I Let a Song Go Out of My Head

When my son was two, or three, or four, we could always tell when he'd awakened, because he would immediately burst into song. Even before he could speak, he'd be scatting some improvised melody. Similarly, in his Boogie Chillen, John Lee Hooker relates how layin' down one night I heard mama n' papa talkin' / I heard papa tell mama, let that boy boogie-woogie / It's in him, and it got to come out.

Same. Woke up this morning with a head full of cosmic boogie. 

We're still preoccupied with upper case History. One thing is certain, however: man is to history as is...

As is history to man, I guess: no man, no history, and vice versa. For us, existence is a historical process; time isn't mere duration, but "developmental time," and this development is in the direction of "maturity" in various levels and dimensions, i.e., biological, emotional, interpersonal, intellectual, aesthetic, political, spiritual, etc. 

While everything else is in process too, human beings are the only processes in creation aware of being in process: man is a conscious process. From where? And to what? Or around what? Is there an axis? A telos? A ground? 

We can debate this all day long, but beneath or behind such debate there lurk different modes or implicit conceptions of Be-ing. One can't really debate a materialist, for example, because the materialist violates his first principle by embracing the immaterial ideology of materialism.  

Either matter cannot think, or we need to rethink what matter is; if vulgar materialism were true, we could never know it (nor anything else). So we can toss out any materialistic conception of history. 

Which is why we can affirm on such an a priori  basis that leftists are idiots, in the literal (etymologically speaking) sense of existing in a dis-ordered private world cut off from public reality.  

As they say, reality is that which, when we stop believing in it, doesn't go away. And no matter how hard man tries, he can never make transcendence go away. But why does he wish to make it go away, when it's where all the real fun awaits? That's another story -- or the same old story, rather, AKA Genesis 3 All Over Again.

Not to belabor that point, but what is the essence of man's fallenness but rejection of the transcendent absolute, even while covertly appropriating and immanetizing it? From the mythic Tower of Babel to the magic babble of tenure, the deep structure never changes. For which reason Voegelin never tires of reminding us that the essence of modernity is gnosticism.  

Well well well, here's a little something I found while looking up that quote: https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=2979

The theology of history asks the question of intelligibility about the unity and significance of man's historical record. This theology extends back beyond man to the cosmological problem itself and to God in His activity concerning man. "The point at issue," Berdyaev suggests, "is this: must man be interpreted in terms of the cosmos or the cosmos in terms of man? Is human history a subordinate part of the cosmic process or is the cosmic process a subordinate part of human history?"

As is true of such questions, they aren't vicious dualisms but generative orthoparadoxes: man and cosmos mutually illuminate one another in the luminous space between. God reveals himself in no fewer than two books, one of which is the Book of Nature. There is also the book of revelation, but neither can be read without the miracle of intelligent subjectivity emanating from the great I AM. Ultimately the Light is always a trinitarian spiral between Persons.

Schall continues: 

movements from the early Protestant visionaries who sought to set up the Kingdom of God on earth to rationalism, liberalism, communism, and fascism are basically gnostic in the sense that they attempt to set up a final order, a salvation order on earth which is based on humanity as its source.

Our leftist Gnostics are indeed "protestants," but what they are protesting -- always and everywhere -- is the nature of things, most especially human nature. If you can maim that, then everything else falls into place. You're doing Satan's heavy lifting.

We are engaged in a gnostic war, or a war on gnosticism. Same as it ever was, only now backed by big tech, or the state-media-cultural-big tech complex. 

 "All of these gnostic movements," writes Schall, "see themselves as absolutes, all qualified and commissioned to impose their vision of life on other men." Obama and Sharpton and AOC and Pelosi all know better than we do how to run our lives, because they have access to the Gnostic secret while we don't. While it's true that they're contemptuous of us, that's not the point. Rather, they don't need us but we need them, so we need to be grateful for their selfless service on our behalf.

More generally, political Gnostics "seek to reconstruct society through specialized scientific gnosis according to their own theories of what society should be like... projecting a world-view upon reality based upon [their] own idea of what reality is like."

The central psychic movement of our cretinous overlords "is precisely the attempt to locate the cause of order in an intellectual vision of the world centered in man and the categories of his thought. Correlative to this, there is always the attempt to reshape the world according to this vision."

But the real vision is the vision of the founders, which acknowledges the transcendent Other in whom our rights and duties are grounded, and with whom we are in permanent dialectic. Yes we are "conservative," but what we specifically wish to conserve is this radical vision of which there could be no more radical, for it is the Last Word on the subject of Who Man Is and what sort of government is appropriate to his unique cosmic status. 

Conversely, so called radical progressives are true reactionaries and metacosmic heretics, for 

heresies are always conservative and reactionary in spirit, merely echoing the predominant trends of the intellectual thought of the times, while the Faith faced with the same problems proves to be existential and dynamic in its approach to reality.

In conclusion,  

the structure of the world is not man's to form. Gnosis is just the opposite for it implies that the world is wholly open to man's intellect.... The result of this theory, in every form, is the reconstruction of a mythological world based on a projection of man's own views. Man no longer, therefore, stands to the absolute as receiver but as maker, he becomes, as Genesis tells, like god.

I Let a Song Go Out of My Head

When my son was two, or three, or four, we could always tell when he'd awakened, because he would immediately burst into song. Even before he could speak, he'd be scatting some improvised melody. Similarly, in his Boogie Chillen, John Lee Hooker relates how layin' down one night I heard mama n' papa talkin' / I heard papa tell mama, let that boy boogie-woogie / It's in him, and it got to come out.

Same. Woke up this morning with a head full of cosmic boogie. 

We're still preoccupied with upper case History. One thing is certain, however: man is to history as is...

As is history to man, I guess: no man, no history, and vice versa. For us, existence is a historical process; time isn't mere duration, but "developmental time," and this development is in the direction of "maturity" in various levels and dimensions, i.e., biological, emotional, interpersonal, intellectual, aesthetic, political, spiritual, etc. 

While everything else is in process too, human beings are the only processes in creation aware of being in process: man is a conscious process. From where? And to what? Or around what? Is there an axis? A telos? A ground? 

We can debate this all day long, but beneath or behind such debate there lurk different modes or implicit conceptions of Be-ing. One can't really debate a materialist, for example, because the materialist violates his first principle by embracing the immaterial ideology of materialism.  

Either matter cannot think, or we need to rethink what matter is; if vulgar materialism were true, we could never know it (nor anything else). So we can toss out any materialistic conception of history. 

Which is why we can affirm on such an a priori  basis that leftists are idiots, in the literal (etymologically speaking) sense of existing in a dis-ordered private world cut off from public reality.  

As they say, reality is that which, when we stop believing in it, doesn't go away. And no matter how hard man tries, he can never make transcendence go away. But why does he wish to make it go away, when it's where all the real fun awaits? That's another story -- or the same old story, rather, AKA Genesis 3 All Over Again.

Not to belabor that point, but what is the essence of man's fallenness but rejection of the transcendent absolute, even while covertly appropriating and immanetizing it? From the mythic Tower of Babel to the magic babble of tenure, the deep structure never changes. For which reason Voegelin never tires of reminding us that the essence of modernity is gnosticism.  

Well well well, here's a little something I found while looking up that quote: https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=2979

The theology of history asks the question of intelligibility about the unity and significance of man's historical record. This theology extends back beyond man to the cosmological problem itself and to God in His activity concerning man. "The point at issue," Berdyaev suggests, "is this: must man be interpreted in terms of the cosmos or the cosmos in terms of man? Is human history a subordinate part of the cosmic process or is the cosmic process a subordinate part of human history?"

