Hope, Change, and Suicide

Liberalism, as James Burnham observed 50 years ago, is "the ideology of Western suicide." And although Glenn Beck will never be our cuppatea or muggagrog, he is correct that we are speeding down the historical highway, oblivious to the washed out bridge up ahead.

Which got me to wondering: why do people commit suicide? And more to the point, is there any analogy between individual and collective suicide?

I have only one book on the subject, but I've never read it. I think I picked it up at a library book sale for a buck. It's by the Father of Suicidology, so it looks sound. Let's see if we can learn anything about why our cohorts are so bent on the destruction of western civilization.

Before cracking the book, here is what I know about suicide just based upon personal experience. Obviously it is related to depression, but what is depression? Clinical depression is often characterized by sadness, but more often it is marked by a pervasive sense of meaninglessness. The severely depressed person is devoid of meaning; or, to put it another way, his only meaning is relentless pain. But while it is a psychic pain, it is so intense that it is perceived as physical. Such a person may harbor ideas that he is riddled with cancer or suffering from some other fatal illness. Depression "feels" like death.

One of the most common features of depression is anhedonia, which is the inability to experience pleasure, satisfaction, joy, or any other positive emotion. It is a kind of living hell, because in the absence of pleasure, the person literally doesn't know which way to turn. He can do this or he can do that, but it doesn't matter, so he ends up doing nothing. The doing of nothing is just an outward reflection of the inward nothingness.

The last severely depressed person I evaluated was completely anhedonic. Not only did he have no positive emotions, he didn't have any "negative" ones either. He just felt dead. While not actively suicidal, he didn't care if he died, and had passive wishes that death would simply "take him." It was as if he were pervaded by an absent-positive as opposed to a present-negative.

America is not a sad place. But it is an anhedonic place. To get a sense of this, one would have to "participate" in contemporary America, which the Raccoon refuses to do. When I say that America is anhedonic, imagine being strapped to a chair and being forced to watch its television, or listen to its contemporary music, or read its popular fiction. Any normal person would soon fall into despair and give up hope.

As it so happens, on Saturday I ran out of books. While I have several in the mail, the earliest they would arrive would be today, so that meant two days with no innertainment. Therefore, I did something I hadn't done in many years, which is to set foot in a bookstore. What a dreadful experience! It was the local Barnes & Noble, and it was about as uplifting as shopping for books in Soviet Moscow. The crap people read! It was like being in the cathedral of the Death Culture.

It did yield one important lesson for the boy, however. He's always hearing about how important it is to read, but it all depends on what you're reading. Like anything else, 95% is worthless at best.

Back to suicide. Shneidman makes the important point that suicide didn't exist before the mid 17th century, because it would have been impossible. What he means is that belief in the afterlife was universal, such that killing oneself wouldn't be the end of one's difficulties. Indeed, one might find oneself in even deeper in the soup: "It was simply not possible to extinguish oneself forever," because "the essence lived on."

This implies that only a secularized society can truly destroy itself, for "only those who believe that this life is the only life [can] commit suicide." Conversely, overtly suicidal Islamist movements and regimes aren't suicidal at all, because they are convinced they will be rewarded in the afterlife.

This puts an interesting twist on the "clash of civilizations," because we are fighting with one hand tied behind our back. In other words, Islamists fight with both this life and the next (as no doubt do most of our actual fighting men; it is just that they are led by the likes of the one-worldling Obama).

I wonder of we could have defeated the Soviet Union (or Nazi Germany) had it not been for the fact that they were unyielding this-worlders while we were still mostly both-worlders back then? Was the atheism of national and international socialism a kind of cultural suicide?

Conquest's Reflections of a Ravaged Century is the finest postmortem of the ideological wars of the 20th century I've ever read. What does he say about the subject?

Why does the revolutionary embrace revolution to begin with? It must be because he feels hopeless about the present but hopeful about the radical transformation he wishes to bring about. Hope and change are the lingua franca of every revolutionary, but they are always grounded in a hatred of the present. This is why they become even more hateful after the radical changes, because they never result in the hoped for utopia. Look at how much more transparently hateful Obama has become over the past eight years. It's all he has left.

Conquest cites the example of the celebrated Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who was asked in 1994 whether the Soviet... experiment had been worthwhile, or if he nursed any regrets in supporting it: "You didn't have the option. You see, either there was going to be a future or there wasn't going to be a future and this was the only thing that offered an acceptable future."

In other words, he was utterly hopeless about the world as it existed before the Revolution. The interviewer then asks about the millions of deaths due to famine, and Hobsie responds that even in hindsight, "the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing."

To put it in contemporary terms, if only the magical hope were justified, then all of this destructive change would have been worthwhile!

Indeed, if we continue our present course, someday an Obama supporter will be able to say: "true, we hastened the destruction of western civilization, but if only you could appreciate the magnificent vision of what we had hoped for, you would see that it was worth it!"

Returning to that interview, Hobsbawm is asked, "What it then comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?" Without hesitation he responds "Yes."

So, that's the mentality we're dealing with. I mean, this guy was in the upper echelons of the tenured.

The point is that the secular leftist doesn't have hope for an afterlife, but this hardly means that he lives in "reality." Rather, he just displaces the hope and ends up living in un-reality. Conquest talks about the "unreal assumptions" that drive such people, "a quite different set of motivations, based on a different political psychology."

This being the case, we fundamentally err if we simply project our own psychology into these people, and imagine they have the same motivations. We cannot do it vis-a-vis the left, just as Obama is delusional in doing it vis-a-vis Iran. Such rubes "assume that the light of their own parochial common sense is enough. And they frame policies based on illusions."

These are the same people, mind you, who never shut up about multiculturalism, but Obama treats Iran like the Harvard department of Middle Eastern Studies. He thinks he's dealing with Edward Said.

There are other reasons for suicide, but one can see how they tend to flow from an anti-Christian metaphysic. For example, some suicides occur "when an individual's ties to his community are too few or too tenuous." Being that man is trinitarian and relational right down to the ground, it makes sense that life might be perceived as not worth living outside conditions of intimately relational love.

Sheidman also speaks of a kind of suicide "deriving from excessive regulation of the individual, where the individual has no personal freedom and no hope." Think of Winston in 1984. Is life worth living in the absence of Christian freedom? "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty (2 Cor 3:17). Therefore, where there is no liberty, God cannot get his Word in edgewise. There is no space for the divine freedom. I can imagine feeling suicidal under such dreadful conditions.

Here's another interesting type, what he calls ageneratic suicide: it relates "to the individual's 'falling out' of the procession of generations; his losing (or abrogating) his sense of membership in the march of generations and, in this sense, in the human race itself."

This very much reminds me of the function of Tradition, and also of Chesterton's comment to the effect that we live in a democracy of the dead, or that our true community includes those who preceded us and those who will follow. The left obliterates this thread, thus the casual dismissal of dead white males and the callous destruction (and sale) of living black babies.

There is also aggressive suicide, AKA ultimate payback. I can't help thinking that Obama's anti-American aggression is of this nature.

Then there is the anhedonic suicide alluded to above, which Sheidman calls "apathetic suicide": it "results from a sense of worthlessness," "in a desire to manifest self-contempt, to reject oneself, to put oneself down.... One's life is seen as having a negative value..." It reminds me of this little exchange at Happy Acres:

Ye Shall Be As Frauds

Ideas have consequences. But for the left, fanciful consequences -- what they want -- give birth to ideas.

Which wouldn't be an issue if the consequences were possible, or if we had sufficient information to bring them about, or if life didn't involve tradeoffs.

No worries! The left's fatal conceit knocks down all three in a single stroke.

In short, liberals don't like the idea that the dispersed, local, and tacit knowledge in a spontaneous order far exceeds what is available to any centralized regulocracy. They don't know that in principle, what we can never know dwarfs what little we can know at any given time.

So there's that.

Ever notice that inequality exists? I have. So what? Since liberty and equality vary inversely, absence of equality shouldn't be surprising in, of all places, the freest nation in history.

But since liberty is an "absence," they don't notice, much less value, it. Rather, they simply fill that space with envy, or resentment, or auto-victimization, or some other malevolent psychic presence.

"How," asks Conquest, "is equality to be attained?"

How else? By robbery, only legalized and entrusted to third parties. But doesn't this create a permanent class of unequal robbers? Yes, but four bureaucratic legs good, two free market legs bad.

Here's a whole book devoted to this sorry subject, American Contempt for Liberty. A note to myself says "prosperity foregone is invisible" -- as invisible as freedom forgone, the one following from the other.

As we've been saying, what animates the left is the truism that "capitalism fails miserably when compared to heaven or utopia." But give the left credit: their vision is idealistic. It's only the outcome that's tragic. Conversely, the classical liberal conservative has a tragic vision. It's only the outcomes that are ideal.

"Prior to capitalism" -- and after, as it so happens -- "the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering, and enslaving their fellow man." But with the rise of capitalism, "it became possible to amass great wealth by serving and pleasing one's fellow man" (Williams).

Harry Reid and Barack Obama have become wealthy men in the process of displeasing me and millions of others. In turn, they are at war with those corporations that bring me nothing but pleasure, prosperity, and a long life, e.g., oil companies. "There are literally thousands of examples, such as wonder drugs, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators, of how the common man's life has been made better by those in pursuit of profits" (ibid.).

And what has been given to us by those in pursuit of equality? Again, a permanent bureaucratic class of unequals that promised to end poverty in a generation. Two or three generations later, the poverty level is identical, but the bureaucrats are happy, and the left is pleased to have this permanent class of venal Democrat supporters.

