Of Messiahs and Monsters (2.3.11)

I was building up to this important point about Nazism, progress, transcendence, and mysticism, when Will appeared out of nowhere and stole my God of Thunder. (BTW, I haven't had time to check it out, but that site looks like a pretty interesting.) As he pointed out, "Nazism was, in a sense, a stab at progress, and a spiritual progress, to be sure. Doomed to failure, of course, because it, like communism, attempted to transcend collectively, an impossibility. I think we should make no mistake, though -- there is a meta-power in the collective that can be harnassed, channeled. Thus Nazism was a mysticism gone bad, and when mysticism goes bad, it becomes evil."

Precisely. In Hitler and His God, we have to get to page 568 before we read Aurobindo saying the same thing, only in the 1930s: "Hitler is a new type, an infra-rational mystic, representing the dark counterpart of what we are striving to arrive at: a supra-rational mysticism.... He is a mystic, only a mystic of the wrong kind! He goes into solitude for his messages and waits till they come."

This was true. As a psychologist, I find the description of Hitler's "voice" to be very different from any typical psychosis, in which the individual has no control over his delusions and hallucination. But in Hitler's case, he would court and call upon "the voice," in the same way that an artist might call upon his muse or I might call upon my household gnome. So who or what was the voice? Whatever it was, it gave him a kind of absolute conviction, plus the complete fearlessness and unwavering faith to carry out its promptings. Now, who does this remind us of? Yes, the Islamists follow that same pattern, with their insane faith in the transcendently evil. Clearly, it is no coincidence that Mein Kampf is a perennial bestseller in the Muslim world, or that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was an ally of Hitler, or that Jew hatred is central to both ideologies.

Just as the Divine leaves its traces in time, Satan always leaves his scent, so to speak. It reminds me of one of the final scenes of Batman Begins, where the Lieutenant hands Batman the Joker's calling card. For what is the Joker card? It is simultaneously nothing and anything. In fact, it can be anything you want it to be, from the highest of the high (the king) to the lowest of the low, or anything in between. It can even be another gender (the queen). As such, it abolishes all distinction and hierarchy, except that in a perverse way, the nothing-anything of the Joker is the "top," as he stands completely outside -- he transcends and upends -- any established or meaningful order.

Now, this is surely a kind of mysticism, but it is again a mysticism "from below" rather than above. It abolishes distinctions before they even have a chance to become distinct, which was again one of the central features of Nazism. You might say that there are only two distinctions, 1) the Volk, and 2) the Fuhrer -- who was truly a "nothing" and nobody who became the German "all." There was also the SA and the SS, but in both cases, their admittance into the hierarchy very much depended upon the degree to which they had subordinated their own will and identity to the Fuhrer principle. The SS in particular was a sort of esoteric mystic body; in fact, they modeled themselves after the Jesuits, only absolutely committed to Hitler instead of Christ.

In his comment, Will also noted that "Personal responsibility arises from genuine individualism and self-awareness -- meaning the attempt to overcome one's self-love, one's own lower instincts. When the emphasis is on a collective responsibility -- meaning making sure you recycle and pay respects to Gaia, etc. -- and personal responsibility is distinctly de-emphasized, then we're veering close to a mysticism gone bad."

We'll discuss the nature-worship of Nazism in a later post. But as Will implies, the nationalism of Germany was a parody of the patriotism of the United States, the latter of which must first involve defense of the sacred principle of the individual. But in the case of German nationalism, it was in defense of the innate superiority of the German people in the collective sense. Again, this was conceived in terms of a mystical essence that emanated from the Volk, and only through the individual in a derivative way. There was a "German genius" that was in the blood, not on "paper," as it is in the case of America's founding documents.

Therefore, in the case of Nazi Germany, they needed to eliminate "foreign blood" in the same way Americans must constantly battle against "lies," or more precisely, "the lie." Hitler had no scruples whatsoever in lying, murdering, or backstabbing in order to further his "higher" truth, which was the racial purity of the German spirit. In fact, in that context, no degree of barbarism was off limits. Everything followed logically -- or infralogically -- from his first principles, which were written in the blood.

Van Vrekhem makes the interesting point that it is no coincidence that the Protestant revolt began in Germany with Luther. I have no idea whether this is generally accepted by other scholars, but Van Vrekhem notes that Christianity always had an uneasy relationship with the German psyche, and was very much superimposed on a much more primitive pagan mythology that was never forgotten among the "volk." Therefore, when Luther came along to declare independence from the central church, he was merely exploiting collective psychic energies that were already very near the surface.

In fact, it can easily be seen how Luther was a kind of proto-Hitler, in particular, with his appalling anti-Semitism. (I'm not trying to compare him to Hitler, as I just don't know enough; but I wonder if someone like Jakob Boehme -- or Meister Eckhart before him -- was the "bright side" to Luther's "dark side" of the German psyche?) Van Vrekhem notes that Luther exploited the same divide "that had opposed the Roman civilization against the barbarian world of the Germanic tribes," and that Germans "had been ready for a long time to recapture the fortress stolen by Christianity." "German utopianism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries almost always meant a return to pre-Christian, pagan spirituality in some form."

Furthermore, it seems that the longing for a "strong man from above" was a continuous feature of the German psyche. As Van Vrekhem notes, "This need for an all-powerful master was an important feature in the psychological make-up of the Germans long before the strong man became the paragon of Fascism in many European nations. The Furher was longed and prayed for; he was expected before he took the shape of Adolf Hitler. It was not the least of of Hitler's intuitions that he knew exactly how to take on the part and act in a way to which the German masses subconsciously responded with religious fervor." Another observer wrote that "The cry for a leader arose from the searing wish for somebody who would provide meaning in a secularized time, which apparently burdened the individual with an excess of individual responsibility and made him feel lonely" (emphases mine).

I want to emphasize that I am not trying to invoke Godwin's law in demonstrating the parallels between this and the Obamessiah hysteria, but parallels there are (not in the ends, but in the deeper structure of the infrarational mysticism). As we continue this series, I will be very curious to analyze the language and imagery of Obama's acceptance speech at his Nuremburg-like mass-hypnosis rally at Invesco Field before 75,000 adoring "fans" (which is the proper term, since this whole creepy exercise is "infra-poltical" and emotional, devoid of intellectual substance).

I just did a quick google search, and found this typical story, which says that "In a little more than a week, 75,000 lucky ticket-holders will head for Invesco Field, ready to usher in a new era of photos for their Facebook pages.... And eventually, upon the entrance of the Great Half-White Hope, they will be reduced to one giant goosebump.... But it won't just be the arrival of Barack Obama that will send chills down their spines. Obama, no doubt, will enter the stadium to the tune of some inspiring piece of pop music. Whose song will it be?.... Which song will electrify the crowd next Thursday?"

I don't know, WWLD? That is, what would Leni Riefenstahl recommend? A little Wagner? Interestingly, there is no question whatsoever that she was a gifted artist. But look at the mesmerizing effect Hitler had upon her will -- and she is hardly alone in this regard. Van Vrekhem relates story after story of how strong men -- generals, diplomats, artists, and journalists -- were reduced to Jello in his presence. He clearly transmitted a kind of supernatural power to which many individuals attested. Is there an "artist" in Hollywood, or a celebrity journalist, who hasn't fallen under Obama's spell? Yes, a few, but only a few. .

Obama clearly has a similar kind of power, at least over the susceptible -- for example, his vaunted ability to make Chris Matthews' pasty thigh tingle. Obviously it can't be Obama's ideas, which are so banal, nor his accomplishments, which are nil. As was very much true of Hitler, Obama's words often make no literal sense on paper, and yet, he personally has this undeniably potent persuasive power. And he especially has this power over people who are not inoculated by genuine religion. In other words, he has a "religious effect" on the secularized mind. Deepak could be speaking of Hitler when he writes of how the Annointed One will bring about a "quantum leap" in human consciousness. How could anyone believe such utter sacred cow manure?

In Riefenstahl's case, she writes of how she read a single page of Mein Kampf and was hooked: "The book made a tremendous impression on me. I became a confirmed National Socialist after reading the first page. I felt a man who could write such a book would undoubtedly lead Germany. I felt very happy that such a man had come."

Michael Burleigh writes of how Germany went "going boldly into the future in search of an imaginary past." In so doing, they created a gilded mythology in which they were the ones the world was waiting for.

Sri Aurobindo stressed the crucial importance of the individual, always of a higher consciousness than the group or the mass, and the center or 'dynamo' of the cosmic forces in humanity.... The message of Sri Aurobindo lay precisely in the possibility and necessity of an upward transformation of the human being, the only way of real progress. --Georges Van Vrekhem

Careening Through History Without a Rear View Mirror

I probably shouldn't even try. It's already 6:40, I have a dental appointment at 2:00, and I have to get a lot of work done in between. Nevertheless....

I guess one thing we're trying to do here is figure out if any general principles can be derived from something that seems so uniquely evil, i.e., the Nazi phenomenon. And not just banal things like "don't appease evil," or "genocide is bad," or "get rid of that stupid little mustache."

One of the important contexts of Nazism was romanticism, which was itself a reaction to the alienation that was felt as a result of the industrial revolution in particular and modernity in general. Veith writes that "people felt alienated from nature, from society, and -- because their identity had become such an enigma -- from themselves. The rationalism of the Enlightenment, which seemed responsible for this malaise, was answered in the 19th century by Romanticism."

Interestingly, romanticism is a regressive phenomenon that occurs in the context of progress, almost the way that a child will regress in the midst of psychological development. As a matter of fact, that's happening to my son right now, as he has suddenly developed the urge and the capacity to toilet train himself. Clearly, his ability to do this is a result of countless synaptic connections taking place below the surface. As a result, he's being ushered into a whole new and unfamiliar world. His desire to sit on the toilet is just the tip of the assberg, so to speak.

