Maps, Models, and Probing in the Dark

This is your Friday Ramble on a Thursday, since I have an early appointment tomorrow...

Yesterday I was rereading the excellent Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. In it Epstein reminds us that the theory of anthropogenic global warming is built upon models, and that the models are wrong -- which is to say, they do not map the territory.

Nevertheless, adherents give more credence to the models than to the reality they are supposed to map. Which only happens all the time in every discipline, from physics to theology.

Some suggest that AGW is more religion than science. Which implies 1) that religions also have models, and 2) that their models are likewise wrong.

But wait. I just finished a book -- The Rational Bible -- the central claim of which is that its 3,000 year old model is both objective and absolute (i.e., not relative). Hyperbole? I don't think so: if people only ordered their lives to the Ten Commandments, "the world would be almost devoid of all man-made suffering."

Scientific models are abstractions and simplifications. They work well enough for linear phenomena, but are much more difficult in the case of complex systems such as weather, the economy, or history, because there are more variables than we can know, plus the variables interact in unpredictable ways. It's why a mutual fund prospectus can tell you all about the Plan, but always ends with the qualifier that

The performance data shown represent past performance, which is not a guarantee of future results. Current performance may be lower or higher than the performance data cited.

Lower or higher. Thanks for the tip! It's the same with global warming models: temperature may be lower or higher than the model predicts.

As Epstein says, anyone can hindcast or postdict after the fact, that is, come up with a model that tells us why something happened after it happened. Anyone can take the reservation. The hard part is holding the reservation. To do that, you need an effective working model of supply and demand.

We cannot get through life without maps and models of various kinds. There are cultural maps, psychological maps, religious maps. Yesterday we mentioned the psychoanalytic theorist W.R. Bion, who gave a lot of thought to how deceptive our psychological models can be. He even tried to develop his own abstract model, one that would allow us to handle psychological problems in the same way the mathematician is able to deal with problems in the absence of the object. It looked like this:

I have to admit, I never really understood the model, but I admired the attempt. For one thing, the mind is infinite, and you can't model infinitude. In other words, infinitude, by definition cannot be contained. Nevertheless, it can be represented, so long as we are conscious of what we're doing. Thus, for example, we can use the word "God," so long as we bear in mind that the reality designated by the word is (ortho)paradoxically beyond language.

Only humans can do this sort of thing. Obviously only humans have language. But even if AI is able to model human language, we would still be one step ahead, because we are able to appreciate the apophatic aspect of language, i.e., its nothingness as well as its somethingness. Could a computer ever acknowledge that, when it comes right down to it, it knows nothing?

It's a question of createdness vs. builtness. Minds are created, while computers are built. And creation is not just anything. All creation is of an ex nihilo character, even human creativity. No one has explained this more clearly than Pieper:

[W]hatever is real in nature is placed between two knowing agents, namely... between God's mind and the human mind. These "coordinates" place all reality between the absolutely creative, inventive knowledge of God and the imitating, "informed" knowledge of us humans and thus present the total realm of reality as a structure of interwoven original and reproduced conceptions.

In other words, what we call "reality" must exist in a potential space between God and man. Analogously, it was once thought that our eyes are able to see as a result of shining a beam on objects, whereas we now know it's the other way around: that light from objects strikes the retina. Likewise, as Pieper explains, "our knowledge is the product of truth, flowing indeed from the 'truth of all things.'"

This light shines in the darkness, and yet... So much mischief results from the belief that the light is self-generated!

An important orthoparadox: "being true and being unfathomable go together," such that "the comprehensibility of a thing can never be fully exhausted by any finite mind -- for all things are created, which means that the reason they are knowable is by necessity also the reason they are unfathomable" (Pieper).

That is exactly what I mean by the somethingness and nothingness of language, which are complementary, not a dualism or defect. This is the true human model.

Yesterday, in a moment of grandiosity, I was thinking of how I would like to wade through the arkive and assemble a Total Model of Reality. What would it require? Well, first and foremost, the Absolute. Deny that, and no model of any kind is possible.

Which leads back to Schuon's Outline of a Spiritual Anthropology. Here is an initial sketch of the model of who and where we are:

At the summit of the ontological pyramid -- or rather beyond all hierarchy -- we conceive the Absolute, which comprises by definition both Infinitude and Perfection.... If the Absolute is pure Reality, the Infinite will be Possibility, whereas Perfection or the Good will be the totality of the contents of the Infinite.

So, man is on a pilgrimage from possibility to perfection, relative to absolute, appearance to reality. But as Bion explains, it is as if each formulation or crystallization along the way results in "a feeling of security to offset and neutralize the sense of insecurity following on the discovery that discovery has exposed further vistas of unsolved problems -- 'thoughts' in search of a thinker" (Bion). In the end -- or In the beginning -- the thinker is God.

Cosmos and Meta-Cosmos, Human and Meta-Human

For a number of weeks now we've been intermittently dipping into Schuon's From the Divine to the Human, but getting distracted along the way. The third section has several essays on the Human World, beginning with one called Outline of a Spiritual Anthropology.

He had me at the title: spiritual anthropology. For if there is a theme that connects everydot about this blog, that would be it: what is man? What is his real order?

It's how I ended up with a PhD in psychology. It certainly wasn't the result of any settled career aspirations, but rather, an inevitable consequence of my unhinged curiosity. Was my curiosity satisfied by what I learned in grad school? What do you think?

Speaking of which, somehow I was lucky enough to encounter the writings of W.R. Bion in my second year, who launched my entire enterprise into a meta level. From that point onward I was in essence studying metapsychology, not just psychology; or, any truth I learned from psychology had to be harmoniously situated within a larger metapsychology: a psycho-spiritual cosmic anthropology, if you like.

Let me see if I can dig out some statements by Bion to exemplify what I'm talking about. As a matter of fact, he published a book called Second Thoughts, which is actually a collection of previously published essays on which he essentially goes meta on himself; in other words, the current Bion considers the past Bion from a higher perspective. (BTW, I don't recommend that anyone run out and purchase his books, since none are aimed at a lay audience.)

Interesting. The book has a single review on amazon, but the reviewer, like me, describes a breathless Can I buy some pot from you? moment on encountering Bion:

Bion is my guru. Fighting my way out of the barren landscapes of modern psychiatry. There is more to man than chemicals looking for a chat. There is more to illness than screwed up chemistry. Bion gives so many answers. He leaves behind awe. An awe of the vistas in front of you. Of the new horizons yet to be explored. There are so many directions to take. It's as if you leave behind a modernistic constrictive complex concrete jungle. Simply step into a delicate vibrant countryside.... Visit and discover places in your own experience and understanding. And yet so much more.

I know exactly what he means, for it is indeed the sensation of being lifted into a higher and more expansive perspective. Of course, I think that happens on any encounter with True Philosophy. For me, it also happened with Michael Polanyi and then later with Schuon, MOTT, Dávila, and others.

Come to think of it, that is the experience I want to transmit via my own writing. It was certainly the point of the book. If and when I assemble another book, it will be 100% about this experience -- a nonstop combination of (n) and (!?). I have no interest in mere information, except insofar as it serves as a launching pad.

Here is Bion commenting on one of his essays:

I am not unappreciative of the account; I think if it were some other psychoanalyst's report I would think it quite good. But as it is, I do not recognize the patient or myself.

This is key, because it demonstrates how easy it is to write plausibly and even convincingly about the mind, but in a way that more or less lacks truth. Only Bion -- the one who wrote it -- can appreciate the absence of truth. Others who read the essay may be convinced of its truth. We can say the same of higher dimensions: how easy it is to write of spirit! Anyone can do it. But is it true? And by what standard?

So much of Exodus is a reminder to the Israelites that they are to follow God's standard, not their own. However, God's standard is universal, which is the point of the whole exercise. If Jews aren't messengers of universal morality, then they were chosen for nothing. What a pointless hassle!

Prager even suggests that this is how and why Jews have in the past gone off the rails in pursuit of non-Jewish universal systems such as Marxism. In other words, Jews are predisposed to think in terms of universality, even if it is a false universality of the left:

Ever since the Jews were emancipated in the nineteenth century, they have been disproportionately involved in universalist movements; but, in their embrace of humanity, they often abandoned the Torah and Jewish identity. They did not wish to acknowledge that it is specifically because of the Torah's teachings that humanity came to view all people, including, of course, strangers, as created in God's image, and therefore -- in the words of the American Declaration of Independence -- "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

When Jews abandoned the Torah and ethical monotheism, these very values affirming the sanctity of all human life have often been abandoned as well -- as was the case with Jews who embraced communism (which made war on religion and God-based values) and ended up supporting the tyrannical and murderous Soviet Union and other communist regimes.

