Are You Using Only Five Percent of God's Revelation?

You know the old crack about how we only use five or ten or whatever percent of our brain potential? There is of course no way to know the actual figure, since we can't quantify something of which we are by definition ignorant.

Let's just say that most people are underachievers in light of what they could & should be. They fail to achieve their potential, which is to say, explicate what is implicate in or to them.

Indeed, what is the brain, really? At bottom, it seems to be an organ for translating the implicate to explicate order. Like right now: there is a post somewhere "inside," and I'm trying to help it come out. In so doing, it is as if certain foundational beliefs and principles are tools to aid in the translation.

More generally, I try to keep as many tools in the box as possible -- biological, psychological, theological, metaphysical, historical, economic, political, etc. Consider what happens when you have only one tool to accomplish the translation, as does our intellectually challenged demagogue in chief.

When your only tool is the hammer of leftism, every problem looks like a nail of class warfare. Even when he appeals to Christianity, it is a Marxist version, not the real thing. Likewise, he can't see Islam except through the prism of White European Oppression.

As applied to psychoanalytic theory, Bion had a name for this: rigid motion transformations. By way of analogy, think of a jazz musician performing a solo. The accomplished one will constantly "say something new," in a kind of non-stop flow of musical conversation, while the lesser one will rely more on a hackneyed catalogue of memorized licks.

This is precisely why Obama has always been so dreadfully boring. He is incapable of uttering something new or creative or witty or spontaneous. It always comes out the same. Everything out of his mouth is spiritually stillborn.

A rigid motion transformation in the mind leaves "invariant more or less permanently certain meanings and other characteristics." I recently read a book on World War II from the German perspective, and it is rather astonishing how they could always find a way to blame the Jews. Clearly, in Hitler's case the Jewish obsession was a rigid motion transformation.

Assuming Obama is not just being cynical -- i.e., that he is sincere -- one would have to say the same of his rigid transformation of global jihad to a gun control issue. Presumably he would find nothing amusing in this image (yoinked from Ace of Spades)-->

This is not to say that rigid motion transformations don't have their place. Indeed, they make everyday communication and even civilization possible.

To cite one obvious example, our constitution is supposed to function as a rigid motion transformation that translates, as it were, our power into the specific and enumerated powers of the state. But in that case, look at how the left's transformations are no longer so rigid! Rather, you could say that they improvise on it like a stoned jazzman. Legally speaking, it is analogous to free jazz, in the sense that it is free of any musico-legal constraints.

At the extreme other end of rigid transformations are what Bion called transformations in hallucinosis. These have some similarities with extremely abstract art. To you, maybe it looks like a child's fingerpainting, but the artist tells you it's, I don't know, a seascape. Try as you might, you can't identify the invariants in the transformation. Rather, it just looks random.

Well, I challenge anyone to examine the Constitution and see there a power to redefine marriage or to force us to buy a state-approved product, or the right to a dead baby. To the extent that a leftist sees these things there, it is a transformation in hallucinosis. We can all see their "end product," but we have no idea how it was produced -- just as we have no idea how the abstract artist came up with that seascape.

Now, whether one realizes it or not, every living moment is a transformation in O. Indeed, that is what gives "life" to the moment. Otherwise we are just living a script or caught up in some rigid motion transformation. Indeed, what is the Conspiracy but one big rigid motion transformation? And what is slack but transformations in O?

I see that there is a whole chapter here on transformations in hallucinosis, but I'm not sure how much more deeply I want to get into the subject. This is intriguing:

"[T]he person who uses this type of transformation believes that his 'creations' are the result of his capacity to surround himself by a universe generated by himself to provide an 'infallible' method of avoiding the pain of frustration."

I can't help thinking of how Obama uses this method to seal himself in his own omniscience. It is a "complete freedom from the restriction imposed by reality" and thus "superior" to actual freedom, as it were. In other words, we all know that fantasy has some significant benefits over reality. But maturity requires us to forgo imaginary benefits for real possibilities.

"In other words, the patient in these conditions has to deny the existence of an external reality that restricts, oppresses, and threatens him with the pain of frustration." Thus the capacity to tolerate the pain of frustration is a key to maturity.

Oddly, through a kind of ontological reversal, such a person forces what cannot exist to exist (e.g., homosexual "marriage") while dispatching what exists to a shadowy realm of nonexistence.

Of course, what exists nevertheless exists, so it still haunts and persecutes the person who has rendered it "nonexistent." The point of the transformation is to render the person "free" from his persecutors, but he just ends up enclosed in them. (Think of how the campus crybullies or Black Lives that Matter are utterly enclosed in their persecutory world.)

Really got sidetracked here. It all began with a passage in Mouravieff to the effect that "our level of being does not allow us to contain the relevant knowledge" of revelation. In other words, it is a kind of translation of an infinitely larger world, so we can only pretend to contain it with various rigid motion transformations (some of which are God-given and therefore entirely valid).

But you don't want to reduce the whole existentialada to a handful of rigid motion transformations, for this is to have the rigid letter but miss out on the flowing spirit of the thing. The former are supposed to assist in the latter, not prevent it. In any event, here is the exact quote that provoked this post, but which will now end it:

"It would not be an exaggeration to to say that only five to ten percent of the true content of the Scriptures is used, even by specialists" (Mouravieff).

Tossing Thoughtcrimes through the Overton Window

Mouravieff goes on to say that we inhabit a Mixtus Orbis, which seems to be a fancy way of saying that ours is an ambiguous world ruled by good and evil. Worse, it is a place "where we find real and imaginary facts and phenomena inextricably intermixed."

I say "worse," because every great manmade catastrophe is predicated on a foundation of lies. A great evil is usually the result of the ruthless application and pursuit of a lie. But the person who embraces the lie virtually never regards it as such.

Rather, his moral fervor results from the fact that he regards the lie as true. While I don't like the word "radicalized," this is pretty much what it means, i.e., to embrace the lie with all one's heart, intelligence, and will. In this regard, Islamists are no less radicalized than Obama.

How and why do people become so confused between the two? "The difficulty in separating them is due to the fact that the Imaginary resembles the Real in the same way that the space beyond a mirror reflects what is actually present on the facing side." In other words, when we look "into" the mirror we see a space, but it is the space behind us.

And "When surrounded by mirrors, we can easily lose all notion of what is real." The real problem is that the imaginary "closely resembles the real," a good example being "homosexual marriage." It does not exist and cannot exist, and yet, millions of people insist that it can and does. But it is only a fake image of the real thing.

In the past we have discussed the idea of 'A' and 'B' influences. You could say that 'A' influences are horizontal at best, imaginary or demonic at worst. For example, whenever I watch television with my son, I point out all of the 'A' influences that are going on. After all, that is why television exists: to influence you, and not just to part with your money by purchasing things you don't really need.

Rather, the most sinister part is the 'A' influences coming from "left wing culture," or whatever you want to call it. These influences are relentless, which is one of the reasons why they can appear "real." In other words, the bombardment is so constant, that it can eventually convince people that the imaginary is real.

Along these lines, yesterday on Ace of Spades I read of a useful concept, the Overton Window. It "refers to the range of acceptable political discourse on any given topic":

"The Left -- dominating the media, the academy, and pop culture -- is unmatched at moving the Overton Window. Consider gay marriage, a subject once so far outside the mainstream that less than 20 years ago, Republicans and Democrats united to pass the Defense of Marriage Act to define marriage under federal law as the union of one man and one woman. Now? That view is such an anathema that it’s difficult to get -- or retain -- a job in entire sectors of the economy if you openly hold to the traditionalist position on marriage."

So the left effectively moved the Overton Window to the point that the imaginary -- homosexual marriage -- is officially real.

With his comment about the dangers of Muslim immigration two days ago, Donald Trump tossed a brick through the Window, and look what happened -- complete hysteria in the media. It looked as if it were coordinated, but that is just an illusion, like when you lift a rock under which ants are living. Each ant knows only one thing, which is to protect the queen. It's the same with the liberal media. They run around like ants because they know only one thing: protect the (illusory) narrative.

So, if nothing else, Trump performs the vital service of vandalizing the Overton Window -- which is really more like a wall or prison: "he is useful for plowing through the... dead hulks of leftist thought that clog the trade-routes of political expression and debate."

The problem is, while Trump does a fine job of dropping bombs on the 'A' influnces, he has no 'B' influnces . Rather, unfortunately, he is, as Ace says, "a boorish and crude demagogue." We obviously need a candidate who does both: attacks the 'A' influences while channeling the 'B.' Now that I think about it, probably the only candidate who effectively does both is Ted Cruz.

Remind us, exactly what are 'B' influences? Here is a summary and contrast between the two:

"'A' influences are illusory in their nature, although the effect of each one of them is real, so that exterior man takes them for reality."

Importantly, they come at us from every which way and pull us in every direction, so that the sum total of their effect is zero. Think of the chaos of the left, which is chaotic because it is not oriented toward any telos and therefore undermines meaning, purpose, and real progress.

In reality, everything on the left cancels out something else on the left, which is what is going on, for example, with the left-on-left silliness of the campus crybully movement. Ultimately leftism is completely self-destructive and self-consuming. At least everywhere it has been tried.

Conversely, 'B' influences emanate from Celestial Central, AKA, the Great Attractor. They are not from this world, nor could they ever be. We are always subject to them, but only if we open ourselves to their influence. Few people are really completely cut off from them, or their souls would asphyxiate. Even atheists revere truth in their own way. Even materialists fall in love. Even Richard Dawkins transcends his genes. I think.

