Obama's Credo: If You Can't Denounce Reality, What Can You Denounce?

Yesterday we spoke of our existential prison, in which we are seemingly bound by relativity, hierarchy, identity, and contingency: in short, we are not God, we float between the terrestrial and celestial, and we are who we are unless we are (more or less) someone else.

Of course, not everyone regards our cosmic home as a prison. There are other metaphors one could employ, for example, the Jewish idea of "exodus" (from slavery to freedom) or the closely related Christian idea of a "journey" (from man to God). There is also the Hindu/Buddhist idea of liberation from ignorance or awakening from illusion, or the SubGenius principle of increasing one's Slack.

Only the Gnostic -- in whatever form -- sees the world as a hopeless prison. Premodern gnostics attempted to escape the prison via radical transcendence, whereas modern politico-religious ones do it via radical immanence.

Looked at this way, one can appreciate the formal identity of, say, the ancient cult of Manichaeism and the modern one of Anthropocentric Global Warming.

In both cases, the cultist leaves his human limitations behind -- for he cannot tolerate the tension of living in the ambiguous transitional space of consciousness and history -- and imposes a definitive form on reality. For him, "The Beginning was a mistake to begin with and the end of the gnostic story will bring it to its End" (Voegelin).

Look how Obama, for example, keeps denouncing the very conditions he has aggravated -- e.g., unemployment, "income disparity," race relations, etc. He does this because he doesn't know any other way to engage the world except to attack it. Critique and denounce, critique and denounce, even if he is implicitly denouncing himself.

Remember a few of weeks ago, when Clinton denounced the Defense of Marriage Act that he had signed into law? Same deal. He also denounced the era of big government before he helped expand it to unprecedented size and intrusiveness by supporting Obama. Doesn't matter. He'll denounce it again when Hillary runs for president and needs to attack the future reality she helped bring into being.

Remember, it's not really the problem they attack, but reality. Who, for example, is naive enough to believe the left actually cares about racial discrimination, or education, or unemployment, or healthcare, or women?

In truth, there is always "ample reason to be dissatisfied with the order of existence" (Voegelin). We all want to improve things, but the Gnostic's "resistance to disorder transforms itself into a revolt against the very process of reality and its structure...."

And "at the extreme end of the revolt in consciousness, 'reality' and the 'Beyond' become two separate entities, two 'things,' to be magically manipulated by suffering man for the purpose of either abolishing 'reality' altogether and escaping into the 'Beyond,' or of forcing the order of the 'Beyond' into 'reality'" (ibid.).

The latter is the preferred method of modern political gnostics, and is their motive for the ceaseless critique of reality, even -- or especially -- when they are responsible for it. For example, the War on Poverty began in what, 1965? During a senate hearing, President Johnson's point man in the war, Sargent Shriver, was asked how long he thought the War would need to go on before eradicating poverty: oh, about ten years.

Instead, they have set up an ineradicable infrastructure for generating and perpetuating poverty, and with it, the assurance that they will always have that reality to attack.

It's the same with racial grievance: as soon as one differentiates group outcomes via statistics, one is assured another permanent reality to attack, for groups will always differ in outcomes.

Likewise, in a free society -- or in the absence of a totalitarian state -- income disparity will be inevitable, and so long as nature has a say in the matter, men and women will differ in fundamental ways.

Speaking of impossible realities, the remodeling pests are here again. I gotta get outta' here. To the park!

On the Nature of Our Prison

Man is obviously imprisoned, or chained to certain necessities, but people differ as to their nature. For example, in an ironic comment, Schuon said something to the effect that man is condemned to transcendence. Ho!

But for the materialist, this is utterly untrue. Rather, he is condemned to immanence -- i.e., to a completely intramundane existence -- and has no access to transcendence at all.

Which is funny, because if man really has no access to transcendence, he wouldn't even have a name for it. One might say -- no, one must say, in order to be consistent -- that if transcendence doesn't exist, man cannot know it. For to know it is to touch the very transcendence one denies.

Nevertheless, it is this question of transcendence that fundamentally divides left and right, or conservative liberals and illiberal leftists.

The question of transcendence is closely related to that of language -- or to symbolism more generally. When we were more animal than human -- remember? -- it was quite frustrating to be unable to symbolize our subjective states and communicate them to those around us.

But gradually we were inducted and plugged into our culture's symbolic matrix, which was a huge relief. No longer were we reduced to shrieking and throwing tantrums in order to get attention. In short, we were no longer leftists.

However, some people confuse this liberation with a new kind of prison. We call them "deconstructionists." True, language is a kind of prison, if you choose to look at it that way. It is clearly a limitation, just as musical scales are a limitation on sound. But if we deconstruct the scales in favor of producing random noises, is this a liberation? Or is a return to the anarchic prison from whence we came?

Just so with language. Or logic, for that matter. One can deny aristotelean logic, as does the postmodern rabble, but this only ends up creating a cognitive hell from which escape is impossible.

So yes, we are imprisoned. We have already stipulated that. I think Schuon has provided the most succinct description of the outlines of our cosmic prison. In fact, I posted on this subject about four years ago, and since I'm squeezed for time again, I think I'll just playgiarize with myself for awhile:

Schuon goes into what he calls four essential limitations or "infirmities" of the soul. The first is the Biggest, which is why it is enshrined in the First Commandment: sorry, but you are not God. You are "creature, not Creator, manifestation and not Principle or Being."

In fact, only the godless can be unaware of the fact that they are not God, which is probably the greatest source of their political mischief. As Obama might say, "if I had a God, he'd look like me."

Two, we are not angels. We are not celestial beings but mid-terrestrial ones. We are not at the top of the vertical hierarchy, nor are we at the bottom (unless we choose to fall even further than where we begin).

Rather, we are somewhere in the middle -- which, of course, goes to the issue of free will, as we are suspended halfway between our better and worse selves. A saint is a man who has more or less succeeded in elevating himself to the border between middle and top, or time and eternity. Thus, he is like an angel on earth.

Third, I am me and you are you. We are different. Thank God! And I mean this literally, for our individual differences -- at least for the Christian -- are not accidental or purely contingent.

Rather, our differences are essential; paradoxically, our contingency is a kind of absolute in miniature. For those of you with more than one child, this is obvious. The differences are a blessing, not a curse. Every face is unique, and yet, a member of the human family. God has counted every hair on your head. We're all different to him (which is the ultimate source of our differences, in that we are different ideas of God). And yet mankind is one.

Fourth are the differences that are not essential but contingent. These include mind parasites, which mostly result from the scars of misbegotten relationships and assimilations along the way. They are "accidental infirmities" that cause a man to either sink beneath himself or become someone else entirely. The problem with a mind parasite is that it's not you, only pretending to be. It is a difference that is peripheral, i.e., from earth (or lower), not from celestial central, i.e., the principial realm.

