The Flowing Flux of a Roiling Donut

Davie uses the analogy of a sphere to illuminate the distinction (or separation) and the relationship (or inseparability) between man and God, subject and Subject, relative and Absolute, (¶) and O:

"[A] sphere has two limits, an outer limit, its circumference, and an inner limit, its center."

Let us call the latter ʘ, the former O (although one must imagine the outer circle without boundaries, so it is technically an unprintable kind of Y@H*V&H?! that must be rendered in invisible and indivisible ink).

We should also stipulate that this center is, of course, everywhere; or everyone, to be precise. In other words, God is only consciously real-ized in human beings. We are somewhere on the radius, although nearer or farther, depending.

O is the ultimate transcendent principle, while ʘ is the ultimate immanent principle. In fact, I would say that they are not even principles, because this would tend toward Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness, or in plain terms, spiritual rockheadedness.

Rather, I would suggest that these two are simply directions, or orientations; you might say they are the "last terms" in vertical space, while understanding that they can never actually be reached -- as if they were a kind of geographical space. Rather, this is not geometrical space but pneumagraphical space, analogous to the space of ideas, only transposed to a higher key.

Thus, O is like a flowing sphere that eternally transcends itself by radiating down- & outward; while ʘ represents the flow toward an orthoparadoxically "limitless inner limit," so to speak. In this context, the outward radiation is analogous to Brahman, while the inward radiation is Purusha, the cosmic Person.

Translighted to trinitarian terms -- and this is only for the limited purpose of illustration -- we might say that Brahman is analogous to Father, Purusha to Son. Thus,

"creation will have one source, but two directions; it will proceed from Brahman to Purusha as from outer limit to inner limit, and from Purusha to Brahman as from inner limit to outer limit" (ibid.).

What has been outlined above applies to the ontological Trinity, that is, to the interior life, or inner activity, within the hidden ground of the Godhead.

What about herebelow? That would be the economic Trinity. Herebelow, each person is a reflection of THE Person, i.e., the Purusha or Son. Our own inner life is again along the radius between O and ʘ, so

"there will be as many radii as there are subjects of consciousness; but however many radii there may be, there is only one center, one inner limit -- the Person at the heart of the cosmos, in whom the identity of Atman with Brahman is realized, namely, Purusha."

Again, to translate the above paragraph into more familyar terms, terrestrial children may become adopted celestial sons via identification with, or inCorporation into, THE Son -- the Sonly ʘne who is fully identified with the Father, or Onely One.

The similarity to Vedanta is striking, whereby "Brahman eternally generates Purusha because Brahman receives back, through Atman, the very deity given to Purusha." Brahman is "the one who utters and receives, posits, through his self-communication, his real distinction from the one who is uttered, Purusha..."

Thus "we have a heavenly paradigm of earthly meaning, in which the divine Subject (Brahman) makes itself Object (Purusha) through the energizing Verb, or passage of force between them; or we may say that Purusha answers as Thou to the eternal I of Brahman, with Atman as the we between them" (ibid).

"We" refers to our part-cipation in the whole existentialada, which takes place via the Spirit. Specifically, via the Spirit, we participate in the relation between Father and Son.

The world is a problem; its meaning is the solution. But where is the meaning? It cannot be within the world, as the world cannot explain itself. I would reverse the terms, and say that since there is obviously meaning, there is God. The converse is literally impossible, for:

"if we question the intelligibility of the world, not only do we have to assume its intelligibility in order to answer the question, we have to assume its intelligibility in order to ask it in the first place."

In other words, "We cannot meaningfully ask a question that calls in question what it needs in order to be the question that is being asked" (T.F. Torrance, in Davie).

I would suggest that O is the answer to ʘ, just as we are God's question. Thus, "the intelligibility of the world is seen to be consequent upon Brahman's being its Source."

I will conclude by pointing out that there is a perverse version of the above, which we know of as ideology, or leftism. Here is how Niemeyer describes it:

"Ideological activism, then, presupposes certain intellectual and spiritual movements which can be seen as two, going in opposite directions.

"Ontologically, the first of these movements denies reality to the given world of experience and proclaims the reality of a phantasmal realm.

"The second movement pulls norms pertaining to the phantasmal realm and its present unreality into the world of experience and orients activities by them."

Again, the left attempts to make exist what has never existed and what cannot exist. In short, you have to break an awful lot of eggs in order to make an impossible omelet.

However, on the positive side, one broken egg is a tragedy, but a billion is just a statistic.

A Religion Fit for the Secular Anthill and Progressive Hive

As we've mentioned before, there is more than one form of Vedanta. For our purposes, we are interested in the differences between Shankara and Ramanuja. Why do we always hear about the former, but not so much the latter? It just occurred to me over the weekend that there are several reasons for this.

First, the Upanishads weren't translated into english until the 19th century. More generally, we mainly learn of the Vedanta through its western interpreters, so if those interpreters have a particular bias or interest, then the interpretation will be filtered through that prismhouse.

Now, the discovery of, and interest in, the Upanishads coincides with several pathological trends in western civilization: the rise of scientism, the general hostility toward traditional religion, the search for a replacement for Christianity in particular, and the alternative gospel of progressive leftism.

It now occurs to me that these scholars idealize Shankara because his nondual approach is much more compatible with the unsophisticated monism of scientism and the illiberal anti-individualism of the left -- which explains why people such as Deepak Chopra and Ken Wilber are always men of the left. I know of no exceptions, although I'd be happy to hear of one. It can get a little lonely here.

Conversely, no one who actually understands Christianity could ever embrace leftism, scientism, or any other ideology. Rather, properly understood, it is the penultimate inoculation against such spiritual cancers and metastatic ideologies.

I say "penultimate" because it is possible to understand the ultimate principle by virtue of which Christianity effectively thwarts ideology. This principle has to do with the fact that the human drama always takes place in the space between immanence and transcendence.

Ideology of any kind collapses this space, which always leads to human catastrophe, because it forces immanent reality to conform to the eschatological fantasy, as we have most recently seen in Obama, e.g., the healthcare system isn't perfect, therefore it must be destroyed.

The goal of history is beyond history, but the left is defined by the absurd attempt to place the goal within history. This naturally redounds to absolute meaninglessness, but the leftist "cures" this with the intellectual swindle of forcing his idiosyncratic meaning upon history.

This has always been the Marxist strategy, i.e., to destroy existing institutions because they do not adequately reflect paradise on earth. In Niemeyer's succinct formulation, it is either nothingness or paradise.

Which makes it quite easy to be a leftist: since reality isn't paradise, their critique thereof is self-evident and self-validating -- an infantile strategy if ever there was one. Radicals such as Obama always appeal to an unarticulated but implicit order that never was and never will be -- except in the valid form of vertical recollection (or an eschatological memoir of the future, if you prefer).

This denial of existing reality is just part of a deeper "ontological negation" (ibid.), beginning with "the annihilation of God" and moving on to the eradication of the moral order, the destruction of human nature (which follows logically from the murder of God), and the effacement of both boundaries (e.g., male-female) and hierarchy (e.g., adult-child).

In short, the PermaRevolutuon of the left is founded upon a prior "metaphysical revolution" (ibid.).

Which is just one more reason why you cannot reason with a leftist. This is because the prerequisite of rational dialogue is "a common universe of reason, which is precisely what the ideologists have demolished." No nous is bad news, to put it wildly.

"A 'creatively destructive' activism," writes Niemeyer, "presupposes an intellectual destruction of present reality, as a result of which the believers of such ideas orient themselves no longer toward 'real possibilities' but rather toward 'possible realities.'"

One is reminded of what appears to have been the Kennedy brothers' favorite crack, to the effect that Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?

Indeed. What an astonishing admission. Mental hospitals used to be full of such dreamers, at least until liberals deinstitutionalized them. Some schizophrenics are homeless and ask why? Others imagine the park is their home, and ask why not?

Oh, and from whom did the Kennedy's lift that line? Appropriately, it was originally "delivered by the Serpent in Shaw's play Back To Methuselah."

And while looking up the exact wording of that quote, I found another doozie by RFK, reflecting the same florid pneumopathology: Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.

Really? So, if, say, some creepy-ass cracka' is being assaulted by one of Obama's stoned and hoodied bastard sons, he deserves it? Come to think of it, RFK was murdered by a Palestinian activist, his brother by a leftwing radical. Oh well. Every society gets the kind of assassin it deserves.

Returning to the actual subject of our post, if one is looking for metaphysical support for the left's radical critique of existence, one could do a lot worse than Shankara, for whom existence is just maya, or illusion, anyway. Only Brahman is real, and you're not it -- unless you eliminate your individual self.