Again, it is the same with contemporary Jewish leftists, who abandon the meta- for the infra-, or transcendence for immanence. The former is always open, the latter closed. The closed system will still allow "realizations," but only of what is permitted or conditioned by the system. Thus, they are "pseudo-realizations" that have the contours of truth without the content. Applied to psychology for example,

It becomes fatal to good analysis if premature application of a theory becomes a habit which places a screen between the psychoanalyst and the exercise of his intuition on fresh and therefore unknown material (Bion).

As it pertains to past bOb, this meant that all the fine theories I was learning were at once doors and walls -- or better, ceilings. Horizontally they are doors, but vertically they are ceilings. The former are essentially linear and mechanistic, the latter organismic and evolutionary, a "coming together, by a sudden precipitating intuition, of a mass of apparently unrelated incoherent phenomena which are thereby given coherence and meaning not previously possessed" (ibid.). This is (n), in contrast to mere (k).

"The verbal expression can be so formalized, so rigid, so filled with already existing ideas that the idea I want to express can have all the life squeezed out of it" (ibid.). I would say that all writing that presumes to be about spirit must be mindful of this minefield of (k). (This is, of course, a major reason why Jesus so often speaks in parables that require a realization on the part of the listener.)

To be continued...

Conscious Freedom and Absolute Truth

I was thinking about the subtitle of Dennis Prager's The Rational Bible: God, Slavery, and Freedom. Freedom and slavery are obviously at antipodes, and yet, freedom ultimately means nothing in the absence of God: the Israelites were "liberated from Egypt to serve God," and many of the subsequent laws are designed to purge them of their slave mentality.

Indeed, even today many Jews still vote Democrat, so the degyptionization process is ongoing: "In every generation a person is obligated to see himself as if he himself has come out of Egypt."

Perhaps on Independence Day we should have something analogous to a Passover service, in which we recall being imperial subjects who miraculously became free citizens thanks to our God-inspired Fathers. As our mosest indispensable Father wrote to a Hebrew congregation in 1789,

May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivered the Hebrews from their Egyptian oppressors, [and] planted them in a promised land -- whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation -- still continue to water them with the dews of heaven and make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.

"The point is while liberty is necessary, it is not sufficient for a good life" (Prager). Indeed, "Whoever sees in liberty anything other than liberty itself is born for servitude" (de Tocqueville, ibid.). Prager continues:

In other words, while liberty is magnificent, the only thing liberty guarantees is liberty, not goodness, not morality, not integrity, etc. Liberty must be accompanied by higher values, because liberty alone will lead to moral chaos, and ultimately... servitude.

For example, serving the state. The state gets a foot in the door by "serving" those who are unfit or unprepared for freedom (we are not taking about the deserving poor). This creates a moral-political hazard, as -- very much in contrast to what God attempts with the Israelites -- the state rewards the slave mentality. Create enough slaves, and the rest of us are placed in the position of serving the state that serves its slaves.

Aphorisms come to mind. Remember Julia, the ideal Democrat woman who unashamedly spends her life in different forms of dependence upon the state? The modern State is a teacher who never grants his students a degree (Dávila).

In short, if you are trained for servitude, don't be surprised if servitude is what you're good at: liberalism pampers its beneficiaries until they have been turned into dissolute adults. Thus, Each day we demand more of society so that we can demand less of ourselves. For As the State grows, the individual shrinks (ibid.).

Think of "the resistance." Our founders resisted servitude, while these pathetic cases are resisting freedom! Thus, He who jumps, growls, and barks has an invisible collar and an invisible chain (ibid.). Trump -- of all people -- is not responsible for the chain. Rather, it is self-imposed. And the louder the bark, the stronger the chain.

Let's dig down to the metaphysics of it all: In any proposition about man its paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom must emerge (ibid.). Agreed: except that it is orthoparadoxical, which is to say, a kind of necessary complementarity. Man is necessarily woven of freedom and determinism.

Which come from where? Maybe you have a better idea, but I'm with Schuon, who writes in From the Divine to the Human that liberty derives "all its reality, hence its efficaciousness, from principial Infinitude -- which coincides with All-Possibility..." Conversely, determinism, or necessity, must ultimately be grounded in "the Absolute, hence to the pure Real."

Absolute Real and All-Possibility, or Truth and Freedom, respectively. And we are the image and likeness. You might say that we are given freedom in order to comport with truth. There is a "Torah" and a "people"; or, Logos and man. Or just Consciousness and Absolute.

Our Civil War is a War On Order

If there is an order of things, it must correspond to the changelessness in things: it is the Unchanging in which all this Change is grounded. If the change has no underlying order, then it's just random chaos with no point or purpose.

There is always order, and there is always change. Analogously, character is who you are when no one is looking. Likewise, order is what exists even if no one sees it: it can only be discovered, not created or imposed. It is what exists despite anyone's opinion about it.

For example, this is obviously the purpose of philosophy: to find the real order in things -- not just of material reality, but in ethics, aesthetics, and thinking itself. Science deals with quantitative order, but that isn't the only order in which we find ourselves.

In The Rational Bible, Dennis Prager reminds us that the Ten Commandments are not intended to apply to just a particular slice of humanity, but to everyone: they disclose a universal moral order.

Thus, either the Torah "has something to say to everyone or it has nothing to say to [even] the Jews." In other words, it either reveals a universal order or it reveals nothing. There can be no in between. You might even say that there is truth and there is autobiography, and that most philosophy is little more than a glorified memoir or diary. Again: universal or nothing.

What we call wisdom is a pool of knowledge about the Changeless. Wisdom exists along a spectrum and eventually shades off into the human margin and beyond (or below). In other words, some wisdom can be truly universal, while much of it may indeed be culture-bound. Philosophy ought to be a quest for the former.

My eyes just lit upon the following passage: "As I show in my discussion of secular education as a potential 'false god,' the best educated in the West have often both lacked wisdom and been among the greatest supporters of evil ideologies and regimes."

Now, what were (and are) these ideologies but the systematic effort to impose a false order upon human beings? The result? Communist regimes alone "murdered about 100 million people and enslaved and destroyed the lives of more than a billion."

This quest for order is a serious business, perhaps the most serious. Get the order wrong, and the result is catastrophe: "The two missions -- promoting goodness and attaining wisdom -- are linked, because it is almost impossible to do good without wisdom."

The entire history of the left can be summarized in a single wise sentence: "All the good intentions in the world are likely to be worthless without wisdom." Actually, worthless if we're lucky. If only leftist schemes were neutral and not deadly!

In the United States we are absolutely in a civil war. It is as real as the one in the 1860s, with the stakes every bit as world-historically consequential. And if we dig down to the ground, what we really see are two different and irreconcilable orders, both then and now.

Speaking of the search for order, in November 2016 I remember Rachel Maddow and other progressives reading up on 1930s Germany in order to comprehend what was going on in the United States. Yes, that is crazy -- among other reasons because conservatism and fascism are at antipodes -- but it goes to the intensity with which human beings will grasp at order, even if there is no truth to it at all.

Me? I find much more useful parallels with the period leading up to the Civil War. I recently read a couple of books that document what it was like for the average person to live through the era, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864 and The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America.

What we have here (and there) are two very different ideas of order: political order, constitutional order, human order. Quite simply, we could not go on being one nation with two orders. A nation, in order to be one, must have one order. We cannot abide states with radically different orders, whether we're talking about slavery or illegal immigrants. In both cases it really comes down to the illegitimate usurpation of power rooted in a false order.

In the margins of the books I often highlighted passages with an N/C, for No Change. For example, I was thinking of the parallels between the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and how contemporary leftists treat blacks who stray from the liberal plantation. They are not permitted to do that, on pain of surrendering their human status.

Nor are they subtle about it. Just the other day on CNN, some dim pundit of color said it was perfectly acceptable to tar black conservatives with racial epithets. Conversely, we are not even permitted to criticize a black progressive such as Obama or Maxine Waters without being called racist. Or, see how the left reacted when someone in Trump's cabinet said he cared more about merit than "diversity." Democrats are no less obsessed with race today than they were during slavery and Jim Crow.

Different orders. In our order, all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. In their order, people are... well, first of all, they are not created. Rather, they evolve, I guess, with unequal races, genders, and classes, and it is up to the state to equalize these. Is it any wonder that This is War?

Prager also reminds us of how America's founders were deeply rooted in the Biblical order, or the order disclosed by our Judeo-Christian tradition. You might say it is the vertical macrocosm in which our political microcosm is rooted. In the past, we've noted how Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin proposed a design for the Great Seal of the U.S. depicting Moses leading the Israelites from slavery to freedom, with the motto Resistance to Tyrants is obedience to God.

Which it is, but why? Because the tyrant imposes a false order, while God reveals the true one. Which is why the loony "resistance" to Trump is hardly obedience to God. If anything, it is defiance of God, which is one of the definitions of fascism: the violent rejection of transcendence.

