What Privilege

Worth repeating: the sense of essentiality attracts us toward shores other than those of the limited plane of physical phenomena alone (Schuon).

Implicit in this statement is that our minds are attracted by and toward essentiality. Which is what? It is the nonlocal whatness of things. Animal intelligence can know that things are; but human intelligence is made to penetrate beneath thatness -- existence -- to whatness -- essence. Only humans are privileged to know the What of things.

No one knows how this is possible. No, check me on that; we do know how it is possible, but only with recourse to a trans-scientific, metaphysical foundation. Certainly science cannot explain how science is possible.

In this regard, it is difficult to say whether language is a cause or an effect, but either way, language is obviously central to the discernment of essences. It is like the shadow of essentiality. Not for nothing is it said that "In the beginning is the Word," yada yada.

Come to think if it, just as only human beings can know essences, only human beings can unknow or rebel against them. For example, we know that men are essentially men and women women. Indeed, this is why we have the words, the words following upon the essences. But what is the left but a rebellion against essentiality? We'll no doubt return to this subject... or maybe not, because the Aphorist can more than adequately summarize this diabolical inversion with just an astringent line or two:

Today the individual rebels against inalterable human nature [essence] in order to refrain from amending his own correctable [contingent] nature.

Boom! "I was born this way" is no defense for staying that way. It is the literal inversion of what Schuon says above, such that the rejection of essentiality compels man to remain landlocked on this shore, and to never set out for the other.

If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

Inane if you're lucky, but usually tending toward the horizon of genocide. For ultimately, Humanity is the only totally false god (because, orthoparadoxially, we are the only essentially partial gods, so to speak).

Here begins the gospel of Hell: In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing. This reduces existence to a vapid monologue in the void, AKA tenure.

Which is why Authentic humanism is built upon the discernment of human insufficiency. Truly truly, in order to understand what you are, you must begin by understanding what you are not. Which is to say, the uncreated Absolute. In the absence of the latter category, you can only imagine yourself to be man -- man being unthinkable in the absence of its eternal complement God. The mirror is not God; and yet, it is "not other than God" either.

At any rate, only the human being knows of essences and therefore appearances, and vice versa. But human beings can never penetrate to the essence of essences, or the holiest of holies, short of self-extinction. There is always a Mystery at the heart of it all, not in the privative sense of ignorance, but in the sense of radiating, or sometimes exploding, presence. Not too little light. Too much. One sees the glowing footprints, and knows they aren't just hanging there suspended by nothing.

"[I]f Being and the first principles which flow from it are incapable of proof, it is because they have no need of proof; to prove them is at once useless and impossible, not through a lack, but through a superabundance of light" (Schuon). If one sees, one doesn't have to prove the existence of sight. Besides, how would you prove sight to one who is blind? Nevertheless, reason can disprove anything -- for example, free will -- but that hardly means it doesn't exist.

Proving what cannot be is insane, humanly speaking. These self-styled free-thinkers only end up freeing man from freedom itself. But you cannot transcend freedom, only sink beneath it. Yes, an ant is free of humanness, while the leftist never stops trying.

Augros asks an intriguing question, which is to say, how is it that we can have five separate senses but experience their transcendent unity in our selves? From where does this unity come? Indeed, to the five natural senses I would add our transnatural senses of the personhood of others, of beauty, of truth, and of the Divine Presence itSoph.

Each sense involves increasingly subtle degrees of touch. We know, for example, that something can "touch our heart." Likewise, to be truly understood by another person is to be touched. We can all "sense" grace, even if most people allow their vertical sense detector to harden or dissipate through nonuse.

"Taken by themselves, the external senses are like five unrelated voices. Together they cohere into your universal sense, they interrelate and become integrated. They harmonize."

To which I would add that the unity is always at the top; if it weren't there, we could never achieve it. It reminds me of a good stereo that is able to reproduce an accurate 3D soundstage. This is only because the sonic unity is prior to the stereo separation (into two speakers) that tries to recreate it.

The senses are complementary. Think, for example, of what humanness might be like if we only had four senses, excluding vision. We are able to teach braille to the blind by transforming what is seen into what is felt. The point is, the higher or more subtle dimension is able to reach down into the lower, but what is the likelihood that a world of blind humans could ever have come up with braille? Braille is a way for fingers to see, but someone first needs to see in order to put sight into the form of touch.

And this leads me to the notion that faith is a way for the intellect to see what it cannot see -- not the intellect in its essence, for intelligence can know anything knowable -- but due to various contingencies. Just as blindness is an accident and not an essence, so too is atheism. If blindness were an essence, then we couldn't teach braille to the blind.

Analogously, think of teaching sign language to lower primates. This can only go so far, because lower primates do not have the essence of speech, and cannot really know essences. I suppose that the brightest among them can penetrate a bit beneath the surface, but no ape will ever be as wrong about existence as your average professor.

Cosmic Extortion and the Drunkard's Search

Yesterday I was thinking about metaphysical Darwinism. (Would a strict Darwinian say that "Darwinism was thinking about me?"; for to think about it is to have transcended and thereby escaped it, which the theory would say is impossible.)

Or better, call it Darwinian literalism. Yes, it is an explanation of how we got here, but it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that it is only scientific. The literalist will no doubt respond: "Only scientific? As if mythology trumps fact and reason!"

Well, yes and no. It is, for example, an undeniable scientific fact that your body is roughly 50% water and that 99% of it is composed of six elements.

But what relevance does this have for your humanness? After all, it's only science. You can't treat a person like a chemical. For practical purposes our chemistry is of no consequence, any more than it matters what typeface is used in writing a book. Imagine a review that begins and ends with a sober analysis of the size and style of font. You'd think the person was an obsessive-compulsive nut.

Darwinian literalism "is the classic example of the bias that invents 'horizontal' causes because one does not wish to admit a 'vertical' dimension" (Schuon). Now, I wonder what is the motivation for this denial? Whatever it is, it is a passion; which is not necessarily problematic, except that in this case it is a passion for something other than Truth.

But Truth is the first priority and prime objective of our little adventure. If it becomes the first casualty then dreadful consequences follow, all the way up to extinction.

The extinction may or may not be physical -- in the previous post we spoke of Christian Science, which may redound to personal extinction if followed to the letter. But certainly soul death follows the rejection of truth -- or at least asphyxiation, dehydration, or starvation due to failure of pneumosynthesis.

Yes, pneumosynthesis. Good word. In fact, I'm a little surprised it isn't a word. I mean it by way of analogy to photosynthesis, which is a real word but no less mysterious. Photosynthesis "is a process used by plants and other organisms to convert light energy into chemical energy that can later be released to fuel the organisms' activities."

Okay. "A process used by plants." So, what process did the plants use before using photosynthesis? I don't know. It's a long article, and rather technical.

The geological record indicates that this transforming event took place early in Earth's history, at least 2450–2320 million years ago, and, it is speculated, much earlier..... Available evidence from geobiological studies of Archean sedimentary rocks indicates that life existed 3500 million years ago, but the question of when oxygenic photosynthesis evolved is still unanswered.

When does one begin the study of biology? Fifth grade? I distinctly remember learning about photosynthesis, and the teacher telling us that science didn't actually understand how it works. Is this still true? In my opinion, no one will ever understand how sunlight is transformed to life. And what would it mean for practical purposes? That our thoughts are nothing more than transformations of solar energy? If so, then the theory of photosynthesis itself would be reducible to a chemical belch.

There is a kind of knowledge that paradoxically diminishes us with its increase. However, you can't really blame the knowledge. Rather, blame the metaphysic that conditions it -- in this case, the above-noted exclusion of verticality. What conditions the choice of metaphysic? Two possibilities: truth or preference. Which is to say, objectivity or subjectivity, reality or passion.

In the case of a solely horizontal metaphysic, "one seeks to extort from the physical plane a cause that it cannot furnish and that is necessarily situated above matter" (Schuon).

Necessarily. Which is to say, objectively. Reality does not care about your feelings, even scientistic ones. Extortion is wrong. Using feelings to extort facts is the beginning of all mischief. You could even blame our primordial catastrophe (G3AOA) on it if you want to.

Scientists -- and we are speaking here of the scientistic type -- want to know, right? That's what they tell us, and we should believe them. But so too does the drunk man sincerely want to find his keys by searching for them under the streetlight. It's a real thing:

The streetlight effect is a type of observational bias that occurs when people are searching for something and look only where it is easiest. Another term for this is a drunkard's search.

So, the Darwinian literalist looks for man's origin where it is easiest, right under the scientistic streetlight. What makes this paradoxical -- or self-refuting, really -- is that light can only come from Light.

What I mean is that science incontestably furnishes light. But it only does so because of borrowed Light. If science is the light, then it is no light at all, and we are again reduced to cosmic indigestion -- a weird failure of entropy.

One reason I reread Schuon is that I always discover subtle points that may have been obscured by the bigger ones -- as in how the stars disappear in the presence of the sun, even though they may actually be exponentially larger. In this case, he writes that "the sense of essentiality attracts us toward shores other than those of the limited plane of physical phenomena alone."

