The Supreme Court Does the Impossible

Not sure where we left off, but then again, I will align myself with the gentleman from Colombia, who says... he says a few choice things, actually, for example, that his sentences are merely "dots of color in a pointillist painting"; nor do his words try to explain, but rather, "circumscribe the mystery." And he also says something about being less like a tree and more like a bush that grows every which way from the center out.

In other words, it doesn't really matter where we begin so long as we are either starting from or returning to First Principles, AKA Alpha and Omega. For only first principles can really bite into reality and generate traction for the vertical ascent. Without them we cannot "defy gravity," as it were, at least on the intellectual plane.

Indeed, if everything were just contingencies and not principles, then we could never get off the goround, could we? Then we would be in the position of the krugmaniacal Keynesian who stands in a bucket while attempting to lift himself by the handle.

This book by Lings -- Symbol & Archetype: A Study of the Meaning of Existence -- is all about first principles. The second half of the title is a hint: the meaning of existence.

Oh great. Just clicked over to Drudge. Let the learned gentleman from Colombia have the floor: "Moral indignation is not truly sincere unless it literally ends in vomiting."

Excuse me for a moment. I need a bigger bucket.

"The fool, seeing that customs change, says that morality varies." The same fool "does not content himself with violating an ethical rule: he claims that his transgression becomes a new rule" (Don Colacho).

Oh well. "Civilization is what old men manage to salvage from the onslaught of young idealists." Besides, "Whoever defeats a noble cause is the one who has really been defeated." Therefore, "The cost of progress is calculated in fools," and I can't count that high.

Speaking of first principles, the SCOTUS decision is a violation of the first rank, because it goes to the very basis of civilization. Perhaps we'll get into that more deeply once this acute nausea subsides a bit.

I wouldn't blame the Creator if he withdraws that providential hand that has both guided and bailed us out so many times over the past 250 years. Why bother with these loons?

It's one thing to be fallen. It's something else entirely to confuse down and up. Once that happens, then man enthusiastically pursues his own destruction. But nothing obliges us to participate in the sickness of the world. Well, except the IRS.

I feel like I'm live-blogging a black hole. This is a Dark Day, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with animus toward homosexuals. Indeed, I have a homosexual relative by marriage, an artist, and one of his works hangs on my office wall. If someone can't appreciate the distinction between micro and macro, between private behavior and the state presuming to redefine reality, then they are too unsophisticated and too insentient to even bother with. Let the dead bury the tenured.

For Lings, what we call the "fall" results in a kind of veiling, the veil being part of the "atmosphere" that opens up between divine and human, terrestrial and celestial. The path of return is "upward," but it is not as if we have lost all O-rientation.

Rather, "the science of symbols is inextricably linked with the path of return," for these symbols "are reminders for the spiritual traveller of man's lost perfection." Or, they may be nuisances, depending on the case (e.g., marriage, which can obviously only be between man and woman without ceasing to be what it is; to not know this truism is to not know what marriage is, even if one is technically married).

The spiritual adventure always involves "swimming against the tide." What makes the contemporary journey a little more tricky is that the stream is a sewer, so we are battling both gravity and ambient toxicity. That's okay. The exercise just makes our wings stronger, and exposure to the left makes our immune system all the more robust. Like a child who eats dirt, I have the antibodies acquired during my many years of exposure to higher education.

About that shrub alluded to in the first paragraph. Imagine looking down on a shrub, which seems to grow in every direction from a central point. Or better, imagine a spider's web, which "is all the more apt inasmuch as the web is woven out of the substance of its 'creator.'" For Lings, this provides a fruitful symbol of the cosmos.

In considering the web, "The concentric circles represent the hierarchy of the different worlds," such that "the more outward the circle, the lower its hierarchic degree." Thus, if the central point is "truth" or "sanctity" or "Christ," then the outer circle would represent darkness, journalism, and tenure.

But in addition to the concentric circles, there are also radii from the center out. Thus, we are never really separate from the Principle; you could say the circles represent immanence, while the radii signify transcendence. Without the radii, we would indeed by stuck like flies in whatever circle we happen to inhabit.

Lings makes the helpful point that at the "end" of each radii is a symbol. Or better, at the center is an archetype, while at the outer end is a symbol that more or less reflects the archetype. The local symbol is an emanation or prolongation of the nonlocal archetype, as it were.

Thus, for example, herebelow, marriage is a symbol that reflects a much higher and deeper archetype, ultimately the union of male and female, or absolute and infinite and other primordial complementarities.

This is the archetype the Supreme Court presumes to be qualified to destroy. Which is analogous to Iranian mullahs feeling qualified to destroy the bond between protons and neutrons. The result is vast destruction, the "unleashing of hell," so to speak. Likewise, to undermine the primordial link between male and female is to unleash a different kind of hell, but equally destructive.

Now, bearing the image of the web in mind, we see that there will necessarily be some things that "fall between the cracks," so to speak, i.e., the indeterminate spaces between the radii.

What sorts of things are these? I would say these spaces are filled with human illusion -- for there is no other kind -- i.e., with things that cannot be, because they have no ontological basis. In one sense they "must be," man being what he is. And yet, they "cannot be," for they are like the possibility of the impossible, or the nihilistic side of freedom, detached from principles and from God.

So, give the Supreme Court credit for doing the impossible.

Pecking at the Inside of the Cosmic Egg

It just now popped into my head that perhaps there's a connection between unity/totality and Gödel's incompleteness theorems, which prove that an intellectual system can be consistent or complete, but not both. Unity would go to consistency, while totality would go to completeness. Therefore, we could say that a human life can be consistent or complete, unified or total, but not both.

"Does this make any sense?" -- a question he probably should have asked himself before springing it on an unsuspecting public. Only one way to find out: keep writing until it either makes sense or goes off the cosmic rails.

What does it mean to love God with all one's mind, heart, and strength? These three are intellect, heart, and will, respectively.

It seems to me that intellect goes more to the quality of absoluteness and consistency, while heart would go more to unity and completeness, while the will is that antsy thing in us that won't rest until it rests in the absolute unity-totality that is God, for God is the one being who escapes Gödel's logical straitjacket.

You could say the straitjacket necessarily exists because under terrestrial conditions, God bifurcates into unity and totality at our end of the bargain.

In his Spiritual Perspectives & Human Facts, Schuon says "Metaphysical knowledge is one thing and its actualization in the mind is another," which right away puts it on a different plane than ordinary knowledge for which there is no such distinction.

But metaphysical knowledge is always mindful of that gap between man and God: no matter how absolute our knowledge, it is never absolute per se, only a reflection of it herebelow.

Here again, this would be consistent with Gödel, who was really trying to prove the meta-truth that just because we can't prove something logically, it doesn't mean it isn't true. He just wanted to place appropriate limits on logic, not invalidate it, for if everything were subject to logic, then man would be condemned to an absurcular tautology. But just because we can't attain unity and totality, it hardly means they don't exist. That's what you call an unwarranted leap, only a leap down, off the cosmic telovator.

Which is why, as Schuon says, "All the knowledge the brain can hold is as nothing in the light of Truth even if it is immeasurably rich from a human point of view."

Substitute "complete" for "immeasurably rich," and you get the idea: no matter how complete our knowledge, it is as if nothing compared to the nonlocal object of all knowledge, which is precisely what Thomas Aquinas meant when he made his famous crack about everything he had written being "so much straw" compared to the soul-shattering experience of infused grace. In the end, God shatters all speech. A word is like an egg, inside which there is always a bit of life pecking at the shell to get out.

Or, "Metaphysical knowledge is like a divine seed in the heart; thoughts represent only faint glimmers of it." If thought were to fuse with divinity, it would turn from a glimmer to an explosion of light. Contact between the two is necessary to get anything done, but you don't plug your toaster directly into the nuclear reactor.

At the other end, failure to plug into the cosmic grid at all necessarily results in Error, whether trivial or grandiose, human or tenured. Why? Because without the divine rocket boost -- AKA the free launch of grace -- "the ascending curve of a circle changes imperceptibly to a descending curve." Remember, just because you don't recognize Gödel, it doesn't mean he doesn't recognize you.

Nevertheless, here lies "the whole tragedy of philosophy," which either breaks out toward God or is a manmode tautology: it is like stamp-collecting instead of sending and receiving letters. Ever see a complete stamp collection? First of all, who would want to? Second of all, no.

Or, as Schuon puts it, "Modern man collects keys without knowing how to open a door." Ho! Even worse, like the politically and academically correct left, he is like "a child who, after having burnt itself, wants to abolish fire." But if you don't burn baby burn, you can't learn baby learn, because where there is Light there is Heat.

This is why everything about Obama is not only dark but frigid. History shows that the two always go together when conjoined with Power. It's why this particular historical passage is so gloomy.

With preluminaries out of the way, let's get back to Lings, who relates all of this to Genesis 3, for "the eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree was the attachment to a symbol for its own sake apart from its higher meaning."

Again: the symbol is "thrown across." The postmodern posthuman will stipulate this, except to say that all throwing is only horizontal in nature, such that symbols point only to other symbols, such that we are forced to participate in this bootless linguistic circle jerk. Which is why it is absolutely the case that liberals throw like girls.

Instead of setting us free, this leftward truth imprisons us. Which I would refuse to believe even if it were true, just for the joy of questioning authority. For even if there is no truth, there is still fun, and what's more fun that tweaking our leftist prison wards?

Remember: man is the "mediator between Heaven and earth." In our unfallen state, you could say this is the "end of the story," in that the Bible would abruptly end at Genesis 2:24, with man and woman naked and happy. What could go wrong?

The short answer: history.