No, I am not conflating God and Trump. Please. Again, the subject is order, and which one we will live under, the constitutional one or the disordered one imposed by progressives.

Here is a critical point mentioned by Prager: "these two events -- the Exodus and the giving of the Ten Commandments -- are the two seminal events (other than Creation itself)," such that "liberty and morality are the twin pillars of the Torah."

Schematically we see Creation --> Commandments --> Liberty. Creation-as-such is the first order; it is the macrocosmos in which man is situated. Of all the creatures -- both living and nonliving -- man is the only one created with free will. But what is free will if it isn't grounded in the permanent order reflected in the Ten Commandments (and elsewhere)?

It is nothing, precisely. Therefore, freedom and truth/order are intimately related. As are the oppression and nothingness of the left. Freedom requires truth. Slavery needs only power.

A Translucent Cosmos

Where is the order or the cosmos?

First of all, the cosmos is not the sum of all things -- like a giant warehouse -- but rather, the unity of all things -- an organismic whole. However, this whole is not an empirical fact or observation, but more of a hypothesis. In reality it is an intuition. But just because its existence cannot be proved by science, we can nevertheless be sure it exists, for it cannot not exist and yet be a home for thinkers: no thought is possible in a non-cosmos.

Insofar as the scientist uses his scientific method, he has no right to talk of the Universe, of the strict totality of consistently interacting things. It may be that his model de facto covers that totality, but science can never be sure about that. Much less can science answer the question, "Is there indeed a universe?" (Jaki).

In short, it is not possible "for scientists or for their instruments to go outside the universe in order to observe it and provide thereby an experimental verification of it" (Jaki).

Science can only exist because numerical properties can be assigned to matter -- quantities to qualities. Or on other words, science is rooted in the extraction of a quantitative order in things. But then -- hello! -- we run into Prof. Gödel, who reminds us that "no non-trivial set of arithmetic propositions can have its proof of consistency within itself. This means that a necessarily true scientific account of the universe is a pipe dream" (ibid).

Hmm. This means that the ultimate order of things is a bit more ambiguous or subtle than simply assigning it a number or formula. Supposing physical cosmologists discover a "theory of everything," it is nevertheless a theory about the whole that is first intuited. In other words, the wholeness exists first, the theory second. The theory doesn't account for the wholeness but assumes it.

For Schuon, there exist three cosmos for man, "first the soul, then the world which is its medium of manifestation and finally the Universe of which this world represents but a minute fragment." This implies that there is an interior order (the soul), an exterior order (the world) and a transcendent order (the Universe of which the world is but a fragment).

Remember, whatever else we may say of existence, it must first be observed by a subject in order to say it. Perhaps you think that's a trivial observation, but it means that nothing can be radically independent of anything else; or rather, that a prior wholeness subtends anything we can know and say about the parts. If you really understand that, it's a can I buy some pot from you? moment.

Meister Eckhart understood it: Being is God's circle, and in this circle all creatures exist. So, Where there is isness, there God is. Creation is the giving of isness from God

To say knowledge is to say knower and knowability; to know anything = to be known by Someone. Therefore, truth implies persons, and in a way, the two are coequal, or of the same transcendent substance: Subject and Object are complementary, and this complementarity is the truth of things -- or, the very ground and possibility of Truth in Things.

This means that knowing is always a relation, such that relation is understood as the truth of things: it is the understanding of understanding. Thus, according to Pieper, "Truth is nothing else but the identity between the mind and reality, a relation originating and accomplished in the act of knowing..."

There is a truth in all things because all things are in the Truth. It is why facts can be factual, for only a tenured factsimian believes a fact could speak for -- or even perceive -- itself.

You could also say there is a Light in things. So, how did it get there? "All things are intelligible, translucent, clear and open because they are created by God's thought, and for this reason are essentially spirit related" (Pieper). To quote St. Thomas, "A thing has exactly as much light as it has reality."

Ah, now we're getting somewhere. Translucent. What a fine and useful word when applied to the vertical! As Pieper says, "the reality of a thing is itself its light," and things have more or less of this light at both ends. In other words, both subjects and objects are trans-lucent, or mediums of Light.

Cleaning windows. It's what this blog is about. Or better, windows and mirrors: a clean window allows us to see outside, while a clean mirror allows us to see inside -- and up. And thereby become more real.

"The soul is all that it knows," said Aristotle; it is necessary to add that the soul is able to to know all that it is; and that in its essence it is none other than That which is, and That which alone is. --Schuon

The Nonlocal Order of the World

Order. This might be the key distinction between left and right, for we believe in a transcendent order to which we owe our allegiance, while the left doesn't.

However, everyone actually believes in some form of order, for life would be impossible in its absence. Thus, the left replaces the transcendent vertical order with an immanent horizontal one, AKA the state. As they say, the state is the one thing to which we all belong. What they really mean is that we all belong to the state.

In the words of the Aphorist, Conservatism should not be a political party but the normal attitude of every decent man. Why? Because every decent man is ordered to the truths and virtues that are anterior to him. Supposing you prefer to live by your own truths and morals -- which is to say, desires -- this is precisely what makes one indecent.

And yet, this was the credo of my blighted generation, the Boomers. I didn't just believe it, but believed it with all the ignorant arrogance of a braying mob of gun-grabbing adolescents. What do they know of the transcendent order? Someone should ask them.

To praise youth is to forget our former idiocy (Dávila).

One reason the left rebels against hierarchy is that hierarchy is a kind of judge. We are judged in the light of certain standards, but for the left, standards are what they call "obstacles" -- for example, the Constitution.

Here in California the Constitution is a parchment barrier to stocking the country with millions more illegal Democrats -- which is to say, enough people to further defy and overturn the Constitution, only this time for good. Rid the country of the troublesome legal wall constructed by the founders, and any southern wall will crumble on its own.

It's the same with guns, marriage, religion, freedom of speech: each is an obstacle to the left.

Freedom is not free unless it is an ordered freedom. "Disordered freedom" is a contradiction in terms, but this is precisely what the left offers. Not only that, but disordered freedom evokes the state to control it. Indeed, this is one of the recurring themes of The Boy Crisis, which has led directly to a man crisis -- or to a Pajama Boy crisis, if you prefer: Vanderleun's New Castrati.

What is the essence of this crisis? And why does a female-centric culture -- such as in urban Democrat hells -- inevitably redound to violence and chaos?

I was about to say that civilization passes through the male line, but it's more that barbarism is combatted through the male line. In other words, the only cure for the toxic masculinity of the Pajama Boys and HoggBrats of the world is a virtuous masculinity (recall that the vir in virtue means man). Without spiritually mature and actualized men, we are merely bystanders to the repetitive cycle of merely biological men: to the bullies and bullied.

Here's an essay that goes to what we're talking about, The Wages of Inversion:

We live in an age in which things are no longer what they are supposed to be. Words have come to denote the opposite of what they signify. Cultural institutions on which we rely to serve our personal and national interests have morphed into caricatures of their original intentions, working against their foundational purposes.

Linguistic and institutional inversion is the time-dishonored strategy of totalitarian systems and is generally associated with the theory and practice of the Left, which has infiltrated the culture and polity of the free world, particularly in the areas of language use, the media, education, the arts and gender relations. The democratic West is now at the mercy of its own reverse polarity.

The left always deploys linguistic tactics in service to an ideological end. In other words, it first attacks language, and often this is enough.

For example, instead of arguing for homosexual unions on the merits, all the left had to do was redefine marriage. Then its legal recognition was readily deduced from bogus first principles. Likewise Roe v. Wade, which inserted abortion into the Constitution, or Dred Scott, which inserted race.

But "A society in which language has been so denatured as to operate on the principle of inversion, beyond even the institutional euphemisms of political correctness, has no future" (Solway). Literally. For language -- and the truth it carries -- is to civilization what blood is to the body. Tainted language is like tainted blood: eventually it spreads to the whole organism.

How does it spread? Three main ways: education, journalism, and entertainment. The media doesn't just provide "fake news," but literally an alternate universe. But this is only possible because the psychic targets have been softened by the continuous bombardment of education and entertainment. Skulls don't just fill themselves with mush. Rather, someone has to do the filling.

Solway quotes Madison, who wrote that

The American people owe it to themselves, and to the cause of free Government, to prove by their establishments for the advancement and diffusion of Knowledge, that their political Institutions… are as favorable to the intellectual and moral improvement of Man as they are conformable to his individual & social Rights.

To the extent that progress exists, it is a measure of the intellectual and moral improvement of man. And this intellectual and moral improvement is a consequence of adequation to a nonlocal order that never confers a right without a corresponding obligation or duty. A right to free speech? By all means, but only if you are obligated to truth! A right to self-defense? Of course, so long as you are defending good and not evil.

It is customary, writes Davila, to proclaim rights in order to be able to violate duties. But there can be no intrinsic right to violate inherent duties. If you believe that, that's... that's when you know The Future has arrived, and the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and overturned the order of the soul (Leonard Cohen).

