Why men feel hopeless, the dating scene & other blackpills

                                                                          

A gentleman does not critique women, especially respecting their own suffering, amd how many get off on bullying the fairer sex. 

Nevertheless, a freind in despair asked me to write something from the perspective of young men that he could show his older parents.

1) Men will use this to spread misogynistic hate, as certain women will with male stats, this is not the bolgs intention.

2) Men will use these stats to excuse they're own weaknesses and failure. I know.

3) Men too need to own up responsibility, but this is about women.

4) These stats need context, often which takes the bite out of them, but this is a blog not a dissertation, so tale it with a grain of salt.

If one has the emotional maturity, then read on with the above in mind, otherwise please skip.

First some stats,

"More than 60 percent of young men are single, nearly twice the rate of unattached young women..." HERE

                                          

The Number Of Sexless Men Has *Tripled* In 10 Years HERE 

                                    

Also, male virginity is on the rise :

                       

Men are often bad, and sinful, and violent.

What happens when you remove large forms of social constraint on men ? They form gangs, they become criminal, they kill themselves.

Now, what happens when you remove social constraints for women ? Nothing ? Is not Eve fallen as well ?

Whenever one critiques women, men come out of the wood work to defend them naturally, it is the make instinct, women come to shame such people, call them incels.

But, if we are equal, then women too must have SOME bad aspects.

Since people keep asking me, here are a few.

Most PUA guys will simply hammer home that guys learn these 3 points :

• Hypergamy (She only dates up)

• Solipsism (Her feelings are her reality)

• Briffault's Law (No value, no relationship)

"Once you understand these concepts...It's laughably easy to predict their behavior,"  they say.

Well....sort of, but let's not get too incelly here.

Men love idealy, just the girl. They can hunt and make huts and are *free to love so.

Women (until 60 yrs ago) cannot hunt a mammoth w a 2 month old baby on her back.

She must love the man, AND his ability to get bread and meat. That aspect will be part of her love.

Men want ideal love, women will never understand that, or understand men's sacrifice...just as men will never understand the hard difficulty of motherhood, or insecurities.

Different genders, different loves, and neither understands what love is for the other.

       

    

Really, this is obvious, and what virtually every society has told us since the dawn, every common man knows this, and intellectuals must be given endless proof of what is well known...everything Rollo says was said thousands of years ago in Assemblywomen by Aristophanes in 391 BC....

These stats actually make sense when you look at how vulnerable women have been historically, see HERE :

Half of women in relationships report maintaining a 'back-up' partner in their social circle

43% of women reported having a back-up partner.

80% were in contact with the back-up partner.

50% said their partners were aware of this potential replacement.

25% said they had feelings as strong for their back-up partner as they do for their primary partner.

15% said their feelings were stronger for the back-up then for their primary partner.

It's true women usually only date sideways and up.

These are the results of a study of Tinder and OKCupid swipes, which suggested that the top 78% of women are only interested in dating the top 20% of men.

        

"The top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men"

Here, women were asked to rate the attractiveness of a man’s online dating photos, and 80% of men were rated as below average attractiveness.

                               

"A man of average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females"


                                                          

Pareto principle, 80% of women going for top 20% of guys.

There is no hierarchy, class, or caste system to regulate this anymore.


Pareto principle checks out against the data. Women rate 80% of men as “below average attractiveness”.



                                                   

Gender gap is nothing, check out the height gap
.
"A 6-foot man earning $62,500 per year is, on average, as desirable as a similar 5'6" man who earns $237,500.

In other words, those six inches of height are worth about $175,000 in salary on the dating market.


                                    

Read HERE and HERE 

"A situation emerges in which most men are desperate for wives, but many women are just as desperately throwing themselves at a very few exceptionally attractive men"


"Once monogamy is abolished, no restriction is placed on a woman's choices. Hence, all women choose the same few men"
–F Roger Devlin, Sexual Utopia in Power (2006)

Women are human, and humans want power. Yes, mostly its men who are power hungry, but now women have joined them. Feminism *these days wants the best of all possible worlds: rights without responsibilities; privileges without obligations.

                               

Psychologists also point to the Great Girl syndrome, women being constantly told they deserve better.


"Women are more egocentric and narcissistic than they used to be, according to extensive research by two psychologists in the US.

More women think the universe revolves around them, with a deluded sense of their fabulousness, and believe they are cleverer, more talented and more attractive than they actually are.


According to the American research, there has been a 67 per cent increase in it over the past two decades, mainly among women. "


Read more HERE and HERE.

Also, women have more friends, a wider social circle, and more social support, Read HERE.

                                                                

Furthermore, women are incentivized to divorce, not only alimony, and an entire industry egging them on, but also the idea of a new fresh relationship, and dozens of men vying for their attention is tempting for anyone.

Social media too - it's not easy for a man to compete with thousands of thirsty fella's commenting on a gal's instagram page, practically worshiping her, not to mention the extreme egoism this induces.

So, men are afraid of divorce.