Yes, yes, history is one long chronicle of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of our post Gen 3 exile in the bewilderness. But that's not all it is. For we insist there is nevertheless a vector, an inscape hatch from the egg, a path of return, a lifeline. The way forward is more or less an I witless foggus, but, like an airplane pilot, we may nevertheless novelgaze forward with the use of our God-given instruments:

"The clouds of the macrocosm are never permanent; they come only to go, the luminaries still shine, and the directions of space have lost nothing of their measurelessness" (Lings). Our primordial calamity veils the firmament but doesn't sever the link nor void the promise. God is still God, even if man will always be man.

Humans Hear a Who

Unity and totality. What are they, and where do they come from?

A totality without unity would be just a blob, while unity without totality would be an impenetrable monad. But darn it, that's not the kind of universe this is, nor the kind of people we are.

This topic may sound... whatever you think it sounds like, but I promise you it isn't, because it goes straight to the nub of the gist of the essence of things. First Philosophy, you might say, because you either have to address this issue or skip right past it while pretending you have dealt with it.

Let's start with an observation by Schmitz, that there must be "an immanent specifying principle," i.e., something that gives things form and makes them what they are -- this and not that. To put it another way, in the absence of the specifying principle, everything would be the same, and we're back to the cosmic blob. It has oneness but lacks all distinction.

Totality, on the other hand, "brings unity to an even wider context, to a system, horizon, or world. It is a kind of organizing form that brings diverse factors into a complex and more or less internally related arrangement."

Thus, it seems that formal unity is the more static of the two, while totality seems more of a process. In fact, totalizing might be a better way of expressing it.

For example, what is personal growth -- the kind of post-biological growth alluded to yesterday, subsequent to the achievement of (merely) formal adulthood? I don't know about you, but to me it feels like a kind of totalizing process whereby the person attains to a higher and deeper sense of totality. Call the latter One Cosmos, or the Cosmic Attractor toward which we are drawn.

Look at it this way. A person laboring under the dead weight of scientistic materialism will agree that there is One Cosmos. But what an impoverished cosmos it is! Sucked into the "vortex of objectivity," it is lacking precisely the totality under discussion. It is one, but in this case, one does not equal one. It doesn't even come close, for the most exterior thing still has an immaterial interiority that transcends materialism, otherwise we couldn't know anything about anything. Knowledge is a relationship and relationships are not material objects.

So there is really a dynamic complementarity between unity and totality. Physicists talk about a "theory of everything," but you can be sure this theory will go only to unity, not to totality. In a footnote, Schmitz dryly mentions that postmodernists "wish to make war upon totality."

This is an understatement, since they actually destroy the very possibility of totality up front, and then go on from there, cleaning up their own mess and calling it scholarship. A tenured barbarian can destroy in five minutes what took thousands of years to attain. In so doing, the postmodern savage is far more effective than those Muslims with hammers, although we don't want to find out what would happen if the latter were to replace their hammers with nuclear missiles.

Grinding our gears a bit, I want to turn to a book by Martin Lings called Symbol & Archetype, because I think it advances our discussion more deeply into Totality. I've only read one chapter so far, but it is so dense and rich that I had to stop to digest it. {Belch}

Lings begins with the bold statement that "symbolism is the most important thing in existence; and it is at the same time the sole explanation of existence." Really? Symbolism is the theory of everything we've been looking for?

This makes a kind of superficial sense, in that any explanation of existence is naturally symbolic, and a cosmos capable of symbolization is radically distinct from one that isn't. Ironically, we may conclude that the very possibility of a "theory of everything" rests on metaphysical grounds far more consequential than its specific content, for the theorist is essentially proclaiming I can explain everything!

In short, he is confessing to omniscience, which you will agree is more interesting than the theory itself. Omniscient products of random evolution? Wo! Now you need a theory for how that is even possible, being that it cannot be explained by your little theory of everything. If anything, your theory renders the theorist impossible, so you need to go back a few steps in order to account for this strange totality to which man is uniquely qualified to access.

We have touched on this subject in the past: that is, we just so happen to inhabit a cosmos in which one thing can stand for another. In short, it is a symbolic and symbolizing cosmos, and we are its privileged symbolees. How did that come about? In any event, we can be sure that physics in principle cannot explain it, only rely on it.

The literal meaning of symbol is something "thrown across." Here again, this implicit meaning is loaded with implicit assumptions about the nature of this universe. For example: thrown across what? Or, from who and to whom? Who? Wo, slow down. How did a who get into the cosmos? And can there be a who without a whom?

"Man himself," writes Lings, "is the greatest of earthly symbols" -- which follows from the "universal doctrine that he was made in the image of God." That language is unfortunately loaded -- or saturated -- such that its metaphysical meaning is lost to most. But in the context under discussion, it suggests that man himself is "thrown across," so to speak, just like any other symbol.

However, being the quintessential case, "man is the symbol of the sum of the attributes, that is, of the Divine Nature in its Totality."

There's that word again, totality. This implies that man is a symbolic totality thrown across a something by another Totality. Everything short of man is also a symbol, but in a much more limited way. They will have more or less unity, but not totality. Which is why we can know -- contain -- them, but not vice versa.

This is why the world "lies open" to us. It is a kind of open book, filled with words, which is to say, symbols. It's where the all the metaphysical transparency comes from, whether we are talking about truth, beauty, or unity.

Better stop. Gotta get ready for work.

Liberalism and Other Spiritual Abortifacients

Every psychologist has his pet developmental theory, but when you get right down to it, one could say human development has only two stages: the first runs from conception to adulthood, the second from adulthood to infinity and beyond, being that there can be no conceivable end to human post-biological development. It's like what they said about the quarterback Y.A. Tittle, if I am remembering rightly: he never lost a game, the clock just ran out.

The great within of the soul is oddly proportioned to the great beyond of God, in that man's worth, in the words of Schuon, "lies in his consciousness of the Absolute." Alternatively, if man is proportioned to relativity, then he is nothing, just as our tenured apes tell us.

What is the essential difference between these two movements? Well, the first must be guided by some sort of largely genetic telos, or morphogenetic field, or teleonomic attractor. It happens "by itself," given certain minimal environmental conditions, e.g., good enough mothering, good enough nourishment, and good enough information.

I am old enough to remember when being an adult wasn't considered much of an achievement. But in the contemporary world there is a panoply of barriers to the achievement of adulthood, virtually all erected by the cultural left. For example, they have no use for motherhood, with the predictable result of producing children with attachment disorders inhabiting adult bodies. That's no way to preserve and hand on a civilization.

The insanity of triggers, microaggressions, speech codes, and political correctness in general are just ways to protect children from the rigors of adulthood. Dennis Prager says the loudest applause he ever heard was during a commencement speech by Obama, when he reminded the supposedly grown-up students that with his healthcare plan, they would be able to stay on their parents' insurance until age 26! YAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY! Parasitism rules!

With so few children making it to adulthood, we can forget all about the second movement for most people. An abortion -- which is to say, an arrested birth -- can occur at any age. I believe it was Boris Mouravieff who coined the term "astral abortion." Let me look it up. Hmm, no index. Ahh, here it is. An astral abortion occurs should we fail to undergo the second birth, because we can't stay in the womb forever. Unless of course we receive tenure.

But once born again, this new "individuality no longer depends on the physical body, in the same way that the child who has been born does not die, even if his birth has been at the cost of his mother's life. It is this to which the apostle alluded, saying we shall not die."

At the very least, the person faces a life of arrested development if not born again from above, which facilitates transition from the little human cosmic womb to the big divine-human matrix which "forms the link between visible and invisible worlds." That link goes to the famous ombilical cord between man and God.

Some additional relevant observations from our guest bobstetrician: "If we were to imagine a perfect World based on a principle of perfect and stable equilibrium, it would be a petrified image -- that of Death. Above all else, Life is movement; movement from a flowing current," such that a key to evolution is broken equilibrium.

Which immediately calls to mind an aphorism: "An 'ideal society' would be the graveyard of human greatness" (Don Colacho).

This is precisely why liberal academia has become just such a graveyard, because it wants to create an ideal world for emotionally fragile children, such that there is no motivation for women to grow up or men to grow a pair.

Remember: the source of man's value -- his dignity -- is in that disequilibrium between us and God. You are of course free to pursue a life of equilibrium with the world, but if you succeed, then you fail.

About that disequilibrium: "God is infinitely close to man, but man is infinitely far from God." The first makes the journey possible, while the second makes it necessary. Again, unless you forge a static equilibrium between the two, which reduces to a death-in-life, for no one is more safe and secure than the dead.

Even before leaving genetic adulthood behind and below, we all have intimations of the beyond, which are analogous to the contractions of labor (second birthquakes). Eventually, the womb simply becomes too small to contain us. Which is why, as Schuon puts it, we discover "that the things of this world are never proportionate to our actual range of intelligence."

Think about that, because it is so experience-near that we can fail to appreciate the weirdness of it. All other animals short of man are indeed proportionate to the world; or not even the world, of which they know nothing (any more than they know of the universe). Rather, they know only their world, as in how a frog can see a living insect but will starve in the presence of dead ones. The dead ones simply fall off the frog's radar screen, as in how living truth ceases to exist for the liberal.

But man is never at equilibrium with the world, a condition which is both our privilege and a source of frustration if not seen rightly. You know Augustine's crack about not-resting-until-we-rest-in-God? This is what he's talking about, i.e., a kind of higher equilibrium that goes by different names in different traditions, e.g., beatitude, shanti, shalom, ananda, slack, etc. It can never be 100% "complete" in this life, because "only the 'divine dimension' can satisfy our thirst for plenitude in our willing or our love," and there are certain terrestrial barriers to full identification with it, such as our materiality.