As is true of such questions, they aren't vicious dualisms but generative orthoparadoxes: man and cosmos mutually illuminate one another in the luminous space between. God reveals himself in no fewer than two books, one of which is the Book of Nature. There is also the book of revelation, but neither can be read without the miracle of intelligent subjectivity emanating from the great I AM. Ultimately the Light is always a trinitarian spiral between Persons.

Schall continues: 

movements from the early Protestant visionaries who sought to set up the Kingdom of God on earth to rationalism, liberalism, communism, and fascism are basically gnostic in the sense that they attempt to set up a final order, a salvation order on earth which is based on humanity as its source.

Our leftist Gnostics are indeed "protestants," but what they are protesting -- always and everywhere -- is the nature of things, most especially human nature. If you can maim that, then everything else falls into place. You're doing Satan's heavy lifting.

We are engaged in a gnostic war, or a war on gnosticism. Same as it ever was, only now backed by big tech, or the state-media-cultural-big tech complex. 

 "All of these gnostic movements," writes Schall, "see themselves as absolutes, all qualified and commissioned to impose their vision of life on other men." Obama and Sharpton and AOC and Pelosi all know better than we do how to run our lives, because they have access to the Gnostic secret while we don't. While it's true that they're contemptuous of us, that's not the point. Rather, they don't need us but we need them, so we need to be grateful for their selfless service on our behalf.

More generally, political Gnostics "seek to reconstruct society through specialized scientific gnosis according to their own theories of what society should be like... projecting a world-view upon reality based upon [their] own idea of what reality is like."

The central psychic movement of our cretinous overlords "is precisely the attempt to locate the cause of order in an intellectual vision of the world centered in man and the categories of his thought. Correlative to this, there is always the attempt to reshape the world according to this vision."

But the real vision is the vision of the founders, which acknowledges the transcendent Other in whom our rights and duties are grounded, and with whom we are in permanent dialectic. Yes we are "conservative," but what we specifically wish to conserve is this radical vision of which there could be no more radical, for it is the Last Word on the subject of Who Man Is and what sort of government is appropriate to his unique cosmic status. 

Conversely, so called radical progressives are true reactionaries and metacosmic heretics, for 

heresies are always conservative and reactionary in spirit, merely echoing the predominant trends of the intellectual thought of the times, while the Faith faced with the same problems proves to be existential and dynamic in its approach to reality.

In conclusion,  

the structure of the world is not man's to form. Gnosis is just the opposite for it implies that the world is wholly open to man's intellect.... The result of this theory, in every form, is the reconstruction of a mythological world based on a projection of man's own views. Man no longer, therefore, stands to the absolute as receiver but as maker, he becomes, as Genesis tells, like god.

Traditional Theo-Drama and Progressive Melodrama

I suppose we could go back to what is perhaps Voegelin's main point, which is that what we call history plays out in the space between immanence and transcendence. Total immersion in immanence would result in no history; rather, we would be as animals, plunged into instinct and bound by neurology. We'd still be in "time," of course, but it wouldn't be human -- which is to say, historical -- time. 

Nor could history exist in a context of complete transcendence, because transcendence is timeless. 

No man, no history, and vice versa. We're in this thing together until the end.

So here we abide, in this ambiguous space of verticality, churning out our symbolic representations of various kinds, from history to anthropology to philosophy to religion, in the attempt to gain our bearings within the dual process-structure of self-other and time-eternity. But we can never actually fully arrive at the fa(r)ther shore, because to do so would negate our immanence -- our seeworthy sonship.

At the same time, I suppose we could say that nondual mystical doctrines are about negating immanence, precisely. According to Vedanta, we can indeed enter a realm of pure transcendence -- Nirguna Brahman -- only we can't be there to enjoy it.

D'oh! Or rather, T'ao!

Here is a Buddhist take on the subject, plucked randomly from the shelf: What is man's life? A bubble on the stream, / Raised by the splashing rain, which merrily / Dances along the swiftly gliding wave / Full of apparent life, then suddenly / Bursts and disappears, leaving no trace behind / To mark hereafter the place that for a few moments it had occupied. --Zeisho Aisuko 

Later in the same passage he compares life to a transient summer moth, a frail banana leaf, an insubstantial shadow, and an enticing dream about a sham reality. All of these descriptions are true as far as they go, and indeed, the Bible contains similar gripes about the vanity of life. I could say more about transient shams and frail banana leaves that won't outlast the summer, but this post isn't about Biden. 

To back up a bit, in my spare timelessness I've been nonthinking a great deal about History. Not this or that history, but History as such. As in, what is it? 

In so doing, I reread a number of books on the nature of historical fallacies, which are mostly helpful in explaining what history is not. But not only do they not tell us what history actually is, I think it's accurate to say that most any midwit historian of tenure would assure us that it is Fallacy #1 to imagine that history can have any such ultimate meaning.

I would agree that this is self-evidently true from within history. It's analogous to the truism that science can have no intrinsic or ultimate meaning from within science; that latter fallacy is scientism, while the former is historicism.

And yet, you will have no doubt noticed how leftist historians smuggle meaning into their imaginary narratives, as do atheistic scientists into science.  

Back for a moment to Voegelin and Balthasar, while they come at the problem from different perspectives, both agree that Truth is something that plays out in history. As in the case of science, our symbolic representations can and will proceed until the end of time, without ever arriving at the end. 

Anyway, yesterday while wandering around the UCLA campus, a thought bubbled to the surface of the headspace: that the Narrative is the left's Theo-Drama. Bear in mind that the Theo-Drama simply is. It is where man lives, has always lived, and will always live -- in the dramatic tension between immanence and transcendence.

Now, revelation is obviously of a different order from the manmode myths we tell ourselves -- i.e., our own little attempts to symbolize the tension between immanence and transcendence, which we can never actually accomplish. 

But the revealed myth comes from the other side of the divide, descending into history, in contrast to our attempts to ascend out of it (whether through meditation, prayer, political activism, drugs, whatever). 

As soon as this thought popped into my head, I knew it was true: that the Narrative is the left's Theo-Drama. Not only does it organize the progressive mind, everything that happens is easily assimilated into the myth. For example, the national crime wave has suddenly appeared on their radar. How to account for it? It's because of Republicans and their dangerous nonsense about defunding the police! 

Similarly, given the improbable results of the last election, the great majority of Americans are rightly concerned about preventing future election fraud. No they're not! They're Jim Crow racists fomenting the worst national crisis since the Civil War!  

Examples are endless, but you get the point (for example, any weather proves AGW, i.e., the theory is unfalsifiable and therefore not science). The Narrative explains everything and therefore nothing. Well, it does explain one thing, albeit on a meta-level: the implicit structure of the left's faux-atheistic Theo-Drama.

And now that I think about it, "drama" isn't quite the right word, for it's always a melodrama, isn't it? Moreover, it's always hysterical (in the literal sense, in that it is animated by a disordered collective female psyche). 

Melodrama: a sensational dramatic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to the emotions. 

Oooooooh, that's a bingo!

Traditional Theo-Drama and Progressive Melodrama

I suppose we could go back to what is perhaps Voegelin's main point, which is that what we call history plays out in the space between immanence and transcendence. Total immersion in immanence would result in no history; rather, we would be as animals, plunged into instinct and bound by neurology. We'd still be in "time," of course, but it wouldn't be human -- which is to say, historical -- time. 

