Trinocular Myopathy and Freewheeling Angelology

Kind of longish, but probably no post tomorrow...

Let's move on to Letter XIV, Temperance, which may sound a little boring -- like some kind of lukewarm neutrality -- but it is not. In fact, one of Josef Pieper's best books is on The Cardinal Virtues. In it he shows how temperance is critical to our navigating, both horizontally and vertically (i.e., in the natural and transnatural worlds). Here, I'll let this amazon reviewer explain why, while I take a sip of coffee:

"Today, temperance is associated with bodily pleasures, but the classic [understanding of] temperance included spiritual temperance as well, such as the virtue that regulates the desire for knowledge ('studiositas') as compared to the pathological need for sense perception which is the vice of 'curiositas.' It is a worthwhile exercise to read the section on temperance to see how moderate St. Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic tradition are when they recognize that virtue is the means between two antipodal vices."

In other words, "Even a disordered turning toward the goods of the world is not necessarily a mortal sin if it does not involve a turning away from God." Conversely, "Even fasting can be a sin if done too strenuously, because it is against reason to overtax nature. Modern libertines, who can only imagine an either/or world -- either all sexual activity is good or we face a world of totalitarian repression by 'prudes' -- would benefit from seeing the nuance that comes from looking at the world as if it had three dimensions, not two..."

Or, one could say that there is a proper balance between both horizontal and vertical extremes -- like the center of a cross or something.

Tomberg says as much, writing that Temperance is the card of "integrated duality," which is actually rather thrilling, since it accounts for most of the tension and drama on the vertical plane. Without this tension, life would be a bit of a snooze. You will have noticed how all these tiresome "artists" are parasitic on a reality which they need to be there in order to transgress.

Most of us get this out of our system by the age of three, and then move on. Others forsake temperance in favor of an imbalanced, reactionary pose. But there is nothing transgressive -- not to mention brave -- about, for example, making a pro-homosexual movie in Hollywood. Likewise, if Madonna really wants to be transgressive, she might begin by putting those worn out things away for a change. {Shudder}

To exist is to live amidst polarity and tension, the penultimate tension being the distance between image and likeness (the ultimate being creature and God, or relative and Absolute). It is this that creates the dynamic potential to transcend ourselves and "become what we are." The narrowing of this gap is the objective measure of our lives. And if not for the Great Attractor that draws us beyond (and toward) ourselves, our lives really would be a vicious and inescapable duality. Coming down on one side or the other would essentially be arbitrary, plus there would be no way to move beyond that. It would be de Sade on one end and d' Buddha on the other, with nothing in between.

As Tomberg explains, the image represents our essential structure, while likeness represents the functional structure; the former is "timeless," while the latter can only be deployed in time. The image is indestructible and responsible for our freedom, since it is a spark of the Absolute.

But the immortality of the likeness is "optional," so to speak, in that "it is immortal only in proportion to the measure that it conforms to its image." For a variety of reasons, many people choose Death. But to paraphrase the outlaw Josey Wales, "dyin' ain't much of a living," for it is analogous to choosing prison for the image while imagining that the likeness roams free. But this results only in freedom for the me (or a self-created ego/image), not the I -- the object and not the true subject.

Tomberg then goes into an extended meditation on the metaphysics of angels, which, in the overall scheme of things, might be thought of as personifications of (↑) and (↓); in other words, they are "vertical emissaries," so to speak. Rabbi Steinsaltz's classic Thirteen Petalled Rose contains one of the most clear and concise explanations of angelology I've ever found, and it is very much compatible with what Tomberg has to say. In fact, here is something I wrote about it several years ago:

"Steinsaltz notes that the soul [read: image] should not be thought of as a 'point' in space time. Rather, it is 'a continuous line of spiritual being, stretching from the general source of all the souls [O] to beyond the specific body of a particular person.... and because the soul is not a single point in space, it should be viewed not as a single existence having one quality or character, but as many existences, on a variety of spiritual levels...'

In the past, I have playgiarized with Alan Watts' analogy of a lampshade with many pinprick holes in it. From the outside it will look as if there are many "local" individual lights, but in reality, they are all coming from a single nonlocal source.

In another way, it's analogous to progressive bifocals, which change the focal point depending upon where you direct your eyes. Look up through the bottom, and things that are near become out of focus; look down through the top, and the distant becomes blurry. So many errors of scientism result from looking through the wrong end of the bifocals! And they've never even heard of trifocals.

Steinsaltz discusses the distinction between the vertical and horizontal, which for me is the essence of any spiritual metaphysic. Obviously, in speaking of the vertical, of the qualitatively higher and lower, he is not speaking of an actual physical location. Vertically speaking, "to call a world higher signifies that it is more primary, more basic in terms of being close to a primal source of influence; while a lower world would be a secondary world -- in a sense, a copy."

Thus, viewed horizontally, we may trace the material cosmos back to a primordial event some 13.7 billion years ago. But this is only a horizontal explanation. Traditional metaphysics deals with the vertical causation of the cosmos, which is what confuses some people. Irrespective of whether the cosmos had a beginning in time (which it appears to have had), it is still dependent on God, and not self-explanatory.

From the vertical perspective, this world is indeed a copy, as are human beings, of a divine prototype. The Logos might be thought of as the model of all things, the nexus between the divine mind above and the creation here below. Looked at in this manner, the inexplicable beauty of the world is not somehow the outcome of horizontal cause and effect, which would be a ridiculous assertion. Rather Beauty is a fundamental cause of the cosmos (among other nonlocal causes, such as Love and Truth).

Because of the ubiquitous vertical and horizontal influences, every aspect of human existence is made up of both matter and spirit. While we are fundamentally spiritual, we are unavoidably material, which sets up a host of, er, interesting tensions and conflicts. The fall -- or exile, if you like -- is indeed a vertical one, a declension from the divine repose of celestial slack, down to this world of toil, conflict, uncertainty, and ambiguity.

Steinsaltz writes that an angel is simply a "messenger" constituting a point of contact "between our world of action and the higher worlds. The angel is the one who effects transfers of the vital plenty between worlds. An angel's missions go in two directions: it may serve as an emissary of God downward..., and it may also serve as the one who carries things upwards from below, from our world to the higher worlds."

I ran it by Petey, but he was, I don't know, noncommittal. But that's not unusual. It's more like he's disinterested, or at least pretends to be. The roll of the eyes, the impatient, audible exhalation, the way his little wings flutter, as if he's got something better to do....

At any rate, here's what he said:

"Blah blah, I'm here, but I'm not here. How to explain.... I'm always here in the same sense that all 200 or whatever it is crappy TV stations are always streaming into your house. They're what we might call 'implicate.' But you can only tap into one station at a time -- assuming you don't have picture-in-picture, which is a little like schizophrenia, or mind parasites -- thereby making a part of the implicate explicate.

"The multidimensional implicate order is anterior to the explicate order, so that what you solid folk call 'consensus reality' is more of a mutual agreement to limit the implicate order in a certain way. It's all about power, or about managing existential anxiety, not getting at the Truth. If you want to get at the Truth, you're going to have to tolerate the anxiety of not knowing, not make the anxiety go away with some stupid scientistic-materialistic nonsense.

"You know the old crack -- 'if the doors of perception were cleansed, then everything would appear as it is, infinite.' It is such a childish conceit for humans to imagine their puny minds can encompass the generative reality that generatively produces and encompasses them!

"Yes, there are higher and lower worlds. I guess this isn't obvious to a leftist, but if any of you saw those Occupy Wall Street encampments, you know all about people who inhabit a lower world. Their language, their music, their feelings, their hygiene, their childish understanding -- all emanate from a lower world. Ironically, most of them aren't even from the earth plane, but a notch or two below that.

"The point I'm making is that the words high and low refer only to the place of any particular world on the ladder of causality. 'To call a world higher signifies that it is more primary, more basic in terms of being close to a primal source of influence; while a lower world would be a secondary world -- in a sense, a copy. Yet the copy is not just an imitation but rather a whole system, with a more or less independent life of its own, its own variety of experience, characteristics and properties' (Steinsaltz).

"This is why the flatlanders can become so enclosed in their absurcular delusions. In a way, their worldview is complete (on its own level), and yet, it's radically incomplete (with regard to the whole).

"If you have stayed with me this far, then you will understand that, just as there are evil beings, there are evil worlds. These are simply the 'space' inhabited by the evil beings. Wisdom too is a space, or 'mansion.' Also creativity, love, beauty, peace. You can sense it when you enter one of these houses of the holy. You can also sense it when you are near one of those demon haunted McMansions of the left.

"Enough malevolent wishes and wicked deeds, and pretty soon you have created a closed world, cut off from the divine influence. As Steinsaltz describes it, 'the sinner is punished by the closing of the circle, by being brought into contact with the domain of evil he creates.... as long as man chooses evil, he supports and nurtures whole worlds and mansions of evil, all of them drawing upon the same human sickness of the soul.... as the evil flourishes and spreads over the world because of the deeds of men, these destructive angels become increasingly independent existences, making up a whole realm that feeds on and fattens on evil.'

"Being that I was once an ordinary embodied and enmentalled man, just like you, prior to the farming accident, I feel that I am fit to pronounce on these subjects. Human beings live in a world of physical 'action,' and imagine that this is where all the action is. Not true.

"Allow me to explain. Or better yet, allow Steinsaltz to explain: 'The lower part of the world of action is what is known as as the "world of physical nature" and of more or less mechanical processes -- that is to say, the world where natural law prevails; while above this world of physical nature is another part of the same world which we may call the "world of spiritual action."

