Yo, Abdul, Keep Your Thoughts out of My Brain!

Oy vey, if only the mind were confined to the head, so much trouble could be avoided in the world. Ah, but then it wouldn’t be possible for us to become human or subhuman, would it? Nor would we even be “subjects” properly so-called, for human subjectivity is irreducibly intersubjective.

This is why, among other reasons, Descartes' pseudo-brilliant wisecrack “I think therefore I am” is such pompous frogwash. No you don’t and no you’re not, René, at least for the reason so-stated. Your mind thinks and you exist because other minds do, because from birth you were immersed in a matrix of thought and language that antedated your being here. This anterior structure of thought is what ushers us from mere animality into the realm of the truly human--if we are lucky.

That is, we can be born into a deviant and oppressive cognitive, familial, and cultural structure that actually prevents our humanness from emerging, or presents us with a bizarre and twisted model to emulate, as in the Muslim Middle East. There, you are often not allowed to become a human being on penalty of dea.... Huh? What the....

Well now, if that don’t put the wink in co-inky-dink. My email just alerted me that a comment was left on One Cosmos. It’s from reader Van, who--speaking of nonlocal cosmic intersubjectivity--was thinking the exact same thought I was thinking at the very same moment. Van writes that “What the world of Islam has never had, because of the allah-encompassing nature of its religion--which dictates right action in all areas of life--is freedom. The freedom to choose, for well or ill, and to suffer the rewards or consequences of their actions. The people of Islam don't have the luxury even of deciding whether or not to shave, or what to put on in the morning, because some aspect of the Koran, or of Sharia, has already made that decision for them. There will be very little adult behavior where adult decisions are never given the freedom to be made.

Exactly, Van. We are two minds that bleat as one.

This touches on the reason why “artificial intelligence” will always remain artificial, because 1) computers will never be capable of being intersubjective members of one another, and 2) while it is possible for computers to be horizontally open systems, a computer can never be a vertically open system, which is precisely where we gain access to humanness--Love, Truth, Beauty, and all that other divine stuff.

The difference between humans and apes is not merely genetic. Nor is it based merely upon brain size or complexity--as if the brain simply got big enough one day and human consciousness just suddenly popped out. Frankly, that is a childishly scientistic sentiment worthy only of atheistic pneumapaths like Richard "White Chocolate Thunder" Dawkins. For humanness did not, and could not have, emerged in thatta way. For example, say human beings somehow become extinct, and the evolutionary field is left open to lizards and other LGFers. The non-LGF reptiles, regardless of what changes occur with their brains, will never become “human.” I don’t just mean morphologically human. Rather, they will never gain access to the human realm of consciousness.

Why? Because the conditions of their development will not allow it. As I wrote in One Cosmos, human consciousness specifically emerged--and only could have emerged--in the transitional space (in Winnicott’s sense) between our incomplete brain neurology and devoted caretakers and/or scaregivers.

To review the situation for newcomers, human babies are born many months “premature,” because otherwise mothers would not have been able to survive the ordeal of giving birth. And only a helpless, instinct-poor and neurologically incomplete primate is capable of leaping over the chasm that separates animal from man or baby gnats from adult Lileks--or man from God, for that matter. (There is also the matter of hands, without which we could not become human, but we don’t have time to get into that. Suffice it to say that we must possess a means of abstraction in our own body structure before we can discover the symbolic realm as such.)

As icky as it sounds, as human subjects we are unavoidably members of one another, in a spooky manner that mirrors the nonlocal structure of the cosmos itself. (This gets into another separate issue, for if the cosmos itself were not internally related, consciousness could not be. But that is a topic for another post.)

Here is another so-called coincidence, for our beloved Dr. Sanity has also chosen this day to write about intersubjectivity. Perhaps after reading my post, you may want to mosey on over to her blog, because she and I have a complementary way of thinking about thinking. (As you read it, note how she essentially monitors the intersubjective space between her and Steve in order to deduce what is going on inside of Steve. Note as well that a computer will never be able to replace Dr. Sanity, although the defense attorney did--a very telling point. I know the feeling of a lawyer wanting to hire a fellow machine, not a human.)

“Projective identification” is one of the most important concepts in psychoanalysis. Whereas projection is a defense mechanism through which we unconsciously project something from ourselves into someone else, projective identification goes deeper. It involves first projecting into someone else, and then forcing the other person to actually take on the quality that has been projected into them. While projection is generally considered a neurotic defense mechanism, projective identification is much more primitive and troublesome (although it also has an absolutely vital adaptive function, in that it is how preverbal infants communicate with their parents; indeed, that is the reason for its existence).

It is actually not difficult to tell when one is on the receiving end of projective identification. That is, you suddenly feel is if you are unwillingly being enlisted into someone else's psychodrama, and being forced to play a part. The person acts toward you as if you have the qualities they have projected into you, and may well goad you into responding in ways that confirm to the projector that you actually have those qualities--that they aren't projections at all. If any of my readers are married, you probably don't need any further explanation. (Mrs. G--I didn't say that. That was Petey.)

Psychologists see this process all the time in more primitive "borderline" patients, who may suddenly experience the therapist as, say, an abusive or withholding parent. It also happens to be the primary mechanism of the Islamists. (I might add that this process is transparently present in my perversely devoted trolls, which is why I am leaving the comments up from yesterday. As always, they reveal nothing about me, but speak volumes about the impoverished and/or conflicted interior life of the troll. Note the anger, the projection, the bitterness, the envy, the devaluation, the attempt to “spoil” me for God knows what obsessive reason. I never ask for whom the troll bawls, because sadly, he always bawls for himself.)

Although he doesn't use the term, Lee Harris's excellent book Civilization and Its Enemies describes the phenomenon perfectly. First, he points out why the process is invisible to us. That is, people who have gone through the "civilizing process" forget that this took millennia, and have no understanding of those who have not completed the human journey. They "forget how much work it is to not kill one's neighbors, simply because this work was all done by our ancestors so that it could be willed to us as an heirloom.”

Just because we as a nation no longer have enemies that we need to primitively project our bad qualities into, we are fooled into thinking that we actually have no enemies, or that if we do, there is some rational, logical, "root cause" that can explain it--that if we are only nice enough, or compassionate enough, they will come around. But as Dr. Sanity or ShrinkWrapped will confirm, this is completely ineffective with projective identification, because the projector emotionally needs you to have the qualities they are projecting. Just as the Islamists need Israel or America to be the source of all evil in the world, my frischky trolls need me to be “His Assholiness.” Please don’t feel compelled to defend me from them. Like Dr. Sanity, I don’t actually mind. For my own idio-socratic reasons, I am also amused by them.

In reality, an enemy is someone who regards you as an enemy, whether or not you deserve the title. We clearly had an enemy for twenty or thirty or seven hundred years before 9-11, not because Islamists were our enemy, but because we were their enemy. We couldn't see it because it was a completely irrational process, based on projective identification. But with sufficient provocation, we have finally been enlisted into the Islamists’ psychodrama, taking on the role so vital to their psychological equilibrium. In other words, we are not their enemy because we are evil--because we have done anything in the real world, such as placing our soldiers on Saudi territory, or supporting Israel. Rather, as Harris points out, we are evil because we are their enemy.

If we do not realize the extent to which we are the enemy of the Islamists, it is almost a sort of condescending insult to them, just as it would be to a patient in therapy if the therapist dismissed their hostile transference as deluded or immature. As a therapist, you have to actually tolerate the projections and allow yourself to be, in the arresting image of Melanie Klein, their “toilet breast.”

First, there is an obvious psychological need for the projective fantasy, or it wouldn't be there to begin with. As Harris explains, a fantasy ideology such as Islamism is not a rational response to the world arrived at in a logical, sober manner. Rather, like "Leftism," it is a transformative belief, meaning that its primary purpose is to psychologically transform the person who believes the fantasy. And believing the fantasy is an end in itself--it has no purpose other than to make the fantasy seem like reality. Therefore, the real reason for 9-11 wasn't actually to bring down western civilization. Rather, it was to further the fantasy by getting us to play along with it. There's no way to reason with these psychologically unsophisticated abduling banjo-pickers and nonlocal yokels.

Iranically, what this means is that, even though we have no real enemy and the Islamists have only a make believe one, because of projective identification we end up with a real enemy. However, underneath it all is a fantasy that we must nevertheless eradicate, and the only way to do that is to bring a little thing called reality to the Islamic world. In the coming days, let us pray that the Jews, who have long been instrumental to the cause of human post-biological evolution (”three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax,” in the words of Walter Sobchak), will successfully introduce a little reality to the psychotically evil fantasists that surround them. Oddly enough, it's what they're begging for. Why not give it to them, good and hard? It's the empathic thing to do.

*****

These synchronicities are starting to give me a psibrain herdache. ShrinkWrapped also wrote about paranoia, projection, and psychotic anti-Semitism today.

Islamists, Leftists, and Failure to Launch: It's a Peter Pandemic

Failure to launch is a big problem for humans. Not just on an individual basis--as in the case of the adolescent in an adult body who is still living with his parents, trying to figure out what to do with his life--but with mankind as a whole. Why are human beings--who have such incredible potential--such persistent underachievers, to put it smiledly?

