Saturday, June 24, 2006

Darwhiggian Evolution and Supernatural Election

Although it really makes no sense to our natural reason, Big Bang cosmology describes an event some 13.7 billion years ago that brought everything into being by expanding outward from a central point of imarginable nothingness. Among other things, scientists deduce that primordial event from the fact that it is still happening now. The cosmos is still banging away, expanding into....

Actually, no one knows what it’s expanding into. It’s a nonsense question, since cosmology only describes the cosmos, not the metacosmos in which it is embedded. That goes without saying, which is to say that it is an unsaid assumption of science.

For the same reason, cosmology cannot answer the question of “what was before the big bang?,” since the big bang brought the modality we call time into existence. “Before” that, there was only eternity and perhaps duration, but not physical time. To ask what was before the big bang, you might just as well ask what your phase looked like before you were bearthed and begaialed, for the answer is roughly the same.

Science adequately describes the horizontal cosmos, which is to say, inadequately. In order to acquire an integral understanding of reality, the linear/temporal/horizontal view must be supplemented by the vertical, which is where revelation, myth, and metaphysics take over. Only these modes can take us beyond the horizon of knowability that afflicts your and myopic little ego. Myth and revelation bypass the ego by making an appeal to our lower and higher intuition, respectively, while metaphysics speaks directly to the timeless intellect which may know absolute truth absolutely, since it is in the image of the divine. These are built-in ways for us to see beyond the temporal illusions of our womentary maninfestation.

We might visualize reality as a circle containing a cross. Science describes the horizontal vector, but there is a second “ray of creation” that extends from the top down and then back up again. The downward descending energy is called the “ray of involution,” while the upward ascending one is called the “ray of evolution.” Of course, this is not the same as Darwinian evolution, which only describes change--but not progress--in the horizontal.

On the strict Darwinian view there is, of course, no such thing as progress, which is as it should be. While technically a “true” theory if we limit ourselves to the horizontal, it is obviously a false and limited understanding if we don’t supplement it with the vertical view of spiritual evolution. Strictly speaking, I can assure you there are no strict “Darwinians,” for even the belief in strict Darwinism takes one out of the strictly horizontal stream of Darwinism, into the realm of transcendent ideas. In short, the theory of pure Darwinism finds itself in the embarassing position of having to express itself in a medium it cannot account for, and make its appeals to a judge that cannot exist. D'oh!

Paradoxically, in order for us to exist and possess our own free will, God cannot exist. But it is not really a paradox, for a moment’s reflection will inform your intellect that if God doesn’t get out of the way, there can be no creation separate from him, no free beings. In other words, at the top of the vertical ray is God. Even that is a bit misleading, for the top of the ray has a “face” we can see from our relative position, as well as an "interior" or "dark side" we cannot see (dark because the light would be too blinding).

Imagine a solar system, if you will, with God at the center. We all have a certain view of God, but “within” God there is the God-beyond-God that trails off into eternity. That is the temporal horizon of God’s intellectual knowability (and here I am again speaking of the higher, faith-infused heart-intellect, not the lower egoic mind).

The vertical “ray of creation” therefore extends on one end from the God-beyond-being to our world “below.” But it doesn’t stop here. Rather, just like the sun’s rays, they go one “forever,” becoming increasingly faint to the point of apparent “nothingness.” But the nothingness is only apparent, since God can only be “relatively absent” from his creation. (Keep that point in mind for later, when we discuss evil and the hostile forces.)

The Kabbala is especially precise on this point, and does an excellent job of objectively describing God's "withdrawal" and the various degrees of being in the vertical ray of creation that "reveil" him. To a certain extent, these degrees are inevitably arbitrary, as are the divisions between the colors of the rainbow. All are an aspect of “pure” white light taking on different properties as one color shades into the next.

God is like the white light who “withdraws” so that color may exist. As different as they may appear, the colors are all internally related to one another, just as the degrees of being interpenetrate and shade into one another. The real world is the entire rainbow and ultimately the white light, although each of us tends to live in just one of the colors, confusing it with the primary reality.

