God is Proof that Man is Intelligent

I don't like to read more than one chapter a day with Schuon. Not that he's difficult per se, just that it's too rich. Dense. Pregnant. Full of implications. You have to allow the time and space, or silence (---) and openness (o), for the spontaneous occurrence of vertical resonance, AKA (≈).

Meanwhile, I started reading Poetic Knowledge, so I can't help drawing it into today's game. In fact, the title of the first chapter of The Face of the Absolute, The Decisive Intuition, goes exactly to what Taylor means by poetic knowledge (and to what I generally mean by [n] as opposed to [k]).

The decisive intuition must ultimately be intuition of God, and this intuition is always of a poetic nature (although it is possible to later work out the logical proof, just as, say, Einstein first had the vision of relativity before working out the math).

Poetic knowledge does not refer to poetry as such. Rather, it is a mode of cognition, "a spontaneous act of the external and internal senses with the intellect, integrated and whole, rather than an act associated with the powers of analytic reasoning" (Taylor). It is pre-analytical, but I would emphasize that it is equally post-analytical, in precisely the way we've been discussing in recent posts.

That is, even if we only regard the neurology as a metaphor, it is very much a kind of inspiraling journey from right brain to left and then back to right, the latter of which being able to integrate the fruit of left brain analysis into a higher and deeper synthesis. This doesn't make the truth of the Decisive Intuition any more true, but it does make it more robust and more intellectually satisfying -- if you have an intellect in need of deep satisfaction, which most people don't, whether religious or secular.

Briefly violating our one chapter at a time rule, in chapter two Schuon mentions how conventional religiosity (or exoterism) "has to take into account the weaknesses of men, and thus also, be it said without euphemism, their stupidity."

But as we alluded to in yesterday's post, the same principle applies no less to the secular world. A conventional university education has to take into account the stupidity of men, especially now that all men are absurdly thought to be fit for college.

As a consequence of this very real limitation, the teaching "must itself take on something" of the intellectual shortcomings alluded to above, "or at least it must allow them some room, on pain of not being able to survive in human surroundings."

So interestingly, truth must be mixed with falsehood -- in a manner of speaking -- in order to reach the average man, again, whether we are talking about religious or secular thought. This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless you want millions of people who are incapable of thought thinking for themselves. That's how we end up with an Obama.

Poetic knowledge is perhaps better thought of as a verb than noun. As a matter of fact, it is the very activity required in order to be a Glass Bead gamer, as it encompasses "religion, art, literature, music, architecture, manners, economics, leisure, and politics" (and more). These things don't just integrate themselves! Hence the sufficient reason of the Mystic Circle of Cosmic Raccoons, who do not shirk the liborious play of total integration.

Schuon writes of how certain religious imagery, "contradictory though it may be at first sight, nonetheless conveys information that in the final analysis is coherent and even dazzlingly evident for those who are capable of having a presentiment of them or of grasping them" (emphasis mine).

For example, "the story of Adam and Eve may clash with a certain need for logic, but we bear it deeply within ourselves..." It inheres in the very nature of intelligence; or better, it is a symbolic expression of a prior truth that "is to be found in the deepest layer of our consciousness or of our being."

If you need "proof" of this statement, the proof is in the fact that we are still talking about it 3,000 (or however many) years later! Furthermore, man -- so long as he remains one -- will always be talking about it, or else about the same truths in another form. Such truths are simply part of our standard equipment.

But the truth can become obscured. Here we can't just blame stupidity, but rather, a kind of willful stupidity that is wrapped up in pride. As Schuon says, this is not a fault of the intelligence per se -- for how could it be? -- but "from a fault of character, of pride above all." It is hard to imagine a proselytizing atheist whose mind hasn't been poisoned by pride, or who embodies the virtue of humility before the Mystery.

Why? Because the Mystery communicates itself, otherwise we wouldn't even have the name.

From humility follows other virtues, and these virtues, you might say, are both cause and consequence of poetic knowledge and decisive intuitions. "In this sense, virtue is a proof of God, as is intelligence" (ibid.).

Or in other words, if you're trying to prove the existence of God with your intelligence, you're going about it backwards; rather, much easier to prove that intelligence is only intelligent because God exists.

After all, it is "intelligence which is capable of conceiving the Absolute," and "virtue which permits man to surpass himself." An "unvirtuous intelligence" is an abomination, as Obama proves every day, and as the Clintons would like to verify for another eight years. Be it said without euphemism.

[W]ithout this poetic sensibility toward things, life deteriorates into brutality and chaos; what is also revealed is the upward movement of the senses and emotions with the intellect that sees the invisible meaning of things. --Taylor

If Atheists are Correct, Only God Knows

Seems like most people who encounter Schuon either accept his program entirely or else reject it out of hand. There's very little middle ground.

For example, a commenter named John recently criticized the B'ob for "taking what he likes from [Schuon] and rejecting the rest," arguing that "with some authors, Schuon being chief among them, the smorgasbord method is a priori disqualified."

He didn't explain why this is so, but in my experience, it is indeed tempting to place him above criticism, because he writes with such intrinsic authority. By which I mean that he doesn't have to appeal to anyone or anything to make his case. Rather, he writes in such a way that he bangs my interior gong in a direct and unmediated way. It is very much as if the proof is in the writing, more on which as we proceed.

Religion is a field in which it is notoriously easy to pose as a false authority, or to write with a certitude that isn't difficult to see through and pick apart. This kind of childish authority is not at all similar to Schuon. Such rhetoric doesn't convince like a perfectly forged key fitting into a lock, but rather, is more like a blunt instrument, or wet blanket, or cloud of verbal smoke. At the same time, it is fragile, like those religious solicitors who are trained to ignore all objections and stay rigorously on script. Belief for them is indeed a matter of will, not intellect.

Which is fine for some people. There's even a word for it: voluntarism. Which is perfectly respectable, within limits. After all, not everyone is cut out for intellection -- i.e., vertical cogitation and recollection -- and God has no desire to exclude them from the festivus.

We have much more in common with a simple fideist who believes (and loves) the truth with all his heart, than with some self-styled intellectual who believes falsehood with all his mind. Note that this is what the journalistic inquisitors are after vis-a-vis Scott Walker: do you believe in the god of matter with all your heart, mind, and strength?

"The content of religions and their reason for being is the relationship between God and man; between Necessary Being and contingent existence" (Schuon). Is that not refreshingly straightforward? Not blunt, mind you, but sharp. Truly truly I say to you, he slices like an effing hammer.

See, you can't joke around with Schuon, either. That last little comment makes me a vulgarian of the first rank.

Nevertheless. Let's continue.

For Schuon there is an orthoparadox at the very heart of religion, being that only religion-as-such can be absolute. It is only conformity to this "that gives [to particular] religions all their power and all their legitimacy," and yet, "it is their confessional claim to absoluteness that constitutes their relativity." In other words, for Schuon, such-and-such a religion can only be an outward mode of the inward principle.

Here again this is an appealing idea, because it can easily be deployed against atheists and other idiots who are more literal than the most literal believer, not in the service of faith, but rather, in order to justify rejecting the whole thing out of hand. Over the years we've had many trolls -- old William Femboy Catsnuggler comes to mind -- who know how to use the google machine to find this or that scriptural passage that makes no sense if taken literally and out of context.

Of note, one could do the same with science, for example, How can you say there was a big BANG, when sound waves would have been impossible? Or, how can RNA read DNA when it's so dark in there?

For Schuon, metaphysics is prior even to revelation, so, to the extent that revelation harbors and conveys truth, it is because it is in conformity to Truth as such.

I would rate this as mostly true, allowing for some things we could not possibly know with certainty outside a positive revelation from God -- for example, God as personhood, Trinity, love, and relation. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that Schuon would regard God as ultimately one and impersonal. He certainly allows for the personal God, but places him below the impersonal.

In contrast, I place them side-by-side, in that they are complementary, not hierarchical.

But in any event, irrespective of whether the absolute is personal or impersonal, metaphysics can easily knock down any secular argument, and indeed, the idea of an impersonal absolute will probably be more persuasive to the average flatlander. This is why westerners flock to Buddhism and yoga, because they reject the idea of God as an "old guy with a white beard." Note again how their childish literalism interferes with vertical perception.

So, "different types of religious imagery inevitably provoke doubts and protests in the absence of a sapiential esoterism" which can "bridge the gaps and bring the accidental dissonances back to the harmony of the substance" (ibid.).

In other words, we can integrate the dissonances with our intellect (AKA nous). We don't have to force the issue with the will, which just alienates the typical secularist who is so proud of his intelligence (even while holding to a Darwinism that utterly devalues it).

Ironically, "the reactions of the unbeliever and the esoterist may coincide," except that for the latter, this is the beginning of the journey, not the end. Thus, "the man who rejects religion because, when taken literally, it sometimes seems absurd," essentially blinds himself to the deeper truths that would speak to him directly -- i.e., bang the interior gong referenced in paragraph #3 above.

