Slowing Time and Standing Fast

If this post seems different, it's because it's the first time I've tried to write one standing up as straight as a post.

For a couple of years I'd been thinking about getting a stand-up desk, but the Paleo book convinced me to make my move, for it seems that no caveman ever conducted his business without one. I even figured out something that no caveman could have known -- that all you have to do is place a flat object on top of your existing desk, and there's your "stand-up desk." Idiots.

It's surprisingly comfortable, even natural. I was able to adjust it by half-inches by stacking some unused shelves underneath, and 48" seems just about perfect.

So, here we go. Feet don't fail me now!

Yesterday we touched on the subject of mysticism, and were wondering if it is analogously to spirit as science is to matter. Petey once quipped that religion is the science of spirit, whereas science is the religion of matter. His wisequack may sound just ducky, but how do we say it without tainting proper science and religion?

I would say that religionism is the scientism of spirit, whereas scientism is the religionism of matter. Expressed this way, it recognizes the imbalanced application of science and religion. Religion, for example, is "about God." But it is quite common for religion to be about religion, and to forget all about God, except in the form of dogmas, rules, and formulas.

Likewise, science is supposed to be about the natural world. But it easily slips into its own abstractions, and becomes about science. Global Warming is a fine example, but there are many others. For example, there is the joke about the two economists. One says to the other, "Yes, it works in reality. But will it work in theory?" That is not an economist speaking. Rather, that is a purveyor of... economicism, AKA a Krugmaniac.

We all know the globe hasn't gotten warmer over the past fifteen years. Ah, but does that make sense in theory? No way!

Once you see how the game is run, you can distinguish real science from scientism. For example, the gap between man and ape is infinite -- as infinite as the difference between truth and falsehood. True enough, but it just doesn't work in theory -- the theory that there are no discontinuities in nature. But if there are no discontinuities, how is it that an ape is presuming to utter the absolute truth of existence?

Easy: shut up.

That's an example of biologism, I guess you'd call it. There is also psychologism, a practice with which I am sadly familiar, since it pervades my field. In fact, I try to stay away from psychology for that very reason, and was recently reminded why when I read a biography of the dissident psychoanalyst Otto Rank.

I won't bore you with the details, but what a crock. Rank essentially tried to decrock Orthodox Psychoanalysis just a little bit, for which reason he was defrocked and treated like Judas -- smeared, vilified, excommunicated, libeled. He was literally called insane, and even psychoanalysts who had been successfully analyzed by him had to be re-analyzed by an orthodox Freudian in order to undo the success -- or to be convinced that they weren't really healthy, just imagining it.

And Rank was no prize either. Yes, he grasped some important truths, but they are only important in light of what he was up against. He was more courageous than brilliant, or at least he was willing to burn his bridges in pursuit of truth. He's more like a Palestinian who wonders if Jews aren't actually pigs and dogs, or a liberal who thinks that maybe conservatives aren't evil.

At any rate, I would go so far as to say that there is no religion in the absence of mysticism -- or, let us just say a mystical experience, in order to make it more concrete.

Mystical experience involves direct perception of a spiritual reality. Thus, the Bible is obviously pervaded by such experiences, for example, the disciples witnessing the transfiguration of Jesus, or Saul falling from his horse, or John, who writes of how "we beheld his glory" -- glory being the Divine Beauty.

So, I think we need to broaden out what we mean by "mystical," since "spiritual experience" is wide, varied, and deep. It has different modes, essentially corresponding to love, truth, and beauty -- or to heart, mind, and will. Thus, there can be mystics of the intellect -- e.g., Schuon or Aquinas -- mystics of beauty -- e.g., Bach or Arvo Part -- and mystics of the will -- e.g., Bonhoffer and every other martyr. Each, in his or her own way, comes into contact with an absolute truth and absolute reality.

That being the case, mysticism can only be "individual" -- in that only the individual can experience it -- but not "individualistic" -- in that it is not arbitrary or idiosyncratic.

Rather, in the words of Berdyaev, "We must insist that mysticism is not a subjective condition," for in reality "it is an escape from the very contrast between the subjective and the objective." Again, as we were saying yesterday, it is a kind of "cure" (or at least treatment) for the very divisiveness and dis-unity we harbor.