Nor could history exist in a context of complete transcendence, because transcendence is timeless. 

No man, no history, and vice versa. We're in this thing together until the end.

So here we abide, in this ambiguous space of verticality, churning out our symbolic representations of various kinds, from history to anthropology to philosophy to religion, in the attempt to gain our bearings within the dual process-structure of self-other and time-eternity. But we can never actually fully arrive at the fa(r)ther shore, because to do so would negate our immanence -- our seeworthy sonship.

At the same time, I suppose we could say that nondual mystical doctrines are about negating immanence, precisely. According to Vedanta, we can indeed enter a realm of pure transcendence -- Nirguna Brahman -- only we can't be there to enjoy it.

D'oh! Or rather, T'ao!

Here is a Buddhist take on the subject, plucked randomly from the shelf: What is man's life? A bubble on the stream, / Raised by the splashing rain, which merrily / Dances along the swiftly gliding wave / Full of apparent life, then suddenly / Bursts and disappears, leaving no trace behind / To mark hereafter the place that for a few moments it had occupied. --Zeisho Aisuko 

Later in the same passage he compares life to a transient summer moth, a frail banana leaf, an insubstantial shadow, and an enticing dream about a sham reality. All of these descriptions are true as far as they go, and indeed, the Bible contains similar gripes about the vanity of life. I could say more about transient shams and frail banana leaves that won't outlast the summer, but this post isn't about Biden. 

To back up a bit, in my spare timelessness I've been nonthinking a great deal about History. Not this or that history, but History as such. As in, what is it? 

In so doing, I reread a number of books on the nature of historical fallacies, which are mostly helpful in explaining what history is not. But not only do they not tell us what history actually is, I think it's accurate to say that most any midwit historian of tenure would assure us that it is Fallacy #1 to imagine that history can have any such ultimate meaning.

I would agree that this is self-evidently true from within history. It's analogous to the truism that science can have no intrinsic or ultimate meaning from within science; that latter fallacy is scientism, while the former is historicism.

And yet, you will have no doubt noticed how leftist historians smuggle meaning into their imaginary narratives, as do atheistic scientists into science.  

Back for a moment to Voegelin and Balthasar, while they come at the problem from different perspectives, both agree that Truth is something that plays out in history. As in the case of science, our symbolic representations can and will proceed until the end of time, without ever arriving at the end. 

Anyway, yesterday while wandering around the UCLA campus, a thought bubbled to the surface of the headspace: that the Narrative is the left's Theo-Drama. Bear in mind that the Theo-Drama simply is. It is where man lives, has always lived, and will always live -- in the dramatic tension between immanence and transcendence.

Now, revelation is obviously of a different order from the manmode myths we tell ourselves -- i.e., our own little attempts to symbolize the tension between immanence and transcendence, which we can never actually accomplish. 

But the revealed myth comes from the other side of the divide, descending into history, in contrast to our attempts to ascend out of it (whether through meditation, prayer, political activism, drugs, whatever). 

As soon as this thought popped into my head, I knew it was true: that the Narrative is the left's Theo-Drama. Not only does it organize the progressive mind, everything that happens is easily assimilated into the myth. For example, the national crime wave has suddenly appeared on their radar. How to account for it? It's because of Republicans and their dangerous nonsense about defunding the police! 

Similarly, given the improbable results of the last election, the great majority of Americans are rightly concerned about preventing future election fraud. No they're not! They're Jim Crow racists fomenting the worst national crisis since the Civil War!  

Examples are endless, but you get the point (for example, any weather proves AGW, i.e., the theory is unfalsifiable and therefore not science). The Narrative explains everything and therefore nothing. Well, it does explain one thing, albeit on a meta-level: the implicit structure of the left's faux-atheistic Theo-Drama.

And now that I think about it, "drama" isn't quite the right word, for it's always a melodrama, isn't it? Moreover, it's always hysterical (in the literal sense, in that it is animated by a disordered collective female psyche). 

Melodrama: a sensational dramatic piece with exaggerated characters and exciting events intended to appeal to the emotions. 

Oooooooh, that's a bingo!

When the Author of History Enters His Play

Okay, there's gotta be an easier way than slogging through 2,700 pages of Balthasar's five-volume Theo-Drama to understand his point. After all, the whole Bible -- both testaments -- comes to about half that. Then again, John did end his gospel with the caveat that if one were to attempt to document everything about Jesus, "the world itself could not contain the books that would be written."

Balthasar: "Hold my beer."

What is the lazy man to do? Oh, right. I saved myself the obligation of reading the Theo-Drama by having previously read it over a decade ago, mostly in 2009. All I had to do was search "Theo-Drama" on the blog, and 12 items come up, one in 2007, one in 2017, and ten between April and June of 2007, when I  read most of the the material and subsequently forgot all about it.

But did I actually forget it, or did something else happen to the information? In other words, did the material just dissipate into the ether, or did it undergo some sort of transformation after floating into my head -- the same way food does after entering one's mouth? Analogously, I've had a lot of meals over the years, more than I can remember. But just because I can't remember them doesn't mean they didn't enter  into and become me.

Besides, isn't that the point of reading? To weave truth and light into our substance so as to maintain our health and strength? True, there is reading for mere pleasure, or escapism, or information, but that's not the sort of reading we do around here -- unless we are just very tired and incapable of comprehending anything deep, wide, and high.

Let's see if we can overcome our retrospective embarrassment and find out if there's anything back there worth dredging up from the past:

In the Theo-Drama, Balthasar likens God's involvement in history to a stage play that reconciles the problems of divine and human freedom -- which is to say, the paradox of infinite and finite freedom. 

For example, "facing forward," it always looks like we have a more or less radical existential freedom -- at least those of us privileged to live in the West.

But "facing backward," it often seems as if our freedom was more or less an illusion.... as if  one's life were being dreamt by a "supraconscious" (or infraconscious) "dreamer" of whom we were unaware at the time.

Yesterday we discussed the idea of spatial, "geometrical" truth vs. temporal, "musical" truth. Our lives are a combination of geometry and music, of adventure and law, of harmony and melody, of freedom within the constraints of some kind of hidden necessity. Our "life" consists of the more or less winding road we take to re-arrive where we startled and even jumped into our skin. In the words of the Poet, And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.

Now, Balthasar has an interesting take on the Trinity and its relation to the cosmic theo-drama. The Jesus of history, because he was all-man, had to be fundamentally no different than the rest of us in this respect. 

As such, just like us, he couldn't fully know or understand the nature of the drama in which he was situated. If he had known, then his passion would have been something less than that, more of a detached "dispassion," as he simply "played out the clock" -- as in a one-sided basketball game, in anticipation of the buzzer-beating resurrection.

Thus, just like us in our own lives, Jesus had an element of horizontal freedom -- which is to say existential nothingness -- within the constraints of a much larger drama in which he was taking part. While he obviously had "hints" of a larger purpose -- as indeed we all do -- the human Jesus could not have been privy to the whole script. 

And in fact, Balthasar uses the metaphor of playwright, director, and actor to conceptualize the situation. The Father is "playwright"; the Son is "actor"; and the Holy Spirit is "director." As Edward Oakes explains, 

"a successful theatrical production always depends on the harmonious cooperation of three freedoms, which are not however equal: for the director must serve the script and the actor must serve both; yet the actor cannot simply afford to be an automaton if the production is to be successful: some unnamed element... must be engaged if the play is to emerge before the audience as playwright and director intended it." 