Hierarchy, Caste, and Light Detectors

Okay, I don't really know where I'm going with this idea of depth. So let's go there!

For example, last night I had a dream that took place in the southern US. I was looking at an empty space where one of their statues had been removed. An old classmate from grad school recognized me, and I sat at her table while pretending to recognize her.

As we chatted, I defended the statues, suggesting to her that there was much more to southern culture than just slavery -- as there is more to Germany than Nazism (or more even to New York than the Times). But she was thoroughly steeped in the Narrative, and obviously didn't understand where I was coming from. I could tell she suspected I was a racist, and there was no way for me to escape the imputation. In such situations, the more you try to explain, the more defensive and guilty you sound.

So, it was a case of level confusion. Yes, it was also a case of narrative vs. truth, but such simplistic narratives can only exist at a certain cognitive level. A more intelligent or curious or openminded person questions the narrative and thereby escapes the matrix.

Eh, that's not a very good example. How about this one: a couple evenings ago I had a wide-ranging conversation with a lady. She asked what I did for a living, and I said "psychologist," which for some reason always gets a rise out of people. But I always qualify it right away, since I don't at all relate to the field. Okay, then what am I?

Good question. Really, I'm just this guy having a wide-ranging conversation with you, nothing more, nothing less. It's kind of what I do. Including on this blog.

But again, it's a question of depth. For me, psychology is dwarfed by metaphysics, theology, mysticism, esoterism, philosophy. The latter are totally compelling, in comparison to which psychology is a cage.

Indeed, it reminds me of the old gag to the effect that for the sage, paradise is a prison. You could drop me into any earthly paradise, but if I didn't have the space and time(lessness) to simply be, then it wouldn't be paradise.

So, in a very important way, being is paradise, and vice versa. That's a bold statement. Can you back it up? I think you're just lazy -- and probably neurotic -- and that you hide behind these fancy metaphysical ideas to conceal your lack of achievement.

Oh shut up. One mother-in-law is enough.

Looking back on it, I've always been sensitive to "class." Not economic class, nor social standing. Rather, something more ethereal... I'm sure Raccoons know what I'm talking about: there are supernaturally natural aristocrats, or "beings of light," so to speak. Can't you tell when you're in the presence of one? Of course you can. You can also feel the darkness. The remarkable thing is that some -- or most -- people can't.

For example, Rachel Maddow is apparently the most popular cable news host these days. I literally cannot imagine what it would be like to regard her as normal -- to not sense the dark-and-crazy. Conversely, there are people who regard, say, Churchill as Hitler. Not just on the fringe, but in the Washington Post (my mother-in-law sent me the link, worried that I might be giving our son a one-sided perspective).

Hmm... if Churchill is Hitler, that means Hitler is Churchill, so what's the big deal?

This post is turning into the Usual Friday Ramble, isn't it? Let's try to restore order with some gimlet words from Schuon. And what is order but awareness of, and respect for, levels?

The man of “aristocratic” nature -- we are not speaking of social classes -- is he who masters himself and who loves to master himself; the “plebeian” by nature -- with the same reservation -- is on the contrary he who does not master himself, and who does not wish to do so.

To master oneself is in substance to want to transcend oneself, in conformity with the reason for being of that central and total creature which is man; in fact, the man of the “dark age” lives below himself. Thus he must transcend himself -- or re-establish the equilibrium between Maya and Atma -- in accordance with a norm which he bears within himself, and which comprises all that makes life worth living.

For example... let's just say I know of a family of billionaires in which the wife and daughters are devoted to the TV program Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Can you even imagine what that must be like? Which proves -- as if such proof is necessary -- that no amount of money can purchase the kind of class under discussion.

I can hear it now: who are you to speak of class, when you support Trump! Again, level confusion: politics is politics. Dennis Prager speaks for me:

the policies of a political leader matter much more -- morally -- than that individual’s sexual sins, or even character. It is truly foolish to argue otherwise.... That “60 Minutes” correspondent Anderson Cooper and many in our country found it acceptable to ask a woman, “Did he use a condom?” on national TV is a far graver reflection of America’s moral malaise than a man having a one-night affair 12 years ago....

The fact is it is none of my business and none of my concern whether a politician ever had an extramarital affair. To cite just one of many examples, a president’s attitude toward the genocide-advocating Islamic tyrants in Tehran is incomparably more morally significant. That is just one of many reasons -- on moral grounds alone -- I far prefer the current president to the faithful-to-his-wife previous president.

It is apparently difficult to escape the caste to which one has been assigned. Think of all the academics who shouldn't be thinking, but rather, engaged in some productive form of manual labor. Most of the real trouble in the world can be traced to miscaste "intellectuals."

Schuon: "Caste takes precedence over race because spirit has priority over form; race is a form while caste is a spirit." But the left, from Andrew Jackson to the present, maintains the opposite: that race is critically important. Really, diversity and multiculturalism are the substitution of race for natural hierarchy, such that even truth itself is denied.

We've discussed the idea of caste before. You don't have to take it literally to understand that there is something to it, based upon everyday experience. Who hasn't met a warrior, or priest, or scholar, or laborer, or merchant? Nor do I, for example, pretend to be a warrior. I could probably be one, but it wouldn't be me -- the guy who likes to have pointless, wide-ranging conversations.

There is first of all the intellective, speculative, contemplative, sacerdotal type, which tends towards wisdom or holiness; holiness referring more particularly to contemplation, and wisdom to discernment.

Next there is the warlike and royal type, which tends towards glory and heroism; even in spirituality... this type will readily be active, combative and heroic, hence the ideal of the “heroicalness of virtue.”

The third type is the respectable “average” man: he is essentially industrious, balanced, persevering; his center is love for work that is useful and well done, and carried out with God in mind; he aspires neither to transcendence nor to glory -- although he desires to be both pious and respectable -- but like the sacerdotal type, he loves peace and is not interested in adventures; a tendency which predisposes him to a contemplativeness conformable with his occupations.

Lastly there is the type that has no ideal other than that of pleasure in the more or less coarse sense of the word; this is concupiscent man who, not knowing how to master himself, has to be mastered by others, so that his great virtue will be submission and fidelity.

Modern liberalism is premised on the idea that anyone can be anything, which is really a way of saying that everyone is nobody. We are not infinitely malleable. You are who you are, and it is a matter of actualizing and deepening that you, not pretending you're someone else.

Surely there must be some aphorisms that can save this wayward and wooly post from itself!

Equality is not justice; it is merely the way of avoiding the obligation of attributing to each his own.

Unjust inequality is not remedied by equality, but by just inequality.

Leveling is the barbarian’s substitute for order.

Where equality permits liberty to enter, inequality slips in.

He who claims equal opportunity ends up requiring that the gifted be penalized.

There is something definitively vile about the man who only admits equals, who does not tirelessly seek out his betters.

Equality is not the fulfillment but the perversion of equity. Only a hierarchical ordering proceeds equitably with “the lion and the ox” (Dávila).

By the way, I'm not saying I'm better than anyone else. Indeed, I would love for just once to be normal. But I've resigned myself to the realization that that is something that can never be. So the conversation continues...

Simple and Deep, Complex and Shallow

We are on the subject of depth: what is it, and how do we know it? There are degrees of depth in thought, prose, poetry, science, religion, music, painting, or in other words, knowledge and beauty.

But again, depth isn't necessarily covariant with truth. I suppose Heidegger is deep, but that doesn't make him any less wrong. And in a certain sense, truth is actually quite simple, simplicity being not at all synonymous with superficiality. "God's essence is to exist." Doesn't get more simple or true than that.

Nevertheless, Often the simpler a truth is the more difficult it is to understand (NGD).

Some people are drawn to depth, while it appears that most people are indifferent to it at best, but often repelled by it. In the past, I've written about the psychological reasons for this, in that -- in my opinion -- just as people have psychological defense mechanisms that repress, deny, project and otherwise transform the lower vertical, they also have "pneumatic" defense mechanisms that allow them to do the same with the upper vertical. Which is how leftism becomes a religion.

To say lower is to say higher, and it makes no sense to affirm that the human ego is the highest entity in all of creation. Rather, it is always situated on a vertical spectrum between... best to leave this undefined -- or unsaturated with preconceptions -- since the unKnown is at both ends; let's just say that man is suspended between O and Ø.

With this in mind, we now have a way to conceptualize depth: the deeply true is in the direction of O, while the deeply false is in the direction of Ø. Looked at in this way, reductionistic Darwinism is deeply false, as is Marxism, or feminism, or positivism (giving adherents the benefit of the doubt that these isms are deep to begin with).