To a certain extent, people remain stuck in adolescence because they can. It’s amazing what human beings can achieve when they don’t have a choice. Thankfully, when my father emigrated to the United States in 1948 after being discharged from the British Army at the age of 21, he didn’t really have any choice but to be an adult. (Interestingly, he was actually stationed in Palestine, trying to prevent Arabs from doing what they do best, which is failure to launch anything but attacks on innocent Jews.)

Failure to launch was not an option for my father. Although he had only an 8th grade education, he eventually, by the age of 40 or so, became a midlevel corporate executive and sent all four sons to college. (Of course, this was in the days before the university had become its present-day ovary tower looniverstiy bin.) My father was not wealthy by any means, but it certainly never occurred to him that someone else should bail him out of life. Nor, in fact, did he bail me out of paying for graduate school myself. He was perceptive enough to realize that my primary motivation in attending graduate school was to extend my own adolescence, at least at the outset. Fortunately for me, things changed when I realized I actually had a knack for human pslackology and advanced psychobobblery.

It is bad enough that leftist thought is so emotion-driven, irrational, and mired in hopelessly obsolete ecognostic theories. But my main objection to it is on the moral/psychological/spiritual plane, specifically, for its corrosive effect on character. That is, it disrupts the developmental arc toward maturity and replaces it with selfishness, entitlement, and dependency--all under the sanctimonious guise of altruism. This is one of the great bait-and-switches in history, for what could be more selfish than to vote to raise someone else's taxes so you can get a lot of free stuff? The left always talks about “free medical care,” as if someone won't have to foot the bill. And to paraphrase P.J. O’Rourke, “if you think healthcare is expensive now, just wait until it’s free.”

Likewise, promoting the goal of making college accessible to everyone can only have two effects: college will become a mediocrity enabler, full of people who don’t belong there; or it will become a stupid factory, an outcome it is well on its way to achieving already. And, shielded from market discipline, it will only become more and more expensive. Eventually, the ability to attend college and become stupid will be financially beyond the reach of most Americans.

Someone--maybe Petey but possibly Theodore Dalrymple--once said that misery rises to the level of the means available to alleviate it. This is one of the reasons why most liberal programs don’t work. No matter how much better off people are, if they are unhappy and envious at their core, they will find a way to express their bitterness and resentment. And envy is ubiquitous. It cannot be eliminated in the collective, as the history of leftist collectivism vividly demonstrates time and time again. Rather, leftist policies fuel envy because they detach effort from outcome and nurture a cosmic sense of entitlement--wanting becomes confused with deserving, as in a child.

Envy can only be transcended on an individual basis. One must consciously cultivate gratitude, which is the polar opposite of our envy (envy being both innate and unconscious).

A corollary to the maxim of rising misery would be that “immaturity rises to the level of the means available to nurture it.” In this regard, historians now understand that adolescence is culturally constructed to begin with. You don’t have to go too far back in history to see that there was only childhood and adulthood, with nothing in between. Only when societies become relatively affluent can they afford a period of adolescence, during which time young adults toy with different identities and enjoy a life of leisure and extended learning before committing to an adult identity. But only when cultures become extremely prosperous is there no compelling reason for adolescence to end at all. You really can "die before you get old."

Today the transition to adulthood can be delayed indefinitely. In fact, children are not even taught that there is a self-transcending destination or goal to life. Imagine, for example, a sex education class that taught children that human beings are not merely instinct-driven horizontal animals, or that marriage was not the only, but the most appropriate outlet and goal of sexuality--in other words, that sexuality had a transcendent meaning and an objective vertical direction toward personal wholeness and social utility.

Of course, once you have chosen one option in life, all of the others are forever foreclosed. If you choose one career, it means all the other possibilities are ended, at least temporarily. If you marry one woman, you are really denying yourself the rest of womankind, and who would want to do that? It seems that many people would prefer to live in the realm of infinite (but unrealized) potential rather than finite, but real, existence.

Because America is so affluent, it can tolerate an unusual amount of foolishness, but not an infinite amount and not forever. In my lifetime I have witnessed the corrosive effect of leftist thought on our culture, as it insinuates itself into, and begins to weaken, the uniquely American character. But I am actually more interested in the more general failure to launch that afflicts mankind at large. What is the cause of this? For example, there is no question that this is the problem we face in the bulk of the Arab Muslim world. Something in their cultural DNA has left them mired in an historical and developmental eddy, sitting on the launch pad below, just where we left them 700 years ago. What happened? Why didn't they grow up? Why didn’t they launch? And why do they want us to join them on the launch pad?

As we have discussed in a variety of contexts, humans inhabit a horizontal and a vertical world. Among other things, the vertical world is the world of psychological and emotional development. We are the only animal that comes into the world with an almost infinite potential that may or may not be fulfilled in this lifetime (actually, being infinite, it is never completely fulfilled). Other animals--assuming that they aren’t eaten or die prematurely for some other reason--inevitably reach their developmental goal and achieve maturity as defined by their species. But not humans. Yes, barring some kind of unusual disease, all humans grow to physical maturity. But it is fair to say that the vast majority of human beings down through history--right through to the present day--do not make it to psychological maturity: they do not come close to fulfilling their developmental potential.

This is a question that has always intrigued me, because it goes directly against the grain of any facile Darwinian explanation. That is, I believe that human development is guided by a telos or an end state that we are supposed to achieve. But unlike other animals, there is no way this end state can be accounted for by natural selection, because it never existed in the material world--it remains latent unless or until it is realized. Only human beings can "not be themselves."

In short, while we certainly have our genetic blueprint, we also have some sort of nonlocal “archetypal blueprint” that draws us toward it. But any number of personal, cultural and historical conditions can conspire to prevent us from realizing this blueprint. For example, if you are a woman in Saudi Arabia, what are the chances you will have the opportunity to become who you are? Approximately zero. But if women can't become who they are, neither can men--which is why there are so few developmentally adult men and in the Arab Muslim world. Likewise, if you are a tenured radical in an American university--say Noam Chomsky or Juan "Osama's Pawn" Cole--what are the chances that you will ever grow up and know reality, much less live in it? Probably zilch.

Another way of saying this is that human beings alone among the animals are somehow built for transcendence. Not only do human beings have the capacity to rise beyond and surpass themselves, but this is our essential nature. No one looks at a pig and says, “Why don’t you grow up and start acting like a proper pig?” But we ask this of humans all the time. In fact, it is the question that answers the question of what a human being is.

Failure to launch is ultimately failure to transcend. As Meister Eckhart wrote, “When the higher incorporates the lower into its service, the nature of the lower is transformed into that of the higher.” But it also works the other way around: when we fail to transcend, the higher is incorporated into the lower, creating a perverse version of itself. Thus, we have the counterfeit transcendence represented by everything from the narcissistic and infantile "new age" movement (what a breathtakingly idiotic deepack of lies from this wholly manboy) to radical Islam, which thoroughly conflates the higher and lower, so that the most bestial acts are celebrated as divinely inspired.

Likewise, here in the United States we have an entire political party that has been hijacked by children suffering from FTL syndrome, and thus replaces transcendence with selfish visions of utopia: dailykos, huffingtonpost, the Hollywood crowd, Air America, Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Ted Kennedy, Cindy Sheehan, the perpetual adultolescents of leftist academia--all are in one way or another living in the bubble of immaturity that our affluent society provides. They are failures to launch, and they hate the symbolic parents that remind them that it’s time to move out of their childhood room, get a real job, and grow up.

They certainly hate me, which is a bit embarassing. That is, being a humble individual, they lavish upon me an encomium of which I am unworthy, for, as ever, the fool's reproach is a kingly title. Charles Johnson is a king. The Powerline guys are kings. I am but a mere foot soldier.

In short, there are three essential causes of error; lack of intelligence, lack of information, and lack of virtue, that is to say of beauty, in the receptacle.... The problems of our times are either the results of abnormal situations or the fruits of accumulated errors, and it is these latter which must first be corrected before even raising the question of whether objectively possible solutions exist.... Man poses as a victim when faced with the fruit of his sin, but without giving the latter its name, indeed quite the contrary. --Frithjof Schuon

Monday Morning Metaphysical Joyread

Intellectual intuition involves the direct perception of Truth. Logic, on the other hand, is merely a mental operation that can lead to true or false conclusions, depending on the data provided it. Logic is particularly useless--even dangerous, as reader Van pointed out a couple of days ago--without the a priori intuition of Truth, without which logic alone eventually leads one over the abyss. The most important truths are indeed "self evident," that is, evident to the higher self. Clearly they are not necessarily evident to the lower self, which is why liberty and human dignity are a tough sell in the Middle East, which awaits the day that its progress is not thwarted by the infrahuman majority in its midst.

In fact, the application of pure logic would dismiss as silly superstition those transcendent truths that are known directly by the higher mind. This is why you cannot prove the existence of God to such a logic-bound individual, any more than you could prove it to a dog--even a very good dog, like mine. Religious truths are conveyed through symbolism and analogy (with the assistance of grace), more like a great work of art than a mathematical equation. Although not logical, it would be a grave error to suggest that the great revelations are illogical, any more than a Shakespearean sonnet or one of Beethoven’s symphonies are illogical.