Reminds me of something Woody Allen once said: death doesn't bother me. I just don't want to be there when it happens. Likewise, for Shankara, you can know God. You just can't be there when it happens.

But for Ramanuja, "the highest kind of unity" would not be "the static unity of a solitary self-centered, self-determined Absolute, but a dynamic unity of a society of souls realizing their highest perfection in love and in mutually enriching fellowship."

And "this is only possible where each has a unique inner life of his own and respects the individuality of others, but yet where each does not lose but finds himself in others" (Davie).

Therefore, union with God is associated with both "increasing differentiation" and "increasingly intensive community and unity." Call it the Body of Christ, which can only be an interior body, nothing that could ever be accomplished -- which is to say, externally forced -- by the state. That would be an anonymous hive, not a unity of souls.

Subjects in Mirror May be Larger than they Appear

The man who says "I" doesn't choose the mouth which says it. --Wittgenstein

Okay, what's that supposed to mean?

Well, first of all, it goes to the miracle of subjectivity, through which each of us can honestly say "I" without starting an argument over who patented the name.

Only a human being -- or person, rather -- can say I AM. (A human being is a type of person, whereas a person is not a type of human being, just as "life" is not restricted to biology, nor substance restricted to physical matter.)

Even leaving Jesus aside, it would appear that I AM represents a collision between the highest and the most inward, or the deepest and most expansive.

This is the essential experiential realization of the Upanishads, an "illumination accompanied by the profoundest penetrative insight, when the mind, at a flashpoint," Iquates "the identity of the absolute subjectivity behind the objective world" and "the inmost ground of that subjectivity which is its Effect..." (Davie).

Yes, our I is an effect; but it is not essentially an effect of matter, of culture, of history (although these things may of course affect it). Rather, in essence it can only be the effect of another I.

This firstandlast guffah-ha! experience represents not a union, but a realization, "of the ultimate with the most intimate," whereby we apprehend the vertical reality of a "single axis, running from microcosmos to macrocosmos, on which the whole creation turns" (ibid).

Thus we make the final deuscovery and solve the last equation -- that in the selfsame text "outside ourselves we decipher at astronomical distances" what is "written on a microscopic scale in the further depths of the heart" (Claudel, in Davie).

Outside in, brightside up, last one first, I-I, sir, this is THAT!, etc.

At this point the only thing left to say is: Can I buy some pot from you?

I've got something better: some unfiltered, high potency Eckhart. Because it's not just a Hindu thing.

The Meister speaks of placing a mirror before the sun: "The sun sends forth its rays both from the ground of the sun and from the [mirror], and thereby loses nothing." The sun's reflection in the mirror is the sun, and yet, "the mirror is what it is."

"Thus it is with God," who "is in the soul..., and yet he is not the soul." Just as the mirror is still the mirror, the soul is still the soul.

Yes, the light is the reflection and God the creature; but the reverse is not true: the reflection is not the sun and the creature is not God. It is the distinction between identity vs. inclusion, respectively.

You might say that God is at one with us, but that we are included in God. To the extent that we are at one with God, it can only be a posterior realization of his prior at-one-ment with us. Thus it is our task to at-one for God's at-onement.

Or is it God's task -- a task he has set before himsoph -- to at-one for our at-two-ment?

This would be the Christian premise, that God atones for humanity by at-one-ing with humanity on the most intimate terms imaginable -- by transitioning through our every evolutionary-developmental stage from blastocyst to embryo to fetus to infant to child to adolescent to adult, and every phase in between.

Recall the wise crack from a few days ago, that Eternity obtains in time reversed divinity. A mirror reflects the object, only in a reversed image.

Just so, time -- developmental time, specifically -- reflects the eternal subject, only in reverse, as exemplified in Jesus' temporal journey from cell to hell and back, or from womb to tomb and beyond.

So remember: subject in mirror may be larger than it appears.

The End. Or Beginning, rather.

My mind has often dwelt on the enigma of "I."
Why is it I who thinks himself "I,"
And not another? Why is the world
Divided into many thousand mirrors? --Frithjof Schuon, I-ness

And

We are Ones again back before the beginning,
Before old nobodaddy committed wholly materimany
And exwholed himsoph into a world of sorrow and ignorance.
Back upin a timeless
With the wonderfully weird Light with which everything was made,
A Light no longer dispersed and refracted
Through so many banged-up and thunder-sundered images of the One.
Back at the still point between the vertical and horizontal,
Where eternity pierces the present moment
And we are unborn
Again. --The book of I Still Can't Believe they Published It

I Am a Revelation. Up to a Point.

Time only for a short post. Got caught up watching the Zimmerman trial at the excellent legal insurrection.

The entire spectacle is an absolute horror -- a sort of concrete universal, or objective correlative, of the same retaliatory statism that drives the IRS. The final common pathway of endstage leftism is the institutionalization of persecution for thoughtcrime, or the criminalization of politics.

I often think about the problem of how, once contained by the mind, revelation loses its power to shock -- to creatively disassemble, rearrange, and reconstitute. Instead, it just becomes routine, part of the endless horizontal stream of information, when its whole purpose is to verticalize its recipient.

It is as if, although man is surely born with an implacable sense of wonder, he does everything within his power to nullify it and render himself just a blah-blah-blasé commonplace.

Oddly, humans also have a tendency to elevate the commonplace to the wonder-full, e.g., Obama. But this always ends in dis-enchantment. Hence Iowahawk's immortal tweet that The unicorn rots from the horn.

Along these lines, there must be a constant dialectic between fact and experience, and by extension, dogma and gnosis (i.e., between (k) and (n).

Voegelin is of the belief that this balance was upset by what we might call a new irruption of spirit -- of direct mystical experience -- in the 13th century.

Ultimately the Church was unable to contain this irruption, which led directly to the Protestant rebellion, and, by extension, the secular materialism that dominates the contemporary mentality. (We will return to this idea in a later post.)

It is cosmically ironic that the last word in both word and wordlessness appeared in the 13th century, in the form of Thomas and Eckhart, respectively. Thomas's rational-ization of revelation has never been surpassed, nor has Eckhart's revel-ization of the ratio.

If you don't grasp that last formulation, I mean by it an experiential plunge into the very nature of the human subject, which turns out to be a living revelation of God.

To back up a bit, there is more than one form of revelation. In its narrow sense it is scripture. However, in the Judeo-Christian view, history is a revelation, as is the cosmos itself.

But the subject to whom the revelation occurs is also a revelation, which both follows from and leads to the mirroraculous doctrine of man's deiformity. Yes, You -- or I, rather -- are a revelation.

Davie writes that "the eye through which we see is not part of the visual field, but a limit of it." Just so, the I "is not a part of the world, but a limit of it."

What would life be like without this limit? I don't really know, but it seems that LSD could occasionally obliterate all limits, leading to a state of blind terror. Then again, maybe it's like a panic attack, in which case I do know.

I'm sure Schuon never ingested LSD, but then, he didn't need to. In a memorable passage, he suggests that if we weren't contained and restricted by the body -- in particular, within the five senses -- "objective reality would tear through us like a hurricane." The world "would rip us into pieces and at the same time crush us."

Exactly. Like being swallowed by a hippo.

The absence of containment -- of a skin-boundary frontier -- would expose us to a God's-I view of the world, which would be approximately like a visit to the interior of the sun:

"we would become transparent; we would be as if suspended over an abyss or rushed through an incommensurable macrocosm, with its entrails exposed, so to speak, and filled with terror."

I know. I hate when that happens.

So, our embodiment is a mercy, compared to the alternatives. In its absence "we would find ourselves ceaselessly faced with a totality of spaces and abysses and a myriad of creatures and phenomena, such that no individual could endure the experience."

It would be nominalism on stilts: a trillion billion particulars, with no possibility or reduction by containment. A bewildering eternity of catastrophic novelty.

It seems to me that our sense of wonder is like the residue, or a vertical recollection, of this ontological situation. We have just enough wonder to destabilize any pat answer to life's enigmas, but not enough to obliterate our very selves.

Stupid Burns but Intelligence Incinerates

Just as "the existence of a visual field presupposes an eye," writes Davie, "the existence of a world presupposes an 'I,'" that is, a subject. Thus, to say "world" -- or, better, cosmos, order -- is to say I and all this implies.

And it implies a lot, not the least of which being a kind of irreducible bipolar field of order, one exterior and objective, the other interior and subjective. Very much like form and substance, you will never find one without the other, that is, a world without a subject or a subject without a world.