Now, what can it mean to be "in the direction of O"? How can we tell? Let's leave aside aesthetics and focus on thought. One critical point is that while Ø necessarily excludes O, O must encompass and account for Ø -- which is precisely what makes it the more deep. For depth implies comprehensiveness, and a system that accounts for the cosmic Subject is obviously more comprehensive than one that pretends to deny it at the outset (and it can only pretend to do so, on pain of saying nothing with no one to say it).

Conversely, O doesn't deny Ø, least of all in the Christian tradition. Indeed, we could even think of Incarnation as O becoming Ø; or, to tweak the old patristic gag, "O became Ø that Ø might become O."

In contrast, think of Eastern traditions for which Ø is pure illusion. Their goal is to attain O, but it must be a less comprehensive O, since it excludes Ø. A western representative of the same approach is Plotinus, whom St. Augustine rejected for precisely this reason. With neoplatonism you can experience the One, only you can't be there to experience it. D'O!

Backing up a bit, it was the work of millennia to first discover that God is one: "A religious-minded Greek felt himself the passive battlefield of overpowering and too often mutually conflicting divine influences. His will was at their mercy" (Gilson, God and Philosophy).

This testifies to a fragmented psyche that is both the cause and consequence of inability to know the One. This was a world "where everything came to men from without, including their feelings and passions, their virtues and their vices..." (ibid.).

And guess what? That world most assuredly still exists. As a clinical psychologist, I see it all the time -- not just in patients but (especially!) in politics, which is the widest field for externalizing various psychic fragments.

For example, the existence of people who cannot tolerate free speech isn't really a political problem but a psychological crisis. To even discuss it on the plane of politics is to obscure and displace its location and depth. In other words, there can be no deep political reason to eliminate free speech. However, there are certainly deep psychological reasons to do so! But that's between you and your psychologist.

Back to the gradual discovery of the One: "What makes Aristotle's metaphysics an epoch-making event in the history of natural theology is that in it the long delayed conjunction of the first philosophical principle with the notion of god became at last an accomplished fact" (ibid). In short, God is no longer the fragmented and un-integrated experience described above, but its synthesis: "At the summit of the Aristotelian universe is not an Idea, but a self-subsisting and eternal Act of thinking": an eternally one-ing one, so to speak.

Coming at it from a different angle -- revelation as opposed to natural theology -- "any follower of the Jewish God would know at once that, whatever the nature of reality itself may be said to be, its religious principle must of necessity coincide with its philosophical principle" -- each is one, but unified in an even higher Oneness: I AM and IT IS are not two, so to speak.

Gilson mentions in passing a key principle in understanding depth, that "Whereas Thomas Aquinas distinguished in order to unite, Descartes divided in order to separate." In the case of the latter, there is no way to put the cosmic egg back together after the initial division of thought and being -- thus, there can be no recovery of the depth of reality.

But what makes a thing deep is precisely the complementary oneness in the many and manyness of the One. "A world," writes Schuon, "is not a simple and inert block, but an infinitely variegated play of antinomies and combinations" which nevertheless possess a "homogeneous character," otherwise they would be different worlds. "Existence crystallizes, divides, and disperses; Intelligence on the contrary brings back to unity." The two are complementary:

we must distinguish between a perspective that is intellectual and unitive and another that is existential and separative; the first envisions everything in relation to unity, even Existence..., whereas the second sees everything in relation to separativity, even Intelligence...

Theology and science, respectively. Which are not two. Anything short of this is in the shallow end of the gene pool. For "there is no true synthesis without discernment." And vice versa.

Aphorisms, which is to say, maximum depth with minimum words:

All truths converge upon one truth, but the routes have been barricaded.

Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to meditating on minor problems.

In order for a multitude of diverse terms to coexist, it is necessary to place them on different levels. A hierarchical ordering is the only one that neither expels nor suppresses them. --Dávila

Building the Cosmic Cake or Something

Back to the structure of the conditions of existence -- which is to say, the rules of the game. What game? The Game of the Cosmos, or Cosmic Game. So play the game existence to the end... of the beginning (Lennon).

These structural conditions are universal. Why is that? Because this is a universe. You might even say they are the universe, because everything else changes, while these remain the same. For that matter, they also account for, or undergird, the change.

"Existence is perceived by a subject, and what it perceives is contents in containers, namely matter-energy, forms, and numbers, all situated in space and time" (Schuon). Can't get more concise than that: mattergy, spacetime, form & number, all perceived by a subject.

Everything we perceive is a form of matter-energy; the form is, so to speak, the nonlocal container, or that which makes a thing what it is. But some forms require time in order to disclose and reveal themselves. Or in other words, they are "nothing" in an instant.

Come to think of it, nothing is anything in an instant, since a degree of time is present in all manifestation. As Schuon explains it, the spatial container "is static and conserving," while the temporal container "is dynamic and transforming." Nothing is actually completely static, nor can anything consist of pure change.

Which, by the way, goes to one of the metaphysical criticisms of Darwinism: if everything is evolving, then we couldn't know it, knowledge -- or truth -- being of the changeless, precisely. Truth cannot surpass, or "evolve" beyond, itself, which is one reason why there can be no species that will evolve beyond man. Man can already know the absolute, so evolution beyond this is strictly inconceivable -- which is not to say we can't deepen our understanding of it, or see it from a higher perspective.

Time out for Aphorisms, once again arranged (by me) hierarchically:

Because opinions change, the relativist believes that truths change.

Truths are not relative. What is relative are opinions about the truth.

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper.

The scientific proposition presents an abrupt alternative: understanding it or not understanding it. The philosophical proposition, however, is susceptible to growing insight. Finally, the religious proposition is a vertical ascent that allows one to see the same landscape from different altitudes.

Regarding that last one, in recent days I've been thinking a lot about the idea of depth. What exactly is it, and is it real? We use the term all the time to navigate the subjective world, and no intellectual wishes to be thought shallow. And yet, there they are: millions of them!

Clearly, to say "depth" is to say "verticality." So, straight away, a person who denies verticality is not only as shallow as can be (e.g. Steven Pinker), but ridiculously self-refuting, because verticality can only be denied from a vertical perspective. Only someone who transcends materiality can deny transcendence.

But for us, subjectivity -- the transcendent center(s) -- is built into the cosmic cake; it is not the residue or by-product or effluvia of something more fundamental, but fundamentality itself. Recall what Schuon says in paragraph three about the structure of existence: at one end subjects, at the other end contents-in-containers. In between is the Cosmos.

Interestingly, "deep" doesn't necessarily correlate with "true." For example, I well remember when I was an ordinary, unreflective, ambient liberal back in my 20s. Then I began to be exposed to thinkers such as Chomsky, Zinn, and all the rest, and said to myself, "Wow, this is deep!" It's deep in the sense that it either drills down to the foundations of leftism, or draws out its ultimate implications. Yes, both are absurd, if not crazy, but I didn't know that. I was too shallow!

Indeed, Confused ideas and murky ponds seem deep (NGD). Which reminds me of the recent insufferable Children's Crusade: To praise youth is to forget our former idiocy.

Come to think to it, at the other end of the spectrum, I'm sure this explains the appeal of Jordan Peterson: for me he doesn't go deep enough -- he's on the way there -- but for many of his fans it's as if he is their introduction to vertical psycho-pneumatic depth.

I'm not going to have time to say everything I want to say about this depth business. But here are some aphorisms that flutter around different aspects the subject:

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality.

The lesser truths tend to eclipse the highest truths.

And this one especially: Profundity is not in what is said, but in the level from which it is said. How do we assess this level? How do we know right away that this person is deep, and this one shallow? This applies not only to thought, but to music, painting, religion, politics, everything. And for some reason, most people get off the depth train before arriving at the final stop.

Definitely to be continued...

Rambling in the Wild Godhead

The usual Friday ramble, only worse. Or better, depending on I don't know what. If I knew that, I'd have more readers. Or fewer, depending.

For those of you reading along at home, I'm trying to digest an essay by Schuon called Structure and Universality of the Conditions of Existence.

First of all, like anyone could know that. And yet, he pulls it off with such confidence and authority, one can't help thinking he's on -- or in -- to something. I'm often reminded of Blake's gag that Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed. As far as I know, Blake never explained what he meant, but it seems to me that it goes to the intrinsic authority of Truth: if you get it, you got it.

Come to think of it, there are all sorts of things I believe because Truth told me so. Sometimes you hear something, and it is like a key fitting into a lock. It totally settles the question, such that it now becomes part of oneself as opposed to being something sought after. How to put it... It's a little like knowing in the biblical sense, in that it is more intimate than mere logic or sensation.

And now I'm thinking of communion, or theophagy more generally, in which Truth is not merely heard or thought, but devoured and converted to one's own substance (or is it the other way around?). Sounds strange -- a hard saying -- and yet, it is without question an analogue of what we're dealing with. Tasting is believing. And vice versa.

Let's say you want to create a cosmos with conscious beings. What needs to go into it? Lets see: matter, form, and number. Space and time.