As an aside, I should also say that there is a pure “black” reality at the other end of the ray of creation. It is the absence of light and the blending of all of the colors into an indistinct blur. This is the leftist/totalitarian dream of E Unum Pluribus, in which a false, descending, material "one" is imposed upon reality. It is the basis of multiculturalism, moral relativism, and secular fundamentalism, for it represents a flight form the real One that unifies and transcends, toward division and rule by a secular elite.

Nazism, communism and Islamo-fascism represent “pure black” in the ray of creation, while leftism represents a degree or two or three above that. But leftism tends toward the all-black, for it is a descending theology that has no means to elevate itself, having rejected the cosmic eschatolator at the outset. Therefore it “falls” and descends at the natural rate encoded into our existence, which is 32 feet per second per second.

By the way, this is why spiritual practice requires effort. True, all things are possible with grace, but grace only operates in the cosmos as given to us by God. There are readers who don't want to believe me on this point, and I have no desire to get into an argument with them yet again. But for most of us, our “fall” must be actively countered on a day-to-day, even moment by moment basis. It is not as if you are “saved” and born again, and that's the end of it. Rather, that is only the beginning of it. It represents the formal acknowledgment of the ascending cosmic winds that one will heretofore spend one’s life trying to navigate back up toward the One at the father shore. In the formula of Sri Aurobindo, it is Aspiration-Rejection (of the lower)-Surrender (to the higher) 24/7/365/13.7 billion.

I’m still trying to get to a discussion of the hostile forces. We’re getting there, but I needed to present a bit of background in order to have an implausible framework to discuss them. Plus, I realize that most people tend to just skim blogs and have little patience for anything longer than a bite-sized paragraph or two. So I'm also trying to break it down and make it real for these omies.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Pickin' Up Bad Vibrations

Hostile forces? Such talk undoubtedly tests the limits of most readers’ credulity. However, this untoward reaction may represent a measure of the degree to which one's mind has become devitalized by the ravages of scientism--of a strictly mechanical, material, and quantified view of the world.

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to conduct psychological evaluations of a number of people from formerly communist countries, mainly the USSR. Uniformly, what has been so striking about them is a certain palpable absence of soul, which was one of the most damaging consequences of communist totalitarianism. For the ban on religion also amounted to a ban on the deepest and most vital regions of Being itself. After a few generations of malign neglect, the damage becomes incalculable and sometimes irreversible in this life. These people are alive, but somewhat like a palm tree that manages to survive in Alaska or a pine tree at the equator. They are surviving, but in an environment not fit for, or worthy of, humans.

Admittedly, it’s a somewhat small sample--perhaps a dozen or so--but not only were these people not religious, but they were literally incapable of being so. It was not that they were hostile toward religion, as is the American left, which represents another type of soul deviancy. Rather, it was just meaningless to them--like someone who didn’t care for opera but allowed that other people might.

But it also left them very empty and devoid of meaning. There was a depression about them, but it had a rather different feel than a psychological or biochemical depression. It was actually a little spooky, as if they had been the victims of “body snatching.” Like Vulcans, it was as if they could operate in the realm of logic, but something vital at their core was missing. They were hollow--in a way, not even like animals (which have an animal soul), for they were more like soulless machines. It also made them very comfort-seeking, very hedonistic--not in the grandiose and narcissistic American way, but in a petty way, as if life consisted solely in stealing whatever small pleasures were available.

Obviously, Europe is well down this bright and shiny secular path, as is half of America. Western Europe is getting to the point that it no longer comprehends religion, as is true of secular America (which is why they are so allied in their contempt for American values). If we do not reverse this trend, we’re going to lose something so critical to our psychic substance, and yet, not even know what hit us. Secular Americans are genuinely clueless in their ignorance of how much they benefit from the thoroughly Judeo-Christian milieu in which they were raised. Like those atheistic Soviets, they really don’t get it, and are largely incapable of doing so.

My point is that the human mind is a religious mind. If you like, you can say that this is simply because of the way we’re built biologically, although I don’t believe that. That is simply a theory advanced by scientific Vulcans trying to understand human beings in terms of their own limited metaphysical framework.

So when I talk about “hostile forces,” I’m talking about something that you know exist, even if you don’t know that you know. I could also affirm with equal certainty that you believe in attachment theory, even if you’ve never heard of it, for infant and childhood attachment is the axis of human psychological development.