It also means that every person is a world, which should not be confused with relativism, since it is an objective statement about the truth of things. Just because in a roomful of people, each person will have a different view of the room, it doesn't mean that the room has no objective existence.

One could also say immanence and transcendence. God exists both within and beyond this polarity, whereas man always lives within it. Or perhaps we should say a normal man, for the essence of pneumopathology involves the collapse of this space.

I've been reading a lot of Voegelin lately, and he reminds us that virtually all political pathologies -- i.e., ideologies -- result from a de-differentiation of this space. It was a singular evolutionary achievement for man to differentiate the two spheres, so to re-collapse them is a definite step backward.

At the very least, it represents the move from a sophisticated theology to an unsophisticated one, e.g., the pure transcendence of Islam or the pure immanence of scientistic atheism.

Thus, progressives aren't only fellow traveling in reverse, but they "start" their retreat approximately three or four thousand years ago, certainly before the Hebrew discovery of the transcendent God. Prior to this, God is thoroughly con-fused with the world, hence the barbarism of pagan polytheism, which is just a fractured, personified, and immanentized projection of the psyche.

I might add that the same accomplishment occurs on an individual developmental basis. We all must proceed from a state of fragmentation to unity, and with each conquest of unity there is a deepening of our subjectivity. Human psychospiritual growth and the achievement of depth are covariant.

Bion called this the PS <--> D dialectic, and it is fair to say that this is a permanent feature of our existence, short of mystical union. You may think of PS <-->D as analogous to the breakdown and synthesis of catabolism and anabolism, respectively. Too much of either -- an unbalanced state -- is pathological. For example, if I don't inject insulin, I will enter a state of pathological catabolism, as my body starts to consume itself. And we all know about pathological anabolism, e.g., Barry Bonds, Ryan Braun, and Alex Rodriguez.

There is another complication for the immanentizing ideologues, at least in the Judeo-Christianized west. That is to say, once discovered, the eschaton cannot be undiscovered -- you can't put the truthpaste back into the rube -- hence the ubiquitous apocalypticism of their programs, pogroms, schemes, and scams.

As Voegelin puts it, "The apocalyptic movements have become socially dominant to such a degree that today we are living in an age of apocalyptic politics." Indeed, "We are submerged with apocalypses of all sorts in the newspapers, the college textbooks," and other media. The Obama cult of 2008 was a recent example. The irony is that these apocalyptarians always manage to bring about a real apocalypose - not the apocalypse of God, of course, but the apocalypse -- the unveiling -- of Man.

When fallen and unredeemed man is unveiled, we don't even see a trousered ape, again, because the man-ape lives in a pre-differentiated world, and is therefore not susceptible to immanentized myths of messianic salvation. An Obama is only possible in a Judeo-Christianized culture that has moved back to de-differentiated pseudo-messianism.

To put it another way, no one aware of an actual transtemporal savior could possibly confuse him with Obama -- or confuse salvation with politics more generally.

Davie makes the important point that the Immanence <---> Transcendence dialectic cannot be infinite in both directions. Rather, it is only infinite vis-a-vis the rightword term, which goes to the very nature of transcendence. In short, "there is a limit of contraction..., but no limit of expansion." That being the case, "there is a limit of opacity..., but no limit of translucence."

Which is why you could say that stupidity always has its limits, whereas intelligence has none. Whatever is knowable may be known by human intelligence, and the "adventure of intelligence" is never over -- unless we artificially and arbitrarily stop with some limiting ideology. But doing this renders intelligence stupid, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the current state of academia.

Having said all this, there is another twist, and it goes to the infinite difference between revelation and ideology. That is to say, an unlimited intelligence -- not limited by any boundary -- can easily become a kind of runaway catabolic process, with no end. Schuon speaks of this in terms of the qualities of fire and water, or of the "dry path" and "wet path."

Intelligence is related to both fire and light, but also "includes an aspect of agitation and destructiveness." And "Even the most penetrating intelligence, if it relies too much on its own strength, runs the risk of being forsaken by Heaven: forgetting that the knowing Subject is God, it closes itself to the divine influx," i.e., (↓). We must remember that "fire illuminates, but it also consumes and destroys" (emphasis mine).

I guess no one says it anymore, but the media-academic rabble used to insist that Obama was unusually intelligent. Even if true, it only makes matters worse in a man who recognizes no extrinsically transcendent limits to his ambition, his authority, and his self-regard -- or to his monomania, egomania, and pyromania.

You're Nowhere Until You're Wondering in the Bewilderness

If you've been following the argument -- or preferably unwrapping its presence -- you will recall that -- to put it in extremes -- self-love (i.e., narciss-ism) redounds to metacosmic obliteration, which is to say, "forgotten by God." Conversely, self-giving, or -abandonment, or -forgetfulness results in what we are calling "re-membered by God."

This doesn't yet amount to an explanation, but it creates a useful schematic or dialectic to understand human action and its real consequences. And, being that it is true, it should be true across all domains, not just vis-a-vis God. Thus, a normal person -- or a person raised by normal parents -- is taught from the youngest age to be caring, compassionate, generous, each of these being an example of "self-giving."

And "taught" isn't quite the right word, since these are things no one could teach if they weren't already in us, so to speak, just waiting to be actualized. One cannot teach a reptile to be compassionate. (Insert Al Sharpton or Harry Reid joke here __________ ).

Thus, if we should choose "the way of self-love," then we pursue "an illusion, since the assertion of 'my solitary subjectivity' involves me in the contradictions of solipsism, 'my subjectivity' having meaning only in relation to centers of consciousness other than my own" (Davie).

As such, we have a useful way to understand various orthoparadoxical remarks by Jesus to the effect that "Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it."

Or in his sermon on nature of the spiritual mount, he suggests that “You are the light of the world" and that "A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven."

Now, what is light but the first and last word in "self-giving"? In other words, light cannot not radiate, because radiation is not what it "does" but what it is.

Which is why light is the most adequate analogy to spiritual energies, which, by their nature, radiate. Likewise, consider the sun, which gives and gives and gives, to the just and unjust alike. But who receives it, and who just takes it?

As alluded to above, an individual subjectivity makes no sense whatsoever, as it always implies an other. I've mentioned before that this "discovery" was a major breakthrough in psychoanalysis, when it transitioned from a one-person psychology to a two-person psychology.

This is captured in Winnicott's remark that there is "no such thing as an infant." Rather, there is the infant-mother dyad -- or even prior to that, the mouth-breast relation. That last one might sound a little odd, but it conceals a profound truth, that even human instinct is related to another subject (which is what makes us human).

In a more sophisticated culture this would go to the intrinsic absurdity of homosexual "marriage," since man's sexual instinct is related to its complementary opposite. This also explains why such a union could never be sacramental, because it is deprived of spiritual efficacy at the very root.

A homosexual relationship can be many things -- including things a heterosexual relationship cannot be -- but it obviously cannot be a marriage. Unless you are just oblivious to anything more psychically subtle than a flying mallet. Or just say leftist.

Speaking of which, too bad it's so expensive, but this massive book of Voegelin's letters is la bamba. Lucky for me, I was able to defray the expense by using the modest monthly amazon gift certificate that accrues from you folks clicking through and making purchases. But consistent with the above, helping me is about to help you, because now I'm going to talk about the book the coonosphere gave me, and for which few if any of you would shell out 64 bucks. Even Steven! What goes around comes around, yada yada.

I'm going to need to occasionally take a little time to blog about the book, because there's no way I'll be able to tackle it from the other end of its 941 pages. But through the medium of Coon Magic, whatever I'm reading in one book is always relevant to the other. And if not, we can always use Coon Muscle to force the issue.

I'm trying to read one year of letters per day, which means it will take about a month to get through. Although some letters are relatively banal, others are quite insultaining. Recalling what was said above about spiritually insensate leftists, Voegelin says of the tenured that

"once they have gone through the process of college and graduate school, they are sufficiently brainwashed and morally debased to hold their positions with sincerity, and for the rest of their lives never have a critical doubt."

You all know the type, because the problem is so much worse today than it was in 1954. Indeed, it has become institutionalized, and not just in academia, but anywhere the left has extended its tentacles.

He adds that such individuals "will never achieve the full unfolding of their talents, because too much of their energy is lost overcoming the handicap of their environment." This very much reminds me of Obama, who is an oblivious and completely un-self-critical creature of this dysfunctional environment.

Thus, the crisis is infinitely worse today than it was in the early 1950s, because now the disease doesn't just affect academia, but has spread to the very height of state power. The "leader of the free world" is now the leader of the project to roll back freedom. It would be chilling if it weren't so mortifying.

