The Remystification of the World: Amen for a Child’s Job

I dreamt last night that I was mountain climbing, something I’ve never done in the 4D world. It looked like someplace in Germany or Switzerland. It was a rather sheer face with lots of vegetation and a green valley down below. I reached out to pluck one of the wild berries that was growing from the mountain side, as it looked like it must be the purest food one could imagine. But my guide cautioned me that it had been discovered that it was actually full of all kinds of subtle toxins. However, there was a pill one could take that neutralizes the poisons.

There are so many thresholds to the doorway of the divine — to the intelligent and benign forces that surpass the ego — and one of them is by way of the dream. Because once you begin taking your dreams seriously, you realize that you “inhabit” a parallel world that is every bit as real as the material world. It is real because you — your ego — in no way create this world. Rather, you are just as much an “object” in it as you are in the material world.

In my dreams I have seen beautiful architecture and paintings that have somehow been produced in me but not by me. I have seen the most awesome landscapes that one would think only God could have created. In fact, perhaps the highly creative person is simply someone who is able to dream by day — to trancelight a small fraction of the infinite creativity of the night and bring it out into daylight. It seems to me that all great art has something of the dream — and therefore, magic — in it.

What is so striking about dreams is not just that you can interpret them and that they contain a wealth of wisdom and knowledge. That is a given. The larger question is, as my colleague James Grotstein put it in the title of a book, Who is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream? Because whoever he is, he knows us much better than we know ourselves. He knows virtually everything about us, and wishes to communicate it to us through plot, dialogue, imagery, character, and symbolism. Why? What are these mysterious messages from our Self to our self?

First of all, dreams are not structured in the way science understands the material world to be structured (they are actually only half right about that, but I don’t have time to get into it right now). Rather, dream consciousness is explicitly holographic, meaning that, like a great work of art, it is dense with possible interpretations, all of them more or less true. In the case of this dream of mine, I believe it was a commentary on our recent little sidetrack into the bloodless and devitalized world of atheism, for such a narrow world represents the exact opposite of the dream, so dense with layer upon layer of inexhaustible meaning.

A person will literally go crazy if he is prevented from dreaming. Along those lines, it is a truism that there is a form of madness that involves losing everything but one’s capacity to reason. This I believe summarizes the dry and denatured madness of atheism.

Here again, please do not get me wrong: I do not intend to insult or belittle rank and file atheists who are simply indifferent to matters of spirit. Rather, I specifically address myself to rank and foul atheists, to those who make it their life’s mission to demystify the unfathomable mysteries of existence, life and consciousness, and then to try to impose that morbid ideology on the rest of us.

For to drain the world of its irreducibly mysterious and dreamlike qualities is to create a nightmare. Even as a child, without knowing it consciously, I realized that this was the world of atheistic communism. More than anything I could have learned from the adults around me, it was this dark intuition of an unambiguous world devoid of dreaming — in a child’s mind, perhaps the polar opposite of Disneyland, which to me was literally paradise on earth. Which world is more real, the objective world of philosophical materialism, or the “fantasy” world of depth, meaning and wonderment? Is sustained wonderment not a vital human faculty? Are we not more concretely in touch with the world when we are full of wonder than we are when we are filled with an abstract answer?

Philosophy is no different than music, in that one can tell in an instant when a musician or a piece of music comes from a merely technical or “mechanical” place as opposed to a spiritual source. This is what gives music its depth and richness, and allows repeated listening despite having heard a piece hundreds of times. It is not about the complexity, for if that were true, there would be no way to explain the magic of certain “primitive” blues musicians such as Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf. I think it is fair to say that the person who is alienated from spirit cannot help seeing the world as geometry, when it is actually frozen music of the most exquisite kind.

One of the reasons I love the music of Van Morrison is that he is always at least trying to encounter the source of music. In reading his biography, I wasn’t surprised to learn that a number of years back he actually organized a conference on the power of music to convey spiritual experiences and to bring about higher states of consciousness. He rarely does interviews, but when asked what effect he would like his music to have, he responded “Ideally, to induce states of meditation and ecstasy as well as to make people think.” Based on my own experience, he clearly possesses an ability to tap into and convey these spiritual states through his music. As he has said, “If you say that we all have a basic purpose for for being here, then that’s why I’m here. I’ve tried running away from it. I’ve tried ignoring it. I’ve tried suppressing it. I’ve tried everything there is to get away from this because at times its seems it’s a hell of a big responsibility.”