To cite one obvious example, he sees that most of his friends are housebroken, and he's suddenly self-conscious about it -- which is to say, a tad ashamed. But just a few weeks ago he wouldn't have had this introspective capacity, nor the ability to look at himself from the standpoint of the Other, which is a prerequisite for shame. This is why two year-olds and trial lawyers do not feel shame.

But just as with every previous developmental leap, he is clearly experiencing a lot of ambivalence about his new capacities, so he's also engaging in more regressive behavior -- at times more clingy, or more angry, or more frustrated, etc. One can well understand why. Just think back on your own relatively sudden transition from child to adolescent. I remember it well. One day you're hanging out with your friends, playing baseball, joking around, hating girls. The next day....

It's very disorienting. And it's now understood by developmental neurologists that one of the reasons it's so disorienting is that the brain literally disassembles at these developmental cruxes, and then reassembles at a "higher level," so to speak. In other words, human psychological development is not like an addition to your house, or building a new floor above the existing one. Rather, it's more the way a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. It's a transformation, not just a transition.

Anyway, it's these "in between" phases that are fraught with such difficulty, those interstices between one stage and another. That is precisely where a lot of the mind parasites get imported, because that is when the brain is much more "fluid," open, and unstable. Could the same thing be true of history? The first thing that comes to mind is Marxism, which specifically developed in that gap between the premodern and modern world. It is fundamentally rooted in the myopic fallacy that things were getting worse for the average worker, when the reality was that, for the first time in 10,000 years, they were actually getting dramatically better.

In this regard, Marx was not just economically illiterate, but completely ahistorical, a malady that continues to afflict the left to this day. The free market will eventually solve most problems that leftist solutions will only perpetuate or aggravate. But the leftist relies upon people being riveted only on the now, which then requires some sort of radical solution to redeem the future.

For example, how many Americans realize that gasoline actually reached its peak price in the early 1960s if adjusted for inflation, while it reached its low point in 1998? For the demagogues of the left, it is vital that you not know that, just as it was vital to Marxists that people be unaware of the fact that for the average laborer, the 18th century was almost a straight upward line in terms of increasing affluence.

So, let's play with this idea that sudden progress is going to bring with it sudden regression -- or at least make certain people more vulnerable to it. Yesterday we mentioned the 1960s. Why would the most affluent and pampered generation in history suddenly revert to neo-paganism, earth-worship, deconstruction, moral relativism, and a rejection of the very civilizational inheritance that allowed such unprecedented affluence to begin with?

It reminds me of an unfortunate incident that occurred last Sunday, when Mrs. G backed her car out of the garage, and in the process managed to amputate my driver's side view mirror. So for the last few days I've been rolling the Coonmobile without one, and it's more disorienting than you might think. You realize the extent to which successfully moving forward requires you to keep one eye riveted on the past. Without that view of the past, it can sneak up on you in surprising ways. Your every move risks colliding with someone else's unfolding line of spacetime. Furthermore, I found myself reflexively looking for the past in the usual place, but finding only a "hole" -- except that the hole was filled with the present.

It is no exaggeration to say that in the 1960s, the baby boom generation gleefully tore the rearview mirror off the vehicle of civilization, while simultaneously believing that they could put the pedal to the metal on the engine of progress. Is it therefore surprising that so many fatal accidents occurred? The breakup of the family, soaring crime rates, a naturalistic or surreal art that became a celebration of the primitive and subhuman, a deteriorating educational system at all levels, a general recrudescence of neopaganism, with its cult of the body and exaltation of the instincts, women emulating men, men emulating women, the rejection of our own Judeo-Christian wisdom tradition, etc. All because a few adolescents tore the rear view mirror off Dad's car. You know, guys like Obama's good buddy, Bill Ayers.

We all know that conservatives realize that liberals are usually well-intentioned but merely ignorant (or immature, or stupid), while liberals imagine that conservatives are evil -- that they are driven by sinister motives. You know the drill -- if you want to liberate the Iraqi people, you really want to enrich oil companies, or if you think Obama is a vacuous celebrity, you're really a racist, or if you think global warming is a hoax, you really hate the environment, etc., etc., etc. Being that leftists flatter themselves by calling themselves "progressives," like a child, they imagine that the conservative must be the opposite. You might say that they imagine that conservatives want to drive the historical car by looking only in the rear view mirror.

But obviously, if you try to do that, you will be no more successful than the leftist who tries to go forward without reference to the past. You'll inevitably get into a lot of accidents, but they will be of a slightly different nature.

Now, as it so happens, there are conservatives who do try to do that. But I don't like to call them conservatives, since it conflates them with the true conservative, who tries to drive forward while having a deep and panoramic view of the past, where objects may be much, much larger than they appear in your mirror.

I realize I'm rambling here, but one theme that leapt out in this book on Hitler is the parallel between the Nazi movement and the traditionalist movement as articulated by people such as Guenon, Schuon, and Coomaraswamy. First of all, let's eliminate up front the idea that I am calling them "Nazis," or some other such nonsense. However, you don't have to search very far before you discover a persistent critique of Traditionalism, to the effect that it is essentially a fascist movement. That is, it is entirely backward looking, authoritarian, cultish, romantic, and very openly repelled by all things modern.

As it so happens, Schuon spent most of his childhood in Basel, which is situated right over the border between Switzerland and Germany. He was born in 1907, and there seems to be little doubt that his childhood was immersed in the volkisch sentiments of the time, as discussed yesterday. For example, he writes of Basel as a "fairy tale city," where he developed a deep appreciation of its romanticism. His biography notes that he was "Germanic to the core," and "impregnated from childhood by that poetic and mystical culture whose particular expression in fairy tales and traditional melodies he never forgot.... His sensibility led him quite naturally in the direction of German romanticism, nurtured by the Middle Ages, at once chivalrous, enchanted and mystical."

But at the same time, he felt profoundly alienated, as if he were more comfortable in the past than the present: "An introvert, he felt like a stranger, misunderstood by those around him." This led him to explore museums "for the traces of past wisdom which seemed to him like windows opening onto a lost world." He was too young to have taken part in World War I, but interestingly, he reflexively blamed the war on modernity, when in fact, as we shall see, neither it nor its second act, World War II, can be understood outside the context of that same backward-looking romanticism that led Schuon in a very different direction. In other words, these wars may have used modern means developed by science, but they were thoroughly rooted in magic and mythology. Just as the current war against Islam, these were medieval people with modern weapons.

I want to re-emphasize that in no way do I intend to denigrate Schuon, whom I consider to be one of the most profoundly gifted spiritual geniuses in human history. But he's definitely not an "American" thinker, a metaphysic which I believe has the best chance to synthesize past and present into a viable future characterized by real progress. But now I'm out of time, so I'll have to continue this line of thought tomorrow.

A Similar Hoax for Different Volks (2.02.11)

Yesterday we left off with the idea that the scientific and industrial revolutions created a kind of historical rupture or existential earthquake which continues to be felt today. In his book Modern Fascism, Veith discusses the deep alienation that resulted from the dramatic change from an agrarian, religious, hierarchical, and essentially timeless (or cyclical) existence to one that was suddenly ordered around the machine, the clock, democracy, and (small r) reason.

If we say that man appeared approximately 200,000 years ago, his life was essentially unchanged from then until the Agricultural Revolution some 10,000 years ago. Afterwards, not a lot changed for the average Joe until the Industrial Revolution, beginning in the 18th century. So in the overall scheme of things, our current lifestyle is truly just a blip -- 300 years out of a total of 200,000. No wonder, therefore, that humans have such a strongly romantic and nostalgic streak. You would too if you were living in an alien environment and couldn't find your way home.

But some people are more romantic than others, no one more so than the late 18th and early 19th century Germans -- perhaps as a reaction to how suddenly they had advanced in the previous century. While they apparently represented the apex of "civilization" by the onset of World War I, that civilization was superimposed, so to speak, on some very experience-near collective memories of blood, soil, and mythology that were not just bubbling under the surface, but existing side by side with the advances.

Back to that idea in just a moment, but we can get a glimpse of the same phenomenon in our contemporary culture, in which, for example, the most cutting edge science exists side by side with the most primitive new age magic and mythology, a la Deepak and his ilk. Instead of seeing these things as opposed (i.e. scientistic fairy tales and new age mythology), perhaps we should see the new age as a kind of fascist revolt against the anti-humanism of modernity. In fact, if I am not mistaken, Jonah Goldberg makes this connection in his book on Liberal Fascism, but I could be wrong there.

In any event, as we shall see, the cultural matrix that gave birth to Hitler was a deeply "new age" one, with all sorts of books, movements, and secret societies exploring the occult -- seances, spiritism, chanelling, reincarnation, hidden knowledge, etc. This phenomenon was only ramped up in the wake of the catastrophic loss of World War I. For example, Van Vrekhem discusses how much interest there was in contacting the dead, given how many parents had lost their sons to the war -- some five million dead between the German empire and Austria-Hungary.

Veith writes that "fascism is essentially a response to the alienation that has been a part of the spiritual landscape of the West since the Enlightenment.... Science, technology, and the economic realities and environmental damage of the industrial revolution isolate the individual from nature. There has thus been a genuine yearning for community and for an organic unity with the natural world."

Living a life of cold logic is intrinsically alienating. There is nothing Rational about living a life of pure (again, small r) reason. But nor is there anything rational about abandoning reason altogether and living a purely instinctual life, which is clearly what occurred with Nazi Germany, but also to a lesser extent in the 1960s, not just in America, but all over the developed world.

I remember a particular patient who was maybe a decade older than I, and who was a young adult by the end of the '60s, whereas I was still a young teen. He was a deeply alienated man, and quite hostile to religion. Interestingly, he frequently articulated his alienation in the form of nostalgia for the 1960s, which, you might say he missed out on. He was more a witness than participant in the dionysian frenzy of that decade, which made him feel as if that is what was missing in his life. If he could only go back and relive the '60s, but this time do it right -- completely obliterate his ego and live some sort of communal life with no tension, instant sexual gratification, no boundaries, etc. For him, it was as if there had been this giant party taking place, but he was on the outside looking in. (The film American Beauty also explores this theme.)

