Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
One who loses or shuns self-confidence goes bi-polar. This result is unavoidable. Fear moves in when self-confidence moves out. Something has to fill the void when the center vacates itself. Nature abhors a vacuum. The non-self fills the void . . . or imagines it does.
The power of non-being is ever willing to stand-in for the Power of Being. It is never willing to replace the Power of Being, be it noted, because its existence depends absolutely on the perpetuity of the Power of Being. If there is no Being, there can be no non-being. Non-being knows this elemental truth and factors the irony of it into its turgidities. Humans rarely spot this particular truth. Their self-confidence is reinforced when they do.
Bi-polar personality means, simply, personality immersed in fear. A Janus, it — fear/bi-polar personality — has two faces: it demands obedience and it renounces responsibility to think. It is arrogant and ignorant all at once.
Fear is the nearest doorway to schizophrenic cleavage, which is the telos of fear-owned, bi-polar personality abandoned to itself. Fear, therefore, is the perfect double bind. You cannot go with it, you cannot go without it. Someone looking from the outside in cannot get to you because in both directions you are needles. Both of your faces horrify.
This is the outcome of lacking self-confidence. Only God can reach the fearful because only He indwells them. They belong to Him or they do not.
Lack of self-confidence looks like this, an exquisite portrait of sententious spite and intellectual irresponsibility on the road to schizophrenic break:
And they pursued beyond their property . . . .
Poor lad.
What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself. Abraham Lincoln
On the other hand, when one hears a demand for obedience in the absence of any actual, though always conditioned, obedience one owes the demander — as, for instance, to an employer or a military or civil commander — or when one hears the demand to cease ratiocination . . . when one hears either of these tones, one is usefully alerted to the presence of a fear-drenched, bi-polar personality — which is to say, a defective — on their way, unless arrested by Divine Grace, to schizophrenic cleavage, which by definition endangers any and all in the cloven’s context.
The term defective will appear harsh in context of contemporary usage. I use it advisedly and necessarily because its root meaning precisely and carefully indicates the phenomenology of which I treat here. The root meaning of the term defective (Latin de + facere) comports with, and one could say illuminates, the Christian Doctrine of The Fall.
The term means, in long-hand, to partially reverse-engineer or partially fabricate a product so that its actual final condition is less than its intended final condition. A defective personality is one some of whose parts and processes are not present, for one reason or another, thus causing the personality diminishment to less than full strength as designed. Likewise, a defective organization is one some of whose parts and processes are missing, for one reason and another, thus causing the organization to report out in a condition of disablement rather than as intended by its founder(s).
So there is that. Non-being always gives away its presence and one can always hear it if one is listening.
What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself. Abraham Lincoln
The terms Liberal and Conservative have the declamatory puissance of a rabbit addressing an elk convention. Ditto the terms Left and Right. I suggest in their stead the terms Abnormal or Diseased and Normal or Healthy, respectively. This nomenclature gives room to the phenomenology of life, which shows the abnormal with traces of normality and the normal with traces of abnormality. Life is a mixture. Nobody is perfect, nor can be, nor should want to be.
In addition, never demand what you cannot take, seek what you cannot find, hide from what you cannot avoid, want what you cannot have, or deny what you must do. David R. Graham
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