Now, anyone can see the bloody mayhem that results if we don't keep these categories straight. The leftist -- because he turns the cosmos upside down and inside out -- begins with #4, the wholly relative, accidental, and contingent, and then elevates it to the highest reality.

Again, this is why the Democratic party is the party of cranks, weirdos, freaks, perverts, misfits, losers, reactionary rebels, rebellious conformists, tyrannical punks, and the generally barbarous. (It also attracts -- let's be fair -- a great many basically decent but just LoFo and easily manipulated folks).

If you've followed me this far, then you will understand what Schuon means when he says that "Relativism engenders a spirit of rebellion and is at the same time its fruit. The spirit of rebellion, unlike holy anger, is not a passing state, nor is it directed at some worldly abuse; on the contrary it is a chronic malady directed toward Heaven and against everything that represents Heaven or is a reminder of it."

Tell me about it! The leftist is either in rebellion against God, and therefore human nature, or against human nature, and therefore God. Either way, he always confuses a prison break with solitary confinement for eternity. But why oh why does he want to force the rest of us to join him?

[T]he primordial and normative attitude is this: to think only in reference to what surpasses us and to live for the sake of surpassing ourselves.... Not to acknowledge what surpasses us and not to wish to surpass ourselves: this is... the very definition of Lucifer. --F. Schuon

On WTF?! is Wrong with Man: Hx, Sx, Dx, Rx, Tx

Or History, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Prescription, and Treatment. But what if the doctor is a cultural pathologist and the disease is mankind?

We begin with the perennial question asked by every person of soundmind, just WTF is wrong with man?!!!

The Bible -- i.e., Genesis -- has its answer, and it's a serviceable one as far as it goes. However, rabbis are still arguing over exactly what man did to incur his existential guilt. In fact, this is one of the pervasive themes of Finnegans Wake, popping up every few pages without ever specifying exactly what HCE is guilty of. He's guilty -- or at least guilt-ridden -- to be sure, but of what?

The whole book is an absurcular "dreamlike saga of guilt-stained... humanity," freely conflating "Lucifer's fall, Adam's fall, the setting sun that will rise again, the fall of Rome, a Wall Street crash. It is Humpty Dumpty's fall, and the fall of Newton's apple.... And it is every man's daily recurring fall from grace" (Campbell).

In these diverse examples, the one common term is fall, which is a simile borrowed from the world of three-dimensional space. In the natural world there exists gravity, which pulls objects downward. Just so, there is something clearly analogous at work in vertical space -- a kind of psychopneumatic gravity which fuels our fall. Or at least that is our preluminary hypotheosis.

Then again, modern physics has revealed that gravity is actually an effect of the curvature of space. I wonder if there is an analogous curvature in vertical space?

I know of at least one enigmatic pneumanaut who says there is, Boris Mouravieff. Can't track down the exact reference, since my books are scattered hither and yon due to the remodel. But he says something to the effect that there is a kind of entropy at work in human affairs, and that in the absence of regular jolts from the booster rocket of grace, we will find ourselves right back where we started -- as if vertical space is indeed curved.

We'll come back to this idea as soon as we get there, but pay attention to the fact that human spiritual growth can only occur in an open system -- in a system open to transcendence, precisely.

So, I wonder if it is helpful to think of the Fall as an effect of the curvature of pneumatic space? This would account for the obscure source of our guilt. In the case of HCE (a symbol of mankind, i.e., Here Comes Everybody),

"he committed an indecorous impropriety which now dogs him to the end of his life-nightmare." At times "he is said to suffer from an obscure disease, suspiciously venereal, a physiological counterpart to his pyschological taint" (bearing in mind that "venereal" is related to venus, or love; HCE seems to be guilty of loving the wrong thing[s]; could it be that his love is oriented in the wrong direction vertically?).

"Unquestionably his predicament is of the nature of Original Sin: he shares the shadowy guilt that Adam experienced after eating the apple. It is akin also to the bewilderment and confusion that paralyze Hamlet, and it is cognate with the neurotic misease of modern times" (ibid).

Ah, now we're getting somewhere, i.e., how this vertical fall manifests in contemporary dis- and misease. Campbell says that HCE "is torn between shame and aggressive self-satisfaction, conscious of himself both as bug and as man.... He is a living, aching arena of cosmic dissonance, tortured by all the cuts and thrusts of guilt and conscience." But enough about Anthony Weiner.

A recurring tribunal accuses HCE of something, but "in the last analysis, the universal judgment against HCE is but a reflection of his own obsessive guilt; and conversely, the sin which others condemn in him is but a conspicuous public example of the general, universally human, original sin, privately effective within themselves."

One is reminded of Chris Matthews' recent magninnymous apology for racism on behalf of All White People. I mean, what's this guy hiding (and not very effectively)?

But let's not lose sight of our target, the maninfestation of spiritual pathology. I mean, we're all on a spiritual path, aren't we? It's just that in some cases the path leads down into a brimrose primstone lane of pathology. Apparently this latter path is wide and broad, while the other is small and narrow.

I think Voegelin was, above all else, a kind of historical, cultural, political, and anthropological pathologist. He recognized that "it is a matter of life and death for all of us to understand the phenomenon" of this pathology, "and to find remedies against it before it destroys us" (Voegelin).

In our day, the pneumopathology -- the vertical fall away from the transcendent order -- primarily appears in the from of ideology:

"Ideology is existence in rebellion against God and man." Conversely, philosophy -- or mental and spiritual health -- "is the love of being through the love of divine Being as the source of its order. The Logos of being is the object proper of philosophical inquiry; and the search for truth concerning the order of being cannot be conducted without diagnosing the modes of existence in untruth" (emphasis mine).

Why the emphasis, Bob? Because "the movement toward truth starts from man's awareness of his existence in untruth" -- one might say awareness of his fallen existence. But in any event, "the diagnostic [Dx] and therapeutic [Tx] functions are inseparable..."

To put it another way, just about any comprehensive history book on most any subject will inform the would-be pathologist that the patient, man, is sick. And the sickness always involves untruth, say, the systematic untruths of Marxism, or fascism, or National Socialism, or scientism, or positivism, or leftism, or Islamism (the latter with some modifications due to its foe-religious trappings).

The symptoms of this illness include distrust, envy, alienation, ingratitude, rage, entitlement, oppression, auto-victimization, and denial of nature, man, and God (these latter three forming a naturally supernatural trinity -- i.e., man is a kind of middle term who is always dialectically related to nature and God).

And the treatment for each of these involves turning around and facing up and out (toward the transcendent order) instead of down and in (to a world of pure -- and therefore meaningless -- immanence).

To be continued...

I Am Obama, Destroyer of Slack!

Squeezed for time.

What does that even mean?