In the case of those latter two modes, poetical and musical truth are conveyed directly to something analogous to the senses, only on level that obviously transcends them. Those who demand “proof” of God are almost always coming from a place where the transcendent truth is simply unavailable to them. It involves a kind of invincible ignorance disguised as healthy skepticism. It reminds me of Bion’s description of the psychotic mind, which, he said, combined the characteristics of arrogance, stupidity, and curiosity. When you put those three together, you end up with a kind of arrogant, omnipotent ignorance that is inordinately proud of its own stupidity.

Then there is the “cultured” man of the European variety who is too sophisticated and knows too much to ever consider the possibility of truths that lie on plane higher than his own exalted mind. These people too are “impenetrable.” They suffer from a distorting mental hypertrophy that is to the mind what those musclebound bodybuilding freaks are to the physique. Only the delusional members of the cult believe that they actually look good.

On the scientific plane, we are dealing with truths that provide causal explanations for various material processes. As such, science is obviously entirely appropriate to the horizontal plane to which it is addressed. But religious truths do not have to do with horizontal causation. Rather, they are intended to provide the higher mind with a means to realize vertical truth. There is nothing that can be provided by mere logic alone that can help one ascend this vertical hierarchy.

Again, religious truths are seen directly, in the very same way that your eyes see directly in the material plane. When you see something directly before your eyes, only a fool would ask you to prove that vision exists. When you hear the obvious beauty in a work of music, to such an extent that it moves you to tears, no one asks you to first prove to them that hearing exists--as if the existence of mere hearing could explain musical truth anyway. Frankly, you wouldn’t even know how to respond to such an individual. What, prove to you the truths that are furnished by my own senses? How about proving to me that your mind exists and that it can discriminate between truth and error, then we’ll talk. Because I’m not sure it does or can.

While the lower mind is active, or “male,” it has always been understood that the higher mind is passive, or “female” in relation to Truth. The lower mind is an acquisitive mind, a grasping mind, even a restless and greedy mind. Part of the reason it is restless and greedy is that it can never be satisfied with what it is capable of acquiring, what with its own inherent limitations. The mind cannot rest until it has found its proper home, and that home is only found in the transcendent metaphysical truths to which it is conformed. There are certain things that the human mind is designed to know, and once it knows them, it settles down, as in marriage. In fact, it is a marriage--a metaphysical union.

Likewise, there are certain things human beings were not necessarily meant to know. It is not that we should not or cannot know them, only that these things are “accidental” and not essential. Someone who rejects the divine in favor of the material plane has rejected what is essential in favor of what is accidental and contingent. Therefore, their soul will suffer proportionately. They will “think,” but the thinking really won’t get anywhere, at least philosophically. Any end to their thinking will, as Schopenhaur recognized, be arbitrary. Even the greatest philosopher simply stops asking “why” at a certain arbitrary juncture and thus founds a school.

On the secular philosophical plane, there is nothing you can prove that you cannot equally disprove. It is “a journey of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing,” a "systematic abuse of language designed for that purpose." If a man doesn’t realize this by the age of 40 or so, he hasn’t learned much in his life's journey. He doesn't necessarily have to do anything about it, but he should at least realize that the intellectual game is up, that it’s all for show--for vanity and amusement.

The secular philosopher doesn’t only end his thinking at an arbitrary point. The truth of the matter is that he also begins it at an arbitrary point that can never be justified by his own philosophy. Postmodern philosophers like to congratulate themselves on the idea that they begin with “ignorance” or total skepticism, but it is an odd philosophy that begins by declaring to people that they cannot know what they most certainly do know.

These thinkers take great pride in living in darkness, and ridicule those of us who simply enjoy the sun’s rays, which both warm and illuminate. In the final unalysis, I don’t really care where those rays come from, and I certainly don’t care if some boneheaded secular philosopher tells me that the sun doesn’t exist. That’s fine. We have no quarrel. I know where you’re coming from, because I’ve seen the darkness. But you can’t know where I’m coming from until you step outside into the inner Light.

The higher mind is truly a mirrorcle of the absolute. In fact, its very existence establishes its own proof of the absolute, just as eyes prove the existence of material objects that can be seen. If truth exists, then surely it is accessible to us. If it doesn’t exist, then there is no point in pursuing it or even speaking of it. We should banish it from our vocabulary as sort of persistent illusion to which the fallible human mind is subject. Of course, the academic left is already hard at work on this diabolical project of “deconstruction,” but the fact of the matter is, the Left as such--whatever you wish to call it--has always been with us, and always will be.

For the deep structure of the Left may be traced all the way back to the first appearance of humanity in its horizontal manifestation. It is not so much that relativism is incorrect as such. Obviously, our own existence proves that relativism is real, otherwise there would only be God. But by the same token, relativism cannot be absolute. Rather, the absolute is precisely that which makes hierarchical relativity possible to begin with. By definition, there is no such thing as an incomplete hierarchy. To paraphrase Richard Weaver, if a series is hierarchically ordered it is conditioned from top to bottom and so cannot be infinite. If it is infinite, it cannot be conditioned top to bottom, and there is no higher or lower.

Clearly, our own existence proves beyond the doubt of a shadow that we inhabit a hierarchical cosmos with degrees of being--atoms, molecules, cells, animals, Man. Man is an arrow that points beyond himself to his source above, not below or behind. So before you even think about caterpultering your buddhafly, make sure you depart and bewholed and always aim your eros for the heart of the world.

good-DAY!

Lay Down All Thought, Surrender to That!

The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. --John 3:8

Many postmodern sophisticates think that religion is not empirical, but this fellow “John” was obviously a careful observer of spiritual reality. Nor is his language vague or inexact. It’s just that human language--at least at this point in our evolution--is somewhat poorly adapted to supersensible facts that lie above the material domain. As such, it has always been understood by the spiritually adequate that the Law of Analogy holds when discussing higher realities: “as above, so below.” Analogy is the link between created and uncreated things, which is why, in relying upon parable and other seemingly rustic literary forms, Jesus could not have been more vague or more precise. He always speaks perfect nonsense.

I don’t know where the Spirit comes from. And yet, it comes. And goes. I’ve already gone through several phases in my attitude toward blogging, but my current attitude is that it is basically a windsock to try to catch the Spirit as it blows by in the morning. It’s like damming a river so as to create electrical power. If I don’t take the trouble to sit here and catch it as it blows by, it’s as if it never existed. You might say that I am attempting to dam the Spirit, something my critics aleady know.

As I touched upon in One Cosmos, in order to talk about Spirit, we must change our relationship to language, for we cannot really speak it. Rather, we must allow ourselves to be spoken by the Spirit. Perhaps you may have noticed that most people, even as it is, do not really speak language. Rather, to a troubling degree, they are merely passively spoken by it. This is why most people really have nothing to say--why they are so boring. Perhaps the only sensible thing that William Burroughs ever said is that language is a virus. Certainly for most people it is--just something that has gotten into the brain and reproduces itself.

In short, many people are shockingly bereft, in other words, of the Other's word. Traditional cosmology holds that we live in a linguistic cosmos, that everyone and everything is infused with the Word. Therefore, language is not something that sprung up de novo in sophisticated primates. Rather, it is an anterior reality that we merely “tap into” or “piggyback” upon. And yet, language can become as frozen and dead as a stone, like Keith Richards or Brian Jones. For most people--and I’m not just talking about the grazing multitudes, but about so-called sophisticated elites--their minds consist of a few ruling memes that determine everything else.

I can think of so many examples that it’s hard to pick just one, so I’ll just use the first one that pops into my head. The other night, I sat down at beer o’clock PST and turned on the TV. It was the Larry King show, and the guest was Dan Rather. Now, I suppose one could concede that these two people possess “adequate” human intelligence. In other words, they are not neurologically damaged or diminished in some way. But two stupider people you could not find--two people who are simply spoken by language and have probably never had a creative thought in their lives.

I am sure there are people out there who think I’m being harsh or insulting here. But I am also quite sure there are others who know precisely what I’m talking about. Boredom is real. I personally do not suffer from it unless I am being bored by someone. As it so happens, the brilliant and subtle psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott wrote that the experience of boredom provided valuable information about a patient. As a psychoanalytically trained therapist, you do not merely “listen” to a patient. Rather, you also listen to yourself listening. In other words, you listen for your own emotional reaction, or watch for your own images or fantasies that are being provoked by the patient. This is called the analyst’s “counter-transference.” It is a source of subjectively objective information about others.

Winnicott maintained that the counter-transferential reaction of boredom was prima facie evidence of psychopathology in a patient. Normally we think of pathology in terms of “positive” symptoms--anxiety, depression, self-recrimination, etc. But boredom is a “negative” symptom. Something is missing. The mind, for whatever reason, has circled the drain and gone dead. The problem is not so much boredom as deadness. (There are many developmental reasons why this deadness can overtake the psyche, but I don’t have time to get into them all.)

When you watch as a child first acquires language, it is a delightful thing to behold. I’m experiencing it right now, in my son. It is very obvious that, as limited as he is, he is nothing at all like those dead people who are spoken by language. He is very much alive, and he is speaking language. He really only knows one word--that!--and yet, he is much funnier, more interesting, and more creative than Larry King or Dan Rather. Frankly, it’s not even close.