Contrary to common assumptions, divorce today seldom involves two people mutually deciding to part ways. According to Frank Furstenberg and Andrew Cherlin in Divided Families, 80 percent of divorces are unilateral, that is, over the objection of one spouse. The woman.

Now, According to the Department of Health and Human Services , “Children of single parents had a 77% greater risk of being harmed by physical abuse, an 87% greater risk of being harmed by physical neglect, and an 80% greater risk of suffering serious injury or harm from abuse or neglect than children living with both parents.” Britain’s Family Education Trust reports that children are up to 33 times more likely to be abused in a single-parent home than in an intact family.

So, we’d expect a woman to be in incredible danger, and initiate divorce only in the most desperate of circumstances.

No. Not because they are beaten or abused, but, according to Psychology today , they divorce because men fail to meet “expectations for gender equality.”

These are not girls breaking up with their boyfriends. These are marriages. Children are involved.

The reasons given are laughably abstract and inconsequential - the woman aren't treated equal enough etc - mistreatment or abuse is not mentioned at all.

                                                    

What ? Only 30% of men can meet reasonable expectations of a marriage, to the point where entire families are dismantled justifiably.

While 70% of women CAN meet reasonable expectations of men ?

And this is not the fault of women having unreasonable expectations.? This is simply because the vast majority of men act so horrifically that the family must be broken up, with all the terrible consequences suffered by the children that entails ?

That many children are harmed by parental conflict is not in doubt, nor is the fact that some children benefit from parental separation because it lessens their exposure to conflict. But Amato and Booth estimate that at most a third of divorces involving children are so distressed that the children are likely to benefit. The remainder, about 70%, involve low-conflict marriages that apparently harm children much less than do the realities of divorce.

Moreover, Amato and Booth estimate that, as the threshold of dissatisfaction at which divorce occurs becomes ever lower, an even higher proportion of future divorces will involve low-conflict situations in which divorce will be worse for children than the continuation of the marriage. This reasoning leads to a startling conclusion, especially coming from two liberal social scientists: For that majority of marriages in trouble that are not fraught with conflict, "future generations would be well served if parents remained together until children are grown."

Here’s another statistic: Divorced and separated men are two and a half times more likely to commit suicide than married men. Divorce, however, doesn’t seem to lead more women to commit suicide. Separated and divorced male suicides outnumber their female counterparts by 4 to 1.

Women are overwhelmingly the ones who don’t want to honor the marriage vows. This is confirmed by the academic study “These Boots Are Made for Walking”: Why Most Divorce Filers Are Women and the data on the age of wife at the time of divorce.

Putting this together, divorce reform is all about redistributing power from the husband who wants to honor the marriage vows to the wife who doesn't.

Why ? Basically, wives are now incentivized to divorce by the alimony retirement plan racket, the anti-male divorce industrial complex, and the practical guarantee of child custody. 

               

Men have it tough, but women don’t see thew bottom 80% of men, they look at the top 20% in society and indeed it is mostly men, but the bottom 80% of men are just as “oppressed” and denigrated as women, who, in general live in the middle, the bottom 40% of society, in prison or homeless, is mostly men.

Norah Vincent disguised herself as a man for 18 months to see what it was like...2 weeks ago she committed suicide, partially due to the psychological scars of how difficult life was as a man.

She was shocked how cruelly women treated her as a man....and how as a man she was constantly and mercilessly scrutinized for weakness or inadequacy, and judged.

A brave woman.   Read HERE  

Here's the real issue :

1) Women's problems are societies problems, and delt with as such.

Men's problems are their own, and male fraternities & friendships are dying.

2) Women are encouraged to voice problems, even get male attention & sympathy.

Men are despised and judged for the same, rightly I think.

3) As the Psychologist Rollo May said, women will never understand a man's problems, and will lose respect if they are voiced....A woman's problems, however, must be also his, listend and attended to, in relationship.

4) As the author writes, her manhood was constantly scrutinized, by women, men, and even children, for weakness, and judged harshly instead of engenduring sympathy or help.

And by most meterics, men have it harsher, prison, poverty, mentally illness, suicide, health, dangerous work etc etc

Both suffer differently but equally, only men have no support, but this strengthens them.

Of course, history has seen this before, I've blogged on it HERE 

A man needs attachments and purpose. A family provides both. Plus respect, significance, and a place in society. Also approval from Mother Nature - your genes are worthy - and from the the community of men. Studies have shown how men without families are distrusted by other men. Without a family, one's sense of worth vanishes, in society's eyes as well.

                                                                  

Adam Lane Smith breaks it down here, he says :

"…all of these men have been raised to believe that the world is ending that we're in a total collapse that there's no such thing as a loving family that there's no such thing as a loving marriage there's no such thing as unconditional love there is no such thing as security there's no such thing as Financial Security there's no such thing as a home you can rely on..