It means first of all that man has free will, because insight into necessity proves it. And as necessity crowds out freedom, time is transformed into something merely to be endured. At best it is neutral duration; at worst it is dread.

However, most people seem to experience dread at the other end of the temporal spectrum, when they have too much time and therefore freedom -- one might also say being. No, I can't relate to these types, but I do understand them, because there is no question that doing is one of man's primary defenses against being.

But the latter can't really be being, can it? I say this because we are assured that being is good. Only a true Gnostic believes otherwise, but if such a person has the experience of maleficent being, the maleficence must be in the self, not in being.

No wonder then that these types habitually try to escape the self via doing, or that a substantial number of them become ideologists, activists, and other existential pests. Activism is to ideology as non-doodling is to being. The activist is forever trying to put us out of his misery. It is what the left does.

Obama for example, has made a fortune from his warped version of "public service," to such an extent that he need never -- in his private life -- be compelled to do anything he doesn't choose to. In other words, for him, there are no external constraints on his freedom (barring physical threats from his bitchier half). Why then is he so interested -- obsessed -- with limiting ours? Exactly what is going in in the heart of such a disordered person?

Obama doesn't have to worry about the cost of his own healthcare. But because of him, I am robbed of freedom -- i.e., I have to work more -- because I have to earn more money to pay for the type of insurance he compels me to have.

It reminds me of the classic essay by William Graham Sumner, On the Case of a Certain Man Who Is Never Thought Of:

"The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D."

In other words, be-badding liberal do-gooders get together in order to decide what I must be forced to do in order to appease their conscience and make them feel good about themselves. Or, they want to eliminate a portion of my slack in order to give it to people who have no idea what to do with it.

In this context, remember what was said above about the maleficent being of these individuals, who attempt through "activism" to transform their own inner darkness into light.

No, it never works. I mean, imagine Anthony Weiner, or Eliot Spitzer, or Bill Clinton -- men who have failed the rudimentary step of governing themselves -- presuming to govern the rest of us! Just on a common sense level, does anyone doubt that Weiner isn't so much running for something as running away from himself? Wouldn't you?

Sumner: "The radical vice of these schemes... is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests... are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man" (which is of course where Shlaes got the title for her excellent book).

This has the perverse effect of slowly transforming the United States from the land of the free to the land of the compelled. But freedom is simply not a value of the left. Rather, equality -- which is at antipodes to freedom -- is. Obviously, equality -- i.e., equal outcomes -- can only be imposed. The left's central delusion is that everything should be equally distributed, whereas in reality, nothing is.

Back to time and being, necessity and freedom. Voegelin observes that such terms will be reduced to nonsense if we forget that they "explicate a tension of existence, and are not concepts denoting objects."

He goes on to say that "There is no such thing as a 'man' who participates in 'being' as if it were some enterprise that he could as well leave alone..." True, we can have more or less being, but the limiting factor is on the side of man, since being is always being.

We are familiar with the apophatic idea that everything we can positively affirm of God must be wrong, so that the least inaccurate approach is to say what God is not.

But in a sense, the same thing applies to man, for "At the center of his existence man is unknown to himself and must remain so, for the part of being that calls itself man could be known fully only if the community of being and its drama in time were known as a whole" (i.e., at the "end" of history, when time has exhaustively disclosed itself).

But "man's partnership in being is the essence of his existence, and this essence depends on the whole [O], of which existence is a part." And "knowledge of the whole" is obviously precluded, for we are not God -- even if we cannot avoid being in permanent dynamic tension with God.

So, this is all by way of saying that I'm squeezed for time and therefore don't have enough freedom to radiate a post from being central.

(A related essay by on the slack shortage created by the left.)

Compulsory Utopia and the Lunar Eclipse of Reality

About the "inverse esoterism" of the left. In the real world, vertical space is characterized by the descending and ascending energies we call (↓) and (↑) -- or just say grace and effort, if you want to keep the arrows out of it.

But the purpose of the arrow symbols is to avoid saturating the space with concepts, so as to keep it clear for the acquisition of experience. In other words, the concept of "grace" is based upon an experience that billions of human beings have had. But if one concretizes the word, then one's preconceptions can actually interfere with, or eclipse, the experience.

More generally, everything about religion was originally rooted in experience. Or, put conversely, nothing about it should be inaccessible in principle to experience -- at least someone's experience.

For example, I am not personally a saint. But I am utterly convinced that some people are -- that they have undergone the process of sanctification to its further reaches. And even leaving the existence of the saints aside, we can all have the experience of the sacred -- or of purity, or of holiness -- so we have only to imagine what it would be like to more or less be in that space all the time.

Reality is what persists even if one doesn't believe it. Therefore, if the vertical dynamism of (↓↑) is real, it cannot disappear just because some ideologue refuses to acknowledge it. Thus, in the words of Niemeyer -- an acolyte of Voegelin who some say understood Voegelin better than Voegelin --

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

Fascinating. Tell me more.

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

This is what we might call "false ↑," in that it is formally quite similar to the religious person's recognition that there is something wrong with the world, and by extension, himself. Thus, it sponsors the urge to transcend both self and world -- or to be in the world but not of it.

But the leftist reverses things: he is still proudly of the world, but no longer in it. Rather, he is now -- without realizing it, of course -- in philosophical fairyland, relaxing in the comfort and safety of his own ideological delusions.

Now, if he would only stay there, he wouldn't be such a pest. But just as comedians secretly long to do drama, tenured activists -- or the media-politico-academic industrial complex -- aren't content to orally gratify one another, but want to screw around with the rest of us.

In short, there is the matter of that second arrow, (↓). What happens to it? Niemeyer: "the second movement pulls norms pertaining to the phantasmal realm and its present unreality into the world of experience and orients activities by them."

D'oh!

It's the difference between evangelizing and compelling, or between religious freedom and tyranny. Say what you want about my jehovial witticisms, but when I knock on your door -- or rather, you on mine -- I don't drag you in and force you at gunpoint to accept my worldview.

Not so the meddling ↓deologue, who wants to rearrange your world -- and your head -- down to the last detail. Every hair on your head is counted -- and that's a threat!

You see, the leftist's (↑) has given him a special insight into the nature of reality and the destination of history, so it would be cruel and uncompassionate for him to deny us the benefit -- the grace (↓) -- of his vision.

Note that the leftist's orientation is the precise opposite of philosophy. True philosophy involves a love of both reality and truth, i.e., it is "philo-ontic" even prior to being philo-sophic.

But ideology is miso-ontic and therefore miso-sophic -- always involving hatred of the existing world and possession of its secret truth. And if you do not know the secret -- which you obviously don't, or you wouldn't understand this blog -- it is only because you have been brainwashed by -- by whatever is expedient, e.g., the patriarchy, white privilege, heteronormativity, imperialism, Christianism, etc.