As Sachs (quoted in Oakes) writes, "The fact that the actor-Son has the responsibility to play the role given him by the author-Father, as 'whispered' to him in each moment by the prompter-Spirit, does not exclude the actor-Son's interpretive freedom. On the contrary, it assumes it and provides the material in which his freedom as an actor can become concrete. Therefore, although the author has a definite primacy with regard to the actor and the prompter (or director), it is by no means a tyrannical relationship. The author continues to be present in his work but as one who opens up the creative 'space' of the part."

Back to our own lives, in which there is a curious freedom that accompanies surrendering to that which we are and He Who Is. Looking back at our lives, we can see that we were least free when we thought we had the most freedom, and most free when we finally gave up the faux freedom. 

Balthasar compares it to the artist who moves from the persecutory space of being tormented by indecision and infinite possibility, until he is finally "possessed by the idea inspiring him and surrenders himself completely to its imperious and peremptory demands." 

So history -- both personal and collective -- is a God-given space of freedom in which we are free to choose the path back to ourselves and to God. Some roads get there faster than others; some are more scenic and beautiful, others more painful (in fact, all inevitably involve both beauty and suffering). Still others arrest the journey altogether -- e.g., leftism -- unless one returns to that fork in the road and reorients.

To be continued....

When the Author of History Enters His Play

Okay, there's gotta be an easier way than slogging through 2,700 pages of Balthasar's five-volume Theo-Drama to understand his point. After all, the whole Bible -- both testaments -- comes to about half that. Then again, John did end his gospel with the caveat that if one were to attempt to document everything about Jesus, "the world itself could not contain the books that would be written."

Balthasar: "Hold my beer."

What is the lazy man to do? Oh, right. I saved myself the obligation of reading the Theo-Drama by having previously read it over a decade ago, mostly in 2009. All I had to do was search "Theo-Drama" on the blog, and 12 items come up, one in 2007, one in 2017, and ten between April and June of 2007, when I  read most of the the material and subsequently forgot all about it.

But did I actually forget it, or did something else happen to the information? In other words, did the material just dissipate into the ether, or did it undergo some sort of transformation after floating into my head -- the same way food does after entering one's mouth? Analogously, I've had a lot of meals over the years, more than I can remember. But just because I can't remember them doesn't mean they didn't enter  into and become me.

Besides, isn't that the point of reading? To weave truth and light into our substance so as to maintain our health and strength? True, there is reading for mere pleasure, or escapism, or information, but that's not the sort of reading we do around here -- unless we are just very tired and incapable of comprehending anything deep, wide, and high.

Let's see if we can overcome our retrospective embarrassment and find out if there's anything back there worth dredging up from the past:

In the Theo-Drama, Balthasar likens God's involvement in history to a stage play that reconciles the problems of divine and human freedom -- which is to say, the paradox of infinite and finite freedom. 

For example, "facing forward," it always looks like we have a more or less radical existential freedom -- at least those of us privileged to live in the West.

But "facing backward," it often seems as if our freedom was more or less an illusion.... as if  one's life were being dreamt by a "supraconscious" (or infraconscious) "dreamer" of whom we were unaware at the time.

Yesterday we discussed the idea of spatial, "geometrical" truth vs. temporal, "musical" truth. Our lives are a combination of geometry and music, of adventure and law, of harmony and melody, of freedom within the constraints of some kind of hidden necessity. Our "life" consists of the more or less winding road we take to re-arrive where we startled and even jumped into our skin. In the words of the Poet, And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.

Now, Balthasar has an interesting take on the Trinity and its relation to the cosmic theo-drama. The Jesus of history, because he was all-man, had to be fundamentally no different than the rest of us in this respect. 

As such, just like us, he couldn't fully know or understand the nature of the drama in which he was situated. If he had known, then his passion would have been something less than that, more of a detached "dispassion," as he simply "played out the clock" -- as in a one-sided basketball game, in anticipation of the buzzer-beating resurrection.

Thus, just like us in our own lives, Jesus had an element of horizontal freedom -- which is to say existential nothingness -- within the constraints of a much larger drama in which he was taking part. While he obviously had "hints" of a larger purpose -- as indeed we all do -- the human Jesus could not have been privy to the whole script. 

And in fact, Balthasar uses the metaphor of playwright, director, and actor to conceptualize the situation. The Father is "playwright"; the Son is "actor"; and the Holy Spirit is "director." As Edward Oakes explains, 

"a successful theatrical production always depends on the harmonious cooperation of three freedoms, which are not however equal: for the director must serve the script and the actor must serve both; yet the actor cannot simply afford to be an automaton if the production is to be successful: some unnamed element... must be engaged if the play is to emerge before the audience as playwright and director intended it." 

As Sachs (quoted in Oakes) writes, "The fact that the actor-Son has the responsibility to play the role given him by the author-Father, as 'whispered' to him in each moment by the prompter-Spirit, does not exclude the actor-Son's interpretive freedom. On the contrary, it assumes it and provides the material in which his freedom as an actor can become concrete. Therefore, although the author has a definite primacy with regard to the actor and the prompter (or director), it is by no means a tyrannical relationship. The author continues to be present in his work but as one who opens up the creative 'space' of the part."

Back to our own lives, in which there is a curious freedom that accompanies surrendering to that which we are and He Who Is. Looking back at our lives, we can see that we were least free when we thought we had the most freedom, and most free when we finally gave up the faux freedom. 

Balthasar compares it to the artist who moves from the persecutory space of being tormented by indecision and infinite possibility, until he is finally "possessed by the idea inspiring him and surrenders himself completely to its imperious and peremptory demands." 

So history -- both personal and collective -- is a God-given space of freedom in which we are free to choose the path back to ourselves and to God. Some roads get there faster than others; some are more scenic and beautiful, others more painful (in fact, all inevitably involve both beauty and suffering). Still others arrest the journey altogether -- e.g., leftism -- unless one returns to that fork in the road and reorients.

To be continued....

Open Thread Head

What can we say besides "open thread"? I realize that all manner of spiritual and emotional retard are enlivened at the prospect of leaving a flaming bag of moonbat droppings on my doorstep, but I don't even use that door, so there's no point. It's just a decoy. I inhere in here, in the ineffable celestial hammock, which neither tongue nor dung has ever soiled.  

Beyond that, I have nothing new to report. As related awhile back, retirement seems to have spread from the extremities to the core, or from the accident to the substance, although in my case I suspect that retirement is the substance. 

For it is one thing to be the laziest man in Los Angeles County in potential, another thing to finally, after years of strategic non-doodling, to actualize this potential. Truly, this is to be nonactualized -- or to be actualized into an emphatically radical apophatical sabbatical. 

Am I actually doing nothing? Yes, and it takes all day to get it done. I suppose I really am a human invert, a Homo Slackiens, a type O personality, an in-activist, an unfashionable leisure coot, in that my ways are not their ways, nor are my thoughts their thoughts.

Still having plenty of the latter, but they float in from God-knows-where and drift past like clouds in the fog. 

This follows Eckhart's fivefold plan to the letter:

Leave place, leave time, 

Avoid even image!

Go forth without a way

On the narrow path, 

Then you will find the desert track.

Says Bernard McGinn,

A mysticism based upon a "wayless way" to an unknown God of absolute freedom can only bear fruit in a "whylessness" that will probably seem either empty of meaning or potentially dangerous to those who know nothing of it.