…our brains are telling us we live in a scenario where our culture has been absolutely obliterated our family is dead our village is destroyed everything is overrun by strangers and we now live in a hostile environment…

… it's as if our village was killed we're the only survivor and we've been stolen by slavers who are now raising us as a stranger in their culture…

…men can't be secure they can't have a family they can't own a home they can’t just get a plot of land build a house have a wife raise kids and be together that's what most men want…

                                                          

..we're blocked from doing that and we have a hundred years of broken system that has erased the memory of being able to do that so it’s no longer mentally even possible those aren't even possibilities anymore so the things that are natural to us that our brains are designed for it is impossible for us to have them…

..a generation of young men who just want even the smallest scrap of kindness stability love warmth the brain says I should be marrying the Girl Next Door she should be my friend as we play together and throw rocks and fight with sticks and and catch frogs and then we'll marry her someday and we'll have kids that's what the brain is saying and it's not happening, you gotta fight on Tinder to try to have sex with a girl who has had sex with more men than you have ever met and that's the culture now and men don’t want that so they're just retreating..”

And of course I haven't even touched on the endless articles blaming men and the "patriarchy" for everything from global warming to the rising price of blueberries, the "cancel men" movement, the Future is Female, and a thousands other movements devitalizing young boys. The amount of hatred and demoralization, from denigrating fathers on TV, to film routinely portraying men as weak and incompetent, had one psychologist I know say to me, "It's open season on men, and these boys I see get the message loud and clear : your bad, your not wanted, and your garbage."

Of course they're ready to hang themselves.

                               

And despite claiming the desire for equality, women seem to have no problem with the bulk of low paying or dangerous jobs going to men.


Plus 2/3rds college graduates are female.


Female share of BA Degrees by College Major, 1971-2021. Women earn the majority of degrees in 10 fields and are near parity with men in 4 other fields and are only a minority in only 2 fields: Engineering and Computer Science, the only two gender disparities we ever hear about.

                                                  

Clinical psychology doctoral programs are now 79% female. When the reverse was true for law and medical schools, we talked about the systematic exclusion of females from those professions and the harm that caused clients/patients.

                                                   

Only 5 percent of American psychologists who are thirty years of age or younger are male !

Source: American Psychological Association, 2020.

"In every country studied, girls are more likely than boys to climb the income ladder...75% of American daughters escape the lowest quintile—not unlike girls in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Fewer than 60% of American sons experience similar success." https://city-journal.org/html/boy-trouble-13615.html?utm_source=pocket_mylist

               

WHY are boys doing worse ?

Well, prejudice.

Yes, as in most studies, when actually studied the prejudice nearly always favors women against men, in hiring as well :

"Boys Lag Behind: A comparison of gender-blind vs. non-blind test scores reveals a teacher marking bias in favor of girls. 

This appears to be part of the reason that boys fall behind girls at school.

"Without teachers’ [marking] bias in favor of girls, the gender gap in choosing a science track would be 12.5% larger in favor of boys."

 doi.org/10.1016/j.econ…8

         

The Village Theory.

Anthropologists theorized that in a village of 60, you'd expect to see less grand love affairs than a modern city of 60,000.

But no.

A person has 2 or 3 true loves.

It is as if the human brain has only 2 or 3 slots for an in depth partner.

Unfortunately, young women fill theirs early.

Also, with many partners you are training your body for infidelity. The more partners a women has, because of oxytocin production, the harder it will be for her to pair bond.

In youth we mound ourselves to the other, multiple partners yield past impressions making long term attatchment tough.

In the 1970s, only 6% of women had 4-5 premarital sex partners, and only 2% had 10 or more. In the 1990s, 16% of women had 4-5 premarital sex partners, and 10% had 10 or more. Fast forward to the 2010s, and 18% have 4-5 premarital sex partners, and 18% had 10 or more (that's almost double the amount in the 1990s). 

The sexual revolution may have begun in the 1970s, but the effects show up significantly in the data at the start of the new millennium. In the 1970s, 21% of brides were virgins. In the 2010s, only 5% were. Again, we can only imagine how much that number has lowered in 2020.

I could go on...and on...and on...and on....


Parents are noticing, even forming "mom groups" to help their sons, but don't understand the why :

                                                   

It is a common trope that men sought to repress women's sexuality, the opposite is true !



Sexual Economics, Culture, Men, and Modern Sexual TrendsRoy F. Baumeister &
Kathleen D. Vohs


This is one the of best studies out there.


..."men have collectively put themselves at structural disadvantages in the organizations that men have created....

The large social structures that comprise the worlds of business, government and politics, economic relations, science and technological innovation, and the like are male creations, and yet the young men entering any of them are required to accept formal policies that women will be treated preferentially at each step. How can we account for this remarkable, ironic twist of history?


We have even concluded that the cultural suppression of female sexuality throughout much of history and across many different cultures has largely had its roots in the quest for marketplace advantage (see Baumeister and Twenge 2002). Women have often sustained their advantage over men by putting pressure on each other to restrict the supply of sex available to men. As with any monopoly or cartel, restricting the supply leads to a higher price.

The giant trade thus essentially involved men giving women not only easy access but even preferential treatment in the huge institutions that make up society, which men created. Today most schools, universities, corporations, scientific organizations, governments, and many other institutions have explicit policies to protect and promote women. It is standard practice to hire or promote a woman ahead of an equally qualified man. 

