The flower of life and the vesica pisces: How do these sacred geometrical patterns inform us about human relationship and the divine equations that are written into us? We're told so often that we are but "social constructs" when, in fact, there are essential and universal elements in each of us. Parental love is one of these essential divine sparks--it is the natural gravity that holds us together and the very essentiality that must not only be protected but relied upon in social, legal, political and spiritual deliberations and systems. Parental love expresses itself in gradations based on the level of creativity and responsibility invested into a given relationship and can reciprocally be cultivated through fostering those very pathways. This universal element—this "gravity" of human relationship—shatters monotonous presuppositions of social engineers and post-modernists and liberates us from the blind machinations of collectivists totalitarians.

Throughout the history of human (homo religioso) civilization, beauty was always something not to confine, define or debate, but something to aspire toward and live into--a universal fabric that cultures around the world abided out of the obvious utility and Truth that living aesthetically entailed.

Through story, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture and religious devotion, humans honored what they saw as a natural seed planted in their hearts which attracted them to the beautiful and universally stirred inspiration within them when participating in aesthetic experience.

In the late 19th century and the early 20th century, along with the denial of God came the denial of human nature, the denial of the immutable nature of beauty and the denial of universality altogether. With this denial, a competition has arisen in the hearts of the modern man to outdo and render obsolete, inert and unrecognizable, timeless and eternal aesthetic expressions that have served humans since for millennia. The rebellion against natural and universal aesthesia offers but one possible direction: anaesthesia. Strangely, as we have rebelled against universality and the obvious common fabric of existence, we have implemented anaesthesia and the anaesthetic to occupy the cultural, spiritual, psychic, philosophical and political space of the aesthetic. In a sense, we've foisted what I describe as an "anaesthetic aesthetic"--a contrived value system that doesn't derive it's power or relevance from the eternal, metaphysical or divine (because it is devoid of value in those realms) but strictly operates within the realm of social credit. My artwork, my poetry, my philosophy, my politics or my psychology is applauded and credited directly in proportion to how drastically it takes a stand against timeless expressions and understandings of aesthesia, vivacity, sensuousness, stength and beauty and instead propagates a fabric of anesthesia, discordance, weakness and ugliness.

But it is a farce and an anesthetic hypocrisy that has resulted in an emptiness and longing among its adherents for the kind of absolute and traditional aesthesia that predates this grotesque and narcissistic rebellion that has been infecting hearts and minds in the postmodern, progressive age.

Could the rabbinic and church fathers or the ancestors of philosophy have truly anticipated the level of servitude and confinement to which modern popular ethics would confine humanity? Perhaps-- but I think that I have a certain advantage living in this age, a certain perspective that they may have never imagined--one only made possible by the increasing remoteness of freedom and liberty in contemporary life sold in a faustian bargain for safety, predictability and control.

Traditionally and historically, most meditations and dialogues concerning theodicy presumed a moral playing field that placed suffering, pain and destitution on one end and pleasure and glory on the other. But what of this premise? Are those the most absolute poles of what is good or evil, or natural results of benevolence or malevolence?

What if those polarities, what if that spectrum, wasn't about pleasure and pain or glory and destitution at all? What if, instead, the proper poles were freedom and slavery? On such a playing field and within such a spectrum, there is no need for meditations vindicating an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God from the reality of painful things happening to good or innocent people, because the pole of good is the equivalent of the pole of freedom. In other words: God needs no vindication because freedom is inherently and intrinsically good and it is only through offering an allowing it that his omnibenevolence can be expressed, fulfilled and defined

Frederick Douglass said this: "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you will have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them." Douglass' words ring true on a timeless level, and in the modern era with the capricious rules of Political Correctness and the ever-changing rules of "safety" in COVID-19 America, we are getting a sense of just how much people will not only quietly submit to--but champion their submission as a badge of honor and sophistication.

One consistent thing that must be given up in order to hang with the changing landscape and often senseless and irrational social and legal mandates is this: dignity. Dignity is lost--or voluntarily surrendered--when one subscribes to a system of rules and regulations that they can't themselves make sense of. Tragically, once dignity is given up to meet a senseless and irrational set of mandates, or capricious power-plays, the leviers of the rules levy an even more absurd round of dictates which seem to meet the undignified populace where they are at, which in turn debase themselves further in indignity to submit to the new mandate-- and the vicious cycle goes on. Douglass' words ring as true to dignity as they do to oppression: find out just how much indignity people will willingly live in and you will find the exact measure of how much dignity they will be expected to give up.