Mm mm mm. This mysterious little "sense of essentiality" turns out to be everything, humanly speaking. What does it mean? It means that human intelligence is defined by the ability to see beyond appearances to the reality behind or below or above them.

Ironically, this is precisely the mission not only of any science, but any rational human inquiry whatsoever, from history to psychology to literature. Obviously it is the mission of art as well, only in reverse: to create a surface for the audience to unpack. Both are fun! Which is to say, the encoding and decoding of mysteries. If you fail to engage in this -- well, let's just say you're missing out on a damn good thing.

Switching gears -- or books, rather -- Augros writes that "we must think that the human mind differs from the animal mind in some way as the infinite does from the finite."

Even that sentence proves the point, because it contains the word "infinite," or at least presents us with the humanly intelligible antinomy of finite <--> infinite, which transcends animality. But only infinitely.

We'll continue down this path tomorrow. Or up, rather, where the light is better.

Ramblers Gonna Ramble

More off-the-cuff rambling.

One of the -- if not the -- ultimate complementarities is subject and object. Indeed, these two seem to define one another, such that it is difficult to conceive of one without the other.

Can you imagine a world without subjects? No, of course not. Prior to 4 billion years ago -- or whenever life appeared -- there was nothing and no one there to perceive anything. There would only be everything everywhere at once, AKA nothing.

And what would a subject be without an object? Seems to me it would also be nothing, for subjectivity is always of, or toward, or with, or some other preposition. It seems to me that this sheds light on the nature of God, which is to say, Trinity, for the structure of Father-Son-Holy Spirit can be seen as Subject-Object-Relation.

This reminds me of something Hartshorne says -- that God is not only relative, but the most relative thing we can imagine. Indeed, he is the very foundation and possibility of Relationship. This is truly flipping the metaphysical script, because it implies that God actually IS what would appear to be impossible, which is to say, Absolute Relativity. Absolutely!

What else could it mean to say that "God is Love"? When I was a kid, my mother used to drag me to Christian Science Sunday school (up to about age nine or ten at the latest). No, it never took root, and proved ultimately to form an early lesson in why religion makes no sense. Certainly there was no way to integrate it with the other 6.9 days of the week.

In any event, I remember a podium, behind which gold letters spelled out GOD IS LOVE on the wall. No one ever explained why and how this could be so, certainly not on any satisfactory metaphysical basis (I'm not even sure if Christian Scientists believe in the Trinity; I don't remember ever hearing the word mentioned). Especially in a Christianized culture, it shouldn't take a man fifty years to begin to figure it out!

Now I'm curious. Let's check in with Prof. Wiki for just a moment. I promise not to get even more sidetracked than I already am. The movement is rooted in

philosophical idealism, a belief in the primacy of the mental world. Adherents believed that material phenomena were the result of mental states, a view expressed as "life is consciousness" and "God is mind." The supreme cause was referred to as Divine Mind, Truth, God, Love, Life, Spirit, Principle or Father–Mother, reflecting elements of Plato, Hinduism, Berkeley, Hegel, Swedenborg and transcendentalism.

At the core of Eddy's theology is the view that the spiritual world is the only reality and is entirely good, and that the material world, with its evil, sickness, and death, is an illusion.

Okay then. Ms. Eddy was a dyed-in-the-wool-pulling Gnostic (in the bad and intrinsically heretical way). Ah, here we go: her theology "is nontrinitarian; she viewed the Trinity as suggestive of polytheism." So she was a theological ignoramus as well. Not surprisingly, she "viewed God not as a person, but as 'All-in-all.'" Whatever that is. Seems like she conjured an indigestible brew of idealism and pantheism.

The whole thing was bound to confuse a child whose mother was a bit of a hypochondriac by proxy. What I mean is, despite all the "illness is an illusion" bit, she didn't hesitate to take me to the doctor if my temperature climbed to 98.7

You may be wondering how this heretical nonsense ever entered the Gagdad strain. Haven't I blogged about this before? There was a time -- maybe in the 1930s -- that Christian Science became quite a fad among Hollywood airheads, no doubt because of its non-conformist appeal. I mean, look at this list. It was like the New Age movement of its day, a pseudo-Christian way to deepak the chopra. Christian Scientology.

My maternal grandmother was a gold-plated eccentric who settled in Hollywood. From what I understand, she was hit by a bus or something, and had what she regarded as a miraculous healing due to the ministrations of a Christian Science practitioner. I'm not sure if she or my mother took it completely seriously, in the sense of living the faith.

But how could you? How can anyone consistently live as if the world is an illusion? You have to be able to live your faith in a consistent manner. But Christian Science ultimately forces you to think one way and behave in another. When it came to a choice between doctrine and reality, my mother always chose the latter, which is to say, medicine.

Here at One Cosmos -- hey, it's in the name -- we insist upon a total integration of horizontality and verticality, with no loose ends dangling from the cosmos area rug. We do not want to believe one way and act in another. We are not Cosmic Hypocrites, but completely consistent on every level of being. If not, then we correct it as soon as it is brought to our attention.

Let's get back to the idea that the world is an illusion. Well, duh! But an illusion is not a hallucination. The bus is not ultimate reality, but you still need to get out of the way if it is about to run you down.

The world is, as it were, a "side effect" of God. If you believe it is the cause rather than an effect, you are bound to chase this fairy tail forever. Scientific explorers "may well plunge into the mechanism of the physical world" and "undoubtedly meet with a variety of instructive insights into the structure of the physical categories..." (Schuon).

BUT: they will never reach the end of their trajectory, for the simple reason that there can be no end in that direction. Like the rays of the sun, they just go on "forever," more or less. Only by proceeding in the other direction can we locate the central source and principle.

Schuon begins with the axiom that "all knowledge by definition comprises a subject and an object." This self-evident natural trinity consists of intelligence-intelligible-knowledge.

This -- it seems to me -- is a kind of projection or prolongation of the heart of the trinity, revolving around Subject-Object-Spirit, this latter taking the form of love, truth, beauty, goodness, creativity, and transcendental unity. Furthermore, the middle term -- Object -- is actually a subject in his own right: he is object to the subject but subject to himself. All in a manner of speaking. Think of our world, in which other persons are objects but obviously subjects as well.

This sure goes back to the subject of Incarnation, doesn't it? "There is a chasm between ourselves and God that we cannot cross by our own powers." Thus, "if man is the bridge between the visible and invisible worlds, then Christ became human to repair that bridge" (White).

Recall what was said above about God being the most orthoparadoxically "relative" thing we can imagine: "Christ is in truth the most human of all of us. In short, God has become the most human of us all so as to reveal to us who God is in a most human way." Absolute Relationship becomes Relative Relationship, such that the latter can become the former.

Now, man is not just subject pure and simple; rather, there are layers, dimensions, and modes of subjectivity, hopefully with a degree of harmony and integration. For example, our senses are subjective. But materialists essentially pretend they have the last word on What Is. However, the senses don't really "say" anything. Rather, they are purely receptive. It is up to the intelligence to weave them into something higher.

Likewise rationalists. Yes, the world is rational, but not only rational; it can by no means be enclosed in the categories of reason on pain of immediately devolving to irrationalism. It comes down to the question of whether reason is an instrument of the mind or vice versa. To believe the latter is to be enclosed in tautology.

There is reality and there is truth, but reality is always bigger. It is like the relation between being and knowledge. We can of course know being, but only God can encompass it with rooms and mansions to spare. He not only drew a circle on the face of the deep, but a sphere around the circle and a four-dimensional object around the sphere. Etc. No matter how high you go, he always goes one dimension higher. Just call it Beyond-Being and be done with it.

"The mechanism of the world," writes Schuon, "can be neither purely deterministic nor... purely arbitrary. In reality, the universe is a veil woven of necessity and freedom, or mathematical rigor and musical play." As such, "every phenomenon participates in these two principles, which amounts to saying that everything is situated in two apparently divergent but at bottom concordant dimensions..." (Schuon).

Everyone knows that music is a kind of math. What they fail to appreciate is the converse: that math is a kind of music. If it's just silent and static -- if it doesn't sing of the creation -- to hell with it.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns.... The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics. --G.H. Hardy

Anchored in a Cloud and Soaring Toward A Dream

Another rambling post. What can one do? It's a jungle in here, and some days the best you can do is hack away.

Instability. It is our lot. On this side of life we're always in critical condition. But don't worry -- you'll be stable when you're dead.

Well, not really, if you believe, as I do, in purgatory. But the point is that this instability isn't a bug but a feature having to do with the very essence of man.

Note that in the case of God, his existence and essence are one; or, his essence is to exist. That's real oneness, baby!