Out of time. To be continued....

A Science of Religions?

I'm reading this new translation of Schuon's In the Face of the Absolute. I've read all of his books, but these new editions -- which are reissued about one per year -- give me an excuse to reread them. Like MotT, it's always a new experience anyway.

In order to understand any thinker, you have to immerse yourself in his world. At least the first time around, you have to suspend criticism in order to sympathetically enter that world and check it out. It's like music or movies that way: surrender first, evaluate later.

One danger in doing this, of course, is that once inside, you may never get out. For example, think of the millions of people who "try on" liberalism as a worldview in college, and then never remove it. They accept it uncritically, often without even knowing they have done so. These idiotic journalists, for example, who want to know if Scott Walker "believes in evolution," have no idea that they are simply enforcing a dogma called scientism.

At PowerLine they have some examples of good responses to such clown questions. To the question of evolution:

"Evolution is a tremendously interesting subject. There are multiple theories of evolution, but none of them has been able to command a scientific consensus because they all have problems. It would be a full-time job to keep track of all of the scientific literature on evolution, and since I have been busy as Governor of Wisconsin [or whatever], I haven’t had time to do that. There are a lot of scientists who could give you better answers to such questions than I can, if you are really interested in the subject. Which I doubt."

Or, to the question of science more generally: "You just used the word 'science,' but I don’t think you know what it means. Science is a method, not a body of dogma. 'Science' doesn’t take positions on issues of public policy. So if there is a particular set of data that you want to ask me about, you need to be more specific."

Better yet, an all-purpose response: "you ask that question because you are a Democrat and you are trying to help your party. But your question contains an assumption that isn’t true."

To the debate about whether Obama is a Christian, I have a question for him: "Before Joe Biden opened his big mouth, you repeatedly lied about opposing the redefinition of marriage because of your so-called Christian beliefs. Does Christianity permit this kind of deception in order to advance an anti-Christian agenda? Or are you maybe thinking of taqiya?

Back to matters at hand. Although I still regard Schuon as one of the greatest religious thinkers of all time, now that there is some distance between us, I'd like to consider some of his ideas from a more critical perspective.

Let's begin with the foreword, in which he encapsulates a few of his key principles, most notably, that there is a distinction between "religion as such" and "such and such a religion."

What this means -- in my own words -- is that there is really only one religion, but that it is nonlocal, so to speak, and requires a local form, or a system of symbolic expression, in order to manifest to this or that cultural group. This is another way of saying that "all religions are the same," or at least have the same teaching beneath the outward multiplicity.

Is this true? Is there really a "transcendent unity of religions"? It's an appealing idea, especially in a modern world in which the diversity of religious belief is one of the main excuses for rejecting it. Can we really blame the village atheist who notices that religions posit seemingly contradictory beliefs that can't be verified anyway, so why believe any of them?

Schuon suggests that "religion as such" may be thought of as vertical, whereas such-and-such a religion is more horizontal. The former is the warp, or "fundamental doctrine," while the latter is the weft, which "consists in applications or in illustrations" of the doctrine. Therefore, every dude's area rug is going to look different because of the differing wefts.

In the past I have used the analogy of jazz improvisation, through which the soloist improvises over the chord changes. Many bebop compositions, for example, are based on the same chords as Gershwin's I Got Rhythm. Thus, each one is unique while sharing the same underlying structure.

For Schuon, the vertical component "possesses a crystalline homogeneity." It is absolute where the horizontal can only be "relatively absolute." Looked at one way, the latter is in the world of maya, or appearances. Even so, these ultimately contain the seeds of the absolute, or point to it.

More generally, Schuon says that "To speak of religion is to speak of a meeting place between the celestial and the terrestrial," or "between the divine and the human."

I can endorse this notion much more wholeheartedly, because I would agree that there is God -- or O -- and there is man -- or (•) -- and that "religion" is simply what takes place in the space between O and (•). This seems to me undeniably true, just as science is what takes place between man and world.

Therefore, "the two poles of a true 'science of religions'" must be "metaphysics and anthropology." Or, there is Truth at one end, man at the other. But a Raccoon takes seriously the principle that man is in the image of the Creator. This being the case, you can know a lot about the Creator by knowing what man truly is, and vice versa.

Schuon agrees that "In order to understand what religion is, it is necessary to know not only what the Message is but also what man is."

This is especially so because the Message is obviously tailored to man -- not to machines, or goats, or martians. In some sense, this message must be "prefigured" in man, otherwise we would have no way of recognizing it. It would be as irrelevant to us as, say, music to a dog.

If you've followed the argument thus far, it requires just one more leap to say that metaphysics -- which is on the divine side of the God-man divide -- "refers essentially to the mystery of the Intellect and thus to intellection." And our job is "to know the Absolute from the standpoint of the contingent, and to manifest the Absolute within the contingent."

Or in other words, there is knowing the truth, which is vertical; and then being, or embodying, or "doing," this truth in the world.

To be continued...

Three Shades of Magic

In Letter III, our Vertical Pal (VP) says that "magic" may be understood as "the power of the invisible and spiritual over the visible and material."

Thus, neuroplasticity is a form of everyday magic, in that it most certainly involves the exertion of spiritual and psychological power over the brain/body. Siegel defines neuroplasticity as "The overall process with which brain connections are changed by experience, including the way we pay attention" (emphases mine). (By the way, I don't want to pretend Siegel would endorse Raccoon orthoparadoxy -- he has a reputation to think about.)

It is important to emphasize that from the standpoint of neurology, this magical power is strictly impossible. Indeed, how, within a naturalistic paradigm, could it be explained? To the extent that the brain changes -- which it obviously does -- it would have to be explained in such a way that the mind is only a passive bystander or side effect of purely physical changes.

In fact, this is precisely how the tenured generally explain the "illusion" of free will. For them, the notion of freedom is a retrospective construct, in that we engage in the act and afterwards imagine that we were "free" to have done so.

I say: someone needs to get out of his mom's basement, or at least leave the campus once in a while. Reality is a big scary place, and you can't just tame it with language -- which is, not coincidentally, what our president is trying desperately to do vis-a-vis ISLAMIC terror.

What is it with liberals and language? On the one hand, secular folks insist that they don't believe in magical things such as religion, and yet, what is liberalism but a giant exercise in magical thinking?

Now Bob, that's a little bombastic. Would you like to take that back? In the words of Rudy, "No, not at all. I want to repeat it."

Just consider some of the magical ideas that are central to contemporary liberalism: global warming, command economics, sexual equivalence, the normalization of sexual perversion, etc. Plus, the ranks of the so-called New Age are filled with liberals who believe in everything from healing crystals to aromatherapy to reincarnation.

Here we need to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate, or white and black, magic. First of all, thats raciss! Leaving that aside, UF says that there are actually three kinds of magic. Looked at vertically, there is the sacred magic that descends from above, and demonic magic that ascends (or is invoked) from below. In between there is "personal magic," whereby "the magician himself is the source of the magical operation."

I would place personal charisma in this latter category, in that it is indeed a mysterious process through which some people are able to exert an immaterial influence on others for good or ill -- say, JFK, whose charisma is such that it completely overwhelms the critical faculties of the average low information voter. Because of this political hoodoo, he always appears in the top ten greatest presidents.

It seems to be the same with Obama, who is the most polarizing president in our nation's history (or at least since they've been doing surveys). This can only mean that he continues to exert his magical charismatic influence over liberals, with some 88% still approving of his "performance." In reality, it cannot be the performance of which they approve; rather, something immaterial must have possession of their souls.

All magic, according to UF, involves putting into practice the following principle: "that the subtle rules the dense." And "It is only magic crowned from above which is not usurpatory." This makes perfect sense, and applies to every virtue, every human capacity, every activity.

Take, for example, freedom, or free will. You could say that freedom is both the ground and goal of magic; again, free will itself is "already" a kind of magical, vertical irruption in the cosmos, but we don't leave it at that. Rather, freedom has a goal, a vector, a purpose. Which is? It is, in the words of UF, liberation in order to ascend.

Now, the difference between Gnosticism and Christianity is that the former falls into the whatchamacallit heresy whereby the human being is able to achieve earthly perfection in a do-it-yoursoph manner, without the assistance of grace, i.e., without surrendering the ego to what surpasses it.

Thus, real magic, according to UF, involves the integration -- there's that word again -- of two wills. It is a we not an I, for which reason UF says that "Magic is the science of love."

Does this imply that science is the love of magic? Oh, I think so. It speaks to the whole poetica scientia thingy we were discussing the other day.

All of this ultimately goes to the Incarnation itself, which is the "supreme work of divine magic," i.e., the complete cooperation of God and man: "the work of the Redemption, being that of love, requires the perfect union in love of two wills, distinct and free -- divine will and human will."

Note that this marriage requires "two united wills," which "are not manifestations of an all-powerful will ordaining, but are due to a power which is born whenever there is unity between divine will and human will." And this brings us full circle, back to "the power of the invisible and spiritual over the visible and material" (VP).