As we speak, there is a shamful show trial going on because someone had the effrontery to defend himself from one of Obama's depraved spawn -- his self-described image and likeness -- and you can indeed draw a straight line from Obama to Trayvon, from sociopathy in the highest of places to sociopathy in lowest of lives. Not the fruit of his loins, but worse, the rotten fruit of his ideology. (And in any event, only the race-obsessed left believes blood trumps values.)

Voegelin even suggests that it is short-sighted for people to focus only on communist infiltration, because communism is not the only ideology that can be deployed for the destruction of the West. Rather, "Our home-grown varieties of progressivism, pragmatism, instrumentalism, positivism, operationalism, behaviorism, and so forth, do the job quite well."

Indeed. That was in 1954, so we can see how prescient he was.

We've spoken before about the time it takes to undo the spiritual and intellectual damage of an extensive public edu-doctrination. Of this struggle, Voegelin writes that "I would not complain too much about the time lost. We all lose time, for we have to disengage ourselves from the creeds of a dying world."

He adds that he "lost more years than I care to remember with Neo-Kantianism and Phenomenology, before I dropped the nonsense." But we should be consoled by the fact that struggling in this way to shed illusion and find truth makes the path more certain than "if somebody had placed you on it right from the beginning."

So true. The one thing I can always say to any liberal at any time on any subject is, Yeah, I used to believe that. But

"life begins with the Exodus from the civilizational realm of the dead, and the beginning begins with the discovery of the world as the Desert" (ibid.).

Yup. You're precisely nowhere until you're wondering in the desert bewilderness, in an open relationship with the O-asis that transcends you, both above and ahead.

Out of this World: Ideology Eclipses I-AMology

Davie quotes an obscure line by Emily Dickinson: Eternity obtains in time Reversed divinity.

Now, what could this possibly mean? For we disagree with the man who said that poems are just "gay sentences." Maybe it has to do with this obscure footnote on p. 96 of Splendor of the True, on the nature of "inverse analogy":

"When a tree is mirrored in a lake, its top is at the bottom, but the image is always that of a tree; the analogy is inverse in the first relationship and parallel in the second. Analogies between the divine order and the cosmic order always contain one or the other of these relationships."

I know. Don't bother asking how he knows. He just does. He's a little like Petey in that way, who is all-knowing but quickly becomes either all-bristling or all-evasive when you try to find out how that's possible. Can't tell you how many times I've heard the word IMPUDENCE!

Davie suggests -- and Schuon would agree -- that there can be "only one sovereign subjectivity," a single I AM at the heart of things, and in which our own subjectivity must be grounded.

This parallels the idea that there is but one material world with diverse manifestations -- a view that is much easier to accept thanks to quantum physics, which reveals the field-like nature of material existence.

Looked at this way, we must, as it were, reverse figure and ground, and regard objects as analogous to, say, clouds, which are just local manifestations of a global order of weather.

So, let's posit the idea of a global climate of subjectivity, shall we? Just as in the film Avatar, when we are conceived, we plug into this matrix, not with our hair, but with filaments of desire, love, curiosity, and probably some other things I'm underlooking at the moment.

Bearing in mind Dickinson's poem and Schuon's footnote, Davie says that our subjectivity is actually the reverse of the sovereign subjectivity. That being the case, there will be parallels with God, but also "inverse parallels," so to speak; or just say "image and likeness," both operative simultaneously in vertical space and horizontal time.

For us it takes time to ascend in timeless vertical space, and the drama of our lives has to do with the choices that confront us on the way up -- or down.

Davie: because "it is man's power of self-determination that constitutes both his likeness to God and his unlikeness," the local self "must be capable of orienting itself... either towards self in forgetfulness of God, or towards God in forgetfulness of self..."

This sets up an interesting dynamic, i.e., self-love (or narcissism) = forgotten by God, versus self-abandonment (or -forgetfulness) = remembered by God.

Only one of these can be "real," even though the self-lover is always utterly convinced that he is following the only realistic path, and that the other path is for the credulous and weak.

I used to "think" that. But in hindsight it is clear to me that I only thought this because of a hypertrophied precritical pridefulness aggravated by years of more intense indoctrination in graduate school. Ideology eclipses IAMology.

By extension, I think we could say that the people who are most convinced that they are merely "of" the world are completely out of this world, in a kind of "inverse transcendence."

It is obviously not genuine transcendence (↑), but it also ceases to be mere immanence when it makes such a sweeping characterization of the nature of reality. Mere immanence could make no such statement, because it cannot take an objective stance toward anything.

But in a way -- and Schuon has spoken of this -- the miracle of objectivity is even more miraculous than the miracle of subjectivity. After all, all other animals -- and it can be argued objects -- contain an element of subjectivity. But man alone is capable of objectivity, of standing "outside" or "above" his subjectivity in a disinterested way.

As a matter of fact, Splendor of the True includes a (typically) profound essay called Consequences Flowing from the Mystery of Subjectivity. Reviewing this essay, I see that it flows right along with what we have thus far said about the subject.

The following is both lucidly and beautifully expressed, without a wasted word:

"The first thing that should strike us when we reflect on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of the miracle called intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and hence its incommensurability with every material object..., or any creature whatever as an object of the senses."

He then speaks of "the absolute Consciousness, of which our thought is a distant reflection" -- which ought to be sufficient proof "that in the beginning was the Spirit."

And "an evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be." You need to take that quite literally, because it is strictly impossible for intelligence to conceive of its absolute negation (for to imagine it is to exercise intelligence).

This should be axiomatic even to the tenured. Which leads us to ask: just what kind of blindness afflicts them? For it isn't just sightlessness, but a substitution of illusion for vision -- which means a substitution of will or passion for intelligence. Which is again none other than the pride at the heart of man's Primordial Calamity (c.f. Obama).

Which in turn helps us understand the nature of this fall, and exonerates our intelligence as the culpable party (which some fideist approaches come close to blaming, or actually do blame). Yes, intelligence may choose -- hence our freedom -- and therefore choose wrongly. But there are usually identifiable reasons for this, which lie outside intelligence -- which is and must be a reflection of the truth it apprehends.

Schuon concedes that "intelligence can in fact fall into error," but that "for this to happen a volitional factor must intervene -- or more precisely a passional factor, namely, prejudice, sentimental bias, individualism in all its forms."

In short, instead of a humble adequation to reality, the will enlists the intelligence to produce and substitute its own version.

But if we examine these specious specimens, we will notice that they always "proceed from 'hardenings,'" from "forms of dryness," and from "intoxications." Thus, modern man is alternatively dense, desiccated, and/or drunk. He is either a buzzkilling, purse-lipped teetotalitarian know-it-all or just wasted on pride. A dry drunk or a wet drunk. You know them well: let's call them scientistic and pseudo-rational man and political-ideological man, respectively.

Hazy Cosmic Jive

I know. What else is new?

However -- fool disclosure -- I never pretend the haze is supposed to be helpful to anyone other than its jive author.

Davie draws the critical distinction between a garden variety mangod -- of whom there have been many, both genuine and fake -- and the one possible godman. Recall that this is the same distinction I made with the following two pneumaticons, the first signifying human ascent, the second signifying divine descent:

Note that I said one possible godman. Why only one? I would say because God is one, and because his absolute unicity is sufficiently revealed in this single Incarnation. It must somehow be complete in itself, so there can be nothing that could possibly be added to it: ∞ + ∞ = ∞.

One might say that in Christ, God says everything he wants to say to man -- while knowing that it might take centuries or even millennia for us to unpack the message. After all, we're still trying, aren't we? And has anyone really wrapped his mind around it yet? I don't think so -- which is one of its allures, so to speak. It's a feature, definitely not a bug.

True, there are plenty of explanations, but I have yet to discover one that fully satisfies. Which makes sense, because if we could "contain" this mystery -- or Mister O -- it wouldn't contain Mister I or U. Or in other words, we would be God.

It reminds me of a crack by Schuon to the effect that "the unicity of the divine Object requires the totality of the human subject" -- which is another way of saying "you shall have no other gods before me," and that one oughtta "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind" -- i.e., with emotion, will, and intellect, respectively.

Or just say totally. Accomplish this and you will be a certified (↑), but it would be a fundamental error to imagine one is therefore (↓). The former is sanctity -- sainthood -- the latter is the spiritual inflation of a malignant cosmic narcissism. (There is no key for the circle with the arrow, so assume for the purposes of this post that the parentheses above are closed).

Elsewhere Schuon suggests that "knowledge saves only on condition that it engages all that we are."

In other words, at the very minimum, knowledge must partake of being, else it is mere surface chatter, just more words. It must penetrate our every dark corner and infuse the will with its light (for the will itself has no light of its own, or perhaps only the "natural light" of survival and pleasure).