The following also goes to the developmental continuum under discussion, that "The way towards God always involves an inversion: from outwardness one must pass to inwardness, from multiplicity to unity, from dispersion to concentration, from egoism to detachment, from passion to serenity" (Schuon).

Note that this doesn't necessarily involve withdrawal from the exterior world, but rather, the infusion of these latter qualities into the world, such that we pull ourselves out by our own buddhastraps -- i.e., the bodhisattva principle whereby we extricate our heads from our own aseity. Or just say down- and in-carnation.

Inwardness is a quality, not a place. You want to cultivate it everywhere, because it is where all the radiance radiates from, whether in the mode of truth, love, beauty, depth, light, etc.

The end, I guess, not that we've achieved equilibrium or anything. Rather, only the fruit of disequilibrium.

Eh, Whatever

That kind of mood. So, open thread.

What Would Churchill Say?

Depressing. Now I know what Israelis must have felt like when one of their citizens opened fire in a mosque in 1994, murdering 29 Palestinians. The difference is that in America there is no us and them, except in the sense that the left wishes to force us to think in this debased and destructive way, instead of just thinking in terms of good and evil, decent and indecent. No doubt doing so would be considered an offensive microaggression toward indecent people who can't help doing evil.

Not to politicize the matter... In fact, not doing so is my whole point, because any decent person recognizes that nine of ours have been senselessly murdered, not nine of theirs. And not to in any way excuse the murderer -- indeed, I would like to see the monster hanged tomorrow after a thorough trial lasting for at least 15 minutes -- but I'm afraid such despicable actions are a mirror image of six years of relentless us-them thinking toward law enforcement and toward racial matters more generally.

Here again, the difference is that none of "us" will condone the actions of this depraved assoul, whereas the entire media-academic complex both condones and encourages race-motivated violence in the other direction. But once race wars are underway, I have been given to understand that they are difficult to stop.

Like I said, depressing. I need a lighthearted subject. Must everything be of cosmic significance, Bob? Why so serious?

One thing that comes through in reading this compendious compendium of Churchillania is his largeness of soul. Magnanimity. Broadmindedness. Not to mention incredible courage. As I mentioned in a comment yesterday, he makes me suspect we are well past Peak Leadership.

As an aside, I am also noticing an odd resonance with one of our favorite authors, P.G. Wodehouse. They were born within seven years of each other, and it is as if they draw upon the identical sources and deploy the same rhythms of speech, except of course in very different ways.

But interestingly, while Churchill was known to be a world-class wit in public, Wodehouse was said to have been utterly boring. Fans who bumped into him expected a stream of lively conversation and sparkling witticisms, but he was a bit of a flatliner.

Example.

When Churchill declares war on Japan, he cites their "wanton acts of unprovoked aggression, committed in violation of international law."

But then he signs off the communique with I have the honour to be, with high consideration, Sir, Your most obedient servant, Winston S. Churchill. While some questioned the appropriateness of his gracious manner, he explained that "after all when you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite."

Wodehouse was able to take such high-flown rhetoric, and by tweaking it slightly, turn it to comedic effect. But in order to tweak it, he had to be totally familiar with, and comfortable in, that domain. Like Churchill he could effortlessly quote Shakespeare and other lumiaries. Both had huge literary accounts to draw upon.

One thing the Arab-Muslim world excels in is outlandish rhetoric about the enemy -- i.e., Jews and infidels -- that is so over-the-top, it's funny. But thanks to political correctness, we are not even permitted to name our enemy, much less describe him. Churchill was under no such restrictions, so his descriptions of the enemy provide a torrent of fine insultainment.

Remember how the left wetted itself over Reagan's crack about the "evil empire," or Bush's about the "axis of evil"? Churchill would never be so restrained. Rather, we were at war "against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime." Our task was to "rescue mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history."

And not only was he permitted to name and describe the enemy, but name what we were defending and why: "Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation." Should we fail, "then the whole world... will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."

He just described Iran.

You can't mention Christian civilization because CRUSADES. Besides, the left supports the enemy of its enemy, since they share the common enemy of Christian civilization. Leftism and Islamism are both motivated by hatred of precisely what Churchill so courageously defended. Now we have to apologize for it, which again goes to the symbolism of Obama exorcising the White House of that bust of Churchill. Al Sharpton? Bueno. Winston Churchill? Adios.

This would be fun. Take some of Churchill's statements about Germans or Japanese or communists, and insert "Islamists" or "jihadis" or "mullahs."

"We shall never descend to the [Islamist] level, but if anybody likes to play rough, we can play rough too. [Al qaeda and ISIS] gangs have sown the wind: let them reap the whirlwind."

"In spite of all their brains and courage, they worship Power..." "They do not value freedom themselves, and the spectacle of it in others is hateful to them. Whenever they become strong they seek their prey, and they will follow with an iron discipline anyone who will lead them to it."

Let's be fair: "All [the mullahs] ask for is the right to live and to be let alone to conquer and kill the weak."

You can't make nice with an Iranian tyranny "which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution, and uses... with pitiless brutality the threat of murderous force." "Never forget that the [mullahs] are crocodiles.... I cannot feel the slightest trust or confidence in them."

"There is nothing they admire so much as strength, and nothing for which they have less respect than weakness." "You can only deal with them on the following basis... by having superior force on your side on the matter in question -- and they must also be convinced that you will use -- you will not hesitate to use -- those forces, if necessary, in the most ruthless manner."

In an arresting image, Churchill characterized Nazis as sheep, but carnivorous sheep. Could the same not apply to the ravenous sheeplings of Islamo-nazism? Although they are religious robots, they've forgotten allahbout the First Law.

In any event, this "gang of bandits.... shall themselves be cast into the pit of death and shame, and only when the earth has been cleansed and purged of their crimes and their villainy shall we turn from the task they have forced upon us..."

As to our contemporary leadership, "My parents judged that the [circus] spectacle would be too revolting and demoralising for my youthful eyes, [so] I have waited 50 years to see the Boneless Wonder sitting in the [White House]."

Advice to President Jello: "To try to be safe everywhere is to be strong nowhere." "Weakness is not treason, though it may be equally disastrous."

But why should America be the policeman of the world? "I answer: 'If we left off [policing it] you would soon find out.'" For "The victory of [America] means the welfare of the world."

The left? Its philosophy "has not one single social or economic principle or concept... which has not been realised, carried into action, and enshrined in immutable laws a million years ago by the White Ant." "The strangling of it at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race."

"One might as well legalise sodomy..."

Or better, one might as well redefine marriage. At this point what difference does it make?

The Church's Greatest Scientific Blunder Since the Galileo Affair

So, not only has Pope Francis bought into the most ginormous scientific bubble in all of history, but now he's doing his best to inflate it. Ironically, this may provide hope to the masses that the theory is near collapse, because when the last -- LIBSWE (let it be said without euphemism) -- dupe jumps in, it's time to cash out of the bubble.

The Pope is reducing the sacred deposit of faith to the status of any other vulgar end-of-times cult, from Seventh Day Adventurists to Hale Bopp necronauts. He will have a lot of explaining to do, unless the encyclical has the paradoxical effect of causing all of the usual suspects to actually check their math, because if this guy believes it, something must be wrong.

Remember the atheist maniac we linked to yesterday? There are plenty more where he came from, and if he is intellectually consistent -- I know, a tall order -- then he will naturally have to wonder how he could find himself standing cheek-to-jowl with Neanderthalic Pedophile Pulpiteers who are Enemies of Fact and who put their faith in Celestial Tyrants to protect them from Evil Genies and other Comic-book Bugaboos.

As histrionic as that is, there is actually a morsel of truth hidden away in there, because as it pertains to global warming, Pope Francis is an enemy of fact who is terrified by a commie book bugaboo, which is to say, freedom and free markets:

"First, the Pope has no idea what he is talking about. His letter is full of factual errors.... There has been no net global warming for something like 18 years, according to satellite data, the most reliable that we have."

Furthermore, "Sea level has been rising for approximately 12,000 years, first dramatically as the Earth warmed rapidly at the end of the last Ice Age, and much more slowly in recent millennia. Currently, the rate of rise of sea level is not increasing."

Moreover, "Extreme weather events are not increasing. This isn’t an opinion, it is a fact: there is no plausible empirical claim to the contrary. In fact, for what it is worth, the climate models that are the sole basis for warming hysteria predict fewer extreme weather events, not more, because the temperature differential between the equator and the poles will diminish."

So, what's the Pope's angle? "[A]pparently, hostility toward free enterprise and the prosperity that it creates. Francis has manifested such hostility in previous statements, and it comes through again in his anti-global warming letter. Francis sounds like just another leftist: the solution to global warming is more state control to dictate how people live, and new international organizations to direct vast transfers of wealth and power."

The lamentable fact "is that through human history, freedom has rarely been popular." Which is precisely why God must emphasize that it is his highest (supernatural) value, and that human beings need to man up and deal with it. If it came naturally, or if man valued freedom, God wouldn't have to go to the trouble of making it central to his meta-cosmic revelation.

Even worse, the enpsychloco borders on -- LIBSWE -- the frankly diabolic, because what else do you call intentional impoverishment and shortened lives for billions of human beings?

"[T]here is no prospect that leftist energy policies will help poor nations. The poor need, as much as anything, cheap energy, which frees resources for everything else. To deprive poor nations of cheap energy is to condemn them to long-lasting if not permanent poverty.... Jesus said, 'The poor you have with you always,' but he didn’t mean that we should conspire to keep them down" (above quotes from PowerLine).