Starting with the first, matter is "the sensible manifestation of existence itself." This is a subtle point, because it situates matter equally outside and in, on the plane where it is experienced and in the experience itself. Matter is object-sensation, as it were, not just one or the other.

But nothing is experienced or known without a form, which is its very principle of intelligibly. In other words, to know something is to know a form, precisely.

Conversely, to be ignorant of something is to not know its form. So, material objects don't just present themselves to our senses; rather, we simultaneously know or extract their form. If we can't extract the form, it's annoying, or frustrating, or frightening, or intriguing. Or just nothing -- nothing because it doesn't actually exist, or because you are actually an idiot.

Think of science, which is nothing but the pursuit of form from depth to depth. But then, so too is any discipline, all the way up to theology -- for what is theology but formal intellection of the intelligible form of God?

Or perhaps we should distinguish between theology and (lowercase) theosophy, the former applying to the forms of revelation, the latter more to the nonlocal form of God-as-such, AKA pure intellection: descent and ascent, respectively.

You might say that revelation is a form of the formless. In deep verticality, God is the being-ness of beyond-being. Or, if you prefer, the Son-Logos is the firstform of the Father.

At any rate, forms are like rungs on the ladder of ascent back to form as such. Which is just a way of saying that the intelligibility of the world isn't absurdly ungrounded (an impossibility), but rather, goes all the way up (even if people tend to stop at an arbitrary whystation along the way).

Moving on to the principle of number, it "manifests the unlimitedness of cosmic possibility, and in the final analysis, the infinitude of the Possible as such." All numbers are multiples of one -- and therefore manifestations of oneness -- "and unity in turn reflects the Principle charged with its innumerable potentialities."

This explains why everything is different but the same -- from people to sunsets to baseball games. Everything is a variation on a theme, so to speak. On the one hand, "there is nothing new under the sun"; on the other, each moment is a radical novelty. Orthoparadox. Deal with it.

Back to matter: don't think of it as the material world only. Rather, materiality is a form of matter, of what Aristotle calls "prime matter." Thus, matter has a vertical span "from extreme subtlety to extreme solidity"; in the end, it is the "divine Substance," or "the final point of the descent of the objective pole" of existence. It represents the farther shore of spirit, or perhaps its epidermis. Think of water, which appears in various modes, from ice to steam.

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

All of this is situated in space and time, the former going "from the ungraspable point to limitless extension," the latter "from the instant to perpetuity." These are not infinite and eternal as such, but manifestations, or representations, or prolongations of them. For time is still the moving image of eternity, as space is the static image of infinity. And you are there.

Fission for Complements

Yesterday I was thinking about fusion and fission, or the forces that hold things together or blow them apart. When things blow apart -- i.e., fission -- it's just a release of the energy that had been holding them together. So it's the same energy, only extroverted instead of introverted.

Let's dispense with the stoner talk and get a more precise definition. Says here that "The energy released by fission is a million times greater than that released in chemical reactions," while fusion releases three to four times the energy released by fission. Here it says that "In both fusion and fission, nuclear processes alter atoms to generate energy. Despite having some things in common, the two can be considered polar opposites."

Okay, I don't have time to pursue the full analogy. Let's just stipulate that I flunked high school physics, and discretely move on. My point, physics or no physics, is that there is a glue that binds people, communities, nations, and even individual minds; and that it's the same glue at each level -- just as energy is energy is energy in physics.

Come to think of it, there are four forces in physics, aren't there? There are the weak, strong, gravitational, and electromagnetic forces, and last time I checked, renown awaits the nerd who successfully reduces these to one.

At any rate, how many elemental forces are there on the human plane? Well, there are many, but they evidently reduce to one; but this one manifests in at least four ways: love, truth, beauty, and unity. Or, maybe the unity is a function of the binding power of love and truth.

Although all the transcendentals are always involved, I would say that love is primarily what holds things together in the micro realm, whereas truth is what binds things on the macro scale. For example, the founders begin with the idea that we are all bound together by certain self-evident truths. They did not begin like, say, a hippie commune, with the idea that all we need is luv.

Conversely, a marriage is not founded on self-evident truths about your partner, but with love. Of course, the marriage will fail if it is based on a lie, but truth alone will be insufficient to hold things together -- even two mathematicians or accountants.

I was thinking about this in the context of the Austin bomber. I don't know anything about him, but I'll go out on a limb and guess that he had no passionate bonds of love with any other human beings. It made me wonder if the energy that would normally bind him to others underwent a kind of fission, such that it was released in a destructive way?

Before you laugh, consider that almost all violent crime is caused by unattached males. Furthermore, these males are unattached to any father figure, and vice versa. Thus, there seems to be a problem of "male energy," which, if not bound by fusion, is released in extremely destructive ways.

Lately Tucker Carlson has had a weekly feature on the crisis of men in America. Last night he pointed out that 75% of unmarried women voted for Obama in '08 and '12. This is simply the reverse side of the destructive fission of male energy, in that these women, instead of fusing with men, fuse with the state. And it seems that men who aren't frankly destructive often fuse with video games, or porn, or some other substitute.

Let's try to probe this a little more deeply. What is the most elemental bond we can imagine? I would say it is the bond between mother and infant. Absent that, there couldn't be any bonds later in life. Maternal love is truly the foundation; however, it gets complicated, because nothing as useless as mother love could exist in nature without father strength and protection. Thus, all of these things need to come together in order for the family to emerge.

For over 50 years now, the left has been messing with this natural fusion. As a result, a tremendous amount of energy is being released, energy that once held families, communities, and minds together. What happens to male and female energy when they aren't fused to one another? What happens to child energy when it isn't fused to a mother and father, who are in turn fused to one another?

The left likes to talk about "white privilege," but the real privilege (one of them), as Dennis Prager points out, is father privilege. Blacks who have a mother and father at home do as well as anyone else. But some 80% of black children are born out of wedlock, or in other words, out of fusion and in fission. They are explosions waiting to happen.

Another key is the binding power of truth, which converges with the binding power of religion. Here again the left is systematically on the case, for multiculturalism is a nothing less than a frontal assault on the cognitive glue that binds us together. Likewise moral relativism, deconstruction, feminism, the whole smorgasbag of toxic leftism. Yesterday I was reading about how scientific objectivity is just a mode of white privilege. Well, rid the world of objectivity, and just watch the explosion that ensues!

University campuses all over America are "exploding." Why? Because of fission. Because the forces that bind us -- say, freedom of speech -- are being eroded, and destructive energy being released.

Likewise, what is religion? The word comes from religare, which means to bind, in this case, to God. What happens when this energy is released? It's happening. You might even say that leftism happens, for it is a substitute religion, with all of the same passions, only scattered and oriented to the wrong object(s).

The title of this post doesn't exactly make sense, does it? Fission from complements might be more accurate, meaning that energy is released as a result of messing with the bonds between complementarities....

The Message of the Cosmos

Continuing with yesterday's post on the keys to existence, an amazon reviewer of Means to Message explains what Fr. Jaki means vis-a-vis the distinction between means and message:

The "means" are the objects of reality which act upon the knowing mind which receives and forms the "message," since reality and the cosmos as whole are rational (that is, can be known). Jaki shows that even science itself must begin with objects that exist apart from our minds, otherwise science and philosophy become just "talk about talk," thereby confusing both means and message. When the means and message are confused, the human mind alone becomes the sole arbiter of reality, plunging humanity into all sorts of metaphysical and epistemological problems.

And political, as we shall see.

In order to for existence to ex-ist, there must be this primordial distinction between means and message. Typically we think of the foundation of things as consisting of matter, or energy, or law, but these are all somewhat beside the point if there is no Message and no Means to encode and transmit it. This means, of course, that there must also be an encoder, but we're getting a little ahead -- or behind, rather -- of ourselves.

Suffice it to say that in order for us to know anything, there must be a cosmic structure of encoder --> message --> means --> decoder; or God --> truth --> medium --> man.

In a way, this corresponds to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, meaning that God doesn't just formulate the message, but first creates the means through which the message will be conveyed. It is not as if the world already exists, so it is only a matter of superimposing a message. This explains why the world is so shot through with truth and beauty from the inside out. It is full of objects -- means -- that transmit truth -- the message. Vertical murmurandoms are everywhere!

There are diverse methods for unpacking these messages, from poetry to science, philosophy to theology, math to music. More generally, you might say there are qualitative ways and quantitative ways. In our Age of Stupidity, there is a widespread belief that only the quantitative ways are valid, but guess what? As soon as you say that, you've made a qualitative argument, one that obviously cannot be reduced to numbers. People such as Steven Pinker who naïvely promote logic as the last word in wisdom are obviously making an extra-logical (but in this case infra-rational) argument.