To paraphrase Williams, unlike capitalism, government is a way to pursue self-interest without causing a good outcome. Call it the invisible hand of inefficiency.

We're getting far afield. Back to Conquest. For the revolutionary, it is "in the nature of things that dictatorship and terror are needed if the good of humanity is to be served." Conquest cites the analogy of Aztec priests, who were needed to rip the hearts out of living persons in order to prevent the sun from going out.

Remember this next time the Democrat priesthood howls about what will occur of there is a Government Shutdown! For that matter, think of the billions of dollars funneled to the climate priesthood on pain of being incinerated by the sun god.

I remember in the 1980s, how the world-class assoul Tip O'Neill called Reagan a cold and evil man with "ice water in his blood," and who had no concern for working Americans. Yes, only 20 million jobs created during his tenure in office. In contrast, Obama, who loves the working man, has the lowest workforce participation in history.

O'Neill was a hateful man, but like all leftists, cloaked the hatred behind an idealistic Luv for the Little Guy. "Like all paranoiacs, revolutionists legitimized hatred, which they practiced effectively. They claimed to legitimize it in the interests of humanity..."

A Karl Marx was a thinker and a writer, but only on the surface. Like Hitler, he was primarily a hater, and everything else follows from that.

Conquest cites Dostoyevsky, who wrote of how "'causes' are attractive... because they provide an excuse for behaving badly." As in war, the restraints of the superego are lifted, such that the most primitive impulses are unleashed and legitimized.

Here is a quote from Norman Cohn, written some 35 years before the rise of the Obama cult:

"There exists a subterranean world, where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when that underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes..."

But exactly what "is the mental material into which they insert their ideas, like certain wasps into certain grubs?"

Those of us who were immune to Obama's charm can't answer that question. Rather, only a recovered ideolater could explain what the hell happened to his grubby psyche. But in any event, "intelligence alone is... far from being a defense against the plague," for where would Obama be without the state-academic complex and the MSMistry of Truth?

Let's try to end this post on an optimistic gnote by shifting over to Barron. Surely there must be some good news.

In chapter two, he explains how much we can learn from atheists and other crackpots. For example, they precisely "clarify what the true God is not," and therefore "expose and implicitly undermine new forms of idolatry."

By extension, the left never stops teaching us what is not real, what is not true, and what is not worthy of our respect and reverence.

In reality, we cannot "know" God per se; rather, we can only know a relationship, for "The human being is a relationship to the God who is continually making and shaping him; essential to the good life is an acceptance of this state of affairs," because your life cannot possibly be good if it is not conformed to the true.

"At the heart of original sin, therefore, is the tendency toward self-creation and self-deification and the concomitant refusal to be shaped." Again, that fraudulent serpent in Genesis is the first leftist.

The Will to Paradise

Continuing with yesterday's theme of how to resolve and overcome our pathological and destructive solutions, Conquest reminds us that "the huge catastrophes of our era have been inflicted by human beings driven by certain thoughts."

Therefore, we need to expose these thoughts, but also inquire into why they are so darn appealing. For clearly, the appeal doesn't lie in their being true or effective, but in some deeper wish.

Conquest asks "How did these mental aberrations gain a purchase?" And "Who were the Typhoid Marys who spread the infection." Marx? No, he caught it from Hegel. Hegel? Nah, he had influences that go all the way back to Plato. Plato?

Well, Popper certainly thought so, but he didn't get Plato's esoterism or irony. Still, we could say that Plato misinterpreted is a consistent disease vector, as described in The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization.

But the real problem, as always, is man. There is something in human nature that is prone to detach itself from the Real, which is what Genesis 3 has been trying to warn us about for 3000 years. Any and all destructive ideologies will repeat the archetypal pattern laid out therein.

What are some of the characteristics of this archetypal booboo? I would say that it results in a vertically closed system, or a system closed to the transcendent Other; that it absolutizes the relative, or elevates the finite to the infinite; that it displaces relationship with division; and that it severs complementarities and elevates one side to the ultimate (examples of irreducible complementarities include part-whole, man-God, time-eternity, subject-object, substance-form, etc.).

Most of the particular ideological pathologies flow from these initial errors. For example, everyone believes in paradise, but the sane among us understand that it cannot be attained in this world.

The leftist refuses to believe this, and uses the inevitable flaws of the world -- the world not being heaven -- to justify the drive to utopia. Thus, the world as-it-is becomes one unending excuse to for the revolutionary to destroy -- to "fundamentally transform" -- the world.

This results in countless broken eggs but still no omelet. Therefore, more eggs must be broken. No, it is not a sustainable exercise, because you eventually run out of other peoples eggs.

In France we see the first revolutionary non-omelet and anti-paradise, "in the sense of the complete destruction of the existing order, and its replacement by abstract concepts -- these latter formulated by, and dictatorially enforced by, theorists with no experience of real politics." This then "spread over half the world."

Plus ça change... And the more the left hopes, the more conditions remain hopeless...

"[T]here is something infantile or childish in the whole revolutionary-despotic approach, which is, in effect, based on the simpleminded attitude 'If I were King...,' that it only needs well-intentioned people in power to solve everything by mere decree."

It seems that lies and violence go together like... truth and freedom. For if we cannot appeal to truth-in-freedom -- or the freedom to independently arrive at truth -- then the only alternative is enforcement of the Lie...

No time this morning. School started, lots of traffic, blah blah...

We Can Deal With the Problems of the World -- It's the Solutions that are So Devastating

Ah: one of our problems is affluence, which leaves grumblers and malcontents with too much free time: "Where there are minds with time to spare, there seems no way of avoiding it." Today this noxious tradition persists, with academic "sub-Marxism" and its perverse relatives "still thumping away."

Indeed, think of Obama, who spent his life nurturing dysfunctional thoughts in the liberal kindergorgon, and who, for the past 6.5 years, has merely been putting the fruitiest of these monsters into practice.

History teaches that when intellectuals seek political power, it's time to reach for the second amendment. This is not to imply that Obama is particularly bright, much less informed, only that he is a man who values ideas more than human beings. And to paraphrase Socrates, the unexamined community organizer is not worth letting near the presidency. (If his community gets any more organized, it will rival the Mafia.)

But Obama is representative of a tenured class that is "simply not aware of any general attitudes but its own" (ibid.). Which makes disagreement with them a matter of class conflict, and we're back to sub-Marxism: we are wrong because we are not members of the proper class. (I believe we are seeing a similar class conflict play out in the Republican primaries, i.e., the Establishment that is a priori correct vs. actual conservatives and other outsiders.)

The state produces a class of unproductive people it then employs via the state; but they are not actually unproductive, in the sense that they produce the very statism that employs more of these unproductive and unemployable idlers. This is Vacuous Jerk Circle of the state-academia complex.

Conquest reminds us of Orwell's comment to the effect that "the man on the street is at once too sane and too stupid to fall for the fads of the intelligentsia."

Given our affluence and the slack it brings, one shouldn't be surprised at the combination of intelligence and un-sanity we see in our tenured class. However, "insanity is itself a denial of intelligence" -- assuming, of course, that the mind has a function and a telos, AKA to know truth. Many if not most tenured fölkers would deny this connection between mind and reality.

Jesus has a lot of bright ideas, but he clearly values people more than intellectual abstractions. And when the Hostile Scatterer (Satanas-diabolos) offers him vast political power, he declines.

Nor does Jesus tempt God or try to turn matter (stones) into spirit (bread) -- which is to reduce spirit to matter, a la Marxism. This latter is in turn related to our primordial catastrophe, the persistent Error that doesn't just occur Once Upon a Time, but rather, Happens Every Time. (Note that Genesis doesn't just touch on the genesis of the good, but also explains the genesis of the bad.)

If this post seems a bit scattered, don't worry. We're always up against the anti-cosmic forces of diabolos, aren't we?

So, "The crux is less intelligence than a failure to confront that intelligence with reality -- and even a drive to use that intelligence to deny or pervert reality" (Conquest). Or in other words, intellectuals using their fallen minds to twist reality is our crux to bear. Omniscience for them comes cheap, but we pay the price.

As we said yesterday, assuming we have a right to think, then we have a prior obligation not to bear false witness. Seems obvious, but if it were, then we wouldn't need to have it etched in stone by the finger of God.

Clearly, if man were naturally oriented toward truth, lies wouldn't be so prevalent. We wouldn't propagate them, nor would we be so easily seduced by them. When man falls into a lie, it is generally because a part of him wants to believe it. In short, the intellect is infected by the will -- the will to not know or to know what is not. This again goes to our primordial c., for it is always the same shitty utopia, only the vocabulary changes.

I'm going to be shifting if not grinding gears back and forth between Conquest and Barron, just to show some reader(s) that one cannot separate Christianity from its political consequences. Indeed, Barron explicitly asks the same question we were asking yesterday, "What would political philosophy look like" given "the Trinitarian assumption that relationship is ontologically basic...?"

Again, Jesus is not an intellectual but a... how to put it? For he is not just person, but even prior to that, relationship: there is no person prior to his relating, for a person is the very possibility of relationship. Thus, the cosmos is infused with personhood, as we shall see.

