God Becomes Asymmetric So that Man Might Become Symmetric

Again: it is not the unrestricted power and infinite nature of God that becomes man, because that would be impossible; the former would overwhelm if not annihilate the latter.

Rather, it is the second Person of the Trinity who does so. It is this Person who makes "unconditional use of the one unrestricted power and nature," and who enters "into a finite human nature."

This reminds me of something I heard Bill Buckley say many years ago, before I knew much of anything about Islam or Christianity. He pointed out that Islam has a simplistic and rather primitive theology, compared to the richness and sophistication of Christianity. Under the assumption that all western religions were equally products of magical thinking, I thought to myself, "what's the point of bragging about a more convoluted fantasy?"

Suffice it to say that I have since then understood his point. Islam begins and ends with the tautology that "there is no God but God." True enough, but it's like reducing science to the statement that "there is no matter but matter." Thanks for the tip! In orthodox Islam (we're not talking about Sufism, a la Schuon) there is no way to "enter" God, only to slavishly follow his external dictates.

But Christianity -- among other things -- invites us to enter into, and participate in, God's very interior reality. Instead of rendering us slaves, we can actually become children and brothers of God. Perhaps I'm being unfair to Islam, but it seems to me that there is a considerably lower level of divine intimacy. And of course, the Koran specifically denies that God could in any way be "three," (unsophisticatedly) confusing the Trinity with polytheism.

Thus, ironically, in the Muslim mind the Koran serves as a correction and progression from a more primitive and error-prone Christian polytheism. But in reverting from the intersubjective God of Christianity to an interobjective one (in which we are reduced to mere objects of God), I think it's the other way around.

I might add that the two metaphysical conceptions have obviously led to very different forms of civilization. Many ideas that underpin western civilization are unthinkable in the Islamic world, e.g., political liberty, freedom of conscience, and separation of secular and religious law.

At any rate, in the same appendix we've been discussing, Spitzer has a brief section called Making Sense of the Incarnation. Is that even possible? Well, it ought to be, since they say that nothing in Christianity should run counter to the highest gift God has given us, our reason.

Why would God's highest revelation violate his most precious gift? If it did, then God would be analogous to the "crazy-making" parent who places the child in a double-bind from which there is no escape.

Of the Incarnation, Spitzer notes that "if self-consciousness inheres (makes use of) a finite nature," then "it will be subject to the limitations of that nature." On the other hand, if it inheres in "an unrestricted power and nature, then there is no limit to the power of its understanding, creativity, freedom, and will."

So, with the Incarnation of the Son in the man Jesus, there are two vectors, as it were, one unrestricted and the other restricted.

I'm trying to come up with a useful analogy. Probably not a good one, but I'm thinking of how, as a psychologist, one must empathically "enter" the restricted world of the patient, even while another part transcends the limitation. Just as the second Person of the Trinity will really and truly know what it is like to be a man -- with all its limitations, conflicts, and suffering -- another "part" has unrestricted access to the divine relationship that transcends the finite. And he wants us to participate in the same power, which is none other than being fully in the world without being of it.

Spitzer: "Christianity holds that the second Person (self-consciousness) did not stop using the divine nature when He took on the limitations of human nature, but rather continued operating through His divine nature so that the one self-consciousness had the perspective, understanding, and will of both an unrestricted nature and a finite nature" (Spitzer).

Ah ha! This sounds a little like the bi-logic discussed a couple of posts back. Indeed, in searching for an (admittedly disanalogous) analogy, Spitzer suggests that our own dream state might illuminate "how a single self-consciousness could have two such different perspectives." (Again, it is not the dream state that illuminates Jesus's consciousness so much as vice versa.)

Note that in the dream, it is as if our consciousness is bifurcated into the "unrestricted" power of the Dreamer and the restricted power that we have as subjects in our own dream. I wonder if Bomford discusses this in The Symmetry of God? Let's have a look.

Yup: "The doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation, particularly, are dominated by symmetric logic and become virtual expressions of its laws." "In terms of bi-logic every effort seems to be made to make it rational and consonant with asymmetric logic: yet, at its heart, is irresoluble paradox " -- i.e., the co-presence of two forms of logic, and of a self-consciousness inflected through each.

To cite just one conspicuous example of symmetric logic, we could say that "because God has become human, humanity has become divine." "Symmetric logic makes unities out of things apparently different.... Many of the historic controversies of Christianity may be resolved by accepting the necessity of expressing them through paradox and myth, by recognizing the symmetric logic implicit in all talk of God."

I -Thou and We-Thou

A relatively short post that is also unusual for having only one Big Idea instead of the usual scattershot of fully half-baked ones...

Continuing our plunge into the heart of the Trinity, Spitzer writes that the first two of its Persons, Father and Son, "form a unity of interpersonal love through the one unrestricted power" (which we have compared to "beyond-being").

In turn, the Holy Spirit is "not simply the beloved of either the Father or the Son," but rather, the "beloved of the union between Father and Son."

That won't be clear until we flesh it out a bit. If the relation between Father and Son is that of "I-Thou," then you might say that the Spirit introduces a kind of "We-Thou" relation, with the We being the Father-Son "couple" -- as in how the child is welcomed into the marital-we (which goes to the intrinsic ontological defect of willed single parenthood, divorce, and newly invented caricatures of marriage; or in other words it is the denial of the gift of a healthy and natural We to the child).

As Spitzer describes it, love "need not be only an outpouring of self," but "can also be an outpouring of an us" -- that is, a gift of the union of the two; or, it is the two welcoming a third into its union of love. We fall in love with another person, but the love we give a child isn't only of a dyadic nature, especially from the child's point of view.

Is this a subtle point, or is it obvious? I'll just speak from my own experience. My parents rarely got along. Either it was a cold war or they were bickering about God-knows-what. I remember this lack of harmony causing a kind of familiar but nameless pain in me.

However, there were moments of harmony, in which they were kind and affectionate to one another, and for me, it was as if a light from above were penetrating the darkness below. There was a great sense of relief, and everything felt "right" in that moment. I remember one time in particular, when they were walking ahead of me, holding hands. The feeling of peace was very distinct -- as if all was right with the world -- but obviously different from merely being loved by one's individual parent.

To the contrary, I never doubted that my mother and father loved me. But that is in the I-Thou realm. The problem was in the We-Thou realm. I knew they would never divorce, but nevertheless, it was a rocky we they bequeathed to me.

I think this is why, to this day, I can't stand any kind of Disturbance in the Force in my house. I have a peculiar need to avoid interpersonal stress and conflict around here. As a result, my son is having a very different experience of the We than I had. Rather, his background environment is one of a harmonious and loving We, and the effect on him is obvious. He has to visit other homes in order to get the sense of a distressed and unhappy We.

The point is, just as we can trace the love between persons back to the Trinity, so too can we trace the love between two persons and a third: just as there is a loving space between the I and Thou, there is a new loving space between the We and Thou.

Here is how Spitzer describes it: "This occurs in marriage where a couple can give its 'us' (its collective self) to another person by welcoming that person into the relationship. One can generally tell when a couple has this loving quality as a relational whole because their invitation is harmonious and welcoming."

Of note, it's not just children who are so welcomed, but anyone else who enters the relational orbit. We have a couple of married friends who are passionately devoted to one another, but at the same time, extremely extroverted, such that to be around them is to enter a... I hate to sound corny, but it is a very palpable We of love.

Conversely, according to Spitzer, "If this quality of the 'us' is not there, or if there is a problem causing a disruption in the relationship, it is immediately discernible." As in the case of my parents. Or, think of the uniquely dysfunctional nature of the We between Bill and Hillary Clinton. I use the word "unique" advisedly, because I've never seen anything like it -- a seemingly loveless political crime family rooted in a cunning will to power. What a perverse We!

In any event, "when Christians say that God is love, they do not mean only that the attribute of love belongs to the one infinite nature of God." Rather, "that there is real interpersonal love (gift of self and gift of the 'us') taking place through three perfect acts of self-consciousness..."

Patterned Transrationality

We've been discussing how the one unrestricted power can be the single source of the three Persons. This is consistent with the very nature of consciousness, which routinely violates aristotelian logic by being in two "places" at once.

This is especially true vis-a-vis dream consciousness, in which we are the Subject who dreams and yet a subject in the dream we dream. In fact, we are all of the subjects in our dreams, which means that our own consciousness is appearing in the form of other persons. It's like quantum entanglement or something, a single field with multiple particles of subjectivity: the parts are a function of the whole.

Which we have discussed in the past in the context of a unique (as far as I know) and helpful book called The Symmetry of God. From the description on the amazon page: "Why does the age-long quest for the eternal express itself always in paradox? Eternity is both an attribute of God and a characteristic of the Freudian unconscious. Recent developments in psychoanalytic theory have discovered an irrational logic at work in the unconscious process.

"This symmetric logic (in the mathematical sense of symmetry) produces paradoxes incomprehensible to asymmetric classic logic. The path of the mystic is an approach to an aspect of God analogous to the human unconscious, and is expressed through paradoxes of symmetric logic; whereas the god who reveals himself in history is a god who, by the same analogy, also exercises consciousness and is, at least partially, subject to classical logic.