But as we are “educated,” something often happens in our relationship to language. Again, it can become as dead and frozen as any material object. Ironically, this is especially common for many people who call themselves “writers.” One reason I enjoy, say, Lileks or Van der Leun so much, is that they do not have this problem. Whatever they happen to be writing about, the language is very much alive, but not for its own sake. There are many well known writers whose writing is simply in service of writing, as opposed to the reality or idea that writing is meant to convey. This kind of stylized writing has its place, but it is often a narcissistic vehicle to conceal the inner vacuity of the person employing it. It is the literary equivalent of someone who is exceptionally good looking but as empty as your typical Hollywood liberal.

I have found that a key to spiritual development is to loosen the grip that the material world exerts on words--on the Word--and to allow language to become more fluid, mercurial, and receptive to higher things.

Obviously, this is something that the great poets have always known. And yet, great poets are not necessarily dealing with higher things, especially nowadays. While they may be alive, and may well have a more vibrant relationship to language, many of them simply use language to give voice to the infrahuman, not the suprahuman. So much contemporary art has descended in this direction, into a subjective swamp of “personal expression.” It creates another kind of boredom--the tedium of Madonna, or of rap, or of other forms of infrahuman barbarism. Frankly, the list is endless.

The real point of art--if art is to have any value except as a sort of pressure valve for the personal unconscious--is to give expression to higher things. And if you do not aim for those higher things, it is a sure bet that you will hit your mark. This is why, in the spiritually debased time in which we live, any subhuman with or without talent can call themselves an artist. For to be an artist merely means to “sing a song of myself,” no matter how ignorant or spiritually degraded that self happens to be.

For art to have real value, it must involve, as Schuon puts it, “the crystallization of archetypal values." Art is “the quest for--and the revelation of--the center, within us as well as around us,” an activity that “depends by definition on a knowledge that transcends it and gives it order; apart from such knowledge, art has no justification: it is knowledge which determines action, manifestation, form, and not the reverse.”

So where does this leave us? I had intended to write about one thing, but the Spirit overtook me and led me in a different direction. If I recall correctly, I had wanted to say something about the relationship between personal effort and spiritual reality. The key, according to Valentin Tomberg, is to first learn “concentration without effort,” and second, to “transform work into play.” I guess that’s what blogging has become for me: I just relax, turn off my mind, and float upstream. And never forget to bring a bucket. Or crock, depending on your point of view.

The essential function of sacred art is to transfer Substance, which is both one and inexhaustible, into the world of accident and to bring the accidental consciousness back to Substance. One could say also that sacred art transposes Being to the world of existence, of action or of becoming, or that it transposes the Infinite to the world of the finite, or Essence to the world of forms.... The Principle becomes manifestation so that manifestation might re-become the Principle, or so that the “I” might return to the Self; or simply, so that the human soul might, through given phenomena, make contact with the heavenly archetypes, and thereby with its own archetype. --Frithjof Schuon

*****

The great Mark Steyn obviously feels the same way as I do about the zombie king and his wacksworks of the living braindead:

"I was on the road the other night and so found myself watching CNN's coverage of Israel, Lebanon, Gaza, etc. It was "Larry King Live," and it was one of those shows where Larry interviews great men about what needs to be done and the great men all agree that what needs to be done is that the president needs to get other great men involved to "broker" a "deal." Sen. Chuck Hagel proposed that Bush appoint Colin Powell or Jim Baker as his Special Envoy; Sen. Barbara Boxer proposed that Bush appoint Madeleine Albright as his Even More Special Envoy. Sen. George Mitchell, who himself served as Extra-Special Super-Duper Envoy a few years back, proposed that Bush involve the European Union. And someone else proposed the G-8. And Larry suggested Putin. Oh, and some smooth-talking apologist in Savile Row pinstripes proposed Chirac, because he and Bush had agreed a U.N. resolution on something or other a year or two back.

"Aside from Larry's closing tribute to Red Buttons, I've never heard more rubbish in a single hour since . . . well, come to think of it, since the last time I saw "Larry King Live." But at least that was a special with Heather Mills (Paul McCartney's missus), with which subject Larry seemed rather more engaged, at least after Lady McCartney plunked her artificial leg up on the desk and invited Larry to feel its lifelike texture, which is more than one can say for Larry these days. But the point is that Larry and his Friars' Club Roast approach to geopolitics is about as irrelevant to what's going on there as could be devised, short of Sen. Hagel proposing Heather Mills as his Special Envoy, which may be just what Hamas and Hezbollah deserve."

*****
A dog named That!


A baby-sitter named That!

*****
All This is That, the Beach Boys:

I am that, thou art that, all this is that
I am that, thou art that, all this is that
This is that
This is that

Daybreak and I take a glide
Into the pool of peace inside
To waves and I both travel by
And that makes all the difference to me

Life supporting waves of bliss
Mother Divine's precious kiss
Brings with love the light of wisdom
And the gift of eternal freedom

To waves and I both travel by
And that makes all the difference to me

I am that, thou art that, all this is that
I am that, thou art that, all this is that
This is that
This is that

Dusk time the shadows fall
Into the timeless time of all

To waves and I both travel by

Golden auras glow around you
Omnipresent love surrounds you
Wisdom warming as the sun
You and I are truly one

To waves and I both travel by
And that makes all the difference to me

I am that, thou art that, all this is that
I am that, thou art that, all this is that
I am that, thou art that, all this is that
I am that, thou art that, all this is that

Jai guru dev
(I am that, thou art that, all this is that)
Jai guru dev
(I am that, thou art that, all this is that)
Jai guru dev
AAAAAAA-UUUUUUUU-MMMMMMMM

(Funny, I always thought it was "two waves and I," but all the lyric sites say "to waves and I," whatever that means)

Temporal Pathologies and the Current Crisis

Historical consciousness is a relatively new thing. Normally, history is what happens when we’re busy making other plans, isn’t it? In the past, people more or less lived in the present, which was in turn embedded in a timeless mythological structure. Although history was happening, perhaps it happened so slowly that no one noticed. Or, if they did notice, it was generally thought to be a bad thing, since it connoted deviation from the timeless ideal. Unlike in the modern West, there was no notion that time = progress. But for us, we can hardly even think about time anymore without attaching some notion of “progress” to it. If things aren’t getting better, then they’re getting worse.

In fact, when you think about it, that’s the basis of our present historical impasse with the Islamists (and to a certain extent, leftists, who have their own issues with time). Clearly, what we call “progress,” the Islamists call “decadence” or “degeneration.” They would specifically like to put an end to what history has wrought over the past 700 years or so, and revert to the static and timeless mode that humans have always known.

Because of our historical consciousness, everyone seems to sense that we have entered a particularly “thick” slice of time in the last week, with the possibility of all out war in the Middle East. Outwardly it looks like a war, but inwardly it is a flooding over into consciousness of a rising tide of infrahuman subconsciousness and barbarism. I imagine that World War I must have felt similar to people--as if they were living amidst a great upsurge of uncontrollable, but somehow necessary, energies.

The esoteric understanding of time is that it has several different dimensions of its own. In other words, it is not mere duration, but has ontologically real modes and qualities. Clearly, the present moment is causing so much anxiety because it is so rich with potential. We are getting very close to the essence of what is wrong with the world--as if the polarized essences are about to “touch,” so to speak, which would set off a sort of historical explosion. We can all sense the impending thunderclap, as light meets dark in a sort of apocalyptic showdown.

For that is clearly what this represents. When you pare away all of the intellectual sophistry, there is no subtlety about this whatsoever. Hamas is pure evil. Hezbollah is evil. The Iranian mullahs are evil. The chinless wonder who rules Syria is evil. They are every bit as evil as Hitler or Stalin or Mao. It’s just that, because of our historical “progress,” we have become too sophisticated and subtle to recognize and name evil anymore.

The moral gulf that exists between Israel and her enemies is literally infinite, for the simple reason that the distance between life and death is infinite. Does this mean that Israel is absolutely good? Of course not. It just means that the moral abyss between Israel and her enemies tends toward the infinite. Quite literally, people who worship life are doing battle with infrahuman beasts who worship death. Normal people who love their children more than they love life are in a struggle for survival with deranged beings who love death more than they love their own children.

Because this latter existential stance is so demonic, so frankly satanic, many in the West simply cannot see it. If you live in the light, then the darkness is visible. But if you yourself live in horizontal darkness, then it’s a case of a very dark night in which all the cows are black. It's just a "cycle of violence," tit for tat. To quote one of the most morally idiotic statements ever made, "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."

Because we are human, we can know when we are dealing with a being that is subhuman, human, superhuman, or divine. For example, we know that animals are subhuman, whereas animals cannot know that we are “super-animals.” But this innate human capacity obviously can and does become corrupted. People can lose their ability to recognize the subhuman in humans. This tends inevitably to happen to people who cannot recognize the divine or superhuman. I know, for example--as I am sure most of my readers know--that Jesus was divine or that the person who wrote the Gospel of John was superhuman, for the same reason we know that Zarqawi was subhuman. There are degrees of light that are obvious to the noetically attuned soul.