"What these two realms have in common is the action of Man, since 'the human creature is so situated between them that he partakes of both. As part of the physical system of the universe, man is subordinate to the physical, chemical, and biological laws of nature; while from the standpoint of his consciousness, even while this consciousness is totally occupied with matters of a lower order, man belongs to the spiritual world, the world of ideas.... Every aspect of human existence is therefore made up of both matter and spirit.'

"It is my nature to be a 'messenger, to constitute a permanent contact between [your] world of action and the higher worlds. The angel is the one who effects transfers of the vital plenty between worlds.'

"'An angel's missions go in two directions: it may serve as an emissary of God downward, to other angels and to creatures below the world of formation; and it may also serve as the one who carries things upwards from below, from our world to the higher worlds' (Steinsaltz). You might call us the transpersonal postal service for prayers and so forth.

"Just to make it clear, it was not I who prompted Bob to steal the Las Vegas Holiday Inn flag back in 1980. For there are 'subversive angels' that are actually created by the thoughts and actions of men. I believe Bob calls them 'mind parasites.' They are contingent objectifications from various vital-emotional domains. Up here we sometimes call them the 'tempters.' Either that, or the 'mesmerers.' The Holiday Inn incident was a fine example of a tempter tantrum emboldened by what we call 'liquid courage,' and fueled by a desire to be seen by his friends as, I don't know, transgressive or something.

"It would be wrong to conclude on the basis of what I have just said that the difference between you and I is that you have a body and I don't. Rather, 'the soul of man is most complex and includes a whole world of different existential elements of all kinds, while the angel is a being of a single essence and therefore in a sense one-dimensional' (Steinsaltz).

"This is why you and I play such different roles in the cosmic economy. You actually have the tougher job, which is to say, because of your 'many-sidedness' and your 'capacity to to contain contradictions,' this makes it possible for you to 'rise to great heights,' but also to fuck up big time, neither of which is true for me. Rather, the angel is 'eternally the same; it is static, an unchanging existence,' 'fixed within rigid limits.' Every angel is his own species.

"You might say that I am already 'whole' in space, whereas it is your vocation to become whole in time. Not easy, I realize, but there you are."

Crazy Love & Calculating Death

The Deity is the truly active source from which something happens to man.... The price is surrender of his autonomy; he must throw himself open to the god, rather than lock the doors of his soul by choosing sensual pleasures alone....

[L]ove reaches its apogee and attains its own potentialities only... when it itself is recollection of something that exceeds any possibility of gratification in the finite realm.... In letting go of himself, man does not surrender to the purely "irrational." He surrenders to the healing darkness of his own divine origin. --Josef Pieper

The next thing I'd like to discuss about the Death card is Tomberg's account of what we symbolize (↑) and (↓). Both arrows are necessary for spiritual development, and various forms of heresy emphasize one to the exclusion of the other -- which is like emphasizing inspiration over expiration. It just won't work. In fact, it will eventually kill you.

Pieper: one would "be barring the healing of the soul from the fatalities which afflict it; for only those who can abandon rational self-control and autarchy, and who know how to 'lose their wits,' are able to experience such healing and purification."

Emphasis on (↑) alone leads to the construction of a "Tower of Babel," or purely manmode ladder to God. Emphasis on (↓) alone leads to the fatalism of, say, the Islamic world or of progressive historicism, or to any form of radical predestination that removes human will -- or freedom -- from the equation.

Not to resort immediately to Godwin's Law, but I'm reading this superb biography of Hitler, and it is all over the purely (↑) nature of his "project."

Indeed, Mein Kampf, of course, means My Struggle; it is the exertion of raw will because, in the end, will is all there is. Biological existence itself is a battle of wills, with only one winner. No compromise is possible. Either one is the hammer or one is the anvil:

"Politics are the conduct and course of historical struggle for the life of peoples.... It is an iron principle.... The aim of these struggles is the assertion of existence.... The weaker one falls so that the strong one gains life." This amounts to death -- or an infrahuman existence -- over real human life.

Tomberg makes the interesting point that the way of Christianity promises not just Life over Death, but Life over life -- a merely horizontal life. More generally, one might say that the point of Christianity is the victory of the vertical over the horizontal, not a temporary pseudo-victory of horizontal over horizontal. Rather, it is ultimately the victory "of radiation over crystallization."

Which reminds me of the narrator's last line of the film Sunset Boulevard: Life, which can be strangely merciful, had taken pity on Norma Desmond. The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her... ["Enfoldment" here is synonymous with crystallization, because both exclude inspiration and involve states of spiritual asphyxiation.]

Now that I think about it, the film is all about crystallization, or about death in life. For that is what Norma is: a breathing corpse, a living death, a monster. She no longer radiates as a living star, but is a dying star from which no light escapes.

The film is even narrated by a dead man, who shares Death's sardonic insights with the audience:

"There's nothing tragic about being fifty. Not unless you're trying to be twenty-five." "You don't yell at a sleepwalker -- he may fall and break his neck... she was still sleepwalking along the giddy heights of a lost career." "How could she breathe in that house full of Norma Desmonds? Around every corner, Norma Desmonds... more Norma Desmonds... and still more Norma Desmonds."

Trying to stop the aging process doesn't really make one younger. Rather, it turns one into a slightly more flexible corpse:

The dead primate at the beginning of SB -- like the one depicted above -- is highly symbolic, for that is what a human being is in the absence of the Divine, just a fleabit peanut Monkey Man. Of the chimp's final rusting place, Norma says, "I'd like the coffin to be white, and I want it specially lined with satin. White... or pink. Maybe red! Bright flaming red! Let's make it gay!"

Even the name: Sunset Boulevard. Not only does it convey the dying of the light, but in case you don't live here, Sunset Boulevard starts in the filthy bowelries of downtown Los Angeles, makes its way through offaluent Beverly Hills, and then comes to a noxious end in the contaminated waters off Santa Monica beach.

So, let us follow Tomberg's advice, and "no longer seek amongst the dead for he who is living, and above all let us not seek for immortal Life in the domain of death."

The spiritual ascent is everywhere the same, and always consists of purification, illumination, and union; or rejection, aspiration, and surrender. "This is the eternal way, and no one can invent or find another."

Yes, as Tomberg says, one can divide & subdivide it "into thirty-three stages -- or even into ninety-nine," but it always comes back to that same dynamic and interlocking trinity that takes place on a moment-by-moment basis, for purification is both illumination -- or consciousness of a Divine reality -- and union with the Divine Will.

Likewise, illumination is purification of the intellect and union with the Divine Mind. And union is a purified heart, which is now the center of one's thought and being.

Or, to turn it around, "a non-illuminated gnostic would not be a gnostic, but rather an 'oddball'; a non-illuminated mage would be only a sorceror; and a non-illuminated philosopher would be either a complete skeptic or an amateur at 'intellectual play.'"

And a non-illuminated and impure gnostic-tyrant of the left brings the gifts of hell to earth.

Human nature is so placed within its plane of existence that it remains essentially open to the sphere of the divine. Man is so constituted that, on the one hand, he can be thrown out of the autonomous independence of his thinking by inspiration, which comes to him as a sudden, unpredictable force from from outside.

On the other hand, this very abandonment of critical sovereignty may bring him an abundance of insight, of light, of truth, of illumination as to the nature of reality which would otherwise remain completely out of his reach. For we are dealing not with self-governing human genius, but with something bestowed by another, a higher, a divine power. --Josef Pieper, Enthusiasm & Divine Madness

Voluntary Slavery: Freedom from Freedom

I don't know how long this remodeling is going to last. A couple more weeks, at least. One Thing has been leading to another Thing, e.g., changes to the pool situation requiring extensive rewiring, so the house doesn't blow up. So until it's all over -- or until I'm totally broke, whichever comes first -- it's probably going to be short rations.

Pieper makes an interesting point about slavery -- the type of mental slavery that, for the left, isn't a bug but a feature.

For the left promises Liberation by seducing the more weak-minded among us with promises of a type of childish freedom that no state -- by definition -- can confer. And certainly no democratic state can survive if it is constituted of weak and dependent children.

Pieper notes that the "contrast between galley slaves and free men has nothing to do with the social phenomenon of slavery." Rather, "there is a concept of slavery which no social changes, no emancipation of the slaves, can wipe off the face of the earth."

This is especially true in a leftist culture that creates incentives to identify with one's own enslavement instead of taking advantage of liberty. Slavery also means dependence, which for many people is much less persecutory and oppressive than independence. If you turn a child from the house and tell him he's free, he's not going to be happy about it. Which is where the left comes in, by protecting adult children from the vagaries of mature independence.

Pieper notes that "what is truly human is never the average." Human nature cannot be discovered via demographics, by looking at the behavior of Mass Man. Humans, since they are uniquely situated in vertical space, are are as free to perfect their nature as they are to flee from it. Just because everyone engages in the latter, doesn't mean it's a good idea.

In short, there is a standard of "what man himself is capable of being," and in my opinion, the very existence of this standard obliges us to move toward and conform to it. In other words, if we can fulfill our potential, then we must try to do so. To avoid this struggle is not only to fail, but to miss the whole point of life.

In the dialogue, this lesson is conveyed by Socrates' two very different speeches. The first is plausible enough, a reflection of the cynical sophistication of his audience. But like an Obama speech or a paper by a liberal academic, it has no interest in reality or truth, and only exists to glorify its author.