Now, "since 'A' influences neutralize each other, 'B' influences actually constitute the only reality." Thus, if a fellow should spend his days failing to distinguish between the two, then he has officially wasted his life, because it has added up to zero.

Also, as one assimilates the 'B' influences -- and this is very experience-near -- it is as if they accumulate and create their own "magnetic center" within, which is in turn magnetized toward the Great Attractor. Which is why, as we grow in spirit, we are less easily influenced and seduced by the 'A' influences and more drawn toward God -- just as the earth, small as it is, exerts a gravitational attraction on the sun.

Out of time.

The Truth Will Set You Free from Your Perverse Understanding of Freedom

Now that we're on the subject, this question of transformation functions keeps popping up everywhere.

For example, I'm reading a book about the architect Christopher Alexander, and it seems to me that he is on a quest to identify these transformation functions in the aesthetic realm, i.e., simple rules for explicating beauty -- which is latent everywhere -- in this world.

If I recall correctly from previous books of his, he believes that space everywhere is latent -- or implicate -- with life and beauty, and that it is up to the architect to explicate it and render it manifest. In fact, I'll bet you right now that if I look up David Bohm in the index, he'll be there.

Well, there's no index but there's plenty of Whitehead and Bohm. Indeed, here is a footnote: "In a series of meetings between the two of us...., Bohm told me that what he defines as the implicate order, and what I define as the wholeness, are essentially one and the same thing." So we're all spinning in the same attractor.

And I would certainly agree that "the most important discovery of modern physics" is that "subatomic particles cannot be viewed as isolated elements which only interact mechanically with other elements through the medium of forces and collisions." Rather, "their existence and their behavior are controlled by their relation to the wholeness of the world around them."

In short, we live in a cosmos of interior relations, in which everything is interior to everything else. This explains so much that is otherwise inexplicable, everything from the intelligibility of the world to the existence of life to the human interior itself. With the paradigm of wholeness -- or of process philosophy, or of pataphysical coontology -- the universe begins with interiority, so the existence of the human interior doesn't present us with such an impenetrable anomaly that unexplains everything else about the cosmos.

Rather, this is exactly what we would expect the creation to look like if its Creator is trinity, AKA, irreducible interior relations. It is alive -- or Life -- and it is conscious -- or Person -- so the fact that we are Living Persons goes from being the most annoying mystery conceivable to the most joyous Mystery possible. Woo hoo!

This is the Fact of facts about our existence. All facts are subordinate to it, and no fact can transgress or transcend it. It's the Way It Is and the Way Things Are, the latter following from the former.

What is Christianity, really? It is 1) Trinity, 2) Incarnation, and 3) Resurrection. Here again, these latter two are really founded upon the first. When our idiot-in-chief goes on about how all religions share the same universal values... well, you haven't really understood what he means unless you literally want to vomit.

Again, the left is subject to a pathological transformation function between implicate and explicate orders. It is pathological because it is a lie. Actually there are several lies. Is there one Big One that organizes all the rest?

I don't usually discuss things here until they are at least fully half-baked, but lately I have been nagged by this idea that it all revolves around sex -- which is why sexuality was and is such a vital aspect of their war on civilization. Then, just yesterday, I received an email from a publisher about this new book called The Global Sexual Revolution: Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom. I took it as a cosmic sign, or friendly metaphysical nudge, and ordered the book straight away. Oddly, it seems to explicate exactly what I had been thinking the day before, but with one side of my brain still in the implicate:

"The core of the global cultural revolution is the deliberate confusion of sexual norms. It is the culmination of a metaphysical revolution as well -- a shifting of the fundamental ground upon which we stand and build a culture, even a civilization. Instead of desire being subjected to natural, social, moral, and transcendent orders, the identity of man and woman is dissolved, and free rein given to the maximum fulfillment of polymorphous urges, with no ultimate purpose or meaning."

(?!), he thought to himself.

"Kuby surveys gender ideology and LGBT demands, the devastating effects of pornography and sex-education, attacks on freedom of speech and religion, the corruption of language, and much more.... she documents in meticulous detail how the tentacles of a budding totalitarian regime are slowly gripping the world in an insidious stranglehold. Here on full display are the re-education techniques of the new permanent revolution, which has migrated from politics and economics to sex."

All in the name of freedom!

Which is surely one of their Organizing Lies. Think about it: all of the freedoms the left has stolen from us have been in the name of freedom.

Fiendishly clever.

Back to Mouravieff: "Lies gravely affect our mind; they distort the undeveloped organs of the Personality, upon which depends the effort that must lead us to the second Birth." If we think of this life as another womb (AKA matrix) in which a kind of development is taking place, "Each lie attacks and distorts" our developing nonlocal organs.

Indeed, lies make us "go backwards," in that we willfully exile ourselves from the influence of the Great Attractor which pulls us forward, inward, and upward on wings of grace. When you listen to Obama and think to yourself: what a coarse and graceless clod!, this is why. His lowborn gracelessness exudes from every pore. As is true in general of any true leftist. The marks of bad nonlocal breeding are everywhere.

So, when a leftist calls himself "progressive," you can see that this represents a total inversion of the facts. What a clever disguise, hiding under the rubric of precisely what they attack and prevent.

Note that for an Obama to stop lying to us, he would first have to stop lying to himself, and what are the chances of that? That would require reaching the evolutionary stage of moral blankruptcy, such that the second birth may take place.

In other words, he would have to see the dark pit to which "Obama" has lead, turn around toward the light, and begin the "work" of auto-abandonment to divine providence. Hello, New Man! I don't see it happening in this life. He is far too damaged, and the more damage he causes, the more his denial hypertrophies. He is spinning in the vortex of that malevolent attractor at the other end of the cosmos, AKA hell.

It is painful to stop lying to ourselves. Doing so means that we "will sometimes feel bitter regret as [our] beautiful dreams vanish." However, God doesn't just leave us in the pit: at the same time, the person "will feel himself more and more liberated." You know, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.

Mouravieff suggests that Jesus specifically chose the word "free" in the context of a culture in which slavery was so widespread. Therefore, the truth shall set you free from a psychic and spiritual slavery.

However, it seems that until one is living in freedom, one can't necessarily appreciate it. This would explain how and why most of the world doesn't value or long for real freedom. For Mouravieff, one must attain "a certain stage in his internal liberation" to "understand the full value of the magical power expressed in the word freedom."

Consider the campus crybully movement, or Black Lives Matter, or radical feminists. Does the term "freedom loving" come to mind? Of course not. These are people who are completely subservient to their own mind parasites, projected into the external environment. It is as if they are trying to escape their own psychic slavery by doubling down on the very conditions that enforce it.

When we say that they forge their own fetters, what we really mean is that they are subject to a pathological transformation function that keeps them in an absurd prison of their own making.

Obama the Miracle Worker

Continuing with yesterday's theme, we were discussing lies that aren't so much superimposed on reality, but rather, are analogous to the transformation function between the implicate and explicate orders.

First of all, what is a transformation function? Easy:

"In mathematics, particularly in semigroup theory, a transformation is any function f mapping a set X to itself, i.e. f:X→X. In other areas of mathematics, a transformation may simply be any function, regardless of domain and codomain."

Okay, but how about in plain Coonglish? I don't know if I'm using the correct term for what I'm describing, but it is like a constant or invariant that translates one domain into another, in this case, implicate to explicate.

Of note, I first encountered the concept in an obscure book on psychoanalysis called Transformations, in which the author uses it to illuminate what must happen in the movement from unconscious to conscious (or from O to [k]). I probably haven't looked at it in over 25 years. Let's see if it can offer us any guidance this morning.

But before we do, let's highlight something Mouravieff says about the types of lies. To plagiaphrase, there is lying to others; lying to oneself; useful lies; and useless lies.

To this list he adds two more, hypocrisy, which is "the pretense of virtue" for purposes of deception; and the... I want to say father of lies, but that's already taken. He calls it the integral lie, which characterizes the person "who, from a habit of lying and cheating on every occasion, ends by believing his own lies and thus loses all sense of truth."

This would be Obama-level lying. It is beyond Clinton-level, since a Clinton usually doesn't believe its own bullshit. They are like bullshitters who lie to preserve the bullshit, while Obama is a liar who bullshits to preserve the integral Lie.

A garden-variety lie isn't necessarily rooted in the personality. Rather, it may simply be an "occasional lie," one that is in the moment and for the moment.

The integral lie runs much deeper, and is more like an epistemological cancer that has taken over the host. Mouravieff claims -- and surely he is correct -- that no spiritual progress can take place for the integral liar. So much for being a progressive, when that is the one movement that is a priori barred the integral Liar.

Yes, liberals lie by definition, but lately I've been noticing the really systematic lying that is more like the transformation functions noted above -- for example, the canard that "97%" (or whatever it is) of scientists believe in catastrophic manmade global warming.

I say, if something is true, why do you need to lie about it? It makes me, you know, not trust anything else you say. This week we've heard similar systematic lies about gun violence and about the Religion of Peace. Again, if Islam is so peaceful, why do you need to lie about it? I actually purchased a Koran on 9-12-2001 to find out for myself, so I'm always shocked when I hear the lies about what's in it. Don't try to tell me the Islamists don't know their Koran.

The Secret tends to protect itself from the integral liar, who, according to Mouravieff, will rarely have much interest in spiritual development anyway. Or, to the extent that he does, it will be for Oprah- or Chopra-esque reasons of narcissistic development, the one conflated with the other.