I’ve never given it much thought as to why people are uncomfortable naming the subhumans in our midst, but it must be because of the experience of nazi Germany. For nazi Germany represented the case of a subhuman ideology attempting to extinguish a divine one. It is as if the Left came away with an entirely backward lesson: that it is bad to call anyone evil or subhuman. But you will notice that when this happens, it is not as if evil disappears. It just gets relocated and projected into things that are patently not evil. Thus the deep moral confusion of the Left that sees George Bush or Israel as evil, even subhuman. I could provide hundreds of examples from dailykos or huffingtonpost or other left wing sites that depict George Bush as an animal or a monster, but I’ve never seen them do that with Arafat or Kim Jong Il or Castro.

I might add that if you do not see the evil in yourself--or the potential for such--then you will generally be unable to see it in others. Here again, this is an entirely postmodern liberal ideology that I’ve never taken the trouble to think through where it came from, but I suppose that it comes from my own debased field, psychology, which has replaced the traditional view of human existence being a battleground of good and evil. There is a struggle within our own soul over who and what will rule over it. But if you are steeped in postmodernity, then human beings are really just animals--we are all subhuman, and nobody is any better or worse than anyone else. Therefore, we teach “self esteem,” that there is nothing wrong with you except your belief that there is something wrong with you.

But there is something wrong with you. Especially you--and you know exactly who I'm talking about. Your only hope is to recognize what it is and to do something about it. That’s why we are here, and that is the actual saving grace of history. It is why history has a forward and a reverse. There is a law of vertical gravitation at work in history, exerting its influence on the soul. We can be pulled in one direction, by the divine attractor, or fall further in the other direction, 32 feet per second per second. This is what it means to truly be a progressive: to fight for the political, cultural, and historical circumstances that allow vertical liftoff for the maximum number of souls.

A child naturally lives in an innocent, light-filled world, and it is the job of a parent to preserve that light for as long as possible, until it is inevitably penetrated by the darkness of the fallen world. In so doing, we can re-experience the primordial light that has gradually dimmed in ourselves. Likewise, there is a life-stream and a death-stream that flow through the cosmic arteries of our existence. The former moves from the past to the future, while the latter moves from the future to the past. Children are naturally oriented to the present and future, but as we age, we become increasingly aware of the entropic death stream. Yestalgia for nostoday sets in.

The only way out is in and up, both individually and collectively. For history must be lived in the light of something that is beyond it, something it is aiming for, something that reveals its meaning and purpose. This something is not found within history, but above history. The Islamists would like to impose something on us from below history, while the Left wants to impose something on us that they think is inside history, but can never actually be found there.

Over and against the soporific influence of the world stands the way of awakening.... All movements of a social, political, artistic, intellectual, and religious kind may indeed have different speeds of devolution, but one thing they have in common: if no reinforcing impulse is given after a certain time, they will inevitably exhaust themselves. A thing of motion or of life becomes a corpse unless “reawakening impulses” intervene. Impulses of regeneration, however, do actually intervene--precisely out of the hidden energy center belonging to the “night realm” of history and also to every individual biography. --Valentin Tomberg

Setting Your Compass on the Face of the Deep

Everything is a mystery of the face to face and the within. OM Abba! --Father Henri Lasaux/Swami Abhishiktananda

(What follows is a reworking of something I wrote in the past in light of what we have been discussing about child-rearing and human development. I'm probably going to begin doing this more often, that is, going through old posts, separating the eternal from the ephemeral, and seeing what I have. As you know, I dash these things off first thing in the morning. Being that the key to good writing is good editing, many of my posts really shouldn't have seen the light of day to begin with. But they generally do contain some seeds that are worthy of further attention and nurturing.)

Ever since the scientific revolution, we have tended to divide the world into a public sphere of objective, measurable reality and a private sphere of ephemeral, subjective perceptions. In this view, the external world is considered the fundamental reality, while consciousness is reduced to an epiphenomenon, so that all our perceptions of the world--its colors, sounds, and textures--are meaningless, revealing nothing intrinsic to the cosmos. All subjective qualities are reduced to quantities--for example, our perception of the redness of an apple is reduced to a particular frequency of light, or music is reduced to vibrating air molecules striking against our ear drums.

As I wrote in One Cosmos Under God, "science begins with the one world we experience with our senses (where else could it begin?), but quickly saws off that familiar limb by 'excluding everything that can be imagined or conceived, except in abstract mathematical terms,' consequently relegating everything outside mathematical description--the very world it started with--to 'an ontological limbo.'" Only this second, abstract world is considered to disclose valid information about the universe, whereas all of our initial impressions of color, sound, texture, beauty, and meaning supposedly reveal nothing real about the universe, only about our own nervous systems.

But one of the fundamental teachings of any spiritual view is that the universe has a within that is accessible to humans. In other words, the universe is not simply an exterior, made up of discrete parts that are external to one another. Rather, by looking at the parts in a certain way, we may discover a wholeness in the world that in turn reveals its interior dimension--and therefore its meaning. Parts show us only the exterior of the cosmos, while wholeness shows us the great within (and vice versa).

The human face is the gateway to the primordial within. As infants, our whole world is oriented around the mother's face. Obviously, in looking at a face, we don't first attend to a nose here, an eye there, and a mouth there, and inductively leap to the conclusion that a face exists. Rather, without even knowing it, we attend to the face as a whole, and can instantaneously distinguish one face from another and one expression from another.

In attending to the mother's face, the baby knows that the mother has an interior, and through her changing expressions, only gradually begins to discover his own interior. Autistic children, for example, do not see whole "faces," but only a collection of parts, so that they are never ushered into the intersubjective Withinness of the cosmos. Instead, they are condemned to a bizarre and frightening existence of living death--immersed in a sea of things that move and have independent existence, but which reveal no meaning. Ironically, in the strict scientific view, one would have to say that people with autism are more in touch with reality than anyone else, since they truly live in the world of meaningless objects described by science.

You may have noticed that most trolls have this “autistic” quality. They generally think I delete them because they disagree with me, but more often than not, it is because they just don’t get the point of what I’m writing about. They think they get it--after all, why shouldn’t they? They only know what they know, but cannot know what they don’t know. It requires a level of cognitive and spiritual maturity to appreciate the “wholeness” of what I’m writing about. You certainly can’t look at a single post and try to tear it apart. Rather, it is a whole way of looking at the cosmos that attempts to take everything into its view. It is to look at the cosmos as a face--perhaps a visible face of the invisible God. I say “a” rather then “the” face, for the latter would amount to pantheism and cosmolatry. God has other faces aside from the cosmos, including scripture, the uncorrupted intellect (which is a mirror of God), the conscience, and certain other inexplicable “inclinations” within us. There are many ways to see the divine light.

Just as the face allows us to access the within of the person who animates it, the wholeness of the cosmos allows us to see within it. (One of the central points of my book is that modern physics reveals the cosmos to be an internally related whole, not just a collection of exterior parts.) Paradoxically, we can know the interior only by focusing on the exterior. Just as the face is the meaning of its features, the meaning of existence can be discovered by dwelling in its outward features.

I remember when my father died some 22 years ago. He had suffered an abdominal aneurysm and underwent emergency surgery. He made a somewhat miraculous recovery, but three months later it became infected and burst again. I had left the hospital and returned just after he had died. The nurse asked if I wanted to see him. I instinctively recoiled at the thought, thinking that it would scar me with unpleasant memories for life. But something made me go in anyway. In looking at his face, the immediate and powerful impression was that he was simply not there. It was only an outside. Something deep within me knew in an instant that his “within”--something with real ontological weight--had left and was elsewhere. Instead of scarring me, it comforted me.

***

Poets have always understood that by indwelling in nature we can intuit what dwells within nature--we are always swimming in a sea of clues that point beyond themselves to a hidden reality to which the clues point. By attending to things and events in a certain way, we allow them to "speak" to us, and this in turn informs us about their nature.

The English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins coined the term "inscape" to refer to this more intense experience of observing things in such a way that their intrinsic qualities emerge. He believed, for example, that by allowing one's attention to be drawn to a bird in flight, a tree, or a landscape, we allow their character to act upon us through a union of the inner and outer worlds. Similarly, Goethe argued that we discover the true nature of things through a contemplative kind of looking he called "seeing with exactitude." By doing this, we can open ourselves to what the cosmos is telling us about itself.

This has obvious theological implications. For example, what is scripture but an exterior narrative that tells us of the within--the inner nature--of God? Likewise, what is the Trinity but a way to think about God’s within, his inner life? Just as it is a mistake to view nature as an object, one makes the same mistake in viewing scripture only as a historical narrative of external events. Rather, those events have a within which is their true teaching. As a matter of fact, this is probably the simplest definition of esotericism: inner religion.

It can also be argued that the figure of Jesus--or the avatar principle, if you want to broaden things out a bit--answers the deepest human longing to "see the face of God," and thereby know his within most intimately. Again, the whole point of the gospels, if you are a Christian, is that their external narrative reveals the interior of God. You cannot dismantle or deconstruct the gospel stories, for this would be like disassembling a human face to try to understand its expression. We see by a sort of interior light when we dwell in faith, for faith is actually a holistic foreknowledge of as yet undiscovered truths--knowledge of approaching discoveries on the interior plane of things. And the discoveries tend to be inexhaustible. There is no end to them, any more than there is an end or "edge" to our consciousness.