"Christian faith holds to both the concept of an eternal god beyond time and of a god who acts in time. This involves both logics, and explains the paradoxical, symbolic and mythical nature of theological propositions. It also throws light on the conflict between realist and non-realist views of God and allows an understanding of orthodox Christianity which transcends both."

The key here is the distinction between asymmetric logic, which is our normal, everyday, commonsense, wideawake, cutandry, linear and left-brain approach, and symmetric logic, which violates most of the things Aristotle says logic cannot do. Superficially, symmetric logic may be dismissed as "illogic," but it simply has a logic of its own. I don't agree with everything Bomford says about it -- he seems to be on the liberal side of the theological continuum -- but I give him credit for being the only person saying it.

I don't remember him discussing the Trinity in the book, but I'll bet you anything a bi-logical approach to it will be a verticalisthenic exercise worth engaging in. Because I'm pressed for time this morning, I will borrow from some past posts in order to avoid having to rethink everything from the ground up:

Bomford is an Anglican priest who is a student of the psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco, who himself is not well known but had some brilliant ideas about the logic of the unconscious mind. Bomford has applied Matte Blanco's ideas to the relationship between God and consciousness, and how we may meaningfully communicate about something that vastly exceeds the limits of language.

One of the purposes of the book is to navigate between the shoals of a softheaded fundamentalism and a hardhearted modernism. It is aimed at the reader who "neither clings rigidly to the literal truth of every word of the Bible, nor on the other hand reduces the faith by rejecting most of what the past has believed to be central."

With regard to the potential dangers of mixing psychoanalytic metapsychology and religion, Bomford makes the important point that "from the beginning the church has borrowed philosophies from the world as handmaids to faith, and has expressed its faith through them. This has not only been to communicate with those outside, but also so that faith may understand itself."

Bomford begins with what amounts to a truism, that our conscious self -- or ego -- is situated in a much larger area of consciousness as such, much of which goes by the name "unconscious." This is a misleading term, since the unconscious is not unconscious, just more or less unavailable to the conscious ego. The unconscious is obviously quite active and aware, only "below," "behind," or "above" the ego.

Traditionally, psychoanlaysts have imagined a sort of horizontal line, with the ego above and the unconscious below. But a more accurate mental image would be an island surrounded by water on all sides, like a point within a sphere [ʘ] (the sphere itself being hyperdimensional).

I would also argue that consciousness is not linear but holographically structured, so that the unconscious is not spatially above or below, but within consciousness (somewhat analogous to God, who is both immanent and transcendent, the deepest within and the furthest beyond of any "thing" that partakes of Being).

One of the most important points to bear in mind is that we might believe a person to be illogical, when they are in fact obeying a different form of logic: symmetrical logic. Indeed, this was one of Freud's central insights, that the sick person was actually logical in his own way. One of purposes of therapy is to expose the unconscious logic that is causing conscious pain or dysfunction.

But it is also important not to automatically "pathologize" all symmetrical logic, for without it we wouldn't be human. Rather, we would be hyper-rational Vulcans with no "emotional intelligence," no interior understanding of things, no ability to comprehend God, religion or art, and no ability to love or create.

With everyday aristotelian logic, if something is in it can't be out; or if it is up, it can't be down. Or in other words, things can't be in two places at once. But if God is up he is simultaneously down, and if he is out he is always in. And vice versa. For God, it is not a problem to be two "places" at once, since there are no places to begin with, only everyplace.

Is this way of talking merely nonsense? Undoubtedly. But it is perfect nonsense, or what I would call patterned transrationality. It describes something that is surely real, but not in the same limited sense as material reality and its interior cousin, the empirical ego.

The difficulty arises in attempting to express the infinite through the finite, or the transcendent through the immanent, which can only be accomplished with paradox, myth, symbolism, and a number of other literary deivoices we will discuss in more detail below. Religious language -- whatever else it is -- is without question a way to memorialize, instantiate, extend, deepen, and meditate upon that which transcends ordinary language.

... God has an outer aspect, which we call being, and an interior aspect that is beyond being. In Orthodox Christianity, the difference is conceptualized in terms of God's energies (which may be known by us) and his essence, which we can only unKnow. I suspect that the dialectic between them is the source of God's creativity, or his eternal surprise and delight at his endless productions.

Now, it is not actually possible for us to experience or know the eternal. Or, to be precise, we can only experience it if we no longer exist, because to identify with it would be to disappear from time, and thought and existence require time ("no one sees my face and lives"). As Boethius wrote, "An unchanging thing displays no before and after, nor does it begin or end." Rather, eternity is "the instantaneously whole and complete possession of endless life."

But there are a number of ways we can experience the eternal and think the otherwise unthinkable in the herebelow. As Bomford explains, "among temporal things, the everlasting most nearly expresses the eternal. It provides the closest image of the timeless within time." This is why our souls are stirred in the presence of the very old and ancient -- the Pyramids, Yosemite Valley, a European cathedral, Barbara Walters, etc.

But interestingly, another penultimate form of eternity -- the symmetrical opposite of the everlasting, so to speak -- is the momentary, for such a thing is also "instantaneously whole and unchanging -- it has no time in which to change. It is not there -- it is there in its fullness -- and it is gone again" -- like a shooting star, or giving your daughter's hand in marriage, or one of Obama's campaign promises.

I don't think we got very far this morning, and now I'm out of time. I'll do better tomorrow.

Collaborating with the Handicapped God

Continuing with yesterday's post, we left off with the idea that persons are subjects of consciousness and freedom. Person "signifies self-consciousness," such that the three persons of the Trinity "may be seen as 'distinct acts of self-consciousness making use of that one unrestricted power.'"

Now, "Self-consciousness is awareness of one's awareness" or "consciousness of one's consciousness" (Spitzer). Thus, "this remarkable power seems to defy physical explanation, because it can be in two relative positions with respect to itself simultaneously." In other words, it is as if the inner universe of consciousness may double back "on itself at an infinite velocity, so that it can be 'inside' itself..."

That is not as clear as it could be. I would say that with self-consciousness we are simultaneously conscious (in consciousness) and somehow above or "outside" it. But this can't be the case. There can't be any strict line between consciousness and self-consciousness, because the latter must ultimately be a mode of the former. Even so, they are quite distinct, and the distinction lies at the foundation of our humanness.

It very much reminds me of the distinction in psychoanalysis between the conscious and unconscious minds. We can talk about the two as if they are separate, but they can't be. Rather, it is more like the yin-yang symbol of the Tao, in which there is unconsciousness in every act of consciousness, and vice versa.

Or, it is like the wave/particle distinction in quantum physics: a particular thought is the precipitate of a wavelike flow of consciousness, in which our conscious mind is analogous to the "shore." We're just children at play along the infinite shore where the waves of eternity break upon the sands time.

We all attempt to use what we know to understand what we don't. In the past, I have mentioned my suspicion that there is something analogous to the conscious/unconscious distinction in God. However, this expresses it backwards. That is to say, it is we who are in the image of God; therefore, our conscious/unconscious structure must be a distant echo of what goes on in God. We are the way we are because God is the way He is.

And remember, when we say "unconscious," we certainly don't mean ignorant, or undirected, or sub-conscious. Rather, it is more like a supra- or hyperconsciousness -- like the total implicate field as opposed to the particulate point of selfhood. As the psychoanalyst James Grotstein expressed it in this decade old post, what we call the unconscious is in actuality

"a sort of alter-ego, or 'stranger within' that shadows our existence in a most intimate, creative, and mysterious way. Far from being 'primitive and impersonal,' it is 'subjective and ultra-personal,' a 'mystical, preternatural, numinous second self' characterized by 'a loftiness, sophistication, versatility, profundity, virtuosity, and brilliance that utterly dwarf the conscious aspects of the ego.'"

From the same post:

Grotstein sees the unconscious as a sort of “handicapped” god who needs a partner in order to accomplish its mission. The goal of psychotherapy is not merely knowledge of, or insight into, the unconscious, but something far greater. Rather, it is to establish a sort of dynamic collaboration between the phenomenal ego -- our conscious self -- and the “ineffable subject of being” upon which the ego floats, and into which it infinitely extends (for the boat is paradoxically made of the same water upon which it floats).

Through a creative resonance between these two aspects of ourselves, we are much more spontaneously alive, creative, and “present.” It is like adding another dimension (or two or three) of depth to our being, through which we become something that has never actually been, but is somehow more real than what we presently are. A new entity emerges, a “transcendent subject” that lives harmoniously in the dialectical space between our “foreground self” and this mysterious “background subject” that surrounds and vivifies it.

You might say that we help God come into being, or to transition from the implicate to explicate order. Could it be that something similar occurs within the Godhead?

This is what I mean by applying the Being/Beyond-Being distinction to God. Again, it is all just one flowing movement.