But just as you generally cannot “see” the effects of your own attachment history until you undertake some form of psychotherapy and systematically uncover it, you will not really get a sense of the hostile forces until you undertake a serious spiritual practice. This is really an area in which all traditions agree. Some sort of resistance is provoked when we try to advance spiritually. This is not speculation but empirical observation. “Hostile forces” is simply a term used--it is Sri Aurobindo’s term--to give a name to a well-known phenomenon.

You can think of the human soul as a sort of ground station for a whole host of collective, individual, personal and impersonal psychic influences from various levels. In other words, there are degrees as well as modes, the former a measure of verticality, the latter its horizontal manifestation. You may think of it as analogous to radio transmission, which has both variety (i.e., modes) and hierarchical degrees (ranging from the sublime to the infrahuman, as in the case of most rap, say, or Air America).

Different traditions have developed different maps to describe the vertical realm, and those from the East are generally more complicated and detailed than those of the West. This is primarily due to our more externalized consciousness. If you like, you can visualize a “global brain” with a right side and a left side that split in two and took divergent paths some 3,000 years ago. In the West, we came to regard matter as ultimately real, whereas in the East, consciousness was regarded as ultimate.

But let us not forget that Christianity was originally an Eastern religion that only later became westernized by the Latin church--not an altogether bad development by any stretch, the reason being that truth is One, and ultimate or integral Truth must subsume both the interior and exterior of the cosmos.

Material development was delayed for hundreds of years in the East because of the overemphasis on the interior dimension and a misunderstanding of the nature of maya, for it is true that the material world is “illusion,” but it is not only illusion. It is only ultimately illusory in comparison with the Absolute, with Brahman itself. The relative is obviously quite real, only in a relative way.

As a matter of fact, this is one of the main innovations of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, which to my mind represents a reunification of those two streams that split apart some 3,000 years ago. It is the historical task of Eastern religions to become more exterior, while it is the task of Western religions to become more interior. Interestingly, if one travels all the way back to the origins of Christianity, to the Eastern Orthodox tradition, one will find that it is already quite interior, easily the equal of any yogic tradition.

This is why a fair number of modern people are pushing into the future by building a bridge to the first century--by embracing the earliest forms of Christianity, as opposed to modern deviations such as fundamentalism which are in fact extremely exteriorized. There is really nothing “fundamental” in fundamentalism. Certainly early church fathers such as Origen or Denys the Areopagite wouldn’t recognize it.

Not to go all summer-of-love on you, but whether you are a scientist or a religionist, in the final analysis, reality consists of vibrations, some good, some bad. Have you ever picked up good vibrations in a religious service? Or how about after one of my posts, or reading my book? In so far as it was possible for me to do so, I quite consciously endeavored to fill my book with good vibrations that would literally resonate in the sensitive reader. Just so you don’t think I’m being a completely silly ass, a number of readers have informed me that, at least in their case, I succeeded. But it wasn’t really me. Rather, at each step along the way, I was simply attempting to retransmit things that had been transmitted to me and which had awakened some sort of “soul response” in me. Everything was personally tried and tested.

The point is that human beings are open systems, both on the horizontal and the vertical planes, and this is how to begin to understand the hostile forces, those bad vibrations.

This is beginning to run a bit long, isn’t it? We’ll have to continue with this nonsense tomorrow. Same time, same station, same frequency. Oh--and don’t try to understand what I’m writing about while wearing a tin beanie--the vibrations will bounce off.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

The Hostile Forces and Their Allies




I just finished an excellent new history of the Cold War, and it is the same story. I mean that literally, for history itself is the same story. The drama of exterior, or "horizontal" history can obscure the deeper reality of interior, or "vertical" history. Outwardly it looked as if a “world war” had ended in 1945, but nothing could be further from the truth. If it is possible for pure evil to surpass itself, then Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot did so. And they did so not only “under the radar,” but aided and abetted at every step along the way by an elite anti-divine spiritual movement called “the international left.”

Thankfully, this movement did not fully insinuate itself into the Democratic Party and hijack liberalism until the early 1970’s, so it posed no existential threat to our ability to name and extinguish evil, for evil cannot triumph so long as virtuous and courageous men can recognize it and mercilessly burn it from our midst.