I know we're supposed to hate the idiocy and love the idiot, but I'm not sure God had genocide in mind when making this recommendation, because dead men give no love.

Some things are intrinsically and self-evidently evil, or we couldn't have any moral compass at all. You might say that man has an inbuilt moral compass that points in the general direction of true north, but that God fills in a lot of the details between where we sit and the North Pole, or between heaven and earth, the terrestrial and celestial. And man should certainly know better than to put his faith in a god who is demonstrably less moral than he. This would be one of the hints that you are worshipping a false god.

For example, if your god requires the death of six million Jews, or a couple million Armenians, or numberless bourgeois counter-revolutionaries, or untold energy-deprived third-world denizens, then you might want to rethink your theology.

I heard an apt line last night in the Sopranos, when the boys are wondering why a Hasidic Jew doesn't just murder his troublesome son-in-law. One of them says something like, "eh, it's a taboo in their religion or something."

So yeah, I have a similarly superstitious taboo about intentionally harming innocent human beings. I've read many books on global warming, but the most powerful one is The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. I can't possibly summarize it, because the whole thing is highlighted. At the end I wrote down several questions to ask of global warmists, one of which is "How many billions of premature deaths due to decreased energy use would be acceptable to you?"

There is no linear relationship between CO2 and global temperature. But there is an incredibly strong correlation between energy use and life expectancy -- not to mention the quality of that life. Energy has been the key to unleashing man's potential, so the global warming hoax is nothing less than a conspiracy against the very purpose of existence.

As billions of human beings have been lifted from soul-crushing poverty thanks to fossil fuels, billions more will be plunged right back into it if the warmists have their way. For starters, good luck feeding the world without them. Sustainability is another word for global famine, and is utterly unsustainable. At least the worst ones are honest about this.

Destroy another fetus now / We don't like children anyhow / I've seen the future, baby: / it is murder --Leonard Cohen, The Future

The Wit and Wisdom of Churchill vs. the Twaddling Twititude of Obama

One last thing I want to say about bubbles, and then I'll move on. Wallison mentions a crack by Warren Buffet to the effect that you can't tell who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. Or in the case of the 2007 crash, until home prices stopped rising, which exposed all those subprime people victimized by the subprime ideas of the left.

However, there are two ways to inflate a balloon. The usual way is to increase the pressure inside, but another way is to decrease the pressure outside. Liberal bubbles rely more on the latter. If we think of the ambient political pressure as "truth" or "knowledge," then the left absolutely can't function except in a low-pressure environment.

It is the function of the MSM to keep the pressure low around liberal candidates (e.g., ignoring Clinton corruption and criminality), but absurdly high around a conservative one (e.g., Marco Rubio's secret history of exceeding the speed limit and being prosperous enough to afford a luxury dinghy).

Democrat ringmasters know there's a lo-fo voter born every minute, except not necessarily in this country. D'oh! Thus the desperate need to import them from south of the border.

Remember, Mitt Romney would have defeated Obama by a wider margin than Reagan beat Mondale if the nation's demographics in 2008 had been the same as 1984. If it hadn't been surrounded by the low pressure media and low-information voters, The Obama Balloon couldn't have expanded at all, let alone to such grandiose proportions -- for example, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for "nothing," an apt symbol of what was actually inside the balloon.

In reading this magnificent compendium of the wit and wisdom of Winston Churchill, I am reminded that no one will ever issue such a compilation of Obama's literary and oratorical gems, because there are none.

To be clear, I am sure some publisher will try, but you can be certain it will nevertheless be as empty as, say, Bill Clinton's turgid autofellatiography. Or, it will be a cornucrapia of malevolent bullshit, which is even worse, i.e., occuping "negative space" instead of merely being as vapid as, say, the collected poems of Suzanne Somers.

It is right and fitting that the first thing Obama did upon occupying the Big Chair was to send the bust of Churchill back to the white racist imperialists who gave it to us.

Another name for this 600 page book could be What Churchill Knew that Obama Doesn't, but even then it can only skim the surface, since it only represents 0.2 percent of his 15 million published words. Edward R. Murrow famously observed that Churchill "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle" against our socialist enemies.

Conversely, our socialist enemies begin by mobilizing a battle against the English language. Ironically, there are even some passages in the book to that effect, in that Churchill recognized the PC virus long before it had a name, expressing the "hope to live to see the British democracy spit all this rubbish from their lips."

In response to the left's relativism, he might say "The propositions of Euclid would be no less indisputable were they propounded by an infant or an idiot." And in reaction to Obama's War-is-Peace Prize, he might remind him that "A sincere love of peace is no excuse for muddling hundreds of millions of humble folk into total war."

How did we get here? We were discussing the human interior, which is an ontologically real space. However, sometimes this space can become "unreal," which is really another way of talking about what happens when someone lives in a real bubble.

For example, if global warming is indeed the greatest scientific hoax in human history, then its advocates are living in a bubble that must eventually burst because reality always gets the last word.

You can tell you're in a bubble if your knowledge diminishes the unknown instead of enhancing it -- if you entertain the unwarranted belief that reality just so happens to comport with your ideas about it, with no remainder; or in other words, if you collapse the space between immanence and transcendence. Being that this latter is the "human space" -- or divine-human space -- to do this is to abolish man by rendering him absurd.

Thus the orthoparadox that "the finitude of things is discovered only in the very conclusion that also establishes the infinite source of their limitation" (Schmitz) -- which you can be certain has never occurred to this unhinged atheist.

Could someone be less self-aware or more ignorant of history, science, and metaphysics? He is only right if human origins may be reduced to physics, in which case he can only be wrong. I mean, science can't even say where our thoughts come from, let alone everything outside them. Such simplistic theories can't even explain the simpletons who believe them.

There's a name for this: the Dunning-Kruger effect, "a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude." If you are a theological idiot, then you lack precisely the skills to appreciate the infinite magnitude of your idiocy.

How does a human being pass beyond this thing called "nature" in order to get at this thing called "truth?" Schmitz provides a clue: personal presence -- or the presence of persons -- "is the immaterial coin of human spirituality, and perhaps the medium through which the anthropological circle can be enriched by being broken."

In short, being a person means being gratuitously free of any ideological bubble in which the left might try to imprison us. For the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, boom, there is liberty (2 Cor 3:17).

For that matter, in a letter to Lady Churchill after Winston's passing, the author wrote: That he died is unimportant, for we must all pass away. That he lived is momentous to the destiny of decent men. He is not gone. He lives wherever men are free.

Conversely, Obama lives wherever the state has a better idea of what to do with your freedom.

Subprime People and Intellectual Bubbles

There are two mysteries that loom above all others, God and person. This is because in their absence there would be no mysteries at all: no humans, no problems. And no God, no answers.

However, in the Christian view, these two mysteries may be reduced to one: persons. Note also that this latter cannot be reduced to first person singular, since the We must be prior to the I if personhood -- which is irreducibly intersubjective -- is our first principle.

For Schmitz, personhood is "a human reality in search of its appropriate name." We have devoted many posts to the subject of how our personhood has become more individuated over the centuries, mainly due to the influence of Christianity (cf. our long series of posts on Inventing the Individual). Under its influence, personhood deepened within the space of "an open intimacy with God" (Schmitz).

"Subjectivity," suggests Schmitz, "is the process of inward uniqueness outwardizing itself." I prefer the term exteriorizing, but I would also emphasize that there are two movements, for the soul interiorizes objects and relationships that speak to its unique idiom. Culture and history are in one sense the exteriorization of the soul, but once exteriorized, become material for interiorization. Or at least they used to, before the anti- and ahistorical left ruined everybody's lives and ate all our steak.

This goes to a rather largish subject, the notion of economic "bubbles." While reading the book Hidden in Plain Sight, on the government-caused economic crisis of 2007-20??, it occurred to me -- no great insight here -- that an economic bubble is ultimately a psychic bubble.

There can be no such bubbles in the biological world, because natural selection punctures them right away. For example, if there is a glut of rabbits, the coyotes quickly take care of the problem. And then, if there is a glut of coyotes, the shortage of rabbits takes care of that problem.

But an economic bubble is a runaway, pro-cyclical event fueled by human irrationality. Well, not exactly, for the players are actually acting rationally based upon the information available to them.

Thus, lenders were under government compulsion to reduce lending standards, safe in the knowledge that government-sponsored coyotes such as Fannie Mae would gobble up their subprime loans like a warren of rabbits. And the GSEs didn't let on that by 2007 over half of all mortgages were subprime (or "non-traditional"), 76% of which on their books (meaning our books, i.e., taxpayers responsible for the left's follies).

Thus, if we dig down to the bottom of it all, we find the government forcing lenders to issue subprime loans. But it isn't really the loan that's subprime, rather, the person receiving the loan. In other words, the real problem is subprime people who are more likely to default on their loans. As such, the so-called bubble was filled with subprime people.

In fact, traditional underwriting focussed on three factors: down payment (loan-to-value), ability to pay (debt to income), and character, i.e., one's "willingness or propensity" to honor debts, as reflected in the FICO score.

It turns out the latter -- "character" -- is by far the most sensitive of the three, and yet, the government forced lenders to ignore it, with (literally) predictable results. For example, the risk of default is 47 times greater with a FICO score of less than 621. But if banks failed to give loans to people with FICOs lower than 621, they would be harassed and accused of racism by government regulators. So, what would you do?

As such, we can't actually blame the bubble on subprime people; or rather, the subprime people are actually bubbleheaded leftists who insist that their fantasies of equality can trump the laws of economics.

I guess that's the point I wanted to get to. It's nice to have all the factual backing Wallison provides, but the real problem is that the left lives in an intellectual bubble inflated by with dreams, wishes, hopes, and more-or-less pure bullshit.