Yeah, probably. So don't take it from me. Take it from Nicolás:

God is the guest of silence. 

In certain moments of abundance, God overflows into the world like a spring gushing into the peace of midday. 

God is not the object of my reason, nor of my sensibility, but of my being.  

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things. 

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

I only contemplate wisps of truth that twist in the night gusts.

The believer is not the inheritor of estates inscribed in land registries but is the admiral of the sea fronting the coasts of an unexplored continent.

And finally,

A man is wise if he has no ambition for anything but lives as if he had an ambition for everything.

 

Open Thread Head

What can we say besides "open thread"? I realize that all manner of spiritual and emotional retard are enlivened at the prospect of leaving a flaming bag of moonbat droppings on my doorstep, but I don't even use that door, so there's no point. It's just a decoy. I inhere in here, in the ineffable celestial hammock, which neither tongue nor dung has ever soiled.  

Beyond that, I have nothing new to report. As related awhile back, retirement seems to have spread from the extremities to the core, or from the accident to the substance, although in my case I suspect that retirement is the substance. 

For it is one thing to be the laziest man in Los Angeles County in potential, another thing to finally, after years of strategic non-doodling, to actualize this potential. Truly, this is to be nonactualized -- or to be actualized into an emphatically radical apophatical sabbatical. 

Am I actually doing nothing? Yes, and it takes all day to get it done. I suppose I really am a human invert, a Homo Slackiens, a type O personality, an in-activist, an unfashionable leisure coot, in that my ways are not their ways, nor are my thoughts their thoughts.

Still having plenty of the latter, but they float in from God-knows-where and drift past like clouds in the fog. 

This follows Eckhart's fivefold plan to the letter:

Leave place, leave time, 

Avoid even image!

Go forth without a way

On the narrow path, 

Then you will find the desert track.

Says Bernard McGinn,

A mysticism based upon a "wayless way" to an unknown God of absolute freedom can only bear fruit in a "whylessness" that will probably seem either empty of meaning or potentially dangerous to those who know nothing of it.

Yeah, probably. So don't take it from me. Take it from Nicolás:

God is the guest of silence. 

In certain moments of abundance, God overflows into the world like a spring gushing into the peace of midday. 

God is not the object of my reason, nor of my sensibility, but of my being.  

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things. 

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

I only contemplate wisps of truth that twist in the night gusts.

The believer is not the inheritor of estates inscribed in land registries but is the admiral of the sea fronting the coasts of an unexplored continent.

And finally,

A man is wise if he has no ambition for anything but lives as if he had an ambition for everything.

 

Journey to the Center of the Cosmos

In keeping with our themes of Christian nihilism and Dudist abiding, I reread an essay by Peiper -- the limber lama of leisure -- on the ins & outs of these complicated subjects.

The Resistance. Just how does one resist a totalitarian worker state that seeks to enclose man in the Matrix, in service to the Conspiracy?  "In the long run, the only adequate resistance" involves rediscovery and realization of the idea that "we work in order to have leisure."

Yes, but what is leisure for? That's the point: it is for nothing, bearing in mind that nothing isn't just anything. It must be distinguished from the mere nothing of nihilists, pacifists, and other perverts lacking any real ethos. In this context, "doing nothing" would be the opposite of the One True Leisure:

we work in order to do something, in order to be able to do something that is not work. What sort of activity is being referred to here? Recreation, entertainment, amusement, play -- none of these is meant here. 

Bowling excepted.

No, what we're talking about here is "activity which is meaningful in itself." Work, for example, is indeed meaningful, but not for itself, rather, for the sake of other things. 

This touches on the original meaning of "liberal arts," which were in contradistinction to the servile arts. One might say that the purpose of the latter is to provide us the slack to indulge in the former -- as in how John Adams studied the arts of politics and war in the hope that his sons might have the slack to pursue mathematics and philosophy, and their children to fool around with painting, poetry, and music.

Of course, nowadays the liberal arts have been subsumed by the servile and worse; indeed, a man who does an honest day's labor with his hands is infinitely preferable to those tenured vulgarians who have transformed the liberal arts into a club with which to beat the restavus into ideological submission. The humanities now serve only to further our dehumanization. 

Yes, literally, bearing in mind the related questions of 1) what is a person?, and 2) what are persons for?  

Clearly, it is only possible to give an answer to this if one has a particular conception of the human person. What concerns us here is nothing less than the fulfillment of human existence. In what does this fulfillment consist?

The lapidary leisurist speaks for me and perhaps a few other cosmic misfits: "The answer offered by Western tradition would be this: whenever, when seeing, watching, contemplating"

we make make contact with the center of the world, with the hidden, ultimate meanings of life as a whole, with the divine root of things, with the quintessence of all archetypes... wherever and whenever we turn in this way to reality as a whole, we are involved in activity which is meaningful in itself.  

I'm gonna guess that contemplating reality as a whole requires the whole of man. 

To know God with all that we are: the very infinity of the object of knowledge requires the totality of the act of knowing.... he who wants the center must realize the whole (Schuon).

This contemplative contact with the Center of the world requires "an attitude of receptive openness and listening silence -- an attitude, therefore, which is completely contrary to the attitude of labor, i.e., of strained activity." Rather, "the fulfilling things in life... come to us only when we are able to receive them as gift" (Pieper).

This checks out. For example,

The routine is the preferred scene of epiphanies.

In reality the only worthwhile thing is the spontaneous fruit of forgotten meditations.

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores, but he does not hold the key to a riddle. Religious peace is not the peace of the problem solved, but of the love accepted. --Dávila x 3

Journey to the Center of the Cosmos

In keeping with our themes of Christian nihilism and Dudist abiding, I reread an essay by Peiper -- the limber lama of leisure -- on the ins & outs of these complicated subjects.

The Resistance. Just how does one resist a totalitarian worker state that seeks to enclose man in the Matrix, in service to the Conspiracy?  "In the long run, the only adequate resistance" involves rediscovery and realization of the idea that "we work in order to have leisure."

Yes, but what is leisure for? That's the point: it is for nothing, bearing in mind that nothing isn't just anything. It must be distinguished from the mere nothing of nihilists, pacifists, and other perverts lacking any real ethos. In this context, "doing nothing" would be the opposite of the One True Leisure:

we work in order to do something, in order to be able to do something that is not work. What sort of activity is being referred to here? Recreation, entertainment, amusement, play -- none of these is meant here. 

Bowling excepted.

No, what we're talking about here is "activity which is meaningful in itself." Work, for example, is indeed meaningful, but not for itself, rather, for the sake of other things. 

This touches on the original meaning of "liberal arts," which were in contradistinction to the servile arts. One might say that the purpose of the latter is to provide us the slack to indulge in the former -- as in how John Adams studied the arts of politics and war in the hope that his sons might have the slack to pursue mathematics and philosophy, and their children to fool around with painting, poetry, and music.

Of course, nowadays the liberal arts have been subsumed by the servile and worse; indeed, a man who does an honest day's labor with his hands is infinitely preferable to those tenured vulgarians who have transformed the liberal arts into a club with which to beat the restavus into ideological submission. The humanities now serve only to further our dehumanization. 

Yes, literally, bearing in mind the related questions of 1) what is a person?, and 2) what are persons for?  

Clearly, it is only possible to give an answer to this if one has a particular conception of the human person. What concerns us here is nothing less than the fulfillment of human existence. In what does this fulfillment consist?

