate of a two-way movement of ascent and descent:

"In creating a work of art, the psyche or soul of the artist ascends from the earthly realm into the heavenly," such that the result is like a "materialized dream" or perhaps dreamland-localized.

But the main point is that it is clearly in between. Michelangelo's Pietà, for example, is not mere matter, a chunk of marble. But nor is it pure spirit, since spirit is by definition immaterial. Therefore, it occupies a mysterious third area between the two.

However, everything human occupies this third area. It is just that, in the case of art, it is as it were hyper-focused, like a lens that gathers the rays of the sun into an intense point of light and heat. Thus, some zones and sectors in this third area can be more intense and meaningful, others bland, diffuse, and oppressive.

To some extent, it is as if any artist in any medium uses the common "substance" of this third area -- which is why activities as disparate as poetry, painting, and music all share the word "art." As Corbin puts it, true art thus "attains a super-reality"; it is "a crystal of time in imaginal space" (Cheetham).

Of course, much so-called art falls short of this standard, which can be discerned by its default to mere reality, so to speak. (Or, it is perhaps subrealism as opposed to surrealism.) The term "pornography" could be a more general concept that encompasses everything from Miley Cyrus to scientism to MSM news to liberal academia.

Note that in each case the third area is collapsed into a simplistic and vulgar literalism devoid of any ascending or descending energies. When people speak of the "mainstreaming of pornography," this is but a symptom of a far more widespread cultural decay -- more of an end-stage of the illness, or final common pathway.

The "culture war" is not between two equal and opposite forces, but rather, between the human and sub-human. It is the source of that suffocating feeling you've been experiencing over the past six years, now too intense and pervasive to ignore.

First and foremost, the progressive left is and always has been at war with the higher human realms. It is what they do. If you want to know why Bruce Jenner is a hero while American soldiers are baby-killers, this is why. The left follows its own insane logic in a completely consistent and predictable way.

Culture as such takes place in the third area, as does science, politics, and interpersonal relations -- in other words, everything from the macro- down to the micro-human. Polanyi might be the first philosopher of science to have appreciated this on a deep level. And ultimately this space is a function of trinitarian metaphysics, which posits a dynamic space of love, truth, and beauty.

The problem is, man cannot actually exile himself from the human space -- the third area -- for we are "condemned to transcendence," in Schuon's ironic formulation. Therefore, the left actually insists on transcendence, but only their own insane version of it. This is exhaustively described from various angles in David Horowitz's Left Illusions.

In short, not everything in the third area is sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows. Rather, some stuff there is "deceptive and dangerous," e.g., "earthly allurements clothed in spiritual garb." I mean, right? Who could not know this? And yet...

With the wrong approach -- of which there are many, cf. various deadly sins -- "we will be ensnared by lies and delusions and the inflation of spiritual intoxication." Is there anyone as spiritually intoxicated as a professional leftist?

In contrast, the correct approach involves little things like, oh, humility, prudence, sobriety, purity, etc. In the absence of prudence, for example, we may not know that "some of the forests are simply better off not exploring. There be monsters" -- for example, like the literally monstrous Caitlyn Jenner, "monstrosity" being something at odds with all nature, both horizontal and vertical. No offense, but such crankensteins are to be pitied, not celebrated. They are entitled to our compassion, not our reverence.

But in the upside-down world of the left, this is precisely what happens: instead of crystalizing the higher energies, they distill the lower ones. Ultimately, opposition to statist sub-humanism can only occur one person at a time, which is why they always have the upper hand, at least from a terrestrial standpoint.

The left relies on forced unconsciousness before all else, which has become the function of their media, their school system, their art forms, and their universities. Through this unyielding and pervasive cultural hammering, "our inner depths become opaque and we are barred from the Kingdom," for we are "cut off from the celestial pole" (Cheetham).

The left is always about destruction (change) and utopia (hope); the latter is a pretext for the former, the only thing the left is really good at, i.e., the relentless pursuit of perdition:

"There are always (and inevitably) two sides to the revolutionary coin. The first is negative and destructive, since it is necessary first to undermine the beliefs, values, and institutions of the old order which must be destroyed before a new one can be established. The second is positive and utopian, a vision of the future that condemns the present" (Horowitz).

Obama's credo might well be Come for the hope, stay for the destruction, for "Using good intentions to justify evil deeds is the first requirement of a utopian bad faith." But unfortunately, it would appear that "a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for reason to kill" (Horowitz). The left will always be with us, for the impossibility of utopia will always justify its destructive impulses.