In other words, the leftist -- as always! -- accuses others of precisely what he engages in, which is to say, eclipsing reality by escaping into ideology.

In the western tradition, politics is "a matter of action within a world which [man] knows not to have made himself" (ibid.). But the ideologue "fancies himself engaged in making a world that so far has not had any being. Teleologically speaking, political practice is switched from the time dimension of the present" toward "the making of a preknown future."

Therefore, from the warped perspective of these pestilent Emissaries of the Future, "the present is something to be removed" in favor of "the phantasmal future whose origin is in the maker" -- the human maker.

You can't say Obama didn't warn us: on the eve of the 2008 election he told us to prepare ourselves for a fundamental transformation of the United States.

Bottom line: we hold very different truths to be self-evident, i.e., those of the founders at the beginning vs. those of the gnostics at the end of history. For the gnostics, the founders are just old (and white and male and European and rich) and in the way.

As a last asnide, the idea that human beings may gang together in the form of a state and redeem history on their own might be the most impressively pathological one in man's cognitive toolbox. It has certainly been the most deadly.

Related: "There is a puzzle before us. We are at the beginning. What are the steps to re-instill an aspirational and moral culture to all our people?... And how do we keep the vandals from ever-scrambling our efforts?

".... [P]erhaps we will have to teeter at the abyss before there can be an American Awakening.... A rejection of the addiction of dependency. An embrace that all your neighbors and countrymen are at Liberty to pursue their own happiness without your interference...."

Bob's Famous "I Have a Reality" Speech

I am always struck by the inverse parallels between leftism and legitimate religion. Man's nature is to be religious, and he cannot rid himself of this orientation, any more than a fish can rid himself of water and still presume to swim. We've all got it in us, but it just comes out in perverse ways in those obnoxious, irreligious weiners.

To quote Schuon, just as "the wings of birds prove the existence of air," man's religious response "proves the existence of its content" (in a proportionate way, of course, conforming to the intrinsic nature of the Mystery; we are not suggesting that religion poses no challenges at all!).

For a normal person, the shadow of a cat will spontaneously "prove the presence of the real cat" -- even if the cat is not seen -- so the crank who demands proof is frankly a little off. He's missing something that is beyond obvious for the vast majority of human beings. But if he wants to spend his life trying to prove cats don't exist, go right ahead. After all, the creator gave us free will.

For example, who is more moralistic than the leftist scold who pretends all morality is relative? In Between Nothingness and Paradise, Niemeyer quotes Lenin, who wrote that for the communist, "morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle," and defined by "that which serves to destroy the old exploiting society..."

With these irreligious religious principles in mind, we can understand the inverted morality of the left, for example, vis-a-vis the George Zimmerman case.

For the leftist, morality is deduced from the class struggle -- or, in more contemporary terms, from the distinction between victims and white privilege. As such, the logic of deduction demands that the victim -- Zimmerman -- be transformed into an intrinsically guilty "white" person, and that the thuggressor -- Martin -- be transformed into an innocent child.

This is obviously a perversion of universal principles of morality, which apply to particular acts, not to universal groups. In other words, the left sneaks the principle of universality -- and absoluteness -- into the group (which doesn't even exist in any concrete or homogeneous way). I don't exonerate Zimmerman because he is a "white Hispanic," but because there can be no natural law more natural than defending oneself from a vicious human animal pounding one's skull into the pavement.

In the real world, the most dangerous place for a black child is in his mother's womb, and the second most dangerous place is among other black (male) children and young men. But these are empirical and statistical observations that cannot be deduced from leftist principles. Indeed, they are hatefacts (I believe coined by Greg Gutfeld), so to notice them is to expose oneself as a hater. It's so easy to be a leftist!

But this is what the ideologist does more generally: that is, deduce reality from his principles, instead of actually experiencing reality. This is a constant danger to human beings, because we are indeed situated in the space between the empirical world and general principles. It is easy to default in one direction or the other, but to succeed in doing so is to eclipse experience.

This applies not just to the left per se, but to all ideologies, say, Darwinism. Anyone can see the partial truth of natural selection, but what spiritually normal person can take the vast leap of faith required to elevate Darwinism to a total explanation and thereby contract the horizons of subjectivity to a virtual nothing? By comparison, faith in the Incarnation is just a step away, requiring no great leap over chasms of contradictory data and experience.

I was thinking too of how the left inverts the great Nothing at the heart of the cosmos. What this means is that the left doesn't just mimic the exoteric aspects of religion, but even -- or perhaps especially -- the esoteric.

In fact, one might say that genuine religion is esoteric by implication, whereas leftism is esoteric in principle, deriving its exoterism -- i.e., activism -- by deduction. This goes along with Voegelin's (among many others) observation that ideologies are modern forms of Gnosticism that always vouchsoph a hidden knowledge about the secret order of the world.

The progressive, for example, presumes to know the direction of history (even though his materialism forbids the existence of any transcendent goal or purpose). At any rate, the idea that one may tell truth from a calendar is so 19th century! Nevertheless, it doesn't stop the left from, for example, redefining marriage based upon their special insight into the direction of history.

Note also that the left, because it overvalues a narrow kind of surface cognition, relies upon the "ignorance" of realities so deep that it is difficult to put them into words. For example, until the last couple of decades, no one thought it necessary to explain why marriage is limited to members of the opposite sex.

If every cultural institution needs to be exhaustively explained and defended, then nothing can be so explained and defended -- certainly not "homosexual marriage"! But that is another hatefact, because leftist moral deduction again demands that existing structures of exploitation -- AKA the real world -- be abolished.

About that great Nothing alluded to above. Oscar Milosz had the proper sense of it, writing of how modern man has repudiated this transcendent No-thing, the "only intelligible container of a universe which is as free and as pure as God's thought, the Nothing superior to any notion of finite and infinite" (quoted in Caldecott).

For the apophatheads the left, the real being of the world is located in the future they wish to bring about. Meanwhile, there is just non-being and alienation from that blissful state -- e.g., the "black alienation" described by Obama in last week's infantile discourse on race (no offense to infants).

This sets up the present world as a kind of bad nothing, for which reason, say, Michelle Obama could honestly affirm that her very first experience of being proud of America occurred with her husband's political success in 2008. Prior to that? Nothing.

But this is what happens when one rejects existing reality for possible ones. Martin Luther King had a dream. But he also had a reality.

For Marx, man is labor. This is a rather startling and nightmarish inversion of the Raccoon view that man is ultimately slack, which is at antipodes to labor. Rather, it is an end in itself, and therefore a means to nothing.

For the Raccoon, the most useful things are the most useless -- like this post -- having no purpose or utility but to perhaps dilate the present moment and open out into the great wide Nothing-Everything. I mean, if you can't enjoy the now, then what -- and when -- can you enjoy?