Obamacare is surely a bubble, and Instapundit (among others) has written at length on the Higher Education Bubble. I haven't read the book, but from the perspective we are discussing, the government is creating artificial demand by insisting that everyone should go to college, and here's some money to pay for it and keep you indebted to the government forever.

Thus, college is filled with subprime intellects, and not just the students! If. Only.

Global warming? Bubble. Feminism? Bubble. Keynesian economics? Bubble. What was Obama but a giant bubble inflated by the toxic fumes of the left?

Man: The Only Animal Obligated to Adapt to Himself

Whether we like it or not, we live surrounded by mysteries, which logically and existentially draw us toward transcendence. -- Schuon

"Haunted by transcendence," I suppose you could say. For if there is no transcendence there can be no hauntedness. In a pre-living cosmos there are no problems because there are no alternatives. And in a prehuman cosmos there can be no anxiety, no worry, no apprehension. Fear, yes, but it can't be like human fear, which lives in the imagination.

I remember (I think) Alan Watts using the example of a rabbit. To us the rabbit looks a bit ill-at-ease as it listens and looks around for predators. But from the standpoint of the rabbit, it might be analogous to a crosswalk with a flashing red light saying DON'T WALK DON'T WALK DON'T WALK or you'll get run over and killed! Yes, there is potential danger, but no one is freaking out about it.

But humans are always haunted by an Otherness which is built into us. You see it right away in prehistory, from the moment there is evidence of humanness. In the book I spookulated that this must have something to do with adapting to the strange new condition of "mindedness." One reason I say this is because man is still adapting to mindedness, so it must have been all the more baffling 50,000 or 100,000 years ago, when the space was all new -- or we were new to the space, rather.

One thing we have to make clear at the outset is that this space is ontologically real. Or at least that is our hypothesis. After all, if it isn't real -- i.e., just a kind of transient and meaningless blip amidst the flow of entropy -- then everything falls apart and human existence is indeed an absurd space between two infinite slabs of darkness. Could be. We don't want to exclude that possibility a priori. But then this really would be a haunted universe, or rather, man would be both the haunter and the haunted.

My belief -- similar to Ken Wilber -- is that there are different degrees and dimensions of reality. Everyone recognizes this, even if they don't admit it to themselves, for there is the material/empirical world, the rational/linguistic mental world, and the immaterial/contemplative spiritual world. In his book Eye to Eye, Wilber talks about the different "eyes" necessary to perceive these worlds, i.e., the eyes of flesh, reason, and contemplation, respectively. (And Corbin calls our multidimensional psycho-spiritual spatiality the imaginal realm.)

Animals have the eye of flesh, but the best among them have only attenuated versions of the higher two, and even then, mostly because of contact with humans (e.g., dogs). Higher primates have tried to teach sign language to the subprimes, but the latter can only get so far before they hit a ceiling. We might think of this as a literal ceiling, only an immaterial one. For humans there is no ceiling, as our space opens all the way out and up. It is what makes us human.

But since this space is infinite, perhaps you can appreciate how it can provoke a kind of agoraphobia, so to speak. Agoraphobia is fear of open spaces, just as claustrophobia is a fear of jolly fat men with white beards. No, wait, it is a fear of enclosed presences. All punning aside, both are pathological endeavors to manage psychic space, only projected outward. But why must space be managed at all?

Because it's haunted, that's why. There was a time -- a long time, meaning most of history -- when this was much more experience-near. Now we psychologize and medicalize the space. Instead of saying you're haunted by ghosts and goblins, we say you're haunted by global warming, or structural racism, or white privilege, or the patriarchy. These poor souls are just trying to manage their anxieties. But anxiety is just a word, whereas the ghosts are real.

The first book I ever read that discusses this subject was The Phenomenon of Life, by Hans Jonas. The first essay is called Life, Death, and the Body in the Theory of Being, and it goes exactly to this subject of adaptation to our haunted space. (I'm sure I have blogged on this before, somewhere in here.)

From previous posts; and I apologize in advance for the length, but I kept finding interesting stuff. Interesting to me, anyway:

"[I]t is in the dark stirrings of primeval organic substance that a principle of freedom shines forth for the first time within the vast necessity of the physical universe -- a principle foreign to suns, planets, and atoms.... [T]he first appearance of this principle in its bare, elementary object-form signifies the break-through of being to the indefinite range of possibilities which hence stretches to the farthest reaches of subjective life, and as a whole stands under the sign of 'freedom'.... even the transition from inanimate to animate substance, the first feat of matter's organizing itself for life, was actuated by a tendency in the depth of being toward the very modes of freedom to which this transition opened the gate" (Jonas).

"But already the simple observed facts sketch an image of nature which advances by successive explosions in the manner of a rocket... from the hands of its Creator [comes] the spiritual form of man to which nature has been destined and in which she is liberated. In this new order, evolution is pursued always in the very interior of humanity. Moreover, evolution which continues in humanity has taken on a different color.... We find ourselves from now on on a spiritual plane where plasticity is infinitely greater... (Charles DeKoninck).

Jonas writes that "When man first began to interpret the nature of things -- and this he did when he began to be man -- life was to him everywhere, and being the same as being alive" (emphasis mine).

Thus, "Animism was the widespread expression of this stage.... Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things. Bare matter -- that is, truly inanimate, 'dead' matter, was yet to be discovered -- as indeed its concept, so familiar to us, is anything but obvious" (Jonas).

As Jonas argues in The Phenomenon of Life, the "discovery" of a non-living cosmos is a very late one. Rather, for primordial man, life was the general rule, death the exception, the very thing that Lucy and her astoneaged friends needed to 'splain.

It is only with modernity that this perspective is reversed, so that death becomes "the natural thing, life the problem." Now that the universe is regarded as a kind of lifeless machine, life becomes a huge conceptual problem, because it must somehow be explained in terms of the lifeless. Could this attitude be one of the metaphysical tributaries to the death culture of the radical secular left? Jonas implies as much: "Our thinking today is under the ontological dominance of death."

One doesn't have to read too many existentialist writers -- e.g., Sartre, Camus, Kafka -- before one realizes that they really do regard life in this deeply pessimystic way -- as a plague or prison with no exit, into which human insects are thrown upon birth, and from which we are then nauseatingly alienated once we realize this is indeed our fate. Just the other day, some profoundly sick feminists celebrated "abortion pride" day. Why not? If our life is just an absurd and meaningless prison house, then surely abortion is a mercy. Why not nip life in the bud?

Jonas was surely converging upon the same Raccoon attractor when he wrote, "Perhaps, rightly understood, man is after all the measure of all things -- not indeed through the legislation of his reason but through the exemplar of his psychophysiological totality which represents the maximum of concrete ontological completeness known to us: a completeness from which, reductively, the species of being may have to be determined by way of progressive subtraction down to the minimum of bare elementary matter."

That last crack comports perfectly with Schuon, who writes that "Man is made for what he is able to conceive; the very ideas of absoluteness and transcendence prove both his spiritual nature and the supra-terrestrial character of his destiny.... The paradox of the human condition is that nothing could be more contrary to us than the requirement to transcend ourselves, and yet nothing could be more essentially ourselves than the core of this requirement or the fruit of this self-overcoming."

And transcending oneself "is to remove the layer of ice or darkness that imprisons the true nature of man.... [O]nly the 'divine dimension' can satisfy the thirst for plenitude in our willing or our love" (in Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, his most aphoristically bite-sized work).

Indeed, you could even say that the cosmos overcomes itself in the form of man:

Man is upright and he is bipedal; upright because he spans all of the vertical degrees of being; bipedal because he has a foot in both realms, the worldly and the celestial, heaven and earth, slack and conspiracy. He is not a dead man walking to his own godless wake, but a live wire waking to his own walk with Wakan Tanka.

Imagine alien explorers discovering earth:

"Our explorers enter a cave, and on the walls they discern lines or other configurations that must have been produced artificially, that have no structural function, and that suggest a likeness to one or another of the living forms encountered outside." Even "the crudest and most childish drawing would be just as conclusive as the frescoes of Michelangelo."

Conclusive of what, exactly? Of a relation to ideas that have no direct bearing upon purely biological ends. Here is evidence of an exit from the world of mere life, and entrance to the world of mind.

Thus, "just as a footprint is a sign of the foot that made it," a picture is not a sign of the hand that made it but of the mind that conceived it -- and that abstracted some essence from the object before representing it. In order to depict the essence one must first perceive the essence. This implies the ability to distinguish form from substance or mind from matter.

Painting involves a transformation and preservation of essence from one plane to another. Obviously, no animal can do this. Rather, they confront only a world of objects. To the extent that they perceive interiors, it is only through invariant signs, not symbols -- and a sign is really closer to an exterior (like a stop sign, which doesn't reveal anything about the person who made it).

Now, to know the distinction between form and substance is to be capable of distinguishing between appearance and reality, or surface and depth. And as mentioned the other day, to know that appearances are deceptive is to know that truth exists, for truth is simply the splendor of the Real (just as beauty is the splendor of the true).

Clearly, in order to distinguish between appearance and reality, there must be a kind of "space" in between. This is the middle earthspace inhobbited by human consciousness. Just as animals live in a world of appearances, God is the being who lives in truth and reality -- or is not different from them. And the human station is in between these two, God and nature, the One and the many.

Note that in Genesis man is given the power to name the animals. As Jonas explains, "the giving of names to objects is here regarded as the first feat of the newly created man and as the first distinctively human act." It is a "step beyond creation," or liberation from being plunged solely into the world of matter. In order to name something, we must be above it, and be capable of perceiving the unity beneath the multiplicity (which is another way of saying the reality behind appearances).