For it is easy to forget that dis-unity is also "just an experience." Monistic theories of existence are not so much wrong as merely partial. Looked at in a certain way, existence is by definition "one," or we wouldn't have the word "existence" (or uni-verse). But the mere fact that we can experience the unity introduces twoness into the mix.

Once we are in this devilish twoness, there are two ways out. One way is heralded by Buddhists, Vedantins, and non-dualists of various stripes: just dissolve twoness back into primordial oneness.

Yes, but to reverse-paraphrase Woody Allen, I don't mind ego death -- I just want to be there when it happens.

The second way is up and out of twoness, into a dynamic threeness. This threeness, of course, is a higher and deeper form of oneness. It is trickier to attain, so it is understandable that so many people prefer the two and the one.

The reason it is trickier is that it does not reject the world. Indeed, it doesn't reject anything, for which reason its central icon is of the Godman, i.e., the Absolute incarnate. Thus, God "experiences" humanness, which permits human beings to experience God-ness.

Despite its radical nature, this is just making explicit what is implicit in every human being. For anyone who says... Better yet, I read something in Vanderleun's sidebar (traceable back to here) that goes to just this subject:

"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things" (Philippians 4:8).

Placed in context, we read that this "standing fast" and being "of the same mind in the Lord" results in divine peace.

I don't know about you, but I am standing as fast as I can, but now it's time to move.

***

Some people thought the title of this song was derived from the acronym G-O-D:

Go Out of Your Mind and Come Back to Your Senses

Chaos this morning. Grumpy boy back to school + painters and tilers, the latter making big noise with their angry saw. We'll do what we can, but don't expect much. That's right: the usual, only more so.

I used to think that mysticism is to the cosmic interior as science is to its exterior: two methods for two modes of reality. Is this too fossile a banalogy? And do I still fall for it?

"Through all human history," writes Berdyaev, "mysticism has revealed the world of the inner man in contrast to the world of the outward man."

And when we say "world," we mean the whole world, inside and out, upside and down, not just, say, an experience of one's own neurology. No mystic interprets the mystical experience as nothing more than a transient and idiosyncratic episode, but rather, an insight into the whole of reality. This doesn't mean it's true, but it is interesting that the experience is accompanied by certainty of its truth content, as opposed to, say, daydreaming, or hypnosis, or imagination.

Thus, "mystical revelations of the inward man have always taught of man's microcosmic quality," for mystical experience reveals "the cosmos within man, the whole immense universe."

You could even go all Kant and say that this whole I-AMmense universe is just a form of our sensibility. Except that little word: just? The soul of man just happens to conform to the whole of intelligible reality, easily containing everything within its boundaries? This is not a demotion. It's a miracle.

Which is certainly how the most illustrious early scientists understood this freakish ability. We won't rehearse that whole argument, but look at Zack Newton, the icon of genius prior to Einstein. Although materialists naturally want to claim such a singular genius as one of their own (since by definition, geniuses cannot be religious), Newton's ultimate goal was to explicate "such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity."

And according to Professor Wiki, Newton "saw God as the master creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation." In short, one might say that he was an early advocate of the One Cosmos approach of regarding spirit and matter as complementary, but seeing spirit as the more encompassing of the two. Which it obviously must be, since spirit may contain matter, but not vice versa.

However, one can well understand how Newton's ideas were easily co-opted by atheistic types, essentially due to the Unintended Consequences of his Protestantism. That is, the Newtonian system eventually reinforced "the deist position advocated by Leibniz. The understanding of the world was now brought down to the level of simple human reason..."

Which wouldn't necessarily be a disaster, except that -- and we'll have to save this argument for another day -- Protestantism inevitably redounds to scientism, since the latter is simply a more parsimonious version of the former. Once you become your own priest, it's a simple step to being one's own god, and then chucking the ladder entirely.

This is why so many liberals mistakenly regard the American founders as somehow irreligious, since they simply project backward their own infertile sensibilities into the more deistic among them, such as Jefferson. So scientism is deism minus deity, i.e., a completely rationalized world without Reason(er).

And I'm not suggesting that Protestantism is necessarily a "bad thing." As you know, I am not a formal member of any church except for this one. Being deusluxic, I don't have a God in this fight. But it's like any knowledge: once you understand the secrets of the atom, you end up with the atom bomb. Mankind cannot unknow or cover up what it dis-covers. Knowledge has its own momentum, its own necessary implications.