Little Big World

I only have about 30 minutes, surely not enough time for a proper post. I'd like to move on from Corbin, so let's dash through the rest of this book and mine any remaining nuggets. Only the big ones. We'll throw back the little ones.

This I like: "the Creator is one with the imagining Creature because each Creative Imagination is a theophany, a recurrence of the Creation."

As such, "Psychology is indistinguishable from cosmology," which appeals to me because it means that I, as a psychologist, am not just a glorified bag boy with too little ambition and too much curiosity, but the very gatekeeper of reality!

I always go back to page one of the Bible, to the third and fifth words, beginning and creates (there are no tenses in Hebrew, right?).

In traditional writing, it is often the case that primacy in importance is characterized by priority in presentation, so this would be doubly Important, being that Genesis is first, and these are the first things in Genesis: the beginning is always now, and God ceaselessly creates in it.

Furthermore, it would appear that, above all else -- or at least coincident with it -- God is a trinity of creator, creativity, and creation.

I would also venture to say that we can read it as Creation Beginning God, or Beginning God Creation, since each of these is bound up with the others. God Creates. Now.

Likewise, if we get right down to it, what characterizes man above all else? Clearly his creativity, which is what distinguishes us from all other animals. It is what puts us in history instead of mere biology or physics.

Creativity is tied in with freedom, since it is not linear or deterministic; likewise beauty, since this is the point -- the telos -- of creativity. I think it would be safe to toss love into the mix as well, because it is implicit in the idea of a beautiful creator who creates such unsurpassable beauty. It's all so gratuitous.

You might say that man's creative imagination mediates between Reality and what a leftist or other materialist would call "reality." Nothing happens if we default to one side or the other -- i.e., head or matter. Rather, it all goes down -- and up -- in the space in between, the creative imagination, the transitional space, the mysterious psychic Third.

An additional benefit of this perspective is that "it heals the split between psychology and physics, between mind and matter, and between the subjective and objective" -- which, coincidentally enough, was precisely the subject of my doctoral dissertation back in a prior but apparently identical now.

For clearly, I am still exploring the same phase space, and being pulled into the same strange attractor. This is "the adventurous search for truth through subjectivity," as opposed to limping along with mere objectivity, which can get you nowhere (since it eliminates the adventurer before the adventure even starts).

And the whole thing works because "The goal is the cause of the beginning," except not in any predetermined way. It is at the author end of the polarity that provides the energy for the journey.

"The space of heaven... is filled with the peace and the teleological energies of the invisible realm..."

Yes, this is the Big World "in which spirits are corporealized and bodies spiritualized."

It's kinda like Art; or, Art is like a very focussed version of the adventure of consciousness:

"In creating a work of art, the psyche or soul of the artist ascends from the earthly realm into the heavenly.... And precisely at the boundary between the two worlds, the soul's spiritual knowledge assumes the shapes of symbolic imagery: and it is these images that make the permanent work of art. Art is thus the materialized dream."

Well, that was fast. How timelessness flies!

Reality: Accept No Substitutes

If transcendence is built into the nature of things, then we can only journey "toward" it while never arriving, for to arrive there would be to "collapse" and negate it. And in a world without transcendence, our journey would be reduced to a random walk in a featureless swamp, just the agitated Brownian motion of an imaginary soul.

This is one of the ways a trinitarian Godhead makes sense, because it seems that God too is in a kind of perpetual motion, eternally going out of and into himselves and falling in love with Love.

For Corbin, our true self is up above and out ahead, like an existential scout at the edge of the frontier. It is what gives our individuated transcendence a direction and vector; or rather, it is the source of our individuation.

We could say that there are no individuals per se, but persons in the process of individuating -- a process which never ends, on pain of putting an end to the adventure: individuation is freedom lived, and freedom is individuation actualizing.

It is as if our higher or deeper or truer selves "go out ahead" and "eternally open new horizons, new distances within Eternity" (Cheetham). And although I wouldn't express it exactly this way, Cheetham suggests that even God "is not a fixed Unmoved Mover, but is eternally drawn upward into an eternal 'future.'"

First, I wouldn't say even God, but especially God. Nor would I use the word "future" per se. Rather, there must be something "in" God that is distantly analogous to our own sense of a future. Our future is somehow a timebound echo or shadow of what happens eternally in God.

Which would be what? What does the "future" really come down to? Shorn of its abstract temporal aspect, future-ness essentially means openness, novelty, surprise, and creative possibility.

This is very much in contrast to the purely temporal future of mere physics, which ends in maximum entropy, equilibrium, and heat death. In that sense, the future is absolutely known: in the long run we're all dead, including the cosmos itself.