I can well understand the latter concern, because, unlike most artists who simply play their “greatest hits,” I have personally seen how Morrison enters a sort of altered state in concert, bringing the audience along with him. In this regard, his music has some connections with jazz, since it is improvisational, but it is improvisational in a specific way — almost as if he’s being led by a spirit into some other dimension and “singing in tongues.” But that’s not something you can turn on like a light switch. It’s is a grace, which is not self-generated but comes from elsewhere — from the dreamer who dreams us. And when it’s not there, the music becomes “merely human,” so to speak. Nice craftsmanship, but missing the vital element that vaults you into another dimension.

Many of Morrison’s songs are about the “natural mysticism” of childhood. Apparently as a child he had many unprovoked mystical experiences in which the veil that separates our world from the deeper mystery surrounding it was rent away — often when listening to music. I can totally relate to this, as I had similar experiences as a child. But as we age and increasingly ingest the “food of the world,” something happens to that childlike (but hardly childish) sense of wonder, unless we are very careful to nurture and preserve it. Is there a pill we can take that can undo or neutralize the pneuma-toxins of the world?

One fatuous charge that is frequently levelled against theists is that we are frightened of life and therefore drawn to “fairy tales” of the hereafter. I can only speak for myself and affirm that I personally don’t give much thought to what happens upon our physical demise. Rather, for me, religion is a much more intense way of being in the world, not just spiritually, but intellectually, philosophically, aesthetically, interpersonally, creatively, and in every other way.

My son, who is 18 months old, is so full of life that it is as if his little body can’t contain the ecstasy involved. Yesterday he stood up on his little chair and began dancing, trembling, laughing, stomping his feet, and shouting with joy. He would become rigid one moment — sort of like one of those body builder poses — only for the energy to course through him like lightning exploding a statue. It was absolutely contagious, because he could look at us through his eyes and transmit the pranic energy. Soon we were all laughing, and our laughter simply amplified his energy. It only happens every day. I’m sure there is a scientific explanation for this transmission of shakti. Which explains precisely nothing.

The child of whatever age remains close to the paradise not yet fully lost, “and it is for that reason that childhood constitutes a necessary aspect of the integral man: the man who is fully mature always keeps, in equilibrium with wisdom, the qualities of simplicity and freshness, of gratitude and trust, that he possessed in the springtime of his life” (F. Schuon).

In Song of Being a Child (a poem by Peter Handke), Morrison recites,

When the child was a child,
[It] wanted the stream to be a river and the river a torrent
And this puddle, the sea
When the child was a child, it didn’t know
It was a child
Everything for it was filled with life and life was one
Saw the horizon without trying to reach it
Couldn’t rush itself
And think on command
Was often terribly bored
And couldn’t wait…

When the child was a child berries fell
Only like berries into its hand…
Atop each mountain it craved
Yet a higher mountain… And still does
Reach for the cherries in the treetop
As elated as it still is today

Morrison improvises here:

And on and on and on and on
And onward with a sense of wonder
Upon the highest hill
When the child was a child
Up on the highest hill
Shhhhhhh, shhhhhhh
Are you there?

Yes, I think I was. In my dream last night.

The Flat Cosmos Society and Their Junk Metaphysics

I think you may have just compromised your hippocratic oath – you have done harm. You have fostered malignant stereotypes on a group of people as wide & diversified as any Western nation. WAAAAAAAA!

At last we reach what has always been the gist of the leftist atheist’s apologia, that he is a victim. The appeal to victimhood is ironic, since, as I have mentioned before, it represents such a twisted inversion of a Christianized psychology: since Christ is victimized, all victims must be sacred, even if their victimhood is self-inflicted. Thus, atheists are sacred martyrs to their God, who is conspicuously present in his absence. But if truth and morality are relative, to what else can atheists appeal except to the Christian sympathy for victims?

(Yet again the disclaimer: my opinions regarding the militant atheist commenters on this site have nothing to do with indifferent or “negative” atheists who simply have no interest in spiritual growth. Rather, I address myself to the angry and juvenile activists who are actually anti-theists, such as the ACLU and radical secular fundamentalists in general.)

Now, all of the castes also exist within each caste, and I make no apologies for being a “warrior priest,” as it were, even if atheists end up with hurt feelings because they’re not used to someone above Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell’s pay grade pushing back. I am gravely concerned about the culture war in which we are engaged, for I have no doubt whatsoever that the future of the world will hinge on its outcome. And at the moment, the activist intellectual laborers of the left (i.e., brains with hammers) are waging jihad against the Judeo-Christian metaphysical foundation of our culture, a foundation that has produced the most decent and prosperous nation that has ever existed.