The nihilists, as could be predicted, have their sights on super-heroes. But, of course, the true target is the heroic impulse--and virtue itself

"Be safe," "Your safety is our number one priority," "Safety comes first." These kinds of phrases are usually common, but in the age of COVID19, they're downright ever present. While seemingly innocuous at face value, the effect of hearing this over and over again and seeing it on signs, email signatures, PSAs, highway signs, corporate messaging, politicians' platforms and government policy is to gaslight us into questioning the very core of our own God-given nature: to take care of our own safety and focus on self-preservation. The message is this: "We're perpetually telling you to "be safe" perpetually because you're a social construct and we can't be sure if such values have been instilled or engineered in you. You very likely don't know how to take care of yourself."

Social engineering directed toward fixing something that isn't broken or building something that already exists has the effect--and quite possibly the intention--of making us doubt our very nature.

Traditionally speaking, rites of passage were orchestrated also as a social engineering program--but not one that reinforced the drive for self-preservation innate in being born and being alive, but to draw us into danger and intentional wounding--forcing us to confront the inherent danger in life as well as the inherent danger in giving up who we are, what we know and how we act in service to our more evolved, more sophisticated, braver, selves. What's needed today, more than ever, is the weaving of ancient rites of passage into our modern day social and cultural fabric to invite us into the unknown and extraordinary world so that we may live fully, courageously and vibrantly, let the calcified and rigid aspects of ourselves die so that we may be reborn.

But all of this can't happen without the casualty of perpetual, predictable safety and security--and the outright sacrifice of the false safety culture that we venerate today.

In Charles Dickens' epic novel Great Expectations--a young man pines for a ticket to the life of high society, where he imagines he will find intensified purpose, increased consequence and a life worth living. Blinded by his superficial fantasies of status and prestige, he is unable to see the authentic beauty of the way of life around him in rural England--and so he betrays the people who comprise such life and stomps on them repeatedly to raise himself to some imaginary ivory tower.

Such reveries also plague the imaginations of the modern progressive elite fueling an endless rampage through working class communities which they afflict with rules, regulations and agencies through which they ruin the very existence of local culture and ways of life, subduing the grit of the increasingly fading American yeoman and forcing him to bend the knee to contrived and uninitiated and rapacious sensibilities disguised in cloaks of philanthropy and utopianism.

The increasing propaganda frenzy of the mainstream media, now mandating cancel culture and the religion of social justice torrentially and publishing mendacious articles with almost unanimous consistency forwarding ideologies promoting centralized authority and planning and denigrating individual liberty could be a sign that we are at a tipping point. But which way will we tip? While it may seem inevitable that we will tip into the chaotic, irrational world of the totalitarian Left, the increasing frenzy could also be a sign that there is a sense among this group that the window of opportunity for the utopian pseudo-dream is closing.

Though the U.S. is far from being a free market anymore, there may just be enough free market left to steer the media's pandering to the Left's outlandish and dystopian "woke" culture in the other direction. After all, millions of people have had just about enough and are incessant virtue signaling and increasingly capricious Overton Window, and are signing off from vanguard media propaganda institutions due to their outright insanity, which in a free market system, will inevitably drive advertisers to choose outlets that meet the rising demand for truth and freedom.

This, combined with the Left's new authoritarianism and the obsolescence of any legitimate claim it may have once had to being the "counter culture"— and therefore losing any credible call to being "cool"—and resulting unpalatability to up and coming generations, may just be enough to keep us from this apparent descent into a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape.

If I had a nickel for every leftist I've heard say "well the world could use a culling" when they reflect on the death toll of the coronavirus--I'd have close to a dollar.

The fact is--the constantly peddled narrative that people are a parasite and the world is overpopulated inspires necrophilic sensibilities and ethical structures within the minds and souls of individuals who subscribe to it. Once someone goes down this road, they find themselves deriving sensual pleasure at the idea of masses of people dying. They feel it as a purging and revel in it though they may virtue signal that it is a tragedy. To boot, this concept and narrative is often used to substantiate draconian measures at collective regulation and the evisceration of individual rights and liberty.

No, the world is not overpopulated and here we talk a little bit about how and why that is and how believing it must be resisted at all costs if we are to honor life, birth and virtue.

'Surely, individuals must give up some rights for the collective welfare..."

Collectivist platitudes like this are common parlance in our popular discourse, culture and ethic today. They are seductive and often convincing because they appeal to spiritual sensibilities that we all have to sacrifice and serve others. However, these sensibilities do not mesh with political templates and when attempted on that scale and in that arena, necessarily result in the disintegration and annihilation of the individual--meaning ALL individuals--thereby undermining the very possibilities of a "collective" and well-being in the first place.

