Coming to a Planet Near You: The Invasion of the Anthropoid Puppets

I suppose it would be fair to say that most people are living and acting in pornographic films, if we understand pornography more generally as a production devoid of transcendence, irrespective of the subject matter.

For when a human loses contact with transcendence, he is no longer properly human. Or, you could say that a human is the animal that transcends itself. And if a human fails to transcend himself, he inevitably sinks beneath himself. Sorry. Way it is.

Transcendence is like a funnel that opens up from the now. Picture an upside-down triangle, with its point at the now (importantly, there is another triangle below, with its point at the now as well). To transcend is to move up the triangle, where the space is wider and a man can breathe free. It is also of necessity a structured, hierarchical space, but we needn't get into that here. (I kind of like the image at the right, because it implies that the now is actually a kind of hologram created by the ascending and descending tendencies. As one moves up into the transcendent triangle, one can see that the upward-pointing one narrows, which would be the result of the world in general and mind parasites in particular having less influence over oneself.)

When we are trapped in a bad film, it is again as if we are in the meaningless line (the Death Train) or the repetitive circle (Groundhog Day). According to Mouravieff, "esoteric evolution" (let's just say spiritual growth) "is impossible as long as the film can always be considered as turning in the same circle. People who perform in such a film are those we have called anthropoids, puppets, the dead who, in the words of Jesus, 'believe themselves to be alive.'"

But growth into the triangle -- or what a Raccoon calls the colonization of the subjective horizon -- "starts when a man, by his conscious efforts, proves to be capable of breaking the circle and transforming it into an ascending spiral."

Now, before proceeding further, I would like to highlight a most excellent comment made by Magnus Noorwegenkøønen in broad nightlight, which you daytrippers may have missed. Not only is it true, but it is the substance of Truth, and speaks to the ubiquitous availability of nonlocal operators to assist us in our cosmic ascent:

Another amazing effect in spiritual aperture science: When your present expands to give room for a bit of eternity, you begin to get in contact with those who lived in eternity, such as saints or enlightened ones who lived long ago.

When you only have the needle-point now [think of the upside-down triangle], the words of the eternals either make no sense or some pretty weird sense, but once you are in the same dimension as them, it is almost like they are talking to you face to face. It is just baffling. [No, not really, so long as one remembers that image of the expanding triangle.]

I believe this to be the meaning of Lao-Tzu's cryptic comment "When you are ready, the immortals will find you," and possibly the popular Buddhist saying "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." I expect Catholicism to have a similar concept, since it enlists the Christian saints on a regular basis.

You bet it does. In particular, this book I'm reading about Eckhart provides a kind of Meister key for understanding where he's coming from (which is literally noWhere and noTime). I hope to get into it in more detail in a later post, but the author's central insight is that Eckhart cannot be understood -- and can only be misunderstood -- if we attempt to grasp what he is saying outside the transcendent space from where he is transmitting.

(The book is challenging and somewhat repetitive, -- nor have I finished it -- so I can't give it an unqualified raccoomendation, especially for those who are not already somewhat familiar with Eckhart's thought; probably better to begin with McGinn's chapter on Eckhart in his Harvest of Mysticism, and then proceed to his outstanding The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing; the latter is also challenging, but at least it will help you determine whether you are Qualified.)

Put it this way. There are two ways to try to comprehend God, one of which is from man-to-God (↑), the other God-to-man (↓). These modes are quite distinct (though not separate), but in our day, people have tended to lump them together, as if God's communication will not be radically different from ours.

According to (my understanding of) Kelley, Eckhart is always speaking in the (↓) mode, and if we try to understand it in the (↑), we will only miss the whole point (which some unfortunately boneheaded Church authorities did when they decided to investigate him, and which contemporary liberal theologians such as Matthew Fox do when they try to convert him to some sort of Buddhist environmentalist neo-Marxist).

Back to Mouravieff. He says that "The spiral [which is obviously a kind of triangle if looked at in two dimensions] represents an intermediate state between the position where the human Personality is found to be trapped in the film, which revolves mechanically in a way hardly separated from the eternal plane," and one's true individuality (which again must partake of transcendence).

True progression in time -- or "spiritual evolution" -- does not take place until we convert the circle into the spiral, a spiral which never ends, since it begins in time but ascends all the way to eternity, i.e., the timeless. And once one touches the timeless, it is useless to try to understand it in (merely) human terms.

Here again, this is where Eckhart comes in, at least according to Kelley. He makes the same point in many different ways, -- again, the book is repetitive; for example, he quotes John Tauler, one of Eckhart's disciples, who said that

"The wonderful Master spoke of that pure knowledge that knows no form or creaturely way.... He spoke in terms of eternity and you (regrettably) understood [him] in terms of time." (This is clearly the error people make in imagining that Eckhart is not fully orthodox, or that he's some kind of pantheistic liberal wacktivist.)

Think of Jesus, who is the quintessential instance of (↓). Therefore, in order to truly begin to understand him, we cannot do so from the standpoint of (↑). Rather, in order to "imitate him," -- or conform to his Truth -- we too must enter the "descending" mode of (↓). The meek shall inherit the earth, the wisdom of God is folly to the world, become as little children, seek ye first the Kingdom of Slack, shunyada yada yada.

Now, having said that, it is by no means easy to do this. Eckhart is clearly not for everyone. But if one has the calling for this particular path, then, as Kelley says, "it opens up truly unlimited possibilities of insight." One reason for this is that Eckhart does not arbitrarily stop at this or that particular knowledge -- as every lesser theology, philosophy, or ideology must do -- but at knowledge (or Truth) itself, which is unlimited by any human constraint, for it is the Truth of truth, the Experience of experience, the Subject of subjectivity, the Is of every it and the I of every am.

To be continued....

Getting the Puck Out of the Way and Collaborating with God On the Movie of Your Life

Continuing with this idea of life as a movie, commenter Lance wants to know who wrote his particular screenplay. Did he write it? Did he collaborate with God? Is it written by the world around him -- which would be equivalent to fate and contingency? If the Darwinians are correct, it is written by the genes. But who wrote the genes? If Shenk is correct, we play much larger role in shaping our genetic expression than previously thought (and either Shenk is right or Toots Mondello is wrong, a doctrinal impossibility and intrinsic absurdity).

This is a rather large subject to tackle with my remaining 50 minutes of blogtime. Some might say that it's best if one manages to write one's own screenplay, but if that happens, it's usually a tragedy, because it really means that it was written by the ego, and the ego did not write (create) itself.

Rather, the ego is a portion of externalized subjectivity adapted to the external (i.e., family, culture and historical circumstance) and internal world. Even worse, it is possible -- if not likely -- for mind parasites to have a covert hand in writing the screenplay, if not dominating the whole process.

As for God's role in the process, I'm tempted to revisit Balthasar's five volume Theo-Drama, but I don't have time to skim through 2000 pages.

There are answers to all the above questions, but for now let's just get back to what Mouravieff has to say on the subject, since he's the one who got us into it. He says that "Each human being, then, is born with his own particular film. This represents the field of action in which man is called to apply his conscious efforts."

And "For reasons we have already mentioned, exterior man, who lives in the system of Future-Past [i.e., the temporal line], cannot embrace in a single moment the ensemble of his film, nor even the part that contains his immediate future."

Which is why so many people can't appreciate the elementary truth that if they continue on their present course, they're likely to end up where they're headed.

Again, the reason for this is that the exterior man is so affixed to the present moment; and the more exterior, the more fixed (e.g., single issue activists, MSM journalists, political "junkies," anyone who loses perspective and histrionically elevates the present moment well beyond its importance). More ominously, just like the stage magician, the Conspiracy encourages you to rivet your attention on the present moment ("misdirection"), so that it may perform its sinister magic outside your narrow gaze.

Remember, the now is everything. But for that reason, it can also be nothing. In other words, properly understood, it is a prolongation of eternity, our one and only access to O. Improperly understood -- i.e., horizontally and externally -- it is just a kind of fleeting nothing between two nowheres, like the commercial between two TV programs.

In any event, in order to begin seeing the film, one must "enlarge the slot of [the] Present." The first thing that comes to mind is the great athlete who is able to seemingly slow down the game in order to see and do things other athletes can't. Wayne Gretzky, Magic Johnson, Ted Williams -- all could open up seams in time in order to slow down events and then freely move around in the resultant slot. Perhaps you have to be a sports fan -- better yet, an athlete -- to understand how literal this is.

For example, I remember when I tried out for the high school basketball team. I was a very good player, but I was accustomed to playing by myself in the driveway, or one-on-one with friends, or HORSE, etc.

The first time I was inserted into an actual five-on-five, full court game, it was literally overwhelming, since I was indeed in the now, but there were so many things -- and potential things -- happening in the now, that I was mentally paralyzed. And it was all happening waaaay too fast.