As usual, quoting old posts takes as much time as building new ones.

I Live in a Haunted House!

It seems that the Great Nothing at the heart of things is related to their being created and not self-existent and self-explanatory. Everything is "open," but not in the usual sense of being a process-structure or dissipative system -- like a whirlpool or organism. Rather, this openness and dependency goes deeper; it is an "ontological openness," as it were. It is not empirical but metaphysical. It can surely be "seen," but not with the eyes of the flesh.

It can be seen because it's Pretty Damn Obvious. Clearly, the biosphere below us is completely entangled, such that nothing is merely what it is. For example, flowers cannot be exhaustively explained without recourse to bees, and vice versa. Who are we to say a bee isn't just an "external organ" of the flower? Nature is filled with such symbiotic arrangements. When you pet your dog, your blood pressure goes down. Chickens and cows would likely be extinct if they weren't so tasty.

Surprisingly -- especially to materialists -- it's the same with physics, which has proven beyond doubt that everything is likewise entangled at the quantum level. There are no unambiguous objects over there or right now. Rather, everything blends into everything else because mass is energy, and energy is whatnow?

A word. As they say, physics can tell us everything about energy except what it is. Likewise biology and life, psychology and mind, theology and spirit. Just because we have a word for something doesn't mean we know what it is. Analogously, Europeans had a name for Africa before any of them set foot inside.

"Each creature wakes up and is stunned at the news of its own existence. It's the kind of news you never really get over" (O'Herron, in Schmitz). That's a bit of an exaggeration, for this is true only of conscious creatures, AKA, man. And even then, it seems that many people quickly get over the shock and pretend everything is normal. BUT IT'S NOT! I don't mean to shout, but THIS IS REALLY WEIRD, OKAY?

I guess there are two types of humans: those who appreciate the weirdness, and those who sleep right through it, AKA the Normals (and now the plague of Subnormals).

Here is a rock-bottom truth: "consciousness becomes self-consciousness when one looks into the eyes of another who looks back" (ibid.). Absent this intersubjectivity, man would not be man, regardless of how "intelligent."

Indeed, human intelligence -- as discussed in yesterday's post -- is always intersubjective and object-related. Objects "give" their intelligibility, just as we "receive" it with our intelligence. Intelligence is to intelligibility as... bee is to flower. It completes the cosmic circuit, at least in potential.

Any difference implies difference as such. To recognize difference is to be alive, for the very first itsy bitsy that teenies its little weenie has a boundary -- a semi-permeable membrane -- between inside and out, self and other. Life, you might say, is the recognition of otherness. Absent life, it's All The Same, just an undifferentiated blob. True, life can at times be a bit too exciting. But without it the cosmos is a complete snooze.

To paraphrase Professor Ibid, does a painting or song give us any more enjoyment if we give it a name? Does Will explain Why if we shake his beard? No! The supposedly solid morphyl man is inunderated and disselves unto the swimminpull of divine otherness.

Whatever.

Recall that life starts with boundary and difference. Transposed to the key of persons, it is the Face that serves this purpose: "only human beings have faces. This is because the face is a structure that shows forth meaning" (Schmitz).

Note also that every non-liberal person is different, so one of the intrinsic meanings conveyed by facehood is uniqueness and individuality, from which it isn't a great leap to dignity and intimacy (for our deepest selfhood can only be given, never stolen or taken forcibly).

"A person's face is meant to be the signature of the character within; one cannot disengage the face from a certain interiority. A face has depth; it is not all surface" (ibid.). And yet, "depth is not a thing at all," just a vector, so to speak. It is a "direction" which travels both in and out. Thus, the face doesn't just convey individuality as such, but interiority as well. "In philosophical terms, the face displays a spiritual reality" (ibid.).

For the baby, the mother's face is the first map of the world, except this is not a geographical map but a pneumagraphical one. We call a person who cannot read the interior map autistic.

This also goes to why for most of western history, actors -- because of the ability to deceive with the face -- were considered suspect, whereas now we are more tolerant and just think of them as crazy.

So, Person means a great deal. When you say it, you've said a mythfull, for example, Narcissus, who fell in love with his own face, meaning that he was confined in a closed system of self-regard. Likewise the dunce abane acrime president who was sunk in an offal orifice of hypertrophed self-regard, where no one else could enter but his talking jarrot.

But personhood really means "the manifestation of meaningful depth, the distinctiveness of the individual, the intimacy of direct personal encounter, and the dignity associated with the divine and with the specifically human." We are "haunted by uniqueness, intimacy, and dignity" (ibid.).

Betwixt & Bewildered between God & Nothing

There is the blind nothingness of nihilism and the Higher Nothingness of man in relation to God, and I think we can agree it is important not to conflate these "two." I say ""two"" because nothing -- in the absence of the prior One -- cannot be a unit of addition. To even give it a word is to tame and contain it under a form of unity it couldn't possibly have.

You could say that in relation to animals -- or to Gaia, or biology, or physics -- man is Everything, since the whole exercise of existence is absolutely pointless without us. But the same applies to our relation to God. In its absence, we are as absurd and superfluous as testicles on a liberal.

How to eliminate the lesser nothing and illuminate the greater? The lesser bupkis is explicitly articulated in all forms of existentialism, which is the conscious philosophy of the null-de-slack; and implicitly unarticulated in scientism, leftism (which is just warmed over marxist materialism), and any other ideology.

Thus, Cheetham begins with a friendly reminder from the Orthodox theologian Panayiotis Nellas: Fear a system, say the Fathers, as you would fear a lion (in After Prophecy).

How is a system different from a dogma? We'll get to that in a minute, but while every system is a dogma, not every dogma is a system. For example, the dogma of Christianity is ultimately a person and a relation, neither being antecedent to the other, because each implies the other. A system, on the other hand, pretends it can exist without the person entertaining it, which is to put the parasite before the host or the ass before the horse.

Put it this way: almost 3,000 posts now, and do you see a system? I sure don't. Sometimes I wish I did, and each post is in its little way an attempt to nail one down, but in the end the system is just... me. Well, not just me, but me-in-relation. As promised at the very top, this is The Religion the Almighty & Me Works Out Betwixt Us. So, I do have a... method.

The Good For Nothing is the "metaphysical state of mystical poverty," such that "all things derive not from themselves, but from a source that is the grantor of Being to everything" (Cheetham). Thus, "each and every thing has nothing in itself, [and] is nothing in itself."

Any thing exists in a state of irreducible dependence on this prior Being, so it is appropriate that all human beings start out in a state of absolutely helpless dependence upon the kindness of strangers. Many people spend their lives trying to forget or deny this state, but it can't be done except at the cost of one's personhood.

And even then, man is always relating, even if only to his own internalized objects. This is why modern psychoanalysis, which is rooted in attachment theory, is called object relations. Even thinking itself is an object relation, because thoughts are prior to the thinker who must think them. And we can't think at all without the mother-object who first helps us think our thoughts in that state of total dependence.

Bion called this alpha function. Where I differ with Bion -- or at least extend his horizon -- is in explicitly applying this concept to the upper vertical, not just to the Freudian unconscious. In his defense, if he had done this, he would have been excommunicated and exiled from the Church of Psychoanalysis. He would have been outside the System (and some colleagues thought he was outside the System anyway, AKA, insane).

Not sure if this will be helpful but here is an extended passage from the above-linked article:

Bion took for granted that the infant requires a mind to help it tolerate and organize experience. For Bion, thoughts exist prior to the development of an apparatus for thinking. The apparatus for thinking, the capacity to have thoughts "has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts." Thoughts exist prior to their realization. Thinking, the capacity to think the thoughts which already exist, develops through another mind providing alpha-function -- through the "container" role of maternal reverie.

To learn from experience alpha-function must operate on the awareness of the emotional experience; alpha–elements are produced from the impressions of the experience; these are thus made storable and available for dream thoughts and for unconscious waking thinking... If there are only beta-elements, which cannot be made unconscious, there can be no repression, suppression, or learning.

Alpha-function works upon undigested facts, impressions, and sensations, that cannot be mentalized -- beta-elements. Alpha-function digests beta-elements, making them available for thought.

Er, what? It's really not that complicated, and is actually quite experience-near. Applied to religion, for example, God is by definition prior to our thoughts about him. Furthermore, religion is here to help us organize religious experience, which is also prior to our actually thinking it.

We do not, nor could we, consciously will spontaneous experiences of the sacred, the holy, the numinous, the preternatural, the mysterious, the venerable. Rather, these things just "happen." They are, as it were, unmetabolized spiritual "beta elements," the raw material of theological alpha-function. To "learn about God" is literally to metabolize experiences of him.

Yeah, you can ignore the beta elements of primordial spiritual experience. Who hasn't? But as Cheetham says, "To cover over this terrible wonderment is to block access to an Absence that is not the empty Nothing of nihilism, but the unknown and unknowable source of everything; the necessarily Hidden God beyond all being." Of course, Christians believe that this HGBAB God did and does come out from hiding, partly in order to show us that there is no System, only a Person and a Relation.

The Principle of the world cannot be in the world; the world is not self-explanatory. This Principle is "at once 'all' and 'nothing,'" but a "nothing from which all things are derived. This is the Nothing of the Absolute Divine, superior to being and thought" (Corbin, ibid.). Again, it is prior to our thinking about it.

I can't improve on this, so I'll just steal it: "The Giver of being can never be an object, a thing. In its infinite fecundity and mystery, its forever-receding depth and absolute Unity, it is unifier, the guarantor of the individuality of every being. As such, it is the archetype of the Person, and the interiority that infuses all beings..." (Cheetham).