This could hardly be more different from, say, the Religion That Shall Not Be Named, which involves the exertion of one will -- that would be Allah/Muhammad's -- over everyone, which will in turn trigger some kind of magical end to the world.

This is precisely what ISIS wants; as Wood explains, their theology is Islamic right down to the last jot and tittle:

"The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic.... the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam." These assouls "will not -- cannot -- waver from governing precepts that were embedded in Islam by the Prophet Muhammad and his earliest followers."

Thus, "Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people." They know better than our theologian-president that "The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam," and "instructs Muslims to fight Christians and Jews 'until they pay the jizya [tax] with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.' The Prophet, whom all Muslims consider exemplary, imposed these rules and owned slaves."

In hindsight, this rambling post has explicated the three forms of magic: there is the legitimate magic of the divine-human partnership, AKA (⇅); there is the dopey human magic of liberalism; and there is the demonic magic of apocalyptic Islamists.

***

Via American Digest, communist magic:

"No man [more than Lenin] personifies better the replacement of the religious impulse by the will to power. In an earlier age, he would surely have been a religious leader. With his extraordinary passion for force, he might have figured in Mohammed’s legions. He was even closer perhaps to Jean Calvin, with his belief in organizational structure, his ability to create one and then dominate it utterly, his puritanism, his passionate self-righteousness, and above all his intolerance."

There's a Party in My Brain!

We're discussing practical means of achieving vertical and horizontal integration. Importantly, these are things we should take the time to do every day.

Yesterday we focussed on Focus Time. Turns out that concentrating real hard changes the structure of the brain. But again, mind/brain/relationships is an irreducible trinity, so each one always affects the others.

We've also been weaving some MotT into the cosmic area rug, and isn't it interesting that the very first arcanum -- of which all the others are fractally related -- is all about concentration?

To con-centrate is to gather all of oneself into a kind of central point -- as in how a magnifying glass can gather the rays of the sun into an intense point of light and heat, or maybe how the stylus of a record player is a tiny thing, and yet, exerts hundreds or pounds of pressure per square inch at the business end.

Next up on Siegel's list is Play Time. It's pretty much the best news I've heard since wine as a replacement for working out; that is, "spontaneously engaging in novel activities that capture attention" releases "chemicals that support brain growth."

(Looking back, I should have majored in leisure studies, but I thought Radio-TV-Film would be more leisurely.)

This is not the same as playing an organized sport or having a real major; rather, "the emphasis is on new and creative forms of interacting with oneself, others, and the world." That's what I told my parents, anyway.

Yesterday I suggested that following these posts requires intense concentration. But today I'm suggesting that writing them requires a high degree of playfulness. What gives? Aren't those opposites? No! Go back to Letter I. Its tykeaway is concentration without effort, you know, like a child:

"The little child does not 'work' -- he plays. But how serious he is, i.e., concentrated, when he plays! His attention is still [---] and undivided..."

And we have it on good authority that Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.

Receive? Enter? Aren't those opposites again? Only in asymmetrical leftbrain world. In the bi-logically integrated world of symmetrical consciousness, what is inside is out, and what is outside is in. We can be contained by what we receive or "take in" -- which very much goes to communion, among other things.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is purported to say that "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner," "then you will enter [the kingdom]."

This also goes to what we were saying yesterday about parasitical ideologies. Back in college (or whenever it was) Obama took in an ideology that now has him by the basal ganglia. Notice also how grimly unplayful Obama is. He makes Hillary look like the fun girls from Mount Pilot.

But with real playfulness, "our minds can become vulnerable and take risks as we push the envelope to go beyond our usual ways of being and of doing, and our brains can try out new combinations of firing patterns."

Moreover, we can "explore new ways of knowing and exciting and unpredictable things to be known," which helps us "to create higher degrees of integration with new levels of complexity..."

So, yeah,

The Pocket Guide to Magically Rewiring Your Brain and Knowing God

Our vertical friend suggests that what we call "tradition" is the residue, so to speak, deposited by mystical experience.

Thus, while mystical experience is intrinsically unitive, "the death of [a] tradition manifests itself in the degeneration of its constituent elements, which become separated." This is because tradition is more like an organism, a dynamic whole. Just as in the case of a human being, when the soul departs, the body disintegrates.

Contemporary liberalism is a quintessential example of the disintegrated parts of a more integrated tradition living on as detached parasites. Like any ideology, it is "a parasitic system of autonomous thought" which "bewitches or enslaves human consciousness and deprives it of its liberty." Which we wouldn't really mind if they weren't so adamant about depriving us of ours.

A person under such a spell -- our president being a prime example -- "can no longer see the world, or people, or historic events as they are." Rather, "he sees everything only through the distorting prism of the system by which he is possessed." As such, "a Marxist today is incapable of seeing anything else in the history of mankind other than the 'class struggle.'"

Which is why the Obama administration thinks the problem of ISIS can be solved by a job fair and maybe a little counseling on how to get that résumé in shape. Like, don't say "spent two years decapitating infidels in the desert." Rather, something like "two year program of medieval studies with subspecialty in penal justice."

Ideologies, or philosophical systems, or even theologies "separated from the living body of tradition [become] parasitic structures, which seize the thought, feeling and finally the will of human beings." They "play a role comparable to the psycho-pathological complexes of neurosis or other psychic maladies of obsession."

This is absolutely the case. Why? Because back off man, I'm a psychologist.

I would say that a successful ideology is a kind of readymade, or "off the rack" mental illness. An all around ideology will have various compartments in which to "plug in" one's complexes, drives, and conflicts, e.g., rage, envy, greed, the will to power, sexual confusion, desire to control others, inferiority, meaninglessness, etc. No matter how crazy you are, liberalism has a place for you. It's a big tent!

The bad news: its "physical analogy is cancer." Why cancer? Because cancer involves a revolutionary part that declares independence from the whole, and presumes to be the whole. 'Til death do you part. A cancer is ultimately suicidal. As is liberalism. It is unsustainable -- fiscally, morally, economically, spiritually, educationally, environmentally, aesthetically, demographically, etc.

A whole tradition requires whole persons to embody and vivify it. It doesn't really matter how integrated the system if the system fails to reproduce itself via integrated beings. The whole person, for VF, "is religious, contemplative, artistic and intelligent." Or, he must think truth (inwardly and outwardly), be creative, and "do" virtue. This unified wholeness exists in each of us in potential, but the (magical) trick is to actualize it.

How does one go about accomplishing this? VF highlights a couple of methods, the cultivation of silence and vertical openness, or what I symbolize (---) and (o), respectively. This facilitates vertical recollection, as it is difficult to integrate what has been forgotten. In any event, it is this "empty silence which serves to mirror the revelation from above."

Interestingly, in the Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiololgy, Siegel has a chapter on some of the necessary conditions of psychological integration and actualization. Being that these are necessary and not sufficient, they don't guarantee integrated wholeness. It is more the case that their absence will more or less engender fragmentation, dis-integration, and dissipation.

He lists seven mental activities (and perhaps "nonactivities") that need to take place on a daily basis: Focus Time, Play Time, Connecting, Physical Time, Time-In, Down Time, and Sleep Time. To exclude or overemphasize one or another will result in an imbalance, like lifting weights with only one side of your body.

Focus Time is closely paying attention. I am reminded of those studies showing that people who strenuously exercise their brains on a daily basis avoid the cognitive deterioration that comes with age.

This is an example of the brain's neuroplasticity, in that we can engage the will to actually change the structure of the brain: "When we focus on one thing at a time with interest and energy, we engage circuits in the brain that enable neurochemical releases locally and globally to initiate neuroplastic changes in the brain" (Siegel).

Maybe you haven't noticed, but these posts require a kind of sustained attention in order to understand what they are about. They cannot be skimmed, not necessarily because they are difficult, but because they are intensely focussed, and I want you to see what I am seeing.

Focus Time also allows you to grab the reins of your genome. Yes, really. True, you can't make yourself taller or grow a third eye. It's better than that! Via neurochemical mediation, Focus Time "supports the activation of genes necessary to create protein production and structural changes that underlie memory encoding and learning." It also "supports gene activation and synapse formation among the neurons that are activated with attention."

And if you fail?

We've all seen them: "After they complete formal schooling, many individuals stop closely paying attention. This may be a risk factor for developing dementia..."

Which is why "low information" and "liberal" are synonymous terms. Or maybe you haven't seen Watters' World on the Factor.

Original Syntheses and the All of Man

Now that I'm playing the Glass Bead Game between interpersonal neurobiology and Meditations on the Tarot, I see that there are links everywhere. No doubt because I am looking at it from a certain angle, I'm seeing the word "synthesis" all over MoTT.

On p. 20 our unKnown friend mentions Friedrich Schiller, who "advanced a doctrine of the synthesis between intellectual consciousness" (what with its "heavy burdens of duties and rules") and "the instinctive nature of man" and his "urge to play."