A normal person would feel shame at such a betrayal, but this is a higher normality defined in light of what man is to become. Which is why an Obama or a Clinton are so shameless in their lying -- which they must be in order to pull it off.

Nor are they ashamed -- as any normal person would be -- at the plaudits they receive from the grazing multitude they have successfully hypnotized and seduced. Why would you want the acclaim of idiots? And what does it say about you?

But Socrates is ashamed of his first speech, even to the point of feeling impure. He "wishes to recant his shamefully false speech by a second speech on Love.... Socrates steps forth from the fogs into the clear light of heaven, as it were. In place of a literary exercise, we have the genuine emotion of one who is saying what must be said.... We find ourselves breathing fresher, cooler, purer air."

To be continued...

First They Came for the Dumpsters...

It seems to me that this book by Josef Pieper, Enthusiasm & Divine Madness, speaks to our current subject of Death, but I don't yet know how. Just a suspicion at this point.

The book is a meditation on Plato's Phaedrus, a dialogue on whether it is a good idea for pedophiles to be in love with their victims. A guy named Lysias says No, just be detached and dispassionate about the whole thing, while Socrates disagrees.

Am I missing something? I mean, right off the top of my head I can think of a third option.

At any rate, Plato's evocation of Athenian society very much reminds me of the contemporary left's culture of death, with its childishness, pseudo-intellectualism, and irony toward everything except itself. Pieper writes of how Plato depicts the callow intellectuals of the day: "Theirs is a world of sophisticated irreverence and detachment, of enlightened health doctrines and simultaneous depravity."

Enlightened health doctrines and simultaneous depravity. What a perfect description of the contemporary left in general, and of my city in particular. Here in Calabasas, the city council has infamously banned cigaret smoking even outdoors, and has also outlawed plastic bags in grocery stores. I'm having to deal with these fascists at the moment, because of the remodeling.

In fact, looking back on it, it was probably a mistake for me to call the city planner a fascist, because it seems to be slowing down approval of the Plan.

We came to their attention due to having a dumpster on the street from an Unauthorized Company. Something to do with a certain environmental policy that the trash company must promise to uphold in Calabasas. That's when I called him a fascist. "I know, I know. just following orders. Where have we heard that before?"

First they came for the dumpsters, and I said nothing...

The Phaedrus, according to Pieper, "is from the start governed by the enthusiasm of the younger generation for Sophistry. Perhaps we should term it fascination and enchantment rather then enthusiasm."

Either way, we can see that human nature hasn't changed, and that even 2500 years ago there were plenty of youthful, low-information Obama supporters.

Pieper writes that sophistry is indeed a phenomenon we "encounter in every epoch": "It is inherent in the nature of Sophistry to expound the avant-garde ideas of any given time. It always presumes to be exactly what is necessary and correct 'now'; to be the timely and modern thing. Sophistry and topicality are co-ordinate concepts in a highly specific sense."

So, sophistry is always temporocentric, which is why, for example, Obama's so-called "evolution" on state-imposed redefinition of marriage -- which amounts to a ban on human nature, or to mutation by decree -- is really just another typical example of leftist regression. It has nothing to do with human norms or with the nature of reality, and everything to do with popular sophistry and crass political utility -- "as though," in words of Socrates, "it were good sense to deceive a few miserable people to win their applause."

Well, I suppose I'd better hit the publish button before the electricians flip the switch...

Put Away the Scythe, and Nobody Gets Hurt!

We're still negotiating with that grim ferryman, Death, but he is truly impossible. Refuses to budge on whisking us to the other side, but refuses to tell us anything about what awaits us there: For me to know and you to find out.

Or not!

Childish, really.

Speaking of passive-aggressive non-responses, Tomberg relates Death to the philosophistries of mechanism and materialism, which are "not at all the realm of answers, but rather the graveyard for real questions." Why is that? Because, for example,

The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face (Don Colacho's Aphorisms).

To embrace scientistic reductionism as a worldview (as opposed to a method) is to more or less live as semi-zombie, in which case one is not so much alive as merely undead. And the painful thing about being undead is that one will be aware of an absence -- a present absence -- but not be able to name it. One will seek to fill the absence, but in the manner of a blind raccoon looking for a metaphor.

I am reminded of the preface to Code of the Woosters, in which the author observes that "High seriousness about [Wodehouse] brings to mind poor Professor Scully," who attempted "to describe a smile scientifically." The professor "doggedly dissected 'the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth, the curving of the naso-labial furrows...' Such an approach is not actively harmful, but it suffers from naso-labianism -- leaving the mystery of Wodehouse's genius intact."

Don Colacho: To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place about which a poet sang. And

If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, error does not exist. But

Stupidity appropriates what science invents with diabolical facility. As a result,

Whoever has understood a notion from the natural sciences has understood all that can be understood; whoever has understood a notion from the humanities has understood only what he can understand (ibid).

Things are no different today than in Professor Scully's day. Ask a victim of materialitis or reductionosis what a smile is, and they could in good faith respond that it involves "the contraction of muscles in the region of the mouth and cheeks, and this latter through electrical impulses transmitted through the nerves from the centre called the 'brain.'" The real cause of the smile -- joy, or humor, or satisfaction -- is defined out of existence.

This misguided approach is similar to trying to understand a telephone conversation by analyzing the electrical impulses that pass back and forth through the wires. The most complete analysis will of necessity be entirely inadequate.

The same applies a fortiori to the mind/brain relationship. Again, a smile is a local manifestation of joy, or humor, or bemusement, which are nonlocal (in the sense that they cannot be found in one unambiguous "place") and which "set in motion both the muscles of the mouth and the electrical impulses of the nerves." As mentioned somewhere in the bʘʘk, every reductionistic explanation harbors a cognitively pathological dualism that results in one side of the dualism sneaking into the other side without acknowledgment.

One might say that, like a psychotic patient, the materialist's explanation is always put forth with the utmost confidence by that which is specifically denied in the explanation. Making a question go away is not the same as having answered it. As Tomberg points out, the question remains but is simply offloaded from conscious to unconscious planes, with no proper connecting flight. These people are carrying all kinds of metaphysical baggage, but don't even know it.

If you ever want to know why self-styled rational people believe in such weird things -- global warming, zero-sum economics, tea partiers are extremists, blacks can't function without socialism, etc. -- this is why. They descend into an incoherent form of unconscious thinking, because one can no more make the unconscious go away than one could make the sympathetic nervous system go away. All one can do is discipline and channel it, the same way one creates electricity from a wild river.

(The following parabular passage is somehow related to the above: "The belief that only conscious actions are 'real' is common among collectivists and economic creationists who can't understand unintended consequences, but this fallacy is akin to believing that drinking a glass of water on a hot day benefits only those who understand the chemical reactions of H2O in human body.")

While ordinary psychoanalysis does an adequate job of describing the lower vertical, in so doing, it generally reduces the upper to the lower vertical. However, one of the purposes of religion is to provide a framework with which to generatively explore the upper vertical. And in fact, it also does a fine job (at least in potential) of structuring and conferring meaning upon the lower vertical.

I'm thinking of all the extraordinary wisdom embodied in, say, the Talmud or in classical elucidations of the cardinal virtues and deadly sins. Awhile back we did a series on the esoteric meaning of the Ten Commandments. Same idea. Just as there is such a thing as a healthy body -- obviously -- there is also such a thing as a healthy soul and spirit. But if one denies the soul and spirit up front, then should one remain spiritually healthy, it will be by accident, not design. Which has a bearing on the subject of death, because

For the man who lives in the modern world it is not the soul’s immortality in which it is difficult to believe, but in its mere existence. --Don Colacho's Aphorisms

So many decent but useful idiots of the left hypocritically retain religious habits and inclinations with no religious belief to support them. For example, they insist that marriage is sacred -- so sacred, in fact, that we should extend it to relationships in which it is literally impossible to live in the state of marriage, e.g., polygamous or homosexual.

It is analogous to saying, "eating salads is healthy. Therefore, I will place my cat on a strict diet of fresh vegetables." Good logic. Wrong species.

Which pretty much sums up the left. It reminds me of a scene from the Larry Sanders show, when his bitter agent says "our job would be so easy if it weren't for fucking talent!" Leftism would be so great if if weren't for effing humans! Humans are the problem. Right, so let's give them more power over us!

Most people don't have the time or ability to be metaphysicians, which is one of the practical blessings of religion. If one eliminates religion, one only ushers in bad metaphysics and values, with nothing to oppose them. See 1960s for details. See Occupy Wall Street for examples. See Obama for implications.

Way out of time, and we didn't even get anywhere. Oh well, to be continued...

What Only Dead Men Know

Letter XIII, our old frenemy Death. What to make of his sinister and persecutory silence? How to unscrew his inscrutability without having to actually meet him?

Silvio / I gotta go / find out something only dead men know. --Dylan

Death is one of those existential parameter thingys that the mind can never contain, but rather, contains us -- like time or space or truth or sexuality or desire. For example, if a man manages to completely contain his sexuality -- his id, as it were -- it can only be because he is dead in that area. More generally, the life force obviously contains us, not vice versa.

Sex and death are intwomately related, for if we didn't sexually reproduce, we wouldn't die, at least for any biological reason. Rather, we would live endlessly, except that it would be a horizontal endlessness, which is not to be confused with eternity (which is outside conventional temporality).

Furthermore, without the boundary of death, we couldn't know nothing, which is the beginning of knowledge. In other words, not knowing must precede the acquisition of knowledge -- which is why, for example, Obama doesn't know anything. He's way too full of himself -- okay, full of shit -- to ever tolerate the state of patient emptiness required of intellectual -- or spiritual -- curiosity. I mean, sometimes one has to wander in such bewilderness for 40 days or even 40 years before seeing the light.