Conquest doesn't come at things from a religious perspective -- which scarcely matters, because to speak truth is to touch God. At any rate, in this other book, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, he writes that the Disaster Area known as the 20th century was disastrous precisely because of the Bright Ideas of intellectuals. In short, we could deal with the problems of the 20th century. It was the solutions that were so destructive and resistant:

"Ideas that claimed to transcend all problems, but were defective or delusional, devastated minds, and movements, and whole countries...." These are abstractions "whose imposition on reality reveals an incompatibility, as engineers say of parts that do not fit, and that can only be made to fit by force, and even then ineffectively and ruinously" (ibid.).

Liberalism: that moment you realize there is no problem that can't be solved by good intentions backed by the coercive power of the state.

But the point is this: to discover what a society worships is to discover what it values most highly, seeks to imitate, and considers ontologically basic. Rome's worship of violent and antagonistic gods thus gives away the game....

Rome is a [read: any] social order based upon the libido dominandi, the lust to dominate, which is so characteristic of the gods Rome honors.... Precisely because God is who he is, the social practices of Communism are dehumanizing. --Robert Barron

Getting to the Bottom of Left v. Right

"How," asks Robert Conquest, "did the mental distortions arise? How did the aversion to and alienation from reality come about? How did the destructive intellectual epidemic strike?"

These are relevant questions, irrespective of whether one is liberal or conservative, because I'm sure you'll agree that one of us is crazy. This is beyond mere disagreement; rather, one of us is distorting the world beyond recognition. One of us has an aversion to reality, and one of us has contracted a psychopneumatic illness that undermines the very purpose of the mind, which is to know truth. To "believe untruth" is intrinsically pathological, like loving evil, doing bad, or creating ugliness.

So, let's keep an open mind about this, for if we are crazy, we want to know about it -- just as we'd want to know if we had a serious illness.

Or would we? Here we need to appreciate the role of denial in human affairs. You could say it is the master defense mechanism, in that each of the others partakes of it. Every defense mechanism begins with denial of a painful truth that is split off, or projected, or compartmentalized, or sublimated, etc.

Or in other words, a defense mechanism is simply a particular way to deny an unwanted truth. There are any number of things to do with truth aside from knowing and bowing to it. (And bear in mind that defending against a truth implies the existence of truth; therefore, to deny truth -- AKA relativism -- must be the most massive defense mechanism of all.)

But the term "defense mechanism" can be misleading, because just what -- or who -- is being defended? And more to the point, it's really more of an attack; defense mechanisms always involve displaced aggression. And ultimately the aggression is directed at reality.

So when Conquest asks "How did the destructive intellectual epidemic strike?", he's on the right track, because he implicitly understands that we're dealing with an aggressive attack.

But why? In another context, Robert Barron writes of the prime characteristics of the being known as the Devil, Satanas and diabolos, which is to say accuser and scatterer respectively.

Accuser. That doesn't sound very nice. Aggressive, rather. "[T]he primary form of reality, on the Catholic reading, is coinherence, the coming together of the many in love. The [aggressive] power that is opposed to this is therefore a dividing, scattering force."

Barron uses the word "coinherence" where we deploy "intersubjective." But the point is the same, and either term goes to the ultimate reality of the Trinity: the Trinity is irreducibly intersubjective, such that each of the persons coinheres in one another; each is a member of the other.

This is where our political opponents are liable to say that we are crazy. You see, in those three paragraphs immediately above, we've stepped into the world of religion, and therefore out of the world of reality.

Which I am trying not to do per se; rather, I'm trying to keep this on a more metaphysical level, such that we can either affirm or deny that the world has a trinitarian structure. I'm treating it here as a principle, not a datum of revelation. If it is true, then it has certain implications and logical entailments. It explains a lot. Likewise, if untrue, then a great many important features of the world will go unexplained.

So instead of dismissing my first principle as crazy, why don't you just show me yours? I don't want to put words into your mouth, but if you are like other self-styled modern folks, then your metaphysic is ultimately rooted in a logical atomism in which everything is intrinsically separate and autonomous: a world of leibnizian monads. This is the implicit order of radical libertarianism. You will notice that it is the last word in being divided and scattered.

Barron reminds us of the majority opinion in Casey v. Planned Parenthood, which rooted the decision in what can only be called a secular revelation: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

Excuse me, but what were you saying about religion?

I believe we've hit bottom here in two senses. Let's begin with the charitable sense, in that we've reached a fork in the ontological road that proceeds left and right.

If you ask us -- or the founders, for that matter -- what is at the "heart of liberty".... Well, first of all, there is no abstract thing called liberty. Rather, there is no right without a corresponding duty, and of the two, the duty must be prior, for why would you ever grant freedom to irresponsible beings?

Oh, right. To get votes.

To say that liberty is the right to define existence in any way that pleases oneself is to embrace a doctrine of the most radical relativism imaginable. In short, liberty means being free of everything, beginning with reality.

But again, in the real world, there is no right without a corresponding duty. Thus, for example, we have the right to free speech. What is the implicit obligation? To be honest. Likewise, we have the right to private property. The obligation? Not to steal it.

Okay, so you have a right to murder your child. What is the corresponding responsibility?

How Did I Become Myself? And Who Was I Before?

I apologize in advance for what will probably be in the short 'n lame category. Feeling the effects of a trifle too much celebrating. Without a doubt the most I've eaten since July of 2004. That would be when the Gagdad pancreas decided to go on strike. With diabetes, it's always an experiment: eat this and drink that, and see what happens. At least now I know.

So, er... delusional thinking in history. Pretty crazy, huh? What's up with that? It's like... wo.

Which reminds me. Back when I was an undergraduate, that's probably how I wrote. I would have no doubt been qualified to contribute to Shit My Students Write.

The other day my son, who will be starting the fifth grade, was asking me when I started to enjoy writing. When I was in the fifth grade -- and sixth, and seventh... and twelfth, etc. -- I was just like him: I had no use for school, and I literally couldn't imagine someone actually enjoying it. I didn't socialize with those people.

That attitude stayed with me through my first stab at college, which ended when I simply quit going in the middle of my junior year. I was already on academic probation and would have been tossed out anyway, so I took matters into my own hands and gave up like a man.

Being that I've related this boring story before, I won't go into the details. But something began changing in me in my mid-twenties, and I still haven't figured out exactly what and certainly why. How can someone completely change like that, especially when not trying to? Rather, it just happened, as "organically" as, say, going from childhood to puberty. It's as if a switch were flipped. Or, it's like type 1 diabetes: one day you make insulin, next day you don't. Decision-wise, you personally are out of the loop.

But how could one be out of the loop of such a consequential life change?

Unless we have much less control than we realize, or that we only pretend to be the master of forces that are not only beyond our control, but unknown to us.

I don't know. Does "late bloomer" cover it?

Then again, there is the Call and there is answering the Call. I won't deny that there was a great deal of work on my end. I suppose the main difference is that what was once work suddenly became play.

That's what I was trying to explain to my son. It actually occurred when I was writing a senior thesis for my BA degree. This would have been in December 1981, to be exact. It was very much a sudden reversal of perspective, or like when you see the duck instead of the rabbit in the drawing. I remember scanning the thesaurus in search of the best word to express what I was attempting to convey, when I had a kind of aha! moment of realization that I was actually enjoying this. It was literally dis-orienting, because now I was the opposite of myself.

No, seriously. Imagine my dilemma. I'm working in a supermarket. I'm lucky to make a good wage, but I am an unskilled laborer -- with the exception of nunchuck and bowhunting skills -- with no delusions that I am anything but. I am not conflicted about this. There is no part of me that thinks the world has misjudged me, or that I actually have some great skill or purpose that has eluded mankind. At best, I'm thinking that someday maybe I'll hate responsibility less than I enjoy drinking beer with my friends, but until that day...

But now it's as if I'm suddenly introduced to another side of me. Even so, for the sake of argument, let's say it's an "intelligent side." Now what? I've systematically ignored this side for 25 years, so it's a little like finding out at age 38 that you can throw a 95 mph fastball. That's nice, but it's a tad late for a career in the big leagues. Sorry, but that boat has left the harbor.

Thus began my cognitive rehabilitation. Fortunately I had no idea how much I didn't know, so I began reading far and wide in a completely haphazard manner, with no recognizable pattern. You know, like today. I knew I had a lot of catching up to do, but I had no practical reason for doing it. There was no plan and no goal. It was completely and utterly Impractical, and still is to this day.

Perhaps we should widen out the perspective and make this more general, especially because I just ran out of time. But what is change, what changes, and how does it change?

Our Laddie of Reality

Anthony Esolen calls upon Our Lady of Reality to have mercy on the "common madness underlying all our troubles. We think that a thing changes because we assign it one name rather than another. A man is a woman if he says he is. Or we refuse to acknowledge that a thing has a nature at all. A man is not a man, because there is no such thing, really."

It's a nice sentiment, but I don't like to trouble the transnatural with things that are wholly in our control, and in this case it is our willful misuse of the gift of language, our logopathic way with words, that causes the trouble. Language, unfortunately, cuts both ways: into truth and falsehood. As someone once cracked, language was given to man in order to disguise his thoughts.

This is certainly why it was given to Obama, or at least the spirit in which he takes the gift. But this just goes to the more fundamentally troubled relationship with language which forms the basis of leftism. Particular illnesses such as deconstruction and diversity are just the final common pathway, the end state of the disease -- similar to how poorly controlled diabetes can lead to blindness, or amputation, or kidney disease, but it's the same underlying derangement of blood sugar.

Likewise, end-stage leftism can manifest in a variety of ways, but beneath them all it's the same spiritual illness.