You might say that, to the extent that we are one -- we call this one a person, an individual -- then we cannot be a nothing. Or, in the absence of the One, then our individual personhood is just a big nothing, a meaningless bit of undigested potato. And if this were so, then the left would be correct that identity follows class as essence follows existence, which we know is impossibly stupid, i.e., both stupid and impossible.

Bottom lines for today:

It is the mystery of this primordial Darkness that it establishes the substantial reality of the human person and yet simultaneously renders us transparent.... The presence of this pregnant darkness is immanent, shimmering through the face of the beauty of the world.... A degree of poverty is a prerequisite for the experience of the fullness of the world. --Cheetham

Liberalism: Come for the Hope, Stay for the Destruction

We left off yesterday with Cheetham's description of artistic creation, which is the precipitate of a two-way movement of ascent and descent:

"In creating a work of art, the psyche or soul of the artist ascends from the earthly realm into the heavenly," such that the result is like a "materialized dream" or perhaps dreamland-localized.

But the main point is that it is clearly in between. Michelangelo's Pietà, for example, is not mere matter, a chunk of marble. But nor is it pure spirit, since spirit is by definition immaterial. Therefore, it occupies a mysterious third area between the two.

However, everything human occupies this third area. It is just that, in the case of art, it is as it were hyper-focused, like a lens that gathers the rays of the sun into an intense point of light and heat. Thus, some zones and sectors in this third area can be more intense and meaningful, others bland, diffuse, and oppressive.

To some extent, it is as if any artist in any medium uses the common "substance" of this third area -- which is why activities as disparate as poetry, painting, and music all share the word "art." As Corbin puts it, true art thus "attains a super-reality"; it is "a crystal of time in imaginal space" (Cheetham).

Of course, much so-called art falls short of this standard, which can be discerned by its default to mere reality, so to speak. (Or, it is perhaps subrealism as opposed to surrealism.) The term "pornography" could be a more general concept that encompasses everything from Miley Cyrus to scientism to MSM news to liberal academia.

Note that in each case the third area is collapsed into a simplistic and vulgar literalism devoid of any ascending or descending energies. When people speak of the "mainstreaming of pornography," this is but a symptom of a far more widespread cultural decay -- more of an end-stage of the illness, or final common pathway.

The "culture war" is not between two equal and opposite forces, but rather, between the human and sub-human. It is the source of that suffocating feeling you've been experiencing over the past six years, now too intense and pervasive to ignore.

First and foremost, the progressive left is and always has been at war with the higher human realms. It is what they do. If you want to know why Bruce Jenner is a hero while American soldiers are baby-killers, this is why. The left follows its own insane logic in a completely consistent and predictable way.

Culture as such takes place in the third area, as does science, politics, and interpersonal relations -- in other words, everything from the macro- down to the micro-human. Polanyi might be the first philosopher of science to have appreciated this on a deep level. And ultimately this space is a function of trinitarian metaphysics, which posits a dynamic space of love, truth, and beauty.

The problem is, man cannot actually exile himself from the human space -- the third area -- for we are "condemned to transcendence," in Schuon's ironic formulation. Therefore, the left actually insists on transcendence, but only their own insane version of it. This is exhaustively described from various angles in David Horowitz's Left Illusions.

In short, not everything in the third area is sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows. Rather, some stuff there is "deceptive and dangerous," e.g., "earthly allurements clothed in spiritual garb." I mean, right? Who could not know this? And yet...

With the wrong approach -- of which there are many, cf. various deadly sins -- "we will be ensnared by lies and delusions and the inflation of spiritual intoxication." Is there anyone as spiritually intoxicated as a professional leftist?

In contrast, the correct approach involves little things like, oh, humility, prudence, sobriety, purity, etc. In the absence of prudence, for example, we may not know that "some of the forests are simply better off not exploring. There be monsters" -- for example, like the literally monstrous Caitlyn Jenner, "monstrosity" being something at odds with all nature, both horizontal and vertical. No offense, but such crankensteins are to be pitied, not celebrated. They are entitled to our compassion, not our reverence.

But in the upside-down world of the left, this is precisely what happens: instead of crystalizing the higher energies, they distill the lower ones. Ultimately, opposition to statist sub-humanism can only occur one person at a time, which is why they always have the upper hand, at least from a terrestrial standpoint.

The left relies on forced unconsciousness before all else, which has become the function of their media, their school system, their art forms, and their universities. Through this unyielding and pervasive cultural hammering, "our inner depths become opaque and we are barred from the Kingdom," for we are "cut off from the celestial pole" (Cheetham).

The left is always about destruction (change) and utopia (hope); the latter is a pretext for the former, the only thing the left is really good at, i.e., the relentless pursuit of perdition:

"There are always (and inevitably) two sides to the revolutionary coin. The first is negative and destructive, since it is necessary first to undermine the beliefs, values, and institutions of the old order which must be destroyed before a new one can be established. The second is positive and utopian, a vision of the future that condemns the present" (Horowitz).

Obama's credo might well be Come for the hope, stay for the destruction, for "Using good intentions to justify evil deeds is the first requirement of a utopian bad faith." But unfortunately, it would appear that "a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for reason to kill" (Horowitz). The left will always be with us, for the impossibility of utopia will always justify its destructive impulses.

Little Big World

I only have about 30 minutes, surely not enough time for a proper post. I'd like to move on from Corbin, so let's dash through the rest of this book and mine any remaining nuggets. Only the big ones. We'll throw back the little ones.

This I like: "the Creator is one with the imagining Creature because each Creative Imagination is a theophany, a recurrence of the Creation."

As such, "Psychology is indistinguishable from cosmology," which appeals to me because it means that I, as a psychologist, am not just a glorified bag boy with too little ambition and too much curiosity, but the very gatekeeper of reality!

I always go back to page one of the Bible, to the third and fifth words, beginning and creates (there are no tenses in Hebrew, right?).

In traditional writing, it is often the case that primacy in importance is characterized by priority in presentation, so this would be doubly Important, being that Genesis is first, and these are the first things in Genesis: the beginning is always now, and God ceaselessly creates in it.

Furthermore, it would appear that, above all else -- or at least coincident with it -- God is a trinity of creator, creativity, and creation.

I would also venture to say that we can read it as Creation Beginning God, or Beginning God Creation, since each of these is bound up with the others. God Creates. Now.

Likewise, if we get right down to it, what characterizes man above all else? Clearly his creativity, which is what distinguishes us from all other animals. It is what puts us in history instead of mere biology or physics.

Creativity is tied in with freedom, since it is not linear or deterministic; likewise beauty, since this is the point -- the telos -- of creativity. I think it would be safe to toss love into the mix as well, because it is implicit in the idea of a beautiful creator who creates such unsurpassable beauty. It's all so gratuitous.

You might say that man's creative imagination mediates between Reality and what a leftist or other materialist would call "reality." Nothing happens if we default to one side or the other -- i.e., head or matter. Rather, it all goes down -- and up -- in the space in between, the creative imagination, the transitional space, the mysterious psychic Third.

An additional benefit of this perspective is that "it heals the split between psychology and physics, between mind and matter, and between the subjective and objective" -- which, coincidentally enough, was precisely the subject of my doctoral dissertation back in a prior but apparently identical now.

For clearly, I am still exploring the same phase space, and being pulled into the same strange attractor. This is "the adventurous search for truth through subjectivity," as opposed to limping along with mere objectivity, which can get you nowhere (since it eliminates the adventurer before the adventure even starts).

And the whole thing works because "The goal is the cause of the beginning," except not in any predetermined way. It is at the author end of the polarity that provides the energy for the journey.

"The space of heaven... is filled with the peace and the teleological energies of the invisible realm..."

Yes, this is the Big World "in which spirits are corporealized and bodies spiritualized."

It's kinda like Art; or, Art is like a very focussed version of the adventure of consciousness:

"In creating a work of art, the psyche or soul of the artist ascends from the earthly realm into the heavenly.... And precisely at the boundary between the two worlds, the soul's spiritual knowledge assumes the shapes of symbolic imagery: and it is these images that make the permanent work of art. Art is thus the materialized dream."

Well, that was fast. How timelessness flies!

Reality: Accept No Substitutes

If transcendence is built into the nature of things, then we can only journey "toward" it while never arriving, for to arrive there would be to "collapse" and negate it. And in a world without transcendence, our journey would be reduced to a random walk in a featureless swamp, just the agitated Brownian motion of an imaginary soul.

This is one of the ways a trinitarian Godhead makes sense, because it seems that God too is in a kind of perpetual motion, eternally going out of and into himselves and falling in love with Love.

For Corbin, our true self is up above and out ahead, like an existential scout at the edge of the frontier. It is what gives our individuated transcendence a direction and vector; or rather, it is the source of our individuation.

We could say that there are no individuals per se, but persons in the process of individuating -- a process which never ends, on pain of putting an end to the adventure: individuation is freedom lived, and freedom is individuation actualizing.

It is as if our higher or deeper or truer selves "go out ahead" and "eternally open new horizons, new distances within Eternity" (Cheetham). And although I wouldn't express it exactly this way, Cheetham suggests that even God "is not a fixed Unmoved Mover, but is eternally drawn upward into an eternal 'future.'"

First, I wouldn't say even God, but especially God. Nor would I use the word "future" per se. Rather, there must be something "in" God that is distantly analogous to our own sense of a future. Our future is somehow a timebound echo or shadow of what happens eternally in God.

Which would be what? What does the "future" really come down to? Shorn of its abstract temporal aspect, future-ness essentially means openness, novelty, surprise, and creative possibility.