But that assumes a purely immanent cosmos without transcendence or direction. In that sort of cosmos, man could never have appeared to begin with: life comes from Life, truth from Truth, intelligence from Intelligence, beauty from Beauty.

Which is why, as Cheetham says, man is never content where he is, but only on the way there: "The longing for home is satisfied not by eternal rest but rather by eternal motion," except it is a vertical motion. "[W]e are always on our way home, in an endless series of renewals, seeking home again and again at higher and higher levels."

He tosses in an excellent and most coonworthy quote by Oliver Clement, that "I am on a destined path as if entering a land of childhood, knowing very well that, in the words of Saint Gregory, it will take me all eternity to go 'from beginning to beginning, by way of beginnings without end'" (emphasis mine, for reasons that should be bobvious to longtome lessoneers).

Which is why "Eternity is a first time, continually renewed" (ibid.). It is the opposite of the Nietzschean hell of "eternal recurrence," which is to say, eternal renewal.

Eros is the fuel. Thanks to it, we always yearn "for transcendence, for a figure who is always beyond" and "illuminates the essentially double [I would say triple] structure of consciousness." It is how the Light gets in -- how the Light sees itself in the subjects it illuminates, and how we exit the darkness of scientism, tenure, and other cheap substitutes for reality.

This reminds us that spirit and soul are always constellated together. Where spirit rises, soul descends. --Thomas Cheetham

***

Update: which is why the left does "no service to a child by preparing him for the lower life -- the life of the state-produced animal” (Roger Scruton, via Happy Acres).

One Human is a Statistic, a Billion is a Tragedy

This is yesterday's post today. Just as I was about to hit the publish button, the power went out, so I was in the Stone Age for the subsequent 12 hours or so, while Edison performed "routine maintenance."

Coincidentally, during that long day of darkness, ignorance, and fear, I was able to read a most illuminating book called The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels, which I mention because it's not the sort of subject we usually blah-blah-blog about. Perhaps we should, because fossil fuels are arguably the greatest thing for cosmic evolution since the opposable thumb, and people need to stop being defensive about them. Rather, they deserve a full-throated celebration -- intellectually, morally, and spiritually, let alone economically.

Perhaps the word "spiritually" comes as a surprise, but I'll provide a brief example. The book is filled with examples of how wrong the left has been about energy depletion and about "climate change," such that if we had heeded their constant warnings of catastrophe, we'd all be living as I did yesterday, in my energy-deprived state.

One of our most distinguished environmentalists is Bill McKibben. When I say "distinguished," I mean wrong about everything all the time. But he is also a moral imbecile, an intellectual sociopath if you will (hence the spiritual angle). We can thank God that his inhumane ideas have never been implemented. (Here is an especially nauseating article that really puts the puff into puff piece. Imagine the MSM treating a conservative intellectual with such drooling fawnmanship.)

In that piece of puffery, McKibbon is quoted as saying that "Human beings -- any one of us, and our species as a whole -- are not all-important, not at the center of the world." Easy for him to say, since capitalism has been good to him, and he lives in his Vermont paradise amidst "red pines that go for miles." (I might add that if human beings are not all-important, then we can safely ignore this one's self-important squawking.)

Although McKibbon calls himself a "Christian," his first principles are at antipodes to Christianity. If you ask me if he's Christian, I would respond, "hey, is the Pope Catholic?"

McKibben is a biocentrist, whereas Christianity is person-centric; this person-centrism is of course tripolar, as in divine, human, and the mysterious Third. How McKibben uses Christianity to undermine itself could be the subject of a whole book, so I'll leave it at that.

Epstein cites a review of McKibben's first book, The End of Nature, a worldwide bestseller first published in 1989. The author of the review enthusiastically agrees with McKibben that the nonhuman world cannot be regarded in terms of utility; rather, it not only has "intrinsic value," but "more value" "than another human body, or a billion of them." You might say that one human is a statistic, a billion -- or 7 billion -- a tragedy.

Some of those human bodies think human beings "are a part of nature," but they are just evil or stupid, or probably on the payroll of the oil companies.

No, "Somewhere along the line -- at about a billion years ago, maybe half that -- we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.... Until such a time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."

(!ʘ_ʘ?)

I guess HIV was the wrong virus.

But a billion years ago? Homo sapiens has only been here for 100,000 or 200,000 years max. Which means that a literal reading of Genesis is much closer to the truth. But how does anything have value in the absence of human beings? When the author says "quit the contract," -- first of all, what a bizarre metaphor. But to the extent that there was a "contract," it was the prehuman one that confined life to mere animality. Thank God we broke that contract and became human persons!