One again, our brave men are in hell, fighting satan. But the morally twisted left, which cannot recognize evil, sees the opposite. Dennis Prager routinely asks callers opposed to the liberation of Iraq if they can at least acknowledge one thing: that we are fighting evil. Not only will they not concede this point, they are outraged and insulted by the question. Rather, America is the aggressor imposing its will on patriotic insurgents.






But what I really wanted to touch on in this post was the nature and role of this ontological evil, and the effect it is having on spiritually sensitive souls at this particular time, as it wells up from the bosom of the earth-consciousness, opportunistically roaming about, looking for minds to colonize. I’ll have to get to that tomorrow.




PS--For trolls who will remind me that Schuon was a Sufi, he was unambiguous. There is a reason why his books are banned and Sufis are persecuted in the Muslim world:

"In some cases, the end justifies the means; in others, that of terrorism for example, the means compromise the end. In the first case, the means are ennobled by the end, since their nature enables them of being so, and assuming of course that the end be noble; in the second case, the end, even when noble, is debased by the means since, precisely, its nature excludes them."

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

The Facts of Life, Raw and Unedited

Once again I find myself exinspirated by reader Copithorne, who mocks the need for metaphysics by asking,

--Do you have an explicit or implicit metaphysical framework when you are not talking?

--Do you have one when you are sleeping?

--Do you need one to shoot a gun?

--Does a plant require an implicit metaphysic to grow towards the sun?

--Does a dog require an implicit metaphysic to make puppies?

--Do you have one when you are talking about cooking or chores? Or is it just when you are making non-trivial statements about reality?

--At what age or developmental level do humans require an explicit or implicit metaphysical framework? And before that, it isn't necessary?

Copithorne was responding to my statement that “It is not actually possible to make any nontrivial statement about reality without an implicit or explicit metaphysical framework." If nothing else, Copithorne proves the corollary of this, that in the absence of sound metaphysics, one can only make trivial and/or incoherent statements about reality.

Religion often involves implicit metaphysics without explicit knowledge. What I mean by that is that embedded in any religious tradition are all sorts of metaphysical insights that are expressed in an obscure, ambiguous, symbolic, or mythological way. Thus, they have to be unpacked and understood.

Metaphysics, according to Schuon, is the science of the Absolute and of the true nature of things. It is that which allows us to discriminate between the Real and the apparent, between Atma and Maya. Metaphysics transcends philosophy because it transcends mere reason. Rather, metaphysics proceeds directly from the divine intellect, the part of us that may know absolute truth absolutely. For if we can know anything at all, we can potentially know everything. Once we acknowledge that it is possible to know truth, any limit we set on that capacity is entirely arbitrary.

In what follows, I attempted to bring together some fragments of past posts that touch on metaphysical questions. However, I ended up not having enough time this morning to truly bring them together into a coherent unity, so there is some repetition and some awkward editing. It would have been shorter and snappier if I had had more time. Oh well. I’ll let you figure it out.


When we say that something is "real," are we talking about the atoms and molecules of which it is composed? Or the physical forms that we perceive with the senses? Or the thought that is able to register and comprehend the perception? If only the subatomic or the physical are ultimately real, then there is no valid knowledge at all, for knowledge would be purely epiphenomenal.

"Exist" is not the right word for higher realities known by the intellect. "In-sist," perhaps. That is, higher and more subtle realities do not "stand out" except to those who "stand in" them. How do you stand in a higher world? It has no physical existence, and yet, it can only manifest in the physical. Furthermore, it can only do so with your coupperation--if you act as midwife and give birth to it. Which is difficult to do if you are a hyper-rational soul in a midwife crisis.


All exteriors have an interior, however attenuated. Consciousness is the interior of the cosmos. It has been co-evolving along with the exterior for the past 13.7 billion years. Our self-consciousness lives in the dialectical, generative space between the nonlocal, noumenal ground of consciousness-as-such and our evolved nervous system.

In the West, it is said that God operates through the Word. In the East, they say that the world is God's play, or lila. Thus, reality from God's perspective is a lot of extraordinarily clever wordplay. The world is actually made of language, but the language is not of this world. Nor is our ability to comprehend language. Both arise from the nonlocal Word--the world is intelligible because we are an image of the linguistic process that made it so.