Animals can only know something, but even then, they don't know that they know, because they don't know that they die. Only man can know that he he doesn't know, and thereby clear a potential space for knowledge. Out of this deathly silence will grow words and ideas of various kinds.

Tomberg says the serpent promises only a purely biological pseudo-eternal life when he tells Adam and Eve they "shall not die." Thus, technically he wasn't lying, because a vertical lie may well be a horizontal truth (and vice versa), as our trolls never stop teaching us.

In our bʘʘk, we wrote of the extreme unlikelihood of anything resembling human intelligence evolving elsewhere in the cosmos, for human intelligence isn't just a matter of "big brains." Far from it.

Humanness emerges within the trimorphic space of an immature and incomplete nervous system in dynamic rapport with an "empathic" mother and "protecting" father (and when we speak of "mother" and "father," we are doing so from the infant's archetypal perspective, wherein the early experience of empathy becomes mother, and is directed into that preconceptual archetype or "empty category"; in this view, mother emerges from baby, and then father from mother -- more on which below).

Tomberg writes of the connection between, on the one hand, sleeping, forgetting, and death; and on the other, waking, remembering, and life.

For example, psychoanalysis has long posited the idea that chronic insomnia can result from an inability to die to the day. One lives by day, but then must let it dissolve and scatter into the easeful death of sleep, only to be resurrected comeday morm or come to mournhim (Joyce).

For other people, they cannot die to the unconscious because of the monsters that lie there in in wait and haunt the interior world. This is a routine result of a traumatic childhood, of things that happened -- and more commonly, what didn't happen, in the form of a secure relationship with the maternal environment/container.

A "monster" is always an indiscriminate mixture of the categories of life and death, resulting in a grotesque entity that has no proper archetype. All the classic monster movies share this feature of a living death or of death living: Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Dracula, the Mummy.

Perhaps this provides a clue about death -- that it isn't so much the opposite of life, but a dark form of it. One might say that Easter celebrates Life amidst death, while Halloween commemorates Death in life. Probably no coincidence that this unholy-day has become much more popular with the increasing secularization of our culture, i.e., the culture of death (which is at root a culture of journalistic sleeping and academic forgetting).

I remember reading an interesting book -- here it is, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality -- which suggests that most funeral rites evolved around concerns of making certain that the dead stay that way -- that the corpse isn't merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.

So, to sleep is to forget the day and awaken to the world of the Dreamer: "One forgets, one goes to sleep, and one dies." In turn, "One remembers, one awakes, and one is born" (MOTT).

In a previous post, I discussed the idea that from a developmental perspective, one may turn Genesis on its head and see the infant-Adam as the creator of God and everything else.

In fact, from a certain perspective, this is how it must be, and to the extent that one fails to understand this distinction, one may well fail to appreciate the difference between God and infantile omnipotence.

(Funny, it reminds me of a song I heard yesterday by Peter Green, called Corners of My Mind: And darkness was around / and he could not hear a sound / no, there wasn't any light / no day or any night / then thunder came from lightning / and the thunder brought the sound / when I opened up my eyes / beneath me was the ground.)

Unfortunately, not only is this conflation commonplace, but it might even be the norm. Certainly the Islamist god is indistinguishable from an enraged infant, while the infantile dreams of the left are suspiciously similar to those conjured by the omnipotent and implacable gods of the nursery, whose incessant demands are few: I WANT!, MORE!, and AGAIN!

Looked at in this way, the human baby's shocking discovery of Adam and Eve -- or of a Mother and Father separate from the baby, with wills, desires, and interests of their own -- is an insult to one's omnipotence. How dare Mommy and Daddy exist separate from my magical wishes!

Therefore the baby-god banishes them from the infantile paradise, where the infant restores his "oneness with God." No coincidence therefore that the way back to paradise is blocked by a contingent of battle-seasoned cherubs with flaming swords.

To fall asleep is not just to give up "everything," but to do so in the faith that things will somehow be cleansed or purified and transformed when we are reincarnated and reborn in the morning. So sleep again has this digestive or metabolic property; which implies that death and forgetting do as well.

And in fact, one doesn't have to comb very far through the esoteric literature to discover this idea, that the initial postmortem state is very much analogous to the metabolic function of dreaming, except that it will range over our entire life, so that whatever was "inessential" is consigned to the flames, while what is essential lives in eternity.

Speaking of which, I just stumbled on this interesting looking book that I may order, called Life after Death according to the Orthodox Tradition.

Out of time...

Until the Last Liberal Professor is Strangled with the Entrails of the Last MSM Journalist

Letter XII, The Hanged Man, is another key archetype for us, as it speaks to the nonlocal happitat in which the Raccoon prefers to dwell -- or ne'er d'well, anyway -- which is upended roughly halfway between -- how to put it without being precipitously understood? -- between 〇 and ( ), or between the celestial and terrestrial planes.

(Recall from the book that ( ) stands for the world, which, in the absence of 〇, is impossibly broken, incomplete, empty, discontinuous and finally absurd; one might say that it is merely the exteriorization of Ø, of non-being.)

Tomberg says that this card "plunges us into the heart of the problem of the relationship between man and gravitation, and the conflicts that this relationship entails."

Something analogous to gravity operates at all levels of the cosmos and in all degrees of being, both interior and exterior, from the solar system, to culture, to politics, to personal relationships, to the self, and even to mind parasites.

In each case there is an attractive force that simultaneously draws subjects and objects toward other subjects or objects and toward their own "center of gravity"; we might say that one is an exteriorizing force, the other interiorizing (or centripetal and centrifugal).

We are not so much interested in the attraction of objects -- which is in the realm of physics -- as of subjects, for this is where the real mystery lies.

For example, once one becomes aware of the true self, it will begin to attract the kinds of relationships and experiences it requires to in order to grow. If one fails to live out of this interior center, then no matter what happens in life, it will be an incoherent stream of experiences with no possibility of synthesis into a higher unity. One can always paper over discontinuities, inconsistencies, holes, psychic envelopes, dead spots, unborns, etc., but there is a technical term for this: papering over, I guess.

Here again, this is why liberty is so critical to the articulation and development of the self. The self is something that pre-exists in the form of potential, but can only develop and be known through experience.

You might say that this implicate self must be exteriorized so as to be interiorized. It must be free to choose the objects, relationships, and experiences it requires in order to "be." This is why one man's paradise is another man's exile or prison -- even a living death. This is also why there can be no real spirituality in the absence of freedom, and in turn why leftism is intrinsically retrograde.

And when we say "real," we mean something like participation in being; in the spiritual realm it is not a matter of "to be or not to be." Rather, there is a continuum between the two. Vertically speaking, one might say we live in the phase space between these two great attractors, which I symbolize in the book as 〇 and Ø. As such, there are two final causes that operate in us; you could even call them eros and thanatos, or love and death. Probably Adam and Eve made a lousy choice, and here we are.

(A point of order: the 〇 <---> ( ) dialectic has to do with God and world, the latter of which is still "real," whereas the 〇 <---> Ø has slightly different implications, since the latter is "nothing," or absence of being; ( ) is at least "concrete," whereas Ø is merely vacuous -- like the difference between, say, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, respectively.)

One way to look at it is to consider the fact that man only discovers himself -- i.e., acquires self-consciousness -- as a consequence of his partial alienation, his separateness from the rest of creation. Without some sort of division, there can be no higher unity.

Vaclav Havel writes that Man is the being who "has fallen out of Being and therefore continually reaches toward it, as the only entity by which and to which Being has revealed itself as a question [?!], as a secret and as meaning."

Again, we are suspended between the terms, or limits, of Being, and can seek to heal this separation in two different (vertical) directions. Havel: Man's "drama unfolds in the rupture between his orientation 'upward' and 'backward' and a constant falling 'downward' into now.'"

Either way, the human subject "is continually stepping outside itself in order to return to itself once more and, through this 'circulation,' it inevitably matures -- becomes itself." It is a "permanent balancing act" between the recovery of Being vs. being dragged "down into the world of things, surfaces, frantic consumption and self-absorption" (ibid.): man becomes a prisoner of his own mental productions instead of a gentleman slacker floating on the sea of Being.

As the death-stream draws us down to the terminal moraine of our lower nature, the life-stream pulls us in, up, and out, toward our nonlocal source above. Even the most cynical atheist cannot live -- not for a moment -- without this life-stream, for it is what pulls him toward truth, or love, or meaning -- even toward his hatred of God (since the latter is usually rooted in allegiance to an invented truth instead of attraction to Truth as such).

Tomberg agrees that "the domain of our freedom... shows the real and active presence of gravitation of a spiritual order." This is why people are attracted to God and religion to begin with, "for what is the phenomenon of religion if not the manifestation of spiritual gravitation towards God -- i.e., towards the centre of spiritual gravitation of the world?"

We cannot see gravity, any more than we can observe the wind. However, we can obviously feel the effects of gravity and wind. On the interior plane, these effects are subtle but nevertheless clear, especially as one learns to amplify them and to live within their attractor space. It's as clear as falling in love. No one teaches us how to do that, for it is not something we could ever learn. If it didn't occur in earliest infancy, it couldn't recur later on.

Speaking of falling, Tomberg situates mankind's fall within this space. i.e., "the passage from a spiritual gravitation system, whose centre is God, to a terrestrial gravitational system, whose centre is the serpent."