So, the -- or one -- question is, how do we unbreak the eggistenshell after it has suffered its great fall? I don't know. What would Joyce say? Let's see: The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice... that the humptyhillhead of himself sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes.

Wha'? Big help.

Let's just say that for Joyce, Humpty's fall is built into the cosmic system. Youfall, Ifall, we allfall from the ovary tower, which results in some awful offal. Thus, the broken fragments were there in what Protestantism hoped to put back together, just as they are present in Protestantism. The crackup cannot be avoided, for the Fall of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy.

Back to this morning's mynstrelcism. It seems to me that the mystical experience represents one type of treatment for the wounds inflicted by existence, for it "is in profound contrast to every kind of closed-in individualism, isolated from cosmic life."

In other words, as we have been saying, individualism is, or can be, interpreted as a rebellion against the group, so here again there is built-in fragmentation. So, how do we restore our oneness?

Well, I give up. Too noisy in here. Eck! I'll leave you with this bit of healthy meistercism:

Mystical submersion... always means going out of oneself, a breaking-through beyond the boundaries. All mysticism teaches that the depths of man are more than human, that in them lurks a mysterious contact with God and with the world. --Berdyaev

History: Wall or Bridge?

If time has its problems, then history is like time on stilts or steroids or stuck on stupid.

However, like time, history must have an upside and not just an oopside, hence, everything that falls under the heading of "evolution."

That is to say, even when absurcularists use that term, they don't envision things going backward and getting worse. "The evolution of man" is a oneway affair, hard as some humans, some cultures, and some political parties try to prove otherwise.

Does history occur in time, or does time occur in history? In other words, is history just a side effect of time?

No, probably not. I say this because we have already established or at least insisted that time is a side effect of creativity -- ultimately divine creativity -- and what distinguishes history from mere animal duration is its creative development. In other words, animals have no history because they live in an essentially timeless state that is free of creativity (and therefore freedom).

Also, as Berdyaev writes, "Movement in historical time is not in a circle; it is in a line, moving ahead." So, time is a lying serpent that consumes its own tail, while history is a tale with a point, extending in two directions from a central point. While this pointed tale "aims at a goal," the goal is not to be found in history, much less time. Alienated from this deus-orienting goal, we are indeed stuck in a disorienting gaol, subject to a kind of "evil endlessness" or naughty infinity.

Unless.

Unless what?

Use your logic: unless we can somehow escape from history -- or, more likely, whatever it is that lies beyond history can inscape to us.

Which is what Berdyaev means when he says that "the only way out is a break-through of the transcendental. Immanently, history may aim at the establishment of a perfectly rationalized and mechanized society" -- c.f. the historical nightmares of the left -- "But I do not want this." Rather, "I want the Kingdom of God, that comes unseen."

In other words, we don't want some broken promidise brought to us by leftist nightmarians, but a break-in and break-down of the real thing. You might say that leftism always revolves around counterfeit (↑). I suppose there is also a counterfeit (↓), most recently in the form of the divine charisma of the evolutionary lightworker, racial healer, and oratorical genius of the Tell-O-Promptly.

Remember Berdyaev's crack about how time recovered from its illness is eternity? Well, here he goes one further, and claims that "If there is no eternity, there is nothing whatever."

This claim is true. I say this because, on an even more basic level -- again, use your logic -- there is either God or nothing, with no possible alternative. So, if there is no God, then absolute nihilism is the only honest option. Of course, there are any number of intellectually dishonest options, otherwise universities would go out of business. Nor would we be open for isness.

Another critical point: (mere) time is quantity. It is why, in the words of The Clash, Clocks go slow in a place of work / Minutes drag and the hours jerk. But history lifts us from quantity to quality -- I would say toward the source of qualities, qualities that ultimately flow from the the One, the Good, the True, the Beautiful, etc. There are many cryptic allusions to this in the Book of the Personalized Blessing, such as

Reverse worldward descent and cross the bridge of darkness to the father shore.... rest your chronescapes and preprayer for arrisall.... Floating upstream along the ancient celestial trail, out from under the toilsome tablets of time.... Returning to the Oneself, borne again to the mysterious mamamatrix of our birthdeath, our winding river of light empties to the sea.... Etc.

Hey, I'm with you. I hate to refer to my own book, but if I don't, who will? Speaking of which, how about this for a deal: just write a review on amazon, and I'll knock five bucks off the price! It doesn't even have to be flattering, just ecstatic and fawning. Make it fun -- try to top each other in your outrageous but accurate claims for the transformative power of the cult of Raccoons! Alternatively, just write a review, and Petey will absolve you of the burden of reading the book.