For example, it is quite easy to fit Jesus into this paradigm. Adam's fall is the fall from timeless communion with God into the separative consciousness of duality and strife. Jesus represents the Universal Principle--the abstract absolute outside time and space--taking on particular form, the "concrete absolute." Thus, Jesus is the Ultimate made Particular, or word made flesh.

However, the Bible clearly teaches that we may share in this process--that it didn't just happen once upin a timeless to one person. Rather, it perennially occurs in the eternal ground in which we participate at the deepest level. We may be sons of God "through adoption," and thereby be saved from the ravages of time, here and now. We may make the eternal present in us. But it must be "realized," because it is anterior to our surface being.

The Upanishads discuss the problem in a slightly different way, but I think it's the same idea: to disidentify with the local personality and see that Atman and Brahman are not-two.

The fully realized person has reversed the fall, or turned figure and ground inside out. He has reversed the vector flow that misleadingly draws consciousness downstream to the objects of the senses. In short, he has realized that the cosmos is tree with its roots aloft, its branches down here below. It's a Tree of Life for those whose wood beleaf.


Let's begin with two stipulations, treating them not as religious statements per se but metaphysical ones:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,



In the spirit of multiculturalism, and in the effort to increase our depth of vision with an extra I, let's toss another bon mot into the mix, this from the opening of the Isha Upanishad: In the heart of all things, of whatever there is in the universe, dwells the Lord.


With the second statement we introduce an unexpected twist: In the beginning was the Word, or Logos. Moreover, this Word was with God, implying that it was there "before the beginning," before the great dualistic creative activity of the first statement. Indeed, if the Word is God, this can be the only logical conclusion.

This then apparently raises language to a most exalted status. But clearly not if we merely look at it in the usual way. It's so easy to take language for granted, when in reality we are dealing with something that is frankly magic. In fact, the very same Biblical passage cautions us about this, pointing out that the light of the Word "shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it." Or, to put it in the slightly saltier terms expressed in the Book of Petey, "the weird light shines in the dark, but the dorks don't get it. For truly, the weirdness was spread all through the world, and yet, the world basically kept behaving as if this were just your ordinary, standard-issue cosmos."


So, what is language, anyway? What is a word? As a matter of fact, a word is a very special thing, because only it has the capacity of bridging the dualistic worlds introduced by primordial creation. Apparently words can do this because they are somehow prior to the great duality and therefore partake of both heaven and earth, above and below, vertical and horizontal.


"In the beginning" of human consciousness there is also a fundamental duality--or dialectic--between the conscious (horizontal) and unconscious (vertical) minds. It is incorrect to visualize the mind in spatial terms as a sort of unconscious space below, with a line separating it from the conscious mind above. In reality, each moment of consciousness involves a generative, ceaselessly flowing "translation," or unfolding, of multidimensional, nonlocal mental space that cannot be thought about, into a local, linear, and particularized expression that can be thought about.

Again, in a healthy person there is a fluid and generative dialectic between these two realms. But many things can go wrong with that process--in fact, most forms of psychopathology have to do with the person being caught up and entangled on one end or the other. There are some people--let's call them the obsessive-compulsives--who live their lives wading in the shallow, rocky shoreline of the conscious side, while others--let's call them hysterics and borderlines--get lost in the storm-tossed sea of the unconscious side. Again, the key is a dialectical rapport between the two dimensions. That's where you are really "alive." And much of that aliveness has to do with language, that secret key to the universe.

For what is a word? What is so special about language? Again, a word easily serves as an emissary between the two worlds. On the one hand, a word refers to something particular in space and time--a cup, a tree, a dog. On the other hand, a word is by definition an abstraction with no localized or localizable being: we only recognize cup or tree or dog because they are a function of cupness, treeness or dogginess. Therefore, words are the local tools of the translating function of vertical into horizontal being, of infinite into finite, of eternity into time and back again--if we know how to use them. If we do not live in the dark.