Maybe I will end up blogging about the book. Meanwhile, back to yesterday's post....

"The energies of life," writes Cheetham, "come from the Divine." If this premise is correct, then we are alive because God is. And although "these energies permeate the universe," it is possible for them to deviate from their course (as in the case of forest-dwelling McGibbon apes), to "get blocked and stifled, or run in little eddies that go round and round forever in one place."

The realm of spirit is life -- and mind -- transposed a higher key. Or better, life and matter are spirit transposed to a lower key, since the source of life is at the top.

It isn't possible to define life with precision, but we can specify the conditions under which it manifests locally; mainly it requires three things, a boundary between inside and out, self and not-self; far from equilibrium conditions (equilibrium equating to death by entropy); and partial openness through which matter, energy, and information are exchanged.

How would this apply to vertical life and growth? Well, first of all we need a firm but flexible boundary between self and other, or me and not-me, or I and environment, or feminists and their triggers. (Dr. Dalrymple alerts us to the young lady who "seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at all. There appeared to be no line of demarcation between the young person’s excessive innocence, and another person’s guiltiest knowledge.")

Most people probably take this line of demarcation for granted, but if everyone had healthy boundaries, I would be out of a job. But at least there would be no women's studies departments, so, even-Steven or effin' Stephan.

There is no end to the mischief caused by poor psychic boundaries. It explains why leftists think the way they do more generally, for it is not so much the thoughts that are wrong but the very structure of the apparatus of thought. Like the foundation of a house, if it isn't secure, then the whole structure is in danger of collapsing.

Leftists unconsciously recognize this, hence the pervasive defense mechanisms of political correctness, speech codes, demonization, slander, imputation of imagined motives, trigger warnings, Citizens United hysteria, etc.

From the cosmic perspective, each of these really functions to keep the leftist's cognitive system closed and sealed off from reality, or to repel any information that would threaten its infantile omniscience and moral superiority. It's all a noxious exercise in pathological self-esteem, which itself is a kind of static equilibrium between (self) image and likeness: I am my own ideal.

I've been reading a book by David Horowitz called Left Illusions, and he describes the pathology as cogently as anyone. For example, the left's demonization of conservatives far exceeds the most extravagant dreams of Joseph McCarthy. Furthermore, these professional McCarthyists don't just talk about it, they get things done, which is why academia and the MSM are so monolithically left wing.

As to our far-from-equilibrium condition, this may be considered from a number of angles. You might say that the furthest from equilibrium are man and God, or (¶) and O. Thanks to this deusequilibrium, everything else is possible, e.g., love, truth, justice, creativity, evolution, and beauty.

For example, premise one is I don't know. Premise two is Truth is. Conclusion? Man may know truth, but only insofar as he maintains that vital disequilibrium between himself and the Source. If he imagines that he is the source, then this is the end of both disequilibrium -- and thus the further evolution of thought -- and vertical openness. We have torn up the Cosmic Contract.

Or, just see Genesis 3. What's really going on there? Well, there is something man shouldn't do, on pain of death, which is to say, existential equilibrium. What might that be? I would say it involves rejecting our complementary pole, and presuming to carry it within. It may be summarized with the atheistic formula, There is no God, and I am he.

That is by definition the ultimate equilibrium, and thus the ultimate death. I'm sure Mushroom can provide scriptural support for this view.

The third characteristic of life is the open exchange of matter, energy, and/or information. In the case of spirit, we're not so much concerned with matter, but then again, forget what I just said, for a central theme of Christianity is that matter itself is to become divinized, or infused with those higher energies. It's a messy job, but someone has to do it. Unless you tear up the contract.

This goes to what we said in the previous post about "first" and "second" theologies. Theology is a kind of information, but if you confine it to the head, then you're a pretty weak be-er, just foaming at the mouth.

Rather, the whole point is to draw that information/energy all the way down and out. In other words, like sap from the upside-down cosmic tree, it should proceed all the way from the roots to the trunk to the branches to the leafy individuals. And then there is the prolongation from leaf-to-leaf, i.e., "love thy arbor."

This, I believe, goes to Petey's jehovial witticism that It's a Tree of Life for those whose wood beleaf.

Interestingly, the footgnote to that very passage goes to exactly what was said above: "In the incarnation humanity is the 'boundary' or 'frontier' between the visible and the invisible, the carnal and the spiritual, like a mediator between creation and the creator" (Olivier Clement).

The leaf motif also reminds me of the final death scene in Finnegans Wake: "My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff!"

So long as a single green leaf remains, the tree is still alive with lff.