Conversely, man has to be the most irritatingly paradoxical creature in all of creation, being that our essence is to change. Or, to express it in terms of perfect nonsense, the point of life is to become oneself. We are condemned to transcendence, and the man who doesn't surpass himself sinks beneath himself, yada yada. You are a child of God, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

As to the reasons for the instability, "the human being is a kind of bridge between the physical world and the spiritual world" (White). The bridge is solid at both ends but spans over an abyss, such that the middle part has a great deal of sway; think of a suspension bridge made of flexible materials over deep ravine.

That's you, on the bridge. There is security at either end, but of very different orders. Both are rock, you might say, one physical, the other metaphysical. Both are solid-as. Only one is dumb-as.

"[M]an can tend upward -- ordering all things to the creator -- or downward into the exclusive pursuit and domination of visible, created things."

So in reality it is a vertical bridge, one end grounded in the Absolute, the other end grounded in... Actually, the other end isn't grounded per se. Rather, I would say that the Absolute radiates toward infinity, so the only thing holding the bridge up at the far end is the linear momentum of the Divine Plenitude tending outward toward nothingness; like an airplane, it only stays up because it's moving.

Think of a ray of light extending out from the sun -- or better, the Big Bang, which is of course still banging. From what? Or, more mysteriously, into what? No one has any idea. What is the leading edge of the bang? Can it really be exploding into, and surrounded by, "nothing"?

That is a different question, and it is unanswerable. As the politicians like to say when they are dodging a question, Let's talk about what we know.

What we know is that irrespective of whether the cosmos is "eternal" or had a beginning, it must have a vertical cause that is always present. It is this cause that extends down and out "forever," or has a tendency toward Nothingness without ever arriving there. It is like numbers; each number is a multiple of one (absoluteness), but they go on forever (infinitude).

In any event, for our purposes, the "tension inscribed within humans marks us with a deep spiritual restlessness and instability, since we cannot live rightly either as angels or mere nonrational animals" (emphasis mine). One can of course tend toward nonrational animality, but no one short a Stalin or Mao becomes a perfect leftist.

The absoluteness of God seems to be mirrored in the black velvet nescience of Death: "Human beings are marked simultaneously both by immortal longings and by the certainty of death."

Now, a total cosmic inversion results in Death being the only certainty, "God" being the illusory byproduct of our fear, uncertainty, instability, etc. In this regard, Nietzsche is "absolutely" correct, which is why he will always be the favorite philosopher of bright adolescent counter-revolutionaries of all ages. He was certainly mine!

Let me drag out my dogeared copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and recall what appealed to me back when I was a 30 year-old teen -- back when God spoiled everything, and I enjoyed the cheap omniscience of the dimestore atheist.

Can't find it. It isn't amongst the usual suspects. However, I looked up some quotes, and it is interesting how he is such a perfect mirror image, or inversion, of the truth, even using the identical language and images in some cases:

Become who you are!

Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman -- a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep -- into evil.

Bravo! He is Satan's Aphorist -- which, in a way, makes him second best. Heresy and orthoparadoxy aren't strangers but cousins. Or twins, even. To err is human. But to invert reality and call it truth is diabolical. Some beliefs must exist, even though they have no right to. This is the true meaning of "tolerance."

BTW, Schuon writes that "Of course, a mature man ought to be 'adult,' but he can be so otherwise than by plunging into forbidden abysses..." Granted, Friedrich is a genius. But just because he jumps off the cosmic bridge, does that mean you should?

Anyway, those two rocks -- our "immortal longings" and the "certainty of death" -- "form a crossroads between God and the whole material creation." There are attractors at each end -- O and Ø -- such that "the devil, in his revolt against the wisdom of God, seeks to wrestle humanity away from God..."

The image comes to mind of a tightrope walker, or maybe just a bicycle rider. In either case you are stable so long as you are moving, but unstable when at rest.

Interesting paradox there, in that complete stability results in utter instability. Oh well. That's life. No, literally: what is life but change-in-service-of-conservation? Speaking of which, what is conservatism but the proper recipe for collective life? "The art of progress," wrote Whitehead, "is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order."

Now we have to switch gears on our bike for a slightly different view of the same phenomena. Let's say God goes to the trouble of incarnating as man.

This changes (?!) everything, in that it now means the Center -- the Unmoved Mover -- is here among us. It is available in a way it never was before: indeed, they will call him Immanuel, which means "God with us" -- and withinus -- no longer just without us. The transcendent becomes immanent that the immanent my become transcendent; or, God becomes bridge that the bridge may actually get somewhere.

Reality and appearances. It seems that our bridge is somehow suspended between these, even though it isn't really possible to anchor anything in illusion. Nevertheless, the tenured have been explicitly attempting to do this ever since Kant, who suspends us, as it were, between the illusory and the unknowable, or between a dream at one end and a crowd of witlessness at the other.

My apologies for this post getting nowhere. We'll leave off with a Whiteheadism:

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

On the Depth and Direction of the Cosmos

As promised, we're going to drill down a little deeper into Ultimate Reality. In order to accompany us on the journey, you will need an ontological drill (AKA language); some quality timelessness with yourself; access to the source of all being; an ordinary deck of playing cards, jokers included; a 4 oz bottle of Elmer's glue (larger is fine); an X-acto knife or sharp scissors; and a sincere heart purified of all egotism, self-deception, and conspiracy indoctrination.

Let's begin!

Um, where?

In the beginning!

Of what?

Oh, let's just say intelligence, since it is obviously the alpha and omega of this entire enterprise. After all, if we aren't first intelligent, we can't even ask from whence intelligence comes. And if it comes from stupidity... well, at least that explains the left.

"Christianity," says White, "affirms that the human person is created in the 'image' and 'likeness' of God,"; or better, "toward the image and likeness."

In or toward; the choice of prepositions makes all the difference. Obviously, "toward" is the more dynamic, connoting telos and finality, or journey and destination.

However, there is really a complementarity between the two: "First, the human being is made in the image of God in a stable way due to his or her nature, as a rational person, having a spiritual soul with incorporeal powers of intelligence and free will."

Intelligence and free will. Here you must recognize that these are two seeds of the same coon: the purpose of free will is to utilize our intelligence to discover truth. If there is no free will, then we are not free to discover truth; and if there is no truth, then freedom is a kind of sick joke that reduces to nothing, AKA limitless stupidity.

If these are two s. of the same c., then the source of our being is not just intelligence but freedom. Or, as it says in 2 Corinthians, "the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." And where there is liberty, there is truth; flip a few pages back, and we read in John that "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Oh, and Jesus then says something rather provocative to his listeners: "you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you." Even more provocative, "You do the deeds of your father." Who is? "He was a murderer from the beginning... there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it."

That is a somewhat mythopoetic way of expressing a metaphysical truth, but clearly, if you are not open to, and grounded in, the source of being-intelligence, then in what are you grounded? For in the words of the Aphorist, Myth is not a premature science of the universe, but a specific dimension of language.

Please take out your bottle of Elmer's glue, and affix your soul to this proper ground. If you have to detach yourself from the false ground, use the X-acto knife.

You will have noticed that when you are attached to the false ground, you are two things rather than one. You are in an imaginary world of paradoxical dualism instead of the real world of orthoparadoxical complementarity:

"The human animal is not two things: a spiritual substance of soul and an animal body, related to one another." No, "there is one composite person who is both body and soul." From where does this most mysterious oneness arise?

Where else? From the upper vertical. The other direction is a non-starter, because there you will find only fragmentation, dispersion, and surfaces with no depth. The featureless homogeneity of Flatland. This is the shadow of God, just as cold is only the absence of heat.

Because there is depth, there is man. It is not the other way around. If it were, then all the depth we experience would be completely illusory. In a way, intelligence is a measure of depth, isn't it? A smart person sees more deeply into the unity of things, just as a genuine artist conveys greater depth than the mediocre one. Likewise a saint and sanctity. Thus,

[T]he human being remains the summit of the visible creation and can become more profoundly so only if he develops a more dynamic, perfect relationship toward God....

[T]he human being was created "in the beginning" to be relational in its own way. The person is made first and foremost to be in relational communion with God....

Man is a combination of melody and harmony, the former going to our uniqueness, the latter to our sameness. Harmony is vertical, whereas a melody (in western music) is a horizontal adventure through the chordal structure.

For our purposes, this chordal structure is "human nature," or universal essences and archetypes. This structure is quintessentially spatial, whereas the melody necessarily plays out in time. For which reason we say that timelessness takes time.

The melody is your Life. But it is also history, which is equally constrained by certain archetypes, for which reason we say that it "repeats." Of course it doesn't literally repeat itself, but it certainly meanders through the same archetypes. It is "going somewhere," or at least supposed to be going there.

The problem -- and this is plainly specified in the owner's manual in Genesis 3 -- is that man tries to dissolve the divine-human partnership and get there on his own -- as if one can enjoy celestial living in the sublunary world without the aid of Heaven! This always fails, because it fails before it even begins.

In other words, it eliminates the ground and measure of success, which is proximity to the absolute. A progressive in the vulgar sense is someone who has obliterated the very ground of progress. His subjective desires become the measure of success, and it's Genesis 3 All Over Again. Cosmic inversion complete.