There are objects and there is motion. Religions are like intellectual cathedrals that endeavor to mirror the father shore of the vertical hierarchy on this side of mamafestation--they are "heaven on earth," so to speak. But spiritual growth is not an object. Rather, it is a "motion" or movement--an expansion. As a matter of fact, it is the leading edge of the cosmos.












Why does religion always come pouring back in, despite the best efforts of secularists to do away with it? It seems that religion is just like nature, which, as we know, can be driven out with a pitchfork, and yet will always hurry back. It will return for the same reason that the unconscious will always return in a neurotic individual who tries to repress it. You cannot cut off a part of yourself and pretend it doesn't exist. This is the source of a great deal of comedy--the tension involved in pretending to be hyper-rational while the unconscious is leaking in everywhere--like George Costanza or Basil Fawlty.

Science, as we have mentioned in the past, deals with a particular aspect of reality, the quantitative, the outwardly extended universe. Religion, on the other hand, deals precisely with other aspects of reality that are excluded by science--the qualitative and internally extended universe, those inscapes known as the soul.

Traditional cosmologies posit a three-tiered cosmos of matter, life and spirit. Science studies the lowest order, matter, and concludes that only it is ultimately real, a self-negating philosophy that appeals only to the intellectually uncurious and metaphysically blind. Instead of "in the beginning was the word," secular science has its own creation myth that says, "in the beginning was a single blind substance, mighty matter, mother of all, both visible and invisible. All things were made through it, and without it nothing was made. Out of it comes life and the light of the mind. But the material darkness fully comprehends the light, which is just an illusory side effect of whirling matter."

It is said that there is a form of madness that consists of losing everything but one's reason. What does Petey say about materialism and positivism? "If you believe that, you'll believe anything." Which is it? Do we comprehend matter? Or does matter comprehend us? Or does matter comprehend itself? If so, how? That's pretty impressive for mere matter.

In order to study the physical universe, western science drew the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa--between matter and mind. So successful was the enterprise that it eventually reified this methodological distinction into a metaphysical absolute, and then concluded that only the material side was ultimately real. This has led to a host of unnecessary philosophical conundrums since then. To paraphrase Whitehead, the universe was reduced on one side to conjecture, the other side to a dream.

But if reality is nothing else, it is One. It is One prior to our bifurcation of it into subject and object, and it will always be One. We can throw out the Oneness with a pitchfork, but it will always rush back in through the walls, up through the floor boards, and down from the ceiling. In other words, the wholeness of the cosmos is ontologically prior to anything else we can say about it. In fact, it is precisely because of its wholeness that we can say anything about it at all. In the miracle of knowing, subject and object become one, but the oneness of matter and mind undergirds this process. In reality there is just the one world that knows itself in the act of knowledge.

When science sets its compass on the face of the deep, the depth disappears. Science tries to confine the universe to its own derivative categories of space, time and motion, but the real uncontainable universe always returns. Life--much less consciousness--will never be reduced to physics. In fact, physics will never be reduced to physics either. This is the real lesson of the quantum world, which leaks like water through any attempt describe what occurs there with the porous equations of linear reason.

Although I am sympathetic to the efforts of intelligent design theorists, ultimately they are looking for God in all the wrong places. Of course the universe is intelligently designed. God has always been self-evident to uncorrupted natural reason. Everywhere you look you will find irreducible information, complexity, and beauty betraying the light of the divine mind. So what? You can study a human brain, but it will tell you nothing about the consciousness of the person to whom the brain belongs--it is not as if you can "know" someone by looking at a CT scan of their skull. You will know a brain, not a person. Knowledge of a person is "inside information"--as is knowledge of God. But you have to be an insider to know that.

There is another kind of truth in the universe that can only be known from the inside, from the within. This within operates along very different lines from the without, and cannot be comprehended by applying the same principles used by science. Religions are very special languages that we employ in order to talk about, understand, and deepen our experience of the greater within of the cosmos.

If we try to talk about this within using the methods and language of science, we will get nowhere. For example, eternity cannot be discussed by reducing it to something within time. If we are going to discuss eternity at all--one of the prime characteristics of God--then we will have to use language in a very special way so as to convey the feeling without reducing it to something merely rational and temporal.