That's certainly how it feels to me. Don't you feel those twin pulls? And don't you remember as a child, the first awareness of the pull into darkness? I remember it distinctly. I think it repeats itself in different forms at different stages of life -- assuming one actually grows through different developmental stages beyond the culturally conditioned ego of the Mass Man. Each stage has a central "temptation" which is a fractal image of the first. In each case, we must choose the Light.

The Gospel designates the two attractors as "heaven" and "this world," or "the kingdom of God" and "the kingdom of the prince of this world." Or again, we could just call them O and Ø; or "slack" and "the conspiracy." Or liberal and progressive (HT American Digest).

Likewise, this can be thought of as a sword that cuts mankind right down the middle, between the "children of this world" and "the children (or the sons) of light." Here again, standard issue cʘʘnvision -- so long as we haven't voided the warranty -- allows us to know in an instant when we are in the presence of the One or the Øther. It couldn't be more obvious now, could it?

Tomberg notes that there are actually three main categories, and I see that these correspond to the three gunas of Vedanta, which we won't get into. But there is the "carnal" (or vital) man who "lives in the grip of gravitation of 'this world' at the expense of the gravitation of 'heaven'"; there is the "psychic man" who "lives in equilibrium between the two fields"; and then there is the spiritual or pneumatic man "who lives under the sway of the gravitation of 'heaven.'"

Frankly, I no longer have any patience for the the first type, who, like barbarians ransacking a cathedral, are "fundamentally transforming" the country into their own vulgar image. Just part of this toxic cloud I've been passing through, I guess. You know the feeling: let the dead bury the tenured, after throttling the latter with the entrails of the last MSM journalist.

Power & Farce

Our next post was originally written in November 2008, shortly after Obama's electoral victory. Therefore, I will try to remove gags that haven't withstood the test of timelessness, while preserving any eerily prescient blognostications that burnish Petey's aura of infallibility. Even so, the post is kind of meh:

Letter XI, The Force, is a timely symbol for the events of the day, as the farces of the left ascend on the political wheel of fortune.

However, we can draw consolation from the fact that -- being that leftism is a closed intellectual and spiritual system -- it is already on the way down as we speak, outward appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

In short, its end is in its beginning, as the poet said. The higher it ascends in its intoxicated (over)reach for power, the further it will fall. The concrete fact of Obama shall soon enough kill the vacuous idea of Obama. Nature hates a vacuum, while the left requires one, into which they can project their dreams and fantasies. But you need a bigger void than Obama to contain an alternate universe.

The following passage by Tomberg is perfectly apt today: "Plato has never had success as a revolutionary and never will do so. But Plato himself will always live throughout the centuries of human history... and will be in each century the companion of the young and old who love pure thought, seeking only the light which it comprises." In other words, you can never have a mass revolution of individuals oriented to truth, since it requires converting one assoul at a time.

But the left is by definition a mass movement aimed at mass men, which automatically condemns it to mediocrity and banality. It is led by a herd of self-styled elites who cluelesslely imagine themselves superior, but nothing could be more mundane -- and self-contradictory -- than the idea of "mass excellence."

In contrast to Plato, Karl Marx has enjoyed over a century "of astonishing success and has revolutionized the world. He has swept away millions -- those who went to the barricades and trenches in civil wars, and those who went to the prisons, either as jailers or as prisoners."

Really, can you name another philosopher who has enjoyed such a literally smashing and grabbing success in such a short span of time?

The point is, "Plato illumines, whilst Marx sweeps away." Obviously, it is impossible to imagine a person with the slightest spiritual maturity getting caught up in the Obama hysteria, but equally impossible to imagine such a person being caught up in any kind of political hysteria. It is one of the reasons we can never match the diabolical energy of the left. Since the leftist is condemned to the horizontal world, he channels his spiritual energy into politics. As we wrote a couple of years ago [November 2006],

"Regardless of what happens Tuesday, it shouldn’t greatly affect the spiritual equilibrium of the Superior Man, whose invisible combat will continue as usual. Indeed, this is what distinguishes us from the agitated multitude of horizontal men who locate their salvation in politics. Whatever the outcome, our lives will continue to center around our own perfection and salvation, not for narcissistic reasons, but for the simple reason that it is not possible to save others unless we have first saved ourselves. Needless to say, horizontal Republicans will not save us from horizontal Democrats.

"The project of the left is to make us all useful to the collective, when the only possible justification for the collective can lie in its usefulness to the individual -- again, not in a horizontal, egotistical sense, but in a vertical sense. Assuming that life has a transcendent purpose -- and you cannot be human and not make this assumption -- then the purpose of society should be to help human beings achieve this purpose -- i.e., to be useful to the Creator."

"Horizontal man, in denying the vertical, necessarily replaces it with a counterfeit version that substitutes the collective for the One and human will for the Divine authority. Taken to its logical extreme, this manifests as the demagogue, the cult of personality, or the dictator-god who expresses the vitalistic will of the people. But all forms of leftism lie and never stop lying on this continuum, because leftism revolves around a false absolute and a counterfeit vertical."

As Eliot said, the leftist dreams of a system in which it will be unnecessary for anyone to be good. But man is the being who can -- and must -- choose between good and evil.

Likewise, "the moment we talk about 'social conscience,' and forget about conscience, we are in moral danger" (Eliot). Eliminate the idea of moral struggle, and "you must expect human beings to become more and more vaporous."

Since man is placed at the crossroads where he is free to choose between good and evil, this again eliminates man. You might say that for the leftist dreamer, man is strictly unnecessary. In fact, he just gets in the way of the Dream.

For horizontality goes hand in hand with exteriority and outwardness, which is the initial direction of the fall: first out, then down, and gravity takes care of the rest. Horizontal man is down and out, whereas our salvolution lies up and in.

The leftist lives in a semi-conscious narrative only a degree or two above blind instinct. Only man -- inexplicably and miraculously on any scientistic grounds -- can exit the closed system of his own neuro-ideology and enter higher worlds, worlds of truth, beauty, and virtue.

To be in contact with these higher worlds is to be Man. To neglect or deny these anterior worlds is to destroy man, precisely. It is to starve and suffocate man’s spirit by laying waste to his proper environment, the only environment in which he can actually grow into full manhood.

You cannot replace the holy grail of Spirit with the lowly gruel of flatland materialism and expect it to feed the multitudes. Human beings do not draw their spiritual nourishment from outside but from above -- which in turn “spiritualizes” and sacralizes the horizontal.

Vertical man is not susceptible to the leftist's state of perpetual hysteria. As Eliot wrote, "we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph."

Nevertheless, vertical man naturally frets about the deteriorating conditions of the collective interior of the human world -- AKA the ambient culture -- and its seemingly unimpeded slide into barbarism, spiritual exhaustion, scientistic magic, neo-paganism, self-worship, the cult of the body, abstract materialism, and a vapid and rudderless subjectivism.

It is a truism that vertical man paradoxically lives close to the ground, as he has internalized the cautionary tales of Eden, of Icarus, of Babel, and of various episodes of the Honeymooners. In contrast, horizontal man seizes what does not properly belong to him, not just recapitulating the fall but enshrining it in his ideology. It's no longer a bug but a feature.

But when you cast your vote for horizontal man, you are unwittingly chipping away at the foundation of the very tower in which horizontal man is privileged to sit despite his metaphysical ignorance. For in reality, we only have the luxury of superfluous and slumbering horizontal men because of the vertical men -- real men -- who came before and built our civilization brick by brick (except for the cornerstone, which was not made by human hands).

Thus we can see our own possible future by casting our gaze at Europe, which is too high and top-heavy for its own long-forgotten foundations, and is well into the process of toppling into dust. For when horizontal man falls, he doesn’t actually fall far, only back down to the ground where vertical man awaits him.

So render unto the horizontal the things that belong to the horizontal, but do not store your treasures there, where myths corrupt and chickens roost. As always, be as wise as the horizontal serpents who stand on their bellies, but innocent as vertical doves who kneel on wings.

A secularist culture can only exist, so to speak, in the dark. It is a prison in which the human spirit confines itself when it is shut out of the wider world of reality. But as soon as the light comes, all the elaborate mechanism that has been constructed for living in the dark becomes useless. The recovery of spiritual vision gives man back his spiritual freedom. --Russell Kirk

The Dog and Monkey Show

The 'wheel of fortune' is a better analogy for history than the 'evolution of humanity.' --Nicolas Gomez Davila

I originally discussed Letter X, The Wheel of Fortune, in the context of Eugene (the future Fr. Seraphim) Rose's Nihilism, which traces humanity's wails of misfortune through the stages of liberalism --> realism --> vitalism --> and nihilistic destruction. Thus, with the rise of Obama's fortunes the country has been plunged into misery and destitution. So things even out in the end.

In case you can't make out the action in the card, Tomberg says that it consists of "three figures in animal form of which two (the monkey and the dog) turn with the wheel, whilst the third (the sphinx) is beyond the movement of the wheel; he is seated on a platform above the wheel."

Tomberg continues: "The monkey descends in order to rise again; the dog rises in order to descend again." Thus, in the absence of the sphinx above, the wheel "evokes the idea of a vain and absurd game."

Which indeed life is and must be in the absence of the transcendent Third which accompanies us through life. It is without a doubt the most shocking feature of this cosmos, and renders any form of materialism utterly beside the point (of life, of cognition, and of existence itself).

The conquest and colonization of this transcendent position is the true vocation of man, but obviously the vast majority of men prefer the dog and monkey show, which is why the same returns. This theme informs most every page of Finnegans Wake, e.g., phall if you but will, rise you must, Mister Funn, you're going to be fined again, Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall, etc.