The real Word of God -- ironically -- "is not a word that can be pronounced" (Voegelin) -- at least by us. Rather, it is a Word that only God can speak.

Thus, not surprisingly, this nonlocal Word is going to be more "dimensionally dense" than anything a human can come up with, which is why it is accurate to say that no man could invent a religion, or even a good myth. The real myths are written by both no one and everyone, hence their power, their universality, and their timelessness.

Elsewhere Voegelin makes the gnomic remark that "the fact of revelation is its content."

Wha? This very much reminds me of another comment by someone -- can't recall who -- to the effect that all revelation is exodus -- or that the exodus embodies all revelation. This makes sense to me, because the exodus involves -- depending upon how you want to formulate it -- being lost, or fallen, or enslaved, or confused; and being found, redeemed, freed, or enlightened, respectively.

It happens. Nor can there be an effect without a cause. Therefore the cause of our redemption/salvation/freedom/illumination/sanctity is.... let's just call it O, for now.

Now, it is easy enough to destroy man. In order to do so, you need only remove the possibility of the prior term (O) in the causal equation. If there is no O (in the sense used here), then there is only permanent bewilderness, with no rational hope of exitus.

According to Cutsinger, a genuine religion involves "a salvific descent of the Real into the illusory," which for us redounds to a "discernment between the Real and illusory and a contemplative concentration on the Real." Doing so requires -- or results in -- a kind of "leaping spark," a "direct apprehension of being as object by virtue of being as subject..." (ibid.).

Thus, in the timeless vertical, Revelation = Exodus. Conversely, Ø revelation = Egypt in all its ghastly forms. That is to say, a sophisticated and complex mental slavery is no better than a simple and straightforward one. It's the same pasture. The fences are just spread out a little further. But in our day and age, "an extreme mental dexterity goes hand in hand with a no less excessive intellectual superficiality" (Schuon, ibid.).

The alternative to O is ideology. Not this or that ideology, but ideology per se. All ideology is Death. Voegelin makes the excellent point that ideology is hardly a nontoxic gastime for the tenured, but a disorder, a vice, and a deviance (from human nature). Ideology is an early symptom of what later occurs in death camps and IRS offices. One might say that the 19th century was a prodromal symptom of the 20th.

Why does ideology fail? First, because it is in no way adequate to the Absolute. Second, because it doesn't even try to be, denying it a priori. Which ends as "a psychological game without any relation to the unfolding of our higher states" (Schuon, in Cutsinger).

Nevertheless, (paraphrasing Schuon) to pretend to know the limits of knowledge is to have transcended those limits. Doy!

I'm out of time, so we'll wrap up this hazy cosmic jive with further testimony from today's star witness, Schuon:

"There is in every man an incorruptible star -- a substance called upon to become crystallized in Immortality and eternally prefigured in the luminous proximity of the Self. This star man can set free only in truth, in prayer, and in virtue."

There's a starman waiting in the sky / He's told us not to blow it / Cause he knows it's all worthwhile --David Bowie, Starman

On the Deep Structure of Religion

Davie speaks of "a Logos-echoing depth grammar" through which we are given a "matrix for proliferating surface-grammars." This is analogous to Chomsky's theory of a universal linguistic deep structure shared by all human beings, over which individual languages are superimposed.

These are intriguing notions: the idea that there is but a single Religion, that a particular faith is analogous to a particular language (or deilect), and that Chomsky is not wrong about everything.

Thus, for example, one may use English, or French, or German to say, "pass the salt, please" -- except of course in Manhattan, where Mayor Bloomberg has banned salt. Likewise, the Yiddish word for Bloomberg is "noodge."

This was more or less Schuon's Big Idea, as articulated in his first book, The Transcendent Unity of Religions. I'm not saying I agree with him -- at least in every detail -- but let's toy with this idea. I don't think he's 100% right, but I do believe he's on to something, and that he's more right than wrong.

First of all, let's see if I can mine any intelligent comments by amazon reviewers, in order to make my job easier.

This fellow is both lucid and accurate: "Schuon's thesis is that while the great religions of the world appear to be contradictory on the surface level (the 'exoteric'), when considered according to the inner reality of the spiritual strivings they embody (the 'esoteric' dimension), they present a unity."

But Schuon is no vulgar "integralist," let alone an uppertunistic Deepakian spiritual vulture. The opposite, rather:

"This kind of reasoning is often put forward on a superficial level to say that 'all religions lead to God,' but [Schuon] has a far more profound awareness of the issues involved. A simplistic pluralism of that kind misses the point, because it is only through following a religious tradition all the way to its inner depth that one reaches the 'transcendent unity' that Schuon is speaking about" (Prof. R.E. Viewer).

Precisely. It is not as if, just because there is a deep structure of language, one may somehow speak this phantom tongue in the absence of an actual, existing language. Rather, to speak the surface language is to explicate the deep structure; it is a complementarity, not a duality.

It is quite similar to Aristotle's idea that there are forms and there are substances, but -- contra Plato -- there is no invisible realm where all these forms may be found. Rather, forms are only found in substances (and vice versa). This is a fundamental orthoparadox.

Nor is Schuon depicting religion as a useful myth that may be dismissed by self-aggrandizing "esoterists."

Again, the opposite. For Schuon, there is no esoterism in the absence of exoterism. Yes, there is spirit and letter, but again, the two are always found together. A vague and gaseous spirituality -- devoid of letter, as it were -- is approximately as useful as a pure materialism. Both are blind, but in different ways.

One especially useful implication of Schuon's approach is that "The large number of religions is often used to argue for their falsity, but Schuon would say that we only approach God through symbols which are appropriate to our time and place, and that there is a unified reality behind these various manifestations. So the most particular religion is also the most universal" (ibid.).

If one is Christian, I think it's a valid objection to ask if everyone prior to, and outside, the Christian faith is therefore damned. Doesn't sound to me like a judge with an especially refined sense of justice. And in fact, it is an orthodox belief that...

Here, I'll just look up the actual passage from the Catechism. Let's see if it can be reconciled with Schuon.

There's quite a lot on this subject, actually:

"The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God," and because this Great Attractor "never ceases to draw man to himself." What we call "faith" is none other than "man's response to God."

Note that the Catechism first speaks of these realities -- God and faith -- in generic, which is to say, universal, terms.

"In many ways, throughout history down to the present day, men have given expression to their quest for God.... These forms of religious expression, despite the ambiguities they often bring with them, are so universal that one may well call man a religious being."

Precisely. Say what you want about man, but his standard equipment includes the (↑) instinct, which is as real to us as is the salmon's instinct to swim upstream or the Solomon's instinct to winter in Florida.

In Acts it is written that "From one ancestor [God] made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him..."

The search for God is just the other side of God's call to man. In my mind I picture a kind of whirling spiral that converges on the Center.

The Church has also declared that it "rejects nothing that is true and holy in these [other valid] religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men."

It got a little hectic around here, and now I've lost the thread. The point I wanted to make is that one needn't believe, with Schuon, that the deep structure of Religion is the nondualism of Vedanta. Personally, I believe the Trinity trumps nondualism every time, more on which tomorrow.

This Post: Looked Good Before It Was On Paper

"If we suppose that creation," supposes Davie, "starts with elementary particles, proceeds to sentient beings, and finishes with fully fledged persons," then "perhaps this is because we are victims of a theoptical illusion."

Now, this is an exquisitely coonlike sentiment -- and not just because "theoptical" is a neʘlʘgism, a made-upword.

I'm not sure if "theoptical" is the best way to express it, though. If I understand him rightly, then our Ocabulary word "cardiomyopia" (not to be confused with cardiomyopathy) expresses the same idea -- that our Adamic standpoint can deseeve us, and that perceiving such a deep truth requires a sabbath restoration of our 20/∞ heart-vision.

At any rate, Davie asks whether we are "to suppose that God begins creating with a minimum," or "does not God express, all at once, the fullness that he is, the maximum -- the Word, the Logos who comprehends the whole world, and around whom the world is organized?"

Good question. I suggest we inquire into how man creates, since there is always something of the likeness in the image. I can't think of the Latin phrase at the moment, but there's one that has to do with the first in thought being the last in execution -- something like that.

The point is, if I build a house, I begin with the finished idea, but I can't start there. Rather, I need to pour the foundation, build the frame, do the electric and plumbing, hang the dry wall, etc.

Why should God's creativity -- especially as expressed in time -- be any different? I mean, he created time. Now he's gotta deal with it, just like the restavus in this manisfestivus.