Remember in 2008, all the talk about how Obama was some kind of Ascended Evolutionary Being of Light? Are they still saying that? And if not, have they engaged in a little introspection to figure out how they could have been so deluded? Doubtful. A lie of that magnitude must itself tend toward the integral.

Yesterday O'Reilly was debating Charles Krauthammer over whether Obama was simply incompetent or ideological. Krauthammer made the host look like an ass -- not a high bar -- because O'Reilly simply has no grasp of the integral ideological Lie. This Lie is so formidable that you can be quite sure that where you and I see abject failure, Obama sees stunning success -- just as communist revolutionaries did. A Lie of that magnitude cannot be contradicted, only confirmed. It is that with which he sees -- like an intense darkness with which he "illuminates" events.

Getting back to transformation functions, I would say that we are all prone to distortions of various degrees between the implicate and explicate orders, or between "heaven and earth," if you like. Presumably, in the case of Jesus, he would be subject to a completely smooth and harmonious translation between the two -- which is what it means to "do the will of the father," or to be at one with him. You could say that where we have vague vertical recollections, for Jesus they are vividly present:

"For our word is not yet a word of Truth. If they had the power of the word of Jesus," then our lies would take on a "miraculous power, [and] would actually have improved the facts.... This sort of lie could be defined as an attempt to perform a miracle with insufficient means" (Mouravieff).

Now, that is some deep stuff, because it seems to me that this is a crock-bottom description of the integral Lie of the left: the attempt to perform a miracle with insufficient means. Works every time, in that it never fails to fail, Obama being just the most recent case.

Now, despite the failure of the Lie, the Lie will never go away. It will always be with us. What is that about?

I think this goes to its primordial nature that makes it much more similar to (perverse) religiosity than to any merely secular thought. Only a kind of insane religious fervor could prevent a person from seeing Obama as he is and his policies as they are. It is why these surrealists see us as the party of satan.

I don't have time to get into Transformations, but it is as if the liberal begins in the O of primordial (implicate) religious experience, but transforms this into (an explicate) secular ideology. In the transformation, something is altered but something is unaltered. In between is the invariant transformation operation of the ideological Lie -- which is, in my experience, grounded either in hatred or in lovelessness (feeling unloved or that one's love is toxic).

An Implicate War in Heaven?

"We live in a world ruled by lies," in which "lying and stealing are the dominant elements of human character..." (Mouravieff).

Yes, you could toss in envy as well, but that is always prelude to a swindle. And idolatry, but that's just the Lie of lies, as murder is the ultimate theft.

A bad lot, these humans. I thought about this while skimming this essay by Victor Davis Hanson, Liberal Nihilism in a Nutshell. Ho hum. The truth about liberalism is well known and understood. What else can one say? It has zero effect on them, which is maybe the most frightening thing about our world, for civilization cannot long survive without truth.

They are not moved by truth, nor can they be shamed. Now, animals have no sense of shame and are not moved by truth.

But a shameless human who rejects truth is not just an animal -- rather, something much worse. Elements of his personality will obviously become animalized, but other aspects will become monstrous; and the monstrous is not a category of nature.

Where is it then, and from what does it derive its energy?

Paul famously remarked that we don't so much wrestle "against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."

True, but he doesn't really define these dark principalities and powers. Perhaps they were just taken for granted. One commentary says that "a struggle, a 'battle of life' must be assumed at once by all who look at the world as it is; the question is whether it is against flesh and blood, or against a more unearthly power of evil." Another says that we do not wrestle "with feeble men, but we have to contend with the diabolic powers."

Perhaps, like us, they worship a father. Of lies. This father's power is "real, but limited and transitory, able only to enslave those who 'yield themselves' to it, and destined to be overcome; and it seems to refer especially to the concrete power of evil, exercised through physical and human agency."

Another commentary adds that "The spiritual hosts of evil are described as fighting in the region above the earth." Maybe it's like being in an unhappy home, where one can hear the parents duking it out upstairs.

I don't have the time to read all those commentaries, but I do have time to make up my own.

Humans exist as individuals. We can all see that. However, what we maybe don't see is the Total Cosmic System that makes this individuality possible. I might compare it to David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Bohm's central point is that the phenomenal universe -- the explicate order -- is only the outward precipitate of a totally flowing cosmic whole.

As it so happens, my doctoral dissertation was on the subject of how Bohm's paradigm may be applied to the human mind. Perhaps this post involves applying it to the much wider spiritual space of which the mind is only one aspect.

The first reviewer notes that "Bohm treats the totality of existence as an unbroken whole." The "implicate order" means "that any independent element in our universe contains within it the sum of all elements, i.e., the sum of all existence itself. He describes an enfolding-unfolding universe with consciousness playing a central role."

And crucially, in between the implicate and explicate orders are "hidden variables," which are like relatively stable transformation operations. In short, something in the explicate order can look completely stable and concrete, but it is nevertheless the "end result," so to speak, of an infinite number of processes. Not to go all Deepak on you, but this is surely what quantum physics "shows," i.e., its overall vision. And this vision is precisely what Alfred North Whitehead tries to develop in his postmodern metaphysics of process.

As an aside, some people say that you really have only one or two ideas that you keep flogging in diverse ways. Here I am, back to the same place -- the same attractor -- where it all started.

Back to the subject at hand, perhaps this "war in heaven" is really a war in the implicate order. We mostly deal with its effects in the explicate order, just as, say, a neurotic person deals with explicate symptoms that are really a consequence of pain and conflict in his unconscious-implicate order. Someone suggested as much in a paper published back in 1991. Oh, right. Me.

I wonder if there's anything in there that can help us today, in our search for the implicate powers and principalities that render the left so hopelessly fucked up?

Bohm "begins with this notion of an underlying, undivided wholeness, and then attempts to show how, amidst this wholeness there may exist the 'relatively enduring subtotalities' available to our senses and scientific instruments."

In another hint of things to come, "Language becomes problematic at this point," because its structure "presupposes a universe of individual parts in external relationship to one another." But underneath the explicate order of conventional language is "the vast multidimensional sea" of quantum-linguistic potential which "forms the constantly unfolding common ground of the manifest cosmos." From here it is but a step to the implicate and generative linguistic order of the Cosmogenesis and Cosmobliteration sections of the Encirclopedia.

I am flat out of time this morning. I'll have to leave it to readers to explicate this idea that there is some kind of nonlocal war going on in the implicate heavens, and that we're just the collateral damage. Spookulate away!

Man... lets himself be bound more and more in life: his faculty for lying gives him the marvelous impression of being able to arrange [read: explicate] things for the best in difficult situations, but he forgets that lies, once uttered, put him under obligation. Imaginary facts... demand [an implicate] context which... must support the circumstances within which we live and act... a serious lie unfailingly leads to a catastrophe commensurate with the importance of the problem. --Mouravieff

Coming to a Theater Near You, Your Life

In a comment, reader Magister suggests that life is analogous to a film, but to what is a film analogous?

Hey, I should know this because back off man, I was a film major. Yes, like the esteemed James Taranto I attended Cal State Northridge, the Harvard of the west San Fernando Valley. Except in my case I bothered to graduate. By which I mean they let me slide with a "gentleman's BA."

Why did I major in film? Because I couldn't think of an easier subject. Except for PE, and even I have more self-respect than that.

Turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined, but it goes to show that some things never change, in this case, my basic temperament. I've just never been able to take the Conspiracy seriously. Things it regards as important are malevolent or silly to me, whereas things I think are important are attacked or devalued -- if noticed at all -- by Big Con.

My whole life, at least from the age of nine or so, has been focussed on outwitting the Conspiracy. I've had some wins and some losses, but overall, I would say I've been able to preserve my sacred eccentricity and thus my Slack. So, open your Encirclopedia to page 261 and let's say it together:

Do the monkey bone, do the shingaling, get your slack back & take a trip, slip, lose your grip, & turn a backover flip and say: not the god of the philosophers, not the god of the scholars!

You know, like Pascal.

Back to the subject at hand: yes, your life is like a film. But what is the film really about? There are characters of course, conflicts, a crazy plot, and also a theme. What's yours? I already told you mine: Slack vs. Conspiracy. Everything else is a subset of that.

We've no doubt discussed this in the past, but I don't recall what I wrote, and besides, readers come and some even go, so it won't be a stale bobservation for one or two of you.

Volume One of Gnosis by slack hustler Boris Mouravieff has some helpful things to say. Indeed! I just opened the book to a random page and out popped this:

"... [S]omeone who has studied esoteric science can and must better understand the comedy of life, in which pretentious blind men lead other more modest blind men towards an abyss which will engulf both" (italics in original).

This is so true it tickles and hurts at the same time -- unless you just can't think of a Pretentious Blind Man who is leading our nation toward an abyss.

Now, the term "esoteric science" is a bit pretentious and bordering on the conspiratorial itself. For our counter-conspiratorial cult, the Cosmic Raccoons, "esoteric science" is just the way things really are. It's "esoteric" in the same sense that Bob is "abnormal" while actually being normal.

In other words, for the Raccoon, the most esoteric thing of all is a little common fucking sense.

Thus the false esoterism of the tenured, which is just more blindness from the pretentious -- systematic myopia masquerading as another -- and superior -- form of vision.

Real vision is of course 20/∞, which really means that the Raccoon can perceive the Infinite from any angle or distance, even its Fine Prince.