This is very much in contrast to the purely temporal future of mere physics, which ends in maximum entropy, equilibrium, and heat death. In that sense, the future is absolutely known: in the long run we're all dead, including the cosmos itself.

But that assumes a purely immanent cosmos without transcendence or direction. In that sort of cosmos, man could never have appeared to begin with: life comes from Life, truth from Truth, intelligence from Intelligence, beauty from Beauty.

Which is why, as Cheetham says, man is never content where he is, but only on the way there: "The longing for home is satisfied not by eternal rest but rather by eternal motion," except it is a vertical motion. "[W]e are always on our way home, in an endless series of renewals, seeking home again and again at higher and higher levels."

He tosses in an excellent and most coonworthy quote by Oliver Clement, that "I am on a destined path as if entering a land of childhood, knowing very well that, in the words of Saint Gregory, it will take me all eternity to go 'from beginning to beginning, by way of beginnings without end'" (emphasis mine, for reasons that should be bobvious to longtome lessoneers).

Which is why "Eternity is a first time, continually renewed" (ibid.). It is the opposite of the Nietzschean hell of "eternal recurrence," which is to say, eternal renewal.

Eros is the fuel. Thanks to it, we always yearn "for transcendence, for a figure who is always beyond" and "illuminates the essentially double [I would say triple] structure of consciousness." It is how the Light gets in -- how the Light sees itself in the subjects it illuminates, and how we exit the darkness of scientism, tenure, and other cheap substitutes for reality.

This reminds us that spirit and soul are always constellated together. Where spirit rises, soul descends. --Thomas Cheetham

***

Update: which is why the left does "no service to a child by preparing him for the lower life -- the life of the state-produced animal” (Roger Scruton, via Happy Acres).

One Human is a Statistic, a Billion is a Tragedy

This is yesterday's post today. Just as I was about to hit the publish button, the power went out, so I was in the Stone Age for the subsequent 12 hours or so, while Edison performed "routine maintenance."

Coincidentally, during that long day of darkness, ignorance, and fear, I was able to read a most illuminating book called The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels, which I mention because it's not the sort of subject we usually blah-blah-blog about. Perhaps we should, because fossil fuels are arguably the greatest thing for cosmic evolution since the opposable thumb, and people need to stop being defensive about them. Rather, they deserve a full-throated celebration -- intellectually, morally, and spiritually, let alone economically.

Perhaps the word "spiritually" comes as a surprise, but I'll provide a brief example. The book is filled with examples of how wrong the left has been about energy depletion and about "climate change," such that if we had heeded their constant warnings of catastrophe, we'd all be living as I did yesterday, in my energy-deprived state.

One of our most distinguished environmentalists is Bill McKibben. When I say "distinguished," I mean wrong about everything all the time. But he is also a moral imbecile, an intellectual sociopath if you will (hence the spiritual angle). We can thank God that his inhumane ideas have never been implemented. (Here is an especially nauseating article that really puts the puff into puff piece. Imagine the MSM treating a conservative intellectual with such drooling fawnmanship.)

In that piece of puffery, McKibbon is quoted as saying that "Human beings -- any one of us, and our species as a whole -- are not all-important, not at the center of the world." Easy for him to say, since capitalism has been good to him, and he lives in his Vermont paradise amidst "red pines that go for miles." (I might add that if human beings are not all-important, then we can safely ignore this one's self-important squawking.)

Although McKibbon calls himself a "Christian," his first principles are at antipodes to Christianity. If you ask me if he's Christian, I would respond, "hey, is the Pope Catholic?"

McKibben is a biocentrist, whereas Christianity is person-centric; this person-centrism is of course tripolar, as in divine, human, and the mysterious Third. How McKibben uses Christianity to undermine itself could be the subject of a whole book, so I'll leave it at that.

Epstein cites a review of McKibben's first book, The End of Nature, a worldwide bestseller first published in 1989. The author of the review enthusiastically agrees with McKibben that the nonhuman world cannot be regarded in terms of utility; rather, it not only has "intrinsic value," but "more value" "than another human body, or a billion of them." You might say that one human is a statistic, a billion -- or 7 billion -- a tragedy.

Some of those human bodies think human beings "are a part of nature," but they are just evil or stupid, or probably on the payroll of the oil companies.

No, "Somewhere along the line -- at about a billion years ago, maybe half that -- we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth.... Until such a time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."

(!ʘ_ʘ?)

I guess HIV was the wrong virus.

But a billion years ago? Homo sapiens has only been here for 100,000 or 200,000 years max. Which means that a literal reading of Genesis is much closer to the truth. But how does anything have value in the absence of human beings? When the author says "quit the contract," -- first of all, what a bizarre metaphor. But to the extent that there was a "contract," it was the prehuman one that confined life to mere animality. Thank God we broke that contract and became human persons!

Maybe I will end up blogging about the book. Meanwhile, back to yesterday's post....

"The energies of life," writes Cheetham, "come from the Divine." If this premise is correct, then we are alive because God is. And although "these energies permeate the universe," it is possible for them to deviate from their course (as in the case of forest-dwelling McGibbon apes), to "get blocked and stifled, or run in little eddies that go round and round forever in one place."

The realm of spirit is life -- and mind -- transposed a higher key. Or better, life and matter are spirit transposed to a lower key, since the source of life is at the top.

It isn't possible to define life with precision, but we can specify the conditions under which it manifests locally; mainly it requires three things, a boundary between inside and out, self and not-self; far from equilibrium conditions (equilibrium equating to death by entropy); and partial openness through which matter, energy, and information are exchanged.

How would this apply to vertical life and growth? Well, first of all we need a firm but flexible boundary between self and other, or me and not-me, or I and environment, or feminists and their triggers. (Dr. Dalrymple alerts us to the young lady who "seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there was no need at all. There appeared to be no line of demarcation between the young person’s excessive innocence, and another person’s guiltiest knowledge.")

Most people probably take this line of demarcation for granted, but if everyone had healthy boundaries, I would be out of a job. But at least there would be no women's studies departments, so, even-Steven or effin' Stephan.

There is no end to the mischief caused by poor psychic boundaries. It explains why leftists think the way they do more generally, for it is not so much the thoughts that are wrong but the very structure of the apparatus of thought. Like the foundation of a house, if it isn't secure, then the whole structure is in danger of collapsing.

Leftists unconsciously recognize this, hence the pervasive defense mechanisms of political correctness, speech codes, demonization, slander, imputation of imagined motives, trigger warnings, Citizens United hysteria, etc.

From the cosmic perspective, each of these really functions to keep the leftist's cognitive system closed and sealed off from reality, or to repel any information that would threaten its infantile omniscience and moral superiority. It's all a noxious exercise in pathological self-esteem, which itself is a kind of static equilibrium between (self) image and likeness: I am my own ideal.

I've been reading a book by David Horowitz called Left Illusions, and he describes the pathology as cogently as anyone. For example, the left's demonization of conservatives far exceeds the most extravagant dreams of Joseph McCarthy. Furthermore, these professional McCarthyists don't just talk about it, they get things done, which is why academia and the MSM are so monolithically left wing.

As to our far-from-equilibrium condition, this may be considered from a number of angles. You might say that the furthest from equilibrium are man and God, or (¶) and O. Thanks to this deusequilibrium, everything else is possible, e.g., love, truth, justice, creativity, evolution, and beauty.

For example, premise one is I don't know. Premise two is Truth is. Conclusion? Man may know truth, but only insofar as he maintains that vital disequilibrium between himself and the Source. If he imagines that he is the source, then this is the end of both disequilibrium -- and thus the further evolution of thought -- and vertical openness. We have torn up the Cosmic Contract.

Or, just see Genesis 3. What's really going on there? Well, there is something man shouldn't do, on pain of death, which is to say, existential equilibrium. What might that be? I would say it involves rejecting our complementary pole, and presuming to carry it within. It may be summarized with the atheistic formula, There is no God, and I am he.

That is by definition the ultimate equilibrium, and thus the ultimate death. I'm sure Mushroom can provide scriptural support for this view.

The third characteristic of life is the open exchange of matter, energy, and/or information. In the case of spirit, we're not so much concerned with matter, but then again, forget what I just said, for a central theme of Christianity is that matter itself is to become divinized, or infused with those higher energies. It's a messy job, but someone has to do it. Unless you tear up the contract.

This goes to what we said in the previous post about "first" and "second" theologies. Theology is a kind of information, but if you confine it to the head, then you're a pretty weak be-er, just foaming at the mouth.

Rather, the whole point is to draw that information/energy all the way down and out. In other words, like sap from the upside-down cosmic tree, it should proceed all the way from the roots to the trunk to the branches to the leafy individuals. And then there is the prolongation from leaf-to-leaf, i.e., "love thy arbor."

This, I believe, goes to Petey's jehovial witticism that It's a Tree of Life for those whose wood beleaf.

Interestingly, the footgnote to that very passage goes to exactly what was said above: "In the incarnation humanity is the 'boundary' or 'frontier' between the visible and the invisible, the carnal and the spiritual, like a mediator between creation and the creator" (Olivier Clement).

The leaf motif also reminds me of the final death scene in Finnegans Wake: "My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff!"

So long as a single green leaf remains, the tree is still alive with lff.

A world without soul is a world without anima, without anima-tion. It feels dead and unreal.... That is what Reality is for us -- being intensely alive. And the energies of life come from the Divine. To tap into this energy it is necessary to sacrifice ourselves, to sacrifice the merely personal, the closed-off and isolated world of the person as ego, in favor of the transpersonal divine context out of which our own tiny individualities flow. --Thomas Cheetham