This sounds similar to what we've been saying about the synthesis of left and right hemispheres, as well as that between neocortex, midbrain (play) and limbic system (instinct). He was hoping to find that childlike balance in which "duty becomes a delight," concentration becomes effortless, and work is transformed to play.

In short, he was fumbling around for the secret of SLACK. But he was probably just a Freemason, not a Raccoon or Subgenius. Unless the records have been lost.

The idea of play is critical, because one of the things that makes man unique is that he never stops playing. Or at least he is not supposed to stop playing.

This is because, unlike other mammals, man's neoteny is not a temporary condition, but permanent. We never stop learning, growing, creating -- and therefore synthesizing. Play is how a child synthesizes. Synthesis is how an adult plays. Hopefully this will become more clear as we proceed, just in case it isn't obvious. (Hint: the Glass Bead Game never ends. Except in sudden death.)

On the next page, UF outlines what might be called the credo of the magician, or Man of Play: we only truly know "that which is verified by the agreement of all forms of experience in its totality -- experience of the senses, moral experience, psychic experience, the collective experience of other seekers for the truth, and finally the experience of those whose knowing merits the title of wisdom and whose knowing has been crowned by the title of saint."

Do this and you'll be a child, my man! (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling.)

Agreement of all forms of experience in its totality. This includes both vertical and horizontal, subjective and objective, beings and things, ontology and existence. The ONE COSMOS is both the Alpha and Omega of this journey, because again, we begin in relative fusion, move through the bewilderness of diversity and multiplicity, and end in the higher synthesis. Or just say one --> two --> three.

And no, I'm not going all Hegelian on you. This is quite different, in that we must accomplish it, as opposed to it being done through us via some abstract metacosmic geist of pure reason. Nor do I mean it in a pantheistic way when I say that the One Cosmos is alpha and omega, because I mean it in a much more integral way that includes God. I don't just mean the material cosmos.

This is also the principle way to avoid being an infertile egghead. Infertility results from a failure of union and synthesis. It is why the tenured are feckless and not fecund.

In Letter II, UF discusses "the reintegration of the two constituent elements of consciousness as such," i.e., "the active element and the passive element."

Here again we are talking about the fecundity that results from the proper marriage and union of male and female, or sun and moon, or left and right hemispheres. "There is no consciousness without these two elements," just as there is no picking stuff up without an opposable thumb.

Notice how thumb and fingers deploy a kind of force against one another for the higher purpose of grasping. Likewise, we grasp things via the "opposition" of various psychopneumatic complementarities. In turn, every orthoparadoxical complementarity is an important reveilation (in terms of what we were saying yesterday about the veils that reveal).

Another key idea: "Christian yoga does not aspire directly to unity, but rather to the unity of two." Which is what makes it Christian and not yoga (except in the generic sense).

What this means is that the oneness is both anterior and posterior to the twoness. However, this is not a unity of substance, but rather, of essence. And this essence is called Love, baby. Thus, as UF says, it is a non-substantial but essential unity."

Which is precisely what Norris Clarke says in his concise and lucid Person and Being. In it he proposes an "indissoluble complementarity of substantiality, the in-itself dimension of being, and relationality, the toward-others aspect." Ultimately this applies to both God and man because Trinity. Or perhaps better, because Trinity is in-carnated, making possible the journey from unoriginal sin to original synthesis and fruitful union.

UF makes the important point that there is legitimate and illegitimate twoness. I would say that this is because the latter is a vicious (because unresolvable) duality whereas the former is a blessed and fertile complementarity. UF goes so far as to say that evil is a result of illegitimate twofoldness. I'll have to think about that one, but it sounds about right.

Consider, for example, how Job One for the left is to sow illegitimate divisions. I think this is why they are always more comfortable hating than loving. Obama-love could only satisfy them for so long. It is much more natural for them to hate Bush, and now a Scott Walker. They are much more animated by Walker's failure to graduate college (we would say success in avoiding it) than they are by the Islamic State decapitating Christians.

We're out of time. To be continued...

It Takes One(ness) to Know (the) One

Well, it's President's Day, a quintessentially postmodern helliday in which the federal government compels schoolchildren to conflate evolutionary cosmohistorical lightbringers such as Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan with smallminded and malevolent assouls such as Carter and Obama.

That is a perfect example of the very opposite of what we've been discussing for the past week or so: fusion as opposed to integration. The same proglodytes lump all religions together, as if Christianity and Islam "worship the same God."

Likewise, these vertically challenged spiritual dwarves conflate freedom and democracy, as if the latter somehow assures the former. (Remember when the press jumped all over Rumsfeld for suggesting that democracy is overrated?) But a Raccoon would much prefer to live in a monarchy with secure civil liberties than in a moonarchic 'batocracy in which our liberties exist at the pleasure and whims of the prince and the drooling mob that made him one.

Thus far we have covered the vertical integration of brainstem, midbrain, and frontal cortex; and the horizontal integration of left and right hemispheres. Siegel mentions several other biggies, such as memory, narrative, state (meaning temporary states of mind), interpersonal, temporal, and "transpirational" integration, the latter being the closest to what a Raccoon would regard as proper vertical integration, AKA the divine-human nexus.

We will get to all of these in due time, if ever, but over the weekend it occurred to me how compatible all of this is with one of our foundational texts, Meditations on the Tarot. Any Raccoon who hasn't read this book cover-to-cover at least twice probably isn't one. Why twice? Because by the end of the book you won't be the same person, so the second -- or third or fourth -- time around it will be a "new book" for this new man. Hello, noumena!

It's all as clear as day in Letter I, The Magician. Note that this arcanum is a fractal of all the others. In other words, while a "part" of the book, it contains the whole in essence. Therefore, the rest of the book will be a reworking of the same themes, just as in a symphony. I was just reading how old Beethoven would take "a piece of material, an idea," and transform it "into new passages that share an underlying essence but sound different." It "is a matter of contrast and diversity founded on unity and invention: fashioning many things from one thing."

Just so, we can say that the subsequent twenty one arcana are all "in" the first, for as our unKnown Friend says, the Magician is "the key to all the other Major Arcana."

First of all, what is an arcanum? It is a symbol -- an authentic symbol. Which is whatnow? Etymologically speaking, a symbol is something "thrown across." It is a means of getting from here to there -- in this case, a vertical there. As such, "they conceal and reveal their sense at one and the same time according to the depth of meditation." For which reason we invented the term reveil: any religious symbol reveils, meaning simply that it simultaneously veils and reveals (or, more to the point, veils so as to reveal).

This is similar, say, to a veil over a statue. But in the vertical world, without the veil we cannot perceive the underlying essence at all. You could say that we cannot "see" God, but we can certainly see his veils, more on which later. But there are two errors to avoid: trying to strip away the veils in order to see God directly, or elevating the veil to God. The former is barbarism (whether primitive or postmodern), the latter idolatry.

The arcana do not provide us with cutandry & wideawake answers, but rather, render "us fertile in our creative pursuits.... An arcanum, is a 'ferment' or an 'enzyme' whose presence stimulates the spiritual and the psychic life of man." As such, these symbols are what we call essential vertamins to aid in our spiritual metabolism.

In order to integrate and assimilate the influx of vertical forces, we must attain openness (o) and silence (---). Doing so involves being "one in oneself" so as to be "one with the spiritual world."

Now, to say "one" is to say integration. You could say that the spiritual life is essentially the exercise (or verticalisthenics) of practical unity, or of putting "unity into practice." That is, the Raccoon begins with "the basic unity of the natural world, the human world and the divine world." Indeed, without this prior unity, "no knowledge is conceivable." Period.

In short, "The tenet of the essential unity of all that exists precedes every act of knowledge, and every act of knowledge presupposes the tenet of the unity of the world." That latter is especially important, because to truly know anything is a key to the whole existentialada. Nothing would be knowable in the absence of this prior unity.

Having said that, we are again talking about a circular movement that begins in unity (or better, fusion), proceeds to differentiation, and returns to unity, only on a higher level (or in a higher key). It is precisely what the Poet means with that crack about rearriving to where we started and knowing it for the first time, or that metamagical transition from p. 266 to p. 6, AKA the endless riverrun to and from evenadam & backagain.

Think about that one once again: it takes one to know One. Or, it requires integration in order to approach the Source of integration. This implies, among other things, that our vision of God is a qualitative matter that varies with the integral width and depth of the subject.

How could this not be the case? Any perception or knowledge of God must be inflected through the human subject. An unintegrated subject is going to have a more or less narrow and/or shallow conception of God.

Think of the Islamists. How do they have such a dis-integrated conception of God? In a way, it is a perverse mirror image of Obama's undifferentiated, fusionist God. Both are primitive, but in different ways. For postmodernists such as Obama, they invert the words of the Poet by arriving where man started and not knowing it for the first time ever (since man has always known of God); this represents omnipotent ignorance upon omniscient stupidity, or tenure².