But again, this was just a symbol for my patient's current alienation, which could only be resolved now, not by dreaming and fantasizing about the past. The blogosphere is a pretty sorry place, but some of the sorriest people of all are the ones like my patient, who are now in their 60s and posting on dailykos about how much they miss the 1960s, and how the Obamessiah is going to bring back that sense of community and oneness!

Again, this is anything but progressiveism; it is pure romanticism, which is always backward looking -- and not just backward looking, but backward to an idealized past that never existed to begin with. It is pure projection of present existential pain, and escapism into the past. No one is more conservative than a progressive. It's just that what they want to conserve is childhood and all of its privileges, i.e., irresponsibility, dependency, entitlement, rebellion against the grown-ups, polymorphous perversity, weak boundaries, etc.

Hey, who wouldn't? For someone who lives without any religious telos, the denial of impulses seems stifling and arbitrary, because it "leads nowhere," and merely becomes bourgeois respectability or rank hypocrisy. As Veith writes, "If objective knowledge is alienating, subjective experience is liberating and healing. Authentic experience comes from unleashing the emotions, cultivating the subjective and irrational dimension of life." So never ask why the left is so hysterical and irrational, because that is the whole point. It is a way of life. You will look in vain for the "rational end" they are seeking, because the emotional irrationalism is its own end. I am quite convinced that leftism is simply a "way of life" -- or, more precisely, a way of managing one's emotional life, of dealing with the pain and conflict of existence. It will be with us so long as alienation is with us, as an alternative to religion.

In Hitler & His God, Van Vrekhem goes into considerable detail about the "volkisch movement" that was a big part of the appeal of Nazism -- or which Nazism co-opted, to be precise. At the root of this movement was the idea that Christianity was a foreign influence superimposed on a much deeper reservoir of primitive beliefs. Christianity unifies people through a common belief system, but "volk" indicates "a tribal unity of blood, unmodified by ideas of a common humanity. Religious in the intensity of their beliefs, volkists had had no real equivalent in other Western nations."

The concept is especially difficult for normal (non-leftist) Americans to comprehend, being that we are the first nation explicitly created around abstract and universal principles instead of more primitive modes of blood, soil, mythology, etc. But here again, we can see how the modern doctrine of multiculturalism is in reality a quite primitive reversion back to earlier ways of life. Multiculturalism is specifically a rejection of American principles, what with its obsession with blood and race instead of ideas. This is why when you criticize Obama's ideas, he accuses you of being a racist.

For Americans -- and for Christians -- "essence" is in the individual. That is, we are created in the image of God, so that our deepest personal essence partakes of divinity. But for the volkists -- and for the multicultural left -- essence is in the group: "Volk is a much more comprehensive term than 'people,' for to German thinkers ever since the birth of German romanticism in the late eighteenth century, Volk signified the union of a group of people with a transcendental 'essence.' This 'essence' might be called 'nature,' or 'cosmos' or 'mythos,' but in each instance it was fused to man's innermost nature and represented the source of his creativity, his depth of feeling, his individuality and his unity with other members of the Volk. The essential element here is the linking of the human soul with its natural surroundings, with the 'essence' of nature."

Now, why do you think that virtually all leftists are hysterical environmentalists and Ice Age skeptics? Here again, you need only scratch the surface of their irrational rhetoric to appreciate a reservoir of primitive, volkisch-like sentiments of "unity" with mother earth, of healing the planet, etc. Never mind that premodern humans were the worst stewards of the planet imaginable, in part because they were so fused with it that they didn't know the environment existed. Ironically, we only know about the environment because we have transcended it. But again, in the absence of a truly integral religious framework, this transcendence will be experienced as alienation, as if human beings are "suspended" above the earth, and need to come back down and re-merge with it.

For (non-left) Americans, the individual stands above the state, and derives his inalienable rights from the Creator. But for the volkist, the group is the supreme identity that stands above or behind the state. Truly, in Nazi Germany, there was only one individual, Hitler; but in turn, he was merely the "embodiment" of the volk, which is rooted in blood and soil. Thus, "it was the genius of Adolf Hitler to wed the volkisch flight from reality to political discipline and efficient political organization." Reminds me of someone....

To be continued....

Dialogue With Death

I'm so preoccupied with this book on Hitler, that I don't think I can blog about anything else. The problem is, I haven't had time to reflect upon or assimilate it, so I will have to do so in real time, with you as guinea pigs. I think I last did this almost a year ago, with the book God and Gold, by Walter Russell Mead. That book was so rich with implications that I spent a couple of weeks "dialoguing" with the author.

This book is also rich with implications, although I still can't say whether I can give it a general recommendation, due to the Aurobindo factor (I also haven't quite finished it yet). Actually, there's not a single mention of Sri Aurobindo for the first 522 pages, which analyze the Nazi phenomenon from every angle, including its well documented immersion in the occult. Only in the last 140 pages or so does the author attempt to tie it all together with Sri Aurobindo's spiritual vision of the cosmos, which will not be to everyone's taste. (Oddly enough, the book ends on page 666.)

But it seems that I'm not getting a lot of traffic these days anyway, so I can't really drive away more readers. So here we go. A rambling dialogue with source and causes of ultimate evil, to try to see if we can derive any general principles, and whether or not they have any cosmic consequences. In any event, if these posts are more rambling than usual, now you know why.

But let's first wrap up the last few posts about the source and end of cosmic evolution, because that itself might provide an important context for understanding "ultimate evil," which will in a sense represent "evolution gone wrong." For if evolution has an ultimate point, or destination, then anything that interferes with the process of realizing it will be more or less evil (but not absolutely everything, for if evolution were a "smooth" and linear process with no obstacles, little could be gained from it; let's just say at this juncture that there are "legitimate" or intrinsic obstacles and "illegitimate" or extrinsic ones).

To cite one obvious example, if reconciliation with the absolute principle requires that we first individuate from the group, then any political system that is hostile to individuality will be a priori evil. Thus, on that basis alone, Nazi Germany, or communist China, or any other nation that radically subordinates the individual to the group is evil, because they specifically prevent the emergence of the "many" that can be reconciled on a higher level with the One. Rather, they impose a "false oneness" from on high, or in the case of the left, enforce a radical diversity, or absolute relativity, from below. But in both cases, power ultimately trumps truth and prevents evolutionary progress, which rests on the synthesis into higher unities, both individually and collectively.

In Reason Through Revelation, Errol Harris attempts in the last chapter to reconcile Christianity with cosmic evolution in a manner that is strikingly compatible with Sri Aurobindo's vision (not to mention Teilhard's Phenomenon of Man, which was only posthumously published in 1959, a year after Harris' book). Harris writes that,

"It is therefore in and through the human mind in its moral organization and its social setting that the cosmic process fulfills itself, and the completion of its fulfillment would be the final perfection of conscious personality. The perfection of man thus merges into the perfection of God" (so to speak, God "in himself" not being subject to change). He quotes Charles Raven, who remarked that "If history is the completion of the story unfolded in its earlier stages by biology and psychology, [then] theology, whose primary data are the lives and experiences of the saints through whom God most fully reveals himself to us, should be at once the culmination of the whole."

Once again we are confronted by the idea of wholeness, which for me is the missing ontological key, without which nothing makes sense on any level. Wholeness is a thread that courses through every artery of the cosmos, unifying the above and below on the vertical axis, but also accounting for the relative totality of any given horizontal level. It is why there can be the relatively autonomous worlds of matter, life, and mind, but also why they are descended "from above." In the absence of wholeness, there is no accounting for either fact.

Harris then goes into a discussion of Jesus, whom he describes as an ideal of "human perfection which is the truth of all other ideals and the fulfillment of every other doctrine of human good. It is that upon which all moral and political theories converge. And it is an ideal of human personality, realized in a community such that every possible achievement in every field of human endeavor would be open to its members -- for what, in such a society, could serve as a bar to progress in other respects, so long as this moral achievement were assured?... This would be the commonwealth of God, and the charge upon its citizens is to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect. The final perfection of man and the perfection of God are identified" (emphases mine).

Now, this comes very close to the Raccoon ideal of "political truth" outlined on pp. 178-180 of your Coonifesto. For there it is written that the universal criteria we may apply to the goodness of a culture is in its ability to foster or impede integration and actualization. As I wrote there,

"If you apply these simple criteria, you will quickly come to the realization that for ninety-nine percent of human history, most cultures have actively stifled the expression of any unique potential, while at the same time erecting preposterous worldviews encouraging psychological fragmentation in the form of bizarre rituals, scapegoating, belief in strange gods, paranoia between the sexes, racial hatred, institutionalized violence, pointless taboos, and the abuse of children. This is why, with regard to history, my specific recommendation is the same as it would be for anyone involved in an abusive relationship: get out."

Now, not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but we shall soon see that Nazism represents a perfect shadow of what we might call "Christian evolution," or the possibility of further spiritual evolution within a Christian framework. In virtually all areas, Hitler wished to invert Christianity and literally create a new religion that represented its very opposite. As John Toland wrote, "National Socialism was a religion and Hitler was its Christ."

Van Vrekhem makes a convincing case that there actually wasn't any such thing as "Nazism" in any consistently articulate sense. Much less was Nazi Germany primarily "fascist." Rather, its ultimate principle was not only the fuhrer in general, but Hitler in particular. Truly, just as Christianity is not fundamentally a religion of "ideas" but of a person, so too can it be said that Nazism was a man. Furthermore, as we shall see, he was most definitely a kind of "word made flesh," only in a very different sense than that with which we are familiar.