The lapidary leisurist speaks for me and perhaps a few other cosmic misfits: "The answer offered by Western tradition would be this: whenever, when seeing, watching, contemplating"

we make make contact with the center of the world, with the hidden, ultimate meanings of life as a whole, with the divine root of things, with the quintessence of all archetypes... wherever and whenever we turn in this way to reality as a whole, we are involved in activity which is meaningful in itself.  

I'm gonna guess that contemplating reality as a whole requires the whole of man. 

To know God with all that we are: the very infinity of the object of knowledge requires the totality of the act of knowing.... he who wants the center must realize the whole (Schuon).

This contemplative contact with the Center of the world requires "an attitude of receptive openness and listening silence -- an attitude, therefore, which is completely contrary to the attitude of labor, i.e., of strained activity." Rather, "the fulfilling things in life... come to us only when we are able to receive them as gift" (Pieper).

This checks out. For example,

The routine is the preferred scene of epiphanies.

In reality the only worthwhile thing is the spontaneous fruit of forgotten meditations.

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores, but he does not hold the key to a riddle. Religious peace is not the peace of the problem solved, but of the love accepted. --Dávila x 3

Making Time for Nothing

Here's a pithy little formulation by Schuon that bears somewhat on doing nothing, AKA non-doing. "Spirituality," he writes, "includes four principal elements," the first of which

cuts man off from the current of profane life; the second empties the soul of illusory contents; the third infuses the discursive intelligence with divine Light; the fourth essentially brings about deification.

Alternatively, 

This could be formulated as follows: in renunciation the soul leaves the world; in purification the world leaves the soul; in meditation God enters the soul; in continual prayer the soul enters God.

(This reminds me of the pneumaticons in the book -- e.g., (---), (o), (↓), and (↑) in relation to O.)

Along these lines, over the past several weeks a phrase keeps popping into my head: Christian nihilism. Of course, this shares nothing in common with the vulgar nihilism of the left, nor with mere fatalism, stoicism, or resignation. 

For one thing, it's a joyous nihilism (or innocent and childlike) because it has only to do with this (or that, rather) world, not the next; moreover, the latter is already here, bisecting this one, i.e., The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Living at the intersection of heaven and earth is where it's at. If not, to hell with it.

Elsewhere in the same book Schuon alludes to the rottenness of this world, for which there are compensatory graces unique to the challenges posed by the civilizational decay surrounding us; come to think of it, this is like an inverse analogy of the communist idea of "the worse, the better" (better because it means the glorious revolution is that much closer). 

Schuon agrees that "there are advantages to this [cultural] evil itself," but (obviously) for totally different reasons from those purely destructive Marxist devils such as Piven & Cloward; specifically, 

the world has become so emptied of substance that it is hard for a spiritual man to be too attached to it.... In former times worldliness was all the more seductive for having aspects of intelligence, nobility, and plenitude; it was far from being wholly contemptible as it is in our day.

Our elites and their institutions are indeed wholly contemptible. What spiritually awakened person could ever wish to take part in this malevolent farce except in opposition to it? 

But this opposition is the precise opposite of "reactionary," because it is rooted in the loving affirmation -- intellectual, spiritual, and experiential -- of a higher reality (or just say reality). 

Note also that "lower reality" makes no sense except in the context of the higher; to the extent that it becomes an autonomous dimension detached from its vertical source, this devolves to the vulgar nihilism of the tenured, i.e., accidental intelligence combined with axiomatic stupidity.

If we were merely opposed to this principled stupidity of the left, it would be a form of counterfeit slack, still rooted in an attachment to the world and its seductive appearances. But our attachment is again to truth, AKA the real. Compared to this reality, the world is literally but a dream, or even "a dream woven of dreams." What else could it be if the intellect weren't an adequation (in potential) to the real?

We cannot  doubt that truth is infinitely real and precious and that its absence must therefore imply a sort of inverted infinity.

Exactly. Absent our adherence to Truth -- at once saving and liberating -- the material world becomes a vast and necessarily meaningless psychiatric prison. Which it is, but the doors are locked from the inside.

Modern man, even when he stumbles upon a truth, never follows it all the way back and up; and any truth detached from the Absolute becomes no truth at all; one might say it takes revenge on the intelligence that pretends it can exist apart from Intelligence as such, i.e., Celestial Central. 

(Quoted material from Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts https://www.amazon.com/dp/193331642X/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=onecos-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=f86b12483b9ef2311a292cf307aed833&creativeASIN=193331642X)

Making Time for Nothing

Here's a pithy little formulation by Schuon that bears somewhat on doing nothing, AKA non-doing. "Spirituality," he writes, "includes four principal elements," the first of which

cuts man off from the current of profane life; the second empties the soul of illusory contents; the third infuses the discursive intelligence with divine Light; the fourth essentially brings about deification.

Alternatively, 

This could be formulated as follows: in renunciation the soul leaves the world; in purification the world leaves the soul; in meditation God enters the soul; in continual prayer the soul enters God.

(This reminds me of the pneumaticons in the book -- e.g., (---), (o), (↓), and (↑) in relation to O.)

Along these lines, over the past several weeks a phrase keeps popping into my head: Christian nihilism. Of course, this shares nothing in common with the vulgar nihilism of the left, nor with mere fatalism, stoicism, or resignation. 

For one thing, it's a joyous nihilism (or innocent and childlike) because it has only to do with this (or that, rather) world, not the next; moreover, the latter is already here, bisecting this one, i.e., The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Living at the intersection of heaven and earth is where it's at. If not, to hell with it.

Elsewhere in the same book Schuon alludes to the rottenness of this world, for which there are compensatory graces unique to the challenges posed by the civilizational decay surrounding us; come to think of it, this is like an inverse analogy of the communist idea of "the worse, the better" (better because it means the glorious revolution is that much closer). 

Schuon agrees that "there are advantages to this [cultural] evil itself," but (obviously) for totally different reasons from those purely destructive Marxist devils such as Piven & Cloward; specifically, 

the world has become so emptied of substance that it is hard for a spiritual man to be too attached to it.... In former times worldliness was all the more seductive for having aspects of intelligence, nobility, and plenitude; it was far from being wholly contemptible as it is in our day.

Our elites and their institutions are indeed wholly contemptible. What spiritually awakened person could ever wish to take part in this malevolent farce except in opposition to it? 

But this opposition is the precise opposite of "reactionary," because it is rooted in the loving affirmation -- intellectual, spiritual, and experiential -- of a higher reality (or just say reality). 

Note also that "lower reality" makes no sense except in the context of the higher; to the extent that it becomes an autonomous dimension detached from its vertical source, this devolves to the vulgar nihilism of the tenured, i.e., accidental intelligence combined with axiomatic stupidity.

If we were merely opposed to this principled stupidity of the left, it would be a form of counterfeit slack, still rooted in an attachment to the world and its seductive appearances. But our attachment is again to truth, AKA the real. Compared to this reality, the world is literally but a dream, or even "a dream woven of dreams." What else could it be if the intellect weren't an adequation (in potential) to the real?

We cannot  doubt that truth is infinitely real and precious and that its absence must therefore imply a sort of inverted infinity.

Exactly. Absent our adherence to Truth -- at once saving and liberating -- the material world becomes a vast and necessarily meaningless psychiatric prison. Which it is, but the doors are locked from the inside.