As the poet Novalis put it, "The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet." If you are feeling boxed in by the materialistic paradigm of modernity, know that you may escape it any time through the many inscapes that surround us.

*****

Of course, it is true that the semitic religions advise against idolatry. However, in my view, idolatry is the exact opposite of what I am talking about. For idolatry involves reducing the Absolute Subject of God to a a mere object in the relative world. An icon of the sort used in Orthodox Christianity is the opposite of an idol: it is a membrane through which the transcendent, unseen energies of the divine penetrate and cast their luster into this world. Truly, the icon is situated at the frontier between the immanent and transcendent God. In meditating upon it, it is another way to know God’s within. (At this moment I am listening to another piece by Arvo Part. It is giving me chills because it is the sound of God’s interior--perhaps even the sound of heaven.)

Those iconoclasts who do not countenance the countenance--Muslims, for example--are missing the point. It was long ago decided that the use of icons is not only appropriate but fundamental to Orthodox Christianity. According to Bishop Kallistos Ware, the seventh ecumenical council in 787 proclaimed that "since Christ became true man, it is legitimate to depict his face upon the holy icons; and, that since Christ is one person and not two, these icons do not just show us his humanity in separation from his divinity, but they show us the one person of the eternal Logos incarnate."

Among my darshan images is a traditional icon of Jesus hanging right above my desk. One of my friendly nonlocal operators, or what I like to call "I-amissaries" from across the father shore.

I wonder if Muslims do not see the face of God because they cannot see the face of God. Perhaps because children are treated so cruelly, they cannot conceive of the loving face of God. Perhaps the ancient Greeks as well. Although Plato could conceive of “the One,” it could never be “stained” or contaminated by any human qualities--perhaps to keep it safe from them.

But one thing we can say with certainty about God is that he is a person because he is at least a person--just as we can know that humans are animals because we are at least animals. But we are animals with something infinite and absolute thrown into the mix, just as God is human and much more. The “much more” is his awesome and mysterious within.

Interestingly, the anti-icon forces were probably influenced by contemporary Islamic and earlier Jewish ideas regarding the depiction of God. But icons are not worshipped. Rather, they are revered in the same way a Jew reveres the Torah, not as an "idol" but as a reflection of God. Easy for Jews to say, because they have always been more literate than the rest of humanity, so they looked for evidence of God’s within through scripture. One of the purposes of icons was to provide "opened books to remind us of God," especially for the toiling masses who lacked the leisure or literacy to crack a real book. This is one great advantage Christianity had over Judaism in spreading the idea of monotheism--the whole story could be presented to the pagan mind in the form of stained glass windows or a pop-up book.

Ever since he was a lad, a reader informs me that he had an affinity--an inexplicable attraction, in the sense we have been using the term--toward the being he understood to be Jesus. This mysterious attraction occurred whenever he consciously thought of Jesus. In my opinion, the attraction was probably mutual without him realizing it, but that's another matter.

The reader pointed out that there have been countless depictions of the "face" of Jesus, probably none actually being an exact or even a close likeness. Nevertheless, "at the risk of becoming an idolator," he imagined the face of Jesus in his mind's eye.

Now why, my dear bobbleheads, why should this little experiment have brought real tears to his eyes, along with a wholly unexpected flood of feeling and emotion? The feelings clearly weren't rehearsed or "affected." Feelings of being an "unworthy sinner," feelings of regret, a desire for reparation, a profound sense of gratitude, thankfulness at having an unseen mentor and invisible but often sadly ignored influence in his life.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that in Judaism, tears--especially this particular type of tears that we don't seem to have a word for--are considered a gift of God. For example, the narrators of the Zohar--the mystical text underlying kabbalah--weep whenever they grasp a profound spiritual truth. Or think of the "wailing wall."

These purifying tears signify many things. For example, they reveal the primordial wound through which vertical energies intrude into our enclosed little world of illusory self-sufficiency. The heart must be "wounded" in order to allow God's energies to flow, while penitential tears are a kind of transpersonal "blood." (What did Leonard Cohen sing? There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.)

Furthermore, it is said that the gift of tears is a form of transpersonal touch, specifically, of contact between image and likeness. Again, we are born in the image of God, but spiritual work involves the never-ending task of becoming the likeness. When image meets likeness--when we are "touched" from above--there is often a spontaneous production of tears. The flow of these vivifying tears is mysteriously associated with "life"--the higher Life, not mere biological life. A saint is always on the verge of tears. And no one is more alive.

For these tears ultimately represent a "crucifixion" of the heart, life emerging out of death, a mingling of sorrow and joy, burial and resurrection, a rose blooming on the cross of the heart. Jesus actually sweats real blood when face to face with God in Gethsemane. And what happened when his heart was pierced by the Roman centurian? Blood and water flow: exterior and interior life co-mingled.

The 'I' of the morning of Easter is of another order... The saving name of Christ is aham asmi, I AM. And the deep confession of faith is no longer the external 'Christ is Lord,' but so ham asmi, I am He. Like him at once born and not born. The Father in relation to the Son--to me--to all. The Son in relation to me--to all. Myself in relation to every conscious being; born in all, ceaselessly, and yet always face to face.” --Swami Abhishiktananda

The Cosmic Struggle of Darkness and Light: What Else is New?

Went to bed thinking about the bad craziness in the world, but drifted off to sleep thinking about eternity with the help of Arvo Part, the great Russian Orthodox composer of contemporary sacred music. Woke up thinking about the intersection of time and eternity and about mankind’s 40,000 year struggle toward the light.

Part was born in Estonia in 1935. At the time it was free and independent, but became part of the Soviet Union after World War II. Like Jesus, he ran afoul of the imperial authorities, especially when his compositions began to openly express his Christian faith in 1968. This was an incredibly courageous thing to do, because one never knew how the Party might react. Shostakovich before him always kept a bag packed in case of the midnight knock on the door. Probably not as scary as it is for Bruce Springsteen or the Dixie Chicks to live under President Bush, but still...

Brilliant light amidst near total darkness. Here is where any kind of mere rationalism or materialism fails utterly as an adequate philosophy, for this metaphysical light and darkness are real, as real as anything you can touch, see, or taste. Or, to put it another way: if you cannot see the transpersonal light--and I'm speaking figuratively here, because many good but irreligious people experience that light without ever thinking about it--then you are likely either a subhuman or a monster, for you have specifically rejected that which makes you human and elevates you above the beasts. Those were real monsters that ran the Soviet Union, and it is monsters of depravity from the same infrahuman abyss that we are fighting today.

If we as a species ever lose our ability to intuit the divine light, then all hope--all reason for hope--is truly lost. The metaphysical light of which we are speaking can be demonstrated to exist, but only to those who are inclined to see it. As a matter of fact, our higher intellect knows no doubt as it pertains to this noetic light, but the intelligence can be so twisted by modern ideologies superimposed on mind parasites that it is reduced to a mere virtuality--a remnant of itself. Materialism and rationalism bring us a deceptive lucidity that is all artificial light.

As Schuon has said, when worldly intelligence---which is to say, unintelligence--”joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental satanism which destroys the very bases of intelligence and truth.” People in the West who call themselves "atheists" are nevertheless usually capable of knowing the light--which is why they are not monsters (as a number of commenters mentioned yesterday, in the case of an Ayn Rand.)

Yesterday we discussed the miraculous appearance of a sliver of light in the midst of the darkness of antiquity: the Jewish people. Prior to their turning toward the light, they had nothing to recommend themselves. They were as barbarous as the next tribe, perhaps even more so. People routinely misunderstand the phrase “chosen people,” as if it means that G-d chose the ancient Hebrews because there was something special or virtuous about them. Quite the contrary. G-d first approached many other more “worthy” peoples, all of whom rejected Him. The Hebrews were simply the only group to take G-d up on his offer.

So the uncreated light was there, but no one was interested in it until the Hebrews decided to try to become a vehicle for it. If you are Christian, then the later appearance of Jesus cannot be comprehended outside the prior preparation of a people to bear that light. It is inconceivable that Jesus could have appeared as a Greek, a Roman, a native American. Where else was he supposed to appear? It had to be in some place that was at least receptive to the light.

It is absurd that contemporary scholars continue to convey flattering ideas about ancient Greece and Rome. Being that they are mostly secularized minds, they do not understand the real drama of history: the struggle between darkness visible and uncreated light. Yesterday we discussed some of the innovations in Jewish child-rearing practices that began to allow the light in. Actually, the key is simply not to deliberately do things to destroy the primordial light that every human being is born with. I see it in my son. It is so obvious--it just radiates. Other people see it. You can’t miss it.

But most people do, especially down through history. Whether it is because of some primordial envy of the innocent light, or a mere repetition of what happened in their own childhood, people pass on their darkness to their own children, generation after generation. There is a reason that there is so much focus on the baby Jesus and upon his relationship with Mary--all of those nativity scenes at Christmas time are conveying a truth and a light that is way beyond what mere words can communicate. It is a straight line from the altar of Abraham to the nativity--from sacrificing children to a dark god to cherishing and nurturing the light in them.

Seems obvious, doesn’t it? Quite the opposite. You are hopelessly historo-centric and ethnocentric if you fail to realize how rare this attitude toward children is. The monsters among us are attracted to children in an entirely different way. There is a deep psychological reason why child sacrifice was so ubiquitous in the ancient world, and why it is so pervasive, albeit in disguised form, among our enemies today.