Nevertheless -- and this is another key point -- the Hitler phenomenon could not have occurred in the absence of a cosmic principle that allows word to become flesh. In other words, it was as if he were hijacking a legitimate channel for a very illegitimate end. But when you think about it, this is not fundamentally different than when someone uses language in order to lie. Our cosmos is built in such a way that objects and symbols may embody, encode, and transmit truth. But for that very same reason, they may encode and convey lies and ugliness. Likewise, if art is to exist, it will be capable of transmitting the celestial light from above as well as diabolical darkness from below.

It seems that in the midst of chaos, uncertainty, and rapid change, human beings will begin to long for a messiah. In some sense, the messiah answers to a need in human beings, even a built in archetypal expectation. If one studies the cultural matrix of first century Judaism, one can better understand the context in which Jesus appeared. Given the difficult situation of the Jewish people at the time, there was much general longing and expectation for a "savior from above," who would smite their enemies, restore order to the world, and bring about justice for the wronged and oppressed.

Similarly, Van Vrekhem goes into considerable detail about the utter trauma sustained by the German people in the wake of losing World War I. In contemporary America, our lives are so stable that we just can't imagine what it would be like for every pillar of stability to be obliterated. I suppose we got a taste of it in the Great Depression, which was precisely why so many nations lurched toward a fascist solution. There is no doubt that FDR rode to power on a similar messianic wave as Hitler, which is precisely what allowed him to usurp and wield presidential power in a theretofore unprecedented way. Most of what FDR did was demonstrably harmful to the economy, but the need was so deep for a "strong man from above," that the people let it slide. Again, there was a kind of perfect resonance between the messiah and the masses. (We will later discuss this in the context of Obamania, as it is a reflection of these same enduring principles.)

Now, to back up a bit, there is no doubt that man has been dealing with an ongoing existential crisis with the onset of modernity. I'm not going to press the point, partly because it's just too obvious, but the rupture between the Middle Ages and the scientific revolution was so great, that we are still dealing with its implications. It is as if there are tectonic plates in human time, more or less continuous planes that occasionally shift, causing an earthquake in history. One such quake was the "axial period," during which most of the world's revelations were downloaded from above.

Then, after the world was largely oriented around these revelations came the massive quake of the scientific revolution, with all of its implications and challenges, blessings and curses. To be continued.

The New and Improved Evolution, Now With Added Meaning!

Why don't I post on Sundays and take Mondays off? Mondays are always a squeeze. And why is that? Because there is insufficient time to find my end, and therefore my beginning.

You see, these posts only discover what they are about in the process of being written. They are definitely about something, there's no doubt about that. But unlike my competitors, they are completely improvised and omade, so it can take awhile for me to get what I'm driving at. I can't just get to the point if I don't know what it is. Unless I actually do know what it is, only implicitly instead of explicitly. If that is the case, then what we call evolution, or developmental time, is a function of an implicate order becoming explicate, perhaps as understood by David Bohm.

This, of course, is the whole point of psychoanalysis, where it is assumed that by free associating -- that is, by saying whatever pops into your melon -- a deeper order will emerge from the seeming chaos. However, it generally takes a trained professional to recognize this order, but not always, any more than you need a literary critic to understand the deeper meaning of a novel. But you do need to disable your left brain, so to speak, in order to allow the right brain to give its deposition. You will notice that that is something with which the scientistically minded always have great difficulty, which is why they habitually confuse their mental abstractions with reality.

So that's what we do here, in the "faith" that order will emerge from chaos, and the post will find its attractor state before it's time to go to work. Which means that the future is in some sense implicit in the present, at least as it pertains to thought. As Brand Blanshard writes, "So intimately are end and process bound up with each other, that thought can be defined only with reference to its end; indeed, it is that end in the course of realization."

Now, what if the cosmos is more like a giant thought than a giant object? If looked at in that way, then many of the most paradoxical aspects of existence will suddenly make a lot more sense, including evolution. Because as it stands, biologists can only pretend that evolution makes sense, so long as they place it in the matrix of an outmoded 19th century scientism. But nothing whatsoever aside from prejudice, convention, and lack of imagination prevents them from understanding evolution in a more cosmic context. As mentioned a couple of posts back, much of the problem results from placing arbitrary, manmade lines where there are none.

Or, as I put it in my book, who can actually say what a mature cosmos looks like, unless you either already have an implicit idea already, or ignore the question altogether? Physics operates under the assumption that all time slices are equivalent (or value neutral), but in a developing cosmos, that can't possibly be true. I mean, no physicist actually lives his life as if one slice of time is no different than any other slice. There are people who do live that way: they are called autistic or psychotic. Or sometimes even just a severe depression can do this to you: suddenly time is devoid of all of the qualities that render it meaningful. Rather, life becomes just meaningless duration, which is to say, a living death.

Likewise, the biologist assumes that evolution is a wholly lateral reshuffling of genes, so that any vertical development is illusory. It's just our opinion, say, that a human being is higher than an ape -- and even there, a lot of people, such as PETA members, are at least philosophically consistent in insisting that human beings are not more valuable than animals, and that "murdering" 6 million chickens is morally equivalent to the Holocaust. Colonel Sanders really is as evil as Adolf Hitler. But these moral retards obviously don't denigrate Colonel Sanders, only trivialize Hitler. In so doing, they actually make genocide more likely, because if murdering a human being is no worse than eating a chicken, what's the big deal? (I know it sounds crazy, but Dennis Prager had on a PETA spokesman who insisted that one could draw no intrinsic distinction between humans and chickens.)

It all makes no sense, for any normal human being knows implicitly, and with absolute veracity, that human beings are infinitely more valuable than animals -- if only because we can know how valuable animals are! I'll join PETA the day that animals open up hospitals to take care of humans, or when mosquitos get together to try to eliminate malaria.

But most human beings are not normal. True, they are average, but average is not normal. The average Palestinian wants to murder every last Jewish man, woman, and child, but that is not normal. But what is human normality? Here again, if you attend a major university, you will learn that there is no such thing -- that what we call normal is abnormal for another culture. Values are a function of culture, not a reflection of timeless truth, since the latter is strictly impossible on any Darwinian/materialistic basis. One person gives their daughter a sweet sixteen party, while another person chops off her head because she held hands with a Christian boy. We are in no position to condemn the latter.

Nor can we condemn Putin for invading a small country to secure oil for itself, since we did the same thing in Iraq. Which is odd, because we don't see nearly the kind of hysteria emanating from the left over the Georgia bashing as we do over George Bush. All leftists know that George Bush is an evil liar who invaded Iraq in order to enrich the oil companies. But why then is their rhetoric so muted, so nuanced, with regard to Putin? Because leftism not only lies, it is a lie.

That is, once you eliminate objective truth and virtue, then whatever you say is merely arbitrary. It is said in order to achieve an end, which ultimately comes down to power, because that is all there is in a Darwinian and materialist cosmos. Never ask why leftist thought is so inconsistent and ad hoc. It has no principles except that there are no principles. Which means that there actually is one principle: power, or survival.

When a leftist says that he cannot say when human life begins, because it is "above my pay grade," one can only laugh. Since when do leftists refrain from making sweeping moral condemnations? They do when it is a matter of power and convenience. They can never openly disclose the first principles that animate them, for to know their beginning would be to know their devious ends. Obviously, in actual practice, the secular leftist has no difficulty whatsoever in insisting that a human fetus is of no more intrinsic value than a decayed tooth. A woman has an absolute right to do whatever she pleases with "her" body, so the fetus doesn't even properly exist. Why not just say so?

Again, because if a leftist just blurts out their first principles in mixed company, people -- spiritually normal people, anyway -- will be repelled. A leftist cannot say in polite company that there is no moral distinction between the U.S. and Russia, even though their every word and deed would actually have you believe that the U.S. is worse.

A conservative is inconsistent in the application of his principles, which is called "hypocrisy." But a true leftist is inconsistent in the articulation of his principles, because they are rooted in convenience and are therefore not even principles, just nihilism by another name. One day the left can fight against racial discrimination, the next day they are the only organized ideology that openly defends it. Why? Because they don't actually care about racial discrimination per se, unless it can result in the acquisition of political power. That is the only consistent thread that unifies the otherwise irreconcilable opposites.

The other day, Dennis Prager published an essay entitled Why I Am Not a Liberal. Agree or disagree, you can see how easy it is for a conservative to lay out their first principles in an open and transparent way, something that a liberal can never do, on pain of never being elected. Hence the need for nuance. "Nuance" is a word invented by liberals to cover the rhetorical divide between what liberals actually believe and what they must say in order to get elected. "Simplistic" is the word they use for people who can articulate moral truth in an unambiguous manner.

For example, a conservative can come right out and say, like Prager, that "I believe that the bigger government gets and the more powerful the state becomes, the greater the threat to individual liberty and the greater the likelihood that evil will ensue. In the 20th century, the powerful state, not religion, was the greatest purveyor of evil in the world." In contrast, the leftist believes that "the bigger government gets and the more powerful the state becomes, the greater the enhancement of equality and the greater the likelihood that social justice will ensue. In all of history, religion, not the powerful state, has been the greatest purveyor of evil in the world." Again, that's what they actually believe. But what they say is a different matter, at least outside college classrooms or Kucinich campaign headquarters.

Likewise, for me it is a commonplace to say that "the American military has done more to preserve and foster goodness and liberty on Earth than all the artists and professors in America put together." In fact, there are actually no courageous leftist artists, despite their constant self-flattery about "speaking truth to power." Speaking truth to power is what Solzhenitsyn did, not what Sean Penn, George Clooney, or the Dixie Chicks do. I mean, imagine the courage of George Clooney to condemn Joe McCarthy! How do you explain such uncommon valor, especially in a cynical age in which young American fascists join the military to advance George Bush's evil empire! For years, I heard the left complain about how Saddam and so many other authoritarian regimes were our responsibility. If that were true, then one would think they would be pleased that someone finally came along and did something about it. Fat chance.

One could go on and on. My point is....

Uh oh. What is my point?