It very much reminds me of jazz, in which the soloist is faced in each moment with an infinite field of possibilities that he must also instantaneously coordinate with the harmonic structure of the composition and with his fellow players. And no wonder why so many of those guys liked heroin, because few things are as effective in slowing down time. (Of course, Raccoons are content with our own Beer O'clock slackrament in order to dilate time.)

Baseball was much less of a problem for me, because there things more or less happen one at a time. Plus, I was a pitcher, so I could control the tempo myself. I never played organized football, but there too, most of the players have a very narrow responsibility on each play, and don't have to deal with the whole game, just the opponent immediately in front of them. But imagine how much the quarterback or running back have to slow things down in order to grasp what's going on and make and execute good decisions.

Interesting: Mouravieff says that if one is successful in widening the slot of the immediate present, it is as if a bit of the future slips in. This again makes sense to me in the context of sports; I think of Gretzky, who could pass the puck to places he just knew a teammate would be (and before the teammate knew it). Likewise, some goalies (Dominik Hasek comes to mind) just have a freakish ability to react to a shot an instant before the opposing player hits the puck.

Now, as long as a man lives in what Mouravieff calls the wilderness, his film "will unfold with mechanical inflexibility, and the Personality will remain entirely unchanged." To be truly "born again" signifies the move toward genuine individuality, which, of course, implies an original film: "By acquiring the gifts of the Holy Spirit appropriate to his nature, he progressively participates in real, objective existence, which finally characterizes his being. This is Salvation; liberation from the bonds of the film."

Importantly, unless one is liberated from this mechanical film, one cannot accomplish one's cosmic mission, being that one's real mission could only be a reflection of the true self. In other words, one's mission might be thought of as the horizontal prolongation of the true self within the field of time. Interestingly, this is reflected in something Paul said, (referenced by Mouravieff) in Romans 28-29:

And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For whom he foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.

In other words, to address Lance's question, the second birth has much to do with abandoning the effort to write one's own script, and to begin collaborating with God. A Raccoon simply calls it O-->(¶).

Everybody's in Show Biz

From photography to cinematography. Mouravieff says that "Incomprehensible as it may seem, our life is truly a film produced in accordance with a script."

Okay, I'll bite. I mean, I live in a place where not only is everyone in a film, but everyone from my pool man to my Egyptian cabana boy is trying to sell a screenplay. Continue.

"Each human being then, is born with his own particular film" (italics not mine; Mouravieff just really likes to use them). Now, what he calls the exterior man (analogous to what Raccoons would call a Flatlander), because he lives his life in the two-dimensional line between past, present, and future, can never really be a witness to his own film.

Of course, this is my bag, since this touches on the task of the clinical psychologist, which is to discern the plot, recurring themes, conflicts, and major players in the patient's film, and share our film review with him. No thumbs for you!

This is why, as I have explained in the past, it turned out to be such a natural transition for me to go straight from film school to graduate school in psychology. Although I did not know it at the time -- for I was only just starting to critique -- and pan -- my own film, I was ultimately destined to be a film critic.

And of course, the sicker the patient, the worse the movie. Wait, I take that back. The sickest patients tend to live out films that are reminiscent of being in a funhouse. Everything about their lives takes on a kooky, surreal cast, which at times is hard to believe, for how can such weird or horrible things keep happening over and over to the same person?

I think it's just a matter of the person's exterior matching the interior, as every day, on a moment-by-moment basis, they are making choices and decisions based upon their own lack of a center, hence the failure to understand the film they're in and the role they're playing. In short, they create a surreal world because they themselves are one.

For example, what type of person marries Larry King? Or, just what kind of person does Larry King think would be willing to marry a decrepit ATM machine?

Schuon said something very interesting about the centerless man, who, by definition, cannot understand his own film, because it will appear so random, chaotic, or meaningless. Such people always ask why did this happen to me?, when they are precisely the type of people about whom it is unnecessary to ask that particular question. Imagine O.J., for example, sitting in his jail cell, asking Why me, Lord? Let us count the ways!

Anyway, in the aptly titled To Have a Center, Schuon discusses the type of people who live "on the fringe of themselves" and who therefore "give their blood to phantoms." The lives of such men will inevitably fall into a multitude of shifting "superficial idolatries" and "blind alleys leading to despair." Or, they will spend their lives trying to prop up the old idols or find newer and more exciting ones.

Such a person is immersed and dispersed in the impotent field of his own scattered subjectivity, and therefore "at the antipodes of the 'one thing needful.'" This is also why you are wasting your time arguing with such a centerless people, who have no knowledge of the dreary films they're living out. If such a person happens to be in the creative arts, their work generally "amounts to inventing aberrant stories in order to prove that two and two make five..." Michael Moore comes to mind. And if they are in politics or the media, their task amounts to convincing you that wrong is right and lies are truth. Michael Moore comes to mind.

A major problem for our culture is that, because its values are inverted, we often elevate the lowest caste to the highest -- hence, the production of a type of art that not only holds no appeal, but is disturbing to anyone who is remotely awake. The vile man not only likes such things, but is attracted to them precisely because they mirror his own disordered interior and therefore legitimize his sordid existence. People need Light, but if they can't see it, they will demand vivid Darkness instead (ironically, they call it "realism"). Gravity takes care of the rest.

The lowest caste, the chandala is characterized by a "decentralized subjectivity, centrifugal and without recognized limits" (one thinks of Tiger Woods). But in a deteriorating culture such as ours, the outcast becomes the in caste, the one everyone aspires to, for he seems the most "free." The centerless losers envy and idealize fellow losers such as Tiger Woods, just because the latter has the resources to live out the dreams and fantasies of his cosmic loserhood.

Of course, a centerless man appears "free," since he has broken free of his own -- and therefore God's -- axis. But the freedom is only illusory, for one only plunges into the waiting jaws of individual, collective, and cosmic mind parasites.

In a memorable passage, Schuon describes the man who exhibits "a tendency to realize those psychological possibilities that are excluded for others; hence his proneness to transgression; he finds his satisfaction in what others reject" and "exhausts those possibilities which no one else is willing to touch."

Such a person may be "capable of 'everything and nothing.'" I think of someone, for example, like John Lennon, who, if he had not been successful in music, would have likely ended up in jail or worse. He was completely ungovernable, least of all by himself. And yet, this is hardly to say that he was without talent. Indeed, as Schuon goes on to say, such a person may even be "protean if he is gifted," but in my experience, the productivity is short-lived before becoming repetitive, exhausted, or trite -- as indeed occurred with Lennon.

Another fascinating observation by Schuon is that, through the law of inverse analogy, such a person can actually resemble certain saints, and can you think of a celebrity who was more sanctified by the boomer generation than John Lennon? I well understand the impulse, because I happen to be one of those people who venerated him in my youth, as if he had anything useful or important to say beyond rock on! Which is not nothing. I still listen to his immortal version of Twist and Shout on a regular basis.

Still, a little perspective is needed in order to place the legitimate urge to rock in the proper context. It cannot be a way of life, or one ends up at the farthest fringes of the cosmos, like Bruce Springsteen or Courtney Love. Fortunately, most of these people also live in gated communities, which at least affords us a little protection from them.

Oops. Out of time. To be continued....

A Swingin' Affair With God

While we're discussing Boris Mouravieff, I should point out for those unfamiliar with the name that he was an Orthodox Christian with a Gurdjieff-Ouspenskian (Fourth Way) slant, somewhat similar to how Unknown Friend is a Catholic with a hermetic slant.

As it so happens, I first bumped into both gentlemen in the same book, Inner Christianity, the latter of which also led to Robin Amis' A Different Christianity: Early Christian Esotericism and Modern Thought. It is fair to say that all of these books were central in helping me to get over my Jesus willies once and for all, being that they present Christianity in terms a Raccoon can sink his mischievous claws into.

Not to say that I agree with everything Mouravieff has to say. To the contrary, much of what he says strikes me as overly occult, gnostic (in the pejorative sense), and frankly unOrthodox. He maintains that he was not copying Ouspensky or Gurdjieff, but that he was dealing with the original sources found in esoteric Christianity, of which Gurdjieff's work was a partial reconstruction and sometimes fabrication.

Either way, when people start talking about "secret knowledge," it's time to hold onto your wallet. Yes, there is secret knowledge, but there is no real need to hide it from others (elementary discretion and propriety notwithstanding), since the secret is quite capable of protecting itself from the unworthy.

It is no more secret than, say, quantum physics, which is available to any intellectually qualified and sincerely motivated individual. You don't have to hide quantum physics to keep it secret. Indeed, promiscuously disseminating it in the manner of a Deepak to people with skulls full of mush involves the grossest distortions imaginable (on both ends of the exchange; in reality, Deepak is just propagating his own mind parasites in a worldwide jerk circle).