Or not. There's no pressure. But I think we could all benefit from some fresh blood around here, don't you? Back when I was a member of PJ Media, we got more people wandering in and going wha'? Of course, I quit PJ Media because Charles 'Queeg' Johnson did. Who knew he had lost his mind? Oh well, God sometimes works in annoying ways.

Back to the topic at hand. Speaking of insanity, because there is God or nothing, it is quite insane to look for salvation in history. It just makes no sense: "Nothing is more pitiful than consolation derived from the idea of the progress of humanity and the happiness of future generations." We know this is true, because we are the happy generations promised by the liberal politicians of the past. But are liberals happy? Of course not. Can't happen, so long as they project it into the future.

Look at the new mayor of New York: even the most complete political expression of liberal dominance has resulted in nothing better than a f*cking plantation. And if the most liberal big city in the country is a plantation, what does that make your city, you filthy animal? That's right, subhuman -- not even a plantation.

Speaking of revulsion, this type of deferred political consolation "has always revolted me." For "nothing 'general' can comfort the 'individual' man in his unhappy fate." In other words, collectivism is no cure for the pain of history, for the simple reason that being nobody is not a cure for being somebody. Might as well amputate your melon for a headache.

Meaning must be commensurate with my own destiny. Objectivized meaning has no meaning for me. Meaning can only be in subjectivity; meaning in objectivity is merely a mockery of meaning.... If God does not exist, if there is no higher sphere of freedom, eternal and genuine life, if there is no deliverance from the world's necessity, there is no reason to treasure this world and our frail life within it.... --Berdyaev

The Proper Use of Sick Time

We left off, more or less, with Berdyaev's diagnosis of, and prognosis for, our timeboundedness: that time recovered from its illness is eternity.

What illness? Well, all the ills for which time is notorious: decay, disease, disintegration, death... and that's just the D's. So, if you've come down with a bad case of Time, there's still hope for you. You've got a good prognosis -- a very good one -- if you take the cure.

I don't know if "cure" is the right word, since time is more akin to diabetes: it is something you manage but don't get rid of. In fact, if you don't manage it, it will manage you. But not for long.

In fact, Bion had the same complaint about mental illness: that the whole concept of "cure" is an analogy borrowed from the realm of physical medicine, and is wholly inappropriate when applied to the mind. He speaks of "the extent to which ideas of cure, based on a background of sensuous experience and the pleasure principle, pervaded not only psychoanalysis but the whole domain of mental or spiritual life."

It is as if we have the implicit belief that "There is pain. It should be removed. Someone must remove it forthwith, preferably by magic or omnipotence or omniscience, and at once; failing that, by science."

In short, "The 'desire' for cure" is "not to be entertained by a psychoanalyst." Likewise, "the idea of 'results' should be similarly suspect because it derives from an attitude, common to physical scientists whose experience is related to sensuous impressions.... We should be amongst the first to have realized the inadequacy of models in which results occupy a prominent place."

Thus, although religion results in more happiness, better mental and physical health, a longer life, and a more satisfactory sex life, this is not why one should be religious. Rather, one should be religious because it is a beautiful and fuller way to live, here and now, for its own sake. One should be religious because one loves being so. One should be "in love," not in negotiations.

Speaking of which, remember the epic Jerry Lee Lewis box set I spoke of a couple weeks ago? There is a funny story in it about how Jerry Lee prayed that his mother be spared from cancer. If God cured her, then he would quit the devil's music and "use his talent in the service of the Lord."

Sure enough, "When Mamie went into remission, Jerry felt obliged to fulfill his half of the covenant," so he began recording gospel music (which is great, by the way; despite his worldly ways, he was always a fervent believer).

But then Mamie died, and that was the end of that: no deal. Jerry Lee had held up his end of the bargain. God had reneged. Back to the boogie woogie.

So, that's what can happen if we confuse cure with treatment, or if we pursue the spiritual life for narrow reasons of self-interest. When we hear the cliche about ridding ourselves of "ego," this is what it means, at least in a western context: not eliminating the self, but purifying it.

Likewise, to return to the main subject, there ain't no cure for time, but there is treatment. For example, creativity: "All creative activity, all creation of something new, should be directed not toward the future with its fear and worry and its incapacity to conquer determinism, but toward eternity" (Berdyaev).