My desk happens to face the former backyard, and at the moment I'm staring into a terrainwreck. Pool torn up, holes and ditches everywhere, exposed pipes and rebar, piles of dirt and gravel, lots of chatter in Spanish. All I can say is I hope my wife knows what she's doing, because I have no idea what it's going to look like when it's done. Maybe God or the all-seeing, all-spending domestic godess knows, but I know I don't.

Interesting too that at every point along the line there are a thousand little decisions to make -- or, to be perfectly accurate, decisions involving thousands of design choices -- down to the size and color of the rocks.

But you can't possibly make the choices unless you have in mind some image of the finished product. Conversely, you can't see the finished project without the individual choices. And when the project is finished -- no more choices! You're stuck with it. It's like a huge window that shrinks exponentially with each decision, until the window closes forever.

Yes, just like life, for "the night is coming when no man can work on self-improvement." Then all that's left is the Judgment. We'll return to that theme later. At least that's the plan.

Did you hear that? Sounds like muffled giggling.

Continuing with Davie's analysis, he suggests that the Godman "recapitulates to himself all stages in the evolution of man," which necessitates that "the creative maximum be expressed through him, in the Beginning, and also that time flows from him, rather than round him, so to speak."

I think I mentioned at the start of this series that Davie can leave you wanting a little more exposition when he throws out something like that. What does he mean?

Well, the Godman is again the Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. But what looks to us like a beginning -- due to our theoptical illusion/cardiomyopia -- is actually a stage on the way to the end.

It must be somewhat like a temporal hologram. In a hologram, the whole is in each part. Thus, in a temporal hologram, each portion of time would contain the Omega, so to speak. Does that make sense? I hope so, because I can't explain it any more clearly than that.

Well, maybe. Think of a symphony. I don't know if it's just apocryphal, but they say Mozart would see -- or hear -- the symphony in a kind of holistic flash, and then transcribe it in linear fashion -- like a kind of declension from four dimensions (musical space/time) to two (on paper).

Thus -- if you follow -- "Where chronology has pride of place, theologians are faced with a problem of their own making, the problem of inserting Jesus into their time series" -- in particular, his divinity (as opposed to humanity).

More orthoparadox: "[F]or if time flows from the center, and if that center is Jesus... then the centrality of Jesus is such that he does not need to be inserted into the time series, because his temporality will then be the outflow of his eternal creativity, its visible enactment..."

I'll just continue, and then maybe attempt to clarify: "Such temporal evolution would... be directed to an End, which is already divinely realized 'In the Beginning.'"

So, in the vertical "Alpha is Omega," which is also the now "where time and eternity intersect, in the moment when Father and Son are eternally one in surrender, yet furthest apart in time." I want to say "eternal sophering," but I won't. In any event, this latter "stretch of time is shortened to the span of the Cross."

You might say that descent and ascent, immanence and transcendence, represent vertically what requires time to play out horizontally.

And now I'm all out of verticality. Hey, Who just giggled?

Adventures in Tenure, or How to be Brilliantly Stupid

Now that we have properly unverted the cosmos and reunited Alpha and Omega, we frankly don't even need to activate our cʘʘnvision to see that "it is simply not the case that the 'I' of human subjectivity is the product of evolutionary (biological-chemical) processes" (Davie).

I mean, we've arrived before at this conclusion from different angles, which makes sense, because a fact so IAMmense -- so fraught with IAMplications -- is going to rIAMify in all different directions. It really borders on an axIAM, since it unifies so many otherwise inexplicable truths, like "how did 'I' -- and 'we' -- get here?"

Yes, you could just say that God breathes a living soul into man and leave it at that. But many if not most modern and postmodern primitives have lost their ear for the mythopoetic, so it can be helpful to cast the old truths in a way they can wrap their diminutive minds around.

Davie references Wittgenstein -- not the naughty one, but the good one -- who points out that this mysterious center of subjectivity, the I of the existential storm, must be "the basis of all that can be said with any sense about" the world. I like this because it turns Kant on his head and enlists him as an ally.

In other words, instead of the world simply being a form of our sensibility, our sensibility becomes the basis of the world, the condition without which the world makes no sense. "It is," writes Davie, "grotesque to suppose that the highest organizing principle, the 'I,' can be explained as the product of what it organizes."

This very much reminds me of the old crack that a liberal is someone who is too broadminded to take his own side in a dispute.

Likewise, the Darwinian fundamentalist or scientistic idolater is someone too scrupulous to defend his own side in a metaphysical dispute. It is as if he is saying: "listen to me carefully, for this is the truth: I am just the product of random mutations, and therefore not worth listening to at all."

M'kay. And they pay you for this?

Now that I think about it, it is of course important to be familiar with scripture/revelation, as it bypasses certain surface structures and penetrates directly to the deeper recesses of the heart, or the cardiopneumatic center.

But when speaking with outcasts -- that is, people who have cast themselves outside the living spirit -- it is helpful to be able to articulate the cosmic principle behind the revelation. The principles are almost always there, with rare exceptions.

I think even the Trinity, which is supposed to be a kind of pure mystery that man could never have stumbled upon unaided, is intelligible. For me it has to do with the idea that ultimate reality is not a substance, but substance-in-relation, or perhaps "self-giving interiority."

This makes total sense to me on a very deep level, so the religious doctrine fits into my intellect like a key into a lock. I frankly can't imagine the alternatives, since they leave too much unexplained and unexplainable. The miracle is that the doctrine was developed way ahead of the explicit knowledge that came much later, e.g., intersubjectivity, or "mirror neurons," or nonlocality.

Recall the essay I mentioned the other day, Understanding and Believing. Schuon says that our legitimate intellectual needs "do not in any sense mean that the thinking man lacks faith."

Rather, they "merely show that [the fertile egghead's] receptivity [(o)] is sensitive to the most subtle and implicit aspects of the divine Message; now what is implicit is not the inexpressible but the esoteric, and this has a right to be expressed."

Intelligence, of course, cuts both ways -- i.e., up and down -- and can just as easily get us into trouble as save us from it. After all, most of the problems in the world are caused by the intelligent, not the stupid. Let us, for example, stipulate that Obama is of slightly above average intelligence. 'Nuff said.

How to guard the intelligence so that it doesn't run riot or even organize a community? In a sense, just as we must control our will, we must exert control over our intelligence, which is something we don't often hear.

But it is very similar to the idea that a woman should guard her beauty, so to speak, another unfashionable truth. But in each case, we are talking about a kind of modesty. To become immodest in any sense is to repeat one aspect of our Primordial Calamity, isn't it?

Now, what is the nature of this thing that must exert control over the intelligence? Is it just a higher form of intelligence? Is it custom? Culture? Common decency? Taste? Manners? A sense of proportion? A sense of irony?

Whatever it is, you won't get it in college. Rather, the opposite. Everything potentially pathological about human intelligence will be aggravated there.

How's that? Well, Schuon points out that a proper faith serves as "the stabilizing complement of the discerning and as it were explosive intelligence."

There are two ways to understand this observation. One way is to consider what happens when faith is absent. I don't have time to go into it, but just think of all the pathological philosophies, schizzy isms, and frank misosophies that have emerged in the post-Kantian intellectual climate. The list is endless.

It very much reminds me of what caused Dennis Prager to return to Judaism. When he entered Columbia he was veering toward a sophisticated atheism, rejecting the religion of his youth -- until he actually encountered these people and their wacky ideas. If one is not born conservative, then surely any sane person is propelled in that direction by contact with the sheer stupidity, perversity, immaturity, and shortsightedness of leftist thought.

I know that in my case, my mind was never so productive as when I learned to think "within the metacosmic faith," so to speak. For me, it is the difference between playing a musical instrument with scales vs. trying to play one without any rules at all -- as if one needs to invent music while playing it.

The problem is, the intellect is a miraculous thing: it is a miracle, full stop. But as Schuon says, "an intellectual qualification is not fully valid unless accompanied by an equivalent moral qualification," at least for any knowledge above physics and entomology, i.e., human knowledge.

Back to what the intellect must subordinate itself to. For starters, this would be a little thing we call reality. If the intellect is not conforming itself to the Real, then just what is it doing?

Yes, that is correct. The technical term is bullshitting.

Just as there is an "art for art's sake" that violates the canons of beauty and therefore purpose of art, there is, as Schuon suggests, a philosophy for philosophy's sake -- or science for science's sake -- "that believes it can attain to an absolute contact with Reality by means of analyses, syntheses, arrangements, filterings, polishings...

"[S]uch thought is mundane because of this very ignorance and because it ends up becoming a 'vicious circle,' which not only provides no escape from illusion but even reinforces it through the lure of progressive knowledge that is in fact nonexistent."