Look at me, for example. When I write an over-the-top political hit piece, I get three or four times the traffic. But newcomers almost never return more than once, because the very next post will likely be full of openly secret knowledge which is of no use to them. It is either inaccessible, an affront to their existing faith (or lack thereof), or just too kooky to be of any practical use. In reality, it's just another routine instance of the kosher pearls protecting themselves from the pork people (the porcinners!).

Regarding Mouravieff's unorthodoxy, Schuon once made a very important point about people's spiritual experiences. He of course had had many such experiences, but he did not wish for them to be the source of any doctrine. Rather, he wanted Truth to stand on its own merits, and to be understandable and independently verifiable within the awakened intellect (hence, to be universal). He would never dream of saying, for example, "I had a vision of the Virgin Mary (which he did), therefore she is real."

Rather, he maintained that "if one wants to impart mystical certitude to another, the import or message should be capable of being coherently expressed" (Fitzgerald). Along these lines, Fitzgerald quotes a poem by Schuon (translated from the original German):

You may often keep silent about a certitude, / But if you wish to impart it, you must support it / With clear logic; for those who hear you / Want to see a meaning in what you are saying. / You must not say: I am certain of this -- / And then withdraw in proud obscurity. / Finally: what is of no use to anyone, / You are not obliged to preach in the streets.

Not only that, but all of the traditions agree that it is a breach of spiritual protocol to blab on about one's experiences to any- and everyone. Such experiences (?!) always have an aura of sanctity that makes one circumspect about sharing them with the unwashed bipedal primates.

Rather, Fitzgerald quotes another student who recalled Schuon saying words to the effect that "When a man experiences a spiritual state or favor, or when he has a vision or audition, he must never desire this to happen again; and above all he must not base his spiritual life on such a phenomenon, nor imagine that the happening has conferred on him any kind of eminence. The only important thing is to practice what takes us nearer to God..."

In short, (?!) is, yes, a gift, but even more fundamentally, it is a sacred obligation, for ultimately you are obliged to follow it back up to its source and to conform your life to the conditions that make the grace flow more readily (which primarily include Virtue, Truth, and Beauty).

For this reason, Schuon insisted that his "message" was contained in his books only, not in his peripheral function as a spiritual master for a particular group. The latter function was not unimportant, but it was nevertheless a prolongation of the former, not his central concern or legacy to the world.

But as it so happens -- at least for me -- Schuon's books are jam-packed with his barakah, or spiritual perfume, or transformative grace, or sanctified mojo, or just plain (↓), for which they are the occasion, not the cause. (↓) courses through his words, not from them.

Of this I am quite certain, but my certainty is of no use to another, except perhaps as a suggestion to try my brand and see for yourself.

Analogously, I am equally certain that Frank Sinatra is the greatest pop singer who ever lived, -- for it would be an absurdity and intrinsic error to believe otherwise -- but here again, this means nothing to the person who's never even listened to A Swingin' Affair and heard the musical truth with his own ears.

I am also quite sure that I am the only person who has ever placed Frank Sinatra and Frithjof Schuon -- and for that matter, Ferrell "Pharoah" Sanders, another favorite F.S. of mine -- in the same paragraph. And that the Shaykh would be none too pleased about it.

Now, back to Mouravieff. Nah, it's too late. Tomorrow.

Seven Dimensional Analogue Photography

I see that much of this post may be obscure to those who haven't read the book of the sane gnome. I'm not trying to cloak my woolymindedness in an toxic haze of seductive mystagoguery, a la Deepak and the rest.

Rather, I'm pressed for time and have to run, so I can't necessarily flesh things out as much as I'd like. But I'm quite certain that at least one of you will understand what I'm talking about. Alternatively, you can think of the post as an unsaturated memo that you can use to arrive at your very own meme of O. (Also any gifted shutterbugs out there such as Robin may feel free to correct and clarify my metaphor and explain what I was actually trying to say.)

Continuing where we lifted off yesterday with Mouravieff's discussion of the additional dimensions of time, we spoke a few days ago of how the line of time pierces the plane of all-possibility and becomes realized in the now.

To put it another way, the now is not strictly speaking in time, but is actually a "portion (or prolongation) of eternity," so to speak. In this regard, Plato was quite correct in characterizing time as the moving image of eternity. I can't think of a more literal description.

This is why eternity is always -- and only -- accessible in the now, for the now is like an ever-present rabbit hole back to the Source. Your personal f-stop accounts for how much Light you allow into your aperture in any given moment. Obviously, the wider the aperture and the lower the f-stop, the more light.

But also bear in mind that this aperture is a two-way street, if you will forgive the mixed metaphor.

For example, if one is in the presence of a person with a particularly wide aperture (or low f-stop), one will be aware of the Light that emanates from him (just as he permits more Light into himself). This two-way camera eye is precisely what Eckhart was talking about when he said that "the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me." Like Plato, he was being quite literal. And Eckhart was a great photographer, to put it mildly.

In other words, there is only the one Eye, but everyone's personal camera is adjusted differently. Some have such a narrow aperture or fast f-stop that they might as well live in the dark, while others are so wide that they over-expose the world, which can result in actually devaluing it.

Was that clear? There are mystics, for example, who are exposed to so much Light that they can't take a good pneumagraph of this world, and therefore cannot appreciate its beauty and its value. f-stops are important. Too slow, and and you can only take pictures of God. And it's the same picture over and over, just a white blur.

A big part of the spiritual path involves slowing down one's shutter speed in order to allow more of the now in; which, practically speaking, is to dilate time -- and which is none other than Slack.

Moving right along, "As for the sixth dimension, this is the Time of the Universe; due to its volume it not only contains the possible, but the accomplishment of all the possibilities of each moment -- a complete cycle of all the lines of Time."

"Lastly, there exists a seventh dimension which is a dot; a dot situated at the same time in both Space and Time."

"Line of Time; Eternity; and All; these are the terms of our current language which correspond to the fourth, fifth, and sixth dimension. The term Zero corresponds to the seventh and last dimension, which should perhaps be considered as the pre-initial dimension."

I would prefer to say that the sixth and penultimate dimension is •, while the seventh is O. Put them together and you get ʘ, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Dot and circle. At first glance these would appear to be opposites, but upon deeper consideration you can see that the dot is simultaneously zero-dimensional and all-dimensional, in that an infinite number of lines may pass through it. Likewise, O can be thought of as possessing zero dimensions from within itself, as all things are simultaneously co-present within it.

Thus, to become ʘ means to establish a harmony between the dot and the sphere, so that the unthinkable plenum of O may deploy itself in time and be read out from moment to moment.

Note also what Mouravieff says about the Zero (O) being both the last dimension and the pre-initial one. This is why my book both begins and ends with that big fat nothing that is simultaneously everything. To us it is nothing unless we learn how to approach and assimilate it. Then it is everything; or, everything emanates and returns to it via the round-trip of the human station. God pours himself into the cosmos in general and human beings in particular, and our task, if you will, is to return the favor by returning each moment to its rightful Owner.

The notion of Zero plays a large role in esoteric philosophy. It is not the void. It is the seed and the end, the Alpha and Omega of all that exists. --Boris Mouravieff

Children are still so close to the Source, that it's difficult to miss the brightness. And they always give back more light than they receive:

Great God Almighty, I'm Free at Last! Now, Who Stole My Chains?!

This will be a short post, just to get us started. It's an early day, and I gotta get out of here.

Here is the full text of what Mouravieff says about the higher dimensions of time:

"For the moment, it will be sufficent to say that Time possesses not one but three dimensions, and that these dimensions are strictly analogous to those of Space."

Okay, I'm with you so far: in Euclidian space there is line, plane, and sphere. This must mean that there are analogies to these three in Time. Please continue.

"We shall limit ourselves to saying that we know that the waking consciousness, that of the 'I' of the personality is extremely relative and is able neither to grasp nor directly observe these two higher dimensions of Time, nor their effects."

Rather, the local ego, or what a I prefer to call (•), "confuses them with the fourth dimension, in a single perception of the ensemble which is the Line of Time."

In other words, dimensions Five and Six get lumped in with Four, which is reminiscent of Bion's "attacks on linking," which I have described as a kind of "dimensional defense," in that the primitive mind is easily able to render null and void meanings that only exist in a higher dimension by fleeing into a lower one.

This is what unifies psychological defense mechanisms as diverse as regression, splitting, denial, and acting out, in that each of these, in its own way, is analogous to seeking refuge in the Circle for fear of what lurks in the Sphere.

Or, as in the case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), one might flee the Circle for the Line. With OCD, the person's existence is quite literally reduced to a line in which they go back and forth between anxiety and its temporary dissipation in the ritual of the obsession or compulsion. Thus, it is actually a kind of circular line, but a line nonetheless, as one always ends up back where one started -- A to B and then back to A.