You might say that seeing the Infinite Abyss prevents us from falling into all the manmade ones.

Still, we must be cautious, as there are snares everywhere: "He who studies esoteric science must watch, and take care not to return once again to the crowd, nor, 'like everyone else,' to follow that broad way that leads to the abyss" (Mouravieff).

This is reminiscent of that fine prince's remark to the effect that He who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is not fit for service in the Kingdom of Slack.

Blah blah yada yada, time has seven dimensions, the last one being O, which is the Alpha and Omega: "It is not the void. It is the seed and end" of all that exists. It is source and destiny. You can't actually get out of it anyway -- that's a tip-toptical delusion, right? -- so you might as well be in it.

Put it this way. What we call "science" -- I mean the whole existentialada, not just this or that discipline -- tries to account for the whole of reality. You might say that it superimposes its vision over O, and does a pretty decent job of it, or at least metacosmically blind folks fall for it.

Nevertheless, there is always a gap between this and reality, and this gap is infinite. Or better, as Mouravieff terms it, there is a "zone of illusion" between us and reality, AKA O. Grace is here -- among other reasons -- to get us over that hump, i.e., to swim the moat.

In fact, here is where I differ with Mouravieff (and there are many such differences), because no amount of effort on our part can propel us over the void. To believe so is... the last temptation, as it were -- the sort of thing to which Jesus was tempted in the desert.

The Raccoon "takes the easy way out" by following the Law of Attraction instead of the Law of Force. But orthoparadoxically, it obviously takes a lot of effort to give up and trust God, no?

Another important orthoparadox is that what they call "civilization" is really a great wilderness, whereas genuine civilization is always out here in the bewilderness. For it is here where all the inaction -- the evolutionary non-doodling -- takes place. It is in this space of bewilderness -- unplugged from the conspiratorial grid -- that we may float upstream on wings of Slack, AKA grace.

The conspiracy loves its own. Therefore it hates us. But the tool's reproach is a kingly title, is it not?

I might add that the conspirator is in a cage, so he can't even really get at you. He needs you for food, but if you just ignore him he'll starve. Atheists, for example, need us. We don't need them, except maybe to toy with and sharpen our arguments and insultainments.

Ah, here's the part I was looking for: "between the limits drawn by birth and death" is a film representing "the life of each of us, all the beings we have met, and the ensemble of material and moral circumstances which surround us."

We watch -- or experience -- this film through a little slot we call the "present." Now, it seems that this present can't really be a part of the film per se.

Rather, it must somehow be outside or above it, right? Or at least more or less so. We all know people who are so immersed in their film that they are unable to stand back and see where it is going or what is the point of it all.

So, the Present has a kind of breadth and depth, does it not? And isn't the Conspiracy always trying to compress this slot and draw us into the agitation and drownian emotion of its urgent nihilocracy? That's the function of the liberal media, to force us to play roles in its low budget film-narrative.

Note that one is either in or out of this narrative. If you are in it, you are not permitted to be out.

Which is why a liberal, for example, is not permitted to watch Fox News, or not permitted to question global warming, or not permitted to doubt vulgar Darwinism.

But once outside the narrow slot of the Conspiracy, one awakens to the wider world -- the expansive cosmic bewilderness. It's so roomy here, who would want to leave?

To reiterate, the "essential aim" is to broaden "the individual slot that opens directly on the Present" (ibid.). Do that and you can read the Signs of the Times like a lesser man reads the clowns of the Times.

Freedom: Divine, Human, and Anti-human

For Hartshorne, God is still omniscient, in that he knows infallibly all that can be known. It's just that he can't know what can't be known in principle.

In a similar sense, he is obviously free, but not to violate his own nature. Like any other person, he is constrained by who he is!

It really comes down to freedom and creativity -- whether these words really mean what they mean, or are just nice sounding platitudes.

Is there freedom in God? Then God is undetermined to himself. Are we free? Then we are (at least partly, but genuinely) undetermined by and for God.

Thus, "Either we determine the divine knowing, in some degree, or we determine nothing at all.... if we cannot do this, then we have no freedom whatsoever."

Not only does this touch on freedom and creativity, but love and truth, for what is the merit of love if it is determined and therefore compulsory? What is its value if it isn't freely given? Is it even love anymore?

In this context, what does it mean to say God is love, if love operates like an inanimate machine? Again, it is reduced to a kind of meaningless platitude.

In my world, truth is the virtue and light of the intellect. If our beliefs are determined -- if we are not free to discover and devote ourselves to truth -- then what is its merit? Eliminate freedom and we eliminate truth.

So, all of these things -- freedom, love, truth, creativity, relationship, and goodness -- are densely connected in the divine hyperspace; each is a necessary reflection of the others. Not one of them is understandable without its sister transcendentals.

When we say that "God is unchanging," it means that he is unchanging in these necessary attributes. His love, for example, is steadfast, but steadfast is not the same as static, for how can love ever be static?

What happens when the Divine Freedom confronts the human freedom? Yes, the Incarnation, but when God incarnates he does so as man, and not just a man. Or, at the very least, we are free to participate in that ultimate drama of freedom.

I suppose there are millions of self-styled Christians who don't believe in the Trinity. To which I would say, if God isn't Trinity, then to hell with it. Who needs him?

For me, that sort of God is literally equivalent to no God. It's certainly not a God I can relate to, because there would be nothing relative in him.

Does such a vision of God limit his power or glory or supremacy? Well, what is power? Or, what would it mean to exert power but not respond to what is produced or brought about by the power?

Isn't this like a dictator or tyrant, all Who and no Whom? Yes, it's "power," but is it divine power? Which type of leader is more like God, the autocrat or the servant-leader who is intimately related to his subjects?

This touches on a quintessential difference between Christianity, on the one hand, and leftism or Islamism on the other.

For the latter two, God, or ultimate power, comes down to authority and obedience. Freedom -- and therefore truth and love -- doesn't enter into it.

Allah, whatever else he is, isn't especially lovable, as far as I can tell. Seems to me he's more interested in respect than love. And he certainly doesn't care about freedom, for in every nation dominated by Islam, freedom is conspicuously absent.

Freedom is a Christian value. Even the left's perverse version of it could only exist in a Christianized person who has simply severed it from its sister transcendentals (in particular, a prior moral responsibility without which freedom is not only inconceivable but toxic).

God is creative -- it says so in the first sentence of the Bible -- therefore he contains alternatives within himself. The world isn't necessary. He could have created another world.

But I would suggest that he cannot not create, any more than he cannot fail to love.

Again, when we speak of God's "changelessness," I think this is what we are referring to. Creating is necessary. This or that creation are contingent.

As it so happens, all this far-out Christian Duddism we've been discussing lately has profound links to Evolution 2.0, that is, the real evolution, not just the watered down Darwinian variety.

For with the God we have described above, creative evolution becomes necessary instead of an impossible absurdity (which it is for both creationists and atheistic Darwinans).

But that's the subject of a different post, one that will appear "necessarily," even if the contingent details are not worked out at this time.

Hovering in Love Around the Above

In response to yesterday's post, reader Magister suggests that life is analogous to a film, and that "whether the film is already shot is a matter of perspective. To those immersed in time, it can never appear to be already shot," in contrast to God, who is "both in and outside time."

That is precisely the issue, or one of them, anyway. Take only the Incarnation, which is analogous to the director jumping into his own film or the playwright into the play.

Thus, if God is subjecting himself to the full monty of humanness, then surely he is submitting to time, no? For if he isn't, then not only is he excluding one of the most characteristic features of humanness, but he isn't really with us all the way to the end of our cosmic predicament. Not even the beginning, really, since it all begins in time. For humanness, time is surely of the essence.

Magister continues: "The question to me is this: how must we understand the relationship between God’s be-ing and His knowledge? If God's being is infinite, then so too must be His knowledge. Otherwise, it is difficult for me to understand how God could be present to something and not know it. The two must be co-extensive.

"I’m not sure then what to make of a claim that God’s omniscience and his omnipresence can be separated. Jewish thinkers have speculated about a void' (tsimstum?) that God created to put a space between Himself and creation, a space where He is neither present nor, presumably, even aware. I get the metaphor, but have a difficult time seeing the logic in it."

Allow me. Regarding tzimtzum, it is an important Kabbalistic concept meaning God's prior "withdrawal" from being in order to leave a zone of real cosmic and human freedom.

This is a metaphysical concept, so it cannot really be contrasted to the physics of the big bang. I wouldn't take tzimtzum absolutely literally; rather, it's an "as if" story that helps to elucidate the phemomena -- you know, like Darwinism.

But it is as if, instead of expanding outward with a badda-bing, badda BANG!, God first "contracts" to "a point of infinite density" before taking up the work of creation with the resultant void; this void is the Great Nothing out of which and into which God creates. It very much reminds me of the Tao, which says, for example, that we build a house but use the space.

I appreciate this way of looking at things because it is so "existentially near," so to speak. When we say, for example, "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven," we are acknowledging that God is present in heaven in a way that is different from his presence on earth.

Under celestial conditions he is "fully present," but here on earth he seems to be slightly introverted. He doesn't overwhelm us or suck all the oxygen from the room. He gives us our... space. He is not, in the words of the Book of the Same Name, an "ainsoferable gnosis all."