So: "the human being is precariously located between the visible [horizontal, local] and invisible [vertical, nonlocal] worlds." The whole innerprize falls apart "without a right orientation toward [our] true homeland and a genuine knowledge of God."

Now, remove your deck of cards. Pick a card, any card. The deck is you, the card your particular action. Was the action free, or was it determined? Yes and no, for in the words of the Aphorist, sin shuffles the deck.

Matter + Math ≠ Reality

Yesterday I didn't get enough sleep because of staying up so late for the World Series on Sunday night. This morning I caught up with my sleep, but now it's too late to post.

Furthermore, being that the Gagdad constitution is a finicky contraption, I don't respond well to deviations in my rut. So, while I theoretically slept enough, I can't say I'm in shape to get behind the wheel of the cosmic bus. And yet, if I don't, then I feel as if the course of cosmic evolution will have been stalled for another 24 hours. Sad!

We were talking about exactly when man became (or becomes) Man -- or rather, examining that border between animal and person. As soon as you think about it, you realize there can't be a border, or that the border is a wall: there are animals and there are men, with no species in between. [Insert Hollywood sexual predator joke here.]

Yes, yes, there is continuity. But there is simply no common measure between animal and human minds. And when I say no common measure, I mean that absolutely literally: that certain human capacities not only surpass animality, but transcend matter altogether.

It's analogous to Flatland, in which two-dimensional beings have no way to comprehend three-dimensional ones. Nor, for that matter, will all the two-dimensional landscapes in the world add up to three dimensions. More generally, quality cannot be reduced to quantity (nor -- and for the same reason! -- subject to object).

This reminds me of the argument from causation: just as no amount of proximate or even ultimate causes adds up to the First Cause, no amount of planes adds up to a 3D space. Likewise, all the animal intelligence in the world doesn't add up to what a child spontaneously knows (i.e., essences).

There is something in the human being that absolutely transcends his material and animal antecedents. What is this something?

Our shorthand way of talking about it is with reference to a soul. Although a perfectly adequate word, it has gradually become saturated with various colloquial or agenda-driven connotations, such that it no longer means what it is supposed to mean, i.e., the form of the body. In other words, a once technical term has devolved to a kind of folk expression, similar to what has happened to the words "marriage," "man," "woman," "liberal," etc.

Jumping ahead a bit, White argues that "the ultimate foundation of reality is both personal and interrelational." And "if this is the primary truth that is behind all other truths, then it casts a theological light upon all else that exists." That's a bold statement. Can we prove it? (Yes, but in the next post.)

Recall what was said above about the first cause. The first cause of three-dimensional space cannot be the line or point, even if space is constituted by an infinite number of these.

Analogously, the first cause of the person cannot in principle be anything impersonal. The materialist will no doubt argue that this is because there is really no such thing as persons -- that what we call persons are just animals with a few more tricks. Perhaps. [Insert Frederica Wilson joke here.]

Although tempting -- the prospect of fine insultainment always is -- I'm in no mood to get into an argument with a materialist this morning. Besides, animals don't argue, and certainly not over the truth of reality. They bite, or mark territory, or fling poo, or become journalists (but I repeat myself), or run for congress, or whatever.

"Here then we can see a fundamental truth of the cosmos: there is a relational character to the hierarchy of being. The nonliving things exist for or are relative to the living things." Emphasis mine. Why? Because I want to emphasize 1) the verticality of it all, and 2) that this verticality cannot under any stretch of the imagination be explained in a bottom-up manner.

In other words, no amount of tenure adds up to even a particle of truth -- just as no amount of MSM reporting can ever exit the libubble narrative. Seriously. That's a joke, but a grievous one that, if you get it, should make you laugh and weep and vomit simultaneously -- assuming you haven't abandoned your soul, or your soul hasn't already departed in disgust.

Oh, it happen. It do happen.

The human being who "turns in on itself in pride and rejection of God" is vulnerable to becoming a "spiritually empty image," i.e., a container with no content. An empty barrel, you might say.

But in a properly bright-side up world, "the human being is meant to be a special 'location' of grace in the cosmos, where the spiritual gifts of God descend through human reason and human freedom," thus instantiating "a human common life based upon truth, moral goodness, and beauty" (White).

We'll try to drill down a little deeper into all of this in the next post...

The Throbbing Novelty of the Cosmos Hurtling Toward a New Post

Back when I was writing the book, I remember pondering the question of when man first appeared -- or appears, since it must recur in eachuvus -- in creation. But only for about five years or so. I read everything I could find that addressed it from an evolutionary, or anthropological, or genetic perspective, but still, there is an inevitable gap.

And when I say "inevitable," that is not a God-of-the-gaps dodge. Rather, it is true in principle, because man is something utterly sui generis, or unique, in all of creation. Although some antecedents can help account for man in retrospect, absolutely nothing could have predicted him. For how can one predict the radically novel? If one could, it wouldn't be novel.

To back up a bit, the same principle applies to existence-as-such (Existence) and to life-as-such (Life), in that both are necessarily presumed by science, not explained by it. Again, this is not a dodge: to ask why there is something instead of nothing is not a scientific question.

Although a more controversial assertion, it is also not (ultimately) a scientific question to ask about the origins of Life. Even if we could pinpoint the time and circumstances coinciding with its emergence, this still wouldn't account for the nature of Life, which is again entirely novel.

Indeed, one might say it is novelty itself. With Life we now have sensation, awareness, perception, interiority, presence, subject, each beyond the reach of even the most subtle materialism. A "science of the interior?" Yes, there is one, but it has nothing to do with science as we know it, but rather, with metaphysics.

Whitehead was all over this, so he was a big help. He thought about these ultimate issues in the Correct way, more or less. He suggests that Life "is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe."

Life, you might say, is the life of the cosmic party. Instead of just going around in circles, it always aims beyond itself and thus has a circular pattern: "the aim is always beyond the attained fact. The goal is some type of perfected things," whereas "inorganic nature is characterized by its acceptance of matter of fact." Borr-rring.

Do you see the revolution? With Life, there is now a wedge between fact-as-fact and fact-as-aim, or process. All of a sudden Time takes on primary importance. By which I do not mean mere chronological duration, i.e., One Damn Thing After Another, but events tied together by an inner coherence from present --> future. For a living system is an anticipatory system, and what is that?! In other words, the now is now oriented toward the great not-yet. Here is where that thing called Hope first elbows its way into creation.

"In nature, the soil rests, while the root of the plant pursues the sources of its refreshment" (Whitehead). That is a typical example of Whitehead's epigramatical pithiness, but it makes me think of how the same image applies to the mind or spirit. Obviously, the mind does not seek its refreshment in matter, unless you are seriously autistic. Rather, it grows upward and inward, ultimately seeking its refreshment in... you geist it!

We'll come back to that later.

What I really want to say is right here in a marvelous marginalia I must have written over 30 years ago, possibly a direct quote of AWN: the creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurtling itself into a new transcendent fact.

Whitehead goes on to say that higher animals seem to be "personal," in the sense that they are organized around a kind of inner center: "Thus in one sense a dog is a 'person,' and in another sense he is a non-personal society." Conversely, lower animals "seem to lack the dominance of [a] personal society," such that a tree, for example, "is a democracy."

I don't know about that. A tree must nevertheless cohere around some nonlocal essence, or it would dissolve into its constituents, as it does upon death. What really sets man apart from the trees -- some men, anyway -- is a conscious hierarchy, or better, hierarchy-become-conscious. Each of us is the king of his own castle, master of his domain.

Or ought to be, anyway. A sick person -- say, Dirty Harvey -- is indeed a democracy, in which the lowest impulse has the same rights as the noblest ideal. (If he has any ideals left -- in other words, if the bottom-up revolution hasn't been complete.)

By the way, you will have noticed how the Founders applied this same principle to politics, such that our system is neither a top-down aristocracy nor a bottom-up democracy. If it were the latter, we could vote for slavery, or for socialized medicine, or for limits on free speech.

D'oh!

We're getting awfully far afield this morning, for which I apologize. But this is the New Regime, and you might even say that it is more democratic than the old one, in that I'm simply allowing all the voices in my head a chance to speak. So there won't be as much coherence, or at least posts may not wrap themselves up as tidily as before.

Let me just get back to what started this post to begin with, which is a passage in White about the origins of man. He speaks of how "there is a kind of historical continuity between non-living things and living things, but also a differentiation and progression from one kind of reality to another, up the scale of perfection." (Recall the continuous/discontinuous chapters within the bʘʘk, and indeed of the b↻↺k itself.)

Once Life appears, there is a kind of "foundation for the emergence in human beings of specifically rational, spiritual activities of language and complex technology." Again, this emergence of human personhood cannot be reduced to antecedents, but is a Novel Thing that is "inserted," so to speak, in this new space:

At a given time, then, we can postulate that due to a new initiative of God, animals were elevated to a higher level. God began to create spiritual souls in human animals, and so the human adventure begins. There was a passage from the "merely animal" world of homo sapiens to the specifically spiritual world of the human person.