Take deconstruction, which promulgates the notion that language is a closed system, such that words refer only to other words. It pretends to be a philosophy -- a rational conclusion -- but is really a diseased premise, principle, or axiom. This irrational principle destroys the supernatural power of language right up front, so it's really just a case of garbage in, tenure out.

Likewise any form of relativism such as "diversity," homosexualism, illegal alienism, feminism, etc. Each begins with an unsupportable, magical conclusion, no different than how, say, communism begins with the theory of "surplus value" or National Socialism with the theory of eugenics applied to Jewish DNA.

But as Bertie Russell said in one of our favorite wise cracks, "The worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise."

Yesterday I saw an activist on TV object to the term "illegal alien" because "there's no such thing as an illegal person." This is a particularly clumsy attempt to use language to deny a simple reality, but no more clumsy than insisting that it is possible for two men to live in a state of matrimony, or to increase a man's value by paying him more than he's worth.

"[V]erbal cleverness, unless its limitations are clearly and continuously seen by its possessors, is an unbeatable way of blurring reality until nothing can be seen at all" (C. James, in Conquest). You could say that language comes with a universal temptation; or better, the universal temptation, which is idolatry. If our divine hunch is correct, then behind every logopathology will be an instance of idolatry.

Note how Christianity has a built-in defense against this idolization of language, in that at the center is not a book but a person from which the book is a response and prolongation. The earliest Christians, of course, had no book, for which we can thank God. (The Bible was not canonized until around 400.) The Aphorist has a number of brainslappers to this effect:

When he died, Christ did not leave behind documents, but disciples. Thus, Only loyalty to a person frees us from all self-complacency. But In the hands of the progressive clergy, the Gospels degenerate into a compilation of trivial ethical teachings (Don Colacho).

Just so, western style political liberalism (the freedom that ultimately comes from God) was incarnated long before it was thought about in an abstract manner: "British principles did not arise out of nothing or from abstract philosophy," but "emerged gradually in practice."

In contrast, "it was the theorists and emotionalists who triumphed mentally" in the French Revolution and its moony descendants down to the present day. These descendants include the hyperacademic logobabblers of the looniversity bin who deploy language to destroy itself, like a linguistic autoimmune disorder.

Politics must serve reality. This would qualify as a banality were it not for the liberal activists for whom it is the other way around, such that reality must serve ideology: "All of the major troubles we have had in the last half century have been caused by people who have let politics become a mania." In order for the political maniac to achieve his ends, huge swaths of reality must be denied, excluded, and sealed off (and damaged in the process).

Thus, there is no left wing ideocracy without some form of intellectual and spiritual tyranny: it goes with the terrortory. The left must pretend that things forced upon us by the state are better than the things we would have freely chosen, or in other words, that real liberty is coercion.

The coronerstone of Marxism, according to its own definition, "is the mass, the liberation of which is the main condition for the liberation of the individual." Or in other words, no man is free until all are enslaved.

If our logocentric roots don't grow upword then they sink downworld. Thus, we are faced with "an increasingly irrational conformism, often no longer open to, or even cognizant of, argument.... The new antis [anti-realists] seem to have sunk to an alarmingly lower mental level."

You don't say.

No, really: don't say that. There are no illegal persons but there are criminal thoughts!

Liberal Utopia, or Obama's Word Made Flesh

This book by Robert Conquest on Reality and Delusion in the Course of History is one of the most insultaining works I've ever read. Among other things, it shows that historians are, get this, as deluded as their subjects -- call it left-on-left delusion, or tenure². It would be funnier if it weren't so deadly.

Consider yesterday's murder of the reporter and cameraman. The proximate cause of their deaths is political correctness, for the station was no doubt under pressure to hire a black person, no matter how unqualified or insane.

And more generally, it is precisely the liberal media that ramps up racial tension. The Obama-era race war rhetoric would be deprived of oxygen at once if the liberal media would just STFU about it. But they won't, so they of all people shouldn't be surprised that some deranged blacks will take the rhetoric seriously. They're the ones pouring the gas and giving away matches.

In reading Conquest's chronicle of delusion, the thought keeps occurring to me: by virtue of what principle is all this madness possible? What is the fatal flaw in man decreeing that insanity is always in the saddle? Yes, we can say man is "fallen" and leave it at that. But that's like saying we are prone to illness and death. True, but it leaves out a lot of details.

It occurs to me that one could answer this question with another question, which is simply What is the lesson of history? Since the same patterns keep repeating themselves, it apparently means we aren't learning the lesson.

For example: is it true that Munich = Iran and Obama = Chamberlain?

Conquest makes the point that what was unique about Nazism and communism was that we were dealing with definitionally unappeasable enemies. From our side, -- the side of sanity -- we wanted to believe there was something we could do to make their madness and hatred stop. But there was nothing we could do, for communism was a worldwide conflict between two antithetical systems, just as National Socialism was intrinsically expansionistic.

Islamists cannot be appeased, or they wouldn't be Islamists.

Another point before we get into the details. We all recognize the value of learning history, but to what end? And how much is enough? How do you know when you've learned enough to *get* the point?

I was thinking about this in the context of the founders. They were all learned men who knew their history. But think about how partial, incomplete, and fragmentary it was compared to what is known today! Truly, they knew a tiny fraction of what the google machine places at our fingertips, and yet, it was sufficient to get the Point. To put it another way, let us suppose President Obama knows much more history than did James Madison or Alexander Hamilton or Abraham Lincoln. So. What. For he has certainly missed the point.

Come to think of it, Lincoln famously immersed himself in the pretend histories of Shakespeare. I would suggest that in so doing he knew more about "history" than does Obama. This is because Shakespeare drills down to the invariant human nature that animates history. History is intrinsically complex, but perhaps like physics or the weather, controlled by a limited number of variables.

The most important of these variables is human nature, itself an amalgam of variables.

From the Publisher's Weekly reviewer, with my emphases:

This book "is a frontal assault on the pieties of the left. At its heart is Conquest's critique of a deluded idealization of the Soviet Union and the underestimation of the danger it posed to the West....

"But his targets here are far broader: if dreamy-eyed socialism has died, its ghost lives on, he says, in a mishmash of icons and fetishes..., held together by uncritical utopianism and reducing our intellectual culture to cerebral jelly.... today, these beasts dwell in academic corridors, where professors speak in jargon and channel the repressive spirit of the medieval Inquisition....

"Responding to the war against Islamist barbarians, Conquest assails veneration of the U.N., the EU, the International Criminal Court, a knee-jerk intellectual anti-Westernism and the presumption that benevolent colonial intervention is necessarily bad. This pithy book... will infuriate as many readers as it gladdens."

Who exactly will it infuriate? Oh, just childish and uncritically anti-Western utopians with dream-riddled brains of Jello prone to fetishistic idealization of their simultaneously post- and pre-religious icons, and willing to barbarically repress anyone who fails to bow before them. In short, the Tenured.

Ah, now we're getting somewhere! For that describes one of the invariants of human nature we're after.

Some of the amazon reviewers fit the description, such that it is as if they leapt from the pages of the book. For example, this two word review:

"Fascist garbage."

Or, "When will conservatives start trying to use facts, reason, and common sense? Instead we get vitrol (sic) once more, sometimes disguised as reasonableness."

I would agree that the book isn't perfect, but I'm getting my $2 worth.

"The psychosphere and the logosphere are permeated by concepts, ideas, verbalizations -- a whole apparatus designed in theory to form some sort of contact with reality, but often resulting in reality's being blocked off."

At risk of auto-fellattery, doesn't that sound a bit like your old Gagdad? He often tosses in neologisms like that.

For example, he talks about how we need "general words and concepts" in order to think, but how these can escape "empirical control" and grow into "obstacles against understanding," which he calls brain blindfolds. Good term, but I would shorten it to brainfold, or perhaps I-patch.

In any event, these crocular infirmities and ideological myopias have always been with us: "Ideas insufficiently connected to realities have always been part of the human effort to understand."

Except there is a big part of man that doesn't want to understand, precisely. Indeed, this is their whole reason for being: not even to misunderstand, but rather, to dis-understand. This is what makes them so pernicious and malignant: that they are rooted in a real and enduring hatred of reality.

He touches on this later in the book, writing of how this drive comes "not so much from a devotion to the proclaimed social transformation as from a hatred for the actual" (emphasis mine).

The following opinion will infuriate as many as it gladdens, but I see Obama as a Hater of the Actual -- which is one of the secrets of his "success." An editorial the other day in the WSJ spoke to this (although I do not share the optimistic conclusion):

"No factor" in Obama's successful failure has been "more decisive than his unshakable determination not to let Congress, the courts, the Constitution or a failed presidency -- as America has traditionally defined it -- stand in his way." In short, we have a president who absolutely will not allow reality to interfere with ideology:

"American democracy has historically relied on three basic constraints: a shared commitment to the primacy of the constitutional process over any political agenda, the general necessity to achieve bipartisan support to make significant policy changes, and the natural desire of leaders to be popular by delivering peace and prosperity. Mr. Obama has transformed America by refusing to accept these constraints."

This is how Obama was able to fast-track the liberal utopia we now find ourselves in.

"There are minds that, having risen beyond primitive, unthinking orthodoxies, often merely turn to a rejection of the traditional.... But we often find those who have achieved a critical attitude to the traditional have also adapted a largely, or wholly, uncritical attitude to untried, or even failed, alternatives whose attraction is verbal rather than real."

Thus, Obama hasn't brought about a real utopia, but at least we're living in his verbal utopia, so we got that going for us. It is his -- and the left's -- word made all too flesh.

Grow Up and Behave Like a Proper Child!