And now that I think about it, it is as if there exist vertical and horizontal in God; the distinction between Godhead and Trinity would be on the "vertical" plane, while the distinctions between the persons of the Trinity would be "horizontal." The Father is not "above" the Son or Spirit, but on the same level. But the infinite Divine Nature must be "above" them, in a manner of speaking.

Spitzer: "[T]here can be only one unrestricted power, but Christian revelation holds that there are three Persons in this one power.... This is not contradictory because [as explained above] an unrestricted power can accommodate multiple acts of self-consciousness.... The one unrestricted power acts as a single 'power source' for the three distinct acts of self-consciousness."

So, that's about it for today. To be continued...

Up and Down in Divine Space

I don't think I'll continue with the discussion of Heather MacDonald's The War on Cops. I try not to duplicate what is widely available elsewhere on the internet, and there is so much solid information out there about the deadly lies of the left (e.g., here), that it's just piling on. Whether it is "racial profiling," "disparities in the criminal justice system," "hands up don't shoot," or police disproportionately targeting black people, it is all malicious flapdoodle.

Besides, more interesting -- and important -- is the machinery of the whole phenomenon. How does one manufacture a class of dupes to passionately believe easily disproved lies? And why? First and foremost, it doesn't begin with blacks, but with white liberals. They are the ones with the power to either propagate the lies or correct them at the root. They are the transmission belt of culpable ignorance and stupidity.

Do they know they are lying? And do they care? Is it really just a cynical attempt to agitate blacks to turn out to vote in November? Or do they actually convince themselves that the lie is true?

It's very hard if not impossible for someone who loves truth to relate to the latter. I would never knowingly propagate falsehood on this blog, and I want to be corrected when I am wrong. But leftists think you are lying to them when you simply tell them the truth. You will have noticed that whenever the left accuses conservatives of something, it is always a projection -- an unconscious revelation of what they actually believe.

For example, they accuse us of racism, when they are the ones who want to discriminate on the basis of race; they accuse us of being "anti-science," when they are the ones who pretend that climate science is settled, or that IQ has nothing to do with genetics, or that an unborn baby is just a random clump of cells, or that the minimum wage doesn't harm the most economically vulnerable, or that homosexuality isn't dangerous to one's health, both physical and psychological, or that the sexes aren't fundamentally different, etc. The list is endless.

So, we'll change subjects. To what? To whatever strikes my fancy, as usual. In this case, it is an appendix to Spitzer's God So Loved the World: Clues to Our Transcendent Destiny from the Revelation of Jesus, called Making Sense of the Trinity and Incarnation. I haven't yet thought it through -- that's the purpose of writing about it -- but while reading it, it triggered many psychic depth charges. When this occurs, it is a clue that there is more here than meets the I. In other words, it is fraught with implicate meaning.

Best of all, Spitzer seems to understand the Trinity in the same way I do, although coming at it from a different angle. Of which there must be countless, since it is analogous to coming at a three-dimensional space with two-dimemsionsl arrows.

Two questions: "How can God be three in one, and how can the Son of God become human?" The early councils were extremely careful in explicating the answers, since it is very easy to fall into misconceptions in attempting to resolve the mystery. Many heresies are simply false solutions to these conundrums, e.g., that Jesus is all God, or all man, or a spirit being, or an enlightened sage, etc.

I am reminded of a Jewish relative who says she could never accept Christianity due to the strict monotheism of Judaism. Does she have a point? Yes! Spitzer: "How can Jesus be divine in human form? Isn't that a contradiction? It would be if the early Church had claimed that Jesus' Incarnation was 'divinity becoming human,' or 'the divine taking human form,' or 'the Infinite taking finite form.'"

Being that they were mostly good Jews, they knew as well as anyone that God is one -- hence the development of the Trinity as the solution to a metaphysical problem of the first rank. The Church "declared early on that it was not 'the infinite God' who became 'man,' but the 'Son of God'" who did. It did not claim God's infinite nature became finite, because this "would have been an obvious contradiction."

This leads to the distinction between "nature" and "person." The divine nature is completely unrestricted: it "would have to be unique (one and only one), because two unrestricted acting powers is a contradiction." If there are two, then one has something the other lacks, and is therefore not unrestricted. And if there is no difference, then they are the same, i.e., one.

So, the divine nature is still one. In reality it is "beyond" or "before" or "above" one, for we are not talking about any mere quantitative one. This whole line of thought rang a bell in me, because it reminds me of Schuon's fundamental distinction between Being and Beyond-Being. To jump ahead a bit, the Divine Nature must be Beyond-Being, while the Divine Persons are Being (not our being, but rather, the being-ness "within" the Godhead -- in divinas, as the Latins say.

Schuon explains this quite clearly in chapter one of Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, Summary of Integral Metaphysics. There he begins in the beginning -- or before the beginning, to be precise -- with the idea that "In metaphysics, it is necessary to start from the idea that the Supreme Reality is absolute, and that being absolute it is infinite." This Supreme Reality could never be incarnated without instantaneously shattering the world.

It is "at once solely itself and totally itself"; it "is not determined by any limiting factor and therefore does not end at any boundary..." And skin is bounded, so there you are. It cannot "contain" the one divine nature.

But again, within Divinity itself there is a kind of qualitative "distinction" that results from its own nature. For Schuon, there is a "pure Absolute" and a "relative Absolute," and although he doesn't say so, I would assign the Trinity to the latter.

Please bear in mind that we are deploying human categories to try to peer into the transhuman. In reality it is the other way around: relativity exists in the human plane as a kind of distant echo of what occurs in divinas, between Being and Beyond-Being. You might say that God manifests to himsoph as Trinity.

I can see that this is going to require a great deal of caution in order to say all of this correctly. In other words, it is probably easy to misunderstand what I'm saying, but be sure that I am doing my best to play within the boundaries of orthodoxy.

About Beyond-Being manifesting to itself as Being. Schuon notes that the Divine Principle "not only possesses 'dimensions' and 'modes,' it also has 'degrees,' by virtue of its very Infinitude which projects the Principles into Relativity..." Again, this is in God; you might say that creation partakes of the same extension, only "outside" God, i.e., ex divinas.

Back to Spitzer. Again, the early councils "were well aware that there could be only one unrestricted power, and therefore one nature in God, and so they knew that they would have to clarify how there could be three 'Persons' in that one unrestricted power and nature."

But since God cannot have "parts" per se, how are we to understand this? Well, what is a person? Spitzer suggests (following Jean Galot) that it is "the subject of consciousness and freedom." Person "signifies self-consciousness," such that the three persons "may be seen as 'distinct acts of self-consciousness making use of that one unrestricted power.'"

To be continued...

Black Lives Martyred

Martyred to the breathtaking lies of the left, that is.

There is so much useful information in Heather MacDonald's The War on Cops that it's hard for this old brain to remember it all. Yes, Black Lives Matter is a total fraud, founded upon easily disproved lies and distortions, but what are the actual statistics? As an aid to myself and a friendly service to readers, I thought I might thumb through the book and pluck and out some of the more salient ones.

By the way, this is one of the most simultaneously exhilarating and depressing books I'ver ever read. Exhilarating because the truth always is. Depressing because it demonstrates how aggressively the left denies reality when its agenda is at stake. As the old gag goes, the first thing a man will do for his ideology is lie.

Which reminds me of Russell Kirk's axiom that one definition of conservatism is the absence of ideology. Unlike the left, we do not superimpose a secondary reality over the first, but rather, allow ourselves to be in-formed by reality. Or in other words, we stick with what is and what works.

The book is also depressing because we have a real problem on our hands, with no solution in sight. In an unprecedented historical experiment, the the left has destroyed the black family, and I have no idea what or how long it will take to put it back together, or if it's even possible.

The left's approach to the problem is to generate all heat and no light, in order to keep their most loyal voting bloc angry, dependent, and in the dark. They also ensure that if anyone talks about the real problems they will be banished as racist, thus sealing themselves in ignorance with weaponized PC rhetoric.

So, cheer up! Things are not as bad as they are going to be.

First the "Ferguson Effect": homicides in the nation's 50 largest cities increased 17 percent last year. This of course is after a fifty percent decline in crime since the mid-1990s. I won't get into all of the reasons for the decline, but suffice it to say that all of these truly progressive methods are under attack by the left, with predictable consequences, including thousands more black deaths.

In 2015 258 blacks were shot and killed by police, compared to 6,095 total black homicide victims in 2014 (the most recent year available), and the vast majority of the latter were murdered by other blacks. Of the 258 killed by police, most were in self defense, as in the Michael Brown case in Ferguson.

"[Y]oung black commit homicide at nearly ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males combined." Why on earth would a police officer not be a little more attentive to the activities of young black males? And why would the potential black victims of black predators not want the police to pay a little more attention to them?

It is precisely because of astronomical levels of black crime that police are in their neighborhoods. Police do not deploy their forces on a statistical basis based upon population, but rather, based upon crime. It has nothing per se to do with race, but with behavior. But when an inevitable statistical disparity in policing shows up, the left takes this as evidence of racism. Madness!