History may not repeat, but it c-certainly st-stutters. The plots change but the theme is pretty constant, otherwise we wouldn't recognize ourselves in the mirrors of revelation, history, and literature: True history flows beneath the facts, and both superstuctures and infrastructures are expressions of the climate of the soul (Davila).

Better yet: Those who prophesy more than indefinite alternations of decline and ascent are hiding some dubious product they want to sell for cash (ibid).

Tomberg goes on to enunciate the orthodox Raccoon position, which posits the existence of two metacosmic (meaning that they flow from outside time and space) movements (↓↑) that determine whether one's life will be a dreary wheel of fatuity or a veritable merry growround:

"The one is based on the idea of the Fall, i.e., degeneration and descent from above below."

Importantly -- and this is a cornerstone of the whole cosmic innerprize -- "According to this class of ideas" -- which, of course, is from the vertical perspective -- "it is not the monkey who is the ancestor of man, but rather, on the contrary, it is man who is the ancestor of the monkey," the latter of which "is a degenerate and degraded descendent."

After all, if there is evolution, then by definition there is both involution and devolution (all of which reflect movements on the vertical plane, in, out, up, down, forward, and back).

If you have difficulty with this concept, just remember the self-evident fact that, just as God is not in the cosmos, but rather, vice versa, man is not in the world. Rather, the world is essentially -- or a priori -- in the human soul. It's all in here, just waiting to be discovered and unpacked -- even atheism (but only in the devolving stream of man-to-monkey).

(To be perfectly accurate, God is in the cosmos, but only as a consequence of being beyond it; in other words, immanence is posterior to transcendence. Or, God's transcendence results in a kind of pouring or overflowing into the world. In mirrorlike fashion, consciousness is in the world and the world is in consciousness, but one of these must be prior.)

It cannot be emphasized too strangely that this inwardness is like the bush that burns but is never consumed. In the words of Eckhart, "It is remarkable that anything should pour forth and yet remain within."

This pouring forth takes place in the "deep within," so to speak, and "when I say the inmost, I mean the highest, and when I say the highest, I mean the inmost part of the soul -- there I mean them both together in one," a place "where time never entered" (ibid).

So the Wheel of Fortune depicts a quasi-human entity who is on the way down -- yes, you may think of him as a leftist.

In contrast, the sphinx "represents the plane and stage of being from which the monkey is moving and towards which the dog is approaching." Now, "Does not the monkey lend itself marvelously to serve as a symbol of the animalization which is effected at the expense of the Angelic and human elements of the prototype being?"

Yes, I just said that -- a leftist.

Man is poised between the two extremes of existence, the spiritual and the material. We are lured by vertical memoirs of the former and hypnotically seduced by misplaced hopes in the latter. Schuon has written that man is "condemned to the absolute," but I prefer to think of it as having a passion for wholeness and a gnostalgia for eternity. The one is aspiration, the other inspiration, or exhalation and inhalation. Our very breath reminds us of the rhythm of eternity. Which is why leftism is I-Amphysema.

An insurmountable problem with Darwinian fundamentalism is that it deals with only half -- the lesser half -- of the circle, which ignores "the ultimate as well as the effective cause of the whole process of evolution," without which it is unintelligible (to the awakened intellect, not to tenured bipeds falling up the academic ladder). Darwinism will always be unintelligible in so far as it "refuses to accept the other half of the circle, that of involution."

Understood esoterically, evolution embodies the mystery of "Fall, perdition, redemption and salvation." As such, one must understand that Darwinism really is fully intelligible to people who have exiled themselves from the fulness of reality. But it would be incorrect to say that they have it "half right," for half of reality is actually no reality, being that it is analogous to living in the "outside" while denying the existence of an inside.

The metaphysical Darwinian is actually a passenger of evolution, not a witness, for to witness it is to have transcended it -- i.e., to have realized the larger circle in the flesh. But of course it is an open circle, so that it constitutes the spiraling ontological and temporal structure of being.

Now back to the dialectics of nihilism. Let us stipulate that religion deals with absolute truth, or at least purports to do so. In the end, in the absence of absolute truth, the only option left open to an intellectually honest person is nihilism, because nihilism is simply the doctrine of relativity drawn out to its logical conclusion.

An honest nihilist such as Nietzsche realizes this: God is dead and therefore man becomes God and everything is possible. In the final analysis, the existence of God is the only thing that prevents intellectually consistent good King Leonardos from coming to the same sociopathic end as their Nietzsche brothers.

Scientific or logical truth is by definition relative truth. Thanks to Gödel, we know that there is no system of logic that can fully account for itself, or that can be both consistent and complete. Rather, completeness is always purchased at the price of consistency, while a rigidly consistent system will be incomplete -- say, a consistent program of materialism or determinism. Such a philosophy will leave much of reality -- including the most interesting parts -- outside its purview. This is why Marxism is such an inadequate theory. In explaining everything, it explains nothing. But at least it’s rigidly consistent, like Darwinism.

Once we have abandoned the absolute and descended into relativity, then what necessarily follows is multiculturalism, moral relativism, deconstruction, “perception is reality,” etc. All cultures become equally cherished, with the exception of the culture that believes some cultures are better than others. All truths are privileged with the exception of Truth itself.

Ironically, in the relative world of nihilism, I am necessarily all. The world literally revolves around I, since my truth is absolute. The ultimate questions have no answers except for those I might provide.

This is why leftist academia has become so corrupt, for how can it not be “corrupting to hear or read the words of men who do not believe in truth?” “It is yet more corrupting to receive, in place of truth, mere learning and scholarship which, if they are presented as ends in themselves, are no more than parodies of the truth they were meant to serve, no more than a facade behind which there is no substance” (Rose).

The emptiness of relativism evokes the next stage in the nihilist dialectic, realism. This is a novel type of debased realism that entirely excludes the vertical and affirms that only the horizontal realm is real -- that is, the material, external, and quantifiable world. In one fallen swoop, this philosophy of unreality becomes the paradigmatic lens through which mankind is now supposed to view the world. Thus, we somehow purchase "reality" at the price of our own absolute unreality. How is that supposed to work?

My book begins with a quote from Richard Weaver: “The modernistic searcher after meaning may be likened to a man furiously beating the earth and imagining that the finer he pulverizes it, the nearer he will get to the riddle of existence. But no synthesizing truths lie in that direction. It is in the opposite direction that the path must be followed.” Nevertheless, it is in this downward direction that our fall inevitably takes us.

Here philosophy is officially replaced by modern misosophy: hatred of wisdom. It is a childishly naive ideology that confuses what is most obvious with what is most true, and what is most fundamental with what is most real. The cosmos is officially turned upside-down and inside-out, incoherently elevating insentient matter to the the ultimate.

As Father Rose writes, “Worship of fact is by no means the love of truth; it is, as we have already suggested, parody. It is the presumption of the fragment to replace the whole; it is the proud attempt to build a Tower of Babel, a collection of facts, to reach to the heights of truth and wisdom from below.

"But truth is only attained by bowing down and accepting what is received from above. All the pretended ‘humility’ of Realist scholars and scientists... cannot conceal the pride of their collective usurpation of the throne of God...”

Such an individual “becomes a fanatical devotee of the only reality that is obvious to the spiritually blind: this world.” Human beings are reduced to races or classes, spiritual love to animal sex, higher needs to lower desires, while the earth is elevated to Goddess, the dramatic to the significant, the celebrity to the important. A new kind of human monster emerges -- for a monster is simply a human being existing outside the human archetype -- and takes his place a bit lower than the beasts.

And Those who live in the twilight of history imagine that the day is being born when night is approaching. --Davila

Thoughts Without a Thinker and Thinkers Without a Thought

Oh yeah. Before being pulled into a meditation on the cosmic order reflected in architecture, we had been meditouting the cosmic order reflected in the Tarot, and were just about to open up Letter IX, The Hermit.

Tomberg claims that a person who is "truly young, i.e., living for an ideal," is instinctively drawn to this figure. This attraction is similar to the Jungian concept of archetypal projection.

The archetypes are "within" -- you might even say they form the implicit structure of withinness -- but must first be located without. Upon contact with an exemplar, we have a kind of interior recollection that lights up the inner archetype.

In fact, it reminds me of an aphorism: When imagination and perception coincide, the soul is burned (Davila). Without the experience, the archetype will remain an empty category -- a letter addressed from the Self to one's self, but lost in transit.

The archetypal Hermit is "a wise and good father... who has passed through the narrow gate and who walks the hard way -- someone whom one could trust without reserve and whom one could venerate and love without limit" (Tomberg).

The reason why there are so many false teachers is that we have an innate need for actual(ized) ones -- just as counterfeit money depends upon the existence of the real thing. But since our culture has largely -- and proudly -- severed itself from its own wisdom tradition, the Deepaks of the world rush in to fill the void. Which expands the negative space of the void. Existence actually becomes more "thin" and weightless.

The Hermit "possesses the gift of letting the light shine in the darkness -- this is his lamp." And here is a critical point: "he has the faculty of separating himself from the collective moods, prejudices and desires of race, nation, class and family -- the faculty of reducing to silence the cacophony of collectivism vociferating around him in order to listen to and understand the hierarchical harmony of the spheres."

You know, like the sober and lucid Chris Matthews, who cut through the confusion of yesterday's events and clearly discerned the hand of white racist Republicans.