Look at it this way. We live on the shoreline between two worlds, one extending infinitely within, the other extending infinitely without. But actually, we are more like an island surrounded on all sides by the watery deep. Science, you might say, studies the island. The non-dual mystic dives into the ocean and disappears into oneness. But metaphysics plays along the shoreline where waves of the infinite are constantly lapping onto the conscious shore. Religions are ways of talking about what it is like to live on that shoreline between the finite and infinite--which is where we live anyway, crucified, so to speak, on the cross of vertical and horizontal energies.

It is here that we find the meta-cosmic and trans-historical source of time, being and self. As best as I can describe it visually, the cosmos is somewhat like a Klein bottle, which has an inside and an outside but only one surface. However, this Klein bottle is in the shape of a toroid, similar to a donut, except that the hole in the middle is our solid world, while the donut is a whirling process that tosses up temporary forms that arise and pass away, like so many grains of sand on the shore. As such, the conventional world of the senses looks real and solid, but it really is an empty hole. The real action is taking place where the hole meets the Whole and partakes something of its abiding reality.

Or as one wag put it:


Monday, June 19, 2006

We are Endowed by our Biology with Certain Unalienable Illusions and Appetites (updated 9.08.07)

While trawling around for a topic this morning, I came across this idiotorial in the Guardian by Noam Chomsky, A Negotiated Solution to the Iranian Nuclear Crisis is Within Reach. Naturally he blames the United States and Israel for the problem. Unlike us, "sophisticated Iranians" are “surely not as willing as the west to discard history to the rubbish heap.” That is, “They know that the United States, along with its allies, has been tormenting Iranians for more than 50 year.” Unsophisticated Iranians presumably live outside Chomskian history as well, and perhaps think that the totalitarian regime that rules their lives is somehow evil.


On the adolescent playground of college campuses, Chomsky's books are always among the biggest sellers. In the course of his career, like the left itself, he has only been wrong about everything (most egregiously, our last generations-long battle against evil), but that doesn’t matter, since the purpose of socialism is not to be effective or to describe reality, but to transform the consciousness of the person who believes it. Therefore, it would be a waste of time to analyze the substance of Chomsky’s ideas, which are frankly bizarre. He is much more of a religious cult figure and should be regarded as such. He cannot be discredited.


So here we have a literal inversion of reality on every level: political, historical, ethical, epistemological, theological and ontological. The classical liberalism of American idealism is explicitly religious, even if it doesn’t explicitly favor one particular Judeo-Christian denomination over another. But clearly, there was a consensus among our founders that human beings, and only human beings, were endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that are rooted in our very humanness. Liberty is meaningless without both free will and a proper divine end for our free will. In the absence of a free will that transcends biology, liberty is obviously impossible. And in the absence of the Good and True, both our behavior and our thinking can have no meaning that isn’t ultimately arbitrary. (In other words, thinking must converge on truth, just as behavior must converge on virtue.)


Adam Smith’s ideas are infinitely more effective than Marx’s ideas because they begin with a very accurate and concrete assessment of human psychology, whereas Marx (and every leftist since him) begins with abstract and general ideas that are superimposed on reality. What doesn’t fit into the framework must be attacked, denied, belittled, and eliminated in order to preserve the framework. Thus, the ontological origins of the perpetually “angry left.” How could they not be? It’s inherently painful when reality doesn’t conform to your fantasies.


The religious creed of the secular leftist would go something like this:

“I believe in a single substance, the mother of all forces, which engenders the life and consciousness of everything, visible and invisible. I believe in a single lord, biology, the unique son of the substance of the world, born from the substance of the world after centuries of random experimentation: the encapsulated reflection of the great material sea, the epiphenomenal light of primordial darkness, the false reflection of the real world, consubstantial with the mother-substance. It is he who has descended from the shadows of the mother-substance, he who has taken on flesh from matter, he who plays at the illusion of thought from flesh, he who has become the Human Brain. As a Human Brain, I acknowledge a single method for the elimination of error, thus ultimately eliminating myself and returning to the mother substance. Amen.” (Adapted from a passage by Valentin Tomberg.)


Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, a universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce a universal prey
And last eat himself up. --Shakespeare

Chomsky gives a pass to the ravenous wolves of Islam, just as he gave a pass to the monsters of depravity who enslaved the communist world. He has to. It's his theology. Or biology. Same thing.