The death-worshipping Palestinians--perhaps the most sick and evil culture since the Ancient Aztec--systematically poison the souls of their children with hatred of the light before sending them off to murder innocents on behalf of their sinister god. They use their children as “human” shields, for that is what they are: the little humans that the monsters hide behind, for some part of their twisted mind realizes that we value their children more than they do. And if one of them is accidentally killed, the monsters know how to play on our guilt. Although they cannot empathize with children, they intuit that we have a soft spot for them, and know that they can manipulate our sensibilities with the cooperation of the dupes of the Western media.

As usual, this post is veering into unintended directions. I had wanted to discuss the barbarity of ancient Rome and the miracle of Jesus’ light appearing in such a dark and detestable world. Gladiators mutilating Christians to the roar of the crowd, grotesque animal sacrifices, mass slaughter of prisoners on the battlefield as an offering to their bloodthirsty gods. Rampant child rape and abuse. Starvation of children, boy brothels in every major city in the Empire, slave boys kept for sexual pleasure, children sold into concubinage.

The literature of antiquity abounds with details of how it was necessary to beat children in order to drive the demons out of their minds. One book notes that “When the Emperor Diocletian became ill in 303 AD, the state required a general sacrifice. Anyone who did not sacrifice a child during the Emperor’s illness would be immediately executed.” When he was 22, Nero murdered his own mother out of fear that she would kill him first. Nero and Caligula inaugurated so many grotesque cruelties that I don't think I want to even mention them. It will ruin your day.

Crucifixion was the product of the most lingering and painful death the Romans were capable of imagining in their sadistic minds. Although they didn't invent it, they perfected the process, making it as slow and agonizing as possible. The length of survival on the cross might go on for as long as four days, with insects burrowing into open wounds and birds of prey tearing at the victim. I could go on, but I won’t. You’ve probably seen the Passion of the Christ anyway.

“Thou shall not murder” made no sense whatsoever to the Romans. Nor did “I am the light, the way, the truth.” Has anything really changed? Same evil, new axis. Some people need to see the darkness before they can appreciate the light. If so, be sure and read LGF every day for dispatches from the front, where light does battle with the absolute darkness of our enemies--enemies of humanity, enemies of God, enemies of the light, enemies of progress, and enemies of all that is decent and holy.

Why the Jews? Come to Think of It, Why the Palestinians? (Hint--the answer is the same)

In his book Human Accomplishment, Charles Murray describes how Jews did not even begin to be emancipated in Europe until the late 18th century. While they technically had full rights under federal law in the United States, protection at the state level had to await passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.

“This history,” he writes, “provides us with a nice example of what social scientists call an interrupted time series. Until 1800 Jews are excluded. Then, over about 70 years, the legal exclusions are lifted and the social exclusion eases. What happens?"

Historian Raphael Patai notes that “the suddenness with which Jews begin to appear is nothing short of astounding.... It seemed as if a huge reservoir of Jewish talent, hitherto damned up behind the wall of Talmudic learning, were suddenly released to spill over into all the fields of Gentile cultural activity.”

In graphic form, Murray demonstrates how, in nearly every important human endeavor--biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, medicine, visual arts, literature, music and philosophy--Jews are staggeringly over-represented given their small numbers. In mathematics the actual-to-expected ratio is 12:1. In philosophy it is 14:1. In physics 9:1. In medicine and biology, 8:1. Remember, these ratios are not just measuring the raw numbers of doctors, scientists and artists, but the number of truly great and significant ones.

Do we have any idea why? Murray gets into some speculation, and there is no doubt some truth to what he writes--for example, the devotion to learning that has always been central to Jewish culture. Jews also have a much higher proportion of people with high IQs, but that introduces the possibility of environmental factors that I will discuss below, since IQ is influenced both by genetics and the environment. Jewish family units also tend to be quite strong, with fewer children growing up in broken homes. But here again, we’re dealing with a chicken-egg problem, since psychoanalysts believe that the ability to have deep and fulfilling relationships as an adult is rooted in early attachment experiences.

So no one really knows why Jews produce this disproportionate excellence, even in the wake of having been perhaps the most persecuted group in human history. Therefore, we are free to speculate, which I will proceed to do.

You know the story about the tailor who met the pope? Someone asked him what the pope was like, and he responded, “Oh, about a 38 regular.” As a psychologist inquiring into "what Jews were like," I naturally focus on their child-rearing practices--not now, but from the time of antiquity. Referring again to the book we were discussing yesterday, The Slaughter of Innocents: Child Abuse through the Ages and Today, Breiner devotes a chapter to some of the striking differences in child-rearing practices between the ancient Hebrews and some of their contemporaries. This chapter is fairly lengthy, so I will only have time to hit some of the highlights.

It is almost impossible for us to imagine the barbarity of the ancient world--very similar to how contemporary liberals find it impossible to comprehend the evil savagery of the Islamists with whom we are in a mortal struggle. As we mentioned yesterday, in all other ancient lands, the abuse of women and children, including infanticide, was common. Breiner notes, for example, that On, the King of the Swedes, sacrificed nine of his ten sons in the belief that it would prolong his life. Think about it. It was if the entire ancient world consisted of Palestinians who think that murdering children will lead to their own salvation.

Surely it is no coincidence, therefore, that the story of the Jews as a people begins with the motif of child sacrifice, and G-d intervening to stop it. What was that voice in Abraham's head? Whether it was G-d or just his “conscience,” it was something new in human history. And even if you want to say it was his conscience, that just begs the question, for where did that come from?

In any event, the story of Abraham and Isaac allows us to assume that, up to that time, the ancient Hebrews were just as barbaric as any other ancient people. This biblical story preserves one of the truly shocking and unexpected “right turns” in human history--when something caused us to empathize with the sacrificial victim and lay down the knife. Not that it wasn’t a struggle afterwards. The Bible chronicles many instances of backsliding and regression, which gives it even more of a ring of authenticity. The struggle against absuing children was (and is) very real.

But the benefits were obvious. For the first time in history, Jews were also able to intuit the one God. Not only that, but he was a loving God. Other primitive peoples lived in the psychological fragmentation of polytheism. In my opinion, they did not know God because they could not know God. Early childhood trauma leads to what is called “borderline personality structure,” in which the mind is subject to vertical splitting and the inability to maintain psychological unity and coherence. Therefore, primitive polytheism was actually an indirect measure of child abuse. Note as well that the gods of ancient Greece and Rome were arbitrary, selfish, and narcissistic, and even got a kick out of lording it over the “little” humans. They were suspiciously simlar to abusive and uncaring parents.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Hebrews began viewing themselves as having an intimate relationship with a benevolent God who took a deep and abiding interest in them, instead of having to live in fear of a multitude of arbitrary and self-absorbed gods.

Again, we are not comparing the ancient Hebrews to modern peoples but to their own contemporaries in the ancient world, and by that standard, they were moyels ahead of the pack. Marriage began to be viewed as a sacred institution composed of two individuals who were in the image and likeness of God. “He who marries for money shall have worthless children,” says the Talmud. Here again, this cannot be separated from psychological issues. One will not be capable of a stable and loving marriage so long as one lives with the psychological fragmentation produced by vertical splitting. It is no coincidence that the “one loving God” was discovered at roughly the same time that it became possible to conceive of a monogamous, loving, companionate marriage between two equals.

Breiner speculates that this prevailing attitude--“to take care of and love one’s wife so that she will care for and love one's children”--was “fundamental in determining why ancient child abuse and infanticide were rare among the ancient Hebrews.” The Talmud stated that those who practiced pederasty were subject to stoning. In ancient Greece, pedophiles were subject to being lionized as immortal philosophers.

One of the most striking differences was in the attitude toward female children, which is one of the hinges of psychohistorical evolution. Unlike other ancient peoples, the Jews began cherishing and protecting female children. Many laws that we might now look upon as chauvinistic were, as reader Yesterday pointed out tomorrow--I mean Tamara pointed out yesterday--very advanced and innovative for their day. They were meant to protect women and girls, not to degrade them.

The Talmud has many laws about the proper treatment of infants and children. “A baby should be as well looked after as a king, high priest and learned man.” Fathers were enjoined to educate their children under penalty of fines. Furthermore, the father was admonished not to envy his son or pupil, which is very wise, for envy of childhood innocence is one of the psychological bases of child abuse. While there were still laws “on the books” allowing for a rebellious child to be put to death, there is no record of that actually occurring. (In fact, being that I am hardly a Jewish scholar, it is possible that this was a figure of speech, a way to emphasize the importance of filial piety, of honoring one’s parents.)

Again, it is easy to be historo-centric and view ancient Hebrews as barbaric by our standards, but the punishment meted out in Hebrew courts of law was lenient and humane by the standards of the day. So too their treatment of slaves, of captured enemies, of the poor, the oppressed, the widow, the stranger. They were the first people to achieve nearly 100% literacy, a development which had staggering implications for the way children were raised. In other words, it makes a huge difference if you happen to be raised by a literate mother capable of abstract thought vs. an illiterate mother capable only of concrete thought. Think of the contemporary Muslim Middle East, where female literacy continues to hover around 50%.

