27-28/11/12

It is one of the great ironies of civilized history that the people who are usually most against free thought should be the religious, and that the absence of significant free thought from religion is due, in no small measure, to a shortfall from and/or opposition to metaphysics which leaves one with either anti-free thought in relation to bound soma or to anti-free thought from the standpoint of some alternative freedom and/or binding which would normally be associated with free speech, free verse, so to speak, or a free press, not to mention the bound opposites to each of those which always exist either in relation to each context or the truncated metaphysics of that which, given to bound soma in the crucifixional paradigm, is inherently hostile to virtually any form of freedom, its own free counterpart in free thought not excepted.

I believe it is worse to be against a given freedom from the standpoint of one or other of the bindings than from an alternative or contrary order of freedom, like free thought to free speech or even a free press to free verse, the classical opposition of reading to writing.

To me, Islam is the worst kind of religion because it upholds the paradoxical principle of 'holy war' to further and/or defend itself. Religious bigotry appears to attain to something of an acme with this religion, which is fundamentally intolerant of other religions.

That said, all religions are, to greater or lesser extents, intolerant of other religions, else there would be no justification for their existence as separate, independent religions with different approaches to and even concepts of God. So much so that those who think or imagine that all religions are fundamentally about the same thing, the same God, are grossly mistaken. Even within the same religion, like Christianity, there are significant differences between Catholics and Protestants, as well as between Protestants themselves, quite apart from the even wider differences between Christians in general and Judaists or Moslems or peoples of other religious traditions.

Islam is, in a sense, the inverted image of Judaism, with an emphasis upon the 'One God' that nevertheless differs, as Allah from Jehovah, from anything Judaic and therefore germane to Jews alone. Allah, the Moslem God, is by no means germane to Arabs alone, but is acknowledged and worshipped by many different peoples right across the globe, as, for that matter, is Christ, the fruit, in each case, of an imperialism that the Jews, driven into diaspora exile, were not in a position to emulate.

However, all religions that worship a God rather than strive to cultivate Heaven within the Self, the Soul, are fundamentally delusional and incapable, in consequence, of transcendental truth in the joy of metaphysical selfhood. Any religion that is true rather than false will be the least intolerant of others and, conversely, the most tolerant of self, least soma, one might say, and most psyche. Hitherto only Buddhism has fulfilled that requirement.

So-called abstract beauty, or beauty that owes more to psyche than to soma, is if not the highest kind of beauty then, at any rate, that which stands closest to truth, as pseudo-metachemical pseudo-free psyche to metaphysical free psyche, and is therefore the handmaiden, so to speak, of truth or, in the event of a metaphysical shortfall from truth (through illusion), even a substitute for truth, as has usually been the case with traditional religions when they are in some degree metaphysical but also, if imperfectly and as it were more spuriously, pseudo-metachemical, like Catholicism and even Islam to a degree.

The Beautiful per se, on the other hand, is concrete as opposed to abstract or, more correctly, pseudo-abstract, and is not only the highest, because hegemonic, mode of beauty but, being metachemical, that which is antithetical to religious truth in a kind of scientific objectivity deriving from its fundamentally vacuous – and hence female – nature. This beauty is somatic, not psychic, and it tends to rule over a pseudo-truth which, being pseudo-metaphysical, appertains to pseudo-free soma, the pseudo-male counterpart to the pseudo-free psyche of the pseudo-metachemical pseudo-female.

Therefore one cannot say, with Keats, that 'beauty is truth, truth beauty', but only that pseudo-truth exists in pseudo-metaphysical subordination, a plane down at the northwest point of the intercardinal axial compass, to metachemical beauty, as germane to the Beautiful per se, whereas pseudo-beauty, by contrast, exists in pseudo-metachemical subordination, a plane down at the northeast point of the intercardinal axial compass, to metaphysical truth, as germane to Truth per se.

Absolutes exclude one another, particularly when they are concrete on the one hand (beauty) and abstract on the other (truth), but the pseudo-concrete pseudo-truth is perfectly or, rather, imperfectly capable of co-existing with concrete beauty, and the pseudo-abstract pseudo-beauty no less imperfectly capable of co-existing with abstract truth, if, as with pseudo-truth, on a subordinate and even secondary basis, the basis not of secondary state-hegemonic subordination, as with pseudo-truth a plane down (at the northwest point of the intercardinal axial compass) from beauty, but on secondary church-hegemonic terms a plane down (at the northeast point of the said compass) from truth, to which it should ever defer because incapable of properly existing without it.

But pseudo-abstract beauty, like pseudo-concrete truth, is the least ratio aspect of the pseudo-element (pseudo-metachemistry) to which it pertains, and for that reason one cannot allow oneself to fall into the illogical trap of isolating it from its complementary most ratio aspect, the pseudo-bound soma that stands to pseudo-free psyche in a 3:1 ratio within the pseudo-metachemical context and is therefore its defining attribute. Just as, conversely, pseudo-truth counts for little within pseudo-metaphysics in relation to the pseudo-bound psyche of pseudo-illusion, so pseudo-beauty counts for little in relation to the pseudo-bound soma of pseudo-ugliness within the pseudo-metachemical context, a context, or pseudo-element, defined, neutralized dragon-like, by its absolutely predominating ratio aspect.

Far from being identical, the co-existence of pseudo-truth with beauty and, conversely, of pseudo-beauty with truth is also the co-existence of pseudo-illusion with ugliness and of pseudo-ugliness with illusion.

The oppression of adults, particularly when male, by kids is a subject worthy of investigation and analysis in an age when the Western decadence of bourgeois equalitarianism has been eclipsed, in the big cities, by the cosmopolitan barbarity of juvenile tyranny, of unchecked, untrammelled anarchic behaviour within the context, by and large, of dysfunctional families or one-parent anomalies of a largely proletarian or immigrant nature.