Which reminds me. They used to say the aristocracy lives for the past, the bourgeois for the future, and the lower classes for the now. But contemporary leftwing success depends upon alienating everyone from the now, and instead living for the impossible Sugar Candy Mountain of the future. Like Obamacare, the dream must be deferred, on pain of revealing itself for the nightmare it is in the present.

Oases of Slack in the Ideological Desert

I find myself in that neutral blandscape between what I had been blogging about and what I will be or could be blogging about, but with no impulsion to proceed one way or the other.

In fact, "impulsion" is the wrong word, because it only works when it is an attraction. Trying to push one's way in is like trying to press Jello through a small hole -- a hole called the present. I long ago gave up trying to do that. Much easier to be sucked up and in through the hole.

Also, we're still being plagued by the Great Remodeling. Might seem like a small thing to you, but I can't even enter my own liberatoreum today because the hazmat pests are removing the cottage cheese ceiling (which apparently contains an infinitesimal amount of asbestos). Had to remove every last object from the Divine Orifice -- the sacred omphalos of Upper Tonga -- which is beyond overkill, but this is California. I'm sure it's more dangerous walking to the mailbox and exposing oneself to the sun.

So I'm sitting here in utterly unfamiliar blogging territory, at the dining room table, and it's just not the same.

I know. First World Problems.

Every day I have to start all over, but at least there's a trace of continuity. Then again, this condition of wandering in the bewilderness is a permanent feature of human existence in tension toward the divine ground, as Voegelin puts it. I read his Autobiographical Reflections over the weekend, and he says that the essential task of philosophy -- real, literal philosophy -- is to live in the erotic tension toward transcendent wisdom:

"The center of consciousness I found to be the experience of participation, meaning thereby the reality of being in contact with reality outside myself." Thus, human consciousness "is neither in the subject nor in the world of objects but In-Between, and that means In-Between the poles of man and the reality that he experiences."

This obviously cannot be explained by -- or reduced to -- biology, because this mysterious "place" is nowhere to be found in the physical world. Rather, it is specifically in between a physical world and a world of pure transcendence at the other end. Thus the soul is the loving "sensorium of transcendence" (i.e., a love directed toward the transcendent ground).

In the past I have referred to this as the "transitional space" (coined by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott), and it is the discovery, colonization, and expansion of this space that characterizes our human journey -- or exodeus -- through the bewilderness.

The bewilderness -- the desert, if you like -- is this very space, and one cannot collapse this space without cashing in one's humanness to one degree or another. It is always "dehumanizing" to do so, but that hardly stops humans from doing it.

And in our day, the principle way to do it is via ideology, e.g., positivism, scientism, leftism, Darwinism, or any other dogma that freezes us at one end or the other of this Great Divide where all the light gets in.

One cannot turn this space into an object or system, as much as man tries to do so. Rather, it is "a flow of participatory reality in which reality becomes luminous to itself" (Voegelin). Nowhere else but here can the light be seen -- or participated in, to be precise.

What is so shocking is that this mysterious space is ordered. Why should it be ordered? I would say for the same reason we discover order at the levels of physics and biology. "By order," writes Voegelin, "is meant the structure of reality as experienced as well as the attunement of man to an order that is not of his making, i.e., the cosmic order."

To exist outside this order is to exist in a state of alienation, and the purpose of ideology is to "cure" this alienation in a way that only perpetuates itself (which is why, for example, leftism can never work, especially to the extent that it works). Alienation from the divine ground -- or logos -- is not only a "withdrawal from oneself" but "from reason in existence," so no manmade system can put the truthpaste back into the tube.

One who tries to do so must inevitably "arrive at the death of God, not because God is dead but because divine reason has been rejected in the egophanic revolt" -- the latter defined as "defiant self assertion claiming independence from a transcendent ground."

Which would be fine, if the ideologues would simply leave us alone. But "Anybody with an informed and reflective mind" can see that we are "hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language..."

And one "cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion" -- i.e., you can't reason with a liberal. Rather, one can only "make them the object of investigation" (and insultainment, I might add).

We may take comfort in the fact that this is hardly the first time in history that "language has been degraded and corrupted to such a degree that it can no longer be used for expressing the truth of existence" (ibid). Moreover, "there are always enclaves" where one may continue the journey despite "the intellectual terrorism of institutions such as the mass media, university departments, foundations, and commercial publishing houses."

To paraphrase Voegelin, no one -- at least in the west -- is obligated to participate in the aberrations, disorders, deformities, and perversions of his day. But it's a constant struggle against the hostile, infrahuman forces that would compel us to do so.

Circumnavelgazing Heaven and Hell

If "the kingdom of heaven is within," then it is our task to exteriorize and render it manifest. Perhaps we might say that the kingdom of heaven is THE within -- or withinness as such, bearing in mind that there can be no within without a without; or, to say within is to immediately say without, even if the within takes priority.

But the same within may manifest in different withouts. As alluded to yesterday, there is no reason why the soul cannot persist "in some other embodiment appropriate to the environment in which it is placed." Thus, "The spiritual body is not... some sort of ghostly double," but rather, "the whole Spirit-enlivened man in that other environment we call 'heaven.'"

We might say that heaven is the sensorium of God. A sensorium is essentially the totality of one's interior, everything one may perceive, know, feel, and imagine. When one performs a mental status exam on a patient, one occasionally sees what is called a clouded sensorium, which is an essential feature of delirium.

But in reality, our sensorium is always more or less clouded, isn't it? Perhaps not in the upper atmasphere, but herebelow there are winds of passion, fogs of war, icy glances, glacial progress, and many, many shitstorms.

The air is boiling -- sun on my back / Inside I'm frozen girl -- I'm about to crack / They may fix the weather in the world / Just like Mr. Gore said / But tell me what's to be done / Lord, 'bout the weather in my head --Donald Fagen, Weather in My Head

So, we are "enabled by grace" to actualize the divine intention, which is a willing on earth what must be accomplished "instantaneously" in heaven. In so doing, "we become instrumental causes in the matter of our own salvation, which is none other than the extension of his Kingdom," or a "'making outer' of what is 'inner.'"

I suppose it could work both ways. We can have the experience of heaven without -- say, in the beauty of the world -- and assimilate it to the within. Even so, to witness the beauty of the world in all its metaphysical transparency is already to be within the divine presence. Davie writes that the inward -- or vertical -- is not "somewhere else," but rather,

"a space that is cointensive with the outward spread" of the world of things. Thus, "corresponding to every point on the horizontal plane" is "a vital INNER axis."

These are those little wellsprings dotting the landscape, which call out and invite us to the other side. I was just reading yesterday in Voegelin's Israel and Revelation that these were among mankind's first spiritual discoveries. It is probably accurate to say that no culture has been unaware of them, and that we all -- even the most mushheaded atheist -- orient ourselves around them.