This is the passage where God initiated the new project of humanity, by creating the spiritual soul, and infusing it as the "form of the body" in what constituted the first human beings. (We might hypothesize that this took place around 50,000 years ago, given the evidence of human culture provided by paleontology.)

Agreed! What could go wrong? A note in the margin says Fall situated here. If I know myself, it must mean that if man appears at around noon, 50,000 years ago, then the fall occurs at around 12:01 PM.

The Adult is a Myth of the Child, and Vice Versa

I think that for the time being I'm just going to continue ranting about whatever pops into my mind.

I know: how is this different from the previous 3,000 posts?

Well, sometimes, without even gnosising, I start to put pressure on mysoph to stick with a certain subject or do things in a specific way. Come to think of it, it reminds me of a musician who just loves playing whatever comes into his instrument, but then accidentally has a hit song. Then, for the rest of his life he not only has to play that stupid song, but do so in the same way every night.

This is why I admire, say, Van Morrison. He's had some accidental hits along the way, including Gloria and Moondance. To this day he still plays them in concert, but always with different arrangements, tempos, instrumentation, solos, and styles -- anything from jazz to country & western. What a nightmare to be trapped in a single version! That's not music, it's architecture.

Sour grapes, Bob? I don't think so. My only concern is that there must be a fair number of people who would benefit from the blog but will never know of its existence. If I were more ambitious -- and grandiose -- then maybe I would try reach them.

But then I'd have to deal with the far greater number of people for whom the blog is not intended -- not just trolls, but normals. I can't function with those people in my head. Rather, it only works if I pull out all the stops and let it flow where it will. (For example, over at Instapundit I will occasionally make a religious comment, which only ends up offending the other mostly religious commenters. All good people no doubt, but normals through and through.)

So, today's rant will be about... I have no idea! I have a few notes to myself... let's see. The other day I was looking for a particular Aphorism, and as usual, was arrested by a hundred others I wasn't looking for. For example, The adult is a myth of the child.

Think about that: when you were a child, didn't you think of grown-ups as having all the answers and having everything under control? But how many grown-ups do you know who have all answers and have everything under control?

What an excellent cosmic joke! Look at Hollywood. Are there any adults there at all? It's easy to point to Dirty Harvey as the infant in the room, but that's just a simplistic projection. The whole place is filled with infants, just different kinds. It takes two to enact a psychic dance. Not to blame the victims, but there actually is such a thing a strong woman who would have kicked him so hard in the balls he would have choked on them.

Maybe it's easy for me to say, since I don't have a daughter. But if I did, and she were in that situation, she would hear her father's voice saying Field goal time. Kick him in the balls!

Now, just because the adult is a myth of the child, it doesn't mean there are no adults. Even so, think of how God had to get personally involved and send an actual adult down for our edification. A real man. The real man -- not just in terms of content, but especially in terms of form.

Indeed, that is the big difference: if Christ were only about the content, then he would be similar to any other teacher or prophet with some good ideas to relate. But Christ is relationship as such. Wha?

God, says White, "is a mystery of relational persons.... Thus, the ultimate foundation of all reality is both personal and interrelational. If this is the primary truth that is behind all other truths, then it casts a theological light upon all else that exists," such that "the physical cosmos ultimately exists for spiritual persons and for relational love."

This is to dis-invert the cosmos and put it back right-side up: "The nonliving things exist for or are relative to the living things" (emphasis mine). This is not a myth -- not of a child or anyone else. Rather, the alternatives are, in all their metamythological translunacy.

In a comment to yesterday's post I mentioned that man is a bridge, not a destiny. White agrees that "The human being is the 'bridge' between the spiritual and the physical world in a twofold way." Here we can see how the earliest Christians committed anticipatory plagiarism against me:

In the ascendent [↑] direction, the physical world mounts up toward God, or "returns" to God through human actions of knowledge and love.... In the descending [↓] direction, man is the "place" that the spiritual world is made visible or manifest in the cosmos.

Ultimately, then, "the human being is meant to be a special 'location' of grace in the cosmos, where the spiritual gifts of God descend through human reason and human freedom," into "a human common life based upon truth, moral goodness, and beauty."

And that is no myth, although children of the dark imagine it so.

What Does It Say It Is? Or, Who Do You Say I Am?

Yesterday it occurred to me that a liberal who is truly interested in equality would, more than anyone else, want children to benefit from a religious education, being that a religiously informed soul is one of the great equalizers.

But that is in the ideal world. In the real world, liberals have no interest in equality (envy is another matter), while religion as often as not stultifies the intellect.

Somewhere there is a note dashed off to myself. Here: "absolutism protects the below average & ungifted, allowing them to know and assimilate truths they could never acquire independently."

The sense of "absolutism" used here has nothing directly to do with politics, but rather, metaphysics. I was thinking of Schuon, who said something to the effect that if you must label him, then call him an Absolutist, since his first principle is knowledge of the Absolute and the human consequences flowing therefrom -- moral, social, metaphysical, and mystical.

If you fail to give children a sense of the absolute -- worse yet, take it away! -- then they will spend the rest of their lives searching for it, running from it, or pretending they already have it. Nor is it possible to advance Godward without a theological vocabulary that includes words like grace, atonement, sanctity, demon, logos, etc. It would be like trying to practice science without a vocabulary of concepts such as quantity, measurement, and law.

Marx is undoubtedly the most catastrophic exemplar of someone absolutely secure in his possession of a false absolute. Everything else is commentary, right down to today's headline, whatever it may be. In other words, the contemporary left carries on the tradition of being crocktroops of the false absolute -- or of absolute relativism.

This absolute relativism is the very quintessence of metaphysical impossibility. Unless you understand this literally, then you haven't understood it at all. You must understand that the left is animated by a fantasy of what never was and can never be. Ever. Period.

Coincidentally, a deep awareness of the distinction between Absolute and false absolute (or absolute relativism) is precisely what motivated St. John Paul in his struggle against communism. The outer or surface political struggle was just the side effect of an infinitely deeper and inner metaphysical one. Like secular saint Breitbart, he knew that politics is far downstream from culture, and that it was necessary to penetrate to the deep structure of culture to generate real change and progress. And hope. The proper and permissible kind.

Reality is a person or it is nothing. Scientism, of course, has the virtue of clarity. But even an unclear sense of God (so long as it isn't upside-down, as in the case of Islamists) is superior to clear error.

For JP2, it came down to person or matter. His first principle is the former, while Marx's is the latter. Ultimate reality is a person, or even the very possibility of personhood.

Obviously there is no possibility of personhood in materialism; rather, in this view, persons are simply side effects of matter and may be treated as such. From Lenin to Bernie Sanders, human beings are just bags of wet cement to be arranged this way or that by the state. In this context, a fascist is anyone with rudimentary taste and decency.

Along these lines, another note to myself: every so-called revolution is a counter-revolutution. Specifically, it is a reactionary rejection of Christ (or the meta-cosmic Person, to keep things ecumenical). For truly truly truly (or truly³), there is and can be no progress beyond the recognition of Absolute-as-Person. Who do you say that I AM is always the relevant question.

Another note, this one a little more cryptic: Apartheid of: class, ideology, religion.

If you think South Africa was an apartheid state, try being an absolutist on a liberal campus (or newsroom), where only the false absolute is permitted. What is the Leftopolis but a homeland for mediocrities, misfits, malcontents, and other assorted materialists, all convinced they have the Answer? This tribe does't circumcise. Rather, decapitate.

The liberal unintelligentsia does not represent the disadvantaged, but rather, consists of emissaries from the land of bad ideas; and bad ideas have a disproportionately catastrophic impact on the poor and disadvantaged, whose margin of delusion is much narrower than it is for a wealthy person. No one is crazier, for example, than Lawrence O'Donnell, but he can afford it. As can Bernie Sander, Keith Olbermann, Nancy Pelosi, etc.

You will have noticed that Satan is far too intelligent, let alone subtle, to be a materialist. However, he has no compunction about enlisting them into his service.

ProAM-tip: don't trust people, including me or Petey, who try to convince you of anything. Rather, trust what is self-evident, luminous, and intelligible -- that little truth which lights the way to infinitely more truth. Chase Truth until He catches you, and then keep chasing.

In each moment, each person is capable of possessing the truths that matter. --The Aphorist

Thursday Morning Metaphysical Rant

Hello. This isn't part of the rant. Rather, the rant is now over, and I am now identifying it as one. A Get off my celestial lawn! moment, you might say. Getting stuff off my chest, AKA externalizing the fourth chakra. Venting the nonlocal spleen. Perhaps I should do it more often. After all, it's only how I really feel:

This should not be a controversial statement, but a first principle of any intelligent human being -- or a human being who endeavors to exercise his intelligence to the fullest: "Man by definition is a center, or 'the center' in a given universe" (Schuon).

Let's leave other hypothetical universes to the side, and restrict ourselves to this one. In this cosmos man is central, which is to say, Pontifex Maximus: not so much the Bridge Builder as the bridge itself.