Most large organizations have policies and watchdogs that safeguard women’s interests and ensure that women gain preferential treatment over men. Parallel policies or structures to protect men’s interests are largely nonexistent and in many cases are explicitly prohibited. Legal scholars, for example, point out that any major new law is carefully scrutinized by feminist legal scholars who quickly criticize any aspect that could be problematic or disadvantageous to women, and so all new laws are women-friendly.


Nobody looks out for men, and so the structural changes favoring women and disadvantaging men have accelerated (Baumeister and Vohs 2004).

"...the evidence overwhelmingly indicated that the cultural suppression of female sexuality is propagated and sustained by women ... Similar to how OPEC seeks to maintain a high price for oil on the world market by restricting the supply, women have often sought to maintain a high price for sex by restricting each other’s willingness to supply men with what men want."

"....men want sex, indeed more than women want it. Women, meanwhile, want not only marriage but also access to careers and preferential treatment in the workplace.

The giant trade thus essentially involved men giving women not only easy access but even preferential treatment in the huge institutions that make up society, which men created."

Read the study HERE

As far as the explosion of male suicide, which I once made a post on and had, literally, hundreds of women up in arms astonished that I'd dare suggest the powerful oppressors deserve our sympathy, I'll simply quote Rollo Tomassi :

"Men will always be more disposable than women, and women instinctively understand this. As such, the female psyche evolved to reconcile men’s disposability to move on from the discomfort of men’s sacrifices. Today, nothing serves that rationalization better than the meme of “toxic masculinity.” 

Men’s suicides can never be attributed to anything less than their fragile egos. This makes them victims of their socially implanted “toxic” masculinity. A female narrative would have men put a noose around their necks to live up to a socially constructed definition of masculinity. 

Therefore, the male suicide rate is attributable to men’s fragile egos, self-pity, and inability to live up to being a ‘real man’ caricature that some nebulous Patriarchy created for them. Toxic masculinity is the perfect social convention to absolve women of the guilt of men’s sacrifices. Men are hardwired for self-sacrifice, so women had to evolve psychological adaptations to help them clear the red from their life’s ledger...

Men are 2 to 3 times more likely to kill themselves after a job loss and eight times more likely to commit suicide after a divorce. In addition, 7 in 10 suicides are men between 45 and 65.

Gynocentric media waves away these stats with toxic masculinity and men’s so-called stubbornness in seeking psychiatric help for depression because “men think it makes them look weak.” Again, this absolves women’s complacency but ignores any conversation about what would motivate men, particularly in this demographic, to commit suicide. There’s no attempt to understand the underlying reasons for male suicide. Any associated guilt, remorse, or cognitive dissonance about men’s deaths is assuaged with easy cultural narratives about pathetic maleness.

There has never been a generation of more purposeless men than today. From an evolved psychological perspective, men need a function."

As far as the effect modern consumeristic culture has had on women's dating and marriage, I've blogged  HERE and HERE

Bataille : by Sacrifice we Sanctify

By sacrificing a thing to God, we "de-thing" it, and it returns to us as blessed, no longer mere matter, but a vehicle of the Divine. We go from a pure economic economy to a gift economy, God's economy of grace. Bataille, with qualifications, has much to teach us on this.

Bataille, of course, makes the blunder of most intellectuals when he takes the sacramental lived experience of sacrifice, or the intimacy of eating, and disembeds, and therefore disfigures, them from biblical narrative, creedal formulae, and the praxis of an embodied faith community.

Christ, of course, came not to give a doctrine, but His body, the Church, to share us in to a particular type of person whose form of life naturally shapes how how perceive and receive the world - as gift.

Bataille did rightly recoil from any theology that proclaimed eternal life could be possessed in a way that did not actually involve this world :

“One cannot posit divine intimacy unless it is in the particular, without delay, as the possibility of an immanence of the divine and of man.”

Indeed, in the prologue to his Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, St. Bonaventure also says that “no one is in any way disposed for divine contemplation that leads to mystical ecstasy unless like Daniel he is a man of desires (Dan. 9:23).”

Bataille did consider medieval sacred festivals, monuments, and architecture to function as at least partial replacements for the reality of immanence, so that Protestantism with its anti-sacramental cosmos and reformed doctrine of justification, having definitively severed the order of intimacy from the order of things, was for him practically identical with the death of God and the rise of industry .

I don’t think his criticisms of authentic Catholic, and Orthodox, ways to the divine, quiet hit the mark as essential, he’s used to the bland fleshless rationalism we see all too much today, but it is a valid criticism of Protestantism, and elements clearly within lived Catholic life that we need to be conscious of of fight against.

Against the “fall” into the utilitarian “order of things” Bataille opposed the “order of intimacy” which he interchangeably called “life,” “the holy,” “the sacred,” “the mythic”, or even “salvation.” Bataille believed religion was at its most effective when it breaks through the utilitarian order and demands sacrifice—an act of consumption that negates any further use.