These two-way terrestrial power points have a funny Greek name that is just too obvious to merit a gag (for even I have standards): omphalos.

The omphalos is "the navel of the world, at which transcendent forces of being flow into social order." Everybody's got one! It is the "gate of the gods," where "the stream of divine being... flows from the divine source," the "civilizational center from which the substance of order radiates, with diminishing strength, toward the periphery." You might say that this navel is simultaneously an "innie" and an "outie" (okay, so I have no standards).

Really, it is the source of civilizational mojo, and to lose contact with it is to begin the slide into exhaustion, decadence, and auto-destruction. Although a *mythological* construct, like all true myths it illuminates a great deal about our contemporary crisis, because the left attempts to systematically bury, deny, denigrate, and destroy all our civilizational omphaloi and replace them with their own sacred cowpies, e.g., the right to marry one's double, or the right to a dead baby, or the right to beat a neighborhood watchman to death.

To be "in love" is, in a sense, to "share the same interior space" (Davie). Thus, perhaps heaven is "a community of love," characterized by "the mutual internality of those who love one another in God, and God in one another." Intersubjective, only transposed to the highest key.

But if there is heaven, there is hell. Which is what? Schuon has a plausible answer:

"Hell crystalizes a vertical fall.... Those who enter hell are not those who have sinned accidentally, 'on the surface,' so to speak, but those who have sinned substantially or with their 'kernel,'" e.g., "the proud, the wicked, the hypocrites -- hence all those who are the opposite of the saints and the sanctified."

The possibility of a vertical fall implies that the omphaloi run in two directions; or, that there are holes in the horizontal landscape that lead both up and down. I've been in both, so I'm pretty sure about this.

Come to think of it, there is no question that people can mistake the one for the other. Each features a kind of transcendence, except that the downward path engenders the kind of reverse transcendence we see in ideology.

To take the most obvious examples, Marxism and National Socialism drew people into a kind of transcendence, resulting in the hypnotized mob as opposed to the community of love alluded to above. Call it hell on earth.

In this context, an Al Sharpton is indeed "reverend," but in an inverted manner. And his bloodthirsty community of hate is darkness visible.

Likewise, Obama is a transcendent genius.

Resurrection, Mind Parasites, and Transporter Errors

So, if you're still with us, you will understand how and why the Resurrection "is an event not wholly in history."

How is that? Well, "on the one hand, it is the limit of history, the frontier and boundary, the end and the beginning in one." But at the same time -- or timeless -- it must be "that very concurrence of End and Beginning 'entering the horizon of man,' appearing as the limit from which that new corporeality comes into being" (Davie).

Get it? In an analogy we have deployed before, think of a three-dimensional object passing through a two-dimensional plane. As it does so, what is a single entity in "higher" (i.e., 3-D) space will be transformed into a temporal event.

If the object is, say, a sphere, the two-dimensional event will begin with a point that then "grows" into an expanding circle. At its limit it will then begin shrinking back toward the point, before disappearing.

But the 3-D object hasn't actually gone anywhere or become anything other than what it always is: a sphere.

Likewise, God is by definition God. And if we stipulate that he is an object of "infinite dimensions," so to speak, then his passage through history is going to generate some *interesting* phenomena.

Among others (recalling the analogy above), some of his "spatial" dimensions will manifest herebelow in a temporal manner, e.g., "beginning" and "end." But as Jesus says, "I am Alpha and Omega." Down here, Alpha and Omega may appear distinct, but this is analogous to maintaining that the sphere's point and circle are separate events in time: just an uptical illusion.

Bearing this in mind, "if mankind, in all the stages of its evolution, is recapitulated in Jesus, as Iranaeus maintained, the implications of this doctrine are far-reaching and profound" (Davie), to put it mildly.

Profound because it would suggest that what we call "evolution" represents the passage of a hyperdimensional object through our 4-D world. Far-reaching because it would explain an awful lot of orthoparadoxes, wouldn't it?

One cannot help recalling John's remark that if one were to try to document the "many other things that Jesus did," "the world itself could not contain the books that would be written" (21:25). I mean, right? This is precisely what one would expect, given the principle involved.

Also, if evolution is ultimately conditioned by the top, it suddenly makes sense of a doctrine that is otherwise grounded in absurdity. We'll return to this idea later, if at all.

Ah, this I like, because it suggests that God is a little like Thelonious MOnk (or vice versa):

"Resurrection shows the power of God to bring forth harmony at the extreme limits of dissonance" (ibid). They say that MOnk could bend the notes of a piano, which is reminiscent of how God somehow writes straight even with crooked liars.

Another good one: "the final term in the redemptive progression of Birth-Death-Resurrection is not another embodiment in the same environment but the same embodiment in another environment (namely, that of heaven)."

It's kind of the opposite way in which the transporter works in Star Trek:

"Transporters convert a person or object into an energy pattern (a process called dematerialization), then 'beam' it to a target, where it is reconverted into matter (rematerialization)." The transporter creates a memory file of the person's pattern, thus making it vulnerable to various transporter errors.

For example, "Scramblers distort the pattern that is in transit, literally scrambling the atoms upon rematerialization, resulting in the destruction of inanimate objects and killing living beings by rematerializing them as masses of random tissue..."

But in real life, our soul-archetype, or form, or divine clueprint, is again conditioned from the top down. It is not, and could not be, the result of matter or energy patterned in a particular way, from the bottom up.

Rather, the soul is the form of the body, which is why, even if it must always have a body, it may have "the same embodiment in another environment." At least I see no reason why this could not be so. It's like a piece of music: it can be on tape, or in vinyl, or in digital bits, but it's the same musical information "embodied" in different media.

The notion of transporter errors also illuminates the human mindscape. If we begin with the idea that the soul is a kind of trans-energy pattern, the purpose of life would be to manifest this pattern in a resistant environment we call "the world." Mind parasites would represent viral forms that get mixed up with ours, interfering with the ability to "materialize" the soul (i.e., love and create) and interiorize or assimilate the world (i.e., learn and grow).

More generally, the world will throw up all sorts of obstacles to the soul's exteriorization and actualization. Which, within certain limits, is a good thing.

Think of the analogy of sports, which couldn't exist in the absence of the gravity we must overcome in order to run, jump, or throw. Trolls and assouls are like vertical gravity. Up to a point.

Thus the purpose of our daily verticalisthenics and gymgnostics. You may now take a rest. And stay away from the scramblers!

New School History: Imagine a Yout' Smashing a Human Head -- Forever

We left off yesterday in the moment of abandonment -- or eternity of surrender -- between crucifixion and resurrection.