Well, one point is that when listening to the left, you must always read between the lyin'. But that's not much of a point. No need to champion the bobvious.

The other point -- a more implicit metapoint -- is that, as Errol Harris writes, "if anything is to be what it is, the whole must be. Because of this implicit presence in every finite being, every finite being proclaims the existence of God." In other words, "the final emergent is logically prior to the undeveloped forms. They can be rightly conceived only in terms of what they are becoming, and so can the process itself. The finally mature is the key to the nature of every immature phase. The developed form, therefore, is logically prior, even when it is temporally posterior, to every other form."

Now, don't you know, this goes to the heart of my beef with Schuon, who believed that the cosmos was necessarily "winding down" into increased evil, chaos, and disorder, the further time takes us from the ideal. But if this were true, we would live in a very different kind of cosmos on every level. Unfortunately, I don't have time to fully make this point, but I think I've finally resolved my painful dilemma between the entropic cosmos of Schuon and the evolutionary one of Aurobindo. In a sense, it is the "third way" for which man has been searching ever since the scientific revolution began to oust him from his comforting religious framework some 400 years ago. Virtually every -ism, -ology, and -osophy since then has been an attempt to resolve this tension, usually at the expense of eliminating one side of the dialectic. But the third way would unify science and religion at a much deeper level, and reveal the One from which they are both an omanation.

Let Go and Let Bob

When all the senses are stilled, when the mind is at rest, when the intellect wavers not -- that, say the wise, is the highest state. --Katha Upanishad

The fourth commandment, “remembering the sabbath,” is another one that materialists naturally strain to comprehend. But like the other commandments, it has a literal meaning, a moral meaning, a symbolic meaning, an esoteric meaning, and a Raccoon meaning.

The literal meaning, of course, follows from the idea that God purportedly took "six days" to create the world, and on the seventh, sat down, cooled his heels, and just enjoyed the show. Furthermore, he didn’t merely spend the time doing “nothing.” Rather, he specifically contemplated the fact that his creation was “good.” Since we are created in the image of God, we are called upon to imitate this pattern by being productive for six days but then resting and rejewvenating on the seventh -- to relux and call on a deity.

But this commandment has so many important implications that it’s almost impossible to cover them all in a single post. I discussed some of them in my book, specifically, on pp. 236-238. First of all, if “observing the sabbath” meant nothing more than taking it easy on Saturday or Sunday, it would hardly have much intrinsic spiritual significance. But clearly, since it is included in the Decalogue, it must be of the utmost spiritual importance. But how? I don't know. Go ask a rabbi. Let me finish this coffee and think for a minute. Hey, where's Petey, anyway? It's already 6:30. Late again. Oh, I forgot.... it's his sabbath.

In order to understand this commandment, we must go back to the very beginning of Genesis, where God eternally “creates the heavens and the earth.” In the esoteric view, this refers to the continuous separation of the vertical (heaven, eternity, the Absolute) and horizontal (earth, time, the relative world). So long as we are in the horizontal -- the horizontal alone -- we are indeed “strangers in this world.” In the absence of the vertical, it is a sort of absurd hell, or at best, a meaningless pleasure palace in which we should mindlessly chase after our lusts and desires until crying time. “A raging animal inside of a dying carcass,” as I believe I once heard Alan Watts put it.

But “remembering the sabbath” has to do with vertical recollection, and cultivating the leisure necessary to achieve it. It is literally re-membering, for it involves reacquainting oursophs with our ground of being before things get too out of hand. In other worlds, it is possible to get so lost in the horizontal -- one’s horizontal commitments can become so complex and all-consuming -- that it is difficult to find one’s way back to that OMnipresent hole in creation known as the sabbath.

For the sabbath ultimately represents a shorthand way of discussing those little springs that dot the landscape of being, through which vertical energies bubble forth from the ground. Every night, before going to sleep, I make it a point to remember how and where I drank from one of these springs during the day. No matter how difficult my day, I can almost always remember some point at which I was “given my daily bread,” so to speak -- some point at which the vertical energies shone through and lit up the inside. Come to think of it, it often happens while making one of these little morning raids on the wild godhead. It’s a big reason I write them. I wake up looking for one of those little springs bubbling up around my computer. As always, the challenge is to make sure I bring a big enough crock.

In any event, it is specifically because the sabbath is “built in” to the cosmos that vertical energies can enter and leave the “kingdom of man.” In other words, we aren’t trapped here below deck in the dark hull of the horizontal, merely sailing toward our doom. It is the reason why prayer, meditation, contemplation, and lectio divina all work. These are all activities that make the vertical presence present, because they allow us to step outside the relentless stream of time and sit on the shore for a bit, “watching the river flow.”

Through these inactivities, we may turn toward what is “behind” or “above” the external world and its nihilocracy of urgent nonsense. Existence is woven from the warp and weft of horizontal and vertical energies, and if you are wholly committed to the former, you can well understand how you might become completely warped.

Now critically, the purpose of the sabbath isn’t just to gear us up for the horizontal, a brief reprieve from the toil and drudgery of existence. Rather, the reverse is true. Although there is a rhythm and a dialectic between the sabbath and the worldly, in my view, the entire purpose of creation is the sabbath, not understood literally, but esoterically as our ever-present link to the whole. Keeping the sabbath holy is etymologically linked to the idea of “wholeness” and healing. I don’t intend to bash the left again, but one thing you will notice about “progressives” is that they are relentless. The idea of the sabbath is foreign to them, because it has been replaced by the idea of trying to force perfection in the horizontal, something which can never happen. For one thing, it is already happening. But only now. And now. And now.

In other words, you must occasionally step back from creation -- as did God -- and realize that it is already good. It is only for us to realize it. But this realization is more of a challenge than you realize. Like the injunction against envy -- which is actually a reward and not an “order" -- the ability to truly experience “sabbath consciousness” is also a reward. It is something that most people have a great deal of difficulty achieving. Therefore, they displace their own inability to experience the simple joy of being, and project it into the future, when the revolution creates Sugar Candy Mountain on earth -- when everyone uses mass transit, when Walmart is driven out of business, and when the last real man has been castrated with the entrails of the last conservative. In short, progressives habitually turn an existential defect into a virtue, since politics is their religion, 24/7/365. To “remember” the sabbath would mean forgetting about the revolution, and that would be the one sin.

When we are caught up in the stream of time, the unity of reality is broken up into hopes, dreams, regrets, wishes, plans, resentments, etc. You cannot get away from these things so long as you are in time, because they are a function of time. The only way out is up and in, where we are called upon to live as if we are already in paradise. In truth, the sabbath is not a recollection but a “memoir of the future.” Here, the world does not need to be worked on or improved, merely enjoyed as it is. In a strange way, we would live in paradise if people were only capable of realizing that we already do. Just toss a frame over your shoulder and enjoy the work of the old master painter.

After all, this present moment of your life is the end result of thousands and thousands of little plans, goals, choices, and decisions you have made over the course of your life. Are you able to step back for a moment and realize that this is it, that this is the very moment you've been waiting for, the result of all your plans coming to fruition? Or are you in reality simply addicted to “planning” as a way to escape the moment?

In the final unalysis, the sabbath must be internalized, so that one has access to it at all times, like a portable slacktuary, a zone of silence, a realm of inner peace between you and the world. For as much as you may think that you are in the world, the opposite is generally true. The world is in you, pal -- it sinks its teeth into you and will not let go, which is why we have to consciously practice letting it go and “dying” to the world.

For the sabbath is also a rehearsal for the Big Sabbath, when it is dark and no man can work anyway. As Petey quipped in One Cosmos, “The paradox at the heart of the sabbath is that you must live your life as if you already abide in the eternal, because you do, but aspire to get there as if your life depends upon it, because it does. The former is more difficult than the latter, because your worries, anxieties, plans, and conventional aspirations trick you into thinking there is another way out. And if you believe that, you are doing the adversary’s heavy lifting for him, and giving him his black sabbath rest.” So relax and die a little.

Lay me down / In silence easy / To be born again / To be born again / In another world / Got a home on high / Ain't nothing but a stranger in this world / I'm nothing but a stranger in this world / Got a home on high / In another land / So far away / Way up in the heaven / In another time / In another place --Van Morrison, Astral Weeks

The Cosmic and Spiritual Retardation of Philosophical Darwinists (7.26.10)

We may be sure that the series of forms does not lead on into infinite progress; it must have a definite completion. The very nature of the scale necessitates this conclusion, because it is a scale, and an ascending one.... It must culminate in what is absolutely whole and self-sufficing, for anything else would contradict and negate all that makes the prior progression recognizable as an ascending scale.... In short, the very nature of the scale necessitates its completion by a reality answering to St. Anselm's definition of God -- that than which nothing greater (or more complete, or more perfect) can be conceived. --Errol Harris, Revelation Through Reason

"Evolution" is just a way of saying "temporal continuity," which must exist if anything is to exist. In other words, if not for time, then everything would have to happen at once. (The word "evolve" is etymologically related to "unroll," as in an ancient scroll.)

And "temporal continuity" is just another way of saying "memory." For example, a person with alzheimer's loses his memory, and therefore his temporal continuity. It's always now, disconnected from all the other nows. Therefore, it's not even really now anymore, because now is only now in relation to a then.

One of my beefs with philosophical Darwinism is that, like an alzheimer's patient, it isolates its own conclusions from the greater context of cosmic evolution. For as Harris writes, "The modern conception of nature is of a continuous evolutionary process, linking the purely physical with the biological, the biological with the psychological, and the psychological with the social, moral, artistic, and religious experiences of man."

Given this temporal continuity, it is wholly arbitrary to define things in terms of the past instead of the present, since everything is in the process of becoming. In other words, in studying any phenomenon, it is important to know what it is in its mature form. If you only study a caterpillar in an isolated slice of time, you won't know anything about its connection to butterflies.