It is no coincidence that the United States is also the most religious country in the world. Some might object that the Islamic world is more religious, but in reality, that’s the problem. They aren’t religious at all, because any true vertical religiosity is rooted in liberty oriented toward a spiritual telos. God cannot be imposed, only freely discovered. Thus, both Islam and leftism–our two spiritual competitors–are excluded, since the one expounds mindless tyranny, the other a meaningless horizontal freedom that ends in tyranny as well. In short, both atheism, and Islamism are “junk metaphysics.” God is specifically a God of liberty — the God upon which the authority of America’s founding document rests. As a conservative, the Declaration of Independence is one of those little things I would most like to conserve. That and the constitution.

As I mentioned, one of our atheist visitors has been reduced to playing the victim card, which is always the last refuge of the left, for it is their holiest of holies. It is designed not to advance thought but to stop it in its tracks. You will also note that he makes an appeal to that related icon of contemporary left-liberalism, diversity, meaning that he has hit the leftist trifecta: 1) relative truth is absolute, 2) I am a victim, and 3) diversity is sacrosanct. This is an exact reversal of the American creed, which is liberty, e pluribus unum, and In God We Trust.

I think you may have just compromised your hippocratic oath – you have done harm. You have fostered malignant stereotypes on a group of people as wide & diversified as any Western nation.

We come in all shapes & sizes. Black, white, Asian, Arab, Jew. We run the entire spectrum from conservative to moderate to left to right. We come from varied backgrounds.

My question is this: does the APA approve of mass diagnoses? How do you, as a psychiatrist, justify a collective diagnosis?

“Diagnosis of what?,” one might ask, since all is truly relative for a leftist atheist. I might add that I am not a psychiatrist, so I am not bound by the Hippocratic Oath, nor am I a member of my own APA because it has been taken over by agenda-driven leftist activists. As for “mass diagnoses,” I do indeed do this, but not in my role of psychologist but as a clinical anthropologist and theo-pathologist. And I certainly have no quarrel with conservative, classical liberal, or libertarian atheists who fight for my spiritual values, any more than I have problems with Muslims who share my values.

Ultimately this is not about labels but about spiritual value systems that are entirely opposed and incompatible. If you want to see the future of America should the left be successful in undermining our Judeo-Christian heritage, you need look no further than old Europe, which “progresses” further every day toward its own oblivion–and into the jaws of its Islamist executioners, who will perform the coup de grace.

Science tells us about the world of quantities, but spirituality is here to tell us about the specifically human world. Needless to say, when it comes to comprehending revelation, atheists tend to be the most literal-minded of individuals. Reduced to mere horizontality, religion makes no sense at all, any more than science can account for verticality, i.e., our free will, our love of truth, and our ability to know objective beauty. Just as biology can explain everything about life except for what it is, science can explain everything except for the radical incommensurability between the consciousness of the scientist and everything else in the cosmos.

The atheist is blocked on his journey to divinity. As such, it is a sort of attachment disorder, a failure to leave the orbit of one reality for another, a metaphysical “failure to launch.” But the spiritual reality from which they are excluded is anterior to the material world, not just chronologically but ontologically. In other words, there is a vertical cosmogonic order, and it is precisely this order that all forms of leftism resent and rebel against.

The lower world is a “mirror” of the higher, except it is somewhat like a tree reflected in a lake. Standing across the lake and looking at the water, we will see an inverse image of the tree, which is what we see here below, and which explains most of the mysteries and anomalies that a strictly scientistic and reductionistic world view will inevitably generate. For, like the tree reflected in the water, atheistic reductionism sees the lowest for the highest and the highest as nonexistent, a metaphysical absurdity squared. Leaves and branches are not roots, but in order to see this, you can’t be a sap.

There are quintessential miracles of which all miracles are a reflection: the miracles of existence, life, and human intelligence. Human creativity — assuming it is grounded in truth — is a mirrorcle that follows the “fiat lux” of the first day, which, in the cosmogonic order, is every day. No, every moment — if you choose to participate (some restrictions apply; offer void in Manhattan, San Francisco, and Hollywood). To be “born again” vertically “from above” is none other than consciousness caterpultering out its cocoognitve limitations and learning to buddhafly, no more or less mysterious than a dead universe coming to life or an ape not just quoting Shakespeare, but being Shakespeare.