Which we must simultaneously build. Irreducible orthoparadox, you see. How to put it... We are the bridge we construct in order to get from here to there. Not a horizontal there but a vertical one. In short, man is a vertical bridge, or a bridge of verticality to the father shore.

Better yet, just look at the caption of the icon in the sidebar: Your life is a path for the Spirit to pass from periphery to center. Thoughts and choices -- truth and virtue -- are the paving stones. To which I would add beauty, each integrated with and reflecting the others.

Anticipating objections, if man is not central, who or what is? Is there a greater being we might consult, one who "contains" us or puts us in context?

Well, yes and no. Of course there are men who are greater than we are, but they are men nevertheless. To the extent that they are greater, it is because they are more central, more integrated, more actualized. They do not belong to a different species, although it sometimes seems that way. They are like men, only better. Others are like men, only worse. There are always two possible perspectives on the worstovus: subhuman? Or all too human?

Which highlights the verticality of it all. In the absence of verticality there is no better or worse, just the multicultural relativistic mush of the left. I don't mind that they don't believe in superior people and civilizations, only that they want to outlaw them (even while privileging the worst).

We're getting a little far afield, but verticality and centrality are two sides of the same reality. In a purely horizontal universe, it would of course be absurd to suggest that man -- or anything else -- is central. Therefore, the materialist is correct that there is no center in the context of materialism. But once the materialist makes such a universal statement, he has actually left materialism behind and has placed himself at the center of creation in spite of himsoph (or sophistry, to be exact).

Now we see that verticality and centrality have something to do with universality. I'm just going to throw all my cards on the table and say that these three in turn relate to eternity, infinitude, personhood, and the Absolute Subject, AKA God. None of these categories can stand alone -- which is why it is strictly impossible to be a consistent atheist, but that is a slightly different argument. Let's stay focused on this scattershot rant.

The Absolute Subject is the only conceivable principle that ties the cosmos together. Put conversely, remove or deny the A.S. and everything falls apart: we are well and truly banished to the periphery. Not even the periphery, because that presumes a center. Unending alienation in an abyss of blind nothingness -- like being stuck in a liberal university forever, with no possibility of graduation. Or an eternal waiting room with CNN droning in the background. There are no words. Only a bone-rattling cry of existential pain from abdomen to larynx to void:

But there are words, and here again, words not only connect us to the center, but are its emanation. Not for nothing does man get to name the animals. Why? Well, for starters because they are relative to us, as periphery is to center. Note that (maybe) the most degrading effect of metaphysical Darwinism is to invert this reality, and to render man relative to the beasts! Which simply cannot be.

Think about it, genius: to even say the word "Darwinism" is to have transcended Darwinism. In so doing, you have placed yourself at the center of creation, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it, short of giving yourself a lobotomy and eating your neighbor. If you're an agglomeration of selfish genes, start acting like it, hypocrite! Don't partake of the detritus of Christian civilization while pretending your withered soul can subsist on the holy communion of sacred matter.

It's like the cult of Global Warming: I'll believe it when beachfront property is worth as much as a mobile home in Death Valley. Likewise, I'll believe in metaphysical Darwinism when liberals start behaving like uncivilized beasts.

Right. Let me put that in a different way.

Obviously the barbarians of the left place themselves at the center, but in the manner of the infant, who is also the center of the universe. Most of my readers probably have children, or at least were once children themselves. It is right and proper that we nourish the delusions of His Majesty the Baby, and treat him as the center of the world. We do this so he can eventually outgrow the delusion, and see that each person is a representative of the same center.

Two errors: deny him this delusion, or indulge it to excess, and the baby will spend the rest of his life in search of the Lost Entitlement. You will have created a monster. In other words, a liberal.

Bottom line for today:

"God became man that man might become God": the absolute Subject, perfect in Itself, descended into contingency so that contingency could be reintegrated into the perfection of the absolute Subject. "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life": Christ identifies himself with the divine Subjectivity, which "is incarnated" in the world of contingency, in conformity with the saving tendency of the Sovereign Good....

God is intrinsically "I"; He is "He" only extrinsically and from man's vantage point.... God is the only and perfect Subject and His intent is to reintegrate the multiple and imperfect subjects...

Metaphysical Dunning-Kruger & the Elephant in the Cosmos

The other day I saw a headline on Drudge to the effect that American children are more anxious than ever. I have no idea if this is true, but I believe it. But first we have to define our terms.

Now, anxiety as such is prima facie evidence of an un- or even disintegrated mind. However, one must first determine whether the lack of integration is a cause or an effect.

For example, one may have a hormonal disturbance that causes a lack of psychic integration, which then causes anxiety. Or, think of someone with incipient Alzheimer's disease: as the mind begins to unravel, the person will start to experience anxiety, persecution, and even paranoia.

This is quite different from a primary diagnosis of anxiety. Which is also very different from normal and even necessary anxiety. Frankly, most people aren't nearly anxious enough. Or, they are anxious about the wrong things. Think of the anti-Trump hysterics. They are certainly anxious and definitely in need of treatment. But not for the Trump hysteria. Rather, they need to find out what the Trump hysteria is concealing.

We've all had that One Great Teacher, right? My own esteemed Professor Worthwhile once said... I actually have my old lecture notes hidden away somewhere, so I bet I could find the exact reference.

In any event, he said that with an anxious patient, always assume (once purely biochemical causes are ruled out) there is something in their life they're Not Paying Attention To. The anxiety is a consequence of the Elephant in the Room which they are ignoring, avoiding, repressing, or otherwise pretending doesn't exist. It is the Thing that isn't integrated but needs to be.

Some of the biggest things can't be integrated, so they require the most pretending. For example, Death. Wait. Is this true? That Death can't be integrated? Just this morning, while randomly bumping around the internet, I was reading of Lou Reed's death:

I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou's as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn't afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life -- so beautiful, painful and dazzling -- does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.

For Christians, Jesus is meant to be the final cure for death anxiety, such that death is swallowed by life instead of vice versa. We'll return to this idea -- or real-idea -- later.

For the moment, let's play with this notion that anxiety and integration are inversely related. A rock, for example, is completely integrated and therefore has no anxiety. But it's easy to be integrated if you're a rock, for what is there to integrate? The reason why man is the most anxious critter in all of creation is that he has the most to integrate. Loose ends everywhere!

Indeed, man's very reason for being is the integration of everything. It's our privilege and our burden. That's what you call a Tall Order, but it is nevertheless the case, and everyone knows it, even if most pretend otherwise. Despite the pretense, it is the Prime Directive (or at least one dimension of it).

Alert readers will have noticed a zinger by Thomas Aquinas at the top of the comment box: Since a soul can know all things, in a way it is all things, and thus it is possible for the completeness of the universe to exist in one thing.

This is just another way of saying that man is in the image of the Creator, who is the Complete Person. Absent the Complete Person, no completeness of any kind would be conceivable, much less attainable, on our end. The very idea of the cosmic area rug would be a childish dream.

That's the good news. The bad news is that we are driven by a kind of anxiety until we fulfill our reason for being. Which can be accomplished in various ways, but not without God's help. For one thing, just imagine the futility of pretending a perfect integration that excludes God. Talk about ignoring the elephant in the cosmos!

Revelation is here to assure that every soul can attain this integration, regardless of various terrestrial contingencies -- existential, cultural, historical, etc. Nevertheless, unlike God, we are always trailed by shadows of the nothingness from which we were gratuitously plucked. That would be the ultimate source of our anxiety. IMO.

White makes this very point in The Light of Christ:

[T]he human being is created toward or unto the image of God because this image is not only static but ultimately dynamic.... [T]he human being remains the summit of the visible creation and can become more profoundly so only if he develops a more dynamic, perfect relationship toward God.

However. I want to say: insert Fall here. In other words, all the Trouble is located right here, in the literally infinite space between man and God. Call it what you will, but there is room here aplenty for every kind of mischief. Or just say History.

Gosh. It's one of those mornings that I have much more to say than the ability to say it. I'm trying to wrap my mind around something that is quite obviously larger than myself, but you can't swallow an elephant in one bite. Perhaps if I had all day. In this circumstance I have but one option.

Help, Mr. Schuon, help!

"Knowledge is total or integral to the extent that its object is the most essential and thus the most real" (emphasis mine).

This most essential and real object is none other than the Elephant in -- and beyond -- the Cosmos. When we say "everything is relative," what we mean is that everything is relative to this Elephant, without which there would be no relativity at all, just a kind of absolute mush. A left with no right.

Intelligence gives rise to "the awareness of our superiority in relation to those who do not know how to discern" (discernment between the real and unreal being the function of intelligence).

However, one of the first fruits of this intelligence is awareness of the relativity of our superiority, in that it is either relative to the Elephant, or it is Nothing at All (except for maybe the anxiety of being permanently sealed in total ignorance and futility).