A world without soul is a world without anima, without anima-tion. It feels dead and unreal.... That is what Reality is for us -- being intensely alive. And the energies of life come from the Divine. To tap into this energy it is necessary to sacrifice ourselves, to sacrifice the merely personal, the closed-off and isolated world of the person as ego, in favor of the transpersonal divine context out of which our own tiny individualities flow. --Thomas Cheetham

Give Me a Premise and I Will Destroy the World!

It seems to me that Corbin's remedy for the error of reductionism is a defiant expansionism: we should resist all attempts to trap the soul in the tautologous absurcularities of its own reason. Auto-pullwoolery is never the solution to man's terrestrial challenges.

Man cannot contain himself. Even on the physical plane, our skin doesn't actually contain us per se. Rather, it is a semipermeable membrane through which pass moisture, light, and sensations (and probably some more subtle energies as well, e.g., certain kinds of touch). It is simultaneously inward and outward turning.

This two-faced property of inside/outside proceeds all the way up the cosmic hierarchy. It not only defines life, but also mind: the mind too is a kind of membrane that bounds the "self." However, there is no self without an and ultimately the Other, this otherhood being built into the very nature of things, i.e., the Trinity.

At risk of belaboring a point that no one outside the Coonosphere will appreciate anyway, this is my main argument against both artificial life and the likelihood of discovering intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos, for an artificial intelligence will not cohere around a nonlocal interior, and the evolutionary circumstances for its terrestrial appearance are so insanely specific that it could never occur by chance.

If we do ever discover an intelligence that is in any way analogous to ours, then it will simply be because God didn't limit it to one planet. The aliens will be "like" us because they have the same source, which is not from below, but above.

This has nothing to do with "creationism," mind you, nor intelligent design. Rather, it follows from the principles involved. The argument -- which is highlighted in a book I recently read, Who Designed the Designer? -- is metaphysical, not merely empirical or (lower case r) rational.

For the intellectually honest, the conclusion is ineluctable but not of course foolproof, since a fool can prove anything. Just as that Greek guy who said "give me a big enough fulcrum and I can move the world," if you allow me to specify the premises, I can prove whatever I want.

How can someone be a devotee of reason and not understand that reason is tautologous, simply following from its premises? How can they not know of their master, Gödel? Or that they are contained, not container?

"Who designed the designer?" is, of course, a trick question. To even ask it is to betray an implicit premise, or to not understand the nature of a first cause. Or, it is just an incoherent projection of human limitations.

Corbin speaks of a "primary theology" which is prior to all of our secondary elaborations, rationalizations, and intellectualizations, the latter of which may perversely function to distance us from that First Naked Encounter with the Nameless Other.

This, I think, must be the function and the appeal of what a Catholic would say is at the center of the whole existentialda, which is to say, communion. Can't get more physical than that that. It is meant to be a primary, irreducible encounter that bypasses all of our (sometimes) unhelpful pneumababble. Its motto might be Just duit!

However, for Corbin -- and I suppose for any esoterist -- communion would nevertheless ultimately be the outward instantiation of an inward principle, albeit the Highest Principle. It is not the only way to know the principle, except for most people. After all, most people can't even read between the lines, because their literacy obscures the transliteracy of the text. It takes a long time to unlearn to read!

In any event, First Theology is not a thought but an experience. All other theologies are number two or lower. Ours is always a "theology of reception," as Son to Father. It is "given." It is gift.

Not to in any way devalue Aquinas's immortal accomplishment, but even he -- when he had that direct encounter and contemplative infusion of First Theology -- was heard to exclaim that All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me. Everything short of this is number two or lower!

Faith and belief are no doubt essential, but they have a function. They are not ends in themselves, but serve the higher purpose of assimilation, such that we may actually believe what we profess to believe. Faith is indeed the evidence of things unseen, or the establishment of a kind of link through which a flow of energies takes place. Without this infusion, "you have nothing -- just a catechism as a list of doctrines, more or less abstruse and impenetrable" (Cheetham).

Just as it is up to us to look through Galileo's telescope in order to see what he's talking about, it is up to us to peer through the teloscape in order to understand what scripture is going on about. The former is necessarily a kind of echo of the latter, otherwise science itself would be strictly impossible.

We might say that First Theology is to theologians as genuine art is to critics. Obviously, all of the Shakespearean criticism in the world doesn't add up to single Hamlet. The tenured will apparently be analyzing it "forever," without ever exhausting it or equalling it. This is because art is what we call a clue as to the Way Things Are. It is why we are "attracted" to art in the first place. The critic is the parasite, not the host.