Likewise, if you study the Big Bang in isolation from the human knower, you're missing the whole point, again, because you're arbitrarily excluding the temporal continuity that even allows a subject to know about and comprehend the Big Bang -- which is without a doubt the most astonishing thing about the Big Bang! I still can't get over it.

A couple of posts back we spoke of the importance of spatial boundaries in human development. Only with the creation of a "semipermeable membrane" can the human subject properly evolve. But it is equally true of temporal boundaries. Again, if we weren't bounded in time, we could not be, for we would be the Absolute. But time for human beings is not merely duration. Rather, the point is to metabolize time, so as to create a deeper form of continuity in one's life, or a personal history.

Here again, I'm afraid that this is beginning to sound overly abstract, when it's meant to be as concrete as can be. For example, the typical therapy patient comes in with various temporal discontinuities. These are like "holes" in the psyche, except that they are gaps in time rather than space. As Freud said, the neurotic person suffers from "reminiscences," except that the reminiscences have lives and agendas all their own, disconnected from one's central identity. In short, they are mind parasites, or rogue elements within the psyche. And they are rogue elements because they have split off from the central government, which should ideally have a monopoly on memory.

Let's make this very personal in order to render it more vivid. I remember my first heartbreak at the age of 18. It triggered such a deep level of depression that only years later, in therapy, was I able to piece together what had actually happened.

To make a long story short, that heartbreak was just the occasion to feel a whole host of emotions that had been placed in escrow since my earliest childhood, from before I could even speak. They were there, stored away in a kind of atemporal eternity, just waiting for the appropriate experience through which to express themselves, or to deploy themselves in time. But because of the temporal discontinuity, I could not connect A and C at the time. I thought it all had to do with that dastardly C, which it couldn't have, since it was an effect that so far exceeded its cause.

But Darwinists routinely do the same thing. For example, the human subject so far exceeds the material shuffling of genetic material, that only a fool or a mental patient would deny the deeper temporal continuity. And on the deepest level, it should be a bananaty to peel out that in our cosmos, matter has the astonishing potential to sponsor life and human consciousness. As such, matter cannot possibly be what the physicist says it is, just as life cannot possibly be what the Darwinist says it is, for both, in their own way, deny temporal continuity. Again, they take an arbitrary time slice and impose a manmade boundary where there is none.

So if we're going to take time seriously, we would have to agree with Harris that "the product of an evolutionary process is, and must be, potential at its beginnings, and if what is inchoate at first becomes progressively unfolded as the process continues, the nature of the final outcome will be the key to the understanding of both the process itself and its origin."

Thus, the Darwinist wants to have it both ways: there is a continuous evolutionary series that culminates in man, and yet, this culmination may be reduced to a wholly random and mechanical iteration of genetic shuffling. Again, to do this not only abolishes man and all he values, but it ironically abolishes evolution, because it says that what has evolved has no intrinsic meaning that isn't reducible to the real meaning, which is simply genes in meaningless competition for survival. Frankly, this is psychotic, only intellectually psychotic instead of emotionally psychotic. Again, the psychotic mind dismembers temporal continuity and as a result lives in its own private hell.

It is also ironic that the Darwinist stresses the importance of adaptation to one's environment. For me -- and I am quite sure this is true of all Raccoons -- if I were forced to adapt my soul to the impoverished intellectual environment of philosophical Darwinism, it would be exceedingly painful, very much like living in a totalitarian state in which I had to subordinate my essential identity to the group's ideology. I am only able to articulate and evolve the most vital parts of myself through the pneuma-cognitive environment of the perennial religion. If I could not do this, it would be like a living death. It would be like a musician who was forbidden to ever pick up an instrument. How on earth am I to become myself in the absence of the appropriate spiritual environment to nurture and sustain my spiritual evolution?

Now, I don't doubt that Queeg or our scientistic jester -- or all of the infamous spiritual retards* such as Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris -- feel perfectly "at home" in the Darwinist environment, just as there are millions of people who get their entertainment from video games or their food from McDonalds. But I could no more feed my soul with Darwinism than I could stuff my body with Big Macs, or listen to rap music all day, or read Harlequin romances. Rather, I have a soul with very particular needs, and to be deprived of the means to fulfill those needs would be spiritual death -- which is to say, death.

Again, given the temporal continuity of the cosmos, there is surely horizontal cause and effect. No one would dispute that. But at the same time, an effect cannot exceed its cause, most especially when we are talking about an "infinite" effect. And make no mistake: the human subject partakes of the infinite and the absolute, even if some human subjects prefer to exile themselves to the relative and the finite. They are obviously free to do so, but they are only free to do so because freedom is real -- which is again to say that it partakes of the absolute. But such is the life of a spiritual retard. They just can't crack the cosmic egg, and want to cram the rest of us into their poultry little vision of reality.

For the temporal unfolding is in reality no more nor less than the serial self-articulation of the whole, which, as realized, is eternally complete. The eternal whole is therefore, without qualification, prior to the temporal process, and to speak of temporal posteriority in reference to it is to misunderstand its character. It is not what comes last but what includes and sublates all temporal series. --Errol Harris, Revelation Through Reason: Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy

*And when I use the term "spiritual retard," I certainly do not mean it in the sense of an insult (much less to mentally retarded people) but as a literal diagnosis. It's obviously not a good thing, but it is no more an insult than is a diagnosis of cancer. There are intellectual retards, spiritual retards, aesthetic retards, moral retards, etc.

Darwinism and Other Barriers to Human Evolution

So, time is the medium of both development and dissolution, growth and decay, synthesis and dispersal, metabolism and catabolism. On the one hand, evolution can result in the great organic synthesis of our beautiful Judeo-Christian civilization. On the other hand, it can result in the retrograde phenomenon of reductionistic Darwinism. Thus, in a sense, time can move both forward and backward, at least human time, which is measured in terms of evolution or development, not mere change or horizontal reshuffling.

Again, time is not mere change, but, like space, "conditions" the contents within it. Just as gravity is a property of curved space, there are many implications that flow from the nature of psychic space. We touched on some of those implications a couple of weeks ago, in the context of a discussion of the "symmetrical logic" of the unconscious mind. Once you appreciate the nature of the symmetrical space of the unconscious (and supraconscious) mind, you see how critical it is to human knowing and being. In reality, the human state (at least in health) is always a dialectical synthesis of symmetrical and asymmetrical modes of knowing. Even the most left-brained science is always rooted in a metaphysical dream that generally goes unacknowledged.

But note that for a strict Darwinist, there cannot even be any objective standard of human normality. In fact, this was one of the first things that intrigued me when I entered graduate school in the early 1980s. I was particularly interested in psychopathology, but not for its own sake. It was an odd situation, because this is just when the political correctness that now dominates academia had begun to strangle the intellect. Thus, it was possible to learn all about various kinds of psychopathology, but no one wanted to go out on a limb and risk defining normality, or the point of being human -- which is to say, the point of life. Because once you do that, you have condemned a large portion of humanity, including whole cultures.

As a result, you then end up reducing psychotherapy to the elimination of pain -- even if the pain is sending a vital message about a pathological way of living. Or you define health on an entirely subjective basis as "do your own thing," "follow your bliss," or some other such new age blather. Again, in such a situation ( which can be called metapsychopathology, to coin a term) there are no objective criteria of psychological health. This is catastrophic in so many ways, but one of them is that genuine maturity does not necessarily involve the elimination of emotional pain, but the tolerance of emotional pain.

I mean, this is something that every parent knows -- or at least should know. Children don't mature as a result of indulgence and the elimination of pain. In fact, one of the most painful aspects of good parenting is to be able to tolerate your child's pain, and not try to instantaneously make it go away! I would much prefer to be in pain than to see my son in pain, but often it is necessary. Truly, he is narcissistic enough without me adding fuel to the fire.

The problem is, when you're the center of the universe, you're in for a rude awakening one way or the other. And we all start out as the center of the universe. Only later do we gradually discover that we're at the periphery. And only with a mature spiritual practice do we regain the center, except at a higher level. Unless you are Deepak Chopra, in which case you revert to infantile omnipotence and call it enlightenment.

This is what happens to any field, including psychology, when it completely detaches itself from philosophy, theology, metaphysics, and other deeper (and more human) modes of analysis. As we were mentioning the other day, you will end up generating a pseudo-autonomous subdiscipline that cannot be integrated with everything else.

Now, no matter how loudly and crudely Darwinists protest to the contrary, humanness is an achievement; it is higher on the vertical scale, not merely one more horizontal arrangement of genetic material. Furthermore, some human beings are objectively better than others, which is to say they have achieved greater "humanness" -- which is not something you can say of any other animal. There are not objective degrees of sheepness or pigginess. True, Michael Moore is a perfect ass, but that is in a manner of speaking.

And once you admit of verticality, you must acknowledge that there is a hierarchical toppermost of of the poppermost that conditions the scale from top to bottom, so you have conceded that the Absolute exists. Which is why Darwinists don't want to concede an inch on this subject, even if it mires them in metaphysical incoherence and stupidity. They are fundamentally committed to intellectual devolution, or the elimination of Man as Such, come what may.

Another way of saying it is that the time of classical physics is reversible. But human time is irreversible, partly because it is developmental. The abstract reversible time of classical physics is like a film that can be run forward or back, or like a mathematical operation that is symmetrical. However, if a cup falls off your table and shatters onto the floor, that is an irreversible process.

The irreversibility of time is tied in with the concept of entropy, which is also irreversible. In the long run, the universe is said to be analogous to a.... to a mortal coil, or a spring that will one day be completely sprung.

But none of this applies to human reality, which is not primarily in the physical or biological realms. To be perfectly accurate, it is "in" those realms, but not entirely "of" them. Rather, a human being transcends but includes (as Ken Wilber would put it) biology and physics, but could never by any stretch of the imagination be reducible to them.