I hope the bit about the demystification and re-mysterization of the world wasn't too obscure. As usual, it's meant to be quite literal and experience-near, but since no one talks about it, it can sound esoteric or goofy or cute or something. However, it strikes me as being at the heart of what we call "spiritual growth" or "religious maturity." For example, Schuon writes of how

"Gratitude is a virtue that allows us, not only to be content with little things -- this is holy childhood -- but also to appreciate or respect little things or big things because they come from God, beginning with the beauty and the gifts of nature; one must be sensitive to the innocence and mystery of the divine works."

One might say that gratitude is awareness of a kind of an ontological exchange that is always taking place, such that we are always receiving more than we give.

Elsewhere Schuon speaks of the rhythms (the spiraling thematic repetitions) and stages (the linear ascent) of life. From an elderly but still spry post:

"For Schuon, all natural phenomena are here to convey deeper lessons to us. Thus, for example, our lives are not just divided into day and night, but into seasons: the childhood spring of 'formation and learning'; the mature summer of 'actual and effective realization'; the late-middle age autumn of 'consolidation, reparation, and the directing of others'; and the old age winter of 'detachment and transcendence.'

"Alternatively, one could say that childhood is 'the paradise of innocence,' youth 'the time of the passions,' maturity 'the time of work,' and old age 'that of sadness' -- at least for the horizontal man. For the vertical man, 'the opposite takes place: age is an ascent towards another world.' Extremes meet, as paradise comes into view (hence the resonance between grandparents and grandchildren, who are on the Same Page)."

That would be page 265: "Too old, older than Abraham, too young, young as a babe's I AM." This nonlocal transcendent-immanent point of contact is precisely where "We'll meet again. Up ahead, 'round the bend. The circle unbroken, by and by." Etc.

So, looked at developmentally -- and this I think is the experience-near part -- we obviously come into the world in a state of... mysticality, for lack of a better term. It's all a mystery, but this will generally be a pleasant or dread-full mystery, depending upon the quality of caretakers. Scaretakers are very adept at transmitting their own dread -- their own anxieties, impasses, conflicts, and dead spots -- into their children for processing.

The point is to cultivate -- or at least not pave over -- a ground of the personality whereby one is Alive Before the Mystery, one reason being that we can only pretend to make the mystery go away anyway. This latter is what I mean by demystifying the world, i.e., draining it of Mystery.

While looking up that first quote from Schuon, I found a number of relevant points from previous posts:

"Both Balthasar and Chesterton make much of the very idea of God-as-child. The former speaks of 'the eternal mystery of the childhood of Christ' flowing 'into the eternal childhood which is given to men: hope.'

"For if you think about it, hope is indeed the essence of childhood. Why? A number of reasons, but I was thinking of how children are always changing and growing. They are like little arrows that always point toward their own telos -- which is to say, perfection, or completion, or maturity. I would suggest that America is infused with this idea -- or rather, that the very idea of America is infused with Christian hope in the sense we have just stated.

"What I mean is that there is no reason for hope in a static society: things are as they are and will be as they will be because they have always been this way (and this way is decreed by the gods, so it is not for us to change it).

"Against the American ideal is the European import of Marxism, which both sees and creates static classes.... Just as the caste system tethers individuals to their societal place, thus depriving them of hope, multiculturalism seals people into so many boxes of petrified failure. The difference is that the leftist exchanges hope for envy, thus the crude appeals to race, class, sexual preference, etc. In other words, the leftist crocktrine of diversity

"'tends to freeze people where the accident of birth has placed them. Unlike the caste system, multiculturalism holds out the prospect that, all cultures being equal, one's life chances should be the same -- and that it is society's fault if these chances are not the same' (Sowell). So instead of hope for betterment, the left promotes resentment of the better off, accompanied by a demand for what they call 'social justice' which is simply envy with a truncheon.

"Now Jesus, of course, makes a point of counseling us to be as children, but surely he doesn't mean this in any pejorative sense -- i.e., to be as naive, credulous, and easily led as a Democrat.

"Again, what characterizes the child? Well, for starters, a child is what man uniquely is, in the sense that -- alone among creatures -- he specializes in immaturity because his neoteny never ceases.

"To say neoteny is to say neo-nate, which simply means 'new birth.' Thus, to say that man must be 'born again' implies that one must not conflate, say, biological and spiritual birth, in that the former happens just once.

"Now a child, just because he is constantly learning and therefore 'permanently immature,' is not thereby a little nothing. Rather, he is the very symbol of our own eros shot into the heart of the divine center. We are all as children growing toward our proper end."

End of Old Stuff.

What I'm trying to get across is this idea of recapturing and reviving that state of Mystery. I well recall how the Mystery gradually closed in my case. It reminds me of the worthy words of Wordsworth:

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy!"

But then, don't you know, "Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing Boy."

D'oh!

"At length the Man perceives it [the Mystery] die away, / And fade into the light of common day."

What I want to know is, can we avoid ebeneezing away the Mystery, or can we revivify it later on?

"Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only? Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead, but if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!"

I suppose that is the point of this book, The Meaning of Blue: Recovering a Contemplative Spirit. (Not sure if I can unambivalently recommend this one.)

Back to how the shades of the prison-house began to close on this growing boy. I suppose it became especially noticeable some time after completing graduate school in 1988 and picking up the spiritual practice in 1995. Seven years in the desert.

To complete school and become a licensed Healer of Souls is to invert the world one had previously inhabited up to that time: instead of being on the receiving end, one is now on the bullshitting end. You go through a brief phase of back off, man, I'm a psychologist, but that fades, at least in my case. Fortunately, the psyche is a small thing compared to God.

Out of time, but I would end by saying it is far more interesting to be contained by the Mystery -- like an innocent child -- than to pretend to contain it -- like an obnoxious or even tenured child.

The De-partment and Re-Wholement of Wisdom

On the macro level, truth -- and therefore intellectual honesty -- is the highest value. As Dennis Prager says, this is not necessarily so of the micro level, where there is no reason to be brutally honest at the cost of damaging relationships. In fact, we might say that on the micro level the most important value is love in its various forms: caritas, eros, and agape.

This goes to one of the fundamental inversions of leftism, as the moonbats among us often behave as if Love is All You Need on the macro level. Isn't this how Obama is treating the Mullahs? Just be nice to them, and they'll be nice back to us. When new age leftists talk about a global shift in collective consciousness, this is what they're referring to: replacing hard truth with gooey luv.

"Taking this perspective into the political realm, [Marianne] Williamson has advocated a Department of Peacebuilding and has created a group called the Peace Alliance to bring this about."

Sounds a little vague, even gooey. How would it work? "[O]ur country’s way of dealing with security issues is increasingly obsolete.... We cannot simply rely on brute force to rid ourselves of enemies.... The only way to make peace with your neighbors is to make peace with your neighbors.”

Now that is profound. It only looks like a vacuous tautology.

Williamson actually ran for congress in my district in 2014. I say this to remind you just how lonely and isolated I am here in Comedy Central. One of her ideas is "to establish a U.S. Department of Peacebuilding that would examine 'non-violent problem-solving options' to global conflict."

Dennis Kucinich is on the same page of the coloring book: "The intention is to develop an organized approach, tapping the intellectual and spiritual power of America to develop programs that would include teaching children the principles of peace: teaching them peace giving, peace sharing, mutuality, seeing the other person as an aspect of oneself, of teaching the inner equality of all people."

Here again, those are all fine goals on the micro level. In fact, we used to teach these things in public schools before the Supreme Court declared Christianity unconstitutional.

This goes to Jesus's crack about being innocent as doves and wise as serpents. You could say that on the macro level we need to be at least as wise and cunning as the serpents with whom we are dealing: Iran, North Korea, Putin, ISIS, the IRS, et al. However, the Obama left is innocent toward our foreign enemies but cunning and cynical toward domestic opposition.

We need a Department of Peace so that the left might examine non-violent solutions toward dealing with conservatives, instead of using the power of the state to harass us and limit our speech. Liberals need to see conservatives as aspects of themselves, and appreciate our inner equality.

Think about how truth works. Truth is always a kind of "opposition," at least to the extent that we haven't internalized it: there is truth, and there is what I believe, and there is no way to simply "love away" the difference ("iron sharpens iron," in the words of Solomon). One cannot make peace with truth by finding some middle ground between What Is and What I Want It To Be, but rather, by submitting to it.

But the modern education establishment is like a Department of Truth. And like the Department of Peace, it pretends to solve a problem by defining the terms away.

Think, for example, of their holiest of holies, Diversity. What is diversity but the insistence that we make peace with multiple truths, which is (literally) no truth at all? Therefore, job one of our federal Department of Truth is to use the power of the state to outlaw truth -- just as a Department of Peace would assure perpetual war (at least until our surrender and defeat).

It comes down to Wisdom and her diverse liberal alternatives. "Aristotle," says McGinn, identifies wisdom "as the habit of knowledge that puts things in their proper order."

Thus, "Ordering and judging are rooted in the essential act of wisdom, that upon which all its ordering and judging depend, namely, contemplation" (McGinn). And contemplation "considers the very object of happiness, the highest intelligible being"(Aquinas, ibid.). Thomas enlists Paul as a wingman, who says in Corinthians that "The spiritual person [i.e., the wise person] judges all things."

This, of course, has nothing to do with judgmentalism, let alone ontological or epistemological closure. Rather, it means forming a living relationship to the highest intelligible being, or O. Thus, it is the quintessence of dynamic openness, its very source and possibility.