Modern man, even when he stumbles upon a truth, never follows it all the way back and up; and any truth detached from the Absolute becomes no truth at all; one might say it takes revenge on the intelligence that pretends it can exist apart from Intelligence as such, i.e., Celestial Central. 

(Quoted material from Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts https://www.amazon.com/dp/193331642X/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=onecos-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=f86b12483b9ef2311a292cf307aed833&creativeASIN=193331642X)

Doing Nothing vs. Doing Nothing

Back in my days as a "productive" citizen, I never took a long vacation -- maybe two weeks at the most -- the reason being that I always suspected that if I unplugged from the Matrix for too long, I'd float away and be unable to readapt to its unnatural demands.  

For related reasons, I never worked on a full-time basis, because my career meant nothing to me while my freedom meant everything. As we've discussed in the past, timelessness takes a great deal of time. You can't just flip on the slack switch Friday afternoon and flip it off Sunday night. 

Rather, you have to arrange your life in such a manner that you're always available for celestial duty when called upon. Of course there are inevitable terrestrial responsibilities, but I've always tried to reduce these to the bare minimum, the better to be available for vertical murmurandoms and other urgent nonsense. 

Come to think of it, back in the early '80s, when I heard about the "voluntary simplicity" movement, it made immediate and total sense to me. I came to regard simplifying my life as equivalent to earning more money. Which it is, except it also results in more time, which is everything. At least for my type. If I didn't have an abundance of unstructured time, I'd literally feel sophicated, gnoseated, and exiled from my omland.  

For me, retirement means complete freedom from the Conspiracy. The last time this occurred was upon graduating high school. I distinctly remember the euphoria of plunging into an endless summer of pure present tense, with no past and certainly no future, the latter being the furthest thing from my mind. Still is. 

This utopian dream or Adventure in Laziness lasted until the fall, when, upon the *advice* of my father, I arose from my ass and obtained a part-time job in a liquor store. There I toiled for up to 12 hours a week, and if I recall correctly, my paycheck amounted to $16.50 a week (minimum wage was $1.65/hr). 

Of course, that was more than sufficient for my simple needs, because it cost exactly $5.00 to fill up my Ford Pinto (gas was around 50 cents a gallon) and exactly $5.25 for a case of Coors. So my paycheck covered one tank + two cases, with enough left over for several Big Macs, which were 45 cents back then.

This is not to say I was an early adopter of voluntary simplicity, being that I was just an involuntary simpleton.  

Then came college, or rather, junior college. Back in high school, people would denigrate it as "high school with ash trays." This was a flippant exaggeration, since it had none of the rigor of high school, although it was more expensive. Back then it literally cost $6.50 a semester -- which my parents generously covered, being that I was again tapped out after gas, beer, and incidentals.

I also tried to arrange my classes so that they required my presence for 90 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays rather then 60 minutes in Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, thus preserving the all-important four day weekend. I've always considered it sacrilegious to roll on Shabbos, which for me lasted from sundown Thursday until around noon on Tuesday. 

Why am I indulging in all this nostalgia?  Because when I retired last month, I assumed I could limit it to the periphery. However, it seems it has spread from the extremities to the core, such that I don't feel like doing anything, mainly because I'm already nondoing it. I'm no longer leading a double life; rather, my I has become single, which is to say, singly enslackened.

No, it's not that I'm doing nothing. Rather, I'm very much doing nothing. Big difference. But this nothing applies to blogging. I have nothing to add to what I've already said over the past 15+ years. I will, however, have nothing to add. I just don't feel like adding it at the moment, or at least it's presently taking all day to get nothing accomplished. I'm sure this will change as I get acclimated to my new surroundings. 

Doing Nothing vs. Doing Nothing

Back in my days as a "productive" citizen, I never took a long vacation -- maybe two weeks at the most -- the reason being that I always suspected that if I unplugged from the Matrix for too long, I'd float away and be unable to readapt to its unnatural demands.  

For related reasons, I never worked on a full-time basis, because my career meant nothing to me while my freedom meant everything. As we've discussed in the past, timelessness takes a great deal of time. You can't just flip on the slack switch Friday afternoon and flip it off Sunday night. 

Rather, you have to arrange your life in such a manner that you're always available for celestial duty when called upon. Of course there are inevitable terrestrial responsibilities, but I've always tried to reduce these to the bare minimum, the better to be available for vertical murmurandoms and other urgent nonsense. 

Come to think of it, back in the early '80s, when I heard about the "voluntary simplicity" movement, it made immediate and total sense to me. I came to regard simplifying my life as equivalent to earning more money. Which it is, except it also results in more time, which is everything. At least for my type. If I didn't have an abundance of unstructured time, I'd literally feel sophicated, gnoseated, and exiled from my omland.  

For me, retirement means complete freedom from the Conspiracy. The last time this occurred was upon graduating high school. I distinctly remember the euphoria of plunging into an endless summer of pure present tense, with no past and certainly no future, the latter being the furthest thing from my mind. Still is. 

This utopian dream or Adventure in Laziness lasted until the fall, when, upon the *advice* of my father, I arose from my ass and obtained a part-time job in a liquor store. There I toiled for up to 12 hours a week, and if I recall correctly, my paycheck amounted to $16.50 a week (minimum wage was $1.65/hr). 

Of course, that was more than sufficient for my simple needs, because it cost exactly $5.00 to fill up my Ford Pinto (gas was around 50 cents a gallon) and exactly $5.25 for a case of Coors. So my paycheck covered one tank + two cases, with enough left over for several Big Macs, which were 45 cents back then.

This is not to say I was an early adopter of voluntary simplicity, being that I was just an involuntary simpleton.  

Then came college, or rather, junior college. Back in high school, people would denigrate it as "high school with ash trays." This was a flippant exaggeration, since it had none of the rigor of high school, although it was more expensive. Back then it literally cost $6.50 a semester -- which my parents generously covered, being that I was again tapped out after gas, beer, and incidentals.

I also tried to arrange my classes so that they required my presence for 90 minutes on Tuesdays and Thursdays rather then 60 minutes in Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, thus preserving the all-important four day weekend. I've always considered it sacrilegious to roll on Shabbos, which for me lasted from sundown Thursday until around noon on Tuesday. 

Why am I indulging in all this nostalgia?  Because when I retired last month, I assumed I could limit it to the periphery. However, it seems it has spread from the extremities to the core, such that I don't feel like doing anything, mainly because I'm already nondoing it. I'm no longer leading a double life; rather, my I has become single, which is to say, singly enslackened.

No, it's not that I'm doing nothing. Rather, I'm very much doing nothing. Big difference. But this nothing applies to blogging. I have nothing to add to what I've already said over the past 15+ years. I will, however, have nothing to add. I just don't feel like adding it at the moment, or at least it's presently taking all day to get nothing accomplished. I'm sure this will change as I get acclimated to my new surroundings. 

Vive la Différence

Or not. In any case, there is a fundamental difference between esoteric and exoteric approaches to the ultimate knowledge, or knowledge of the Ultimate. First, the latter: St. Thomas 

does not admit that an a priori proof of God's existence can be given. He grants indeed that the proposition, God exists, is in itself self-evident, and would therefore be self-evident to us if we had a priori face-to-face knowledge of God (Garrigou-Lagrange).

However, for Thomas "we have no such a priori knowledge." Rather, we must "begin with a nominal definition of God, conceiving him only confusedly, as the first source of all that is real and good in the world." 

As with everything else, we must start at the far end -- in concrete sense experiences -- and subsequently determine whether they "necessitate the actual objective existence of a First Cause" corresponding to our nominal definition of God.