When dealing with the seductive rhetoric of a collectivist, it's important to be able to dissect their logic and shine a light on its lack of principles, slippery premises and hellish implications. Here's one way you can do that.

Observe, as our culture and collective consciousness becomes more and more uniform, narrow, obediently politically correct--as we kill off our creativity and imagination month by month, mandate by mandate--how the fascination with the symbol of the unicorn is in clear ascendance.

This symbol--a sort of demigod of the natural world, a marriage of the divine and the natural, the mortal and the immortal, is a symbol of near perfection in the physical world. It is a symbol of virtue, courage, beauty, life and the nexus between the sacred and the profane, the imperfect and the perfect, the manifest and the ideal. Symbols, mythologies and ideals like the unicorn help to tether humans--in our souls and our imaginations--to the ethereal realm and to God. They are directional images that inform us on how to actualize and pursue our own soul's purpose.

Ironically, this particular symbol--the unicorn--is popularized and waved most aggressively by demographics who tend to be the most conformist and obedient in politically correct orthodoxy, and artificial control. Demographics who, in fact, have chosen not to pursue and elevate the eternal, the great, the heroic and the godly, but to elevate the constricted, fake, contrived, slavish and authoritarian. They are, in essence and action, necrophiliacs. They experience and pursue intoxication and exaltation not in their own courageous expansion and soul's connection to the eternal and the divine but, rather, by maiming, enslaving and capturing--even just for a moment--those who are honoring and venerating that very eternal connection and the immortal and godly strands of their core essence.

This act perpetuated by necrophiliacs, of temporary enslavement, is their best shot at permanence because they have turned their backs on moving forward, expanding and becoming more virtuous. This act is a cheating shot at power, achieved by carving out a traumatic memory and experience in the the immortal souls of those who remain dedicated to God and truth--the unicorns. And in those memories of traumatic captivity that carry on within the unicorns, the necrophiliacs achieve their Satanic semblance of immortality.

Here as we set into the high holidays i think it's appropriate to discuss how giving is the gift of life and the complexities thereof.

There are many threads of purpose within the divine creation we live in--we can create them or more aptly, we can discover them by paying attention to who we are and what drives us forward, outward and enables us to expand spiritually.

Here we'll talk about how Gratitude is foundational to Growth with is foundational to our capacity to Give and how living this cycle is one key to soul expansion--a responsibility we all have for the work that awaits us int he next world.

Betrayal by our peers in particular, during the initiatory teenage years hurts like hell--but in realty is a true gift. When a budding adult has such an experience, they are forced to look within to define who they are, their morality, their principles that will be their guiding stars for the rest of their life, while also developing the heroic callouses and viscera that are necessary for standing in the fire of social scrutiny later in life.

We all try to avoid betrayal--because betrayal is horrible to experience. However, when we successfully avoid it for our entire lives, we fabricate the illusion that if we are only "good and obedient enough" to social whims and mandates--then everything will be OK--blind to the fact that we've blindly adopted social whims as our very morality, and enabled ourselves to participate in whatever heinous deeds or ethics that such whims have constructed.

For decades now, a concerted and illogical assault on the masculine has been waged on both men and the essential nature of masculinity in general. Starting in the U.S. and Western Europe, this movement is, unfortunately spreading around the world. Ironically, the ideological maps that are used to make the assault and deconstruct the masculine would never succeed or gain ground in a society in which the masculine was healthy and properly empowered. Why? Because it is the divine masculine itself that--on every level from existence and the cosmos to the human psyche to the economy and to society--that creates and holds structure and form together with painstaking effort.

The success of this assault and "masculinicide" relies itself on a weakened masculine, as a strong masculine would suss out the illogical, flawed and hypocritical foundations and premises used to forward anti-masculine agendas in the first place.

While there is an equivalent assault on the psyche of women and interrupting their connection to the divine feminine, through styling and contrived ideology of what it means to be an empowered woman, there will never be an equivalent assault on the actual essential divine feminine to the extent we are seeing on the essential divine masculine because it is the reservoir of infinite possibility that is needed to bring forth the structure of reality. What must be destroyed and what is much more vulnerable is the masculine--that which brings life forth with painstaking effort and creates and maintains the structure of reality itself. Once that is enervated and conquered, new access to the infinite well of the divine feminine is granted to allow for any new structure that is desired.

You break our legs and expect us to accept the soup you bring us? No no, Mr. Governor--we aren't so easily tamed.

Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?
I do not believe it can be done.

The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
If you try to change it, you will ruin it.
If you try to hold it, you will lose it...

-Lao Tsu

...if only the progressives could hear.