And of course, many people are far too stupid or ignorant to understand how stupid or ignorant they are. Metaphysical Dunning Kruger is a real thing.

Here is our omega for today, which will be tomorrow's alpha: "The human vocation is to realize that which is man's reason for being: a projection of God, and therefore a bridge between earth and Heaven."

There is degree of anxiety so long as we are suspended on this rickety bridge called life.

Dirty Harvey and the Image of God

We are in the midst of a discussion of the human telos, which, if I am not mistaken, has something to do with Harvey Weinstein.

Why Dirty Harvey? Because even liberals seem to understand that he is a poor example of humanness. That being the case, something must have gone wrong in his development; something must have prevented him from being the Harvey God intended him to be.

Again, the two operative words are integration and actualization. And as usual, as soon as I start thinking about a subject, books fall into my hands that relate to the same subject. I wonder about that: is it just because my preoccupations are so vague and universal that everything speaks to them? In that case, what looks like synchronicity is just inevitability in disguise.

I don't know. We can never see beneath the veil on this side of the rug. But I just started reading a seemingly unrelated book that has an awful lot about integration -- specifically, the metacosmic integration made possible by Christ. Indeed, if Christ is who believers say he is, then he is in principle the last word in both integration and actualization. Or first and last, which is to say, archetype and fulfillment.

Now, man must love and will the good; indeed, willing the good is a function of loving it, which "completes or perfects the human being teleologically." We must also love truth, such that real knowledge is another form of teleological completion or perfection.

In any event, we can see that what we "must do" -- i.e., what is necessary for man -- is very much a function of our purpose. Because there are things that we cannot not be, there are things we should not fail to know and do.

The "Catholic intellectual vocation," says White, calls its practitioners "to be people of a holistic integrity." Off the top of my head, this may be what most distinguishes us from the animals: they too should be integrated, but they can never attain a holistic integration.

A dog, for example, may achieve a perfect integration with its archetype, and thus be honored by the Westminster Kennel Club. But a dog is nevertheless enclosed in its archetype. There is nothing holistic about it, in the sense of being ordered to, and integrated with, the Whole.

Not so with man. Why? Because our archetype is ultimately the Godman, being that we were created in the Image and Likeness of the Absolute.

In this context, "microcosmos" is too confining a word. "Micro-theos" is more like it, so long as we don't misunderstand the implications. Dirty Harvey, for example, certainly pretended to be a "micro-god." Big difference. Still, we need to know why it is so different, and why his approach is intrinsically deviant, i.e., what one mustn't do.

"Every facet of our life needs to come progressively into the light of Christ," so that "we may live in a more truly human and divine way," the one being a reflection of the other:

When human beings are integrated morally, intellectually, and spiritually, their intellectual concerns and their moral patterns of life cohere. Their artistic sense and their capacity for self-giving are united. Their forms of recreation and rest are in harmony with their sense of worship and commitment. Their relationships of human love are deeply related to their aspiration to divine love (emphases mine).

What this really amounts to is an integration that is both vertical and horizontal; or better, horizontality integrated with verticality. Horizontality inevitably involves an element of contingency. Indeed, if there were no verticality then man would be condemned to either a pure horizontal contingency or an unyielding determinism. Only our verticality lifts us from these twin hells. Transcendence is always there amidst our immanence.

But it is not enough for man to merely be free; rather, freedom in the absence of a telos is just nihilism by another name. Dirty Harvey's worldly power made him "free" to engage in all sorts of intrinsic transgressions. And don't think for one moment that thousands of other reptilian Hollywood denizens don't want to be just like Harvey! They just don't want to get caught, that's all.

For example, in this morning's jolt, Jim Geraghty writes that

For decades, the stars and powerful players of Hollywood instructed us about which political candidates deserved election. They told us which causes were worthy of support and which ones needed to be opposed. In their works and in their speeches, they told us how to be a better person.

(!)

That's the key: our moral superiors in Hollywood don't just tell us whom to vote for and what policies to support, but how to be better human beings. And you cannot presume to know what is better without an implicit standard of what is best, i.e., without a telos. What -- or who -- is their telos? They don't really ever say, but it's usually someone who is Really Brave, by which they mean someone who Stands Up to Republicans and all they represent. In short, someone like Dirty Harvey, who is a bully for the left, which absolves the rest of his bullying. Or did, until a week ago.

But real integration -- and therefore integrity -- is "rare in the world today, where we are constantly confronted with stories about morally divided lives.... De-Christianization leads to re-paganization. We begin to serve multiple gods and suffer the division [read: dis-integration] of our selves. Without the grace of Christ, the integration of the human person is made more difficult, and even on many levels impossible" (emphasis mine).

I think you can look at this in two ways: yes, without the grace of Christ, integration on many levels is impossible. But you can turn it around, such that "integration of many levels" is the grace of Christ, precisely. That such integration is even possible, let alone actualized, is nothing less than the Trinity in action, call it what you will.

For In the Beginning are the uncreated Persons of the Trinity. It is that ultimate harmony of which we are the image and likeness.

I don't mean to leave you hanging, but that's as far as I've gotten in the book. However, I'm also rereading Schuon's Roots of the Human Condition, which not only complements the above, but provides an even deeper... integration.

The title provides a hint, doesn't it? Roots of the human condition. You might say that our task herebelow is to trace the latter up into the former, i.e., to scamper up that venerable Tree with Roots Aloft and Branches Down Below.

Example. Okay,

To know, to will, to love: this is man's whole nature and consequently it is his whole vocation and duty. To know totally, to will freely, to love nobly; or in other words: to know the Absolute..., to will what is demanded of us by virtue of this knowledge; and to love both the true and the good, and that which maintains them here below; thus to love the beautiful which leads to them.

That's a tall order, but is it really? Eh, I don't think so. Seems like the bare minimum. Indeed, it should "come naturally" (or supernaturally naturally, to be precise) to us, just as eating grass comes naturally to an herbivore. In order for it to not come naturally, something must get in the way. What could that be? Who or what is trying to prevent us from being ourselves, i.e., from actualization of our archetype and integration with our telos? More on that later. Because we're outta time.

Let's just say that Reality -- ultimate Reality -- is not actually that complicated. Rather, we are. Also the world, what with its crosscurrents of turbulence, contingency, karma, fluctuation, relativity, finitude, and other people. The Conspiracy.

Nevertheless.

"Intelligence is the perception of a reality," which is ultimately rooted in "the perception of the Real as such" (emphasis mine). Because we can know, Reality Is; but this still doesn't go far enough. For Being Is, and Being is a communion of Persons characterized by love, truth, and beauty. And we are not other than That.

The Intelligent Stupidity and Well Adjusted Insanity of the Left

The infrequency of posting over the past week isn't due to an absence of ideas or inspiration -- AKA coonstipation -- just lack of time.

The irregularity does, however, make the continuity of logorrhea more of a challenge -- like going back to sleep and trying to resume the dream one was having. I can do that sometimes. Just not after a week.

What was the dream? Something about how to tell if conservative liberals are no better than illiberal leftists who use politics as a way to manage their psyche (mainly by projecting hatred and other impulses and emotions into conservatives). Although it's always best to deal with left wing arguments on the merits (in a face-to-face setting), this doesn't mean we can't afterwards examine leftism on a deeper level and laugh behind their backs.

As we've discussed in the past, leftism is a collective psychological defense rooted in primitive mechanisms such as denial, splitting, projection, delusion, fantasy, acting out, and even hallucination (what else to call it when someone looks at our president and sincerely "sees" a racist, or Russian spy, or anti-Semite?).

What I mean is that, if I'm having a conversation with a leftist, I don't just tell him to his face that he's crazy, or a retard, or needs to grow up. That would be rude. Nor do I like to play the Psychologist Card, because that is one of the tricks of the left. However, it doesn't mean that privately I don't regard the ineducable leftist as more in need of psychotherapy than dialectic.

In this regard, we want to do the opposite of the left, in that they dismiss conservative arguments by simply attacking our motives -- for example, we are opposed to affirmative action because we are White Supremacists, or don't accept AGW hysteria because we Hate Science. Much progress could be made in "healing our divisions" if the left would simply deal with our arguments on the merits instead of habitually accusing us of that which they are unconsciously guilty.

People who condemn imaginary motives may or may not be correct on this or that policy, but they are certainly immature, and immaturity is never the answer (and soon becomes the problem).

For example, a group of emotionally stunted liberals may "believe in free speech" as much as you or I. But this doesn't for one moment prevent them from violently prohibiting opinions they don't like, because of the nature of splitting. Splitting is a defense mechanism that allows one to simultaneously believe two opposite theses without any cognitive dissonance, or even any real awareness that one is being illogical.

To back up a bit, you might say that mature defense mechanisms are rooted in a horizontal division between the conscious and unconscious mind, whereas primitive defense mechanisms are a result of vertical splits that extend from the conscious into the unconscious. We've all heard of "multiple personality disorder," which is simply an extreme case of vertical splitting, in which the sub-personalities are autonomous and split off from one another.