Now, in my opinion, one can work from the senses up to God or from God on down; moreover, I would say that the two approaches are complementary, or in an eternal dialectic. And it is precisely the God-on-down vs. senses-on-up approach that goes to the esoteric-exoteric distinction. I suspect, anyway.

Vis-a-vis the esoteric approach, Laude explains that, in contrast to Thomas, its epistemology isn't a posteriori but a priori: it

sees the act of understanding as presupposing a prior knowledge of the object that is understood, whereas concepts and terms are only occasional means of actualization.

It reminds me of how, just because we have a word for something, it doesn't mean we have any idea what that something is. It's easy enough to prove God exists, but what is God -- besides your own circular conceptual definition? How do we get from the abstract knowledge to the concrete experience -- or as symbolized in the book, from (k) to (n)?

one can only know that which one already knows, often without knowing that one knows it. It follows from the premise of this epistemology that understanding does not, and cannot, depend upon a literal grasp of conceptual terms (Laude).

An analogy. Suppose one wants to prove the existence of music, beginning with sensory experience, i.e., with air vibrations striking the ear drum. While there is a continuity between this and the experience of music, music cannot be reduced to mere sensory stimulation. Rather, it will only be an abstract conception exterior to the realm of music unless and until the music is actually heard; and it isn't heard by adding the discrete sensations together. Rather, the musical composition is prior to our sensory experience of it. 

Same with the divine. Some people just can't hear it, even though their ears are in perfect working order. This is why, for example, I don't respond to the intelligent design people. They're like someone trying to prove the existence of music by looking at how the notes appear to be organized. To say that the cosmos reflects "intelligent design" is simultaneously redundant and insufficient. 

Rather, it is enough to say that intelligence exists, because intelligence participates in the truth it knows; it is the substance of truth, otherwise it would again be purely conceptual and exterior to what it knows. Not only does the soul become what it knows, but it must already be what it knows (in potential), or it could never possess real knowledge. 

This conundrum is solved if we just acknowledge that intelligence and intelligibility are complementary reflections of the one divine substance. Intelligence doesn't just know truth, but participates in it a priori.  

Vive la Différence

Or not. In any case, there is a fundamental difference between esoteric and exoteric approaches to the ultimate knowledge, or knowledge of the Ultimate. First, the latter: St. Thomas 

does not admit that an a priori proof of God's existence can be given. He grants indeed that the proposition, God exists, is in itself self-evident, and would therefore be self-evident to us if we had a priori face-to-face knowledge of God (Garrigou-Lagrange).

However, for Thomas "we have no such a priori knowledge." Rather, we must "begin with a nominal definition of God, conceiving him only confusedly, as the first source of all that is real and good in the world." 

As with everything else, we must start at the far end -- in concrete sense experiences -- and subsequently determine whether they "necessitate the actual objective existence of a First Cause" corresponding to our nominal definition of God.

Now, in my opinion, one can work from the senses up to God or from God on down; moreover, I would say that the two approaches are complementary, or in an eternal dialectic. And it is precisely the God-on-down vs. senses-on-up approach that goes to the esoteric-exoteric distinction. I suspect, anyway.

Vis-a-vis the esoteric approach, Laude explains that, in contrast to Thomas, its epistemology isn't a posteriori but a priori: it

sees the act of understanding as presupposing a prior knowledge of the object that is understood, whereas concepts and terms are only occasional means of actualization.

It reminds me of how, just because we have a word for something, it doesn't mean we have any idea what that something is. It's easy enough to prove God exists, but what is God -- besides your own circular conceptual definition? How do we get from the abstract knowledge to the concrete experience -- or as symbolized in the book, from (k) to (n)?

one can only know that which one already knows, often without knowing that one knows it. It follows from the premise of this epistemology that understanding does not, and cannot, depend upon a literal grasp of conceptual terms (Laude).

An analogy. Suppose one wants to prove the existence of music, beginning with sensory experience, i.e., with air vibrations striking the ear drum. While there is a continuity between this and the experience of music, music cannot be reduced to mere sensory stimulation. Rather, it will only be an abstract conception exterior to the realm of music unless and until the music is actually heard; and it isn't heard by adding the discrete sensations together. Rather, the musical composition is prior to our sensory experience of it. 

Same with the divine. Some people just can't hear it, even though their ears are in perfect working order. This is why, for example, I don't respond to the intelligent design people. They're like someone trying to prove the existence of music by looking at how the notes appear to be organized. To say that the cosmos reflects "intelligent design" is simultaneously redundant and insufficient. 

Rather, it is enough to say that intelligence exists, because intelligence participates in the truth it knows; it is the substance of truth, otherwise it would again be purely conceptual and exterior to what it knows. Not only does the soul become what it knows, but it must already be what it knows (in potential), or it could never possess real knowledge. 

This conundrum is solved if we just acknowledge that intelligence and intelligibility are complementary reflections of the one divine substance. Intelligence doesn't just know truth, but participates in it a priori.  

On Circularity and Absurcularity

I think it's accurate to say that while Thomas begins with the material senses and ascends to the immaterial Principle, Schuon begins at the other end, with the Principle -- or Absolute -- and skis down the mountain to the manifestation below. 

However, once Thomas rises to the Principle, he too schusses down the mountainside, taking everything below into consideration, as illuminated by the Principle(s).

Here's how Fr. Reg describes Thomas's vertical circularity: he 

marches steadily onward to that superior simplicity..., a simplicity pregnant with virtual multiplicity.... the saint's progress is a slow, hard climb to the summit of the mountain, whence alone you can  survey all these problems in a unified solution....

He exemplifies his own teaching on "circular" contemplation, which returns always to one central, pre-eminent thought, better to seize all the force of its irradiation. His principles, few in number but immense in reach, illumine from on high a great number of questions.

Again, the Great Cosmic Circle of coontomplation begins from below, ascends upward, and then returns down, only equipped with the principles that illuminate this downward path.  

Herebelow, things can either exist or not exist, irrespective of their essence. Only at the summit of metaphysics do essence and existence converge, such that in God alone are they one: God's essence is to exist, and existence is his essence. This is the final truth arrived at by reason:

this supreme truth is the terminus, the goal, of the ascending road which rises from the sense world to God, and the point of departure on the descending road, which deduces the attributes of God and determines the relation between God and world.

Snowboarding back down,

Many positions which we have already met on the ascending road now reappear, seen as we follow the road descending from on high. 

So, be nice to those discarnate nonlocal intelligences on the way up, because you'll meet the same ones on the way down.  

For Schuon, all of this is true enough, except he would say it is possible to start at the summit -- or, to be more precise, the "meta-summit." 

He would essentially say that there is Reality and that there are appearances, the latter being a consequence and prolongation of the former. Thus, appearances are at once distinct from the Principle, and yet "not not" the sophsame principle in the mode of appearances.

This realization is possible not just because of the ascent described by Thomas, but because we too are "not not" the Principle. Obviously we are not God, but the fact that we are in his image and likeness means we're not exactly not God either. Frankly, anything purely not-God would be nonexistent.  

This brings to mind our two subjective centers -- the local material ego and the nonlocal self. Importantly, these are not a duality but a complementarity that  -- in my opinion -- can be traced all the way up and in to God. For example, "Father" and "Son" are two subjectivities or "personal centers" within a radical unity.

. . . But we're out of time, so we'll pick up this towline of thought in the next. . .