Conversely, Asians "barely show up in police-shooting data because their crime rates are so low." Thus, whites should organize a White Lives Matter group to protest this blatant discrimination against us in favor of Asians. Fight yellow privilege!

In New York City, "blacks are only 23 percent of the population but commit over 75 percent of all shootings.... whites commit under 2 percent of all shootings" despite constituting a third of the population. "Blacks and Hispanic shootings together account for 98 percent of all illegal gunfire."

Thus, it is no joke: the left wants to take our guns away, when the main reason we need them is to protect ourselves from their constituents. Or in other words, if we could just prevent guns from getting into the hands of Democrats, we would have murder rates (by shooting) comparable to Sweden.

Eh, I'll have to complete this tomorrow. It's a little crazy around here, being that today is the day the wife gets the new hip installed...

Is Liberalism Preventable?

What with leftism ending in what leftism always ends in — hatred, division, poverty, oppression, political violence, etc. — I was wondering over the weekend if there is any surefire way to prevent it. No, not via some form of censorship or reverse-indoctrination, but rather, to make sure it never plants its tentacles and takes hold of the soul to begin with.

I use the word “soul” advisedly, because I am convinced that leftism is first and foremost a spiritual disorder. Yes, leftism is irrational, but it’s more than that; it is anti-rational. Being that the mind is composed of reason and made for the purpose of exercising it, it takes great effort to subvert the natural process of seeking and loving truth.

Yes, leftism is fraught with daddy issues. Indeed, Black Lives Matter is unimaginable without these subspiritual and more banal psychological influences. If black lives mattered to their fathers, there would be no need to project the resultant abandonment and resentment onto white people, or police, or “structural racism.” But urban black children by and large don’t matter to their fathers, with predictable psycho-political consequences, i.e., various forms of acting out.

But here again, it takes real effort to not see the connection. This is what I mean by its being a spiritual disorder, in that there is a prior attack on truth before the mind even sets itself to the task of thinking.

In the past I have written about Bion’s concept of “attacks on linking.” Knowing an abstract truth requires a linkage of various ideas, concepts, and preconceptual archetypes and categories. If the mind can pre-emptively dismantle the supporting links that lead to a truth, this will be much more effective than having to deny each unwanted truth on an ad hoc basis. Cognitively speaking, it is the difference between a handgun and a nuclear bomb.

It takes great mental effort to believe the lies upon which Black Lives Matter is based. Or does it? Like Obama, its devotees certainly don’t appear to exercise much in the way of mental effort, so there must be something that makes it “easy” for them to arrive at such absurd and unsupported conclusions.

You might say that Satan’s yoke is easy but that his words endarken.

But how do minds become so easily yoked in this fashion? And is there any way to inoculate a person against such motivated stupidity? Satan never compels; rather, he only tempts and seduces. What is it about leftism that makes something so fundamentally ugly appear so attractive? Consider the fact that in one generation we have gone from “winning” the cold war to nearly nominating a socialist, mostly thanks to the young and stupid.

But are they only young and stupid? That can only account for so much. I think about my 11 year old, for example. He is already a bleeding-brain conservative, and I don’t foresee any possibility that he will be seduced by leftism as he gets older. You know the old gag, that if you're not a liberal when you're 25 you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative by the time you're 35 you have no brain. However, in my son’s case, it is precisely because he has such a big heart that he could never embrace leftism.

For example, his heart informs him that good and evil are objective realities, that there is a vital difference between them, and that life is an unending struggle between the two. Likewise, he knows that truth exists and that the purpose of the mind is to know it.

You’d think everyone would know these things, which again only goes to the left's success at inverting the psyche before it even begins to think. It is analogous to a fighting force that softens the battlefield via airpower before sending in the troops. I would say that public education — supplemented by the media and culture in general — softens the battlefield of the mind until the university troops go in and finish the job. Then the mind becomes occupied territory, usually for the remainder of one’s life.

Why else would Bernie Sanders want “free college” for everyone?

Here is a typical piece plucked from somewhere this morning, Universities’ War Against Truth. Just think about the perversity of that title! We all know it’s happening, as is the “artistic war on beauty” and the “ethical war on morality.” Again, this is why I am forced to conclude that a hostile spiritual power is at work, because how do you explain how an institution designed for the very purpose of pursuing and exalting truth has become precisely the opposite? Give the Evil One credit. That is an amazing accomplishment.

"Young people today are very reluctant to assume that anything is certain…” But why, and how? How can one not know that there are certain absolute truths without which thinking isn’t even possible?

"Whence came this ubiquitous hesitation? As I understand the matter, it has much to do with the new ideology of non-discrimination. Modern education aims to be ‘inclusive’, and that means not sounding too certain about anything in case you make people who don’t share your beliefs feel uncomfortable.”

Of course, this fails to convey the obnoxiousness with which the bogus conviction of having no convictions is held. Thus,

"Speaking or thinking in the wrong way does not mean disagreeing with the beliefs of the students — for they have no beliefs. It means thinking as though there really is something to think — as though there really is a truth that we are trying to reach, and that it is right, having reached it, to speak with certainty. What we might have taken to be open-mindedness turns out to be no-mindedness: the absence of beliefs, and a negative reaction to all those who have them.”

To paraphrase Chesterton, there is one thought that should be declared off limits, and that is the thought that stops thinking. For the left, the Forbidden Thought isn’t a bug but a feature. It is their foundation, their self-evident truth.

Last week I read a relevant comment at Happy Acres, that “To find out what is destroying your culture, discover which ideas are considered beyond criticism.”

That is the real purpose of the regime of political correctness: it is all about forbidding the very thoughts that facilitate thinking about -- and conforming ourselves to -- transcendent reality.

Big Win in Dallas for the Father of Lies

Since the vicious and willfully obtuse anti-police rhetoric of the left is based upon easily refuted statistics -- cf. the indispensable work of Heather McDonald (see also here) -- the events of last night must be counted as a big win for the Father of Lies. Five officers are dead because their murderer believed lies about "racist police."

In order to facilitate any great evil, lies are necessary. People act upon their assessment of what is true. If they believe a lie is the truth, then they will act on the lie and adjust their lives accordingly. Palestinians are steeped in lies about Jews, as were Nazis. When lies are accepted as true, it transforms evil actions into "moral" ones.

Human beings cannot help believing truth and behaving morally; our minds are epistemophilic (oriented to the True) as our behaviors are oriented to the Good. Therefore, in order to subvert man, it is necessary only for him to assimilate the Lie in order to converge upon the bad or evil.

Obama and the left don't want to know the truth, because they don't want the truth to be true. Therefore, they shun it in order to nurture their lower vertical impulses of envy and resentment, perpetual grievance and blessed victimhood.

The same was true of southern slaveholders vis-a-vis Christianity. Before slavery had become morally problematic, no one needed a rationale for it, religious or otherwise. Just as Obama and Black Lives Matter activists cherrypick out-of-context statistics to support what they want to believe, slaveholders tried to find biblical support for their own immoral interests.

If you can get someone to believe a lie is true, you have done Satan's heavy lifting. The rest takes care of itself. Distance from the truth doesn't matter; rather, it's that first step that counts, in that it literally places one in a parallel universe, being that the universe is made of truth: what exists is true, and vice versa. Lies are always parasitic on truth -- they have no real being -- so believing one results in a kind of ontological erosion of the soul, of real personhood.

To believe the lie is to be in the universe without being of it. It is a precise inversion of the proper state of affairs, in that it fosters a reverse transcendence into the -- or a -- lower world. Instead of using the world as a ladder or stepping stone for the purpose of climbing to higher realms, the lie places a hole in the center of existence, through which we may drop down into unreality. Remember?

"The ego becomes a hole that 'fulfills' itself by devouring other selves, leaving behind a trail... like remnant bones on a beach" (Rutler). "[T]he Mocker turns to the men and women of this age endowed with more intelligence than judgment: 'Come down from the Cross! Give me your intellect!' And we do: we do each time we call truths lies and lies truths." Same snake. Same fall. Same result.

It has always been thus, "except for one aneurysm that has paralyzed the life of the mind in our day, a convulsion imperceptible along the way so that it is hard to locate in any one philosopher" (ibid.). Derrida? Nietzsche? Kant? Descartes? How long ago did we go off course? More to the point, when did we conclude that there was no course, or that all courses were of equal value?

When the student of old attended school, he "was told to prepare for truth." Certainly he assimilated untruths along the way, but "at least he was told there was such a thing as truth" (ibid.).

But the postmodern tyranny of relativism transmitted by the perpetual adultolescents of Big Education would have us believe "that there are two sides to truth, your truth and my truth." These intellectual abusers have "betrayed childhood by robbing it of a sense of the interior life of the soul, making it unfit" for the acknowledgement and reception of any higher reality.

Instead, the victims of this intellectual con are indoctrinated to believe things that specifically block the path toward truth. This results in an "intellect that appropriates information for private ends" and thus renders inoperative its submission "to the truth for truth's sake" (ibid.).

Progressivism is really a post-civilizational neobarbarism -- just as Obama is what "comes after" the United States of America, both its ideal and its reality. (Nothing can come "after" self-evident truths except for something worse, based upon lies of various magnitude.)