But this also renders a kind of false eternity, doesn't it, perhaps analogous to the hell of Nietzsche's eternal return? For at the ground floor of all human striving -- including of course intellectual striving -- is the desire to know the Absolute, i.e., God or O.

Now, one easy -- and all too human -- way to do this is to reduce the Absolute to something more manageable, by, say, washing one's hands hundreds of times a day, or devoting one's life to a political candidate in the belief that he will change one's existence, or placing one's faith in a two-dimensional scientific theory such as Darwinism in the belief that this linear scheme explains the Sphere.

Perhaps a clinical example will better explain my meaning. Not too long ago I evaluated a person who was crippled by a lifelong case of OCD. In fact, the OCD had been present for so long that for him it was normative. He knew no other way of existing. Furthermore, his obsessions and compulsions -- his various physical and mental rituals -- gave him comfort in the same way that one can obtain comfort from food, or sex, or companionship, or a scientific theory, or God, whatever.

This individual eventually became depressed, which is inevitable, since OCD is originally put in place to protect a vulnerable self, but ends up depriving the self of what it needs to survive and grow. In other words, the person's life revolves around his rituals, so that he cannot metabolize sufficient Love, Truth, and Beauty to remain intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually healthy.

Anyway, this person ended up being prescribed an SSRI for his depression, but it had the added benefit of eliminating the OCD (which his doctor hadn't even known about, since the patient didn't see it as a "problem" and therefore hadn't even mentioned it).

Long story short, he ended up discontinuing the SSRI because he missed his OCD. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that he was literally lost without his rituals, in the sense that he was now naked in the infinite Sphere without so much as a figleaf of compulsiveness to help him cling to the finite line. He was suddenly "free," but for him, this actually meant terror -- quite literal terror, Pascal's eternal silence of these infinite space -- as he was now face-to-face with the very reality which his OCD had been implemented to protect him from in the first place!

Now, could we make a gratuitous comment about how this is analogous to what the leftist -- I mean the true believer, not merely the clueless Democrat -- does with the terror of his God-given political freedom?

For what is the Nanny State but a gargantuan two-dimensional plane that we should all cling to in order to protect us from the infinite Sphere of Life?

And what are all of the thousands of useless laws and agencies they put in place, but a kind of collective OCD, in which we always end up back where we started? In other words, trillions of wasted dollars later, we have the same poverty, the same violence, the same stupidity. The same Mankind, frankly, only worse for the systematic neglect of man's true nature.

And the leftist does not wish to be cured, any more than the above patient did. For to be cured is to realize that one's life has been wasted in meaningless rituals. And that's a depressing thought.

On the Cosmic Inevitability of Boneheadedness and Butt Ugliness

Little chaotic around here. Gardener putting in new sod yesterday put his pick through the water main called his cousin "the plumber" who was here until midnight working on the problem still not fixed yada yada yada.

In short, no time for a new post. Instead, a slacktory refurbished and fully guaranteed old one.

Who, looking at the universe, would be so feeble-minded as not to believe that God is all in all; that he clothes himself with the universe, and at the same time contains it and dwells in it? --Gregory of Nyssa

To say that one believes in the self-evident truth -- and it is self-evident to the Self -- of "intelligent design" is really to say that one believes in intelligence, especially human intelligence. For intelligence is less than nothing if it cannot know truth, and no random shuffling of Darwinian evolution could result in truth-bearing animals. Please.

Rather, because the cosmos is logoistic, we should never be surprised to find traces of intelligence on the one hand, and truth on the other, wherever we look -- or, in other words, in the objects we perceive and in the subjects to whom they are intelligible.

The absurdity of neo-Darwinism -- and it is an absurdity to the interior Self, not necessarily to the externalized ego -- posits an absolute contingency capable of knowing absolute truth about itself. If it can do that, then it is no longer merely contingent, but participates in a transcendent absoluteness for which it can never account. Obviously there is relative truth in natural selection -- only a false absolutist could insist otherwise -- but surely not absolute truth.

Instead of "intelligent design," one might just as well say "beautiful design." For example, underneath the temporal flux of the cosmos, we apprehend those beautiful and elegant mathematical structures that seem to abide in a sempiternal platonic realm of their own.

Or so we have heard from the wise. We only got up to trigonometry, in which we received a gentleman's D, in part because we were distracted by the more beautiful Susie Campbell in the next desk. Still, although we did not know it at the time, the geometry of her form revealed something essential about our cosmos.

Yes, ugliness -- even butt ugliness -- "must needs be," but we can only know it because it is a privation. Only in the postmodern world "has ugliness become something like a norm or principle; in this case, beauty appears as a specialty, even a luxury" (Schuon). But this ugliness is merely an exteriorization of the tawdry souls who produce it, e.g., {insert contemporary example}. It requires no talent, since it takes none to produce ugliness and barbarism.

Rather, it requires the exertion of will to arrest and reverse the entropic movement away from beauty. To put it another way, some butts are quite beautiful. Still, if it is a full time job just to be beautiful, then your life is clearly out of balance. ($2302.29 per day on one's hair? I'm not sure if I've spent that much in my life.)

It seems that our decline into the postmodern cult of ugliness began at the other end, with the aesthetic movement of "art for art's sake." But this was an aesthetics cut off from its transcendent source. Once that happened, then gravity took care of the rest, and down we went on a wilde ride to the bottom. Idolatry of the beautiful is still idolatry, which is why the modern art museum became a kind of church for irreligious sophisticates. It is also why so much modern art is ultimately "empty," because it has been drained of any transcendent reference. In the absence of transcendence, all art is merely decoration on our prison walls.

Art is obviously a form; but the form must skillfully convey something of the nonformal; it is the real presence of the infinite captured within, or radiating through, the finite. Schuon wrote that "beauty is the mirror of happiness [I would say delight] and truth." Without the element of delight, "there remains only the bare form," and without the element of truth, "there remains only an entirely subjective enjoyment -- a luxury." Then we are stuck with a decadent aestheticism instead of aesthetics, which is as desiccated intellectualism is to the ever-moist and chewy intellect, just a meretricious counterfate worse than death.

In this regard, to say that there are no objective standards of aesthetic value is to insist (to paraphrase Schuon) that myopia and blindness are merely different ways of seeing instead of "defects of vision." Stupidity is not just another form of intelligence.

So why should we call formal ugliness art, especially when it aids and abets the hijacking of man's spirit down and away from its source? This is a quintessential form of demonism, of black magic, a "revolt of the darkness." Obviously it doesn't "elevate," since the broken elevator of the postmodern mind can never ascend from the ground floor to begin with. But curiously, it can nevertheless descend. It can do this because this is where they locate the "real," in matter. And this is why their vision is so hellish.

Now, what does this all have to do with the human body? Again, man is said to have been created the image and likeness of the Creator. It is the Raccoon position that we will therefore find traces of this deiformity in both our subjectivity (e.g., our capacity to know truth, to will the good, and to love beauty), but also in our material form.

This is not a new idea, but an archetypal one that belongs to the religio perennis, or the Religion of which religion is an expression. As the Orthodox Christian Olivier Clement writes, "There is no culture or religion that has not received and does not express a 'visitation of the Word.'" For "he is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Col 1:16-17).

Quoting from Manly Hall's sometimes kooky, sometimes helpful Secret Teachings of All Ages, he writes that "The oldest, most profound, the most universal of all symbols is the human body. The Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, and Hindus considered philosophical analysis of man's triune nature to be an indispensable part of ethical and religious training."

In this approach, "the laws, elements, and powers of the universe were epitomized in the human constitution," so that "everything which existed outside of man had its analogue within man." An outgrowth of this was the notion that God is a "Grand Man," while man is a "little god." Thus, "the greater universe was termed the Macrocosm -- the Great World or Body," while man's body, "the individual human universe, was termed the Microcosm." As above, so below. Placed in this context, the idea that "the Word has become flesh" is perfectly comprehensible, even inevitable, given the nature of the Sovereign Good.

And in fact, even the secular scientist believes in this ancient formulation after his own fashion. To cite one obvious example, how is it that human beings are uniquely privileged to have access to the abstract formal system that rules the heavens? In other words, the quantum cosmologist "contains" the cosmos just as surely as it contains him.

But this is what the Christian has always believed; it is the materialist who cannot account for this mystery: "Understand that you have within yourself, upon a small scale, a second universe" (Origen). "Man, this major world in miniature, is a unified abridgment of all that exists, and the crowning of divine works" (St. Gregory of Palamas). "Man is the microcosm in the strictest sense of the word. He is the summary of all existence" (John Scottus Erigena). "All things in Heaven above, and Earth beneath, meet in the Constitution of each individual" (Peter Sterry).