As to the relationship between God's being and knowledge, yes, in him knowledge -- which is to say truth -- would be entirely wrapped up in his being (as would the other transcendentals, beauty, goodness, and unity). However, it would seem to me that God's ultimate attributes are love and relationship -- AKA Trinity -- such that God's being is always a giving-and-receiving.

I think this goes to Mushroom's later comment to the effect that "There is an eternal 'depth' to time like a spring boiling up from beneath." Now we're plunging into the Eckhart of the matter, because that is precisely how the Meistero describes it. Admittedly we are attempting to describe the indescribable, and yet, I don't think God wants us to be out here with no earthly idea of what goes on in there.

In one of my favorite books, Bernard McGinn writes of "the dynamic reciprocity of the 'flowing forth' of all things from the hidden ground of God, and the 'flowing back,' or 'breaking through,' of the universe into essential identity with this divine source."

Now, I think this flowing-forth and flowing-back result in "change" in God. You could say that with the Incarnation, God includes man in this eternal freeflow of the Trinity. We are cordially invited to participate in this same eternal creation-in-love. How this can be reduced to a static and changeless reality, I have no idea. Who needs a heart that doesn't beat?

Magister writes that "Emotionally, I'm all for freedom, joy, unpredictability, improvisation, and unpredictability. I completely agree with Bob: 'I'd want to create a little realm of unpredictability just to relieve the tedium!'”

Well, what we have outlined above provides an airtight alibi for belief in the divine freedom, unpredictability, and improvisation, AKA the Adventure of Consciousness in which we may participate -- but only by mirroring God's own kenosis, i.e., chucking our illusions of control and predictability and surrendering to the the flow (especially the vertical flow of grace). Conversely, to be drifting downstream in the creek of time without a kenosis is to be sealed up in our own personal hell.

Magister continues that "In the Thomistic view, God is an infinite supernova of creative love. All be-ing is present to Him, the good and the evil, He sees it all elapse, He responds to its elapsing, and He has it all, every bit of it, in His embrace. But here we can only resort to metaphor. God does not experience the sequential thing called 'tedium' because God is not only in time."

Well, yes and no. If he does indeed "respond" -- and he does -- to things that are in time, then he has surrendered at least a part of himself to time. It's just that he always "enlivens" time, and I would go so far as to say that he is the life in the time, which is why in a genuine religious practice, we enjoy the time of our lives.

Again, the Incarnation is necessarily an In-temporalization. And we have heard it from the wise that this temporalization shall continue to the end of the age, during which Christ is "always with us." Being that we are undoubtedly in time, then if God is with us, then he too is in time.

Think of the alternative -- which strikes me as absurd -- in which "God influences all things, nothing influences God" (Hartshorne). What, is God autistic, like Obama, oblivious to the reality he has brought about?

But Genesis tells us that this is not the way God rolls. Rather, each time he creates, he responds to what he has created by declaring it "good." It seems to me that if he just creates but doesn't respond to his own creation, then that is more like the God of deism, in which there is one creation, one time, and then we're on our own.

I won't press the point, but for me, this is a more sublime description of our Ultimate Reality: "He influences us supremely because he is supremely open to our influence. He responds delicately to all things, as we respond delicately to changes in our nerve cells," although "Of course, his delicacy is infinitely greater" (ibid.). And no way would we have this delicate responsiveness if he didn't first.

The point is, the creation is a two-way street, not a one-way nul-de-slack. And in this regard, it again mirrors the interior of the Trinity. Therefore, if becoming is the primary reality, then God's being is only an abstraction from his perpetual becoming-in-Trinity.

Thus, in contrast -- or better, addition -- to Magister's point above about God's being and knowledge being co-extensive, prior to this would be his becoming and his knowing. And this is indeed "infinite delight."

In conclusion, our love of God is a kind of floating on the currents of his eternal trinitarian mystery. Don Colacho even says so:

To love is to hover without rest around the impenetrability of a being. And Religious thought does not go forward, like scientific thought, but rather goes deeper.

Hovering in vertical space, drawn ever deeper into the vortex of the Great Attractor. The Raccoon lifestyle.

Cosmic Freedom and Divine Presence

Not much time this morning... Continuing with our theme of divine omniscience, it seems to me that God can either be omniscient (in the traditional sense) or free, but not both. After all, to be free is to be undetermined, but to know everything in advance is to be completely determined.

I feel as if I'm beating a dead horse, but the vast majority of believers would apparently disagree on this point. Rather, God by definition knows everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen. I can go along with the first two, but not the third, because the second -- the present -- includes a space of real freedom and therefore uncertainty. Woo hoo!

We used to have an irreligious reader who would come by and flog his theory that man has no free will, but is totally caused by antecedents. I could never make him realize that if his theory were universally true (and it was probably more or less true of him), then truth itself would be impossible because there would be no point of vantage outside the deterministic system. (I say true "of him," because the theory was likely an autobiography of his sense of being enclosed in and determined by his mind parasites.)

If everything is just an effect of antecedents, then there can be no exception for your little theory. So the theory falls by its own standard: eliminate freedom and you simultaneously abolish truth and creativity. D'oh!

There is existence and there is experience. Perhaps the central mystery of the cosmos is how the former becomes the latter -- how experience gets in here at all, and what is its meaning.

Now, one of the first principles of the ancient Raccoon teachings is that you can't derive experience from existence. There's not even a theory for a theory of how this would be possible on a purely scientific basis, i.e., how an objective universe can become subjective -- how the outside can become inside and then perceive and understand its own outside.

It's difficult enough to comprehend how a single cell can become a human being, but an even deeper issue is how a dead cosmos can come to life without presupposing Life.

Experience can only take place in the present, and indeed, in a certain way, is the present. If that is the case, then "presence" and "experience" co-arise, such that each moment is reality presencing itself.

But if there were no being to experience the presence, then the present wouldn't exist. It seems to me that there would just be a kind of perpetual "pasting," i.e., one damn objective thing after another, each determined by its immediate predecessors. But how can you even say "object" without implicitly positing the Subject?

Is the present a function of the experiencer, or vice versa? I think ultimately the whole existentialada falls apart unless we posit a Divine Experiencer. Remove him from the equation, and I don't see how you get to subjects, to human beings, and to the present (in which freedom and creativity are expressed).

Hartshorne: "To live is to decide, and decide anew, each moment." If each moment is already decided for us, then life is a kind of illusion. We are really dead, or at least there is no fundamental difference between being dead and being alive.

Here we go: "we shall never understand life and the world until we see that the zero of freedom can only be the zero of experiencing, and even of reality" (ibid.). And another Raccoon principle is that it is experiencing all the way down, because the manifested world is really a prolongation of the Divine Experiencer; or, to put it another way, God can create nothing that doesn't reflect his God-ness.

The cosmos is shot through with organicism, or internal relations, which is why every teeny weeny, right down to the last itsy bitsy, "is in some measure free; for experiencing is partly free act. Thus creativity, emergent novelty, is universal" (ibid.).

To see this, one must only look through the correct end of the cosmic telos-scope. Among other benefits, "with the admission of universal creativity, dualism loses its necessity."

Experiences are facts; the only question is, what else is fact? --Charles Hartshorne

If I Were Omniscient, I'd Give it Up for a Moment of Creativity

I'm not sure how anyone, even God, could know the future in every detail. If the future were determined, why would grace need to exist as a kind of separate Godling (or Godding, i.e., a verb) who largely manifests by changing the course of one's life, AKA the future?

So, what is God's relation to this unknowable thing we call the future?

Hartshorne writes that knowledge and prediction of the future aren't merely limited by ignorance, "but by the very meaning of the future," what with our countless "decisions yet unmade, issues not yet settled even by the totality of causes already operating."

In other words, in order to know the future, one must not only know every cause before it becomes an effect, but an infinitude of variables that aren't yet even causes.

It's a big job.

Furthermore, if the world could be known in this way, it would eliminate creativity: "Reality is predictable just in so far as it is not creative, but rather mechanical, automatic, compulsive, habit-ridden" (ibid.).

So yes, much of our world is "uncreative and hence predictable." But who wants to live in such a world? And if we don't want to, why on earth would God? Indeed, if I were an omniscient God, I'd want to create a little realm of unpredictability just to relieve the tedium! Otherwise you reduce God to the last word in obsessive-compulsive disorder. You make him a control freak.

Speaking of having skin in the game, I think this must apply quintessentially to the Incarnation. I'm not one of those people who thinks the whole thing was orchestrated from beginning to end.

Rather, the entire arc of the Incarnation -- the theo-drama -- involves a confrontation between two freedoms, divine and human. This means it plays out creatively, with the only sure thing being that God will somehow find a way to redeem man, no matter how weird the details. And boy, did they turn out weird!

I might add that if the future is known, it makes it absolutely indistinguishable from past and present. In reality, although we call past, present, and future diverse modes of time, this tends to conceal how radically different they are.

What is the difference between "what happened" and "what will happen?" In a mechanical world there is no difference, because the future is in the past (and present) without remainder.

But there is a remainder. What do we call it? For starters, we call it freedom. Also creativity. And from the divine end, grace.

Grace must be accepted in freedom, but when we do, it means that the future is going to be different from what it might have been. If the Father is divine, I don't know, "law," and the Son is logos, then the Holy Spirit is divine surprise.

Boo!

Nicolás Gómez Dávila has some excellent aphorisms that go to this general subject, sometimes even plausibly. For example, "I distrust the system deliberately constructed by thought; I trust in the one that results from the pattern of footprints."