Along these lines, Rutler quotes a prophetic passage by Giambattista Vico (who, by the way, was a big influence on Joyce, specifically, with regard to the circular structure of Finnegans Wake -- its "commodius vicus of recirculation" -- in which the the Same Returns throughout history, like the theme in a symphony):

Such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure.

So, microaggression has a long genealogy.

They shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection...

Which is why the new barbarism of the left is even worse than the old.

Building the Cosmic Infrastructure

We left off yesterday with the idea that history is a kind of race down from the trees of west Africa, to the wide open spaces of temporal change and development, and back up the nonlocal tree whose roots are aloft and branches down below. Is this a Christian idea, or just something I made up?

Yesterday I was reading Spitzer's God So Loved the World, in which he points out that Jesus brought "not only an entryway into the future Kingdom of Heaven, but a passageway that connected the present Kingdom to the future Kingdom."

In other words, he builds a path, a road, a bridge, from horizontal here to vertical there. The gift of the Spirit helps us complete the project of building this cosmic infrastructure, this "conduit between earth and Heaven." However, it's a project that not only takes time but keeps going over budget, given the nature of human contractors.

The Spirit is "the power of God" experienced on our end as a personal presence. "This 'presence of God' is more than merely 'the power of God' viewed as blind supernatural force; it has a subjective (indeed, intersubjective) quality." It is the more-than-human flowing through the merely human in various ways, i.e., charisms.

So the Kingdom of God is where we are headed, and the Spirit is what helps guide us there. It must also be where history is headed, indeed, the very purpose of history: "The "Kingdom of God' is the most synthetic concept in the Gospels. It is the reality that is thought to be the way, the means, and the end of humanity.... It is also identified with the divine life, and therefore, with the perfect, eternal condition of God to which all humanity is called."

Thus, word-made-flesh also ushers in the future-made-now, end-made-middle, and top-made-down; it "causes a dynamic force (the goodness of God) to enter into the world here and now."

In the past we have called the left the Good Intentions Paving Company, for we know where their projects always lead. Why is this? Because they are a repetition and prolongation of the Fall, i.e., the attempt to accomplish something without God that can only be achieved with God. Thus, the left never stops building towers of Babel and the roads between them.

Jesus advises us that we must look for the Kingdom "amid many distractions" in the world, "as well as choose it and remain faithful to it. If we do choose and remain faithful to the Kingdom, its power will affect us, making us 'Kingdom builders.'" Here again we encounter the orthoparadoxical idea that the Kingdom is the road we both build and and travel upon in order to help get us there; thus it is both path and destiny.

This is quintessentially true of Jesus, who "not only speaks of the Kingdom" but "acts it out..." As such, to the extent that he is Word, this Word is a verb, an "action word."

McKenna speaks of history as a kind of backwash from the eternal; history is a wave -- a timewave. "What we are moving toward in three dimensions is the passing of this wave of understanding into a higher dimension, the realm of the atemporal." And "the real Anti-Christ is history's distorted reflection of the Christ at the end of time." It is precisely this that causes the left to never stop immanentizing the eschaton with their good intentions.

About that atemporal reality to which we are (hope-fully) headed. Spitzer suggests that it "brings not only the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity, but the satisfaction of being immersed in tremendous beauty, the beauty of complete intelligibility, perfect symmetry, perfect creativity, perfect mind, and the perfect love behind it all." In this vision, "truth is beauty and beauty is truth; love and goodness are truth and beauty; and truth and beauty are love and goodness" beheld "in the midst of real interpersonal love" and joy.

So, the Kingdom of Heaven is really a "grace-filled adventure" toward its own fulfillment. Otherwise I just don't see the point.

Psychedelic Christianity

I have a little unexpected timelessness this morning to ponder the imponderable...

Back when I was in graduate school, I happily toiled as a retail clerk, often on the graveyard shift. The tranquility and silence of an empty supermarket afforded me much facetime with myself; this forced contact between me and my own dreadful abyss helps explain why, to this very day, I am able to live with myself. Or at least tolerate the bastard.

But that gets old after awhile, so I started listening to a portable radio. This was before the days of widespread talk radio, plus I was a lefty back then, so I would frequently tune into the barking lefthound side of the dial, i.e., public- and listener-supported radio. If you think what goes on there during the day is crazy, you should listen in at 3:00 AM, when no one's listening.

For many years I was devoted to a program on Pacifica Radio called Something's Happening. It was on Sunday through Friday mornings, like midnight to 6:00 AM, and featured all kinds of counter-cultural metaphysical, mystical, scientific, political, and religious sense and nonsense. (Looks like it is still on to this day.) For example, once a week it featured lectures by Alan Watts and Krishnamurti. I also remember frequent talks by Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Campbell, David Bohm, and various Buddhists, Jungian psychologists, astrologers, and sundry healers and holy men.

But the guest who made the biggest impression on me was the "ethnobotanist" Terence McKenna. Many if not most readers will have heard of him. He was one of the most mesmerizing speakers I had ever heard, able to somehow combine science with the psychedelic experience in such away that he made the weirdness of it all seem plausible. At least at 3:00 AM, when the world was soundasleep but the right brain was wideawake.

Although I reject a lot of his details, he definitely helped open me to the transdimensional nature of reality. Through him I was introduced to Whitehead, Joyce, mystical Christianity, and other enduring themes and interests. Ultimately I think it's because of him that I wanted to write a Really Weird Book. In fact, one of my problems with Christianity was that it wasn't weird enough. In reality it's plenty weird, but the weirdness tends to get worn away as the shocking message tumbles down the centuries.

Anyway, I was recently thumbing through a volume of his works and was reminded of how I am still attracted to the idea of a psychedelic Christianity, minus the psychedelics.

In the preface to the book, he (humbly) speaks of how he "had apparently evolved into a sort of mouthpiece for the incarnate Logos," based upon the startled reaction of his listeners: "I could talk to small groups of people with what appeared to be electrifying effect about the peculiarly transcendental matters that you will read about in these pages."

I well remember the electrifying effect, although I don't know that it would occur today, some thirty or more years later. But I know what he means when he writes that "It was as though my ordinary, rather humdrum personality had simply been turned off and speaking through me was the voice of another, a voice that was steady, unhesitating, and articulate -- a voice seeking to inform others about the power and promise" of other dimensions.

Now, religion as such is obviously about the power and promise of these other dimensions, and about revealing the hidden vertical continuity between Here and There. Back when I was conceiving the book, I concluded that, just as animals presumably evolved into a specifically human consciousness, human consciousness was evolving further into a spiritual dimension; or rather, animal neurology evolved to the point that it could enter the human space (or they could sponsor the ingression of a soul), and it is the task of human beings to further explore and acclimate themselves to a spiritual space that is prior to them. "Civilization" is its terrestrial residue.

McKenna speaks of consciousness as a "hyper-organ" that gives access "to the doorway" through which "the dead pass daily." What I would say is that mind is the first nonlocal organ, not bound by space and time but able to rise above and beyond it into realms of truth, beauty, goodness and unity. But we need to develop it in order "to navigate in hyperspace" and get to know the area.

McKenna helped me to connect everyday language to the Logos, and to show their necessary relationship. The trick is "to describe the phenomenon as accurately as possible. My task is compounded by the fact that the phenomenon I must try to describe has itself to do with the very tools of description; i.e., language.... since the phenomenon begins at the edge of language, where the concept-forming faculty gropes but finds no words, I must be careful to avoid not distinguishing between mere language-symbol-metaphor and the reality I am attempting to apply it to."

This is precisely what I attempted to do in the prologue and epilogue of the book. I'm not saying I succeeded, only that I was toying or playing with the idea of deploying language to make present the reality to which it is pointing. Or as McKenna describes it, it is a making visible of "the normally invisible syntactical web that holds both language and the world together." Hey, someone's gotta do it.

McKenna also helped me make sense of Christian eschatology, the idea that history aims at its own fulfillment beyond history; history is "the shock wave of the final actualization of the potential of the human psyche." Thus, the thing we call history is a kind of race down from the trees of west Africa, to the wide open spaces of temporal change and development, and back up the nonlocal tree whose roots are aloft and branches down below.

To be continued...

Another Open Thread

Too much going on. Now the wife needs a new hip, soon to be installed. Afterwards we'll know how much of the pain had been coming from the hip rather than the back.

Aging. Just when you're finally used to your body, it starts changing on you...

Summa Vocation

Yesterday's post quoted from one of my favorite books by Schuon, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism. It never ceases to amaze me how someone can write of the Invisible Real with such precision, lucidity, and brevity, with no wasted words, no wooliness, and no sentimentality. Rather, just pure light.

Reading him is accompanied by a very distinct "feeling" or sensation in me -- a paradoxical combination of freshness and recognition achieved by precious few other writers. Thus, for me it is a gymnostic exercise in vertical recollection, i.e., learning what I somehow already know deep down.