“The opposite of project is sacrifice. […] And where only the result counts in the project, in the sacrifice, the act consecrates value in itself. Nothing in sacrifice is put off until later;”

— Bataille

And, if Christianity is true, then Christ’s sacrifice has indeed sanctified the world, by removing all things, including people, form utilitarian “thing hood” and conferred infinite value, sanctity, and all things. Another way of saying the is we are all Priests, and must offer up, sacrifice, the things of the world, ti be returned as blessed by God, no longer objects of mere use for ourselves, but now as means and vehicles to and of the the Divine; sacrifice and gift, are ultimately One - but that is only if indeed there is a divine telos to the Cosmos, which Bataille denies, despite all desire phenomenologically intended toward the good necessarily.

The point of a sacramental sacrifice, in rational Christianity, IS to unite the flesh and spirit in an erotic way that does not degenerate in violent and chaotic multiplicity.

Bataille’s criticisms of reason as a pale discursive faculty have little to do with Christianity’s traditional stance, after all, regardless of what we see today. It is the liturgy which shapes how and what we desire, affirming that true discourse of the God who cannot be grasped by thought must be related to by an open heart in communal praise, charity, and thanksgiving.

This is the sin of Protestant thought, with its “faith commitments” to mere creeds, informational knowledge apart from transformational embodied knowing experience in embodied liturgical forms of life.

Catholic thought, utilizing Platonic philosophy, always knew better than to separate or oppose desire from intellect, after all, one can only know what one loves, one must wish to know a thing first to intend one’s attention to that thing, hence all knowledge begins in the heart.

Think of King David - “I will not give to the Lord what costs me nothing” or the woman who broke an alabaster jar of ointment over Jesus’s feet instead of giving money to the poor.

David’s sacrifice was a destruction of utility and the woman at Bethany recognized that worship does not justify itself by anything other than itself.

Unfortunatly, Bataille refused to accept that sacrifice was in any sense teleological, or that it resonated with the peace of God rooted in the goodness of Creation.

Ultimately, without a proper doctrine of the fall, he ends up in a kind of reverse Gnosticism, divinizing the agony of our present incarnated fleshly existence, and extolling what amounts to yet another death cult, for there is nothing real outside the game for desire to pursue, yet in reality, at the end of discursive thought, it is only true eros which risks the leap of faith past what the mind can grasp to land into the abyss of God’s love.

Naturally, his thought led to his work with the Acéphale (‘Headless’), a human sacrifice-themed secret society, but for Christians Christ is the head of Logos, not a logos severed from eros, but one rational BECAUSE it is first embedded in the story of Christ, the God who sacrificed out of love, and it is this narrative that creates the grammar and "rules", the spirit, of Christian erotic rationality.

Let loving the beautiful be your morality

                                                

Without the power of desire there is no longing, and so no love, which is the issue of longing; for the property of desire is to love something. And without the incensive power, intensifying the desire for union with what is loved, there can be no peace.

—St. Maximus the Confessor, The Philokalia

Orthodox Christian theologian Timothy Patitsas has written a beautiful book,The Ethics of Beauty. In the West, he says the intellectual sins like pride were taken as primary, while in the East, the sensual sins were taken as primary. 

In Orthodoxy, first the passions must be cleansed, then we can perceive and fall in love with true Beauty.

Moved by Beauty the will now desires to embrace Goodness.

Lastly, we are ready to bow down to Truth.

The modern world operates in the opposite way, stop being ignorant and just do the right thing.

It’s not about moral reform, to will yourself to do good. You’ll naturally wish to do good when you perceive it to be desirable. What causes you to desire something ? When you see it as beautiful . For that, you first need to cleanse the nous to perceive what’s truly beautiful and fall in love with it, thereby embracing the Good you now see as Beautiful.

The following are excerpts from an interview he did HERE :

“….in Orthodoxy first comes the battle with concupiscent passions, which we win by fasting—in other words, by falling in love with Beauty itself, and not with false beauty. But what is this real Beauty, but Christ himself in a moment of self-emptying love? And so through Beauty we learn the Goodness of the Cross—that is to say, Ethics—and we ourselves long to pour out our life for our brothers, sisters, enemies, and all of creation. To contemplate this good-ness, to be illumined, we must give alms. We are then illumined in both senses—we contemplate correctly, and our light “shines before men.”

The healing of the soul begins with noticing God’s many theophanies, and with falling in love with them. In other words, it begins with Beauty.

After this we can discuss Goodness. By embracing what we ind within authentic Beauty—the crucified Savior and the Cross—we attain Goodness and become good, and ind our communion to others restored.

Finally, through these two steps we are brought to the gates of Truth, by a purified feeling. I mean a theological sensing, the innate ability we have to recognize theophany even in its hidden manifestations. In relying on that intuition, or in recognizing that within the Beautiful story of Christ is goodness, and therefore almost certainly truth—we fall in love with beauty and step out in faith toward it.