You will often hear reductionistic Darwinians refute design with reference to certain "ugly" realities in the world, say, the mosquito, or man's windpipe being too close to the esophagus, or Keith Olbermann's wide ass and ferret-like eyes. And yet, such quibbles actually "praise God," being that there is an implicit recognition or "recollection" of perfection in apprehending its abence.

But again, the manifestation is not the Principle, otherwise the world would be God. Nevertheless, as Schuon points out, "the world is fundamentally made of beauty, not ugliness.... and [it] could not contain ugliness if it did not contain a priori far more beauty." Likewise, contingency and randomness necessarily exist, but they are ultimately harnessed by a higher ordering principle to achieve newer and deeper syntheses. There is no metabolism without catabolism.

"The Father is God beyond all, the origin of all that is. The incarnate Son is God with us, and he who becomes incarnate is none other than the Logos who gives form to the world by his creative words. The Spirit of God in us, the Breath, the Pneuma, gives life to all and brings every object to its proper perfection. The Logos appears as order and intelligibility, the Pneuma as dynamism and life.... Thus, to contemplate the smallest object is to experience the Trinity: the very being of the object takes us back to the Father; the meaning it expresses, its logos, speaks to us of the Logos; its growth to fullness and beauty reveals the Breath, the Life-giver." --Olivier Clement

Time, History, Apocalypse, and Buggery

I think we have time for a Saturday bonus post on the topic of those additional cosmic dimensions. At this juncture I am prepared to affirm without hesitation that there are seven cosmic dimensions in all, based upon sneaking suspicions, revealed hunches, hand-selected evidence, and some scattered notes scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin by a certain disembodied household gnome.

Now, we all know about the first three dimensions. Throw in time, and that makes four. But time itself -- i.e., the time of physics -- is mere quantitative duration, with no qualities or substance at all. Therefore, I think that profane history begins to touch on the fifth dimension, since it attempts to reveal a kind of unity -- or at least interconnectedness -- beneath the flux of seemingly disconnected events.

For example: 313, 476, 1066, 1492, 1620, 1776, 1865, 1914, 1917, 1929, 1939, 1945. This is not just a random list of numbers, but a random list of dates that everyone would agree are of world-historical importance. These are dates that every schoolboy once knew (but which college students probably no longer know) -- even a cloud-hidden lad as distracted as I was. In my case, I was much more concerned with baseballically sacred numbers such as 714, 56, 382, 61, 1.12, etc.

In any event, not all dates are created equal. If they were, then the practice of history would be impossible, for there would be no way to determine what in time is "important." History doesn't end, but begins, with the selection of what properly belongs to this higher -- which is to say, transcendent -- dimension we call History (which I will capitalize in order to distinguish it from the mere existence of a past).

But why is anything in time important, being that in the long run we're all dead? Again, this goes to intuitions about the very purpose of human existence, a purpose which must by definition be transcendent if it is to be a purpose at all. In other words, to say "purpose" is to have lifted oneself from the raw facts of time, even if one's purpose is totally whack, as in the case of the left.

Now, since we in the Judeo-Christian West are so embedded in a certain view of history, most people don't notice how odd it is to be situated in this kind of time. But no primitive culture knew of history. They still had time, of course, but their lives were primarily spatial, not temporal. That is to say, they were rooted in a timeless archetype which provided the culture with its sufficient reason. Time was regarded in wholly degenerative terms, as a kind of entropic flow away from the source -- very much like the physical aging that inevitably ends in death. Although I'm working on that.

Therefore, the sacred rituals of primitive cultures all had to do with arresting time and undoing its corrosive effects, in order to bring the culture back to its pure spatial archetype -- like a collective case of OCD. Usually this required a volunteer from the audience in order to engage in a little human sacrifice. True, the volunteer had to be led kicking and screaming to receive their honor, but this at least added a little drama to their otherwise monotonous lives. It also conferred a temporary unity on the culture; or, to be precise, unanimity minus one. See Bailie for details.

By the way, this obviously touches on one of my core disagreements with Schuon, who venerated these primordial cultures. In my case, I do not condemn them, for it would be absurd to apply Christian ethics to a pre-Christian world that was simply doing the best it could with the available materials. The fact that all primitive groups engaged in animal or human sacrifice (cf. Burkert's Homo Necans) must mean that it was effective in accomplishing what it was supposed to accomplish, and that failing to engage in it was actually the more destructive option, since it would have meant dissolution of the culture. And man needs culture in order to be man, otherwise he is just another animal.

Now, where was it.... One of our Raccoon Fathers speaks of the different temporal dimensions.... Here it is, letter XX of Meditations on the Tarot, if that's the one I'm looking for. Let's see. He discusses...

Hey, wait a minute. I don't have to reinvent this wheel of karma. I can just review my previous commentary on MOTT, which we did back in 2008. Here it is.

Well, that was a waste of five precious minutes. What a copout!

Besides, that's not the schematic I was looking for.

Wait -- this might be it -- chapter XII of Mouravieff's Gnosis. He's a man that wasn't afraid to speculate. Nevertheless, much of his speculation has the intuitive ring of truth, such as "All that exists in Time, until the day when the Seventh Trumpet will sound to announce that the work undertaken by the Absolute has been achieved (sic). Then the Kingdom of the World will become that of God and his Christ, the Alpha and Omega of manifestation."

This accords with my own intuition about what we might call the "seventh dimension" of existence, in which the "heavenly kingdom" is currently under construction, so to speak (but don't quote me on that).

Later in the chapter (p. 125), Mouravieff discusses the three dimensions of time. It first appears as a simple line between future and past. Again, this would correspond to the pre-historical time alluded to above.

I'll just quote what he says next: "The fifth dimension represents the geometrical locus of all the possibilities of a given moment, of which only one is realized in Time -- while all the others remain unrealized." Now, the first thing that occurs to me is again the work of the historian, which would not be possible if time were not pregnant with different possibilities.

For if time were linear or mechanistic, then it would be absurd to say that any time was more important than another, or that any choice was more significant than another.

Also, this would be much closer to the Muslim view of each moment of time being directly caused by Allah, with no intermediate realities or human contribution. Rather, the "book of history" is already written, which goes to the dialectic between Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia, if you were paying attention.

For Prince Ali, history is already written, whereas for Lawrence, the book of history is largely dependent upon man's free choices. There is one point in the film when Lawrence succumbs to the temptation of imagining that he is not subject to the vagaries of time, which ultimately results in his getting buggered by a Turkish general. So let that be a lesson to you.

Mouravieff compares the fifth dimension to a kind of temporal plane of possibilities that is "pierced" by a single line of time, which transforms it from potential to actual. Kind of reminds us of the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics; or, of the flow of O which can result in only one explicate manifestation at a time. Or of art, which is the attempt to convey the boundless within boundaries.

And with that, we'd better stop. Need to catch up with my work down in 4D. I don't get paid for the higher dimensional stuff.

New Keys for Old Doors

I'm reposting this baby from several years ago, in order to see if my thinking on the subject has evolved at all. It has to do with Schuon's solution to the problem of the existence of more than one valid religion. (By the way, anyone who is interested in him ought to check out the new biography, Frithjof Schuon: Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy.)

For if there is only one valid religion, then all the others are wrong. But if they're all true, how can any of them be? I'm sure I have some subtle disagreements with Schuon -- although I'm equally sure that he wouldn't regard them as subtle; he was a my-way-or-the-highway sort of guy, for which I don't blame him at all, being an unquestioned spiritual genius and all. I don't really believe I've earned the "right" to disagree with someone of his stature -- in the same way that, for example, lost, malevolent, and God-hating souls have no intrinsic right to criticize the Catholic Church.

Well, I suppose it's not to that extreme, since I genuinely mean well, and I place Schuon on the highest plane of spiritual attainment. But since I am aware of the distance between us, what gives me the right? My preliminary answer is that Schuon is literally a man out of time, so that some of his ideas are unworkable in practice in our day and age. But troubled times call for a trouble man.

I mean, I'm just not prepared to write off the modern world, although one is at times tempted. I'm sure part of it has to do with his witnessing of the apocalypses of World Wars One and Two from the European perspective. Life looks very different from the standpoint of genocidal or cowardly countries who got their asses kicked vs. the one nation that kicks ass and saves others from getting their asses kicked. I don't think Schuon could conceive of the providential role of the United States, without which his life and work would have been impossible (although ultimately the same providence accounts for both).

This hardly means that one compromises the truth in order to make it compatible with the passing fashions of the day. Rather, as Schuon himself wrote, it is not a question of promulgating "new truths." Rather, "what is needed in our time, and indeed every age remote from the origins of Revelation, is to provide some people with keys fashioned afresh... in order to help them rediscover the truths written in an eternal script in the very substance of man's spirit" (emphasis mine). So just think of me as an unlicensed groksmith.