Davie writes that even -- especially? -- an eye witness at the foot of the Cross would have "no answer to Pilate's question, 'What is truth?,'" nor would he have any idea that the question -- which implies a world-weary and cynical subjectivism -- was about to be answered in the most definitive way imaginable -- or broadest way immarginable (Joyce).

Only several days later does the disciple learn that the story hasn't ended (recall what was said yesterday, to the effect that we can never actually know what history is until we have seen its end):

"His senses tell him one thing: this is so. His preconceptions tell him another: this cannot be so. He has seen the humanity of Jesus as the vehicle of his divinity, and now he encounters his divinity as the vehicle of his humanity" (emphasis mine).

In other words, the vehicle of the divinity -- the body, the flesh -- "died." But the vehicle of the humanity -- its form or essence or something -- is here, reorganizing matter -- or something -- in its pattern. What is going on?

Remember, at this point there are no gospels to consult, no Bible to explain the matter. Rather, as alluded to in a comment yesterday, "the believer does not look to the Gospels to explain the Resurrection: it is, rather, the other way about. It is the Resurrection that explains the existence of the Gospels: it is the Resurrection that has become the central explanatory event..."

Again, we cannot know what history is until it has reached its end. Thus, in the absence of a vertical ingression -- something from outside or beyond history -- there is literally no possibility of understanding what it is (or was).

For Voegelin, all of the genocidal mischief of the 20th century was rooted precisely in this pneumopathic error: presuming to know the meaning of history, and then proceeding to make it happen.

Communists, progressives, and Nazis all know the purpose of history. Thus, if you have other ideas, you're just in the way of the future. Trayvon Martin's friend, the ridiculous Rachel Jeantel, couldn't have expressed it better: "The jury, they old. That's old school people. We in a new school, our generation."

This new school not only doesn't teach cursive, but ignores facts, logic, and evidence, none of which matter, since the progressive -- like the Islamist -- already has all the answers and knows the direction and destination of history.

George Zimmerman -- who voted for Obama -- nevertheless finds himself in the ruthless path of progressive history, which, ironically -- if you've ever tried to reason with a liberal -- is exactly like smashing one's head against concrete. The concrete wins every time, unless you have a deeper source of truth or are carrying.

(Recall Orwell's remark that if you want to understand fascism, just imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.)

Voegelin spent his life trying to understand the deep historical structure of such depraved thinking. Yes, we joke abut the media-tenured idiocracy complex (MTIC), but that is only to keep from crying. Here is how he described it in a letter:

"The liberal pastor who denies original sin, the... intellectual who asserts that man is good, the philosopher who argues for utilitarian ethics, the legal positivist who denies natural law, the psychologist who construes the phenomena of life as manifestations of the instinctual life -- they all do not commit crimes like an SS-murderer in the concentration camp -- but they are his intellectual fathers, a very immediate historical cause."

The MTIC may be childish, but they are far from harmless. Rather they are the collective expression of a "destroyed person" which attempts "to establish public, binding validity, which can only be done at the expense of the existing public order." This is where the permanent revolution comes into play, or in other words, the boot to the face forever.

I just flipped to another page, in which Voegelin points out that, in one sense, both Socrates and Jesus are judged guilty by the mob. But that is only in history. Outside history, the mob is forever being judged by Socrates or Jesus.

Likewise, the liberal mob has decided that George Zimmerman is guilty, just as they have decided the Constitution has no standing and God is dead (because they both old school and just impede new school History).

It isn't difficult to look at Obama and see a hand reaching into to your wallet -- forever. But Obamacare reaches directly into your body, just as the educational establishment reaches into the soul, the redefinition of marriage reaches all the way down to the foundation of civilization, and the ceaseless attack on religion reaches up and out to our source. That pretty much covers all the bases doesn't it? Inside and outside, up and down.

Nevertheless, Obama and his mob of wilding scribes and tenured mouthpieces are forever judged guilty by a higher standard.

Perfect (via American Digest):

At the Cutting Edge of the Cosmos, Where the Razoraction Is

We are now up to chapter IX of the book we've been deconscrewing around with, Jesus Purusha. It is here that Davie begins to lose me a little bit, either because he is too fast or too obscure or I am too slow or too dense.

But even if the latter, I agree with Don Colacho's advice to writers (paraphrasing): torture your sentences so as to avoid torturing the reader. Yes, I'm down with making the reader think, but there's a fine line between that and just being lazy, unclear, or confused. Schuon, for example, always leaves an unsaturated space for thought, despite his verbal precision.

True, we're dealing here with ultimate issues -- technically beyond the limits of the cosmos -- so that is a valid excuse. Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Anamnesis, i.e., vertical recollection of the first two, to the point of re-Incarnation. Is it even possible to com-prehend such mysteries, or is it only possible to part-icipate in them via the mode of faith? How much can we know before the living knowledge begins congealing from a fragrant encounter to a smelly little ideology?

In his last book -- appropriately dictated on his death bed, at life's limits -- Voegelin addresses just this problematic:

"As I am putting down these words on an empty page I have begun to write a sentence that, when it is finished, will be the beginning of a chapter on certain problems of Beginning.

"The sentence is finished. But is it true?

"The reader does not know whether it is true before he has finished reading the chapter.... Nor do I know at this time, for the chapter is yet unwritten.... [T]he story has no beginning before it has come to its end. What then comes first: the beginning or end?"

Voegelin answers his own question with the only possible orthoparadoxical response:

"Neither the beginning nor the end comes first. The question rather points to a whole, to a thing called 'chapter,' with a variety of dimensions."

Among others, a chapter has "a dimension of meaning, [which is] neither spatial nor temporal, in the existential process of the quest for truth in which both the reader and writer are engaged. Is then the whole, with its spatiotemporal and existential dimensions, the answer to the question: what comes first?"

We'll come back to that question, but note how the sentence points to the incomplete chapter, the chapter to the unfinished book, the book to the unknown -- or is it somehow known? -- whole, which must be "present" to both writer and reader.

This actually goes to the whole structure of being-consciousness in its relation to the thing we call "history" -- the latter of which being the human stream of being-consciousness as it reveals itself in time.

You could say that the (human) beginning begins precisely with this recognition of participation in the greater whole. For example, where in Genesis it says: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, this is not about God's beginning, but about our beginning in relation to him, or to O, if you prefer. It is a statement about the absolute limit of what we may know about the "beginning." Attempting to go beyond it will only generate paradox and absurdity, i.e., "what was before time?", or "what is outside space?"

So, when Jesus affirms that he is Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, he is suggesting something fraught with metaphysical implications. In a way, he is providing the answer to -- or at least way to think about -- the question, "what is before the beginning and after the end?"

With this prelude in mind, perhaps we are in a better position to understand Davie. For example, we could say that Incarnation represents a beginning of sorts, a horizontal beginning that ends in Crucifixion.