Is faith any different than eros? Abraham stepped out of his land and onto  a journey of exile not because he worked it out intellectually, but because he had received a theophany! Perhaps faith is just the memory of theophany, the continuing to launch out towards that divine supernova when it seems to have gone dark?

And when we ind within Beauty the miracle of empathy, and contemplate this Goodness by imitating it, we see that the irst feeling is not left behind. Rather, it is amplified and becomes contemplation, a feeling that includes discursive thought—a faith that is expressed as reason. 

And Finally our sense of truth is but an amplification of our sense of Beauty and our sense of Goodness or morality. The three are just one clear channel, one pure stream—from feeling to contemplation to knowing Truth directly. 

This is why Orthodox theology looks the way it does, so pure and free, so elegant and aesthetically satisfying—rather than cold, logical, and hard.

Your sense of the beautiful is already an intellectual power, and your initial  knowing of truth will still be a falling in love with the beautiful through feeling. 

                                                       

This is why Orthodox ascetic struggle, and Orthodox theology and ethics, do not begin with intellect and truth, nor with the intellect investigating goodness. Or, they may temporarily begin there if challenged to do so, but they will always return to their real beginning, which is Beauty, followed by Goodness, then the appropriation of the self-revelation of God. We begin with theophany, then add correct praxis, and inally we investigate dogma.

Imagine an ethics that was nothing more than Truth investigating Goodness, with no thought for Beauty? Who would even care about what it discovered? But isn’t this exactly how we deine Ethics today?

Or, imagine a psychotherapy in which Truth investigates Truth, asking only whether what we feel is true, always seeming to denigrate concern for Beauty and Empathy in the form of its very practice? Can there even be a Truth without Goodness and Beauty? Well, this is just what we call “objectivity,” and it is just a kind of hell.

We begin with theophany, then add correct praxis, and finally we investigate dogma.

Purification, illumination, deification .

Deification comes not from moral struggle, but from ascetic struggle—the attempt to fall in love with Christ and him alone, to be chaste, to energize our eros. And Illumination is a contemplation not yet of theological truths, but of goodness, of the empathy and compassion at the heart of beauty. 

Thus to purify our reasoning, we emphasize not logic, but the giving of alms; only this will clarify our judgment about goodness and render us Illumined.

 Deification is not separate from the others. To attain Eros (Beauty; the first commandment of Christ's two greatest commandments) and Agape (Goodness; the second of these two commandments) is already to be Deified.

 Or, we must see that even the first rays of Beauty in our lives, represent the onset, incipient but real, of our deification. We know the theologian to be deified because when he speaks, it is God speaking with him, with one voice human and divine. He is theologos be-cause he has found his own logos in the Logos who is Theos. This could be anyone."

                       

Man as Microcosm Healing the Fractured Cosmos

                                                               

For most of the eastern religions the Cosmos is mind. So too for many quantum physicists and some idealist leaning Christians - all is consciousness.

If so, it offers an explanation of The Fall - that God’s energies were creating the Cosmos as pure gift. Everything filled with Logos - logic, ie every thing acting in accord to God’s will. Then something disrupted this flow of gifting. An intention arose in some being. 

To narrate this spiritual truth in images the Bible tells us that Man made a counter-intention to God’s will. Instead of accepting the fruit at the proper time when mature as a gift, Man took. This disrupted the flow of grace, and the Cosmos fell.

St Maximus tells us that Man is a Microcosm of the Cosmos, and within him is contained 5 fractures of being.

We now live with the dualities of created and uncreated, intelligible and sensible, heaven and earth, paradise and universe, male and female.

Man, being microcosm and mediator of the spiritual and material, is called to heal these divisions within himself.

To unite heaven and earth by virtue, to unify the tangible and intelligible worlds by acquiring angelic gnosis, and to reunite by love the created and the uncreated.

As Andrew Louth puts it,

“…through accomplishing all the stages of the spiritual life, the human person achieves, not simply union with God, but also fulfils what is the essentially human role of being the natural bond of all being, drawing the whole created order into harmony with itself, and into union with God.”

The healing is also reflected in the Eucharistic liturgy, St Maximus tells us in his Mystagogia.

Basically these divisions are echoed by correspondences in the Church. Sanctuary/nave is reflected in invisible/visible, heaven/earth, soul/body, mind/reason, New Testament/Old Testament, meaning/text.

So the movement between sanctuary and nave in the liturgy interprets and is interpreted by movement between the other divisions.

So the liturgical movement celebrates the healing of the five divisions.

                         

Another way to think about it is that the cosmos is Mind, which is “funneled” (incarnated) into brains.

The disharmonious FALSE patterns of chaos in the cosmos (incarnated as passions and conflict) are attuned within us to the TRUE patterns in harmony with God’s loving will.




Think of it as being in accord with the Tao, the Way. What is “true movement?”

Well, right now we exist as biological beings, and get our energy from dead biological beings - animals and plants.

This is life as bios.

However there is another type of life energy : zoe, or spiritual life.

It’s often missed in translation, but Christ came to give us zoe, true life, which is eternal, and animates not our biological body but our soul.