Our unKnown friend says some things that sound very much like what we said in the previous post about the integration of left and right hemispheres. In fact, he is saying the identical thing, only with a different vocabulary:

"The Magician [i.e., integrated person] represents the man who has attained harmony and equilibrium between the spontaneity of the unconscious [read: right hemisphere]... and the deliberate action of the conscious [left hemisphere]." Thus, "His state of consciousness is the synthesis of the conscious and unconscious" -- except to emphasize that this latter is not really "un-," but rather, quite oneconscious.

To be continued...

Cosmic Defense Mechanisms and the IKEA Brain

Yesterday we discussed the bilateral integration of left and right cerebral hemispheres. But there is also the vertical integration of hindbrain, midbrain, and frontal cortex (AKA brainstem, limbic areas, and neocortex). You'd think their integration would be automatic, and the brain certainly tries to converge toward a complex wholeness -- a unity-in-diversity -- but not always successfully.

Siegel asks, "Why would anyone not have such important access to the wisdom of the body, to the regulation and protection of the survival reflexes of the brainstem, and to the evaluative, emotional, and attachment-focussed limbic system processing?"

In other words, why might our sensory and emotional input fail to flow harmoniously into the higher executive functioning of the self? (The question is not fundamentally different from why our pathological governmental executive would ignore input from the legislature and the citizenry.)

Think, for example, of how emotions can be split off, repressed, and projected. Or, how someone may become paranoid, or hypochondriacal, or develop somatic delusions, or veto bills everyone else favors.

For paranoiacs, it is as if they develop a kind of global, reptilian fear of their surroundings. For hypochondriacs, it is as if they develop a similar fear with regard to the normal sensations of the body. A rumbling in the abdomen is magnified into colon cancer, a twinge in the chest to a heart attack, a tension headache to a brain tumor. But enough about me.

Siegel writes that "one reason" for the disconnect "is attachment history." That is, "if the relationships you may have had were not attuned, the signals from your body may never have been seen by others, and, in fact, you may have felt overwhelmed by the unfulfilled needs emanating from the subcortical regions," i.e., the limbic system and hindbrain.

I don't know how much of this is new to my readers, but I have been thinking along these lines for some 30 years, so it's pretty basic to my worldview. What is novel about it is that it takes much of the unnecessary mystagoguery out of psychoanalysis by locating what used to be called the "unconscious" in easily identifiable regions of the brain and in clearly recognizable patterns of attachment, i.e., relationships (remember, it is always mind-brain-relationships, never just one).

As I highlighted in the book, it is not difficult to understand how disturbances in early attachment and bonding might lead to a failure to integrate various parts of the brain. It is similar to economics: there is no need to explain the phenomenon of poverty, since that is the universal condition. Rather, what needs to be explained is the creation of wealth.

Likewise, we come into this world -- meaning the post-uterine condition -- in a state of neurological immaturity, such that our brain is wired together at the same time we are bonding with the primary caregiver(s), usually a mother. So the brain is a little like IKEA furniture, which also comes to us in need of final assembly. Just as your furniture may bear the scars of poor assembly (but enough about me), so too can the brain be haunted by the synaptic shadows of troubled attachment.

Yes, in one sense this seems a bit unfair, but if you really think about it, there is simply no other way to grow a human. And when it works the way it is supposed to, it is such a beautiful thing -- truly an icon of God.

I suppose it's like sexuality that way. There is a logical fallacy -- can't remember exactly how it goes -- to the effect that the improper use of something does not invalidate its proper use (for example, with regard to guns, or booze, or freedom). Anything, no matter how sublime, may be misused, which I believe goes to commandment against taking the name of the Lord in vain.

I'm not sure where the typical person locates "meaning," but it can't be in the left brain. The left brain, being logical, can only generate ultimately circular tautologies and self-imposed models. Again, if you really think about it, meaning comes from someplace else -- from the gut, or the heart, or above the head, or the whole cosmopnuematic sensorium. It's really a whole-body/mind/relationship sensation, is it not?

When I deploy the term "infertile egghead," I am referring to someone who lives -- or subsists, really -- in his own ideas, which is a much more narrow and shallow area compared to our whole body-mind-relational world.

Just as in "climate science," the models can only simulate an infinitely more complex system. Which is why mere intellectuals tend to be such an impoverished class. Nevertheless, they are a proud bunch, which is why they are compelled to try to one-up a Scott Walker, or anyone, really, who lives outside their Ønanistic leftworld constraints. It is primarily an exercise in propping up their own inappropriately high self esteem by projectively shaming someone else.

With a little personal mindsight, these spiritually impoverished cretins could perhaps dig beneath their own superficial mental maps, but then, that would spell the end of the left.

"Promoting vertical integration involves cultivating awareness of the lower input from the body, brainstem, and limbic areas..." (ibid.). I can only emphasize that human beings, because they are free, have many alternatives to this, a whole menu of what are called psychological defense mechanisms: denial, splitting, repression, projection, regression, somatization, fantasy, wishful thinking, acting out, idealization/contempt (two sides of the same defensive coin), etc. Or just say liberal.

One of the three pillars of Christianity is Incarnation, the idea that God becomes man all the way down to the brainstem (which in turn branches down and out into the whole body). Perhaps we should take a hint and follow his pneumasomatic example. Around here we call it I-AMbodiment.

Whole Brains vs. Halfwits

We're in the midst of a discussion of the various domains within the brain-self-relationships trinity that need to be integrated in order for us to be "healthy" (or to have a whole in our heads). In short, if we wish to potentiate, we must integrate.

Next on Siegel's list is bilateral integration, or a harmonious relationship between the left and right hemispheres. These two rascals perceive the world and process information in very different ways.

As Petey has said on many occasions, "homosexual marriage" is impossible for the same reason it would be impossible to have two left (or two right) brains and still be fully human. Rather, our humanness emerges stereoscopically, so to speak, in the mindstage produced by their complementarity. To eliminate this fruitful complementarity is to render oneself barren.

It is quite interesting that our brains are set up in this heterospheric way. It seems to me that if God and nature went to all the trouble of lending us these two very different brains -- and sexes -- then we ought to pay attention.

Most of the time we don't notice the two hemispheres. I suppose this is no different than health in general, in that if we feel well, then our body becomes somewhat invisible. When we start to notice it -- as in pain, weakness, dysfunction -- then we know we have a problem.

Likewise, "When the two sides of the hemispheres work well together, there is no need to intentionally try to promote bilateral integration," because "it is already fully in place!" (Siegel; BTW, I dock him half a star for excessive use of the exclamation point. Has he no control over the grammatical enthusiasms of his right brain?).

So, much of the time the marriage between left and right is harmonious. However, "given the anatomic separation and unique dominance of these two modes of processing on either side of the brain, sometimes one side or the other can dominate in a person's ever-changing life" (ibid.). Or maybe one side will lag behind or run ahead of the other.

As it so happens, the nonverbal right brain does run ahead of the left in early infant development, with important consequences, since that is where un-verbalizable mind parasites will lodge themselves. Siegel has an interesting term for this: synaptic shadows. You could say that a mind parasite lives in the synaptic shadows, or that it is a synaptic shadow. Either way, they are not just in the mind, but etched into our hard drive. To be perfectly accurate, they will manifest in the brain, in the mind, and in relationships.

I don't know if we need to go into a great deal of detail, since we already covered this subject not too long ago we, in our discussion of McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary, the Master being the right hemisphere. The discussion seems to begin with this post. Let's see what we can yoink therefrom.

Hmm. The following all seems pretty sound to me, and is entirely consistent with the Interpersonal Neurobiology perspective. I'll try to condense it:

Perhaps the most provocative research finding is that our primary experience of the world is located in the right hemisphere, whereas our abstract "mapping" of this same world is located in the left.

Frankly, I don't think we need all this brain research to tell us something we all know -- that there is a primary, lived experience of the whole of reality, over which we superimpose an atomized grid of knowledge. In my autographed book for cheap I use the symbols (n) and (k) to distinguish the two. Not surprisingly, it turns out that there is a neural substrate for (n) and (k), but that doesn't mean that knowledge of either type can be reduced to neurology.

Rather, we begin with the principle of the Person, and it is not possible for a Person to incarnate in the absence of the "opponent processing" of the "divided" brain. But of course, the divided brain isn't really divided at all; or, to be perfectly accurate, it is divided so as to be united at a higher level. A non-divided brain couldn't possibly host the unitary person.

Yes, you could say the hemispheres are distinct but undivided, like a certain godhead we know. Which is why we don't (usually) subjectively feel as if we are two different persons. We are aware of the input from both sides, but there is something in us that usually unifies the two -- and it's not just "two," because, as McGilchrist explains, there is also a front-back structure in the brain, i.e., frontal to hindbrain, and a top-down one, i.e., cortex to mammalian to reptilian to Sharptonin brain.

In fact, perhaps only the left brain sees the brain as divided; indeed, McGilchrist points out that the right brain is able to take the perspective of the left into consideration, since it is part of the "whole," whereas the left cannot do this vis-a-vis the holism of the right.