However, these then point before and beyond themselves, to pre-existence on the one hand ("before Abraham was, I am") and to Resurrection. But what comes first? Or is it a single flowing whole vertically encompassing self-sacrificing generation and rebirth?

Don't ask me. The post isn't finished.

Maybe this passage by Davie will illuminate the discussion: in the Crucifixion, "where Jesus hangs, the true center lies. In the pause between upward and downward breath, we are being created: in the pause between Crucifixion and Resurrection there is a cessation, a suspension, of creation. And in that pause, God is abandoning his very Self, abandons the universe to the internal collapse which it must suffer in his absence: for Jesus knows, in the cry of dereliction from the Cross, what it would be like if there were no God."

Or, to put it another way, if this were the END, full stop. If it is the end, then this confers absolute meaninglessness on everything that has preceded it and everything that will follow. It is absolute nihil, nada, zilch, bupkis. A cosmic shutout, with no runs, no hits, and no errors (for there can be no errors in the absence of God).

Thus, "Jesus consents to die in order that our humanity shall no longer be separated from his. In the cry of dereliction from the Cross," Jesus throws himself on the live grenade and "suffers the death of all men, the death of the universe. He takes the supreme risk of love, and that risk is the 'awful daring,' not of a moment's, but an eternity's surrender" (emphasis mine).

Why my emphasis? Because it goes precisely to our question of what is before the beginning and after the end, and therefore reveals the wholeness that conditions both of these human limits.

So: "Must we not say that there is an eternal Passion of Creation enacted in the unfolding drama of the universe, and a temporal Passion of Redemption which is the enactment in time of that eternal Passion; and yet that there are not two Passions, but one?"

I don't know. The book isn't finished. Or is it? You might say that the end occurs somewhere in the suspended tick of time between p. 266 and p. 7.

Which is pretty much where the previous 2,186 posts have come from. Yeah, born again, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

It's a Boy, By Jove!

If any of you were able to unravel yesterday's post -- which I shouldn't have tried to write with one ear on the Zimmerman trial -- you will see how it segues seamlessly into Davie's next chapter, called Purusha-Jesus-Christ (recall that Purusha is the "cosmic person").

We began tapping into this cosmic artery almost exactly a month ago, with a brief reflection on how Jesus might have been understood had he appeared in India instead of Palestine:

"Imagine him surrounded by his Indian disciples on an occasion corresponding to that in which Peter made his confession of faith.... What would an Indian Simon Peter have said in answer to the question, 'Who do you say that I am?'

"I ask you to suppose that the reply would have been, 'Thou art the Son of the living God.'" However, in an Indian context, this would have been understood as Purusha as opposed to Christ (i.e., messiah); instead of Christ-Jesus, the confession (and revelation) would be of Purusha-Jesus.

Of course, in Indian metaphysics, the local self IS (or is not other than) the nonlocal Self, even if few people actually real-ize this experientially. However, Davie suggests that the very possibility of this realization is predicated on the ontologically prior existence of Jesus -- of Jesus Purusha. Thus,

"the primary question is not whether the identity of Atman [read: Son] and Brahman [Father] is personally realized in anyone, but whether it is uniquely dependent on Jesus for realization anywhere. And this can only be so if Jesus is Purusha, and Atman is his very Self..."

It just occurred to me that if we really want to tie this all together, we might relate it to another excellent book, Christ the Eternal Tao. Not sure if I'll have time to do that, so perhaps my prolific colleage, Professor R. E. Viewer, can be of assistance. In one of his nine brief treatises on the subject, he writes

"'Jesus is more Eastern than Western,' said my religion teacher many years ago. That truth rested in the back of my mind for 25+ years. Recently, after three or so years of exploring writings on Orthodox Christianity, this book came under my radar. It carefully presents the idea that the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching) intuitively gained insight into a compassionate, self-giving God -- an inkling into what would later be clarified through the coming of Christ.

"The book is a very thorough presentation of the history of the development of human understanding of God and the fulfillment of this understanding which came with the incarnation of Christ. The second portion of the book is a fascinating, calming journey of poetry in which some of Lao Tzu's ideas are echoed or answered by some of the words of Christ. The similarities are striking!"

"'In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God.' That sentence, the opening of the Gospel of John translated from the Chinese version into English, says it all. Hieromonk Damascene does here what the Church Fathers of the first through fourth centuries did with their ancient Greek heritage: he takes up the ancient spiritual wisdom of the Chinese and uses the insights of long ago to illuminate the New Covenant of the coming of Christ -- the Tao, the Logos -- in the flesh."

The point is, there was (obviously) a historical context for Jesus's appearance, and we have to -- to the extent that it is possible -- separate the merely historical from the truly essential expressed through history. There are times that God makes a vertical ingression and bursts into history, other times when history is just history.

The official Catholic view is that Jesus's appearance in a Greco-Roman context was no accident, but based upon the ideas we're discussing, we could widen this out and place him in a truly world historical context. Looked at in this way, we could stipulate that there exist other revelations, but that Jesus furnishes the missing key that unlocks them.

After all, this is precisely how Jesus is understood in relation to the Hebrew scriptures. For the Christian, these do not stand alone, but are the backward shadow cast by the Omega. Although they existed in some form or fashion long prior to the terrestrial appearance of Jesus, he is nevertheless their explanation, that toward which -- or whom -- they are converging. Only in behindsight could it be seen that Jesus is all over the OT.

(No disrespect to Judaism intended here -- just explicating Christian doctrine; in fact, Voegelin was of the opinion that Christianity actually has two Old Testaments, the Jewish and the Greek.)

Regarding the Greco-Roman OT, consider old Vergil's famous prophecy:

Now a virgin returns, the golden age returns; / now its firstborn is sent to us, down from the height of heaven. / Look kindly, goddess of childbirth, on the birth of this boy; / for him shall the people of iron fail, and a people of gold arise in the world.... / Come soon (for the hour is at hand) to the greatness of your glory, / dear offspring of the gods, great child of Jove himself!

As Balthasar writes, "In Vergil, the subterranean stream flowing from myth into revelation becomes visible for a brief instant" (quoted in Beckett).

Back to Davie: "Thus where Self = Atman and Person = Purusha, the gospel according to Hinduism declares that Jesus is God's Self-in-Person." Furthermore, "if the identity of of Atman and Brahman is actualized historically in Jesus, then the interiority of the godhead is made visible in him."

This would explain how "the self-consciousness of Jesus was such that there is nothing incredible about the statements attributed to him on the subject of his pre-existence," i.e., that before Abraham was, I AM, because before Atman was Purusha IS.

But it probably has nothing to do with the phonetic similarities between Jove and Jehovah, Abraham and Brahman, AUMMMMM & I AMMMMM, or Coon and koan.

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.