Our biological body moves in three dimensions, up and down etc, and also in the fourth dimension, time.

Our soul does not move this way. Our soul moves by desire. Think of when you move toward someone in your intention, in love. This is an invisible movement of your soul.

This movement is exercised by virtue.

Order *IS* love.

The incarnation basically injected this harmonious pattern in perfect accord with God’s will (because Christ IS God) into the disharmonious patterns of our world and universe.

Kind of like a harmony injected into a cacophony that gradually harmonies all those discordant notes with God's perfect song.

As David Bentley Hart says HERE,

"...virtue is, he [Augustine] argues....is the establishment of the soul's proper rhythm; and the soul that is virtuous is one that turns its rhythms not to the domination of others, but to their benefit. "

Christ then draws all contradictions into Himself, purifies and harmonies them.

In Jordan Daniel Wood’s superb new book, The Whole Mystery of Christ: Creation as Incarnation in Maximus Confessor, he puts it like this :

“Every creature’s motion, sinful or not, generates time.

False motion renders existence more crudely finite, slavishly borne along with the flow of phenomena.

True motion—the motion of virtue, knowledge, love of God in Christ—brings creaturely motion nearer its term and thus cessation, and hence takes leave of the provisional necessities of spatiotemporal existence…

But those logoi carry potentialities that are themselves actualized for the first time in one hypostasis, Jesus of Nazareth.”

.

Inability to Love & Avoiding God's Love

           
                             

Do You Know Yourself? Psychological Problems and the Spiritual Life by Archimandrite Symeon Kragiopoulos is a wonderful book.

Fr. Symeon's main thesis is that many people are not making spiritual progress because they are stuck in psychological ruts.

Fr. Symeon uses the work of the psychologist Karen Horney. She posited that neurosis is comprised of three flawed "movements" that people make in relation to each other are: moving toward people, moving against people, and moving away from people.

The solution is to detach from a false image of yourself.

I’ll concentrate on those who move away from others. In today’s psych jargon this type in the extreme might be labeled as having Dismissive Avoidant Attachment or being Love Avoidant. 

The following are excepts from the book on this type :

“We don't know what degree some people who remain unmarried fail to move toward marriage because God calls them to another life. It may be that they remain unmarried because they are afraid of marriage. They think they'll lose this freedom - this unhealthy freedom, however. They think they'll lose this independence - this unhealthy independence, of course. To be precise, they're afraid that someone else will enter the depths of their existence, and they don't want this at all. Certainly other needs exist that finally cause them to get married. For example, when a woman is looking for protection, affection, in the end she'll get married, but this shortcoming will exist. How is a communion of souls and persons possible in this marriage, then?

He doesn't want people to approach him, he doesn't want them to influence him, he doesn't want them to obligate him to do anything.

This type also has the tendency, among other things, to deaden his feelings, to suspend them, not to allow them to act, to operate. And he does this, as a rule, because every one of our feelings, this or that feeling, causes us to open up, to express ourselves, causes us to manifest ourselves. Precisely because this type of person is closed, however closed off even before his very self...

                     

This type, then, is the sort of person who can't open himself to God, who can't trust in God. He ends up being that Christian who is doing fine, just fine, but deep down - he feels it, he sees it, when he's paying attention - he still doesn't have communion with God, he still doesn't have contact with God. The light of God hasn't come into this secret darkness that exists inside him, into this double-locked shell of his.

....he wonders why he doesn't love other Christians, why he doesn't love other people. 

It's possible that the whole relationship between this "good" Christian and other people appears to be good, be ongoing, but at depth, however, his existence has no communion with other people, and this Christian doesn't feel that the other existences pass into him and his own existence passes into the other existences. That is, doesn't perceive his soul to be open so that the love of his brothers, his fellow Christians, and first and foremost the love of God passes inside him.

…a hyper-sensitivity is created in a certain way, like a defense mechanism, which is immediately set in motion, at work, in operation, as soon as something comes along and influences this soul at its depth, as soon as it comes along in some way to obligate this soul to do something (against its will) or as soon as it gives the appearance that it wants to oppress this soul.

For him it's a catastrophe to open up. We could say that this type knows one word - closed. Openness frightens him - and still more openness before God.

….[When] a person surrenders fully to God, this means that he accepts a visitor within him. He stops being fenced in and closed off. The unhealthy type, however, can't do this, because he seeks isolation, he has recourse to isolation in a compulsive way.

How is it possible for this person to receive grace? How is it possible for the light to come to such a soul? It isn't possible.

….it’s possible that we want away and we try to make it go away, and yet it doesn't go away.

Let me give you an example so that you understand,

It is difficult for granite to melt from an ordinary fire as for this situation to be resolved by ordinary efforts. In order for granite to melt, it requires a very high temperature. And in order for this situation to go away, for this wall to melt and the soul to open, it requires, to be sure, a great temperature of faith.

However, when this human being who has such an unhealthy condition understands how he himself is, deep down, and how he moves, and he can be given truly to Christ and truly be reborn in Christ, then he'll really be flooded with love, he'll become a true personality and will have a true, real relationship with other human beings."