You could say that God is no Hegelian, superimposing some rational idea over the world. Rather, again, it is divine Freedom vs. (or with) human freedom, the result being an unpredictable path of footprints. That's the whole bloody fun of it!

One reason why tenure is the embalming fluid of the left is that, unlike God, they really do pretend to know it all. But "History shows that man's good ideas are accidental and his mistakes methodical." Ho!

At one end we have the subhumanity of scientism ("His serious university training shields the technician against any idea"), at the other end the anti-science proglodytes of the humanities. A machine at one end, an asylum at the other.

Thus, "maturity" for the wanker bee scientist is a kind of vulgar atheism, whereas the developmental telos of the humanities is a state of perpetual immaturity where, to paraphrase Nicolás Gómez, idiocies are not seen as obvious. For "A confused idea attracts a fool like a flame attracts an insect."

Which is why this is the case. And when you mix the two -- science and politics -- out pops the scientistic idiocy of global warming. Note that its adherents are like false Gods that can know the future in every detail, but are ignoramuses about the present and past.

Insufficient time this morning to wrap this all up in a neat package.

The believer is not a possessor of inherited property recorded in a land registry, but an admiral looking upon the shores of an unexplored continent.

And One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time.... whoever celebrates future harmonies sells himself to the devil. --NGD

The Axis of Evol... ution

In response to my suggestion that "collective development is analogous to individual development, in that -- obviously -- the further back you go, the more primitive things get," a reader commented that "This begs the question [of] what collective development is like the further forward you go. Is there a collective analogue to the sage or saint? Or does the analogy break down?"

The short answers are "no" and "pretty much yes." First, perhaps I should have specified that I'm using the word "primitive" in the psychological/developmental sense (as in primary, or earlier in developmental time). It might be the first category with which one assesses a new patient, even if implicitly. In short, is this person psychotic, or personality disordered, or neurotic, or (more or less) "normal?"

Each of these categories in turn correlates with different defense mechanisms. More developmentally primitive people rely upon primitive defense mechanisms such as delusion, denial, splitting, and projective identification, while less primitive (and more mature) people rely upon such things as repression, sublimation, intellectualization, and humor.

The quality of one's relationships will likewise vary along the same axis. For more primitive types, their relationships will be clouded and contaminated by primitive needs and agendas.

My most influential teacher back in grad school expressed it well, commenting that in terms of relationships, the primitive person wants to go from a sense of twoness (i.e., of being frightened by separation) to a primitive fusion of oneness, while the mature person wants to go from oneness (a sense of wholeness and unity) to twoness (i.e., a genuine relationship to -- not fusion with -- another person who is equally real).

It was specifically because of these ideas that I rejected multiculturalism even before I admitted to myself that I was a conservative. By way of analogy, let's say that the ideal weight for a 5' 10" man is 160 lbs (or whatever). If the 5' 10" men of another culture weigh 300 lbs, you don't abandon your standards and say that morbid obesity is now the ideal. Rather, the same universal standard should apply regardless of the culture.

Well, it's the same with psychological development. If we find a culture in which delusion is the norm, we don't call it normal. And if you don't believe there are cultures -- and subcultures -- in which delusion is the norm, then you haven't been paying attention. And you certainly haven't attended college.

Consider the relationship vector. For a number of reasons I probably don't have time to get into, mature heterosexual monogamy is the developmental standard and telos. Note that there are any number of alternatives, including immature heterosexual monogamy, immature heterosexual polygamy, and even (relatively) mature homosexual monogamy.

Yes, it is possible for a relatively mature homosexual couple to be more developed than than an immature heterosexual couple (although the typical homosexual couple is going to be more immature; male homosexuals often compulsively seek anonymous sexual encounters, which is as immature as one can get, because there is no real relationship at all).

Note that it is specifically because male and female are so "other" that an enriched relationship becomes possible. Or better, they are similar and other in equal measures, such that relating is more rich and complex. Which is why so much of this beautiful richness is lost in the homosexual relationship (and in a contemporary culture that is simultaneously genderful and genderless).

By the way, anyone who imagines that anything I have said above makes me "homophobic" is in fact delusional, and only proves my point. If you want to see primitive and delusional, see a one of the pictorials at Zombietime. Or, maybe you think we should celebrate those beautiful reflections of multiculturalism. So let's just stipulate that one of us is delusional, without all the name-calling.

Now, I am not one of those infertile eggheads who unduly idealize the so-called Enlightenment. Nevertheless, wouldn't you agree that a scientific culture is going to have advantages over one that revolves around myth?

And before you say "Nazism" or "communism," note that that was their whole problem: that they were (and are) rooted in mythology, not science. While each of them had science, the science was completely in service to the myth -- just as the mullahs are using nuclear science in the service of their Islamist myth (or global warmists use a warped version of climate science to advance their religious agenda).

In the case of, say, Obama, the issue is not whether he is Muslim or Christian, but rather, how mature he is. For there can be mature Muslims, just as there can be immature Christians.

Again, the developmental axis is going to be a relatively independent variable -- although, at the same time, I do believe it is going to converge upon certain universal psycho-political realities such as natural rights, free markets, the rule of law, etc. Does this make me a whig or evolutionist? I don't think so.

When I read history, one of the things that always strikes me about the past is the unimaginable cruelty. I can see killing your enemy and being done with it, but why the extraordinary sadism? Let's say I am a Catholic and you are a Protestant. Can't we agree to disagree without one of us disemboweling the other in the presence of his children?

That's the type of thing that gives religion a bad name, but remember, just as with science, religiosity is going to be situated along that developmental axis.

And I think I'm going to stop with that, because maybe I should leave early for work and try to avoid the holiday traffic.

Time and History, Development and Regression

From time to time we get the traditionalist commenter who suggests that the world of the past was far superior to the world of the present. Like last Friday.

I don't know if I was ever susceptible to that idea... No, check me on that. Now that I think about it, back when I was a liberal, I mindlessly joined in with the pack, imagining, for example, that American Indians lived in a kind of innocent paradise instead of being violent and repressive Stone Age brutes. Their lifestyle has little to recommend to the space-age Raccoon.

It was my study of psychology, and by extension, psychohistory, that cured me of the tendency. You could say that collective development is analogous to individual development, in that -- obviously -- the further back you go, the more primitive things get.

And no, I am not devaluing or dehumanizing our venerable furbears, without whom we wouldn't be here. Rather, the opposite. You may recall that on any number of occasions I have said that I don't regard children as "defective," or partial, or somehow incomplete human beings.

Rather -- for example -- I look at my 10 year old and see him as a perfect 10. The purpose of being 10 is not to be 11, let alone 18, or 21, or 30. I never give him the impression that his life will really begin in the future, and that there is no intrinsic validity and dignity to his current life, just as it is. We never talk about college, as if it is a matter of great importance where or even whether he decides to go. If anything, we let him know that he will have to gird his soul if he decides to explore those endarkened precincts.

Indeed, I assume that in 10 years time, everyone will have seen through the malevolent silliness, the infantile fascism, of college, and the bubble will have burst. The University Snowflake movement is doing everything in its power to move up the timeline.

Well, take that same principle and apply it to history, prehistory, and even pre-prehistory, AKA mythology. People of the past are often rather childlike by our standards, but that doesn't invalidate their lives, any more than our lives are invalid in comparison to the enlightened ones who will be here 1,000 years hence.

In fact, one of the most important functions of religion is to make sure that our current being has full validity in light of future developments.

What I mean is that religion speaks of universal truths, i.e., truths that will always be true regardless of future discoveries and developments. It's just that we must take those developments and inflect them through the prism of timeless truth. Which is what we are always doing around here.

For example, just as our predecessors took Aristotelian or Newtonian physics and examined them in light of religious truth, we do the same thing vis-a-vis quantum physics, or chaos and complexity, or information theory. The truth doesn't change, but our way of conceptualizing and communicating it does.

Among other things, this assures us that our lives will always have the possibility of being "valid," validity presupposing access to a truth that never changes -- in which we can confidently place our faith.

Conversely, let's say you place your faith in science in the vulgar sense. This automatically condemns you to obsolescence, being that science is always changing. For example, what if you placed your faith in Newton in the 19th century? Oops! Einstein just obliterated your faith. It is no different if you place your faith in Darwin today.

Having said that, just as there is a proper way to be a 10 year old -- for example, you don't expect him to act like a five year old -- there is a proper way to be an 18 year old or 30 year old. You still have expectations, it's just that you don't project future ones onto the present. Which is why mature people don't condemn America's founders because some of them owned slaves.

At one time slavery was universal. Indeed, I would guess that there were more white slaves in the world in 1860 than black slaves. I myself am no doubt descended from serfs or worse, but I don't brag about it. I don't try to use it as an invitation to not grow the hell up and to become dependent upon the state. Jews are the most mistreated people in history, but you rarely see one on welfare.

Another critical point -- and one we've discussed in the past -- is that, precisely due to the conditions of modernity, we have so many more ways to be wicked. People of the past were just as vain and greedy and lustful and narcissistic, it's just that they lacked the means to act on their badness (or at least the damage was limited).

But thanks to Obama, we have Genghis Khan with nukes. Historically speaking, he has given to two-year olds what only 40 year-olds are mature enough to handle. Ironically, he has no respect for their culture, which is only running about 700 years behind ours.

Prior to evil modern capitalism there was the predatory state. "What was odd about northwestern Europe in the eighteenth century," writes McCloskey, was "that it escaped from 'predatory tendencies' common to every 'agrarian civilization' since the beginning."