Alert or obsessive readers will recall that this very principle was embedded in the Mission Statement of the One Cosmos blog, pronounced in October 2005. You can can't look it up, because I've since deleted it and republished it in a later post. I will append some of it to the end of this post, so as to not break up the "continuity" of this one.

Back to pointless creativity as a treatment for time: "This is the reverse of movement to hasten time." In the Church of the Subgenius, it is known as "time dilation." For Berdyaev, "it differs from the speeding up of time" associated with a modern technical society, and provides us with a kind of daily "victory of the spirit."

If you are a clock jockey living in the kingdom of quantitative duration, you're pretty much screwed. "We are witnessing a mad speeding-up of time," so "man's life is subject to this constantly swifter time. Each moment lacks value and completeness in itself, we cannot stop it, it must be succeeded as quickly as possible by the next moment....

"The 'I' has no time to think of itself as the free creator of the future." Rather, "it is carried away by the mad current of time." This temporal acceleration is "destructive for the 'I,' for its unity and concentration...." (Berdyaev).

As we were saying above about the proper pointlessness of religion, the "moment of contemplation" is not "a means to the next moment" but "communion with eternity."

Christianity intensified time extraordinarily, narrowed it to one point, from which the results of every act are extended through all eternity.... This intensification of time indicates the possibility within a moment of time, of passing out toward eternity, toward events with eternal, and not merely temporal, meaning. --Berdyaev

*****

From that first post, which emphasizes that the blog is an endless exercise in discovering its own purpose:

Q: We don't need another blog. Why are you inflicting your beastly opinions on us?

A: To those of you who are new to this site, join the club, as I am still in the process of trying to understand the author's intention. For surely there are already far too many books and blogs, with no way any human being could ever assimilate the information contained therein. Actually, the problem we face is how to relate all of this fragmented and sometimes contradictory knowledge into a coherent picture of our world -- to move from mere knowledge, to understanding, to truth and to wisdom.

2,500 posts later, there's no longer any need to try to understand the author's intention. It's too late for that, and he doesn't know anyway. Now the question is, What was that all about, then?, and that's for you to decide.

.... If you can detach yourself somewhat and try to "hover" above it, the news of the day may be regarded as the free associations of a very troubled patient called Homo sapiens. This patient, now about 40,000 years old (before that we were genetically Homo sapiens but not especially human), has many sub-personalities of varying levels of emotional maturity, and one of his problems is that these different aspects of his personality are constantly at war with one another, which tends to drag down the more mature parts.

You could almost go so far as to say that this collective patient suffers from the kind of severe splitting and "acting out" characteristic of Multiple Personality Disorder. One of our axioms is that geographical space reflects psycho-developmental time, so that different nations and cultures embody different levels of psychological maturity. In this regard, the Islamic world bottoms out the scale at the moment.

More broadly, what I hope to facilitate is an appreciation of the "vertical" dimension of human history, culture and politics. For example, historians typically view history in a horizontal manner, leading from past, to present, to future. Likewise, we divide our political mindscape in a horizontal fashion, from left to right. However, as in a great novel or film, the "horizontal" plot is merely a device to express the artist's greater intention (the theme), which can only be found in a vertical realm, by standing "above" the plot.

I don't think it's healthy to orient your life around politics 24/7, as does the secular left, for whom politics is their substitute religion. Politics must aim at something that isn't politics, otherwise, what's the point? Politics just becomes a cognitive system to articulate your existential unhappiness. Again, this is what leftists do -- everything for them is politicized.

.... One of the general purposes of this blog will be to try to look at politics in a new way -- to place the day-to-day struggle of politics in a much wider historical, evolutionary, and even cosmic context. History is trying to get somewhere, and it is our job to help it get there. However, that "somewhere" does not lie within the horizontal field of politics, but beyond it. Thus, politics must not only be grounded in something that isn't politics, but aim at something that isn't politics either.

.... Tip O’Neill is evidently responsible for the cliché that “All politics is local.” The greater truth is that all politics is nonlocal, meaning that outward political organization rests on a more fundamental, “inner” ground that interacts with a hierarchy of perennial and timeless values. Arguments about the surface structure of mundane political organization really have to do with whose nonlocal values will prevail, and the local system that will be established in order to achieve those nonlocal values.