Tacitus, the renowned Roman historian who lived in the first century A.D., viewed the Hebrews as contemptible because “they considered it a crime among them to kill any child.” Nothing has changed. To paraphrase Golda Meir, the Arabs will only begin to make psychohistorical progress when they love their own children as much as they hate Jewish children. The two attitudes are simply two sides of the same coin: Palestinians and other Arabs engage in systematic abuse of their own children, who then grow up to externalize their implacable hatred onto Israelis.

Pockets of Sanity in an Insane World

Did I add that I’m not a scholar? I know I’ve mentioned that I don’t consider myself a writer, not a real one, anyway. However, if you want to say “visionary,” I suppose I’m okay with that, so long as you mean it in a neutral sense. That is, for me, being “visionary” simply means seeing everything at once, or at least attempting to. It is trying to encompass as much of reality as you can in a single view. As such, there can be good visionaries and bad visionaries, and we must especially be on guard against the bad kind, for they are at the basis of most really evil movements in history. After all, Hitler was a visionary with an all-encompassing view that explained the whole of reality. So are the Islamists. All cults are headed up by a charismatic visionary of some sort.

On the other hand, our founding fathers were visionaries. St. Paul was obviously one of the most important, if not the most important, visionaries in history.

Newt Gingrich is a visionary, which is the reason why he probably wouldn’t be suited for president. Ronald Reagan was clearly a visionary, but in a different way than Gingrich. In Reagan’s case there was a strong component of very grounded spirituality that I don’t see in Gingrich. Again, this can cut both ways, but I would almost regard Reagan as a “nationalistic mystic,” similar to Hitler, only in a good rather than demonic way (interestng that leftists continue to regard Reagan as demonic). Sri Aurobindo described Hitler as an “infrarational mystic” who embodied the dark spirit of his nation. He clearly possessed unusual vertical powers over others, but in a wholly maniacal and diabolical way. Reagan, like Lincoln before him, came to embody America--almost as if he were the “idea” or logos of America made flesh. I do not believe that the strong emotional reaction that people have to Reagan has to do with Reagan the person. Rather, it has to do with his embodiment of the ideal of America.

How did we get off on this tangent? Oh yes--my troubling visions. For whatever reason, I just cannot see a thing and leave it as it is. Rather, the way my mind works, I instantly see all sorts of hidden connections between things that you might not think are connected. There are inductive thinkers who first see the parts and then attempt to build “upward” toward a model of reality. I am the opposite. It’s as if I first see the whole pattern, and then figure out how all the parts fit into the pattern.

For example, when I first began studying psychoanalysis some 22 or 23 years ago, I immediately saw connections between it and other things--quantum physics, chaos and complexity theories, neurology, history, politics, you name it. I never saw it merely as “a way to treat patients.” Instead, my mind reeled at all of the possibilities and implications.

Much of modern psychoanalysis revolves around attachment theory. In the early days, psychoanalysis was rather doctrinaire and detached from empirical observation of actual mother-infant interactions. Freud tended to regard memories of childhood as consisting primarily of fantasies and wishes, whereas now there is much more appreciation of the real experiences of children, and how those experiences shape character and development.

Instantly I began to wonder about the cultural and historical implications of this. Even when I was a big liberal, I was never really very politically correct. It very much went against the grain of my personality. In fact, I frankly thought most people--and especially most cultures--were more or less crazy. Even before studying psychology, I can distinctly remember thinking that the world was basically insane--that insanity was its default state--but that it was sprinkled with little “pockets of sanity.” The purpose of life was to locate or create one of these little pockets of sanity as a bulwark against the world’s perpetual madness. Your family should be a little pocket of sanity. America has clearly been the deepest pocket of sanity in world history. Perhaps you consider this blog to be one (which is why I pledge to be more vigorous in deleting and banishing insane trolls).

This, by the way, was why history was so boring to me in school, since it largely consisted of irrational people doing insane things. Naturally, I wanted to know why. But no answers were ever forthcoming. I was not impressed by the pyramids. Rather, I wanted to know why ancient Egyptians spent hundreds of years building oversized crypts for their pharaohs, where they would bury their family and slaves alive with them so they would have company in the afterlife. I didn’t care about the “beauty” of indigenous American cultures. Rather, I wanted to know why they thought it was a good idea to conduct human sacrifice and to cut the beating heart out of thousands and thousands of sacrificial victims in order to prevent the sun from going out. Why did Nazi Germany believe insane things? What really motivates Islamists to believe things that are not only untrue, but cannot possibly be true?

Clearly these are important, even fundamental questions. Think about it. Our current war, for example, is not over territory or resources or even ideas, because Islamism, properly understood, is not an idea at all, any more than nazism was an idea. Rather, it is plainly a mental (and spiritual) illness that uses whatever materials are at hand to elaborate itself and metastasize. If it were an idea, you could sit down and have a sensible discussion with them, which is why liberals are so naive. Islamism is a deep pathology that has even deeper roots in cultural and historical pathology. But where does cultural pathology come from? Where could it come from?

Here is where my visionary ideas could well be wrong, for the first place I want to look is in their manner of child-rearing, since that is where the vast majority of psychopathology emanates from. Of course, there are more or less purely genetic conditions such as bipolar illness, schizophrenia, and certain depressions, but those diseases afflict individuals, not whole cultures.

But what does one make of a whole culture, say, the ancient Greeks, whose men did not fall in love with women, but with young boys? Women and wives were basically regarded as subhuman nuisances, whereas the love between man and boy was idealized by poets and philosophers. Perhaps I am the one who is naive, but I just can’t understand how historians can look at such craziness and pass over it as if it were of no consequence, no different than their preference for columned architecture.

What could possibly cause ancient Greeks to be so psychosexually messed up? Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question. For if history is actually a field of insanity sprinkled with little pockets of sanity, we shouldn’t be surprised by this systematic abuse of woman and children. Rather, we should only be surprised when we encounter the opposite--humane and empathic treatment of the weaker members of society.

When we look beyond the beautiful art and timeless philosophy and examine the actual cultural beliefs of Ancient Greece, a disturbing picture emerges. Historians of ideas like to talk about the link between ancient Athenian and modern democracy, but these people were not like us. Well, not like me, anyway. You can speak for yourself.

We are naturally appalled at the barbaric way our captured soldiers are treated by the Islamist savages, but this was pretty much the norm in history. For example, the Mycenaean pirates of ancient Crete subjugated the peoples around them, who paid tribute with pre-pubertal boys and girls to be used as human sacrifices to their bull-god (just as Islamists make such sacrifices to their bullshit god).

According to Breiner, author of a book entitled Slaughter of the Innocents: Child Abuse Through the Ages and Today, the women of ancient Greece were essentially slaves. A wife’s function was to “look after the household and produce children--preferably boys.” While courtesans--who were used for pleasure rather than procreation--could be educated, wives were illiterate.

Similar to Islamic societies today, the ancient Greeks “viewed men as sane and stable while women were considered mad, hysterical, and possibly dangerous and destructive to men.” Furthermore, “a woman’s freedom was severely restricted” and she was without power. “A man could sell his daughter or sister into concubinage if he wished.” Children of concubines were simply “aborted, killed or sold into slavery.”

At the time of Pericles in the late 5th century BC, a girl could marry only through parental arrangement: “no man married for love.” And once the marriage took place and the Athenian bride went to live with her husband, “she was cut off from her family and became a menial worker in her husband’s home.” Even the children she bore were not her own, but belonged to the husband to dispense with as he saw fit. Out of a population of 400,000, only 14,240 people had full civil rights. The rest were women, children and slaves. Unwanted children were simply exposed on a mountainside to die. “In all the Greek cities except Thebes the father had the right to kill his child at birth without question. In all cities except Athens the father could sell his children to slave dealers.” Female infanticide was the norm. Very few families raised more than one daughter. Even then, girls were given inferior food and no education.

Breiner feels that the revulsion towards women was at the basis of Greek male homosexuality. Can you think of a better explanation? The fashionable modern idea is that homosexuality is “genetic” and not subject to environmental influences. If so, how does one account for the prevalence of Ancient Greek homosexuality? “It was considered quite proper for the young men of Athens to engage sexually with older men, and most did.” “Merchants would import handsome boys to be sold to the highest bidder”; these boys would “be first used as concubines and later as slaves.”

Breiner speculates that “homosexual pederasty was so universal in Greek society” because it was “a means of ‘rescuing’ the male child from the perceived dangers of women...” “Boy brothels flourished in every city and a child prostitute could be rented, even at the height of Athenian culture... A freeborn child might see his father having sexual relations with a child his own age who was a slave.”

I don’t even have time to get into the human and animal sacrifice. “Human life was considered so short and cheap that there was little concern about killing. When a town was captured the men were automatically killed or sold into slavery and the women were taken as concubines or slaves.” Traits such as “gentleness, kindness, industry, honesty, and integrity were scorned as effeminate and inferior.”

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Remember Petey’s law: history is basically insane, with pockets of sanity. One of the first tiny pockets of sanity to appear in history was the ancient Jewish people, which we will discuss tomorrow. All of us continue to benefit everyday from that little sliver of light that miraculously opened up in a world of infrahuman darkness.