It reminds me of how conservatives must deal with liberal arguments, since they permeate the culture, whereas it is possible for a liberal to live in an entirely friction-free cognitive world, since he must go out of his way to deeply understand the conservative point of view in a way that is unfiltered by the left wing hate machine.

Under the best of circumstances, we are all faced with this problem of integration, especially in the contemporary world, since there is a virtually infinite amount of data to consider, so much that no single person could ever literally integrate it all. Which is one of the main reasons left wing ideologues take refuge in their simplistic left brain fantasies of cognitive and social control. This is also what allows the typical low-information liberal voter to nurture his delusions of adequacy.

To cite one glaring example, when monohemispheriacs talk about the Republican "war on science," what they are mostly referring to is the conservative resistance to scientism. And the resistance to scientism comes partly from the right brain, which knows full well that scientism is not true because it cannot possibly be true. And it cannot be true because the right brain is precisely what mediates our connection to being as such. The right brain knows of what it speaks, even if it must express itself via the mythopoetic.

One doesn't have to be aware of brain research to understand why the fantasies of scientism are quite literally delusional. In every branch of science, the persistent application of purely "left brain" scientific methods has resulted in ambiguities that come back around to a right brain view of the world. This is the proper Circle of Being, whereby experience starts in the right, is broken down and categorized by the left, and then re-dreamt and integrated by the right. Reality doesn't just dream itself.

In physics, for example, we have the uncertainty principle, complementarity principle, and nonlocality. In logic we have Gödel, in math Cantor, in biology Rosen. Such "transformative developments," writes McGilchrist, "validate the world as given by the right hemisphere, not the left." No worldview can hope to be adequate without taking these fundamental orthoparadoxes into consideration.

I might add that in psychology we now have interpersonal neurobiology, which integrates anthropology, molecular biology, cognitive science, genetics, linguistics, neuroscience, physics, psychology, psychiatry, attachment, mathematics, computer science, sociology, and the Bo Diddley beat. To which the Raccoon adds cosmology, theology, philosophy, metaphysics, and the Bobby Blue Bland squall.

This cannot be accomplished by the left brain alone, since it is, as Siegel describes, too committed to the L modes of logical, linear, literal, and linguistic. The most important things obviously cannot be understood with mere logic, and to pretend otherwise is to be an unintegrated halfwit.

End Psychic Segregation Now!

Yesterday we spoke of various types of integration that result in the release of human potential. Two of the main types are vertical -- brainstem/midbrain/cortex -- and horizontal -- left hemisphere/right hemisphere/corpus callosum. But then those two (vertical and horizontal) need to be integrated with each other, so you see how things can get complicated pretty quickly.

Let's see how many relatively autonomous systems we can identify, in order to understand how they must be integrated with the restavus. Remember, integration must be preceded by differentiation.

Siegel mentions one we tend to take for granted because it mostly happens automatically -- unless one is a Brian Williams or Barack Obama -- that is, the integration of past and present. Like everything else in our mind (and relationships) this has a physical substrate, whereby the present "enters" us, either from the senses or from higher centers, but then encounters "the past," AKA memory, or our working maps of reality.

The cortex, for example, "serves as a source of perpetual filtering, shaping the nature of what we are aware of as it compares prior experiences of similar events or objects with ongoing, here-and-now sensory input" (Siegel).

In other words, the world is always streaming into us on a nonstop basis. Siegel analogizes the latter to a kind of "bottom-up flow of ongoing sensory streams of energy and information," which in turn encounters -- or sometimes crashes into -- the "top-down flow" from the accumulated past. These two waves must find a way to coexist harmoniously, or the world will simply make no sense.

So every moment is like two waves from opposite directions that must somehow become one. Fortunately, waves can do that. Most of the time. But think, for example, of trauma. Trauma is like a present-wave that completely crashes over us, like a psychic tsunami. My wife, for example, is having a very hard time with the recent death of Tristan's teammate's mother. In addition to the tragedy itself, it is just too close to emotional home. It is overwhelming the present, and is impossible to assimilate.

Which I think is what bereavement is all about: the slow assimilation of an unassimilable event. In the past I have compared trauma to one of those snakes that swallows a whole rabbit. Our minds too must metabolize experience, and some experiences take a long time to digest. Indeed, some are only partially digested, or not digested at all, in particular, very early trauma that ends up hardwired into the nervous system (more on which later).

As an aside, I want to highlight how different this is from Brian Williams-style lying. In his case, it is not due to bottom-up (or outside-in) trauma disrupting and overwhelming his top-down narrative memory. Rather, it is quite the opposite: the conscious imposition of a false narrative on the past for some secondary gain in the service of his narcissism. Big difference.

As we shall see, integration and narrative are intimately related. In short, an accurate narrative is an integrated one, and vice versa.

Siegel has a helpful chapter called Domains of Integration. Each of these domains can be characterized by rigidity or chaos, which is the hallmark of un-integration, the latter of which preventing intra- and extra-psychic harmony.

He also mentions the subtle point that "when integration of consciousness is not present, individuals may be prone to identify thoughts and feelings as the whole of who they are."

For example, when a person becomes depressed, it is very much as if the depression displaces everything else in the psyche. Or, it is like a mind parasite that hijacks the machinery of the host in order to reproduce itself in the form of more depressed thoughts and feelings. The part becomes the whole.

In fact, Siegel's first category involves the integration of consciousness. Easy, right? Well, a schizophrenic, for example, absolutely cannot integrate consciousness, which becomes a moment-to-moment unfolding of catastrophic novelty.

An acquaintance recently experimented with psilocybin and had an unfortunate experience along these lines. It can be visualized as Munch's scream, only forever. He was plunged into a dreadful realm of unintegrated and persecutory psychic bits, so to speak. Later I ran into this article on what 'shrooms do the brain, causing it to go from the image on the left to the one on the right:

As the author writes, "the shrooms" facilitate "a whole lot more connections between disparate parts of the brain...." (emphasis mine). Yes, this can allow "creativity and imagination to blossom when we let go of the old ways of thinking," whereby we leap -- or are pushed, rather -- from our familiar attractors, those "established patterns of connectivity" that may "limit our potential."

But for how many shroomheads does this actually succeed, and for how long? Look at John Lennon, who took LSD everyday for like a year. True, we got the classics Rain, Tomorrow Never Knows, I Am the Walrus, and Strawberry Fields Forever, before he burned out his neural fields forever. So, this is not the ideal way to try to integrate unintegrated parts and explore new psychic territory.

Importantly, there are times that we want to become dis-integrated, or to oust ourselves from our customary attractor(s). I do so every day, only not with psychedelic drugs. Here is how Siegel describes it: we may become "swept up by a feeling" -- or thought or activity -- "and lost in the power of its persuasion. Sometimes this flow is a useful way of getting lost in an activity, of joining fully, without reservation and perspective..."

It is definitely what I try to do with these posts, i.e., abandon control and just let it flow where it will. But afterwards I always need to exercise another part of the brain in order to edit it -- to clean up any loose s*it -- which comes down to integrating it and making sure it is a "whole" that also fits in with the rest of the Whole.

There are some forms of consciousness we don't want to indulge and abandon ourselves to, for example, anger, resentment, envy, grandiosity, despair, hopelessness, victimhood, etc. Or, if we do, it is only for the purpose of shining light on them so they do not become semi-autonomous mind parasites with unintegrated agendas of their own. Or in other words, we want to re-member them, as opposed to them dis-membering us.

Well, that's about it for today. Funeral to attend, which is in so many ways an exercise and a ritual to help us try to integrate the most difficult thing of all to integrate, which of course brings us back around to the central purpose of Jesus' mission.

Respect Your Monkey! Honor Your Reptile!

As we've been saying, one of the principles of Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) is that mind, brain, and relationships represent an irreducible trinity, in that you can't have one without the others.

However, it occurs to me that each of these components may be further divided (but not separated) into three. For example, vis-a-vis the brain, we have the hindbrain, the midbrain, and the neocortex -- or the reptilian, the mammalian, and the human. Thus, when we talk about integration, it is not just between mind, brain, and relationships, but within the brain itself.

For which reason the Raccoon says: Integrate your monkey! And don't forget your lizard!

Likewise the mind, which I visualize as spanning a vertical hierarchy from the divine to the human to the infrahuman. Importantly, the infrahuman is not analogous to the mammalian or reptilian, but is something far worse than mere animals -- like Nazis, or ISIS, or Al Sharpton. Matter can only go so low.

With regard to relationships, there is always self, other, and the link between them. Here I follow Bion, who mainly posited links of (L), (H), and (K), or love, hate, and knowledge. Others might include empathy, passion, and curiosity, but in each case the link is from interior to interior, or soul to soul. And to meet souls where they actually are, we have to possess the "mindsight" to see them, more on which later.