But this is simply an extreme case of a much more common and mundane phenomenon. It's what humans do. Think, for example, of all the Hollywood feminists who, until a few days ago, loved Harvey Weinstein (HT American Digest). Now, if your mind is whole and integrated, then it is impossible to simultaneously "respect women" and "love Harvey." But with splitting, all things are possible!

Think of it: how can you detest Christopher Columbus, even while your public detestation is an outgrowth of the European values he brought to this erstwhile bleeding-edge world of Stone Age barbarism? Or, how can Black Lives matter to you, when your movement will result in thousands more blacks being murdered by other blacks?

Indeed, how can you protest the very flag that symbolizes the sacred right to petition government for the redress of grievances? Go ahead! Petition away! But why do so in a way that severs the limb you're protesting on? Granted, these protesters may well be borderline retarded. But that is no excuse for being crazy. Plenty of people with IQs lower than 85 are capable of understanding principles. Children certainly are (emotionally healthy children, I mean).

The other day it occurred to me that there are two main kinds of liberal: there are those who are susceptible to correction (as indeed was I), and those who are absolutely fixed in their beliefs -- who cannot benefit from any amount of fact, logic, information, or experience, no matter how brutal the mugging.

So, what explains the difference? It is certainly not a function of intelligence, or there would be no intelligent leftists such as Noam Chomsky, nor the stampeding herd of tenured lemmings more generally. Chomsky may be a genius for all I know, but this does nothing to prevent him from being a malignant retard. How is this possible?

Well, if the concept of vertical splitting didn't exist, then we'd have to invent something like it to explain someone like Chomsky. In a well-worn analogy, think of the mind as a wristwatch. We can observe the movement of the hands and changing of the date, but we have no idea why the actions are taking place. The best we can do is propose a theory that explains the phenomena. But we can never actually observe the causes beneath the phenomena, for subjectivity by definition cannot be objectified.

In this context, the concept of splitting is a way to imagine how a person can harbor mutually contradictory ideas. How, for example, is it possible for a Catholic to be a leftist? In (mere) reality it isn't possible, but that hardly prevents it from happening. Examples abound: Nancy Pelosi. Ted Kennedy. Joe Biden. Pope Francis.

You may argue that these people aren't mentally ill. Okay. But how exactly do you define mental illness? Mental illness, in my opinion, cannot be defined socially: for example, a well-adjusted, conflict-free Nazi or native American cannibal who fits in well with all the other Nazis and cannibals is nevertheless sick. But by what standard?

Ironically, psychology cannot answer the question, because it long ago drained the multicultural Koolaid to the dregs, so Who Are We To Judge? In this inverted world, judgment and discrimination based upon objective and universal standards is evil, such that the healthy person is rendered sick. Nice trick!

There is a bill in California that will make it against the law -- punishable even by prison -- to Misgender someone. In other words (to paraphrase Ace of Spades) it will be a crime for us to properly gender someone who misgenders himself.

As we've discussed before, there is rebellion and there is inversion, the latter far more pernicious than the former. The modern left has gone all-in for inversion -- for things that cannot be and mustn't be, the former going to ontology, the latter to morality; and if your ontology is wrong, then your conscience will follow.

Now, back to our definition of mental health. I dwelled on this question in the bʘʘK, but only after about two seconds of cogitation. In other words, the answer just popped into my head, but even so, I've never come up with a better one since then.

Two words: integration. And actualization. Despite the brevity, these are full of implications. Take the first, for example: the cure for the splitting described above is integration. And what is the cure for immaturity more generally? Well, immaturity presupposes maturity, maturity presupposes a developmental telos, and a telos presupposes an objective end of humanness, AKA actualization of an archetype.

So, what is this objective end? Note that the left would dismiss the question as either meaningless or pernicious. We'll pick up the thread tomorrow. If I wake up early enough. If not, then Friday.

Help Wanted: External Enemy, Must be Existential Threat

We'll start with some arresting passages from Who Are We?, until one engages my blogging gear and we take off from there. Maybe we can even find their hidden unity and wrap them all together.

National interests derive from national identity. We have to know who we are before we can know what our interests are.

Historically, the emergence of nation states in Europe was the result of several centuries of recurring wars.... [But] in one estimate only seven of one hundred and ten wars between 1989 and 1999 were not civil wars. War is now more often the breaker of states than the maker of states.

The notions of nation, national identity, and national interest may be losing relevance and usefulness. If this is the case, the question becomes: What, if anything, will replace them and what does that mean for the United States?

Historical experience and sociological analysis show that the absence of an external "other" is likely to undermine unity and breed divisions within a society.

"You" and "I" become a "we" when "they" appears...

To define themselves, people need an other. Do they also need an enemy? Some people clearly do. "Oh, how wonderful it is to hate," said Joseph Goebbels.

Humans, Freud argued, have only two types of instincts, "those which seek to preserve and unite... and those which seek to destroy and kill." Both are essential and they operate in conjunction with each other. Hence, "there is no use in trying to get rid of men's aggressive inclinations."

"A part of being human," as a committee of psychiatrists put it, "has always been the search for an enemy to embody temporarily or permanently disavowed aspects of ourselves."

BING! This I think goes to the essence of the left: they simply cannot exist without projecting disavowed aspects of themselves into conservatives. We aren't the violent ones, obviously. We don't riot when we don't get our way. We don't burn down our cities. We don't use violence to suppress contrary opinions on college campuses.

The other day I read that fifty percent of the crime (or maybe it was the shootings) in this country occurs in two percent of the counties -- and you can be sure they aren't red counties. Without looking, I would bet they are Democrat strongholds that have been run by Democrats for decades.

Let's be honest. In other words, let's indulge in a thoughtcrime, which is to say, unvarnished truth. We don't need gun control. Rather, we need to prevent people who cannot even control themselves from controlling guns. Who might these people be? Who and where are these people who are incapable of governing themselves? They are not evenly distributed. Not remotely. If not for certain violence-prone subgroups, America would have the crime rate of Tonga.

In any event, you always know what a leftist is thinking, because it consists of what he accuses conservatives of thinking. In short, his imputations and accusations are just his own impulses and emotions experienced by proxy.

Think of, say, Keith Olbermann. It is difficult to imagine a person more unhinged with fascist-level rage. But we are the fascists. Right. Isn't it obvious that he is simply managing the content of his own disturbed mind via imaginary others? What is MSNBC but a kind of mental therapy for liberals in need of projected enemies? Lawrence O'Donnell? I've never been close to that angry in my life, over anything. What would be the point? It doesn't help solve the problem.

It all comes back to, as Bion put it, the problem of thoughts and what to do with them. Yes, they're a problem, and our whole life consists of managing them. I am reminded of the man who, on his death bed, lamented that his life had been full of troubles, the great majority of which never happened.

Think of the SJW. Whether male or female, her life is FULL of troubles: racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, patriarchy, white privilege, etc. There can be no peace of mind in such a psyche, ever. Rather, her life takes place amidst a swarm of imaginary threats and enemies.

But don't even try to relieve her of this burden, because without it, she will be left to her own buzzing hive of envy, hatred, and persecution. A paranoid deprived of enemies is literally reduced to psychosis; in order to heal, the person must own these psychic fragments and rebuild a coherent sense of self without projecting them into others.

In developmental terms, it is called transitioning from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position. It is very difficult to achieve this with a single patient. Impossible when dealing with millions of them, especially when their delusions are reinforced and rewarded by the dominant cultural establishment. And when sanity is positively punished.

Which it always is: for you will be persecuted for my sake. If you are not being persecuted, then you're doing it wrong. Ah ha! How then is this different from the way the leftist feels persecuted by his imaginary demons? That's a very good question. I'll come back to it.

In any event, for all practical purposes, the best one can hope is to manage what amounts to a psychotic core in such a way that it doesn't cause too much destruction. Not for nothing is politics called the organization of hatreds.

Like anyone short of a saint, I have a Greedy and Acquisitive side that cannot be satisfied. I don't try to completely stifle it, nor do I project it into my ideological enemies. But I don't let it wreck my life, or detract from my Infinite Satisfaction for the Gift of the Moment.

Rather, I let it blow off a little steam by, for example, collecting CDs. Or, I let my aggression out by hating the San Francisco Giants. Or, this weekend it will be the Arizona Dirtbags. Who knows, maybe John McCain will be in the stands, so I can double my enmity. But it's all harmless. Like the way dogs play by enacting their aggressive instincts. Except I really do detest John McCain. But I don't want him dead. I just want him to go away.

Which is one of the main sociological purposes of sport: I HATE YOUR GUTS HA HA HA! Which is why it is so distressing -- and depressing -- for the genuine haters of the left to inject their unmanageable rage into our fantasy space. The point is to pretend we're at war, not to actually foment civil strife.

Back to the question of how to tell if you are no different from an SJW who uses the political space to manage her psyche. It's too vast a subject to cover in the remaining time. It's really another way of asking, What are the characteristics of objective psychological maturity? I'll try to tackle this tomorrow....