Nonexistent, that is, unless there is a prior Truth and a nonlocal Intellect that may conform to it.

Aaaaaaannnnd we're out of time. Have a nice weekend and GO PUIG!

Phall If You Will, Rise You Must

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. --Rev. 22:13

Again, down here in time -- in the horizontal -- Alpha and Omega appear distinct.

But to say "I am" Alpha and Omega means that the two are unified in the atemporal (vertical) ground of being, for "before Abraham was, I AM." In ether worlds, before time and history is the ahistorical being-ness of the Cosmic Person.

I think of Alpha and Omega as semantic containers, almost like algebraic variables -- in fact, let's call them α and Ω -- that express a complementary relationship.

Thus, as implied above, they signify first <--> last and beginning <--> end; to which I might add outer <--> inner, existence <--> essence, ego <--> self, letter <--> spirit, and perhaps even exoteric <--> esoteric.

Note also that it is only a linear "relationship" in the horizontal; in the vertical it must be a kind of circle, or spiral, or maybe just a kind of generative play.

Here again, think of the yin/yang symbol. I wonder what this symbol would logolike in three, four, or more dimensions? Let's find out.

Hmm. Here is a fractal version:

This I like: reflects the old ghagavad the cosmos being a tree, its nonlocal roots aloft, its local branches down below:

This is good: ♀, ♂, and †:

This too:

Funny. I thought I was just a crank, not a nerd.

I searched "four-dimensional yin yang" and came up with these. No time to check them out, however.

So, as Davie says, "we must always be able to understand first as last and last as first." He notes that in the extra-canonical Gospel of Thomas, "the extenstion of the Kingdom is the 'making outer' of that which is 'inner.'"

Now, this sounds very much like "thy will be done, on earth (i.e., horizontal) as it is in heaven (vertical)."

In the upper reaches of the vertical, it must be the case that the "divine intention" is already realized. "But clearly the realization cannot be earthly as yet," and the making inner what is outer -- or celestial what is terrestrial -- must be none other than the eschaton.

Thus, we're really talking about the cosmic eschalator, teloscape, or attractor at the end -- which is to say, fulfillment -- of history.

Looked at this way, history really is the shadow of the Cross, where "it" -- whatever "it" is -- is already accomplished. I think I'll just quote Davie here, because he seems to know what he's talking about:

"Hence the divine intention has a protological [meaning the antonym of eschatological, i.e., the beginning of things] realization that is coextensive with its earthly realization, and by 'heaven' we mean no less than a universe transfigured by divine energies, a universe to which the miraculous [what I call a vertical ingression] in human experience gives us momentary access."

This sounds to me like what I reefered to in the book as cosmotheosis -- and no, you can't buy any -- whereby the cosmos is fulfilled whenever a single person shares in, or communes with, or dwells in, this realization. You might call it (?!) on stilts.

At any rate, if you have made it this far, all the way to the beginning, then you understand how the "congruence of heaven and earth is the destination towards which history moves," but "also the origin from which history moves" (Davie).

Fall and Redemption. Same as it ever was. Or in joyceful author words,

The fall... of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.

And the oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay.

So don't sweat it, because just as Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall, Phall if you but will, rise you must!

Obama and Anti-American Personality Disorder

Alpha and Omega: while these two are more or less distant in time -- in the horizontal -- in vertical space they must not only be proximate but ultimately two aspects of one being. With this in mind, Davie makes the orthoparadoxically correct 〇bservation that "we must always be able to understand first as last and last as first."

But this highlights a more general principle, to the effect that our intellect must adhere to our faith, and vice versa.

Which reminds me of a particularly cluminous essay in a new collection thereof called Splendor of the True: A Frithjof Schuon Reader. For me, the Schuon scale of luminosity runs from bright to blinding, but in this piece nearly every sentence is highlylighted or wonderlined.

The essay is called Understanding and Believing (it originally appeared in his forcibly raccoomended Logic and Transcendence).

Schuon begins with the truism that it is possible for a man to believe without understanding. At the looooow end this is just bovine stupidity, but at the high end this is mature faith, which is quintessentially an intuitive perception of an unfathomable truth experienced subjectively as a generative mystery (i.e., as an active presence, not a mere absence).

But what people generally don't realize is that the opposite is equally true, "that one can understand without believing" (Schuon).

How can this be so? Didn't Blake say that "truth cannot be told so as to be understood and not believed"?

Yes, but the operative word there is truth. Evidently, one of the hallmarks of falsehood is that it can indeed be understood (so to speak) but not actually believed -- for it is written, who would believe that shit?

There appears to be something paradoxical here, because why would one need faith if one has understanding? Isn't faith just a kind of booby prize for those who lack understanding, a glorified fig leaf over our naked ignorance?

That's one way of looking at it.

Schuon goes on to say that a form of hypocrisy arises whenever there is a disjunction between certainty and behavior, and here is where we see the gulf between understanding and faith. This is because genuine belief -- or faith -- involves "identifying oneself with the truth one accepts" -- and then waiting for the truth to be realized or actualized within.

When I read this passage, the first thing that occurred to me is that secular materialists of all kinds -- proglodyte liberals, assorted purveyors of blind scientism, kosher darwienies, atheistic sales reptiles -- do not actually believe what they understand, or their behavior would be entirely different.

In short, materialists are devoid of real faith, for they do not put into practice what they screech, nor do they exhibit the courage of their concrocktions.

Consider: if I understand myself to be nothing more than a wild animal who has no possible contact with anything transcending matter -- e.g., truth, morality, beauty, wisdom, etc. -- then my behavior should comport with my understanding.

Such an animal will frankly meet the diagnostic criteria for a Sociopathic Personality Disorder, except they would not be ill. Rather, they would be "awakened" or "enlightened," like a reverse Buddha, or an inscapee to Plato's mancave.

Let's look at those criteria, and see if the shoe fits up their ass.

"A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years."

Well, sure. But why 15? Isn't that a little arbitrary? Why not birth? Rights are for suckers -- Christians, constitutional conservatives, "civil" libertarians, homos.

"Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest."

I know. Give Obama credit. There's a leftist whose faith is in conformity to his understanding.

"Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead."

One word: Obamacare. Okay, two more: Arab spring. Three? Fast and Furious. Four? I will close Gitmo. Five? That idiotic reset button gift.

"Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying."

Yeah, I see your point. Maybe the left isn't so hypocritical after all, because the media-academic complex certainly embraces such hopenlie antisocial behavior:

"The new Western media, products of the fully propagandized Western university, have broadly succumbed to the sympathy with totalitarian ethics and intentions that Revel warned was the West's imminent danger, and the communists' long-term strategy....

"Having morally weakened the West by exploiting the legitimate free press to their clever advantage, and at last having converted that press itself into a de facto ally, the enemies of freedom could begin their work on the inside of the Western establishment in earnest. It was now time to bring the ideological war home."

Meanwhile, "The Western media has been factionalized into the totalitarian propagandist majority and the searching, skeptical minority which forms the last remnant of the true calling of that free press which was once supposed to be a bulwark of liberty" (Jonescu).

But in the inverted world of the sociopath, we are the sick folks, for which reason those regular folkers sic the IRS on us.

Yes, the left directly attacks what freedom they haven't yet eroded. But at this point, what difference does it make? What's good for the state is good for you. You don't know that?

The next criterion: "consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to honor financial obligations."

Too easy. Let's move on.

"Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another."

At this point, what difference does it make?

"Irritability and aggressiveness."

ARE YOU DEAF? AT THIS POINT, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE, FUCKWIT? LET'S JUST HOPE YOU KEPT THOSE RECEIPTS FOR 'CHARITABLE GIVING' BACK IN 2006! AND NO, I DON'T CARE THAT YOUR CHURCH DOESN'T ISSUE RECEIPTS.

Okay, you got me. But at least this proves that I can keep an open mind. I hereby withdraw my charge of leftist hypocrisy.

A Borne Again Man of Dustinction

Don't know if I have time to spell- or even basic sensecheck, so you're on your own...

To say there is a human nature is to say there is an archetype of our humanness, a "cosmic man." It has to be cosmic, because everything about the cosmos has to be tweaked just so in order for us to existentiate the archetype.

For example, imagine if I have the idea for a palm tree. If I live, say, in a subarctic zone, no matter how perfect the idea, the palm tree cannot take root there outside the archetype.

Both Kabbalah and Vedanta posit a Cosmic Man from whom we are descended: Adam Kadmon and Purusha, respectively.