I'm looking at the foreword, written by Bruce Hanson, and it pretty much summarizes the Quasi-Venerable Way of the Raccoon. "At the level of being we are, of course, human; which is to say, every child who is born of human parents comes into the world with a human essence."

In this highly qualified sense we are "created equal."

However, "it is quite another matter to achieve our humanity in our existence; that is, to realize to the fullest degree the very promise which is already in our nature" (ibid.). Thus the gap -- or abyss, depending -- between what we are and what we are supposed to be -- between Is and Ought.

This also goes to both the source and end of our freedom: the very reason for the existence of the human station "is to choose, and to make the right choice" (Schuon).

Think of yesterday's Brexit from Big Brother's room: Great Britain chose freedom, or at least freedom for the possibility of freedom; they have reclaimed the title deed to their liberties. Now it all depends upon what they do with it.

"So, to become human is the religious task of humankind. Biological nature develops us only up to a certain point, and then we must individually, with great deliberation and full consciousness, seek the rest" (Burton).

This can sound like new age do-it-yoursophistry, but "Schuon is quick to point out that it is not through our own efforts, ultimately, that we become ourselves." We cannot pull ourselves up by our own buddhistraps.

Rather, he emphasizes our dependence upon grace, i.e., "that energy which embodies the will of Heaven. If we are to individually fulfill and express our nature, we must first recognize our radical dependence upon that Power which constituted us in the first place" (Burton). Certainly Christianity teaches the hidden power of abandonment to Divine Providence: like Father, like Son, like us. A blestavus for the restavus!

"If the human person will unconditionally make himself available to the work of that Power we call grace, grace will do the rest." It seems to me that this involves an undoing of the Fall; or, the insinuating Fall of evening was precisely adamn doing of the opposite of what we ought to be doing. And eating.

Thus, "insofar as we conform ourselves to our original nature, we participate in the divine life. As we conform ourselves to our original nature, God expresses God's self as us." Burton cites the old patristic gag that "The Spirit became flesh that the flesh might become Spirit." In between the two is the Cosmic Adventure.

I love this summary: "Schuon invites us to take seriously that the life of spirit is the fountain from which our scriptures have come to us, and to take seriously that we too can become explorers, trace the scriptures upstream, drink from the same waters and understand their meaning firsthand through the very source that inspired these scriptures" (ibid.).

Through this daily verticalisthenic exercise we may gradually "become the concrete expression of what we understand" (ibid.).

Amen for a child's job.

Crossing the Phoenix Line

I like this winged thoughtlet found at Happy Acres:

The Fire Bird,” wrote Chambers, “is glimpsed living or not at all. In other words, realists have a way of missing truth, which is not invariably realistic.” The “Fire Bird” refers to the classical myth of the phoenix, a bird composed of fire that, since it was consumed by flames as it flew through the air, left no body. Its existence therefore could not be proved empirically, by finding its body; it had to be seen alive or not at all. Chambers’s meaning is that Burnham’s worldview demanded empirical proof for things that by their nature could not be proved but were nevertheless known to be true by those who had seen—or felt or intuited—them.

Things that by their nature cannot be proved but are nevertheless known to be true. That goes directly to the Gödel enigma we were discussing a couple posts back. You could say that Gödel proved the existence of the Fire Bird -- or that there is a category of real things (odd birds though they might be) that must exist but can never be proved.

This is all covered in The Soul's Upward Yearning, but it also reminds me of Schuon; for example,

"It is indispensable to know at the outset that there are truths inherent in the human spirit that are as if buried in the 'depths of the heart,' which means that they are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect: they are the principial and archetypal truths, those which determine all others."

Truth flows downward -- for it could never be the converse -- and breaks into its variegated modes (e.g., empirical, rational, mathematical, aesthetic, moral, spiritual), just as white light refracted through a prism reveals a spectrum of colors. Just as no one can say exactly when violet becomes blue or blue becomes green, no one can identify a strict demarcation between matter and life, or life and mind. This is because the whole spectrum of existence is being illuminated from above.

The white light from above cannot be seen directly, only in its reflections; reason is like the moon that is illuminated by the sun of Intellect. Thus, "if there were not pure Intellect," writes Schuon, then "neither would there be reason, for the miracle of reasoning can be explained and justified only by the miracle of intellection."

That right there is a pure expression of the Gödel enigma -- that we are always above and beyond the reason we deploy to comprehend lesser realities. For example, in this post, the writer gets a lot right but arrives at the wrong ultimate conclusion.

Yes, it is true that science cannot inform our values, that logic has fallen out of use, and that liberals argue in a circular fashion from their own false premises. However, the writer illogically concludes that "the solution is LOGIC, yes, Vulcan, Star Trek, fucking, logic."

This cannot be the case, because something outside logic must furnish the premises for logic to operate upon. And those premises must ultimately come from above, i.e., those principial and archetypal truths which determine all others. Otherwise you are trying to resuscitate a dead parrot of truth inside an oxygen deprived tautology.

A certain kind of logic presumes to tell us we are nothing more than animals. But animals do not reason. And it's not just because they aren't smart enough, rather, because they cannot conceive of the Absolute in which reason is grounded, AKA the Logos: "in other words, if man possesses reason, together with language, it is because he has access in principle to the suprarational vision of the Real and consequently metaphysical certitude" (Schuon).

This is how we can be certain the Fire Bird exists, even if we have never seen the body.

Thus the decisive error of materialism and of agnosticism is to be blind to the fact that material things and the common experiences of our life are immensely beneath the scope of our intelligence. --Schuon

Righteous Nobility and Lefteous Pride

We left off yesterday with affective and spiritual consolation and desolation (making four distinct categories). Being that we only touched on the subject, we may have left the impression that spiritual growth comes down to good feelings, when that is not at all the case. (Redemptive suffering is a vast subject in itself.)

For example, "the evil spirit will try to give feelings of elation and excitement about ideas that are evil" (Spitzer). It's very much like those old cartoons with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other: "the evil spirit attempts to coax, persuade, urge, and support with false justifications and feelings of excitement," which the Holy Spirit might counter "by presenting feelings of guilt, alienation, discord, and agitation..." It's a little like living between two lawyers.

Come to think of it, that must be why we instinctively detest trial lawyers. We all know what they're up to.

But this is the 21st century. Isn't all this premodern talk of angels and devils just the anthropomorphizing of neurological activity? I am reminded of a remark by Schuon, that "there are two pitfalls that must be avoided: to maintain that there are two gods, one good and one evil; and to maintain that evil does not exist, either objectively or intrinsically."

In other words, in evil we are dealing with a phenomenon that is both intrinsic and objective, but nevertheless not ultimate. And if we don't recognize its objective existence, we end up like Loretta Lynch, who yesterday claimed that the most effective way to deal with ISIS is through "compassion, unity, and love."

This is a fine example of the Evil One provoking a false affective consolation in Lynch. You could say that he is exploiting her untutored desire to do and be good.

That is, we are all born with a conscience that helps us distinguish good from evil. But like any other faculty, this innate conscience must be formed and developed, not just left alone like an empty field. As Spitzer writes, "the vast majority of people know general precepts by nature, but must be taught more specific precepts."

I first encountered this concept back in graduate school, where it went by the name of a "corrupt superego." The superego is essentially Freud's term for conscience, so a corrupted one converts evil into good (and vice versa), and ends up punishing the person for doing good and rewarding him for doing evil. This is how we end up with morally upside down ideologies such as communism, Nazism, and leftism more generally. Such individuals experience a subjective reward for doing bad or evil.

Indeed, what we call "leftism" (as distinguished from liberalism!) is precisely this moral inversion. It has great explanatory power -- for example, it explains why no one is as morally righteous as the leftist fighting on behalf of his demons, whether it is the redefinition of marriage, forcing us to allow men into girl's restrooms, guaranteeing to women the right to a dead baby, wrecking the world economy and forcing millions into poverty based upon inaccurate but cherished climate models etc.

"We love and are drawn to the good before we do it, and feel noble and at home within ourselves after we do it." Thus, it seems that there is a built-in moral hazard here (literally), in that we can put the cart before the horse and conflate feeling good with actually doing good. But isn't this what the left is, AKA the Intracosmic Good Intentions Paving Company?

How do we get around this moral hazard? It must be in the distinction between nobility and pride -- which can look similar but are quite opposite. Scratch a leftist and you will find that they are motivated by ungoverned pride, whether it is the intellectual pride of the tenured or the conspicuous virtue of the campus crybullies and other morally dysfunctional types.

What we want is nobility without pride. The leftist -- you will have gnosissed -- has pride without nobility. Ever see a gay pride parade? Wouldn't it be nice instead to see a gay nobility parade, with no public nudity and defiant expressions of deviance from cultural norms? One from which you wouldn't need to hide the children? Or better, no parade at all. Just a little discretion, dignity, and taste.

Exactly what is nobility in the spiritual sense? It is readiness "to sacrifice one’s interest to the truth," and "to see things 'from above' and without any baseness" (Schuon).