With this in mind, I think we are in a better position to understand what Siegel means when he says that the triangle of mind-brain-relationships is a "process by which energy and information flow." This is obvious, say, in education, where information passes from one mind to another via our relationship to the teacher (and the relationship turns out to be critically important). But such links also occur in far more subtle ways.

For example, in a paper I published back in 1994 -- before the internet permitted me to bypass the middleman -- I talked about "the back-and-forth interplay between mother and infant" through which we come to know ourselves (and without which we could never know ourselves).

Therefore, certain obstructions, blind spots, and inflexible repetitions in the mother will be internalized by the baby. Although the self cannot develop without a brain, it obviously cannot be reduced to mere brain activity. An isolated brain is just a disorganized blob of cells, while an isolated self isn't really a self at all.

However, there are such things as a healthy brain, a healthy mind, and healthy relationships. Things can go south in each realm, which will in turn affect the others.

For example, a brain tumor will probably not be good for your mind. Likewise, a painful relationship, or a death or loss, will cause real structural and chemical changes in the brain. And we all know how the internalization of a dysfunctional ideology causes both soul and brain damage.

The keynote is integration: "From an IPNB perspective, integration is the definition of good health," and "integration is the linkage of differentiated elements." Failure to integrate always results in one of two outcomes (or else an alternation between the two): either chaos or excessive rigidity.

Here we can see how rigidity may become a habitual defense mechanism against chaos, but how excessive rigidity inevitably results in more chaos. (Of note, this applies to any system, which is why the rigid, top-down economics of the left doesn't work.) Obama, for example, is an unusually rigid ideologue. The result? Global disorder. Economic disorder. Medical system disorder. Racial disorder. Immigration disorder.

As Siegel describes it, "Brains or relationships that are not integrated move outside this river of integration." That is, the integrated flow of an open system can be analogized to a river. On one bank is rigidity, the other chaos. Siegel is absolutely correct that every single diagnostic category of the DSM is characterized by either rigidity or chaos.

To cite some obvious examples, a compulsive personality is too rigid, while a borderline personality always generates chaos. Narcissists are generally too rigid, while a person with bipolar disorder goes from extreme to extreme -- from a static depression to wild mania, the former functioning like a fixed point attractor, the latter a strange attractor in subjective phase space.

As it so happens, I'm reading a rather comprehensive biography of Beethoven in the hope that it might contribute to our Glass Bead Game of integrating music and the structure of reality. Interestingly, Beethoven was deeply unintegrated in certain areas (e.g., emotions, relationships), even while creating perhaps the most vertically and horizontally (and intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually) integrated music that had yet appeared (from what I am told; I don't pretend to be a classical music maven).

Being that he was one of the first representatives of the then new cult of genius, we have ever since had the romantic image of the "crazy genius," but it is not necessarily so. One doesn't have to be crazy to be a genius, but one can see how, in an excessively rigid cultural or academic environment, it may require someone who has no ability to stay within the lines -- the river banks -- to discover new territory. Thus, there are times that chaos can be in the service of development, but it is not the ideal.

On the one hand, Beethoven strived "for unity within diversity," and "struggled for greater unity and at the same time for greater diversity than any composer had aspired to before." And yet, outside the context of composing, he "had little grasp of the world at all. In childhood he did not truly comprehend the independent existence of other people. He never really did. He reached maturity knowing all about music... but otherwise he did not know how to live in the world."

To be continued....

On the Genetic Transmission of Original Sin

As you know by now, one of the purposes of this blog is to try to make traditional religion relevant to intelligent people in the modern world. After all, it made sense to the most intelligent people of the premodern world, meaning that it must have "fit the facts" -- or better, must have addressed man's ticklish existential situation.

One doesn't want to say "facts," because they weren't really discovered in an unambiguous way until just a few hundred years ago, and there are still some atavistic stragglers who haven't yet reconciled themselves to their existence, such as Brian Williams.

In fact, if you check out that link, it can be seen that Williams not only rejects the world of fact, but exists in a cognitively undifferentiated state in which fact and religion are still fused -- in his case, the secular religion of liberalism. The conscious lies are one thing, but they pale in comparison to this unconscious fusion that renders his entire perceptual apparatus dysfunctional. Who can read that catalogue of liberal pieties of without cringing? I couldn't even finish it.

After the 2008 presidential election, "This nation woke up this morning changed. As one columnist put it, America matured in 2008 by choosing Barack Obama." So now we're mature. Like Brian Williams.

"This is our President. To see people, whatever your politics, that excited about our new chief executive after a line of what the ordinary voter would maybe describe as bad choices or choices of evils, for years, generations, it is unbelievable to me.”

I agree. It is unbelievable, in the sense that "the damage he has wreaked is beyond calculation. He has hobbled our economy, trashed the Constitution, eroded trust in government, politicized one federal agency after another, poisoned relations among the races, stifled opportunity for poorer Americans, weakened our armed forces, conducted a perverse foreign policy, made the U.S. a laughingstock abroad… the list goes on and on" ( PowerLine).

Anyway, back to a religion that fits our existential situation. One of the first principles of Christianity is that there is something wrong with man. In fact, each religion expresses this principle in a different way: for Christians it has to do with sin -- thus being located in the will -- while for Buddhism and Vedanta it has more to do with ignorance and illusion -- more in the mind.

There is also the notion that this pathology is somehow handed down through the generations. Note that this was not a "theoretical" observation, nor any kind of deduction from abstract principles, but rather, an empirical observation that anyone can confirm for himself. In the words of Michael Novak, "A system built on sin is built on very solid foundations indeed."

Denying this foundation leads directly to an Obama and to the left more generally, which builds on an entirely different metaphysical foundation. Even so, leftists do not deny that there is something wrong with man, but simply project it into their domestic enemies. Which is why Williams can suggest that presidents prior to Obama were "evil," or that capital punishment is immoral, or that the Tea Party is an extortionist, hostage-taking "suicide caucus."

Now, in my opinion, when we talk about man's proneness to sin, we're talking about something analogous to a parasite -- a mind parasite. To even talk about this subject implies that there is a proper and healthy way for man to exist, and that there are things that interfere with this healthy functioning. I say: why not use the modern tools at our disposal to illuminate this pathology instead of, say, attributing it to "original sin," or blaming it on our first mythological parents?

Remember, the facts are one thing, the explanation another. We can still believe man is fallen without accepting the ancient explanation, just as we can believe the world is created without suggesting that it occurred in six days.

This subject is discussed in the Encirclopedia Raccoonica, and fleshed out in Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology. For example, Siegel writes that "In relationships within families, one can see the intergenerational transfer of patterns of communication that are reinforced by the repeated experiences of energy and information flow exchange patterns."

In a moment (or maybe tomorrow) I'l explain more about what he means by "energy and information flow exchange patterns," but for now let's just highlight that fact that these pathological patterns and tendencies are handed down from generation to generation, which is what our forbears would have noticed (again, empirically).

Siegel highlights the critically important point that this intergenerational transmission is not only behavioral but genetic -- or epigenetic, to be precise. That is, "Recent discoveries in the field of epigenetics" reveal "that alterations in the control molecules regulating gene expression may also be important in this intergenerational passage of patterns of communication."

Now, think back to our furbears. Unlike us, they had no way of knowing that the cosmos was 14 billion years old, or that life had emerged 4 billion years ago, or that man had been here for 200 thousand years. In such a context, "original sin" is not a bad theory, in that it certainly accounts for the observable facts. It's just that we now have some additional cognitive tools to illuminate those same facts.

But one thing I want you to notice is how much more scientifically realistic is the idea of original sin, in comparison to the modern leftist assumption that man is born good and therefore infinitely malleable. Rather, given the complexities involved, we will rarely find the person who has escaped the exigencies of human development without his share of intergenerational mind parasites -- so rare that we might as well say that it happened just once!

It is really quite fascinating how this transmission works, and what sorts of things can be transmitted. For example, "extreme stress in one generation may be passed through gametes, the egg and sperm, such that the ability to regulate stress may be compromised in future generations."

And it turns out that the inability to regulate stress has all sorts of adverse consequences that directly affect the development and the wiring of the brain. Again, it doesn't affect the genome per se, but rather, the expression of the genome (i.e., switching some genes on and others off).

I won't bore you with all the brain parts and neural networks that are affected, but one thing we can say is that the transmission of a mind parasite always results in a lack of differentiation, an absence of integration, and a failure to achieve one's potential.

In fact, this goes directly to how we may define psychopneumatic health, which (and this is identical to what occurs collectively, based on our recent series of posts on Inventing the Individual) results from the differentiation of initially fused dimensions and modalities, followed by a "linking" that reintegrates them at a higher level. This integration is precisely what allows us to achieve our potential.

This has been a rather simple and straightforward summary. I hope the subject will become more queer as we proceed.

The Sad Divorce of Mr. Substance and Mrs. Process

The bad nose: sinus infection. The good nose: antibiotics are on the way, but not until my 2:30 appointment. Not that uncomfortable, but a little fuzzy in the head, so we'll just have to struggle through this together. I wouldn't expect much.