It calls to mind an aphorism: A work of art has, properly speaking, not meaning but power (Don Colacho). Or, its meaning flows from its power. It first "makes an impression" on us, after which we explore the nature of the powerful impression.

Am I just repeating myself? Sometimes I feel like Schuon, who wrote in the preface of one of his books that "Everything has already been said, and well said; but one must always recall it anew, and in recalling it one must do what has already been done: to actualize in thought certitudes contained, not in the thinking ego, but in the transpersonal substance of human intelligence."

So, I suppose this blog really is one great big exercise in vertical recollection, or at least avoidance of vertical forgetting, especially mine.

The Individuation of the Beyond

As mentioned a couple of posts back, partly because of its associations and partly because of Corbin's idiosyncratic use of the term, I would prefer to deploy the unsaturated pneumaticon (¶) for when he says "angel." This allows us to consider the phenomena he describes from a more purely functional and experiential angle.

In other words, it doesn't so much matter what we call it as how it actually functions. As we know from our Aristotle, knowledge of any reality requires the proper mode of investigation. One doesn't study religious objects in the same way one would study physical objects, which is what occurred to me while taking a random walk through this atheist site.

Such sub-metaphysical blah-blah is unavoidably beside the point, since you can't actually transcend transcendence from below, although many people try. On the other hand, such a missgodded approach is a time-honored path to the divine -- a lefthand path -- for just as communism is the longest distance between capitalism and capitalism (or at least it feels that way), atheism -- pursued to its absurd and destructive ends -- can be a circuitous path from a preconscious theism to a mature and fully developed theism. That's how it was for me, anyway. Atheism is the ironyclad link between the two.

Besides, why would anyone want to make transcendence go away? It is without a doubt the most privileged view and interesting property of the universe. It is what makes the immanence tolerable, as we always have our vertical freedom, or inweird mobility and upward nobility. Without it, this really would be a prison.

"Human beings can become Angel or demon or anything in between," writes Cheetham. Again, my preference is to simply situate human potential along a vertical spectrum, one reason being that it is so experience-near. We all know there are saints and sharptons; and minimal acquaintance with oneself leads to the conclusion that the line between saint and sharpton runs straight through the human heart.

If our highest potential is (¶), then our culture- and timebound ego is (•). How then do we psymbolize the lower vertical? In the book I called it (•••). This was for a number of reasons: first, because it is always a state of fragmentation, or partialness, or lack of integration; second, because development -- whether scientific or spiritual -- involves the reduction of multiplicities to unity; and third, because (•••) has the literal meaning of an ellipsis, in that it "goes on forever," as in pi equaling 3.14159265....

In other words, it is the paradigmatic case of a naughty infinite: "A bad infinity contrasts with true infinity, which is closely associated with the finite, for something that is infinite in one perspective can also be finite in another. True infinity is like a circle, finite but unbounded..." Or better, it is an absolute point which is "everywhere," from which radiates infinite potential, or a circumference which is "nowhere."

The world is not infinite, but it does "reflect" infinitude, most conspicuously in the transcendence of the human psyche. However, in the absence of a complementary and dependent relation to the Absolute, it simply redounds to nihilism, or a mayaplicity of false selves all the way down.

Absoluteness is also reflected in the herebelow, and this is precisely the function of (¶), which is both one and unique, but only in light of the Absolute, i.e., it is the "image and likeness" of O. Otherwise, it is just random error, or the intrinsic absurdity of "absolute contingency," or the truth of untruth.

None of this relies solely on logic, even though the logic is ineluctable. Rather, it must be lived, enfleshed, incarnated, sophered, etc.

As Cheetham explains, "The exegesis of the soul is the individuation of the Beyond," in the absence of which life is "a journey into madness, into the unconscious and impersonal realm of the powers of the psyche that can destroy a soul, a society, and indeed, the world itself."

The individuation of the Beyond.

What a perfect way of expressing it, for without this individuation, the Beyond is like an obscure and I-ambiguous nonlocal cloud. It is analogous on the physical plane to the wavelike ocean of energy that "collapses" into individual particles. I generally don't like these analogies from physics, unless it is emphasized that physics is the way it is because God is the way he is, not the other way around. If humans are soph-evidently trinitarian, it is because God is. Likewise, if we are persons and not indistinct blobs, it is because this mirrors the interior of the divine situation-comedy.

I will be the first to acknowledge that many people are indistinct blobs, which goes back to what (•••) is supposed to convey, i.e., a meaningless agglomeration of drives, impulses, desires, habits, masks, personas, and cultural programing, with no personal teloscape. It is the direction toward which the political left always tends, in case you haven't gnosissed.