This expansive view of reality is in contrast to the closed circle of atheism, which is, after all — now please, don’t get me wrong here — the “devil’s perspective” of reality. Let us stipulate that we are speaking, er, metaphorically. The devil’s perspective is to turn the cosmogonic order inside out and upside down, so that what is distant appears close, and what is close, distant. As a result, it drowns in “particulars” and is lost in endless induction.

This induction will never end in wholeness, for the wholeness is prior to the particulars: it is the Creator’s perspective, the One who sees the whole of reality in an instant. This view synthesizes a mass of of particulars in order to perceive both their depth and their meaning, which amount to the same thing. Meaning, depth, consciousness, life, love, beauty, truth, humor, the sacred… To quote brother John Hiatt, “Don’t come from you and me, come from up above.” Furthermore,

Ugly ducklings don’t turn into swans
And glide off down the lake
Whether your sunglasses are off or on
You only see the world you make.

Yes, that’s the point. The atheist is proud of the fact that he only believes what he sees. But in so doing, he only sees what he believes.

Garbage In, Godlessness Out

What a night. First the vaporized post — which was a real corker, by the way — and then Dupree came home raving drunk from a costume ball at 3:00 AM.

All I hear is pounding inside the garage. I go in, and he’s torn a hole in the wall with a sledge hammer, looking for the “murphy bed.” Needless to say, we don’t have a murphy bed in the garage — or anyplace else, for that matter — but Dupree is confused and agitated, because he thinks he’s back in the last place he stayed in Baton Rouge. So now I’ve got an extra window in the garage, and meanwhile, I have to attend another all-day seminar today while atheists flock here liked rodents to an offal dump. Now, I hardly blame rodents for being attracted to offal dumps, but the problem is, they don’t know the difference between that and a banquet table, and in so doing, turn the latter into the former.

Just what is the atheists’s claim? It is not quite accurate, is it, to say that he knows something we don’t, for he specifically claims to not know what we do know; and furtherless, that his metaphysical ignorance represents a superior form of knowledge. That ignorance is not knowledge — let alone truth — eludes them entirely, even if one can be sympathetic to their view that authentic ignorance is preferable to what they necessarily regard as false knowledge–which, were that true, is no knowledge at all.

The atheist believes that reason obliges one to deny God, but this represents a most limited and facile understanding of reason, since reason can only work with sources that are not supplied by reason in its narrowly construed understanding.

There are two distinct forms of ignorance, an active variety and a passive one. As it so happens, tolerating one’s not-knowing is an indispensable step on the way to genuine knowledge of any kind. However, it cannot be a permanent phase, for the simple reason that generative “not-knowing” in any discipline is guided by a telos that will eventually fill out this unsaturated container with content.

Put it this way: an a-theist is no different than an “a” anything (except perhaps a-hole) — for he is a self-confessed ontological adolescent, in the sense that human beings (analogous to, but also very different from, other living things) point toward their own completion, whereas the atheist forms his identification around what he is not: a theist. As any parent of a two year-old can tell you, it is very easy to no! what you are not.

Now, knowledge is a grace, which is to say mercy. It certainly does not have to be, and yet it is. That there exists a primate capable of knowing absolute truth absolutely is proof enough for me — albeit, a preluminary truth — that any materialistic philosophy is hopelessly self-refuting. Again, the hiatus between the most lofty animal and the lowliest bacon-loving atheist is nevertheless absolute, which is why we may say — insist, even — that his every blasphemy only praises God. He is his own doorway that leads straight out of a crude and reductionist Darwinism, for while human beings may easily comprehend the truth in natural selection, natural selection can never comprehend the truth that is in man–that is man.

Naturally, there was a time that I did not know. Like our militant atheists, I was ignorant of my ignorance, and instead knew that I knew. For me, the key out of the closed world of my own nervous system was to encounter a being who did know, and to tolerate the considerable gap between his knowledge and my ignorance. This gap is known as “faith” in its dynamic and generative aspect, and is the critical component in acquiring metaphysical knowledge that is rooted in being, not just the “head.”

It must be jarring to a pork-loving atheistic renaissance man to be the proud possessor of a triple digit IQ and therefore absolute knowledge and truth, only to stumble upon a community of souls who reject his facile pseudo-philosophy as the commonest stupidity. What? How can this be! My MENSA friends assured me that my superior intelligence was the guarantor of absolute truth!