Until just a second ago, I had always had an issue with the idea that the self is a process, as opposed to a kind of stable entity. It seems like a sneak attack on the soul, as in the perspective of neurology, which reduces the self to a process of the brain only: in other words, the self is just an emergent phenomenon of brain activity.

It's a bit like the Buddhist view, which also regards everything as a process with no substance underneath. In fact, to see any enduring substance is to be trapped in maya-illusion. The cosmos is just a big sand painting and we have a head cold, so we're always one sneeze away from Obliteration.

However, it is not the idea of process that's wrong, only the reduction. For if man is a fractal of God, and God is a kind of interior process, then every created thing should reflect this, human beings quintessentially so.

"With the decline of Newtonian physics and the emergence of quantum theory and relativity, the physical world-picture in the West became centered around a process concept" (in Nature, Man, and Society). I would qualify this somewhat, in that, although the metaphysic has changed, the People haven't heard the news, and continue to live in the Machine Cosmos of their collective imagination.

As we've discussed a number of times, Alfred North Whitehead was the first to understand the philosophical implications of the new physics, and yet, it is not as if everyone suddenly became a Whiteheadian.

Far from it. I don't even want to know who the fashionable philosophers are today among the tenured, but these academic blackhats owe nothing Whitehead. Rather, for the most part, they have utterly rejected even the possibility of a Grand Metaphysical Narrative, and instead fallen -- or enthusiastically leapt -- into the tyranny of relativism.

I suppose the orthoparadox at the heart of this is that the Absolute is a process. Intuitively we think of the Absolute as static and unchanging. But if I understand God rightly, he wants us to know that this is not the case, and that he is indeed a process. Being that he went to some lengths to press the point home to earthlings, I think we ought to listen.

So, the emergence of quantum physics should have alerted all and sundry to "the end of the stiff mechanistic absolutism based on the substance view" (ibid.). However, I would again modify this, and say that substance and process are complementary, not opposite. Therefore, "to be," -- in the formulation of Norris Clarke -- "is to be substance-in-relation" (note that that is OneWord in three).

As it applies to man, I would say that we continue to have a center, but that this center is more analogous to the central point of the worldpool or the I of the cosmic hurricane. Or better, a strange attractor in the complex phase space of our interiority. Looked at this way, it is impossible to say whether the process is "obeying" the attractor, or whether the attractor emerges from the process.

Again, complementarity: substance and relation "belong together in any adequate metaphysics," writes Clarke "as intrinsically complementary aspects, distinct but inseparable..." This complementarity conveys "what it means to be, to be a real being in the full and proper sense of the term" (ibid.).

So, we are human beings, not human islings or itlings. Who knew?

When you think about it -- think about it in the Raccoon way, I mean -- we're really talking about that sameold primordial marriage of He & She, Adam & Eve, Absolute & Infinite, Earth & Sky, Math & Music, etc. But "Unfortunately the two notions, originally joined together, have become sundered and more opposed to each other as modern philosophy has unfolded since Descartes..." (ibid.).

In fact, Clarke suggests that we could call this metaphysical divorce "The Sad Adventure of Substance in Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Whitehead."

Another key idea that emerges from this view is that reality is intrinsically communicative. How's that? Well, let's start at the top (or bottom, if you like), with the Trinity. Obviously the Trinity is "communicative" within itselves, Father-to-Son, Son-to-Father, Holy Ghost to everyone, etc. There is nothing beneath, before, or above this eternal comm-union of love-in-relation. Or, just say Love, which is unthinkable in the absence of relation.

By the way, why can't it be Hate, as implied by Islamist theology or leftist vilification?

Because primordial hatred is always a severing, a rupture, a rejection, a failure of communion and integration. We will return to this idea shortly, as it is a central principle of Interpersonal Neurobiology. In fact, this entire coonversation will eventually lead back to and extend the ideas put forth in that book, i.e., to an interpersonal theoneurobiology.

As Clarke describes it, substance-in-relation "has an intrinsic dynamic orientation towards self-expressive action, toward self-communication with others, as the crown of its perfection, as its very raison d'tre, literally..." After all, if it's good enough for God, it ought to be good enough for the likes & loves of us, right?

To reiterate, a certain kind of self-expression is the "crown of perfection" and our reason for being. I hope it doesn't sound like Brian Willams-level pomposity to say that this is indeed my reason for being. Not the only reason, but certainly the highest, as there is nothing I desire more than the knowledge of truth AND the ability to share and communicate it. The former would be a little anemic -- not to mention narcissistic or even Ønanistic -- in the absence of the positive joy of the latter (and this is naturally to be distinguished from the perverse joy of communicating lies, as in the case of an Obama or Williams).

Why should the communication of truth be such a joy? Again, if it's good enough for God...

Recreating a Realistic Lifestage

The book we are discussing -- the Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology -- although suitable for lay readers, is not plagued by the usual agenda-driven PC activism masquerading as psychology. I would dock the author a few points for excessive use of liberal dog whistles such as empowerment, honor, impactful, and healing the planet, but overall it's an excellent summary of what I would consider to be the state of the art of what science can say about the art of human development.

In other words, back off man, he's a psychiatrist.

The book is interdisciplinary, but only up to a point. For example, these ideas are metapsychological but not metaphysical, so no consideration is given to the wider context in which the mind is situated.

Rather, the cosmos is assumed, as if just any cosmic conditions could give rise to something as strange as persons. I would say that Siegel stays within the boundaries of science, but that in so doing, greatly expands those boundaries by including the subject in an irreducible way. I mean, we've been doing the same thing for years, but we are obviously not sanctioned by the Conspiracy.

As alluded to a few days ago, while I have some issues with the field of IPNB, these are going to inevitable, if only because of the limitations of the scientific perspective. While Siegel does actually venture into quasi-religious territory, as a scientist he can only do so in a generic manner that is compatible with such mindfulness practices as Buddhism, yoga, centering prayer, etc., each of which has a real and measurable effect on the brain. He can't deal with such realities as grace, prayer, sin, rebirth, etc.

Which is fine. IPNB is about as interdisciplinary as one can get and still dwell among the tenured. A Raccoon is not dragged down by such terrestrial considerations, by virtue of his multi-undisciplinary orthoparadoxy.

For example, read the following, and I'll bet you're thinking what I'm thinking. The triad of mind, brain, and relationships composes "one reality with three independent facets."

As the council of Nicea Siegel describes it, "This is not splitting the three aspects." Rather, they "are three aspects of one reality.... With this view, we have one reality with three facets -- not three distinct domains of separate realities."

Siegel is speaking of science, not theology. However, the Raccoon would like to know what kind of cosmos this must be in order for such an irreducibly trinitarian science to exist.

In any event, within this interpersonal trinity it is as if there are arrows of influence in all directions, such that "the mind is influenced by both relationships and the brain; relationships are influenced by both the mind and brain; the brain is influenced by both mind and relationships." From the IPNB point of view, "this triangle embraces our ground of being."

To which we naturally want to ask, "what came before that?," or "What is beneath that ground?" Which is like asking a physicist, "What came before the big bang?" The physicist cannot answer the question, not because there is no answer, but because his model cannot venture beyond its own horizon. Which is entirely appropriate. We are not the village atheist. We do not demand that science be religion, or that stones turn to bread.

Now, if man is an image of the ultimate reality, and vice versa, we would have to conclude that the Absolute is similarly a kind of dynamic process of one-in-threeness. Or, it is oneness with interior relations.

Don't worry, we haven't forgotten about music. If we were playing the Glass Bead Game, we might ask the question: what does all of this say about music? Or, how does the reality of music relate to interpersonal triobiology?

Zuckerkandl provides a clue in the form of another question: "If music does not belong in the external world, which physics investigates, nor yet in the inner world, which is the subject matter of psychology, where does it belong?"

Referring back to our interpersonal neurobiological trinity, I would say that it must belong to the same space in which relationship occurs, or between world and neurology.

"Whereas musical tone is always localized in outer space, the localization of sensations of vibration takes place in our own body" (ibid.).

In other words, there are the exterior vibrations that resonate with our own body, which are then seemingly re-projected into the space from which they originated, in a kind of circular movement. The same is true of vision, or of any sense, really.

Even with headphones one does not experience music as something coming from a localized source, nor from in between the ears. Rather, a field is perceived beyond the boundaries of the head.

In audiophile terms, this is referred to as the "soundstage." A good stereo set-up will recreate a wide and deep soundstage, whereas a mediocre one will sound more like it is merely coming from speakers. Or in other words, with a good system the speakers "disappear" into the image they reproduce.

Now, I wonder if life is the same way? Some people have a wide and deep lifestage, whereas others live in a cramped space whose ideological source can be easily identified. Looked at in this way, the purpose of a liberal university education, for example, would be to sell you a cheap stereo in which the higher dimensional image of the world collapses into a two-dimensional facsimile.

Open Thread

Because if the Conspiracy didn't occasionally get the upper hand, it wouldn't be much of a game.