In a manner of speaking, it is not as if we are made in the image of God once and for allah, but rather, ceaselessly being remade -- similar to how one's body retains its identity while undergoing constant change. To cease changing is another term for death.

Note also that Wisdom is what orders science. It is superior to science, and allows us to put all of the many individual scientific disciplines in their proper place: physics, biology, chemistry, neurology, anthropology, psychology, etc.

The fraudulent metaphysic of scientism is really a bad imitation of wisdom and theology, because it surely orders the universe in a hierarchical manner, but does so in a precisely upside-down manner, placing physics at the top instead of at the bottom or periphery.

In contrast, Christian metaphysics places person at the top (and center), such that this is the sort of cosmos we would expect to see, given the necessity that persons exist in it. By dis-inverting the cosmos and seeing it from this proper perspective, we can eliminate a lot of the mystification -- not mystery -- from the world.

This goes to one of the Prime Directives of the Raccoon lifestyle, which involves the demystification the world in order to re-mysterize it. Doing so requires a kind of skepticism at one end -- wise as serpents, you might say -- and open acceptance at the other -- innocent as doves or children.

This goes to the born and born-again cycle, or the continuous remaking alluded to above: "Such wisdom follows the model of the most perfect form of movement, circular motion, by beginning from principles, arguing to conclusions, and returning to the principles with deeper understanding" (McGinn).

There are many ways to express this perfect nonsense, e.g., Returning to the Oneself, borne again to the mysterious mamamatrix of our birthdeath, our winding binding river of light empties to the sea: as it was in the beginning, same as it ever was... same as it ever was... same as it ever was...

On Being Your Own Best Enemy

Continuing with the centrality of the Why in human affairs, McGinn notes that "Thomas's mode of engagement was always to encourage discussion, not invective."

Thus, in the Summa, for every question he formulates at least three plausible objections, and these objections are never in the authoritarian form of the modern liberal, i.e., "because my truth is newer than yours," or "because consensus," or "because blacks / women / homosexuals have their own truth and it's just as good as yours."

As Kreeft explains, objections "must be arguments, not just opinions, for one of the basic principles of any intelligent debate... is that each debater must give relevant reasons for every controvertible opinion he expresses."

Thus, an intellectually honest person will always seek out the strongest possible objections to his own opinions -- not just to win the argument, but much more fundamentally, to be secure in one's own groundedness in truth. In a way, it is totally self-interested, since the last thing we want to do is found our lives on a Lie.

One reason people hate politicians is that they are so transparently intellectually dishonest. For example, Howard Dean says the Clinton e-mail crimes have been "manufactured partly by a press that’s bored and partly by the Republicans."

I know what you're thinking: who's Howard Dean? He is someone the liberal press turns to when it needs an authority to deny the obvious and to pretend the irrefutable is controvertible. If it were refutable, then he would just refute it instead of attacking the motives of his imaginary interlocutors.

Reducing another's thought to its supposed motives prevents us from understanding it. --Don Colacho

Which is why they do it. It's not really misunderstanding, but preemptive dis-understanding.

You will have noticed that on any major question, the left reduces our thought to its supposed motives (e.g., racism, homophobia, "controlling women," favoring "the wealthy," etc.), which seals them in their ignorance. The clever ones -- the 1% -- do this consciously as an intellectually dishonest debate strategy, while the other 99% of liberals just imitate the 1%, or do as told. Thus far, every one of our trolls has been a 99 percenter.

And of the 1% conscious liars and distorters, some are adept at it (e.g., Bill Clinton, Eric "Otter" Stratton) while others are awful at it (Hillary Clinton).

Does it trouble you that liberal-funded ghouls hack through a baby's face in order to extract his valuable brain? For Hillary Clinton, your misogynistic distress is "really an attack on a woman’s right to make the most personal, difficult decisions that any woman would face.”

Is she ashamed to be associated with such sadists? Not quite: "I'm proud to stand with Planned Parenthood, [and] I’ll never stop fighting to protect the ability and right of every woman in this country to make her own health decisions."

Truly, Clinton gives intellectual dishonesty a bad name: "If this feels like a full-on assault on women’s health, that’s because it is.”

Your real motive? When folks like you “talk about defunding Planned Parenthood, they’re talking about blocking millions of women, men and young people from live-saving preventive care." Just not too young.

It's hard to imagine even Bill Clinton so grotesquely hiding behind the flag:

"When they attack women’s health, they attack America’s health and it’s wrong and we’re not going to let them get away with it.”

Compare this to Otter's classic courtroom defense in Animal House:

"The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules, or took a few liberties with our female party guests -- we did. But you can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few, sick perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn't we blame the whole fraternity system? And if the whole fraternity system is guilty, then isn't this an indictment of our educational institutions in general? I put it to you, Greg: isn't this an indictment of our entire American society? Well, you can do what you you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you badmouth the United States of America. Gentlemen!"

Back to intellectual honesty, which is a trait we need if we are ever going to reach the truth. In particular, we are all in need of intellectually honest adversaries in order to be truly secure in our truth. If we are only exposed to the bozos of the left, it is awfully easy to gain a false sense of security. Since they do not furnish the arguments against us, then we ourselves need to do the job. We have to be our own best enemies.

Here again, Don Colacho has a number of aphorisms that go to this:

The unbeliever is dumbfounded that his arguments do not alarm the Catholic, forgetting that the Catholic is a vanquished unbeliever.

Thus, Whoever wants to know what the serious objections to Christianity are should ask us. The unbeliever makes only stupid objections. Indeed, his objections are often the foundations of our faith.

Note that it is possible for the Christian to be to Christianity what a Howard Dean or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama are to liberalism. Which is why Every Christian has been directly responsible for the hardening of some unbeliever's heart.

So, we want to be our own best adversary, secure in the faith that our faith can handle the challenge. "If we do not consider opposing views, we spar without a partner and paw the air. If we do not do our homework, we only skim the surface of ourselves" (Kreeft).

But if we spar only with liberals, then we spar with partners who flail around as indiscriminately as Helen Keller before she discovered that water is wet.

"One who is seeking the strongest possible arguments against any idea of St. Thomas will rarely find any stronger ones, any more strongly argued, than those in St. Thomas himself." He "aimed only for light, not heat."

To which it should be immediately amended that light gives off its own heat, i.e., that there is a proper "intellectual passion," so to speak. We are not Vulcans. Only half Vulcan.

A Word to the Whys

Yesterday we spoke of how man is orthoparadoxically characterized by what is missing in him. The primary symptom of this present absence or absent presence is the Why. Every human, in so far as he is one, asks Why, and never stops doing so.

Unless. More on which later.

To ask Why is to seek into the cause of an effect or the reality behind an appearance. This is what man has been doing from the moment he was hatched from the cosmic egg.

In other words, to ask why something happens is to ask what causes it. The cause is presumed to be greater than the effect. Everyday experience shows us that something is "lost" or dissipated between a physical cause and its effect, AKA entropy.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason puts forth the controversial -- because inconvenient -- principle that "nothing is without reason" and that "everything must have a reason or a cause." We consider it soph-evident that:

"For every entity X, if X exists, then there is a sufficient explanation for why X exists. For every event E, if E occurs, then there is a sufficient explanation for why E occurs." And "For every proposition P, if P is true, then there is a sufficient explanation for why P is true."

Now, on to the burning question before us: what is the sufficient reason of wisdom?

Remind us, what is wisdom? Wisdom has to do with ultimate causes, or the highest cause. Thus, the sufficient cause of wisdom must be God. Conversely, the sufficient cause of lesser forms of knowledge is found in, say, material interactions, or the laws of physics.

You might say that everyday science is "caused" by the world (or causes within the world), whereas the higher science of theology is caused by God.

However, science as such must also be caused by God, unless you simply stop asking why, or else tautologically confine your whys to a single level.

You parents out there will have noticed that even -- especially? -- a child won't fall for that one. They cannot be satisfied with some explanation that simply displaces the cause a little further back. You could explain the Big Bang in every detail, but the most elegant explanation withers in the light of just one more innocent Why?

The whys can only stop at God. Since God is the uncaused cause, he is by definition the source and end of the Whys.

Thus, you might say that the Why as such is a kind of "hook" that attaches to God. Without God, there is no reason for the hook, plus our earthly garment just falls to the ground.

We've been discussing this in the context of one of the greatest Whysmen of all time, Thomas Aquinas (or St. Thomas, his AquWHYness).

McGinn notes that the Summa contains "over a million and a half words divided into three large parts containing 512 topics ( questiones) and no fewer than 2,668 articles..." It is sort of an inverse fractal: questions within questions within the Question.

"Thomas says that all wisdom comes down from God," like water from the mountaintop. "In communicating true teaching to make the earth (i.e., their hearers) fruitful, they [teachers of divine doctrine] do not depend on themselves." Rather, "God communicates wisdom by his own power, so he is said to water the mountains by himself."

Thus, the best we can hope to be is a curious waterboy. And in order to be an effective water carrier, we need an empty bucket, or a bucketfull of Why. And be sure to check for holes. You want a big one at the top.

A Sound Mind is a Sound Cosmos

We left off with a reminder from St. Thomas that the pursuit of wisdom is a game, and that this game -- like any game -- "is not ordered to something else but only to itself."

Moreover, the game "brings the greatest delight."

I deem Thomas's observations Entirely True, otherwise what am I doing here? Why am I doing this? For money? Fame? Attention? Boredom? My health?