Likewise, the Hermit "possesses a sense of realism which is so developed that he stands in the domain of reality... on three [feet], i.e., he advances only after having touched the ground through immediate experience and at first-hand contact without intermediaries." This is none other than 〇-->(n), or the transformation of prior reality into thought, or being to knowledge.

So the Hermit is an archetypal reflection of the good father, behind or above whom is the Father in heaven. The Hermit is a little word from our nonlocal sponsor, so to speak.

As UF says, he also represents the method of obtaining valid spiritual knowledge, in that he is able to synthesize within himself the three great antinomies with which any thinking man is confronted, and which any efficacious philosophy must reconcile. These are the complementary pairs of 1) idealism <---> realism; 2) realism <---> nominalism; and 3) faith <---> empirical science.

Consider the first antinomy, idealism <---> realism. Most philosophers come down on one side or the other of this pair -- and when you think about it, you really have only three choices: idealism, realism, or both.

Actually there is a fourth option, which is total confusion: an arbitrary, a pre-philosophical, and ad hoc blending, based upon the needs of the moment. Leftism in general and scientism in particular fall into this category.

Tomberg writes that "the idealist (e.g. Hegel) considers everything as so many forms of thought, whilst the realist (e.g. Spencer) affirms that objects of knowledge have an existence which is independent of thought."

In the case of realism, "it is the world which bears the word and it is the human intellect which listens." But in the case of idealism, "it is the intellect which bears the word and it is the world which is its reflection" (MOTT).

Who is right? Boxers or briefs?

"Let us not prostrate ourselves either before the world or before the intellect, but let us prostrate ourselves in adoration of the common source of both the world and the intellect -- God: God whose Word is at one and the same time the 'true light that enlightens every man coming into the world' and the creator of the world -- 'all things were made through him, and nothing that was made was made without him" (Tomberg).

The source of both world and intellect is Word, or Logos, "whose objective manifestation is the world of prototypes underlying the phenomenal world, and whose subjective manifestation is the light or prototype of human intelligence." You see, the universe meets in the middle of the monkey, and we are the monkey in the middle, i.e., between world and God.

This formula gets us out of many philosophical pickles, and arms us against satan's deadly pickoff move. For example, our former scientistic jester would presumably insist that a random contingency -- the human subject -- is able to affirm valid knowledge of reality, which, as soon as one actually thinks about it, disproves itself. Yer' out!

Therefore, one must not think in order to continue believing it; or else engage in counterfeit thought. But why bother thinking anyway, since the subject isn't really real, and can have no valid knowledge of reality? Why not just sit around serenading your cat?

Nor could objects be really real, in the sense that we couldn't really know them. Not really. Rather, we would be trapped in Kant's phenomenal world -- ultimately just our own nervous system -- with no access to the noumenal. But with the Hermit's approach, both objects and the subject who knows them become really real, since they become real in the Word. In turn, assimilating this reality into the Word is to "redeem the world."

The next antinomy is realism <---> nominalism -- which can be confusing, since this type of realism is the opposite of the type discussed above.

Recall that realism originally referred to the objective reality of abstract universals or platonic forms. A realist in this sense sense of the term is an extreme idealist, e.g., Plato. For Plato, the idea is more real than the things of the world, which are just "copies." But for the nominalist, these so-called objective ideas are nothing more than words which have no independent reality.

Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but this seemingly innocuous fork in the philosophical road eventually wends its way to the horrors of deconstruction, multiculturalism, moral relativism, "positive liberties," "gay marriage," Gosnell, etc., the whole leftist catastrophe.

For example, marriage is a natural right that exists prior to the state, and it is not for the state to invent or impose the archetypes that distinguish us from the beasts and make us human. Therefore, to promulgate the fantasy that members of the same sex can live in a state of marriage is a barbarous assault on reality. It is not just offensive and bigoted, but magical, totalitarian, and phobic of reality.

Any scientist who actually takes the trouble to think deeply is a philosophical realist. For example, there is no great mathematician who is not an explicit or implicit Platonist. G. H. Hardy, in his A Mathematician's Apology, wrote that "It would be difficult now to find an educated man quite insensitive to the aesthetic appeal of mathematics.... A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas."

If we consider the whole idea of creation -- i.e., the cosmos....

Wait, let's stop right there: the idea of the cosmos. For that is what it is: an idea. No one has ever seen the cosmos. But it is incorrect to say we just "assume" it exists. Rather, we know in our bones that it exists -- that is, the strict totality of all interacting objects and events, which is a shadow of the Absolute.

There is no part of reality that exists independently of this Absolute. The interior wholeness we see at every level of reality is simply a fractal reflection, or distant echo, of this Absolute. It is what accounts for the organicism of organisms, the nonlocality of locality, the unity of the human subject, and the inner coherence of science.

The realist (i.e., idealist) says that "the general is anterior to the particular" (deduction). The nominalist says that "the particular is anterior to the general" (induction).

Here again, we see how the latter plays out at the local level, with disastrous consequences. For example, for the left, the collective is more real than the individual, even though nowhere does the Constitution speak of groups, much less group rights. Rather, the Constitution is of, by, and for individuals.

The Founders knew that the individual was real and that this individuality was rooted in liberty, which is the very means through which we become more real -- or realize our reality. It is this idea of liberty which is ultimately real, and which creates the possibility of real individuals (in other words, without liberty, our ideal "created" self will not be able to actualize in time; or, Image cannot embark upon the journey to Likeness).

But for the left, it is only in its concrete particulars that liberty is real, i.e, "positive liberties." In other words, liberty is not real unless the government somehow creates it and gives it to you in the form of cash, favors, birth control, dead babies, etc. You might say that negative liberty preserves the ideal reality of liberty, whereas positive liberty ends in its negation.

For the nominalist, truth, beauty and goodness do not exist "as objective realities, and are only a matter of taste," that great leveler of the hierarchical cosmos. One cannot argue with a nominalist, because their first cognitive act is to dismantle the very cognitive scaffolding that makes higher thought possible.

In truth, we clearly need both, i.e., realism and nominalism: "We cannot dispense with realism if we attach any value to the existence of objective truth (science) and trans-subjective truth (religion)."

So, what is the proper relation between these two categories? Tomberg: "The 'problem' of universals was resolved in the spiritual history of mankind by the fact of the Incarnation, where the fundamental universal of the world -- the Logos -- became Jesus Christ, who is the fundamental particular of the world."

Here, the universal of universals, the very principle of intelligibility, the Logos, became the particular of particulars, the very prototype of personality and personhood, Jesus Christ.

Which is why for the Raccoon, spiritual knowledge is embodied knowledge or it is no knowledge at all, just nice sounding words.

Surrounded by Time Bandits

Still no time for timelessness, so I guess this is an open thread.

An Entomologist's-Eye View of Predatory Liberalism

Just finished After Tocqueville: The Promise and Failure of Democracy. However, there must be a Volume 2, because he left out the promising part. Rather, his description of the nature of advanced liberalism leaves little reason for optimism.

Example?

"[T]he moment the germ of liberalism is introduced into the traditional body politic, that body is doomed to death. And its death leaves Power standing alone above the brittle shell of its defunct contents."

If you've ever wondered why the state behaves so stupidly, this is why. The state is not about intelligence but about power. Which is one reason why things get worse only a little more slowly when Republicans are in charge.

In a functioning democracy -- not merely a place where "voting" takes place -- there are centers of power distributed throughout the society. But "the state is at war with the intermediary institutions of society." "All command other than its own, that is what irks Power" (Williamson).

We certainly see it in Obama, what with his attacks on the Catholic Church, private enterprise, the Boy Scouts, marriage, the family, self-defense, educational choice, etc. In each case the goal is to crush a little area of power that has the effrontery to challenge the state.

Thus, "these characteristics are entirely expectable in a pseudophilosophy emanating from a moral and intellectual delusion that fatally misconstrues reality, which it almost violently denies even as it revolts against that reality. Power is required to defy the universe..."

It takes a whole lot of energy to deny and defy reality (which is one reason why mental illness is so taxing). This would explain why the left, in order to have any power at all, pretty much needs all power.

Which is why they are so offended by the existence of, say, talk radio or FOX News. How dare they defy the herd! Likewise, one conservative truth teller in the humanities department is a major headache for the left, as is a black person who has strayed from the ideological plantation.

In addition to destroying intermediate institutions, the left must create a different kind of human being. The whole scam collapses if they can't accomplish that, hence the totalitarian temptation that is never far from leftist thought: "liberalism depends on a certain kind of human being, a type it must either create or extend, if necessary by eliminating uncooperative types" (ibid).

This is because "Liberalism is inspired by faith in a specific view of human nature to which it is irrationally wedded, a view that requires closing certain lines of enquiry on the assumption that they are beyond debate."

How, you ask, is this different from, say, the Inquisition? First, the Inquisition wasn't only an aberration, but perfectly contrary to Christian ethics. Conversely, inquisitorial tactics are essential to leftism.

Moreover, the Christian Inquisition only resulted in -- what, 5,000 deaths? whereas leftism murdered 100 million or so just in the 20th century. And this doesn't take into account the unintentional deaths resulting from, for example, the banning of DDT or the breakdown of the black family.

"Liberalism for this reason should be recognized as a new religion, a system of moral absolutes based on a denial that moral truth is knowable, which consists of nothing less than the deification of man" (ibid.)

No, it is not "ironic" that those who supposedly deify man also murder him in the tens of millions. Rather, predictable, for "Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, another who believes he is a god" (Davila).