A google search for the two yields some arresting images, although I didn't spend any time looking for the best ones. For example, here is Adam Kadmon and his holo-hoops, the one below descending from the one above:

And here (see below ↓) is Adam Kadmon bifurcating into Adam-and-Eve, the archetypal terrestrial parents (recall that in Judaism, the proper unit of mankind is not man or woman, but man-and-woman, 1 and 0):

Down here (↓) is another shot of the cosmic man, as if emerging out of O (or vice versa):

Here's a shot of Purusha, kicking back and enjoying his cosmic slack. Note that the world seems to be a product of his creative imagination:

Here's another that captures the relationship with O -- a humandala, as it were:

Ultimately, the positing of the Cosmic Man helps us to unvert the cosmos, and to understand the nature -- which is to say, end -- of evolution. The Cosmic Man is both alpha and omega, and thus, both the ground and destiny of evolution. In between is this little nightmirror we call "history." In the night it is hard to see the image, which is precisely what Finnegans Wake is allabout. Yes, Obama is an uncommonly lightless loafer, but it's always the Dark Pages down here. You can look it up. With a little light.

I want to shift gears momentarily, because for the past two weeks I have been flooded with Baader-Meinhof phenomena revolving around the Cosmic Man -- as if he's dropping hints everywhere. Look out below!

For example, in Bouyer's The Christian Mystery, he discusses the idea of "Christ as the Second Adam, or rather the last Adam, that is, the heavenly man whose radiant image, as First Corinthians tells us, we have to put on," because "we have borne for too long the disfigured image of the first man."

Also, the neophyte Raccoon cultist or even advanced stalker will be reminded of the obscure references on pages 254/f. 17; 261/47; and 264/58. I know. They're funny because they're true!

Now, this is intriguing. "Son of man" appears in the the Hebrew Bible over 100 times, so it is a very common construction, and one that would have been familiar to Jesus (in other words, he obviously didn't coin the term, except of course he did). But what does it mean, exactly?

Here is Kabbalist interpretation, which may or may not be kosher: "the essential meaning of Ezekiel's vision, then, is that the son of man, the human son of God, is he who has achieved the mystical capacity to see the divine nature of his own higher self."

This comports with what Bouyer says about the matter. He adds that in his letters, Paul rewords the concept in order to get away from Jewish esoterism, and make it "more accessible to non-Jews." Thus, the phrase "Son of Man... disappears from a preaching to the Gentiles, in spite of its central place in the preaching of Jesus. All its content" is "now transfered into the figure of the heavenly Man, which Paul introduces when he contrasts with the first man another man, who is not just a second Adam, but the final Man."

This gets very dense, and I'm running out of time. But Bouyer quotes Paul who wrote of a "psychical body" and a spiritual one: "the first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam a life-giving Spirit." And "the first man was from the earth, a man of dust, the second man is from heaven." Therefore, "Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven."

But there's an additional twist here, because it was a common belief in antiquity that "the primordial man was a quasi-divine being and that man as he is now only a degenerate form of this being, fallen into matter and multiplicity..."

However, this is not the Jewish understanding; rather, it is unalloyed Gnosticism, for if you will note the image above of Adam and Eve, they do not represent an a priori fall from Adam Kadmon. In short, the fall occurs to Adam & Eve, not in them.

And again, "humanity" is both source and goal for human beings. We must "become reintegrated into the second Adam" in such a way "that it becomes more than a second beginning -- for Humanity is its final goal" (Bouyer). The Body of Christ? Yes, you could say that, because that would seem to represent the real instantiation, or existentiation, of Adam Kadmon/Purusha herebelow: body of Christ, mind of Slack.

I Am. Not Myself. But Maybe Somedeity...

Continuing with Davie's thesis that Christianity represents a synthesis of Judaism and Vedanta, he writes that under Christianity (C), the two different views of God -- continuous (V) and discontinuous (J), immanent (V) and transcendent (J), "are placed together in the perception of identity-in-difference."

This particular orthoparadox "informs the entire theology of C: thus, Christ is God and man; the bread is the body; One God is three persons, etc. In short, the boundary relations of absolute identity, on the one hand, and infinite difference, on the other, combine to yield identity-in-difference..."

And as mentioned a couple of posts ago, it is as if C embodies a balance between predominantly left (J) and right (V) cerebral hemispheric approaches to the divine.

Again, one doesn't want to oversimplify or push the analysis too far, but I think it is fair to say that a law-based approach is more exterior/objective, whereas the experiential approach of Vedanta (or Zen, or Mahayana Buddhism) is more subjective/interior.

Just as there is no monastic tradition in Judaism -- radical withdrawal from the world being considered mishuggah (except on the Sabbath, and even then the slaccent is on being with the world more intimately) -- Vedanta is in many ways a lawless religion, so to speak.

Or in other words, remove all of the laws from the cosmos -- which are ultimately spun from maya's web -- and what you are left with is God.

Along these lines, Davie goes on to suggest that Judaism's "main concern" lies with "finding an answer to the question, Who? (who is this God revealed to Abraham, Moses, and the prophets?...)," whereas the central concern of Vedanta "is identity-with" the ultimate principle. In Judaism there can be no identity with God, just as in Vedanta our apparent separation is only a stubborn illusion.

As it so happens, if we dig a little deeper, we see that the same dialectic obtains within Hinduism, between the rival ganges of Shankara and Ramanuja, or nondualism vs. qualified nondualism.

And Davie points out that in the Old Testament there are numerous references to the godmensch. Still, there is a certain line one cannot cross in Judaism, for which reason (among others) Jesus-as-God is a non-starter, and more generally, "what H takes to be saving truth, J regards as blasphemous."

Another interesting contrast between Judaism and Vedanta has to do with creation. J is famous for taking a lot of pointless speculation out of the grubby hands of the tenured, and insisting that creation has a beginning, so deal with it.

Conversely, Vedanta maintains that creation has no beginning, and that this particular cosmos is just one in an endless series of emanations.

Likewise, with J, creation involves divine choice, whereas with V it is somewhat "automatic," in the sense that Brahman cannot not create, because this would violate its own nature.

Because of this, it seems that Judaism cannot help but be eschatological, or future-oriented, most particularly, with regard to the messiah or savior. But in Vedanta there can be no end, because any end will just be a new beginning. To be perfectly accurate, beginning and end are always now.

Davie reminds us that Jesus is called Alpha and Omega, first and last, beginning and end, which permits of two perspectives which are unified in the one person.

The whole thing becomes a little confusing because of our immersion in time. Because God is in eternity, beginning and end must by definition be the same in him; or, what we call beginning and end are the serial instantiation -- the "moving image" -- of eternity in time.

As we have said on a number of occasions, herebelow eternity takes time, whereas thereabove it takes all day to get nothing done. But nobody minds, because you've got forever to do it.

Now, a religion provides the cure for the particular spiritual disease it diagnoses. The cure is what we call redemption in Christianity, or holiness in Judaism, or moksha in Vedanta. But is there a way we can see these three as different symptoms of the same underlying disease?

At least superficially, it appears not. For what is the disease? In Judaism, identity with God would be a fatal spiritual sickness, whereas in Vedanta the very same thing is the cure!

But we need to make some more subtle linguistic distinctions, or at least find a way to bullshit our way out of this metaphysical nul-de-slack.

For example, in Vedanta the point is not to elevate the local ego to godhood. Rather, there is a lower self (jivatman, [•]) and a higher self (atman, [¶]), and we dis-identify with the former in order to identify with the latter. And for Davie, the lower self "approximates to the Hebrew nephesh," while ruah does duty for the higher, more subtle being. (And as always, we are happy to be corrected by brother Gandalin for our hamhanded analysis.)

There is also the distinction between local image and nonlocal likeness that is emphasized by both Judaism and (Eastern) Orthodox Christianity. Thus, our "fallenness" is essentially a measure of the distance between image and likeness, lower self and higher self, jivatman and atman, nephesh and ruah, slack and conspiracy, etc.

In each case, redemption, or sanctity, or liberation, or slack, is an eschatological movement from the one toward the other. There is an "immaculate manhood" (Davie), so to speak, at the end of our seeking, which "draws us on by offering glimpses of ourselves in our ideal nature."

And in the case of C, "the likeness which was lost through Adam is fully restored in Jesus," who is uniquely image and likeness; whereas for the subgenius, we would measure the same distance on a logarithmic scale of 1 to Bob.

In fact, I believe it was Schuon who said something to the effect that Jesus is both man's icon of God and God's icon of man (man-as-such).

And what -- or who -- is man-as-such?

Ah, that leads us into a deuscussion of this purusha character, more on whom tomorrow.