In reality, there are by definition as many ways to prove the existence of God as there are human beings. One could say the same thing about the unconscious, which no other human being can discover for you. Therapy can naturally help, but only to assist you in making the discovery yourself.

But the atheist is an egomaniacal control freak who refuses to see that we do not control the unconscious. Rather, he is just like the obsessive-compulsive patient who attempts to colonize the unconscious mind with a grid of mere conscious knowledge. It can accurately be described as egoic imperialism, and it works both ways, above and below. For the ego can “comprehend” neither the unconscious “below” nor the Spirit “above” (this is a simplification, for many aspects of the “unconscious” are highly conscious and “above,” for example, the dreamer who dreams the dream). Rather, the idea is for the ego to be conquered by the divine. To the extent that we do not participate in this profoundly mysterious process, we are all the poorer for it. Or, let us say, the proud ego becomes wealthy while the spirit goes begging for crumbs of bacon.

In order to grow spiritually, we must become supple and receptive, and yield to powers that are largely unpredictable and beyond our control. This is something the hypertrophied ego of the atheist cannot do for whatever developmental reason, if only because the humility is intolerable and readily slides into shame. Thus, they cannot know what it means to abandon oneself to something infinitely higher and greater. In maintaining the postmodern superstition that they are the sole authors of their own lives, they miss out on the adventure of a lifetime. As one can see, the spiritual impoverishment radiates (as if darkness could radiate) from their very manner of expression. They exalt in their own misplaced egoic exaltation, which amounts to the most unsophisticated form of idol worship.

As I predicted several posts back, the atheists cannot stay away from this site for the simple reason that the atheist necessarily projects his religious “shadow” (to employ Jung’s terminology) into the theist, where he may engage it through proxy. You might say that they see in us a pneumagraphic negative of themselves–a shadow of their own inner fire. Naturally the image is distorted through repression and projection, which is why none of us recognize to the crude and childish religious image being projected onto us.

The crudeness and childishness most certainly exist, but in the projector, not projectee. This is elementary. It is also alimentary, rooted in the most primitive oral and anal psychodynamics. This is a topic for another post, but those who have been following this debate and have ears to hear will most certainly know what I am talking about. You are what you feed.

Sadly, as Jung understood, one of the reasons why “shadow work” is so critical to psychological development is that the alchemical gold is found in the shadow. Is this not obvious? The atheists project a part of themselves into us, but in so doing, reject their most vital and precious aspect — something of great beauty and value, now rendered ugly and worthless. Pity, really.

Now, there is a proper form of projection that is required (not always, but generally) for spiritual development. That is, we all must find the mentor — living or “dead,” it does not matter — who represents the projection and the attractor of what we are to become. He or she is your unrealized self, projected onto someone who has realized it. There are many forms of realization, and I imagine that this blog specifically appeals to people who share similar “spiritual histories.”

For example, I did not know my Minister of Doctrinal Enforcement before he staggered in from the cold into our warm little inn a number of months ago. And yet, what is so remarkable is the close correlation of our beliefs, not just the broad strokes, but many fine and subtle details. This, even though we arrived at our respective deustinotions through largely divergent paths.

And yet, here we are, all of us, shaking hands atop the mountain, while at the same time regarding with sacred awe the even more towering peak that stands before us.

Naturally we cannot help seeing the valley dwellers below, who seem content to live with their noses to the ground, occasionally pausing to look up and remark about the cloud cover that obscures the mountain top. We have no quarrel with the contented valley dwellers. However, more than a few remind us of a bucket of crabs who instinctively pull down any of their brethren who try to climb out. To call such a crabbed existence “philosophy” is to celebrate the state of being a raging animal inside a dying carcass, as one metaphysical wag put it. I can’t say I really blame them for being drawn to this site. There is no envy like spiritual envy.

This I know: beauty enters as the ego falters. The cosmos is a circle that opens in man and closes in the Divine Being, however you understand it. We are the two-way mirror through which the sacred projects itself, and which stimulates the spontaneous response of adoration, devotion, and yes, submission. But if you align yourself with these forces of your own destiny, you will discover that the sub-mission of the ego is a super-mission of the Self, as — surprise of surprises — you pull the sword of life from the stone of death. For we do not merely dream to live, but we live to dream, and we build by day the dream body we shall wear when the sun has set and no man can work.

O mighty atheist, knower of all, you are already whole! Why dost thou need this asswholier-than-thou-physician?