So, to the extent that there are residual predatory tendencies in modern capitalism, it is because the tendencies are in man, not in the system per se. Indeed, the predatory tendencies are only worse with socialism, as we have seen in the Obama regime, which is one gargantuan macroparasite on the economy.

McCloskey reminds us that as a result of the long "European Civil War" of 1914-1989, "capitalism was nearly overwhelmed by nationalism and socialism." It was as if man had reached adolescence and decided to plunge back into childhood (which only happens all the time).

But a child's mind in a man's body is quite different from a man in a man's body. Regression to earlier stages of development is always possible, and indeed, this goes to the deep structure of the culture war between left and right. The left is very much like an immature child who will never get what he needs so long as he is getting what he thinks he wants.

Much to do today. To be continued...

From I Have a Dream to A Dream Has Me!

We left off with an interesting observation by Hartshorne and a cryptic one by me. Hartshorne pointed out how billions and probably trillions of influences contribute to the experience of you and of the moment.

This is an example of an extremely weird phenomenon that is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. For without this experience of unity -- or unitary experience -- we wouldn't be having any experiences or any discussions to begin with. Rather, our "experience" would reflect an infinitely heterogeneous world with no center. Experience would be dispersed instead of integrated.

Now, the latter does sometimes happen to human beings. We call it psychosis. A useful way to think about the psychotic person is that he has no center, no spontaneous organization of his many parts. Thus, you could say that the psychotic mind is a kind of rolling catastrophe that never resolves itself into unity -- except perhaps the faux unity of terror, or persecution, or hatred, or dread.

By the way, this does, or at least will -- I think -- touch on my cryptic comment claiming that "the so-called quantum world below is actually outside us, while the starry expanse is inside." Give me a moment. It will come to me. It's right on the tip of my temporal lobe.

In a colorful passage about the world of the psychotic, Bion speaks of a dread-full "sense of imprisonment" that "is intensified by the menacing presence of the expelled fragments within whose planetary movements he is contained." In other words, the psychotic mind is contained by what it should properly contain; it orbits around what ought to orbit it.

As an aside, I want you to assume that psychosis is not only on a continuum, but that we are all possessed of a psychotic mind (or a psychotic part of the mind, to be precise). For some of us it is integrated -- it is often implicated in creativity, for example, -- while for others it is un-integrated, untamed, unmastered.

You could even say that healthy "mental metabolism," so to speak, involves a dialectic or complementarity of psychotic <-> nonpsychotic, or what Bion calls PS <-> D for short.

And in a way, you could say that PS <-> D is very much similar to Hartshorne's description of the trillions of influences that contribute to the simple and unitary experience -- the simplest experience conceivable! -- of I AM in every moment.

BTW, I think this is what They mean when They talk about God being "simple." Not simple as in an undifferentiated blob, but simple like us despite our infinite complexity. Only in God's case, it is amplified by orders of magnitude. In other words, think of what must go into God being able to declare that I indeed AM!

Here is another important observation about the psychotic side: "Each particle is felt to consist of a real external object which is incapsulated in a piece of personality that has engulfed it" (Bion).

Here it seems we are venturing very far from the everyday map, but this is precisely in order to examine the everyday. For Bion is describing something very basic, very concrete, very experiential, i.e., that it is possible for us to inhabit a world -- a psychic space or sensorium -- that consists of persecutory objects that are vivified by the bits of our personality engulfed by them. If not for this process, then the world would just appear "dead" to the psychotic, but it is very much alive, in a monstrous and menacing way.

I would suggest and perhaps insist that something similar must be the motive force of our psychopathic Islamist monsters. For what do they see when they see us, or Paris, or Jews? Do they see them at all?

And it's not just Islamists. For we could ask the same question of the fascist snowflakes of the Campus Crybully movement, or the auto-persecutory slaves of the Black Lives Matter sickness. When the latter looks at a white person, what does he see? He sees a projected bit of his own psychic enslavement.

So, why does this Black Life project his enslavement into the external world, where it contains and persecutes him? The question answers itself, because it is a dreadful thing to be enslaved by one's own thoughts, perceptions, and passions. Yes, our first property is the self, but only if we make it so, i.e., by ruling and mastering ourselves.

You could say that the persecuted Black Life would actually prefer to be mastered by white people than to undergo the painful process of mastering himself, the only true liberation. Which is the real reason why there are so many blacks in prison -- as if you can vote for a huge government to do only pleasant things for you, and not expect it to do unpleasant things to your unmastered ass!

What Happens Next? I mean, once you inhabit a world consisting of unmetabolized and projected bits of your own personality?

"The patient now moves, not in a world of dreams, but in a world of objects which are ordinarily the furniture of dreams." These objects of psychic furniture are "primitive yet complex," and partake of various qualities which are integrated into the healthy personality, say, anger.

This really explains how and why the liberal sees us as he does. When a liberal describes a conservative, we naturally say, "Dude, that's crazy. You sound like you've never actually spoken with a conservative."

In this regard, the village liberal is like the medieval peasant who never met a Jew, but knows only that they have horns and cloven feet.

You could say that for the liberal, his intestine is where his brain should be. Thus, it is strictly inaccurate to say they have shit for brains. Rather, shit for thoughts.

It also explains why they cannot "swallow" -- which is to say, assimilate -- a thing we say. That's just not what an intestine does. Not only that, but the effort to put an object in there will naturally be experienced as an aggression, a "violent intrusion." It's why liberals are always buttsore about some microaggression.

What is the solution for this madness? A little thing called thinking: "An attempt to think involves bringing back to control, and therefore to his personality, the expelled particles and their accretions" (Bion). In so doing, the projections must be translated into words, so it can be a long and painful process.

From a very different angle, Schuon describes these same phenomena in To Have a Center. He writes of how "To be normal is to be homogeneous and to be homogeneous is to have a center."

Thus, a normal homo has his diverse sapiens (thinking) in a row: "if not altogether univocal," he is "at least concordant." He isn't fundamentally fractured and dispersed like an Islamist or campus snowflake. "Such a soul is a priori a 'house divided against itself,' and thus destined to fall, eschatologically speaking" -- which is a nice way of saying destined for hell.

Schuon even speaks of the psychopath, who, "not knowing how to master himself, has to be mastered by others." Such a man "finds his center only outside himself."

Almost all activists are of this nature, from the global warmists to Islamists to Black Lives Matter. Their only psychic continuity is an artificial narrative that they impose on the world, and they are personally threatened by any threat to the narrative -- which is what makes these snowflakes so flaky to begin with.

Let's get back to our koan about the stars being inside us and the quantum world outside. Does it have a solution?

Consider how, when light from a distant star is registered on our retina, we not only see the past, but use this information-containing light to construct the cosmos, such that the cosmos is a kind of re-projection of what we have assimilated. This is literal photo[light]synthesis.

As for the quantum world, here again, this is just a projection of the mathematics we already have inside of us.

There's more, but we're out of time for today.

Matter is the Ultimate Abstraction, Mind the Ultimate Concretion

Back to Ultimate Reality and how it gets that way. First, I think we can stipulate that it is either changeless or changing. For Plato, change and truth were essentially antithetical, which is why he sought reality outside the transient appearances of the world.

Inside his cave, all is shadow and movement, but outside the cave are the pure and unchanging forms. These forms can be trusted because they are always the same, whereas the world keeps changing on us. Thus, in the Platonic view, science deals only with the circumstances of the cave, while philosophy addresses what goes on outside.

Now, what is metaphysics? At least in the Whitehead/Hartshorne tradition, it is the study of those principles that simply Cannot Not Be True. Therefore, everything we perceive and experience (for there is no a priori reason to place "matter" above "experience") will be a special case of these more general principles.

Some people believe it is possible to think coherently without metaphysics, but they are asses. They are so naive and lacking in self-awareness that there is no reason to waste a moment arguing with them. For in fact, any statement about reality betrays any number of hidden assumptions. Thus, to deny metaphysics is to affirm it.

I was thinking about this the other day in reading Ridley's Evolution of Everything. Here he is, at once insisting that free will is an illusion, and yet, trying to convince us that this is the case. So which is it: are we free to assent to truth, or not?

Although free will is self-evident -- for it reveals itself to be so in any meaningful communication -- it is also easy to prove (onto)logically. Yes, things have causes. However, there are so many causes that go into being human -- literally millions of them -- that this equates to being undetermined by them.

What I mean is that the causes are many -- even infinitely many, considering our billions (or is it trillions?) of neural interconnections, not to mention whatever is going on at the quantum level.

And yet we -- assuming we are healthy, AKA whole -- are one. Now, how does that even happen? In other words, how do the trillions of causes harmoniously resolve themselves into one effect, if that effect isn't its own (at least partial) cause of those effects?

I always remember something Whitehead wrote back in 1925, and I've never heard it refuted: that

"an electron within a living body is different from an electron outside it, by reason of the plan of the body. The electron blindly runs either within or without the body; but it runs within the body in accordance with its character within the body; that is to say, in accordance with the general plan of the body, and this plan includes its mental state" (emphasis mine).

Therefore, biology (or organism) by definition transcends physics: you can't get to the former solely by way of the latter.

A reductionist such as Ridley pretends that we are only a consequence of lower causes such as chemicals and genes and instincts, when there is actually a two-way causation, from the bottom up and top down. This ubiquitous dual causation is another cosmic complementarity.