Sunday, June 18, 2006

I Got Plenty of Nothin'

Gee, usually if I write something needlessly inflammatory my numbers go up. But according to my site meter, I had only 350 visits yesterday. In fact, according to Google analytics, the last six days have been 523 --> 487 --> 501 --> 451 --> 373 --> 304, not a good trend.

I’m not complaining, but it seems that there is not a whole lot of potential interest in my bobservations. At this rate, if I don't stop blogging soon, I run the risk of losing my audience entirely. I suppose I never expected otherwise, but it does occasionally make a fellow wonder whether there might be a less futile way to bark at the moonbats, tilt at the windbags, and engage in this wild nous chase. It’s not your fault, since you’re obviously reading this. It’s that deathly silent majority of 6,451,058,290 No Cosmos readers.

I’m pretty sure I’d get more traffic if I posted nothing. In lieu of that, I suppose I could just post about nothing. After all, nothing is a topic of vital concern to us all. We’d all like to know something about nothing, since our lives seem to be framed by it. For those of you who have ignored my equally unpopular book, you have no way of knowing that it is also framed by NOTHING, since the book is circular and begins and ends with that word.

But if you look closely, you will notice that the book doesn’t even begin and end with nothing, for, as Meister Eckhart, the greatest Christian mystic of them all, said, “There is something in the soul which which is above the soul, divine, simple, an absolute nothing; rather unnamed than named; unknown than known....”

Thus, beyond even the nothing we can say is the nothing that can only be silently unsaid, and, as we all know, the multiplication of two negatives results in a positive, which is why the book (and cosmos) has to start up again with a big bang on page 12. Creatio ex nihilo is the technical term, the divine something for nothing or sacred free lunch to which we owe our existence.

This is what is meant by the mythsemantical phrase, conceived in d’light immaculate, every lila son of adwaita is born of a voidgin. Trancelighting this unglish into pure nonsense, it means, roughly, that, if we look at the situation veridically, we are all miraculously born out of the nondual void as a result of the cosmic play, or lila. To quote the Meister again, “the Father ceaselessly begets his Son and, what is more, he begets me as his son--the selfsame Son!”

Many Christians, Jews, Vedantins, and assorted Cosmonaughts have experienced the divine Nothing, that “fount of all being, unborn thus undying, beginning and end of all impossibility, empty plenum and inexhaustible void.” One of the great modern Eastern Orthodox writers, Vladimir Lossky, wrote that the divine nature is “like a sea of essence, indeterminate and without bounds, which spreads far and wide beyond all notion of time and nature.”

Why does it do that? Because existence is inevitable, given the fact that it is in the nature of the Good to radiate and communicate itself. God is not some old nobodaddy who can’t create anamour. Rather, he is really and truly the only unnarcissary thing there is. That’s why he even dies a little to give the cosmos life. As all you parents know, parenthood is a joyous sacrifice. In God’s case, it is kenosis, the self-emptying and self-surrender represented by the creation of the world and symbolized by the cross, where he is nilled to a blank for our benefit. Yes, the Nothing became something so that the something could become Nothing.

So we should thank our father in heaven and give him an abbasalute for his undertaking of mortality, for our daily lessons in evanescence, for this manifestivus for the rest of us. He expectorated this cosmic mirrorcle, and we are his spittin’ image. If that weren’t so, we could never know nothing but wholly matterimany. And to put it kabbalistically, that wouldn’t be ainsoferable. Far from it.


"It is fantastic, this Light which empties, annihilates, fulfills you; and how true the Upanishads are! But to discover them is a mortal blow, because you can only discover them in yourself, on the other side of death!

"The 'I' of the morning of Easter is of another order... The saving name of Christ is aham asmi, I AM. And the deep confession of faith is no longer the external 'Christ is Lord,' but so ham asmi, I am He. Like him at once born and not born. The Father in relation to the Son--to me--to all. The Son in relation to me--to all. Myself in relation to every conscious being; born in all, ceaselessly, and yet always face to face.

"Everything is a mystery of the face to face and the within. OM Abba!"

--Father Henri Lasaux/Swami Abhishiktananda