Now, the end result of a temporal series cannot be a member of the series. That is, time is simply a series of events with no "end" or telos. But most everything human beings do, both explicitly and implicitly, has a point, and that point is not equivalent to one more event in the series. For example, the purpose of your life is not just one of the events that constitutes it, ¿comprende? Nor is the theme of a great novel reducible to the plot. Rather, the plot represents the temporal unfolding of the theme.

It is just so for the Raccoon. Once one enters "Coon Time™," one begins to see the events of one's life cohere in the most astonishing, even "miraculous" way, as if they are being "coonditioned" from above; or, as if there is some hidden relationship between what are normally called "inside" and "outside." Soon enough, we discover that the bright line that scientism imposes between these two modes is not so bright after all. And why should it be? On what basis, save for metaphysical whimsy, can anyone say that matter is anterior to consciousness rather than vice versa?

Are we saying, like Deepak, that human consciousness creates reality? No, that is manifestly not what we are saying. Rather, what we are saying is that the human subject is a sort of projected mirror of the dialectical synthesis of subject and object that constitutes what we call "reality." We can try to draw a bright line between subject and object, but that line is entirely manmade. Nature doesn't know anything about it, which is why, for example, math can be lodged in matter, or brains can be lodged in higher consciousness. Once you start to look at the world in this way, you soon begin to realize where all the truth and beauty are coming from, and why we'll never run out of them unless Darwinists and other materialists succeed in their mad attempt to eliminate the goal of the human state.

Again, that goal cannot be part of the temporal series. Rather, it must be eternal and unchanging, not subject to change. Health is etymologically related to wholeness, and this is exquisitely true of human health. So the question becomes, what constitutes a "whole human?" Christianity provides its own archetype in the form of Jesus, who constitutes the "perfect unblended blend," so to speak, of humanness and divinity. Likewise the saints, who represent fixed stars of truth, virtue and beauty (for virtue is human beauty in action).

But what are the fixed stars of Darwinism? Well, first of all, it is an absurd question from "within" the narrow constraints of philosophical Darwinism. Again, no one will ever accuse a Darwinist of being intellectually consistent. But I suppose the fixed star is "survival," even though survival can have no ontological superiority over extinction. I mean, who really cares, except perhaps the one doing the surviving? And even then, natural selection cares only for the group, and is ruthless about weeding out the genes that don't benefit its survival.

Now, there is just no question that Hitler was animated by this metaphysic (as you can see in the sidebar, I'm currently reading a book about him; can't yet say whether I can recommend it). Is this to say that he was a Darwinist, or that Nazism was just some sort of logical extension of Darwinism? No, not at all. It is venturing on the impossible to even suggest that Hitler ever read Darwin in the original. Rather, he was familiar with his ideas -- of which he approved -- only through the popular literature.

But even then, Hitler never "reasoned up" from facts to ideology. Rather, he developed his sinister ideology by 1920 or so, and his only interest in books and ideas was to find things that confirmed his prejudices and preconceptions. Thus, he would have considered Darwinism through the lens of his ideology. Happily for him and tragically for the rest of humanity, he not only found nothing in Darwinism to oppose his ideology, but much to support it, for Darwinism has no intrinsic basis for opposing evil or promoting human evolution. Rather, that's our job.

The Economics of Time and the Metabolism of God

Not much time... the clock is ticking... but when is it not ticking? I guess we only notice the ticking when we don't have enough of it... or too much it. I don't know about you, but that's what school was like for me. I was bored out of my skull, which perversely causes time to slow to a crawl. How's that for a novel bobservation!

And writing these posts specifically requires timelessness. But at the same time, I suppose I wouldn't even bother to try if it weren't for the time constraint. As I may have mentioned before, this is one of the things that surprised me about having a child. We waited to do so until my life was pretty much over. The idea was to cram everything into one book (and one life), because that would be it. The end of Part One of my life. On to Part Two, in which there would be no time for reading, thinking, writing, etc. Which was fine with me. I was done. I said what I needed to say. Time for death and rebirth.

So it's come as a big surprise that I've been able to be so productive over these past three years, much more so than during all the years before. How does that work? Assuming that what I've written is of value -- which of course it may or may not be, depending on your point of view -- the value only emerged within the context of time scarcity. But this is apparently why it is possible for our lives to be meaningful: because they take place within time, and time is short.

Which is interesting when you think about it, because the materialist or existentialist take the exact same set of facts and (assuming they are self-consistent) come to the opposite conclusion: that because WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!, it's all meaningless. But in my case, it was all much less meaningful when I lived in the illusion of eternity.

I guess the fundamental question is, why is slack precious? Like anything else, it is precious because it is scarce (even though it is simultaneously "eternal" and therefore unlimited). But even then, it is only valuable if you know what to do with it. I definitely had more slack prior to April 20, 2005, a day that will live in infancy. Only now do I realize that I really didn't know what to do with my slack, because there was too much of it. It was just like an economy in which money becomes less valuable because of inflation. The other day I heard that in Zimbabwe they now have a billion dollar bill. Thus, you can have a situation in which more and more buys less and less.

So there is no question that the fact of death is precisely what confers meaning on our lives. In fact, a moment's reflection will inform you that you couldn't even know you were alive in the absence of death, any more than you could have bodily existence in the absence of spatial boundaries. In other words, our bodies bind and define us in space, while our death binds and defines us in time. I remember once hearing Alan Watts make this point in a lecture, to the effect that if our life did not come to an end, it would be no different than if our height did not come to an end, and we grew to infinite size -- which is no size at all. As we were saying yesterday, existence is synonymous with definition, and to define is to give boundaries. Thus, God's first act is one of definition or separation of the upper waters from the lower waters. Good call, Moses!

Much of psychological growth entails the acquisition of boundaries. This is a fine example of a profound subject that will have no meaning for the materialist, for how can something immaterial (and probably illusory anyway) have a boundary? It's like placing a sharp line between the sky and a cloud. In reality there is no such border, no place where the empty sky ends and the cloud begins.

Nevertheless, psychological growth is founded upon the development of what we might call a semi-permeable membrane, only on the subjective plane. As you know by now, I wasn't paying attention in biology class, partly due to boredom, partly due to Suzie Campbell sitting at the adjacent desk, but I do remember that term: "semi-permeable membrane." In order for something to be alive, it obviously must have a boundary, or it will be indistinguishable from the environment. But at the same time, the membrane must allow for the passage of information and energy in and out.

There again, that's another subtle point. The very first living being created the ontological category of "inside." There was no "interior" to the cosmos until that very first itsy bitsy teeny tiny turned around on itself and said, like the Everly Brothers, "let it be me." (Not to get ahead of the story, but as it so happens there is an ontological interior that was necessarily prior to its appearance in time, AKA, God, or I AM; but we'll save that for later.)

Just so, in order to be a person and not just an anonymous performing flea in the mother of all Chinese fire drills, we must be psychologically distinct from the group. Just as our bodies are born into a physical environment with which we exchange food, water, and oxygen, we are also born into a psychological environment in which we exchange information and emotion, which are conveyed in a number of ways, including touch, sound (which transmits meaning even before we understand words), introjection, and projection (which are just two sides of the same phenomenon).

That latter concept -- projection -- is a critical one in developmental psychology, in that it is an artifact of our being "members of one another" on the psychic plane, just as our bodies are members of the same biosphere. Just as no body can declare independence from the biosphere without dying, no human being can declare independence from the "psychosphere" without undergoing a psychological death -- like, say the Joker. Again, I haven't seen the film, so I'm operating on second hand information, but it seems that he is radically separate from the human environment, a kind of psychopath on stilts.

Because that is what a psychopath is: a radical individualist who does not share any interior relationship with other human beings. What we call empathy is really the ability of one interior to know another and share in its joys and pain. A sociopath specifically lacks this faculty, which is why they can treat subjects like objects. They are truly undead which is an entirely distinct ontological category from life and death. The reason for this is that the undead person still must "metabolize" experience in order to go on being, but he will be unable to distinguish between life and death, good and evil, love and hate, lies and truth. It would be analogous to a living being that is unable to distinguish between food and feces. If that were the case, we would all be tenured.

One of my first academic papers was on the subject of dissipative structures (i.e., open systems that exchange matter, energy, and information with the environment) and their implications for human psychological development. I don't have time or space to get into details here, but to a certain extent, in my book I applied the same ideas to our relationship with God, or the Absolute, or O if you like. Here again, just as there is surely a material environment and a psychological environment, there is a sprititual environment. You all know it well, as it is characterized by such enduring phenomena as the sacred, the holy, the celestial light, the fullness of being, the presence of presence, the influx of grace, the mercy of Petey, etc.

Now, just as the possibility of human psychological development is dependent upon becoming an open system with "wise and loving" others, the possibility of human spiritual growth is entirely founded upon the ability to become an open system with that which transcends us, i.e., the Permanent Real. In the final analysis, this is the "way of the Raccoon," which is to say, to become an open system with O by any means necessary. To a certain extent -- and within intrinsic limits -- we all have to identify the means and method that are personal to us, or our "spiritual idiom." We all have to eat, but we don't eat the same things. You may like pepperoni on your pizza, while Dupree likes crawfish and burnt bacon.

Likewise, we all fall in love, but we all know how that works -- one person's deal of a lifetime is another's bargain bin castoff. It seems that our love has a specific idiom that clicks into place when we meet the right person. I felt that click on my very first date with Mrs. G in May of 1984. Somehow, that single "click" was loaded with all the implicatiosn that woytld take years to unpack. One of them is now crawling into my lap and prevebting me fgrom tyoibet]ng. why? becyanuese he has certain idiomatic needs that he would like for me to fulfill RIGHT NOW, since it is always RIGHT NOW for him, like he has ultimate slack but no slack at the same time.

There. He's watching Curious George now. Be a good little monkey!

Anyway, one doesn't "get married"; rather, one "makes a marriage" (through the resultant boundaries) in order to find out what it is, which will require time. Marriage is only a container, not its content.