And to be fair, one might add that an overly rigid or literal religious understanding tends toward the the other extreme of a crystallized, closed, and hardened (•). Cheetham quotes Emerson, who warned of the religious error of "making the symbol too stark and solid."

Rather, in order to function, the symbol "should flow" and not "freeze." Indeed, this is how we grow with the flow while avoiding the embarrassment of existential shrinkage. ("Let the soul fall in with the Ugly and at once it shrinks within itself" [Hillman, in Cheetham]).

Cheetham writes of the "cosmically unique process by means of which a divine figure, an Angel, meets with, struggles for, and transforms with an incarnate human soul" It is this "coupling" which "produces the eternal individual."

Here again, I would simply say that there is a complementary or dialectic relationship between (•) and (¶), which "bears fruit" herebelow; (¶) is in the orbit of O, and already its reflection, but only in potential; it is image, but not yet likeness, the latter resulting from identifying with and assimilating its energies.

This is a "transmutation," or change of form through which "the world becomes more real, more alive, more intense," for "the soul has come Home. This is the hallmark of the Return" which begins in metanoia, i.e., turning around, looking up, and opening within.

Thus, our own free will is a necessary condition but not the sufficient one, as only God can (or could) provide the latter, i.e., grace. Man could no more invent or provide his own grace than he could truth, beauty, virtue, or unity. Each of these comes from above or doesn't really exist: God or nihilism, person or animal, O or Ø.

The cosmic bus is on an adventure; this adventure is "the individuation of the world and the energies of the world. That is why it has its end in freedom -- the release from the compulsions of nature" (ibid.).

You could say that the adventure relies upon a map that we simultaneously navigate while drawing it. But isn't that the nature of all genuine discovery?

The Cosmic Law & Disorder of the Left

A brief unscheduled snidetrip while my brain wakes up.

I was arrested by this observation at Happy Acres, to the effect that "A movement toward the Left, and ultimately toward despotism and collapse, is the 'normal course of history', in exactly the same way that the 'normal course' of a river is to run downhill."

Quite true. Axiomatic even. But why? Following the quote to its source, the author points out that "the phenomenon is even more general than either history or human nature: in conformance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it is in fact a manifestation of entropy -- of the wearing down of complex and specific structures, the destruction of the particular in favor of the general, and the relentless erosion of all of the gradients, distinctions, and disequilibria that are the only possible source of usable energy, and therefore useful work, in any system."

In short, the left is "an entropic historical force." And "any compromise with entropy is ultimately futile, because all such compromises are necessarily a unidirectional movement toward greater disorder" (ibid.).

Entropy explains the left. But what explains the right (or better, the ordered and creative liberty of conservative liberalism)?

As it so happens, this does converge upon our recent discussion of the "struggle for the true self," except that it is on a collective/political/civilizational scale. For if there is no attractor above or ahead, then chaos is the norm and order is just arbitrary, or oppressive, or meaningless. Which is pretty much what I believed when I was a leftist. It explains why the left can only destroy but not create.

This discussion takes me back to that enigmatic Russian Orthodox esoterist, Boris Mouravieff. The amazon page informs me that I purchased his book Gnosis Vol. One on March Forth! 2003. A lot of his writing is kooky, but a lot is orthoparadoxically sound. My recollection is that the three volumes become less sound -- or more occultish -- as they proceed, so the first is the best.

On page 3 he has a good description of the ordinary life of quiet entropy: "Man is so caught up in the toils of mechanical life that he has neither time to stop nor the power of attention needed to turn his mental vision upon himself. Man thus passes his days absorbed in external circumstances. The great machine that drags him along turns without stopping, and forbids him to stop under penalty of being crushed," such that "he quickly exhausts himself in the frantic race, impelled in a direction which in the end leads nowhere."

In that single paragraph he describes the absence of Slack (time theft) due to the power of the Conspiracy (the great machine), ending in Entropic Death (exhaustion leading nowhere). The result? "Life passes away from him almost unseen, swift as a ray of light, and man falls engulfed still absent from himself."

Now you know what inspired the obscure passage on pp. 257-258 that reads: So long. So short! Whoosh! there went your life (see footnote 33).

So, it's all connected in the cosmic area rug.

Should we fail to become ourselves, then naturally "life will be in effect a factitious existence," because if you're not you, who are you? Whose life are you living? "This state of things" is called "The Law of Chance, or The Law of Accident," and is "the principal law under whose authority he leads his illusory existence."