Leftism is ultimately an assault on the very civilizational foundations that gave birth to it. Thus the special animus for Christianity:

"The Left hates Christianity and its satellite institutions because they represent metaphysical reality, which leftists have always despised, denied, and labored tirelessly to overthrow, for the purpose of supplanting it with a synthetic version of their own construction."

The resulting spiritually and intellectually enfeebled mass men are "fit for nothing but socialism." But the state prefers such a "mass undifferentiated man because he is easier to govern." Like shoveling around bags of wet cement.

Now that I think about it, contemporary liberalism features two main types, the agitated and excitable hysteric-activist and the LoFo slugs who are manipulated by them.

Marriage -- or the sacralization of the male-female union -- is the foundation of civilization, so the left's attack on it is utterly predictable.

Someone -- I think Mark Steyn -- mentioned that the same people who have spent the last 40 years telling us that marriage is either a meaningless piece of paper or an oppressive institution now want to buy into it.

This will work out as well as their infiltration into the educational system (or into anything else, for that matter; they can't even run the Post Office, but they're qualified to redefine man). Only an omnipotent state can presume to invent marriage instead of simply recognizing it.

But progressivism continues to progress -- or metastasize, rather -- so now we are stuck with "America's first ideological president," fully equipped "with his pseudo-intellectualism and suprapolitical vision."

Such "ideological thinking" is "an infallible sign of the hopelessly immature political mind." Among other things, it "induces a false spiritualism far more damaging and dangerous than materialism itself."

Indeed, "Civilization and ideology are mutually exclusive things" (ibid).

Your Inside is Out when Your Outside is In

It seems to me that the world is a landscape of psychopneumatic attractors. I mean this literally, because this is literally how we experience the world. Things grab us, right? Unless you're kind of braindead, in which case maybe only journalism and other bodily functions grab you.

So, different things grab different people -- it takes all kinds to make a world, and vice versa. What is indeed so surprising is how specific the attractors can be. It is by no means obvious why the world should be built in this way. But it is strictly impossible to understand this absolutely vital phenomenon within the standard scientific paradigm.

And when I say "absolutely vital," I'm again being literal, because in a certain way, this attraction is our whole life. This thing moves us. That thing leaves us cold. This person excites. That person bores. This writer expands. That one contracts. Etc.

For example, when I think of the four great "B"s of large scale orchestral music -- Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and Barry -- I have to say, I truly only "get" Barry. The others are too vulgar for me. More generally -- as you all know by now -- everything Bob does has got to be funky. Obvious when you think about it, but why?

Alexander gives the example of a particular painting. The painting attracts us. Thus, there is a relatedness that occurs between you and the painting. What is the nature of this mysterious "between?"

In the past I have discussed this in terms of "links" -- e.g., of love (L), or hate (H), or knowledge (K) -- but what are the links made of? And how did they get here?

Let's say we're particularly attracted to the blue hill in the painting. Alexander suggests that we "do not, I think, experience the bit of blue as if it were your self."

Rather, "you experience something stretching between yourself and the blue hill, something that seems to mobilize your self, stretch it out toward the bit of blue, connect with it."

Again, it's a relationship, in which the painting reaches out to us, and vice versa: "stretching between you and the blue hill, something comes into existence."

And it's not just our everyday, mundane self that is tickled. Rather, "It is as if the eternal you, the eternal part of you, your eternal self, is somehow being mobilized..."

Whatever the case may be, that's exactly what it feels like. And no theory that ignores such a central feature of our existence can be adequate. Several aphorisms come to mind:

Any theory is false that seeks to characterize as delusion what one day affected us nobly.

There is evidence that disappears along with those who deserve to perceive it.

We have reached such an extreme of ineptitude that we only believe to be real what would persist if the arts were abolished.

Each of these aphorisms goes to the idea that our (constant) experience not only doesn't deceive us, but mirrors the very structure of reality.

Yesterday we spoke of how experiences within this space -- which Winnicott called the "transitional space" -- incarnate or potentiate the substance of our being, as we assimilate them. From the article:

"Winnicott related the concept of transitional object to a more general one, transitional phenomena, which he considered to be the basis of science, religion and all of culture. Transitional objects and phenomena, he said, are neither subjective nor objective but partake of both" (emphasis mine).

Here is how Grotstein describes it: "Where Winnicott truly surpasses is in his delineation of potential or transitional space, the domain of the intermediate, the area sacred to [ortho]paradox." It "seems to correspond to the metaphor of a post-natal umbilicus, the imaginary yet concrete experienced connection between mother and infant..."

"One can picture this connection as a Moebius Strip of connected disconnectedness or of a 'Siamese twinship' in which there are two heads connected to one body. In one perspective they are invisibly connected; in another they are separate."

In the past I have in fact used the Moebius Strip or the Klein Bottle as models of reality. Why is that? Because in each case the object conveys the paradoxical idea that the inside is the outside, and the outside is the inside. This way one can preserve unity -- each object has only one side -- and yet duality -- each has two sides.

It seems to me that it is the same with the cosmos, which is why the subject is in the object, and vice versa. Yes, the Klein Bottle is a metaphor, but it is only a metaphor because metaphor is possible. And metaphor is only possible because the Cosmos is something like a Klein Bottle, in which interior and exterior, subject and object, are reflections of the same underlying reality. (BTW, it also explains why parables not only work but may be unsurpassed in their ability to link worlds.)

Posts will be shorter and shallower until this remodel business is over.... "

If You're Bored, You're Wrong

Very little time today. Chaos reigns, what with Easter vacation going on and the remodel about to commence.

I know. Tragedy. Progress in theology will be set back for at least another 24 hours.

If the world is a reflection of the Creator, then we shouldn't be surprised that it is neither a radical One -- a featureless monad -- nor a disorganized mess of a Many. Rather, we should expect to see wholeness everywhere we look.

A typical case would be DNA, each part of which contains all of the information necessary to create the whole.

More generally, we see that wholeness -- which is a state of irreducible interior relatedness of part and whole -- appears in a different way at each level of the cosmic hierarchy. On the plane of physics, for example, we see it in the phenomenon of nonlocality; in biology, the ecosystem; in man, intersubjectivity; in spirit, the Trinity.

By the way, I was pleased to discover an analogue of the Trinity in Judaism. In his excellent The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning, Rabbi Sacks writes of how in Genesis God is initially called Elohim, "a noun meaning roughly the totality of forces operating in the universe." Exterior and impersonal, as it were.

However, a little later he is called Hashem, which might be understood as "the transcendental reality of interpersonal relations," which is how and why "our experience of God mirrors our experience of other people."

The deeper point is that we are not related to the world in some superficial manner, like two objects placed side by side. That is exterior relationship. In contrast, interior relationship is an intrinsic connection, more in manner of how the parts of our body relate.

But there again, that is only a biological analogy. On the psychological -- i.e., cognitive and emotional -- planes, it means that there is a kind of endlessly extended space between any two subjects. It is obviously the case between two human beings, in which you can spend your whole life exploring and deepening that space with just one other person.

But it is also true with the non-human world, which is why there is no end to any discipline. There is no conceivable end to physics, for the same reason we'll never run out of poems or melodies.

Rather, we are assured a kind of endless harvest for the very reason that we are not God. Or, to be perfectly accurate, because 1) God is, and 2) because we are not him. You might say that this formula results in a burning bush that can never be consumed, or in a hidden source of nourishment that prevents us from ever going hungry.

For Alexander it means that "the character of this relatedness is not invented or concocted in our minds, but actual." It is the prior condition of everything.

Furthermore, the relation is always personal, but not in the impossibly atomistic manner of subreal modern science, but rather, in the retrofuturistic manner I have discussed over the previous 2,500 or so posts.

It can hardly be overemphasized that this is entirely consistent with the way we experience the world. It is not an abstraction. Rather, the problem is that, over the course of a lifetime of indoctrination, we superimpose a psychopneumatic grid of scientistic abstractions over the world, and then wonder why it has lost its savor.

Here is a hint: if you are ever bored, you are wrong. And I mean this ontologically, where there is no word for boredom. Rather, you should call it what it is: deadness, the deadness that results inevitably from being a closed system.

It is a truism that a closed system is dead, and that we die when we are no longer an open system. What is not generally understood is that openness is the prior condition, and deadness the secondary condition.

We cannot create life. Rather, we can only live or encounter it. We can, however, "create" death, so to speak. Once you recognize this, you experience signs of life -- and of death -- everywhere. You see how the left has managed to create a culture of death, or why television has all the life of a stagnant pond.

Again, Alexander is simply taking these ideas seriously and drawing out their implications in his chosen field of architecture. Thus, he writes of how it is only in connection with deeply "living things that I am fully real."

However, this life is coming from both ends of the relation, and is a mutually reinforcing and deepening spiral. He writes of how this relatedness "is the most fundamental, most vivid way in which I exist as a human being" (italics in original).

Under such naturally supernatural conditions we experience ourselves as we "truly are," that is, "a creature which is undivided and a part of everything: a small extension of a greater and infinite self."

I think this intense bond between man and cosmos accounts for the erotics of being, in which our lives consist of a kind of journey whereby (in the words of Christopher Bollas we discover our idiom, our unique soulstench, our fingerprint with no hands. We find our(prior)self through attraction to the various cultural objects, experiences, and persons we need in order to actualize it.

Well, the man with the sledgehammer is here, and it's challenging enough to do this when the walls aren't tumbling down around me. But if you search "Bollas" on the blog, you'll probably find a lot more on this subject of using the cosmos to discover yourself. Or is it the cosmos deploying you to articulate itself?