I suppose we could go so far as to say that we need to discover a similar "click" on the spiritual plane -- to "fall in love," as it were, or create the boundaries that will allow us to find out "what God is." For many folks, they have what amounts to an "arranged marriage" with their religion. Sometimes this works out, while other times it ends in divorce and disillusionment.

So we're all looking for that nonspatial One with whom to settle down and sail hopefully foriver rafter, 'til we remerge with our wholly sea.

Well, he's back. End of slack. Beginning of meaning.

Croaking Hoaxters Don't You Think the Joker Laughs at You?

What is intelligibly diverse must be unified and whole, and only what is whole and unified can be intelligibly diverse. At the same time, only what is diversified can be intelligibly one. This is because change requires continuity if it is to be change of anything at all, and the parts of what is continuous must be distinguishable or else it congeals to a dimensionless point (or instant).... Although a whole is a single unity, it is at the same time a unified diversity. The reality of time, therefore, establishes concurrently the reality of a whole which is nontemporal. --Errol Harris, The Reality of Time

I will cooncede at the outset that this rambling post did not come together into a unified diversity in the manner one might have hoped. Why? Because there simply wasn't enough time to compensate for all of the distractions, in order for the One to perform its unifying magic over the many. Therefore, I will leave it to you to make sense of it, or to decide whether it is intelligibly diverse or just an unintelligible blobservation.

Atheistic types like to accuse religious folks of being naively uncritical about scripture, and no doubt many are. But the same can be said for radical secularists who adopt a naive and credulous stance toward the natural sciences, as if they require no metaphysical foundation, and simply "speak for themselves." But there is no meaningful scientific observation that isn't theory-laden, and as soon as one examines the implicit theories with which science is laden, one is led back into the realm of pure metaphysics. And once that happens, you soon discover that the naive religionists are not so naive after all.

As Errol Harris writes, "all the stock arguments against metaphysics, from Kant to Wittgenstein, have long been exposed as self-refuting, so that far from being impossible, metaphysics is indispensable and unavoidable, always inescapably presupposed in whatever philosophical position is adopted -- even one that repudiates it."

Now, metaphysics aims at the comprehension of the cosmos in its totality, both in its vertical and horizontal aspects. Any scientistic metaphysic which aims only at an explanation of the horizontal world eliminates in one stroke the very realm where metaphysical truth abides. This is the principial realm of which the horizontal is merely a derivative "prolongation," which is why it is said, for example, that the Torah is prior to the world, or why Jesus could say that "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." Likewise, "In the beginning was the word, and you know the drill, so I won't repeat it here."

Of metaphysical certitude, Schuon writes that it results from the "coincidence between truth and our being; a coincidence that no raytiocination could invalidate. Contingent things are proven by factors situated within their order of contingency, whereas things deriving from the Absolute become clear by their participation in the Absolute, hence by a 'superabundance of light'... which amounts to saying that they are proven by themselves. In other words, universal truths draw their evidence not from our contingent thought, but from our transpersonal being, which constitutes the substance of our spirit and guarantees the adequacy of intellection."

I suppose there is one way to avoid metaphysics, and that is to be genuinely psychotic, and to truly live in a world without a priori meaning, sense, and coherence (although even there, people like Matte Blanco and Bion have provided theoretical keys that allow us to appreciate the order beneath psychotic disorder). I am told that the Joker in the new Batman film is such a person. Of him, commenter Dusty writes that he is

"a perfect personification of transcendent evil. That is, the act of rejecting transcendence a priori at the same time downwardly transforms that person into an inverted reflection of the saving grace from above. True transcendent evil is a faceless force until given temporary one by an earthly personality. Notice that the joker in Dark Knight is in truth a faceless terror all throughout. He really has no personal history: no name; his clothes are self-made; the past that he does reveal turns out to be contradiction and lies; and even the face that we do see is painted in the style of the Jungian archetype of the mad clown. There's nothing there but a trail of violence and disaster. Whence did he come? Where did he go?"

You see? A diversified chaos, with no wholeness or unity. You might say that he is deconstruction personified, or the archetype of Tenured Man:

"He is chaos personified, and the only connection that he does have with grace is a masochistic-like dependency on the archetypal hero who opposes his will. Even the darkest of nights, night within night, evil for the sake of evil, must necessarily maintain contact with the light, or else there would exist an absolute hell, which is strictly impossible unless God chose to suffer it himself. But if God is Good, he would choose eternal delight, and not an eternal dark night."

Those two paragraphs are loaded with insights that need to be unpacked. For example, gnotice how our scientistic jester is indeed dependent upon us, not vice versa. We do not seek him out, and do our best to ignore his irrelevance. But he "must necessarily maintain contact with the light," hence his desire to associate with us rather than with his own kind, which would indeed be a kind of cold and dry hell. Just imagine those scintillating conversations between blind atheists sharing stories of what they cannot see!

Let's discuss the idea of "a perfect personification of transcendent evil." Now evil cannot actually be transcendent. Rather, it can only mimic and mock transcendence by "escaping" the obligations of our humanness from below. I'm just free associating here, but this is one of the things that creeped me out about the opening ceremony of the Olympics a few nights ago. I only caught the first 20 minutes or so before turning if off. Yes, I could see that there was a kind of bombastic majesty taking place, but toward what end? Toward man as ant, or the elimination of man as such. It was like a leftist mass, I suppose.

2008 drummers playing in lockstep? Give me one immortal jazz drummer. Give me Philly Joe Jones, Art Blakey, Tony Williams, or Jack DeJohnette, all playing around with the beat, adding their own flavor, throwing in their own unpredictable syncopations, being individuals. For that is what America is all about: not the ant as ant, nor the ant in opposition to the hive, but rising above -- i.e., transcending -- it. If Art Blakey had been one of those 2008 drummers, he'd probably now be in a slave labor camp.

So man can "transcend" -- or at least get around -- the ego from above or from below. In the case of a great jazz musician, while he "stands out," it can never be in a "selfish" way, or it won't be jazz anymore. Rather, the whole point is that in real jazz, each of the parts is subordinate to an emergent "higher unity" that is being spontaneously created in the moment, in an organismic manner. For example, back in the 1930s, Louis Armstrong would often be thrown together with a bunch of musical stiffs who couldn't approach his level of virtuosity. As such, the results aren't really "jazz." It's more like when the Harlem Globetrotters defeat the Washington Generals night after night. It might be a spectacle, but it's not really sport.

I don't think it's any coincidence that jazz was invented in America, as it is our quintessential art form, combining as it does a maximum of freedom (which is to say, individuality) and discipline, for it requires much, much more discipline to be a great jazz musician than it does to be in a glorified marching band. Likewise, anyone with a mediocre intellect can understand science. But not everyone can understand Aquinas or Schuon or Aurobindo, or so many other true theologians.

Now, the cosmos is ordered (as we all know, cosmos is from the Greek word for order). Everywhere we look, order. There is incredible mathematical order in the equations of physics, in chemistry, in the genome, everywhere. There is also order in the human psyche and in the human spirit, two distinct categories that people have tended to conflate over the past 300 years or so. But the psyche is more or less the area addressed by psychology, while the spirit is the domain of religion (although there is admittedly much overlap, as there must be, just as there is overlap between physics and chemistry, or chemistry and biology).

Toward the end of the 19th century, at the peak of reductionistic materialism, there was an attempt to reduce the psyche to a purely material or "energic" phenomenon (and to eliminate the spirit altogether). One sees this in the early theories of Freud, which absurdly reduce the mind to a kind of pressure cooker seeking to let off the "steam" of primitive instincts and impulses; or in the behaviorists, who imagined that there was no such thing as a psyche, only behavior.

In fact, there are people who still believe this. I remember during my internship, getting into a heated debate with a fellow intern who was a behaviorist. At the time, I didn't yet realize that the discussion would be as pointless as trying to bring light to our scientistic jester. After all, how does one impart truth to someone who believes only in behavior? I suppose by physically striking him on the head with a book. Anyway, this is an example of a man who voluntarily cashed in his humanness for a kind of faux liberation, in which nothing means anything. Rather, it's all just behavior. Thus, he succeeded in escaping the pain of the human state "from below."

Isn't this what the Joker would say? He's just a behaviorist with the courage of his absence of convictions. He's just a mindless man thinking. Or, in behaviorist terms, just a dead man walking, or not even a zombie. In a way, he is death.

Existence is unavoidably tied up with language -- with the Word -- because to have existence is synonymous with having a definition, even if we cannot put it into purely logical words. For example, Just Thomism writes that

"The idea of soul arises when we notice that some bodies are alive and others are not. Our judgment of what is alive and what is not is far from infallible, but it remains that among the physical things we know, some are alive and others are not. Words like 'soul' were first imposed from primitive theories of what made a living thing alive: early words for soul simply meant 'breath'; although it is unclear if they thought that breath was really soul or if it was more the clearest sign of whatever soul was. Theories about the soul quickly became more precise. The Greeks had a vast multitude of opinions about what makes something living -- the best of which was that the soul was some kind of organization in a body which involved the mixture of various elements in the right proportion."

Thus, for someone who is alienated from their soul, it will simply be a kind of nonsense word that corresponds to nothing real, like "unicorn." This is one of the crude arguments that bonehead atheists commonly make, all the while imagining themselves to be sophisticated, courageous, or clear thinking. But the joke is on them, for

"Our modern scientists who deny the spiritual existence of the soul because they can account for human life without it are no different than a bookbinder who denies the existence of writing style or syntax because he can account for the whole book without mentioning them at all. In a sense he is right. He can completely account for the book without once invoking syntax or grammar. For that matter, the marketer, bookseller, and distributor needn't speak of syntax and grammar in order to give their own complete account of a book. Their way of analyzing a book into its relevant parts doesn't need to include this" (Just Thomism).

So our jester is correct, in that he does adequately convey the universal truths of the undead.