Wisdom. Is it a thing, and could it ever be expressed with mathematical precision? Obviously Yes and less obviously YES -- in a way. This for me is the appeal of the Aphorisms, which express a maximum of wisdom with a minimum of words. Here are some relevant examples; I've arranged them so they build to and convey a kind of meta-aphorism:

To believe that science is enough is the most naïve of superstitions.

What is capable of being measured is minor.

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

Being only falsifiable, a scientific thesis is never certain but is merely current.

The natural sciences, where the process of falsification prevails, take only errors out of circulation; the social sciences, where fashion prevails, also take their achievements out of circulation.

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will not have explained anything.

The Christian who is disturbed by the “results” of science does not know what Christianity is or what science is (Dávila).

Jaki writes that "Concern for anything serious cannot be taught in a straightforward manner, if it can be taught at all." Rather, like painting, poetry, and composing, philosophy, if not "inspired by the love of truth," reduces to banality. Thus,

the scientist singles out what is quantitative in reality and therefore he deals with matter only insofar as matter embodies quantitative features. From there the scientist proceeds along a straight track which conceptually is also an extremely narrow track.... The scientist need not probe into the deeper origin of matter as quantitatively patterned...

In contrast, the philosopher -- at least one who is open to being as such, and not just a little corner of it -- must probe the "many other aspects of reality in which the true, the good, and the beautiful are intertwined as they reveal ever greater depths that cannot be fathomed quantitatively."

None of this is to denigrate science; rather, to simply describe it.

Science not only deals with material reality, but assumes it. But as Schuon writes, "Matter is the sensible manifestation of existence itself," such that it is immediately elevated to something much more than science can say about it.

Or, put conversely, if you were to consider all the things science says about matter, they wouldn't add up to existence itself, for existence is greater than the sum of its parts. Again, science simply assumes not only that "matter talks," but -- more bizarrely -- scientists can hear what it is saying!

Critical for our purposes is that "what holds true for the universe applies equally to the soul," for the macro- and microcosms mirror each other, because each is first a mirror of the Divine Mind, the Absolute Subject, the El Supremo at the Top of the Stairs. Oh? Tell us more.

The soul is "matter" by its existential substance, "form" by its individuality," "number" by its necessarily unique subjectivity; it is "space" by its expansion and "time" by its cycles. Or again it is "spatial" by its memory, since space conserves, and "temporal" by its imagination, since time changes and transforms; it could be added that reason refers to number, since it calculates, snd intuition to form, since it perceives directly and by synthesis (Schuon).

Hmm. I just thought of something. A conservative wishes to conserve our founding principles, so this reflects the spatial orientation referenced above. But progressivism -- it's in the name -- is not only temporal (i.e., oriented to an imaginary future), but in such a way that it cuts itself off from founding (spatial) principles.

Now, properly understood, our founding principles are both spatial and temporal, in that they are the operating instructions for a rule-bound dynamism, or ordered liberty. But progressives imagine we can have meaningful progress with no ground and no telos. In short, it is pure message, or abstract idea with no concrete underpinning. Being that they begin with their ideas rather than the world, it should come as no surprise that they end up shipwrecked on the shoals of reality -- the very shoals they deny up front.

How to Exist

No time to post, so blogging will resume tomorrow. However, if I did have time to post, I'd want to talk about the nature and conditions of existence, in other words, what must first exist in order for existence to exist.

For example, in order to exist, you need a body. But the existence of bodies is founded upon any number of prior, or deeper, or more universal principles and conditions. I touched on this in the book, for example, vis-a-vis natural selection. Sure, natural selection makes sense on its own level, but to treat it as an ultimate explanation, without need of much deeper supporting principles, is only to prove you aren't very evolved.

I suppose I first ran into this idea in a book by Stanley Jaki called Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth. If you're going to say anything useful about the world, you have to begin with what you are presently doing, which is, trying to say something useful about the world. How is this even possible? So many assumptions are packed into it, and yet, intellectuals of various kinds just proceed as if they're all self-evident.

All philosophers, intellectuals, thinkers, pundits, and professors, despite different conclusions, will agree on one thing (even if the are unaware of it): that "They all use tangible means for the delivery of their respective messages" (Jaki). In order to communicate meaning, there must be a means of communication:

Therefore, if philosophers are logical, their strictly primary concern should be about the extent to which their particular philosophy justifies the use of any such means, indeed its very reality and all the consequences, both numerous and momentous, that follow from this.

Take Darwinism, for example. Is there anything in this philosophy that permits the entities explained by it to explain themselves, with no remainder? I don't see how. At best, this metaphysic traps us in an inescapable tautology, such that there would be no reason to take seriously what such a restricted being says.

In a way, it's a variant of the old Epimenides gag about all Cretans being liars. For to say that all Darwinians are telling the truth is to transcend Darwinism. As we've put it before, if Darwinism is true, it can't be. More generally,

The perusal of representative selections from the works of modern or pre-modern philosophers hardly reveals on their part a sense of the need to justify thematically the means that carries their message. Yet only in the measure in which that justification is done, implicitly or, what is far better, explicitly, may the philosopher's message become truly about truth (Jaki).

Which means that 99% of philosophers imagine they are finished -- or close to it -- when they haven't actually even begun.

And now I have to get ready for work. To be continued....

Transcendence or Hand Grenades

In yesterday's post I did something I try always to avoid, in that I tossed out a lazy and inadequately supported statement. I hate it when others do it, because this endeavor -- the Raccoon project -- calls for precision, even if precision poetry. The last thing I want to do is deepak the chopra. Nor does it matter if what I said is true. It still needs fleshing out.

This is the statement: "the cosmos is in the soul, not the soul in the cosmos," and later "the cosmos is in us, and we are in God." Those are not the sorts of things you can just toss out there, unless maybe you're passing a joint while doing so. If truth is "just anything," pretty soon it is just nothing.

Yes, religion is often guilty of this sort of thing because of the I-AMbiguous nature of the subject. You might be tempted to believe that science is innocent of this abuse, but you would be wrong. If anything, it is the bigger offender, because nothing about science (or scientism) is grounded in anything (or everything grounded in nothing).

And that's just the metaphysics. Concepts such as "big bang," "evolution," "consciousness," and "person" are thrown around as if they are self-evident. Which they are, so long as you buy into the whole paradigm, but the paradigm is absurd if you take it seriously.

Truly, scientism isn't "in the world" but in its paradigm. Therefore, it sees what the paradigm allows it to see. As soon as we realize the paradigm is in us, we have transcended it, as outlined in yesterday's post. And then you have to account for how this inescapable transcendence has gotten into the universe.

But it cannot be a scientific account, because then you're back where you started, safe inside your little paradigm. This is part of what I mean by saying that the cosmos is in us rather than vice versa. However, I'm saying something a little more radical, because I don't merely mean our representation of the cosmos, but the cosmos as such.

As we've mentioned any number of times, "cosmos" or "universe" are already profoundly metaphysical concepts that assume the oneness of creation. Why should creation be one? Because we intuit it as such. Deep down we know there is an Absolute, and that it is a contradiction in terms to affirm two Absolutes. Reality is one, and we all know it, if not explicitly then implicitly.

The only exceptions to this are the mentally ill or brain damaged. For example, people who are subjected to early trauma, abuse, and deprivation often suffer from a kind of primordial rupture on the ground floor of their neuro-psyche. As such, they have difficulty with most any kind of integration, whether of emotions, thoughts, or actions.

I read a short book the other day that touches on this, God and Philosophy, by Etienne Gilson. To paraphrase and expand upon an amazon review, Greek philosophy was eventually able to arrive at That Which Is -- the objective Absolute, so to speak -- while it fell upon the ancient Hebrews to not only discover the subjective Absolute -- He Who Is, or I AM -- but to then put the two together in a daring cosmo-historical act of integration.

But then Uncles Rene (Descartes) and Manny (Kant) came along and ruined everybody's lives and ate all our steak by demolishing this unity with a "'purely rational' philosophy which holds nearly every intellectual today in bondage." This is the paradigm capture alluded to above, although the prisons are diverse, for truth is one while ideology is many -- a fractured fairy tale.

In any event, any metaphysic worthy of man must account for the IT IS as well as the I AM, i.e., objectivity and subjectivity. Sure, you can reduce the latter to the former, but that doesn't actually solve the problem, any more than throwing a hand grenade onto the board solves a chess problem. Frankly, you can eliminate any problem via reverse transcendence, or "transcendence from below," but this is always accompanied by a destruction of humanness.

For example, the male-female relation is a problem. There is a cosmically correct way to deal with the problem, and then there are the left's ways, which naturally end in more problems -- which is precisely why women are less happy today than when feminism got hold of them. It is impossible to be happy while living in defiance of one's archetype instead of in conformity with it.

So many aphorisms. Regarding what was just said in the paragraph above, Christianity does not solve “problems”; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level. Again, transcendence, not hand grenades.