The answers to the last five are, respectively, No, No, No, No, and Yes. Yes, I am doing this for my health, AKA wholeness. Health is of course cognate with WHOLE, and we might say that the One Cosmos is the Ordered Whole, or the whole order.

Here is how Webster's defines health: the condition of an organism or one of its parts in which it performs its vital functions normally or properly: the state of being sound in body or mind.

Several points: health can only apply to organisms. Ah, but what is an organism? The answer may surprise you!

Second, health applies to parts and wholes, or to parts within wholes. If a part is sick, then the whole cannot be well. And if the whole is sick, then the parts will suffer.

Third, the concept of health is incomprehensible in the absence of teleology: both the whole and its parts have "vital functions" that may be performed normally or abnormally. And these functions are never static, but always in process (which is part of the definition of an organism).

Fourth, there is objective health of the body, and subjective health of the mind or soul. Thus, the soul too has vital functions, including an intrinsic relation to a larger whole (i.e., a purpose or telos).

Let's go back to what Thomas says about the pursuit of wisdom bringing "the greatest delight." Why would this be?

Well, for starters, wisdom is to the soul what nutrition is to the body: it is a literal food, to which many biblical passages will attest. The dictionary adds that health is a "flourishing condition" marked by vitality and well-being. Thomas calls it "delight." Which is? "A high degree of gratification of mind or sense," or "lively pleasure."

Not to get pedantic, but out of curiosity I just looked up "game," and the first thing it says is "amusement," which adverts to the Muses, who were the Greek goddesses associated with learning and creativity. Thus, they seem to be play-cousins of Sophia-wisdom.

Now, in an organism everything runs in cycles, and a cycle is a kind of self-renewing spiral. This implies that wisdom must also be a cycle, and Thomas says it is: his entire Summa is structured around this cycle, which is ultimately emanation from, and return to, God. This represents the Cycle of cyclicity, the Rhythm of rhythmicity, and the Circle of circularity: it is the fundamental respiration of the cosmos.

It is a spiraling movement; however, spiral is apparently not cognate with the breath, but rather, with spire, or a central axis around which things move. So you could say it makes implicit reference to the unmoved mover, or again, the Cause of causes to which Wisdom is conformed.

Now, just as there is in-spiration and ex-spiration with regard to the lungs, it seems that there is an analogue of this on the spiri-tual level. If the mind is an organism, then this follows the principle that an organism is defined by an open exchange of matter, energy, or information.

What is the spiritual analogue of expiration? Jesus makes many references to it, but it essentially comes down to "poverty of spirit," i.e., a kind of positive emptiness, for the poor shall receive, the last shall be first, the dead shall be given life, etc. (And to die is to expire.)

We might even say that Jesus's mission involves the Whole becoming part so that the part might be made whole. "It is not the healthy" -- the whole -- "who need a doctor." But who is whole? Only people who pretend to be, or who cannot tolerate their part-hood.

So, wisdom begins with consciousness of part-hood and incompleteness, which implies dependency. How do we express this parthood?

Well, I would say the Quest begins with questioning. Whatever else we can say about man, man is the being who questions: Aristotle, for example, "said that questioning was the essential operation of the human mind..." (in McGinn).

For truly, man begins with an epic (?!) that can still be heard today, the sacred WTF?, the astoneaged shout heard 'round the cosmos.

Now, that right there is interesting, because it implies that the essential operation of man is not a "fullness" (as an animal vis-a-vis its settled and invariant instincts), but rather, a kind of anticipatory emptiness.

And what is anticipatory emptiness but faith, or what we symbolize as (o)? Faith is implicit foreknowledge of as yet undiscovered truth. It is truth waiting to happen, or to be born. The question is the Womb of Truth.

The pathological versions of this are many. For example, this morning I saw this headline on how a Leading science publisher retracts dozens of papers for fake peer reviews. What does this mean? It means that the scientists in question only pretend to ask why. Therefore, there is no space for the answer. Instead, they fill the space where the Why ought to be with someshit they just made up.

This means that leftism -- which has thus far been mostly confined to the liberal arts, to history, and to politics -- has now seeped into science. Which we already know -- cf. global warming -- but the larger point is that this failure of Emptiness is an intrinsic cosmic pathology.

I don't know if we got anywhere today, or if I've just wasted our time. One thing you can say about the spirit: it blows where it will so long as you provide an empty space.

The Vertical Church of Perpetual Delight

Yesterday we mentioned the difference between the two forms of knowledge, (k) and (n).

There are many ways to frame this distinction, but one is between information and wisdom. One of the characteristics of the left, for example, is that it is full of information-blather but utterly devoid of wisdom. The university is Ground Zero for the liberal scary goround of zero wisdom.

And even then, their information tends to be fragmented, inflated out of proportion, expanded beyond its proper limits, or just plain wrong, rendering it (-k), that is, knowledge that isn't so.

And in recent years the contemporary left has become more characterized by low-information, for which I haven't invented a pnemuaticon.

Hmm... How about (ø) for our lo-fo mouth-breathren. This signifies the bad nothing, in contrast to the good for nothing of (o), or the "poverty of spirit" with which we approach God (or O).

Information can be in conformity to anything down to the most trivial matter. Yesterday, for example, I read in Stereophile of a few low-cost tweaks to supposedly improve the old sound system, so I was messing around with them as would any obsessive crank in futile pursuit of perfect sound.

What I was actually doing was messing with the cause(s) of "good sound." This subject can get metaphysical very quickly, but I'm looking at it in a more purely linear context: try this, listen for that.

But what is the Object of sound wisdom? McGinn writes that the whole point of the 1.5 million words of the Summa Theologiae is to converge upon and disclose "what he called sapientia, that is, wisdom."

Philosophy, left to its own devices, can only deal in (k), not (n). The moment you realize that philosophy is infused with energy and information from a nonhuman source, then you are in the world of theology. Of course, every philosopher deals in theology, but only a relative few admit it.

I mean this literally, because wisdom "deals with the highest cause, which is God" (ibid.). Science and other disciplines deal with various intermediate causes, but as soon as you posit an ultimate cause, then you are a theologian, even if a frivolous one. Two gags from Happy Acres express this principle in a succinct form:

In the first, Professor Dawkins concedes the absurdity of imagining there is no higher cause outside this world, but just when you think he's about to get a Clue, he simply converts it into a horizontal fantasy about alien beings.

But this does nothing to resolve the ineluctable philosophical problem, since it just defers and displaces the ultimate cause elsewhere. In other words, you still have to account for the cause of aliens.

Oh, right. Other aliens.

In the second image, Chesterton reminds us of Petey's adage that supernature abhors a vacuum, and that you can drive it out with a pitchfork but it will always come rushing back in, only in a transmogrified form because it promiscuously "mates" with various mind parasites from a lower order. Thus, liberals will be the first to tell you that Santa Claus doesn't exist. Yet.

As information allows us to accomplish things in the world, wisdom is the cause of judgment (or prudence), which is the cardinal virtue.

It reminds me of how the ancient Greeks could only learn so much about the world, because they didn't have much commerce with it. Rather, slaves did all the work, so they are the ones who learned how the material world actually works. You might say the Greeks specialized in wisdom but had a rather impoverished knowledge of the world.

But this only shows how there can indeed be a (-n), or "false wisdom," so to speak. This tendency is only fully eradicated in the "moderate realism" of the Aristotle-Thomas tradition, which begins with the world but doesn't end there.

There are two main alternatives to this sane approach to the world: the older one is to begin in the other world, a la Plato, and to devalue this one. The more recent is to begin and end in this world, as do materialists, Marxists, atheists, etc.

I suppose there's a third approach, the Kantian one in which you essentially begin and end in man's neurology. Deconstruction would simply be a postmodern version of this, as it traps us in the closed system of language, itself just a prolongation of our neurology.

Note that any of the three alternatives splits the world and then elevates a part to the whole. Big. Mistake.

In fact, this is the quintessence of anti-wisdom, for "judgment is made about an effect through its cause, and the same is true about lower causes through the higher cause, so wisdom is the judge of all the other intellectual virtues; it belongs to put them all in order" (Aquinas, in McGinn).

In other words, we might say that (lower case) judgment allows us to infer causes from effects (and vice versa), whereas (upper case) Judgment allows us to wisely organize reality into a hierarchy of causes, with the Cause of causes at the top. A comprehensive -- and wise -- account of reality will exclude neither causes nor Cause.

There are three sources of wisdom: there is the universal metaphysics from which we may deduce various truths that cannot not be (e.g., the laws of non-contradiction or excluded middle), revelation, and what we are calling (n), or direct infused knowledge/intellection of the transcendental Object.

You will have noticed that evangelicals tend to reject the first and third in favor of a pure fideism to revelation, whereas "new agers" will tend toward the third while rejecting tradition and science. But the Raccoon wants all three in his arsenal: knowledge, revelation, and grace.

For St. Thomas, sapientia (n) "has a greater affective, even experiential, quality than abstract deductive reasoning."

This is indeed a key point, because (n) cannot just be handed off from mind to mind or soul to soul as can ordinary (k). Rather, it must be experienced and "vivified" by each soul anew -- and ultimately this cannot be accompliced without the aid of the Holy Spirit, for

"To see oneness in creation is to sense the source of creation, the Creator. To see only fragments in creation is to see creation in its material aspect, missing its source and its life." Thus, wisdom is ultimately a reflection of wholeness, of life, of dynamic unity, and of divine delight, for

"[C]ontemplation of wisdom is like a game for two reasons. First, because a game is enjoyable and the contemplation of wisdom brings the greatest delight.... Second, because a game is not ordered to something else but only to itself; this belongs to the delights of wisdom" (Aquinas, ibid.).