It seems that this was a much bigger problem in the past, when people first discovered the existence of Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism, and other faiths. The first impulse was to devalue them, if not vilify their practitioners. Today it's not such a big deal, but that may be due to the fact that our elites don't take religion seriously anyway. Rather, it's just a part of culture, and cultures are different, that's all.

But now that I think about it, it is odd that the multicultural left elevates culture to a kind of sacred, pseudo-absolute, even while devaluing its grounding in the true Absolute, i.e., its religion. All culture is rooted in the cultus which is its origin, ground, and justification.

Anyway, on to the post:

Schuon has written something to the effect that most people, in order to get a sense of the Absolute, must imagine that their particular belief system is absolute, instead of being an expression of the Absolute. This misunderstanding has caused all kinds of mayhem down through the centuries, and is obviously at the basis of our war with Islamist idolaters who make a god of their religion.

But it is also the basis of the left's deeply irrational jihad against religion, since they believe that belief in absolutes -- which is to say, belief -- is the problem. Therefore, no beliefs, no problems. But this simply leads to the kind of spiritual nihilism we see in a supine UK that cannot rouse itself in the face of absolutist Islamist barbarians who mock the hypersophisticated moral paralysis of the neutered EUnuchs.

Schuon's position is rather nuanced, and generally will not appeal to most religious people and to no irreligious people. First of all, his metaphysics affirms the Absolute, which puts him completely at odds with any form of postmodern secular leftism. However, he situates the Absolute beyond form, which naturally makes conventionally religious people uneasy, since people believe in and practice this or that religion because they believe it embodies absolute truth. If it didn't, they wouldn't believe it. No one practices a religion because they believe it is false, partial, or the feel-good hit of the summer.

You might say that Schuon noticed the same thing that secular extremists do -- a seeming clash of irreconcilable absolutes -- but came to the opposite conclusion. That is, the secularist rejects and even ridicules religion on the basis of its different forms, whereas Schuon observed that religions only clashed outwardly, but not inwardly -- just as there can be no real "clash" between Buck Owens and Waylon Jennings, despite the fact that each attained the aesthetic absolute. Better yet, the existence of blue or green does not clash with, but verifies, the fact of the white light of which each is an expression.

Inwardly, orthodox religious forms represent differing views of the Absolute, and in that sense are absolute. They are the highest form of the absolute that can be known and expressed on the relative plane. As such, they are "relatively absolute."

Given the necessarily hierarchical conditions of existence, the relative absolute is something which must exist, i.e., "there is none good but the One." Conversely, the "absolute relative" is an intrinsic absurdity -- and even monstrosity -- that is at the heart of all secular misosophies (i.e., hatred of wisdom).

Again, I realize this makes people uncomfortable, because when they hear the word "relative," they equate it with the relativism of the left or of the new age integralists, but Schuon would be mortified at such a conflation. Again, he affirms the Absolute, which must exist. Or, to put it another way, the Absolute cannot not be. But since it is absolute, how do we think about it? How do we engage it? How do we make it more than a philosophical abstraction, mere pseudo-intellectual deism by another name?

We do so through real religion, which you might say is the "first fruit" of the Absolute, or O. Now, you will note that there is nothing in this point of view that prevents one from personally believing that one religion does a more adequate job of expressing and reconciling us to the Absolute. This is indeed the official position of the contemporary Catholic Church, but it was affirmed as long ago as Augustine, with his crack about how that which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed began to be called Christianity.

Again, this is very different from how the secular leftist deals with the same "problem." Such individuals have a pseudo-tolerant attitude (at best) toward religion because they don't take it seriously; I, on the other hand, have a genuinely tolerant attitude because I take it so seriously.

In the absence of its relative form -- which partakes of the substance of the Absolute -- there is no ponderable Absolute on our side of manifestation. These forms are efficacious and ontologically real in a way that mere objects or ideas from the relative plane can never be; contemplation of them will change you. As Schuon wrote, they "leave durable traces in the soul, to the point that we are no longer the same man as before; they remove one from the world and draw us toward Heaven. And there is a kind of vision or inward presence that remains."

They leave durable traces in the soul. Is this not obvious? This is why scientific and philosophical ideas come and go, but Western man -- so long as he remains man, which is a fifty-fifty proposition -- will always be haunted and shadowed by the Incarnation of the Word, which speaks to a part of us that transcends time and place. It is why the Jew -- assuming he is a Jew, and not just a Democrat -- will always be haunted and shadowed by the Torah, by the very notion of the absolute Word of God, an absolute Word that inoculates against the errors of relativism.

I could go on, but you get the point. We are either permeated by a sense of the Absolute, the Infinite, and the Eternal; or we are condemned to a horizontal teenage wasteland of relativism and materiality, and a timebound tyranny of mere existence with no essence.

It therefore seems that there are ultimately only two metaphysical positions one may take: a belief in absolute supraformal truth embodied in diverse religious forms that complement and do not fundamentally exclude one another, at least a priori; or a belief in relative truth, which ultimately redounds to the subformal intellectual blob of nihilism, given enough time. Is that clear? Perhaps not.

Let's put it this way. As my friend Joseph says, if someone -- especially someone with the wrong motivation -- wants to pry into his exact religious beliefs, he tells them this: I am a believer. For in the final analysis, there are only the Believers and the unbelievers, Absolutists and nihilists; one is the upword way of faith leading to real knowledge and salvolution; the other is the downward path of manmode ignorance and superstition leading on an individual basis to spiritual sclerosis or dispersion, and on a collective basis to cultural decadence and exhaustion.

Update three years later: I personally find that the Judeo-Christian tradition -- especially the strand that leads to and from Denys to Eckhart to Unknown Friend -- perhaps spiced with a little neo-Vedanta, furnishes me with the most adequate vocabulary to think about, discuss, and assimilate the Absolute. But that's just me. More importantly, the true Believers need to stick together in this age of malevolent stupidity.

If Darwinism Were True, All Writers Would Be Food Critics

Well, I think I'll delve into the archive for awhile. It's not that I have nothing to say, only that I don't see any need to repeat myself. Better to take an old post and drive it a little deeper into the ground. This exercise is not without its benefits, at least for me. First, it lets me know what's down there in the arkive. Second, I can correct errors or infelicities of expression, or at least explain things more clearly, especially to myself.

This is important, since I'm (almost) never writing from the standpoint of time, but eternity. That undoubtedly sounds grandiose, but it's not, for how could it be grandiose when I am specifically not taking credit for truths that do not originate in me? In fact, one's writing should always try to partake of eternity, or why bother? It's just that in our relativistic, journalistic, now-obsessed culture, we're not used to people trying to express truths that will still be true tomorrow, next year, and even forever.

Rather, the new norm is people like Thomas Friedman or Paul Krugman, whose columns are obsolete before they even write them. And yet, on the left, there's no penalty for being wrong. As Navy Seal Dennis Prager says, being on the left means never having to say you were wrong. The reason for this is that the leftist lives in an a priori abstract world that is governed by self-righteousness and good intentions (i.e., desire), not truth. And the sanctimonious are never wrong, since sanctimony concerns itself with ontological planes other than the Real. At best, one can say that the column of an aptly named Timesman has succeeded in conveying their sanctimony and superiority, which is no success at all.

If there is no intrinsic truth of man -- a Truth that doesn't come from man, but through him -- then the existentialists, Darwinists, and other relativists are correct that man is truly just freak of nature, a meaningless bridge between nowhere and nothing. That being the case, why even bother writing about it? Why not honestly enjoy one's little animal pleasures for as long as they last instead of inventing likely stories about what it all means? For if Darwinism were true, all writers would be food critics. Then we'd kill all the bad chefs.

On to the post, which is not only true, but always will be.

Man is made in such a way that he is never fully actualized within the limits of his possibilities except with the help of constraints, otherwise he would be perfect; where there is no brake there is exaggeration and unconsciousness. --F. Schuon

One of the intrinsic problems of leftism is that it confuses an absence of constraints with freedom, when the only real freedom is precisely a result of thinking, feeling, willing and even "being" within transcendent and ultimately God-given constraints.

For example, just as it isn't possible to "think mathematically" in the absence of mathematical forms or to play music in the absence of harmony, melody, and rhythm, it is not possible to "think spiritually" in the absence of authentic and timeless religious truths. These are the boundary conditions that vault one's thought into a higher vertical space which is anterior to us, even while we "co-create" it -- again, somewhat analogous to musical improvisation.

Real thought is the essence of prayer, meaning that, like all prayer, it links man's intelligence with what is timeless and eternal. Indeed, this is the sufficient reason for our thought, for if it isn't linked to the universal -- and hence timeless -- then what is it good for? How is it an improvement over the animal, who unfailingly knows what to do without having to cogitate about it?