Thus, "Man has the right to be happy, but he must be so nobly and, what amounts to the same thing, within the framework of the Truth and the Way.... It has been said that nobility of character consists in putting honour and moral dignity above self-interest, which means in the last analysis that we must put the invisible real above the visible illusory, morally as well as intellectually" (ibid.).

In which case we come back around to discernment, i.e., between reality and appearances, creator and creation, up and down. And pride goeth before that last one.

Discrimination with Deference

I suspect that blogging will be light to sporadic for the remainder of June. To return to matters at hand, we're still pondering the question of whether the "atheist New Ager who meditates and claims to be enlightened is accessing" the same reality we are, and "is there a dark side to this practice?"

Again, it comes down to discernment. Yes, of spirits, but also just plain discernment, as in discrimination, distinction, and differentiation. For what is it we are attempting to discern? In the end, just truth, and truth is found everywhere, i.e., in every nook and cranny of existence.

To paraphrase Schuon, our task, always and everywhere, is to distinguish reality from appearances, no less in science than in religion. That we can even do this at all is a statement about something extraordinary in man. No other animal can discern the reality beneath appearances. That we can do so is already evidence of the spirit we seek.

Or in other words, while animals are essentially proportioned to their environment, man alone is proportioned to something far greater than the material world -- to the totality of existence and beyond, to the Absolute ground of things: "the sense of the Absolute" -- of God -- "coincides with totality of intelligence" (Schuon).

Which is why nothing short of God satisfies the intelligence, not excluding the intelligence of the godless. That is to say, the godless simply substitute a faux absolute to serve as the ground of their own intelligence, not knowing that this is a tautology; in other words, they implicitly project something of their own intelligence to serve as its own ground.

Spitzer has a good explanation of how this works in his The Soul's Upward Yearning. In fact, there is a whole chapter devoted to proving the existence of God by just this means. It's about 50 pages long. Not sure if I can condense it into a paragraph or two.

I suppose it ultimately comes down to what he calls the "Gödel enigma," which goes to how it is that human intelligence is always "beyond any set of predescribed rules and algorithms." It accounts for why any form of rationalism is simply swallowing its own tail. There is no way to get beyond it without at least implicit awareness of a truth from outside or beyond the system. That's the enigma. And thank God for it, because without it we would be as enclosed as any other animal. True, our prison pod would be slightly larger, but still a prison.

It turns out that this little enigma is the key to Everything. As Spitzer puts it, we "have the capacity to see any mathematical theory in light of the horizon of 'mathematical intelligibility,'" which simultaneously "reveals limits to our current knowledge and points to higher-level solutions within the horizon of intelligibility."

Thus, our intelligence can never be explained from below; rather, intelligence always transcends any "below" it posits out of its own substance. Human intelligence, free will, and creativity come from above and beyond; we are "the only transcendental species tacitly aware of a horizon of complete and unrestricted intelligibility," such that "God is notionally present within our consciousness, making possible free inquiry and creativity." This "implicit God" is what I mean by O. A spiritual practice is what renders O explicit.

But revelation also comes into play here, for revelation is O rendering itself explicit to and for us. Human intelligence can only approach O in an asymptotic manner, for again, our intelligence always surpasses any system it can come up with. Which is why manmade religion -- no less than rationalism -- necessarily chases its own tail. Scientology and Scientism are twins brought up in different families.

It is stupid to defer to any manmade idol. Rather, it only makes sense to defer to God.

Back to discernment of spirits. Here is the bottom line: "The most important rule is the following: if a particular spiritual idea, decision, or direction leads in the long term to an increase in faith, hope, and love, it very probably is inspired by the Holy Spirit, but if it leads to a decrease" in these, then "it probably comes from an evil spirit."

In the past I have likened it to driving an invisible car into the (equally invisible) Great Attractor. We must guide the vehicle by "feel." What is it we are feeling? Spitzer explains that we are guided by affective and spiritual consolation and desolation.

Affective consolation "refers to an experience or feeling of peace, joy, love, mystery, transcendence, sacredness, awe, glory, and ultimately home (being)."

Conversely, affective desolation is "precisely the opposite: it is a feeling or experience of being alienated from the Divine or not being at home in the Totality."

However, there is more to it than this, because sometimes God uses affective and spiritual desolation for his own ends; for example, think of the desolation you feel upon exposure to someone deepaking the chopra. If you were to experience affective consolation upon such exposure, that would be an example of the Evil One seducing you with a meretricious imitation of the real thing.

We're outta time here. To be continued...

Open Thread

Still squeezed by the conspiracy this week, so insufficient timelessness for a new post. Therefore, open thread.

Inspiracy and Conspiration on the Left

We never got to item four on yesterday's agenda, Is an atheist New Ager who meditates and claims to be enlightened accessing the same O->(n), or is there a dark side to this practice?

Two words: Deepak. Chopra.

First of all, I would be extremely skeptical of anyone who "claims to be enlightened" (let alone someone who sells enlightenment), because such claims are rarely made by the enlightened. Saints don't declare their sanctity. If anything, the opposite: they are most aware of their sinfulness.

Even Jesus didn't say, "hey, look at me, I'm enlightened! Buy my book!" Rather, when it is genuine, "enlightenment" is something that is witnessed and testified to by others. And it awakens and resonates with something spiritually healthy in the witness.

In this regard it is a matter of discerning spirits. By definition there is no objective way to discern a spirit, being that spirits are not objects. Nevertheless, there are ways.

For example, Jesus advises us to "Beware of false prophets" deusguised "in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves." (This recalls Churchill's characterization of Nazis as "carnivorous sheep.")

So, how do we tell the difference? "By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?" My Bible has a cross reference to Jeremiah 23:16, where it says that these false prophets "speak a vision of their own heart, not from the mouth of the Lord."

In Spitzer's Finding True Happiness there is a whole section on Discernment of Spirits. It is appropriately contained in the chapter on Divine Inspiration and Guidance, because if there is divine inspiration, then surely there is sub- or anti-divine inspiration.

What really inspires the Islamists, for example? There is no question that they are inspired, and that this inspiration gives them the strength of will to engage in "superhuman" (antihuman) feats.

This is one reason why Obama's inability to name that which inspires them is so diabolical. By failing to say what in-spires them (or what they are in-spiring from below), it is as if he is con-spiring with them -- or with the spirit that animates them. Which he surely is, for those with eyes to see.

The question is, why does the left protect and embrace an ideology that runs directly counter to so many of its sacred cowpies, including homosexuality? It must mean that the spirit that unifies the two -- Islamism and Leftism -- is coming from a much deeper source than mere surface differences. To con-spire is to "breathe with," and both Islam and the left are definitely inhaling.

This would explain how the left could oppose Hitler one day, only to embrace him the next with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. For a normal person this would cause intolerable cognitive dissonance if not ontological whiplash. But spirit is very fluid, easily dissolving such contradictions. There is a logic involved, but it is more like dream logic than the wideawakey version.

Life is hard enough. It's harder when you're stupid, but perhaps it becomes easier if you combine stupid with evil, because then the stupid doesn't burn as much -- or at least you have lots of support in your culpable stupidity.

In ten or eleven Muslim countries homosexuality is punishable by death. You can ask for gays and Muslims to unite there, but only one side will come out standing.

Here are some additional contradictions on the left which the unholy spirit helps to smooth over:

"Biological sexual differentiation must yield to voluntary gender identity," and yet, homosexuality is genetically determined; "the demonstrable failure of socialism wherever it has been tried is proof that it has not been properly implemented"; "democratic Israel is an apartheid state"; "Islam with its record of unstinting bloodshed is a religion of peace"; "a child in the womb is a mass of insensible protoplasm" (unless the mother decides otherwise); "there is no such thing as truth, an axiom regarded as true"; etc.

I say, resolving such stark contradictions is an infrahuman task that requires assistance from below.

That was an unintended snidetrip. Back to the question at hand, which is a little more subtle than it is on the pneuma-political plane (where it would be comic if it weren't so tragic), since the phenomena will generally be more of a mixed bag, a combination of good and evil, light and shadow, instead of unalloyed evil (being that there is no one good but the One).

But we're out of time, so, to be continued...

I. Am. Adequate!

Well, I'm off the hook again with the court. But that means I'm on the hook for reader James' questions, which I rashly promised to tackle if I didn't have jury duty. Those questions are as follows:

1) I assume that your communication with Holy Spirit began with meditation? Could you describe this in more detail?

2) In the beginning did you use any aids, such as music or spoken word? How long after beginning did you (weeks, months, years?) before O->(n).

3) Do you think this is available to everybody, or is it more of a gift or talent?

4) Is an atheist New Ager who meditates and claims to be enlightened accessing the same O->(n), or is there a dark side to this practice?

Starting with question one, the answer is Yes and No. I would say that formal communication with the Holy Spirit began with meditation (and of course it is the HS that is communicating with us, not vice versa; we are just opening ourselves to, and co-upperating with, it).

To continue with the meditation part, I began meditating in 1995, and continued doing so on a daily basis -- same time, same place -- for a full ten years. Then my son was born, and it unalterably changed the routine around here. A new phase began, which was the blog.