Finally, from The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology :

                ".....the embodied historical struggle of every creature to discover and to be its true self, to communicate the vivacious idea at its core, is never left behind but is integral to its consummate realization, to its fullness of life. And as the creature fully lives into its self-communication, this true life surges past all false selves constructed by sin and prejudice and violence of every kind, and onwards into the inexhaustible self-sharing of its truth; for the truth at the heart of every creature is God's eternal and imperishable knowing and loving of it and this is the life from which it flows and which, Christians believe, God intends it to enjoy forever."

Robert Imbelli HERE comments,

"The death from which Christ saves us is far more than physical death. It is the very corroding of God’s image in us through fantasies of self-aggrandizement and hatred. These distortions of the generative divine ideas wreak havoc not only on individuals, but also on the whole human community and the rest of material creation. Sin falsifies divine communication and erects obstacles to the communion God desires. At its deepest, sin is refusal of Incarnation. For, in a sentence from Maximus the Confessor that McIntosh relishes, “the Word always and in all things desires to realize the mystery of his embodiment.”

With the resurrection of Christ, God’s life-giving Word stands fully revealed. Christians are those whose converted consciousness perceives the fulfillment of God’s plan in the risen Christ and whose conduct seeks to further the restoration of all things in him. Immersed in Christ’s paschal mystery in baptism and nourished by the Eucharist, Christians are led “into a new communion with the divine ideas…a new perception of all reality from within the eternal divine knowing and loving of all things.”

Sisyphus or the Saints, ritual or rote, time accursed or graced ?

 

    

Contra Plato, I believe we must let the poets lie to us, but only with those lies that tell the truth. 

The poet Stephen Dunn wrote a series of poems on Sisyphus, that old Greek cursed by the gods to forever roll a boulder uphill, never to reach the top, never to rest, only endless struggle with no future change or end. Life feels like that. Our endless numbing days of rot and habit. The solution to time's curse ? It is ritual.

As an Orthodox Christian I try to follow the liturgical calendar, referencing days to events in the life of Christ, bodily entering the rhythms of His life. Mircea Eliade wrote about how myth and ritual redeemed "the implacable becoming that leads toward death" :

"The defense against Time which is revealed to us in every kind of mythological attitude, but which is, in fact, inseparable from the human condition, reappears variously disguised in the modern world, but above all in its distractions, its amusements.

It is here that one sees what a radical difference there is between modern cultures and other civilizations. In all traditional societies, every responsible action reproduced its mythical, transhuman model, and consequently took place in sacred time. 

Labour, handicrafts, war and love were all sacraments. The re-living of that which the Gods and Heroes had lived in illo tempore imparted a sacramental aspect to human existence, which was complemented by the sacramental nature ascribed to life and to the Cosmos.

By thus opening out into the Great Time, this sacramental existence, poor as it night often be, was nevertheless rich in significance; at all events it was not under the tyranny of Time. The true ‘fall into Time’ begins with the secularization of work. 

It is only in modern societies that man feels himself to be the prisoner of his daily work, in which he can never escape from Time. And since he can no longer ‘kill’ time during his working hours—that is, while he is expressing his real social identity—he strives to get away from Time in his hours of leisure: hence the bewildering number of distractions invented by modern civilization… 

The ‘fall into Time’ becomes confused with the secularization of work and the consequent mechanization of existence, and the only escape that remains possible upon the collective plane is distraction."

Dunn captures this well in his poem,

SISYPHUS’S ACCEPTANCE

These days only he could see the rock,
so when he stopped for a bagel
at the bagel store, then for a newspaper
at one of those coin-operated stalls,
he looked like anyone else
on his way to work. Food—

the gods reasoned—
would keep him alive
to suffer, and news of the world
could only make him feel worse.
Let him think he has choices;
he belongs to us.

Rote not ritual, a repetition
which never would mean more
at the end than at the start . . .
Sisyphus pushed his rock
past the aromas of bright flowers,
through the bustling streets
into the plenitude and vacuity,

every arrival the beginning
of a familiar descent. And sleep
was the cruelest respite;
at some murky bottom of himself
the usual muck rising up.

One morning, however, legs hurting,
the sun beating down,
again weighing the quick calm of suicide
against this punishment that passed for life,
Sisyphus smiled.

It was the way a gambler smiles
when he finally decides to fold
in order to stay alive
for another game, a smile
so inward it cannot be seen.

The gods sank back
in their airy chairs. Sisyphus sensed
he’d taken something from them,
more on his own than ever now.

Another thing about secular time, it is cursed. It is cursed because it is free. It has no form to contain spirit. We can do whatever we wish, even as it destroys us.

In his poem Sisyphus's Affair, he imagines the cursed Greek cheating on his wife, a portion reads :

For a moment he longed for the old days
when there were gods to take offense,

when a man who wanted too much
would be reduced to size
with a life-long redundancy or thunderbolt.
But, no, there’d be nothing so neat.
It came to a choice, and he chose everything.
He left almost everything behind.