To put it another way, the purpose of religious forms -- one of them, anyway -- is to allow us to think spiritually, and to do so in a productive way. One of the reasons why the "new age" is so empty and ultimately unfruitful is that it tries to invent or cobble together its own spiritual language, which amounts to thinking without constraints or playing music with no harmonic or melodic structure. Most self-styled "independent gurus" fall into this category, and this is the primary reason why their work dies with them (if we're lucky), since it does not arise out of any eternal tradition. They end up trying to invent their own tradition, which is analogous to the musician trying to invent music itself.

I remember Bob Dylan saying something similar with regard to his artistic development. He said something to the effect that he didn't understand how young musicians can think they'll produce anything of enduring value by simply imitating contemporary sounds, instead of immersing themselves in an authentic tradition.

In Dylan's case, one of the keys to his greatness was that he surrendered and submitted himself to the American folk tradition, as if it were a religion. Which, in a way, it was. That is, just as authentic religious revelations descend from "above" and are elaborated by no one and everyone, a genuine folk tradition arises from "below," in the collective experience of mankind. This is what gives the music its archetypally resonant power, a power that no single person could have invented (analogous to how math is powerful because it isn't invented).

Only once he had immersed himself in the folk tradition could Dylan then "legitimately" branch of into freer directions; but even so, I believe he would be the first to acknowledge that he is still working with timeless materials within a traditional framework. He is not truly an "innovator" in the way we usually think of that word. To the contrary, he is a strict traditionalist, out of which comes both his power and authority.

One other important point is that this approach ensures that music is not merely made for egoic or narcissistic reasons, but out of love -- love and respect for the tradition that is higher and greater than oneself. So much music is vile because it betrays the traditions out of which it arose. And man cannot betray tradition without betraying himself, since tradition is a repository of so much collective human wisdom and experience.

If one truly immerses oneself in a tradition and is guided by love, an alchemical transformation occurs within the soul. In this process, the lower self "dissolves," so to speak, allowing one to graft onto or merge with the tradition in a seamless, or "interior," way. The reason why this can occur is that a legitimate tradition embodies what is permanent within the self (in both its celestial and terrestrial aspects), so it is not really a discovery but a deep recollection of one's true being.

This, by the way, is one of the things that is so troubling about Obama. It is not so much that he is the spiritual disciple of an ignorant clown, but that he has surrendered himself to a tradition that is not a legitimate one at all, but one that is wholly -- or largely -- manmade. Any spiritually attuned person can listen to Jeremiah Wright and know this in an instant. That he is not radiating divine qualities is patently obvious. He has no dignity, no nobility, no sobriety; rather, he is "wild," intoxicated, incoherent, and self-glorifying. At best, he mimics certain qualities such as divine wrath and judgment, as well as a genuine fake charisma that emanates from his fascinatingly unbound mind parasites, as opposed to any celestial gift. All demagogues have this toxic gift that resonates in the susceptible.

A person of genuine spiritual attainment will radiate from the calm center, and be an image of the "motionless mover." But Wright is all periphery and no center; he has no spiritual center and therefore no intellectual center, hence, the insane conspiracy theories, which are both systematic and incoherent, just like any clinical paranoid who is invincible in his certainty of the impossible. Wright has quite literally substituted paranoia for metanoia, in that he orients himself around projected illusions instead of "turning around" and calmly orienting himself toward and around the peace and tranquility of the One.

As a commenter mentioned yesterday, this is not religion but Marxism, Marxism being the archetypal inversion of religion precisely. As I have mentioned on many occasions, this is my principal objection to the psychospiritual left, as it inverts the cosmic order, so that everything is quite literally backward and upside down. Mixed with religion, it becomes a particularly potent and destructive force, even demonic in the strict sense of the term.

Now, why is this important? Because a religion is where one's soul finds its rest. It is where one feels spiritually "at home." As such, if one finds one's home in a false religion, one is ipso facto a false person (which is no person at all). To put it another way, if one finds one's truth in lies, then one is living a lie -- or worse yet, one is a Lie.

But why would someone "fall in love" with religious lies and liars? Good question. It could just be because it is convenient to do so, or congenial with what one already wishes to believe. Thus, a person who has already committed himself to neo-Marxism finds his soul's rest in the tawdry "liberation theology" of a Jeremiah Wright, which is not theology and certainly not liberating.

Is this what has happened with Obama? Unfortunately, we just don't know, and that's the problem. Is Obama just cynical and calculating? Spiritually blind and tone deaf? Not too bright underneath his unruffled veneer? In any case, his attraction to this buffoon Wright speaks to some sort of flaw which is quite deep, and which reveals a fundamentally dis-ordered soul.

We all have flaws. But hopefully we do not glorify them and give them a divine imprimatur. It's like a sex addict joining a polygamous church, or Jeffrey Dahmer converting to the Aztec religion.

If Obama felt he needed to join a black church in order to gain some sort of "street credibility," it certainly wouldn't have been difficult to find a mainstream one. I happen to believe that the black church at its best represents an authentic sub-tradition, as it is the spontaneous merging of the gospel with an oppressed people with their own unique take on the timeless. There is so much truth and beauty in the black church, e.g., gospel music. Why get involved with this perverse, parasitic, and politicized version of it? Perhaps because the real ones tend to be socially conservative.

If we give Obama the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is not a malicious person, then we are left with the option that he is simply a man with no identity in search of one. Such a centerless man will grope around for his center at the periphery, and if he thinks he has found it there, it only means that his true self died somewhere along the way.

There are few greater sins than making religion look foolish or evil. Perhaps none, for it is the one sin that negates all the others and thereby legitimizes everything.

The Willed Stupidity of the Left

As mentioned yesterday, it is a truism that one can be stupid in one area and a genius in another. At the very least, being gifted in one discipline -- say, music or physics -- is no guarantee of being even adequate in another.

But also, one must sometimes intentionally render oneself stupid (so to speak) in one area, in order to prevent its dominance over other aspects, dimensions, and modes of the self. Human beings are so good at things, that a small segment of the personality can become hypertrophied and cause a major imbalance. For example, the rational side can dominate the supra-logical side, and vice versa; or reason can extinguish intuition; letter can dominate spirit; collectivism can overwhelm individualism; etc.

A classic case in my profession is the dominance of the conscious over the unconscious mind -- not just for the patient, but for the doctor. When Freud developed the psychoanalytic technique, he said that the analyst needed to essentially disable his own linear, conscious mind in order to attend to the patient's associations with intuitive, even-hovering attention.

In fact, Freud expressed it well when he said that "When conducting an analysis, one must cast a beam of intense darkness so that something which has hitherto been obscured by the glare of the [conscious] illumination can glitter all the more in darkness." And as irrationally hostile as Freud was to religion, this is ironically the approach one must take in illuminating the subtle realm that lies beyond the ego. In other words, the same general principle equally applies to realms above as below the ego: only when the sun is down do the stars come out.

Bion formulated the same idea in affirming that the analyst's task was to "abandon memory, desire, and understanding," so as to clear a space for the spontaneous emergence of novel meanings -- similar, say, to the receptive mode with which one approaches a poem or musical performance. It's quite simple, really: in order to know what you don't know, you must begin by unKnowing what you think you know.

And for readers who might be a little slower on the uptake, e.g., anonymous, the same applies to the attitude required to profit from my posts -- which mirrors the passively active and actively passive state of mind from which they were produced; to read them with the ego is, as the Zen master said, like chasing a criminal while banging a drum. Your pursuit will be fruitless, but at least it will be loud. Or, put it this way: if you don't profit from them, that's a subtle hint that you do not understand them, mindless attacks on the messenger notwithstanding. What can I say? I can't help you. But I can give you a referral.

Now, a few years ago, charter Raccoon Dilys made a piquant observation regarding the suspension of one faculty in order to activate another and bring it to the fore: "Have you heard of the 'learned incapacity' idea, that proper execution of every calling requires the disabling of certain kinds of intelligence? For instance, I know a lot of people who are just too intelligent to be [certain professions], because there are some things one needs not to know in these roles, some mental and emotional strategies that must be disconnected" (emphasis mine).

I had never thought of it in exactly this way before, but this is truly a key idea, for it explains how any discipline or philosophy can take on a cult-like quality, elevating a relative incapacity to the only capacity. For example, in order to be a materialist, one must disable virtually everything that makes one human. This is fine as a temporary strategy, but if the incapacity takes root and dominates the personality, then you have become a kind philosophical and spiritual retard, like our own anonymous. But so long as you associate with fellow cult members, you won't even know that anything is amiss. Like the rest of them, you will take the shadows on the cave walls as reality, and nurture a childishly superior attitude toward those who notice that big light entering the mouth of the cave.