About the futile attempt to enclose the cosmos in (lower case) reason, civilization is the irrational fusion of opposing terms. Those who aspire to a “rational” civilization plan slaughters. See 20th century for details.

About the metaphysical slide from oneness to diversity, After conversing with some “thoroughly modern” people, we see that humanity escaped the “centuries of faith” only to get stuck in those of credulity.

About the implicit oneness, Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is a perception of a special order of realities. It is not a conviction that we possess, but a conviction that possesses us -- from outside the cosmos. Faith is like an air hole at the top (in addition to letting in the light and warmth).

About reducing subject to object, One to many, soul to matter, He who does not believe in God can at least have the decency of not believing in himself. Because The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book.

About being stuck in a paradigm and calling it freedom, The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

In philosophy nothing is easier than to be consistent. Rather, the trick is completeness! And no man can pretend to be complete without God.

As to our initial problematic statement about the cosmos being in the soul, Schuon writes that "the Intellect coincides in its innermost nature with the very Being of things." Or in other words, we are ultimately in conformity with reality. If not, then what is the point? This is the truth that sets us free. Every alternative places us in bondage: God or Egypt, transcendence or hand grenades.

There's Room at the Top of the Cosmos

I caught an article the other day that depicts the entire known universe in a single image:

Boom. Or ¡BANG!, rather. There it is.

Three things: first, that's us in the center. Second, you have to imagine it as a three-dimensional cone, with the central point closest to us. Third, it is not to scale, since it would be impossible to depict the vast distances involved. If it were to scale, our sun, which you see at the center, would be so tiny as to be invisible.

Interestingly, it looks very much like any other mandala, which is a symbolic representation of the cosmos. I wonder if this is because it is a perennial nonlocal form to which humans have vertical access?

Also, the sphere has always been understood as the perfect form, and the cosmos must be a perfect sphere, since it is expanding in all directions from a central point at 68 kilometers per second.

So, what is it expanding into? That's a nonsense question, or at least beyond the limits of the model. Ultimately the mathematical model must be tautologous, forbidden by Gödel to step outside itself. Only humans can do that, not science.

Therefore, there is a strange loop involved in gazing at that model; or better it is like a Klein Bottle, in which yer inside is out and yer outside is in. Again, we are at the center of the model, implying that we are "contained" by it. And yet, we are looking at it from the outside, such that it is we who contain the cosmos, not vice versa.

Is this possible? No, it's necessary: the cosmos is in the soul, not the soul in the cosmos.

Again, consider the logarithmic scale of the image above, such that as one gets closer to the center, things get smaller and smaller. But that is only the "reality," not the Reality. For in real Reality, at the center is the largest imaginable thing in all of existence, which is to say, the human mind -- the same isness that transcends the whole business.

I've mentioned before that I read a novel some 35 years ago called Little, Big. I don't remember anything about it except that it depicts a world of concentric circles. However, unlike standard geometry, the closer one gets to the center, the larger the world, to the point of infinitude.

Here again, this is very much like our world, being that the infinitude is at the center, not the periphery. Think, for example, of childhood. On the one hand, it was a small world -- our house, our family, our neighborhood. Nevertheless, remember the infinitude? It was everywhere and in every thing.

The good news is that there's still room at the top, as man always "opens out" to infinity. As such, it is as if there is a pinhole at the center of the image, with Light streaming in -- the same light that illuminates the image. This pinhole is a window or a door, depending. Jesus said "I am the way," but he might have said ways, e.g., the gate, the vine, the light, the truth.

God has opened a door in the middle of creation, and this open door of the world towards God is man; this opening is God's invitation to look toward Him, to tend towards Him, to persevere with regard to Him, and to return to Him (Schuon).

It is the actual river that runs up Mount Improbable:

the human state is a gate of exit -- and the only gate for the terrestrial world -- not merely out of this world or the formal cosmos, but even out of the immense and numberless objectification that is universal Existence.

Maybe you can't see it, but at the very center of the center -- the beating heart of the cosmos -- would have to be the cross. God is "outside" the circle, but when he condescends to enter, he is cruciform.

Schuon often uses the image of the circle as a point of reference. God is at the center, radiating outward, with each concentric circle representing a world -- for example, worlds of matter, of biology, of mind. In one sense the material world -- or the world of the material ego -- is the most distant from the center, but it is possible for man to plunge right past it, into "negative" spaces of falsehood, evil, and tenure.

In any event, in this view, the spiritual adventure is a journey back to the center:

The subjective principle emanating from the divine Subject crosses the Universe like a ray in order to end in the multitude of egos.... Man marks the limit of the "creative ray" for the terrestrial world that is his; his sufficient reason consists in being this limit, that is, in providing a stop -- after the manner of an echo or a mirror -- to the "ray of exteriorization".... it is at the same time a door open toward the Self and immortality (Schuon).

So, where does this leave us vis-a-vis our picture of the universe? In truth, man cannot be enclosed in any system, whether material, mathematical, ideological, visual, biological, whatever. Rather, the cosmos is in us, and we are in God. And the higher you fly, the deeper you go. So c'mon!

Religious Dunning-Kruger

Yesterday the term occurred to me: "religious Dunning-Kruger." Certainly it applies to Pinker, who simultaneously overestimates what he knows about religion and underestimates what religious people know about his secular humanism. The following is adapted from wiki, but with certain relevant words changed or added:

The Religious Dunning–Kruger effect is a psycho-pneumatic bias wherein excessively rationalistic people suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their spiritual discernment as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority derives from the metaphysical inability of low-ability persons to recognize their own spiritual ineptitude; without the self-awareness of metaphysics, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual knowledge or experience of the spiritual realm.

Conversely, spiritually gifted individuals may erroneously assume that principles easy for them to understand are also easy for other people to understand, or that other people will have a similar understanding of subjects that they themselves are well-versed in.

At the very least, an intellectually honest atheist will want to seek out the finest in religious thought in order to refute it. Instead, they either dismiss it out of hand with a wave of Dunning Kruger, or trot out the worst examples of religious thought in order to prove their phony superiority. But if all religious thinkers were Deepak Chopra I'd be an atheist, just as if all women were Michelle Obama I'd be gay. It proves nothing.

Much of what goes by the name of "thinking" is nothing more than a crude display of intelligence signaling. Ideology in particular is a cognitive system that allows idiots to have opinions.

Conversely, orthodox religious belief is often a helpful way for non-metaphysicians to have correct opinions about the foundations of existence. That is to say, when the average person starts thinking things through for himself from the ground up, disaster is just over the horizon. My entire generation (the boomers) was guilty of this, and look what ensued.

If you don't believe me, believe the Aphorist:

To educate man is to impede the “free expression of his personality.”

Oops.

Educating the individual consists in teaching him to distrust the ideas that occur to him.

What, ideas like man is perfectible and government can solve social problems? The self-satisfied individual who believes his own interior propaganda "ends only destroying values higher than than those he is capable of aiming at and engendering evils greater than those he sets out to overcome" (Schuon). For proof, look at any Democrat-run city.

Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy, and lust invent a thousand ideologies to justify themselves.

Bernie Sanders in '20!

When man refuses the discipline the gods give him, demons discipline him.

Hollywood comes to mind.

An irreligious society cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how imbecilic it may be.

Bernie Sanders in '20!

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

Pinker deserves himself, as Times readers deserve the Times and progressives deserve progressivism.

Nothing remains of Christianity when the Christian tries to seem to the world not to be stupid.

Religious Dunning-Kruger assures this.

Back to Gnosis, which, as I mentioned in the previous post, has some really bad news for Pinker. Except it's not news, of course, but the most venerable things short of God, i.e., the principles that lead from and to him.

At the root of religious Dunning-Kruger must be a rational ego so hypertrophied that it not only obscures the intellect but appropriates some of its its function, which is precisely what allows it to pronounce on realities above its station:

[I]ntellectual genius should not be confused with the mental acuity of logicians: intellectual intuition comprises in its essence a contemplatively that is in no way part of the rational capacity.... it is contemplative power, receptivity toward the uncreated Light, the opening of the Eye of the heart, which distinguishes transcendent intelligence from reason.

For short, it is (o) and (↓).

Moreover, "Reason perceives the general and proceeds by logical operations, whereas Intellect perceives the principial -- the metaphysical -- and proceeds by intuition." Seeing is believing. Which is again where faith comes in, because believing is already a kind of seeing.

Precisely, it is a seeing-beyond-logic, through a window or door situated at the top of the vertical scale. Man is always an open system, both horizontally and vertically -- or at least is supposed to be.

But both history and simple observation of one's contemporaries show that human nature "tends to lock itself into some limitation," which is to say, man stops asking Why? at an arbitrary point, and calls it a metaphysic. Politically this metaphysic ends in a neo-barbaric atheocracy, while intellectually it ends in a prison of relativism, AKA ineradicable stupidity.