But I ask you: of the two forms of causation, which must be primary? Is it even intellectually conceivable that those trillions of causes could result in the simplest and most unitary experience of them all, I AM? Indeed, without this latter, it is not even possible to entertain the idea of causality.

Ultimately, we would say that, just as being is an abstraction from becoming, part is an abstraction from whole, and material and efficient causation are abstractions from formal and final causation.

Indeed, matter itself is an abstraction from something that is always flowing and always interiorly related. There is no such thing as an unambiguous bit of exterior matter, right here and right now, unrelated to everything else.

This only highlights how any form of ideology -- whether political or religious or scientistic -- is really an idolatry, or an elevation of some abstraction to the concrete reality.

This is precisely the burden Obama's little mind labors under, such that he can no longer even perceive concrete reality. In other words, he is trapped inside an ideological abstraction that forces concrete facts to comport with it.

And people say the second commandment is irrelevant!

Again: matter itself is an abstraction. Therefore, what is actually concrete?

What is concrete and undeniable is organism. To paraphrase Whitehead, biology is the study of large organisms, while physics is the study of small ones. Indeed, thanks to relativity and quantum physics, we now understand that cosmology is the study of the largest organism (excluding God, i.e., the metacosmic organism of the Trinity).

Where were we?

I'll just close off with a relevant quote by Hartshorne:

[T]he stimuli moulding an experience are many.... but all this multiplicity of influences is to produce a single unitary experience, yours or mine right now, let us say.

The effect is one; the causes, however, are many, literally hundreds of thousands, billions even, considering the cells in our brains, for example. This vast multitude of factors must flow together to produce a single new entity, the experience of the moment.

I also wanted to say something about how the so-called quantum world below is actually outside us, while the starry expanse is inside, but maybe we'll get to that tomorrow, when I regather my many thoughts into another one post.

Constitutional Law is What You Can Get Away With

In response to people who aren't so sure it's a good idea to import thousands of Muslims into the country at this particular time, President Obama said that failure to do so would represent a "betrayal of our values."

He didn't specify which ones, but he was probably referring to well-known liberal value of being so broadminded as to refuse to take one's own side in a war. Indeed, the left has effectively been fighting for the Islamists since 9-11, so it would be hypocritical to stop now.

Being that this country -- love it or hate it -- was explicitly founded upon Judeo-Christian principles, it is a little difficult to understand why giving priority to Christian refugees would betray those values. Christians throughout the Middle East are being murdered by Muslims.

By way of analogy, "in the 1930s and 40s it should have been permissible for American officials to view Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied territory differently from those of, say, non-Jewish Germans who sought to flee Europe..."

It is actually a betrayal of our values not to let these persecuted Christians jump to the head of the line.

Even -- or especially -- Muslims should be able to acknowledge that our values are not Muslim values. Consider the plight of the so-called Palestinians, who only exist because no Arab-Muslim state will absorb these pathetic refugees.

In actual practice, "Muslim values" dictate that the Palestinians remain a permanently stateless people so as to pose a mortal threat to Israel. That is why they exist. There is no Judeo-Christian analogue to weaponizing a people for the purposes of promoting genocide.

Islamic values dictate that man exists to surrender to God, and by extension, to the state. Thus, there is nothing un-Islamic per se about the Islamic state. Indeed, every Arab constitution is rooted in Sharia law, which is as it should be (if one is to embrace Muslim values).

Our values hold that government exists for us, not we for it. Prior to the separation of church and state is the separation of society and government. Our culture was a spontaneous outgrowth of our Judeo-Christian values, and the purpose of government is to protect this sphere of liberty and personal responsibility, i.e., self-governance.

Why do we have a constitution? For one reason, which bifurcates into two. That is, it is to protect us from tyranny. But tyranny comes in two forms, from the tyrant and the mob. Note that if we were actually a democracy, then no constitution would be necessary, since law would be reduced to the tyranny of the majority.

Now, does the federal government have the power to compel the states to accept foreign refugees they don't want? The question answers itself, for no one would have signed the constitution if they were signing away such a power.

As Madison wrote, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite" (in Charles, emphasis mine).

And the latter "extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state." It seems to me that the forced importation of potential terrorists touches on the latter three.

Jefferson, commenting on the above, wrote that "To take a single step beyond the boundaries" of the enumerated powers "is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to definition."

Unfortunately, that horse has long since left the barn. For example, if the federal government can force us to purchase a particular kind of health insurance, what can't it force us to do? What is the principle that protects one from the reach of the state, if it can already reach into our bodies -- if our "first property" isn't even our own?

Now, what does this all have to do with ultimate reality?

Well, one's vision of ultimate reality is necessarily the source of one's values, is it not? The real issue is that for a nihilist such as Obama, his only value is power.

And being that Professor Obama is a liberal Constitutional Scholar, he knows as well as anyone that constitutional law is defined by what you can get away with, precisely. Time and again throughout his presidency he has proven that this is a nation of law, and that the law is what he wants it to be.

But if this value of his is truly universal, it means that we too are the source of our own truth, law, and reality, so we are free to ignore this dimwitted pest.

Ultimate Reality: I Think it Moved

It happens. Flat out of inspiration at the moment. It always comes back eventually, but one doesn't want to have a sense of entitlement. If you have any ideas for subjects, feel free to share.

If only for my own benefit, I would like to take time to review why I think God not only changes, but must be the very essence of change.

As we've discussed before, changelessness tends to get a free ride -- and change an unfair reputation -- because of the ancient Greeks. In turn, the early fathers, because they wanted to show that Christianity could be reconciled with the most prestigious philosophy of the time, identified the Judeo-Christian God with the Greek/Neoplatonic One.

But if we simply take the Bible as it is, and develop a metaphysic from that, then I don't see how anyone could affirm that God in no way changes.

And yet, this is still the Official View. Through the application of pure reason, contemporary Thomists affirm that because things obviously change, this necessitates the existence of an unchanged; or, because things move, there must be an unmoved mover, otherwise we end in an absurd infinite regress in which we have effects with no cause.

But I think God goes to all the trouble of revealing himself as Trinity for a reason. If the Trinity is the foundation of existence, then surely this must imply some kind of ceaselessly creative change, no? In other words, the first cause is not a substance or a thing, but a process -- not a noun but a verb.

Verb, of course, is cognate to word. Just sayin'.

Hartshorne covers this topic in his Creative Synthesis & Philosophic Method (which I do not recommend -- too turgid and diffuse). He points out that "Prior to the twentieth century, scarcely any philosopher... saw in the idea of creativity a fundamental principle, a category applicable to all reality."

It wasn't really until Whitehead, and I suppose Bergson before, that process, creativity, and evolution began to be appreciated in their own right.

Now, the moment I encountered Whitehead, I concluded that what he was saying Must Be True. Not all of it -- I am not a Whiteheadian -- but at least the broad outlines. I'm trying to think back on when I first bumped into him... must have been in the early 1980s, and he has been an implicit touchstone ever since (as has Polanyi).

I don't know, maybe I'm a little effed up in the head, but someone needs to explain to me how God can "create" without undergoing change. It seems to me that there is no way to squeeze creativity out of a changeless entity, unless you just play word games.

Let's look at it in a purely logical manner: the world isn't necessary, but rather, contingent. We can all agree on that. It didn't have to come into being. Rather, God had a choice.

Or, maybe you are suggesting that God had the choice of whether or not to be creative, and that if he had chosen not to create, then there would be no such thing as creativity? Nevertheless, this implies the possibility of creating, i.e., potential (which, in the traditional view, God is not supposed to have; rather, he is all act and no potency).

I just remembered my key takeaway from reading Whitehead: it is that ultimate reality is subject rather than object. This goes to the discussion in the last post, and to my rejection of Matt Ridley's vision of cosmic evolution: for him, it is as if it is objects all the way down, whereas for Whitehead, it is subjects all the way down.

To be precise, subject-object is one of our primordial cosmic complementarities. However, as with all cosmic complementarities, one must be prior, and in this case it is the subject, because you cannot get a subject out of an object, but you can get objects from the subject.

Now, to say that ultimate reality is subjective is but a step away from saying it is Person. Looking at the Trinity, we can say that it is one process with three "objects" (in a manner of speaking). Or better, there is this subject-object vector at the very heart of reality. When a person relates to another person, it is in the form of both subject and object.

Back to the divine creativity: "a free agent must create something in himself, even if he decides not to create anything else; for the decision, if free, is itself a creation."

For Hartshorne, the implication is that "freedom is self-creation," or in other words, freedom means not being determined by outside agents. To the extent one is determined, one is not free. So God is either changeless or he is free.

It seems to me that to be made in the image of God is to be invited to participate in God's trinitarian nature.

Or, let's turn it around and suppose that the God of whom we are the image and likeness is the unmoved mover. In this view, "God influences all things, nothing influences God. For him there are no 'stimuli'..." Is this how God wants us to be? An unchangeable absolute? How can something that is admirable in God be sociopathic for humans?

I read somewhere over the weekend that the Father is God beyond us, the Son God with us, and the Spirit God in us. How in particular can God be with us without being truly open to us?

Hartshorne completely inverts the traditional view in a way that I find quite appealing. That is, instead of being the distant and absolute unmoved mover, God is the most relative thing conceivable, as in relationship. He is related to everything and everyone, most intensely to human persons.

And although Hartshorne nowhere mentions the Trinity, God's relatedness must be because he is intensely related even -- or quintessentially -- to himself: ultimate reality is pure relationship and therefore "relativity." It moves.