For to submit to a discipline is to learn to interpret the world in terms of that operating system, which only reinforces and reifies the system. For example, it's fine to attend law school, but if secular law displaces the law that is written on the heart, then one is lost. Or, if one begins taking scientific abstractions for the concrete reality, that is another form of spiritual suicide. They disable certain kinds of intelligence, and then confuse their little operating system with intelligence as such.

As I have mentioned before, one of the great shocks of my life has been the unending discovery of how fruitful the traditionally religious operating systems are for novelgazing around O. Some 1,500 posts later, it continues to be an endlessly generative surprise for me. I don't know where it comes from -- well, I suppose I do, in the sense that it comes from O -- but I do know that it would be inaccessible without the proper operating system. It would be like trying to play blues without the pentatonic scale. I suppose you could try, but you'd just sound silly.

Now, there is a huge difference between fruitful willed stupidity vs. a kind of pathological and permanent disconnection of cognitive links in order to understand the world in terms of this or that specialty. One of Bion's most important ideas was "attacks on linking," a primitive mental process that dismantles the scaffolding of the mind so as to prevent certain unwanted meanings from emerging. This intrapsychic violence is always associated with exteriorized violence, for if you do violence to the truth, it is only a matter of time before you do violence to human beings.

Take the example of the willfully stupid leftist who knows the truth and believes that it sanctions him to impose it upon others, e.g., Obamacare. In such a case, truth is naturally transformed into a lie. But just as importantly, truth draws one to it, while the lie agitates. You might say that the meaning goes from being a centripetal thing, so to speak, to becoming a centrifugal event.

So too does the personality under the influence of the lie -- their personalities become disturbing "events." I'm not talking about charisma or about benevolent love, which also radiate from certain people. Rather, this is a person whose energy "agitates" those around them, and inducts them into their particular psychodrama. In short, it is "acting out" as a replacement for "thinking."

Karl Marx is the quintessential example of idea-turned-event, for his fraudulent system of thought continues to agitate minds and spur action in the present. He cannot stay buried in his dustbin, because his ideas are just too tempting to certain sick minds in need of intellectual sanction for their acting out. It is as if he were the prophet of an anti-religion that substitutes action for thought. Pass the bill first, then find out what's in it!

This in itself is a fascinating idea, for we must always ask ourselves, "when is action action, and when is it a substitute for thought in order to unburden a disturbed mind?" At the same time, we must ask "when is thought thought?," because for many on the left, a thought is not an idea but an object to be used for some primitive purpose such as releasing aggression or blocking certain unwanted meanings (as we see here every day with anonymous's aggressively clueless comments).

Political correctness -- the cognitive Swiss Army knife of the left -- is another example of a collective attack on linking. It also deceives the person who engages in it, because PC is always able to operate freely under the pretext of "compassion," when it is actually quite aggressive and even violent. The leftist cannot be consciously aware of this violence, because one of the purposes of political correctness is to allow the leftist to behave violently while denying it -- and even tell themselves that they merely have "compassion," or "inclusiveness," or "tolerance," or some other benign motivation.

However, the person on the business end of political correctness is well aware of the primitive and bullying violence, which is one of the reasons he is not a leftist. A sane person recognizes that Truth is without question the highest societal value, higher than love, higher than compassion, and certainly higher than democracy, i.e., the collective will -- which will simply devolve to the will to power in the absence of integral Truth.

It Doesn't Take a Rocket Scientist To Be a Rocket Scientist

In his chapter on the order of the mind, Schall begins with a couple of amusing anecdotes about Einstein.

On one occasion, the father of relativity had to be rescued on three successive days after repeatedly capsizing his dinghy off Long Island. As one of the rescuers remarked of Einstein, he simply lacked the common sense to control the dinghy. In short, whatever other gifts he might have possessed, he was a nautical moron.

Einstein also attempted to learn piano, but was apparently awful at it. Finally, in exasperation, his teacher exclaimed, Albert, can't you count?!

Schall's point is that there are different kinds of knowing that correspond to different orders of knowledge. This goes to what I said in yesterday's post, about each of these orders being analogous to a relatively autonomous plane that bisects O. Who knows how many of these planes there are? For there are planes within planes within planes, i.e., sub-subspecialties within subspecialties within specialties.

For example, I work with a psychiatrist who has forgotten as much medicine as I never learned. Although he attended medical school and I didn't, for him that particular order has been more or less eclipsed by his psychoanalytic training, which applies to a wholly different order (i.e., more to do with the software of the mind than the hardware of the brain).

But I am acquainted with another psychiatrist who knows nothing of the psychoanalytic order, and thinks it all reduces to the biochemical order. Talking to one or the other is like talking to people from different planets.

Schall affirms the truism that just because we are adept at understanding one order, it hardly means it will apply to another. Noam Chomsky comes to mind, in that he is apparently a genius linguist, but when he turns his attention to politics, he is crippled by paranoia, moral inversion, and a complete absence of perspective. But he's just one of countless intellectuals and artists who become morons when they step outside the narrow order which they have mastered.

Of course, a man has got to know his limitations. As I've mentioned before, we often think of narcissism applying mainly to one's appearance, but narcissism is a mind parasite that can glom onto just about anything in order to express itself -- money, power, intelligence, musical ability, really, anything about oneself that rises above the average.

Therefore, people who have been treated throughout their lives as "special" because of their intelligence can run the risk of their intelligence being hijacked by narcissism, if they happen to be especially vulnerable to the latter. Narcissism is only problematic when it becomes a pathological means of self-esteem regulation. You can see how this would apply to intelligence, because the intellectual narcissist will not say things because they are true, but because they make him look intelligent.

In recently reading a couple of new books about Schuon, I can see that he was precisely the opposite of this pattern. His need for truth was rooted entirely in the intrinsic rights of Truth and the obligation of man to know it, not in the petty need to make himself look special at the expense of Truth. It was a humble submission to Truth, not a vulgar use of Truth to elevate himself (as one generally sees in all the bogus gurus, swamis, and new age cult leaders).

If Schuon's soul were as filled with corruption as, say, Deepak Chopra's, it would have been as easy for a man of his genius to get rich writing vulgar new age books as to compose a grocery list. But that is impossible to do without doing violence to Truth. If one is not made humble in the face of Truth, then it's probably not Truth you've stumbled upon.

Anyway, what intrigues me is not just that some people know things that others don't, but that these different forms of knowledge apply to diverse, ontologically real orders. I will just speak to a couple of orders with which I am most familiar, the orders of religious metaphysics and of psychoanalysis. I mention these two in particular because in each case, it wasn't a matter of accumulating knowledge and piecing things together bit by bit until an order emerged.

Rather, in both cases, there were particularly vivid experiences of literally "entering" the order in a sudden and catastrophic way (as in catastrophe theory). In the past, I have posted about how this happened to me with psychology. My undergraduate major was in film, not psychology, so when I entered my masters program, I clearly had less explicit "knowledge" than my peers. And yet, I instantly -- and I mean instantly -- zipped ahead of them, for it was as if I were suddenly operating from "within" the order of psychology, whereas they were still outside of it, trying to get in.

I'm afraid this will sound grandiose or self-serving, but it certainly isn't meant to (for one thing, I have no delusions that expertise in one area carries over to all the others). I should hope that nearly every Raccoon will have had this experience in some order of knowledge, whether of computers, music, mathematics, painting, business, medicine, whatever.

And if you have, you will be aware of that sensation of suddenly being "inside" the order in question. A key point is that we do not invent this order, but discover and enter it. And this is only possible because the soul is not in the world, but rather, the reverse: the world is in the soul, so that its various orders may be located within us.

I'm pretty sure it's the same with theology. Oddly enough, I just seem to have a knack for it, although I should add that the knack has *coincidentally* improved with thousands and thousands of hours of practice.

For it is not necessarily that one is born with a gift for knowing this or that order. Rather, it is probably fair to say that in most cases, the most important element is passion. Thus the prescription that in order to advance spiritually, one must love God with all one's strength -- mind, body, and soul. That's just another way of saying that one must pursue O in the same way that Michael Jordan pursued basketball or John Coltrane pursued music or Tiger Woods pursued skanks.

This other book I happen to be reading, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong, makes this point quite forcefully. I'll get into some of the details in a later post, but one of the author's theses is that experience actually changes genetic expression -- that we are by no means genetically determined.

It is as if we have an abundance of genes just sitting around doing nothing until they are called upon, either of necessity by the environment or by choice with the will. Perhaps the expert makes it look easy not because he was born with the gift, but because he was born with so much passion for a particular subject or activity that his pursuit of it seems more like play than work.

In other words, it takes a whole lot of work for something to just come naturally. That goes against the romantic view of the genetic determinists who posit a kind of essential, inborn genius, but Shenk marshals some compelling evidence in favor of the thesis that genius is more perspiration than inspiration.