I'm sure I've spoken of this meditation practice before, but it was in the specific context of being an informal disciple of Sri Aurobindo. The technique was easy, so it was very much compatible with my personality style: 1) silence the mind, and 2) open oneself to the descent of the grace. There was no "self effort" at all; rather, it was entirely (as the Buddhists say) "other powered."

This appealed to me because I had actually experimented with various forms of meditation for many years prior to this, and really gotten nowhere (I can't say I was ever very disciplined about it).

In this regard, I had been trying to be a do-it-yoursopher, almost treating it as a scientific technique to transcend the ego and vault myself into a higher dimension or something. But this new way involved an implicit recognition that I myself could get nowhere, and that I had to surrender to a higher power if I were to enjoy a free launch.

Right away you can see the parallel with Christian meditation, or what is more properly called "infused contemplation." To quote Professor Wiki,

"Infused or higher contemplation (also called intuitive, passive or extraordinary) is a supernatural gift by which a person's mind and will become totally centered on God. It is a form of mystical union with God, a union characterized by the fact that it is God, and God only, who manifests himself. Under this influence of God, which assumes the free cooperation of the human will, the intellect receives special insights into things of the spirit..."

Another writer says that although "the prayer is called passive, man is not purely passive in it. On the contrary, one is never so completely and utterly active as when God moves him by the graces of mystical prayer. But in this mystical experience the 'divine partner in the dialogue' is in the foreground rather than the human response."

This is why in the book I adopted the symbols (---) and (o) for our silence and openness/receptivity before O. I suppose it takes a kind of "effort" to maintain (---) and (o), but as far as I'm concerned the yoke is on us and it's easy.

Having said all this, I have come to believe that the story of the influence of the Holy Spirit in our lives is really the story of our lives; in short, every biography is a pneumography, but every pneumography is different, since we are each unique. Our lives are a complex tapestry of horizontal and vertical influences, such that no story can be the same.

There was a time when I would have been aware of no vertical influences in my life. However, I think that anyone on a spiritual path reaches a kind of tipping point whereby they look back upon their lives and become aware of a cosmic Conspiracy of Grace that had been occurring all along. There is a recognosis of the myriad experiences, events, and meetings that had to occur for you to be where you are. From this perspective the whole thing looks contrived. No one would believe it, except that it actually happened.

Anyway, when I would engage in the meditation I would begin with a chant/prayer with words to the effect of "I surrender my life, my heart, my mind, to your light, your love, your power." Just total surrender. I give up. I can't get anywhere on my own, so it's on you. Little help, please. Throw us a bone, eh?

I would literally imagine the vertical energy coming down into the top of my skull -- you know, the seventh chakra. In order to facilitate the exchange, I would breathe it in via inhalation, and "surrender" it via exhalation (something I still do to this day). So I was literally imagining (↓↑) via respiration.

And soon enough I began to feel something in the top of my head, although it could of course be just my imagination. Nevertheless, it was a definite sensation of energy and opening, so I just stayed with it. After all, I had nothing better to do with my time, and besides, a little belief in the unbelievable never hurt anyone.

As for aids to meditation, I did sometimes have ambient music on in the background (such as Steve Roach). Also, I had an old, first generation "brainwave synchronizer" that I believe I purchased at Hammacher Schlemmer or some other overpriced gift store. I'm not sure it did anything it was advertised to do, but it did facilitate the silence and emptiness.

James makes a reference to O-->(n) which is the symbol I deploy in the book for infused contemplation -- or to put it in the most general terms possible, the communication of content from ultimate reality to us. Unbelievable? Yes, unless you believe ultimate reality exists and that we are in its image. Then it's as easy as shutting up and listening.

Having said that, this leads directly to James' next question, "Do you think this is available to everybody, or is it more of a gift or talent?" I suppose in theory it's available to everyone, but practically speaking it can't be. For example, could I write a symphony that communicates the divine presence? Yeah, but it would help to learn an instrument and to know musical theory and notation, like Bach. It would also help to totally devote my life -- not only to music, but to God, or to God-through-music.

In my case, I have totally devoted my life to God-through-words. Which is not that easy, since Bob is definitely not to language as Bach is to music. I am obviously not a great writer, but I do believe I'm an adequate one, and I have been told that I am good at conveying deep or complex ideas in a straightforward and unpretentious manner. So, I think I'm adequate to get the job done so long as this verticalisthenic exercise of (b)logostreaming is accompanied by total sincerity and surrender.

So the current structure is really no different than the meditation of old, except I surrender my mind, my heart, and my FINGERS to your light, your love, your power.

To be continued...

Blogging Under the Influence

Well, I'm in the clear for today. I wasn't needed for jury duty. In California you're on the hook for one week, but you can check in the night before and they may or may not need you. So here I am with nothing to write about, as usual.

As you can see from the sidebar, I've been reading Robert Spitzer's trilogy -- soon to be a tetralogy -- on happiness, suffering and transcendence. Right now I'm in the middle of volume 2, The Soul's Upward Yearning: Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason. The whole structure of the series is a bit like One Cosmos (the book), except it is much more sprawling and sometimes repetitive, taking him four books to carefully convey what I recklessly packed into one eccentric flight of fancy.

For example, in my book there is a very brief passage on What It's Like to write under the influence of the Holy Spirit. I didn't put it exactly that way, but there is something in there vis-a-vis having one's language conditioned from above, as opposed to coming out in a mechanical or precogitated way -- about truly speaking instead of being spoken by language.

As an aside, the One Cosmos book -- very much like the blog -- was simultaneously written and discovered. It is by no means a work of "scholarship," although I naturally brought in scholarly support when and where I could.

You could say that the book is both experiential and phenomenological. If read in the proper spirit of discovery, it is as if we can take a cosmic adventure together, starting at zero and ending in O. It's a whatchamacallit... a journey from innocence to experience, only on a metaphysical plane. I couldn't write the same naive book today, because I "know" too much. Now I have proper names for all the experiences.

As I've mentioned before, one of the shocks of my life is that the names for all these experiences already existed in Christianity. Thus, nowadays I deploy Christian words, symbols, and concepts for the experiences, but the experiences came first.

Which goes back to the subject of today's post, alluded to above with the remark about language and the Holy Spirit. Again, in my case, I made an independent discovery that my writing could be conditioned from above by some nonlocal force. Now I call it the Holy Spirit, but at the time it was just a seemingly disorganized raid on the wild godhead.

Anyway, in Spitzer's Book One there is a whole chapter devoted to Divine Inspiration and Guidance, with a subsection on The Inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and I've never read anything that so closely parallels my experience. For example,

"Every time I write a book or an article, I begin with a vague or general idea that suddenly turns into a very clear, detailed tractate, expressing ideas and wisdom far beyond my own."

Check.

At one point "I tried to flatter myself by thinking that, well, perhaps I was being incredibly and spontaneously insightful in the writing process..." This was around the time I was struggling with what I was going to call the cult.

"[B]ut then it occurred to me that I had never really thought about most of the fine points I was making -- not even for a moment." And "after literally dozens of occurrences of this kind of inspiration," he concluded that "while I did play some role in the writing, another wiser and more subtle agent was also integral to the process." Yes, that's right -- Petey.

"Jesus intended to give the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to all believers," such that we should call upon its in-spiration "whenever we need spiritual wisdom or want to communicate that wisdom to others." Which is pretty much all the time. Thus, you should call upon the Holy Spirit to read these posts just as much as I do to write them. Among other things, this will help you discern when I am full of it.

Which is always possible, being that I never know what I am talking about. Spitzer has the identical experience when writing on a subject that is relatively new to him. It would be accompanied by a distinct sort of excitement which is "part of the Holy Spirit's encouragement -- and if I seized the moment, I would begin speaking or writing about the subject as if it had been a product of long reflection."

In the book I refer to it as being drawn into the Great Attractor. Likewise, Spitzer says it is as if one is "drawn into ideas and ideals about which you were not previously thinking. You will probably be startled by these new ideas [?!] and wonder how they popped into your imagination..." However, "if you go with the inspiration into the new domain, you might notice how your thinking becomes expansive, and in some cases, explosive" -- what we call depth charges.

Something similar occurs to me when reading Deep Truth. Spitzer talks about this experience as well, for it must come from the same source that "guides us to all truth." "I kept thinking, 'Wow! That's right.' I didn't know why it was right (yet); I just knew that it was 'spot on.' I had an inner conviction... about truth that I could not yet justify. I... wondered how I could be so sure about something for which I had not yet mastered the rationale."

That's exactly how it is for me: there are certain truths that, when I hear them, it is as if a key fits perfectly into the lock. My mind says "case closed," such that there is no reason to spend any more time pondering the question. The gnosis is settled!

One can also experience the other side of this via our coon-scent. It is "the opposite experience of feeling a conviction about falsity" which is communicated through a feeling of emptiness or negativity or alienation or darkness. It's that feeling you get -- or that sulfuric odor you detect -- when Obama, or Pelosi, or Hillary, or Harry Reid, or Josh Earnest open their mouths.