Outside the Gates of Eden

Some time ago I minted the irritating term orthoparadox to signify the manner in which the divine reality bifurcates herebelow into seeming paradoxes that are actually complementary and wholly orthodox.

To cite an obvious example, take justice and mercy. In the higher dimensionality of God these are one, but herebelow they can seem at odds. In God, perfect justice is perfect mercy, and vice versa.

This is not a new idea, but rather, very old. "Orthoparadox" is just a neologism for a paleoconcept.

For example, over half a millennium ago Nicholas of Cusa wrote of his discovery that God is "girded about with the coincidence of contradictories." He calls this the "wall of paradise" beyond which God resides: "Thus, it is on the other side of coincidence of contraries that you [God] will be able to be seen and nowhere on this side" (in Bell).

On this side most everything about God seems somewhat paradoxical, but that's just the way it is in order for us to be in Isness for ourselves. Presumably in Eden we were inside the walls of orthoparadox, but in our fallen state we face the wall of complementarity.

But it is no small thing to realize this. This may not be the best analogy, but it reminds me of Panic Disorder. A panic attack is a terrifying experience, especially if you don't realize it's "only" a panic attack. But if you do, then it's possible to detach from the experience somewhat and ride it out.

Likewise, if you imagine the various cosmic complementarities to be paradoxical contradictions, then your thinking will suffer. Indeed, most every bad philosophy -- which is most -- begins by abstracting one complementarity from its I-AMese twin and then elevating it to a totalistic metaphysic. Materialism is just one version of this. Idealism is its pathological sibling.

Which leads to an important point about heresy (and about the charge of Gnosticism discussed in yesterday's post). That is, if you consider the various heresies, they all result in an ontological shrinkage, not an expansion, of the divine reality. While they always masquerade as liberating or mind-expanding, they do so from an anthropocentric point of view.

The logical endpoint of such shrunken Gnosticism is modern liberalism, which has managed to fully liberate itself from God.

But this perverse liberation is just another name for nihilism. In reality -- the divine reality -- freedom could never be detached from the Good. In God, freedom and goodness are obviously one. And if you believe in saints and in sanctity -- or in the sanctification/theosis process -- it comes down to an increasing harmony of freedom and goodness as we ascend closer to the divine source.

Conversely, "progress" for progressives is whatever redounds to the destruction of Christian civilization. They don't hesitate to acknowledge this. Why do conservatives?

The progressive materialist is free "in the sense that breaking an arm confers a new freedom of movement on the arm: it is the freedom of incoherence. In philosophy as in morals, it is the facile path that leads to hell and the hard one that rises to heaven..." (Sire).

Yes, if you jump from a building you will "fly." Up to a point. Or, it is "like a husband who resolves the problem of controlling his wife by murdering her" (ibid.).

Nothing brings more narcissistic joy to the progressive than the conceit that he is more educated, or sophisticated, or scientific, or intellectual than the restavus. To a certain extent these are accurate, so long as we deploy the qualifier "merely," as in "merely intellectual."

For the cheap omniscience of the tenured leaves them entirely -- and proudly -- outside the Walls of Paradise alluded to above. After all, if mere words were sufficient then the Incarnation would be superfluous. But not only did Jesus leave no book, he left not a single printed syllable. Rather, he is the book God throws at us.

One of our fundamental epistemological distinctions is between (k), or ordinary knowledge, and (n), which is essentially (lower case) gnosis. This is again a wholly orthodox and venerable idea, for it goes to the difference between open and therefore living vs. closed and therefore dead language. To be open to O is to assure that language never reaches a dead-end nul-de-slack, but rather, is perpetually infused with energies from the very source of language itsoph; for

"Language is not its own end: it comes from and leads to thought that transcends it" (Bell).

This again goes to that pulsating meta-cosmic circular flow at the heart of creation described in yesterday's post:

"Movement along this vertical axis is not simply upward: life from heaven can come down to earth." Via man-through-Christ, "Heaven [reaches] to earth through him even as earth reaches to heaven in him. Downward and upward he is as a tree" (ibid.).

God is an open book. Only man's learning can close it.

Man too is an open book. Only rejection of God can end it.

And although he's got a Way with Words, God is fortunately a terrible mathematician, or one plus one would equal one or two instead of three. I suppose he's a practitioner of the evernew math.

At times I think there are no words / But these to tell what’s true / And there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden --Gates of Eden, Bob Dylan

O, Nothing in Particular

Picking up from where we loafed off... which was wherenow? Something about whether there is actually such a thing as Man, or if man is, as the Darwin-at-all-costs insists, just a random jumble of contingencies -- a permanently moving target instead of the being who is permanently moving toward his nonlocal target, i.e.i.e., O. You know the old gag: eros shot toward the heart of the son.

But first, thank you for all those kind komments. I hadn't planned on a living eulogy, just the announcement of a brief break and an open thread to go along with it. The reference to "ten years of service" was just tossed out there, but became the focus.

Which is fine. I know that every year on his birthday, Dennis Prager invites guests to call in and let him know how he has changed their lives. It's a profound and touching ritual, and it helps both parties in different ways. For Prager, he says he always takes praise to heart and criticism to the head, where most people presumably do it the other way around.

I'd like to believe I'm the same way. There's just no way those flattering comments could go to my head, for reasons mentioned in one of my comments: if they did, it wouldn't be an occasion for narcissistic inflation, but rather, black despair. If I am IT, then we, my fiends, are as deluded as any Obama voter. I don't know how these new age teachers such as Tony Robbins or Deepak Chopra or fill-in-the-blank can live with their depraved selves. Probably by projecting it into conservatives.

No, my self esteem just isn't that high, and I promise that there's nothing you folks can do about it. Besides, if self esteem is what I were after, wouldn't I write a bunch of useless books for the mediocretin masses or get myself published in the International Journal of Tenured Hackery?

On the other hand, to the extent that the blog is truly "efficacious" -- meaning that it does apparently lead to genuine change in people's lives -- then that is Something to be looked or even sneezed at. What's going on there? I have to believe it begins with me, because that is precisely where I begin: my first operating principle, as it were, is to get me out of the way. In fact, it's really spelled out in the book, isn't it?

For example, we begin (or end) by positing the existence of O -- which is necessarily many things, such as the Organized Totality. I believe that by selflessly orienting ourselves to it, we set up a kind of vertical exchange of energies which we symbolize (⇅). When I first came up with that idea, I imagined I was being a little daring or esoteric or avant garde, but I've come to realize that I'm just being as literal and mundane as can be.

For example, a reader this morning posed the following question for Catholic anti-Bob whisperers: "how does one reconcile the esoterist perspective on religion with the exoteric religion that is largely intolerant of any heresy? I mean Schuon is clearly a heretic (Bob likely is too) according church teaching. It seems to me that believing special revelation exists outside the church isn't compatible with being a legit Catholic."

What I am suggesting is that there is nothing "special" about this verticalisthenic exercise, nor are we talking about Revelation, and certainly no revelation that deviates from Tradition. Catholicism is a rather large tent, in fact, the largest tent I have thus far encountered on this earth.

I mean, Meister Eckhart? Yes, he ran into a couple of bumpkins in the road during the Inquisition, but he was never excommunicated, and he is as Far Out as you can get without burning down the tent. I've been meaning to do a Meister Eckhart Review and Update. Soon.

Here are some concrete examples, torn from my recent slactio divina. Take this book on Aquinas by Bernard McGinn (who also wrote THE best book on brother Eckhart).

First of all, this haiku-ized statement by Thomas could be our motto:

our task is to hand

onto others the things gained

in contemplation

It goes like this: 1) (↑), 2) (o), 3) (↓), 4) (→). In fact, you could say that your Lavish Praise is (←). And I know and you know that (←) is a meager thing unless it is preceded by your own (↑) and (↓). I am just the middleman. You're welcome.

About the charge of esoterism. Well, yes and no. No because I don't believe I contradict Tradition, Yes because one can hardly get more esoteric than Christianity itself.

Example.

Take the circular structure of One Cosmos, the prequel. Pretty modernist and avant garde, right?

Wrong.

"The wisdom found in revelation and the wisdom that is the gift of the Holy Spirit go beyond any wisdom we can acquire by our own thinking -- they are what Thomas calls 'supernatural gifts.' They come from God [↓] and are integral in our return to God [↑]..."

This is the Circle to which the book -- and blog -- conforms: "For Thomas there is a cycle of wisdom, a circular process of emanation and return to God, following the order of the circular model of the creation and return of the universe."

Yes, that is pretty esoteric but that is also the Doctor of the Church talking, so no, you can't buy some pot from him.

You might even notice that I yoinked a bizarre statement by Thomas and placed it above the comment box below:

The circle among figures and circular motion among all the forms of movement are the most perfect, because there is a return to the source in them. For this reason in order that the whole of creation attains its final perfection, it is necessary for creatures to return to their source.

Nor is it remotely Gnostic to say that the Great Return is a return to Nothing.

First of all, that is made plain by Eckhart's crack on p. 6, the Page of Darkness: There is something in the soul which is above the soul, divine, simple, an absolute nothing, rather unnamed than named, unknown than known, etc.

To borrow a gag from this other book, we're not talking about some vague and vacuous existentialist nothing in general, but rather, the divine and slacuous nothing in particular.

Not much time this morning. Back to vertical play but back to horizontal toil as well.