So, a lawless and disordered life that has no higher authority than transient impulses and desires is actually the most lawful life of all, except that it is the law of Chance, Accident, and Entropy. Which is why all those dysfunctional Democrat-run cities such as Baltimore are actually quite lawful. But instead of "law and order," they reflect "law and disorder."

Now, man does have different centers of consciousness, the question being which one will rule the roost, and how integrated they are. One can conceptualize these in different ways, but let's just call them intellect, emotion, and will; or mind, heart, and body.

We are not born with a harmonious synthesis of these three; to the contrary, the whole purpose of human development -- at least on the horizontal plane -- is to achieve their integration. As I also wrote in the book, we may judge the value of a culture in terms of how effectively it produces integrated and actualized human beings, the latter (actualization) largely depending upon the former (integration). In other words, it is difficult to actualize oneself in the absence of one self.

Sometimes we have to fall -- or be torn -- apart, in order to be properly put back together and reassembled in accordance with our higher clueprint.

For example, the self-satisfied entropic man will "live in the absurd and inconsequential, taking his desires and illusions for reality." Such a one is in desperate need of a kind of breakdown, or existential pimpslap; he must see his life for the meaningless null-de-slack that it is, and get out while he can. This is no doubt the principle behind Jesus's warnings to the wealthy and powerful caught up in their counterfeit versions of terrestrial slack.

Therefore, we must facilitate "a transformation of our factitious existence -- whose value is no more than potential -- into real existence."

Now, every lie is the dark penumbra of a factitious existence. And some people are lies, such that they veritably radiate darkness, as in the case of an Obama.

Truth is alive; it is a living thing, because its source and substance is Life Itself. Conversely, the Lie must partake of Death. This is the true meaning of the so-called "death culture," which is really founded upon a lie culture.

Here again, this is precisely what Jesus means with his crack about those who will be "persecuted for my sake." Yes, it is difficult to "love one's enemies." But bear in mind that telling them the truth is a way of loving them while irritating them at the same time, so perhaps not.

Importantly, the Lie doesn't just function in terms of its content, but rather, its very form. That is to say, the Lie is a way of achieving a kind of factitious continuity in the self. A narcissist such as Obama, for example, lives in a narrative in which he is so brilliant that he is always right about everything, and therefore entitled to appropriate our God-given Slack. That is an enviable psychic continuity, but obviously quite thin and brittle, and dependent upon millions of enablers to help prop up the fantasy.

Mouravieff describes what would happen if such a Lie were suddenly taken away: "Life would become impossible due to the shocks and conflicts which we would have to face." Here we see that the real function of lie is to serve as a buffer, "like the buffers of railway carriages which soften shocks."

So, Rule One in the adventure of consciousness is to stop lying, especially to yourself. Think about it: how can the lie get you anywhere except deeper into it? If, as Mouravieff says, the goal is "the march [forth] towards Consciousness," then it would be a contradiction in terms "to try to approach the truth while continuing to lie to ourselves or to believe in our own lies."

In short, the vertical march is a march toward truth, and vice versa. Conversely, lying is the satanic eucharist, such that when we eat it, it eats us, like in that Garden once upin a timeless.

I want to get back to the subject of the Law of the Left, which is entropy. Mouravieff calls it the General Law, whereas the Raccoon just calls it vertical gravity. Thankfully there is another law that opposes the General Law, or just call it the Great Attractor.

As we always say, man is situated between two vertical attractors; call them God and Satan if you like, but those terms might be too loaded.

For Mouravieff, "the Devil" is simply "the personalized moral aspect of the General Law"; he is the personification of a principle, so you needn't literally believe in satan so long as you see how he operates, which is via the broad way that leads to destruction and dissipation -- the abyss -- as opposed to the strait gate and narrow way that lead to Life and Truth -- the other Abyss.

What I really want to say is that time will indeed be entropic or cyclic at best unless we step in to prevent it. Hence the old adage that any institution that is not explicitly conservative will eventually drift toward the left.

Preventing this eventuality requires the ingression of truth into an otherwise vertically closed system. At the other extreme -- should truth be more or less completely rejected -- is a Flood or Holocaust of total destruction, which is where the left always leads us.

But as we all noah, at least those of us who survive the flood get a fresh start.

Mouravieff says that the "bipolar" structure of our intelligence exactly mirrors the structure of "the World," in that both are situated between what we call the two Attractors. The point is to lay up those upper vertical treasures that moths can't eat and thieves can't steal. The more we are bound to the lower, the less power we have, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. Rather, "power means liberty," or freedom of vertical movement. Which is why the meek shall inherit the earth and blessed are the poor in spirit, and all that.

So, we got that going for us.