AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
Upon occasion, in human affairs, it becomes necessary to remind the functionaries that they are not proprietors. This observation has reference to that Euro-American mélange of colossal dummies who self-identify as the foreign policy establishment (FPE) and intelligence community (IC).
At Power Line Blog, which I attend daily, one of the five writers commenters rake regularly, fore and aft, for remorseless self-absorption, irksome prudery, and relentless sophistry. Abridgments of their sensibilities regarding etiquette in high places the writer condemns in high moral dudgeon. Consequential moral, legal, and political assumptions the writer employs insouciantly sans self-scrutiny. Always the writer’s disparagements, calumnies, and condemnations issue from a proscenium comprising self-assumed moral and intellectual, if not also religious, superiority.
This phenomenon I choose to call gangrene logic. I invite attention to its counterpart in life, the which let us call vivacious logic. The Vedic correlates of these two types of logic — and only theses two types of logic are available to humankind — are avidyamaya and vidyamaya, respectively: delusion which leads to necrosis and delusion which leads to vivacity. Vivacious logic is so from being with comms and gangrene logic is so from being without comms. Vivacious logic interacts with reality. Gangrene logic shoots itself inside its own closed system.
Delusion is inside the genesis of human cognition because it is inside the genesis of existence. None, not even the greatest Sage, can escape the effects and affects of the power of delusion. No human artifact, claim, or aspiration can match much less exceed the consequential power of delusion. Every human artifact, claim, and aspiration has delusion built-in to it, hard-wired, so to speak, as integral with its existence.
This is the real meaning of the essential and salutary Christian doctrine mis-labeled stupidly by not a few Christians and maliciously by Christianity’s cultured despisers — the phrase is Schleiermacher’s, made famous modernly by Reinhold Niebuhr — as Original Sin. Estrangement at Origin would be a sober and proper replacement for the misleading phrase Original Sin.
Power Line Blog’s writer referenced above refuses with adamantine tenacity and a certain admirable consistency to recognize and self-correct for delusion inside the genesis of their own cognition. Spiritual exercise requires one to implement, without ceasing, various strategies, acts — call them comms, for they are that — that maintain awareness of delusion’s power and diminish its necro-genetic puissance.
Gangrene logic emerges from one’s unnoticed, insufficiently scrutinized, and/or demonstrably false assumption(s). In other words, gangrene logic emerges from one’s un-thwarted delusion. Allowed to self-develop, gangrene logic assiduously and often with celerity erects a house, so to speak, a structure, of disease and death the main remedy for which is excision.
So, gangrene logic, like vivacious logic, accomplishes something, not nothing. Gangrene logic is not neutral or ephemeral, an occasion for unconcern because it has no consequence. Gangrene logic has consequences, unpleasant, smelly, necrotic ones. It has power to expand by self-replication, at least so long as it has a host. Gangrene logic produces points of death, which someone then must labor to cut away so as to prevent their overwhelming more of their host than they already have done.
This scenario comes from severing comms with reality then shooting about in the closed system resulting therefrom.
Vivacious logic accomplishes something as well, something that is pleasant, restorative, worthy to be sought after. Think Psalm 1.
Just reflect on this for a minute: How and why did men and women forget their innate Divinity? How did they fall into this delusion of little-ness? Inquire in such manner – then you will know that it must be the result of the mind running after momentary pleasures. What then is the remedy? Mastery over mountains of information has been attained by people now; but wisdom has lagged behind! Hence, your capacity to probe and progress into the realm of the Universal and the Absolute must be developed. The secret to success in this journey is just one word: Worship! Do everything as worship. ‘You become that which you feel (Yat bhavam tat bhavati).’ You can get the feeling for the Divine only if you have a taste of the love of the Divine. Divine incarnates as human (Avatar) to give you a taste of that sweet love so that the yearning for the Lord will be firmly implanted in your heart.
Sathya Sai Baba – Divine Discourse, Nov 24, 1961.
Examples of vivacious logic include:
Bible, Vedas, Ramayana, Gita, Bhagavatha, The Christian Liturgy (Greek and Latin), Tillich’s three-volume Systematic Theology, autobiographies/writings of Saints, Sages, Soldiers, Poets, Statesmen, and Builders of manufacturing, transportation, and hospitality concerns.
Sex is for procreation. Marriage is for procreation. Anything inhibiting procreation should be unthinkable, to protect an existing family, or sublimated in espousal of faith and loyalty in the disciplines which procreate spiritual progeny: poverty, chastity, and obedience.
Examples of gangrene logic include:
All three arguments for the so-called existence of God — Ontological (Anselm), Cosmological (Aquinas), Moral (Kant) — Whitehead/Russell’s Principia Mathematica, Talmud, Fiqh, Medina (second) portion of Koran, and soi-disant activists for and practitioners of an ideology, aka a house of gangrene logic.
Sex is for pleasure (Roe v. Wade). Marriage is for sex (Obergefell v. Hodges). Anything inhibiting pleasure by sex is to be discarded.
These analyses rely on the assumption that one, in this case the writer, can know the difference between good and evil. There is an ancient and accurate myth recounting consequences of even wanting to know that, much less claiming to and adjudicating by the presumption.
Existence is a mixture and none of us knows or should want to know which element of the mixture is of which moral flavor because none is of either . . . or better, each is of both. This is Theology 101 and even Philosophy 101. It trumps Law 101, even as an operational protocol.
Who is right and who is wrong about this or that wish or happening is another matter altogether. Although not easy, and requiring subtle strength in the power of discrimination, it is possible and desirable to be able to see which is which. In this case, as between Donald Trump and his anti-claque, he is right and they are wrong. That is a phenomenological assessment, which is possible, not a moral one, which is not.
A joke circulated among Confederate Soldier of The Army of Northern Virginia. It went like this: Come down, come down, come down out o’ that hat. I know you’re in there. I can see your legs a-danglin’.
The Church long plays a canon using that theme: Come down, come down, come down out of that ignorance. I know you’re in there. I can see your hands a-whirlin’.
From 13 September 2017: Something Dreadful Is Afoot:
Tillich, BTW, maintains that the conundrum of theodicy is solved by the Doctrine of Love, to include abandonment of the intractable — the truly deplorable — to their own self-destruction.
It occurs to me that the dread is not ours, not citizens’, not the nation’s, but the UniParty’s and the colleges’ and universities’ who populate the UniParty. They are trying to make us feel about them the dread they feel about themselves, for being derelict in their duty, for having destroyed their raison d’être.
Let us make its sources own the dread they feel and want to off-load onto us but cannot.
The great Sage Cusanus’ (Nicholas of Cusa) phrase docta ignorantia is a correlate of the Vedic word vidyamaya and the present phrase vivacious logic. See also here.
A puckish thought occurred to me this morning:
Q: What is the CIA doing around the world?
A: Look around the world to where people are unhappy and miserable, and there is your answer to that question.
VDH: The Military-Intelligence Complex
Joel D. Harrison: The Most Important Thing You Need To Know About Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Theology
Βασιλεία του Θεού