Reaching the level of our incompetence.
Many of you know that I'm a huge Jay Dyer fan, at least a fan of the part of his work to which I can relate. Now saying that I'm a fan of Jay's is not idol worship; I'm merely speaking in the language of "personalities," and Jay has deliberately made himself "a personality" in the show business sense. After all, he is regularly featured on the Alex Jones channel, and there is no greater theatre on earth than the theatre under the headship of the master actor, Alex Jones. Now, I'm not saying anything out of school about Alex Jones since, by his sworn testimony in court, he stated numerous times that he is an entertainer. So then, it stands to reason that the Alex Jones "platform" is theatre, and Jay Dyer is one of the entertainers who appear there. Now, as I said, I have made no secret that I am a huge fan of Jay Dyer, at least a fan of the part of his work to which I can relate. I believe from the caliber of his work in the areas I can connect that his "Decoding Hollywood" work is most likely based on reality and create hundreds of thoughtful lessons for the people steeped in Pop-Culture.
Now, you may look at me and think I am just an old fogy and can't relate because of my age. You people raised on the media of several sorts probably can't believe that for half a century, I rarely watched T.V.; in fact, until 1990, I never had T.V. larger than a nineteen-inch black and white set. It may sound like a boast, but it isn't; from my childhood on, I usually found something more entertaining in real life than Television. I was raised on a Pentecostal College campus and in a colorful neighborhood where there was always an array of people, characters, and friends. I also discovered the T.V. to be dangerous. I observed firsthand how people were programmed by the programming (not a stretch if you just hear the words). One day in the early eighties, it was like I had stepped into an alternative world. It was the first time I witnessed what they now call "mass formation psychosis." Suddenly, even the most optimistic, upbeat people I knew became fatalists. I kept hearing the phrase, "We've decided to go all out for Christmas (or take a European Trip or whatever, like bucket list stuff as they say today) because only God knows if we will be here next year." It was days before I discovered they had all been brainwashed by the movie "The Day After." That fatalism created the largest Christmas sales in the 20th century, and it was after 911 when Bush told people that "since they hate our freedom, the best thing we can do is go shopping" and buy more stuff. That year broke the 1983 sales record. People think they are immune, but it is like a drug; no one can really "handle it." With the multiple means of media today, the power of manipulation is much stronger, not just inducing mild psychosis and Christmas sales, but people purposely doing things they know are irrational but feeling the need to do so anyway.
The modern addiction to constant stimuli is horrible, and the shared addiction of the American population. When my wife of now thirty-three years moved in, here came the color T.V. At the end of 1991, sitting for six weeks holding my chest bones together following a severe head-on collision, I never watched T.V.; I could not focus to read, but I had a six-foot window next to my chair, and the fall was late and beautiful; I listened to some music that fit the live scene. Many people would go crazy enduring hours, days, weeks of solitude, no T.V., no radio, no reading, just being and enjoying the beauty of the autumn outside my window.
I'm writing this because of my love for Jay Dyer, and the horrible burden that Pop-Culture is upon America's young.
Jay exists in two worlds, the world of striving for Theosis, in the Orthodox Understanding, and trying to be relevant to the Pop-Culture. I've viewed this part of his work as a "ministry," causing thousands of young people to view the 'data' constantly coming to them with a critical eye, rather than just being hypnotized and conditioned by it. The problem is, that one cannot escape the conditioning because Pop-Culture is ubiquitous and is the international
lingua franca of the digital world, having replaced refined music, classical and folk music et al., as the global language. This is a vast coarsening of the culture and a powerful weapon of hypnosis, creating an alternative consciousness, the source of the real "mass formation psychosis" of the Death Cult.
Beside the pop-culture work that Jay has done, are two other categories of work that have been extremely impressive. The first is his analysis of the books and papers of the Globalist Oligarchs, and those who have accurately reported on them, and his rather militant apologetics, refuting the false claims of Romanism; Rome's theological and philosophical departure from Apostolic Orthodox Catholicism, the strange innovative spiritualities of Romanism (he hasn't gone into depth there, but he has recognized it); also the theological errors of Protestantism and especially his razor sharp analysis of the errors in so-called "Reformed Theology." He literally studied and talked himself into Orthodox written theology, coming to agree with the "concepts" of the Orthodox Fathers, the saints and theologians of the Ancient Christian Faith, wrestling with it for a decade before he actually became Orthodox. Now, this week because of some unjust persecution from an "orthodox" source, Jay reacted, reaching his level of incompetence. Being a philosopher and wordsmyth extraordinaire he stumble upon the words, unable to press his spiritual understanding past his mental concepts, hanging onto the words like a drowning man, unable to conceive that God in his essence is unknowable, and unknowable in every way, existing outside of human language and concept. I would say to Jay, (and ask his forgiveness if I am reading him wrongly) that a God who can be comprehended by a human mind is a God encompassed by that mind, making that God a mere mental reality of that mind and nothing more. If some have gone to verbal excess to impress upon the pride of man, the wholly other aspect that is God, I can forgive them, since the opposite is a trite, elementary and false idol. It creates the likes of the pocket Jesus, that I know in my gut, Jay naturally hates - that being the fundamentalist with his pocket New Testament continually stating what God thinks, "I think I have the mind of God on this . . . God wants . . . . God needs . . . God is say . . . God thinks . . . ad infinitum." Until one steps out of the mentality that says, "my mind can comprehend God" the wonder of God's condescension in Christ is lost to us. We say, "Jesus had to come because, X, Y, or Z" and that is hubris beyond sanity. If indeed we cannot comprehend even what God has in store for those who love him, and are the called according to his purpose, what eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, neither is the heart of man capable of comprehending what God has in store for those who love him . . . Saint Paul goes on to say that God has revealed these things to his saints (to us) by the Spirit, for the Spirit searches all things even the βάθος = deep, extreme, poverty, of God. He wasn't saying that the depth of God was poverty, but that our understanding of it and ability to conceptualize it in human thought and language was poverty. I've written in times past that the more I learned of God, the less I knew him. And this is speaking in term of conceptual language, not experience and communion. And it is true. If one catches even a hint of the reality of God, just the uncreated energies of a monad of his Glory, one realizes that there are no words to encompass that. Our concepts become βάθος, an extreme poverty. If all this is so, how much less richness can we place in the concepts of "Analogia" and "Similatude."
Analogia = "Analogy is a type of reasoning or expressive mechanism of language. It consists of the comparison or relationship of various referents: objects, reasons or ideas, to indicate general or particular characteristics in common in order to justify the existence of a property in one of them" i.e. a human concept to picture a substance, an essence, a property. And Similatude = "Similarity; resemblance (as in the image of God" one that closely resembles another (ditto) but then it also means, a simile, allegory or parable.
Where does the simile, the allegory, the parable breakdown?
What similarity can we presume of the Being who existed in non-being, a concept we cannot say or understand. And that Being who existed in non-being, from nothing creating all that is in being. If we pretend to be "like that" we exercise herculean hubris. And by the way, the fact that we cannot describe non-being except in a negative, a negation of being, proves that we are beings, of being, and have no comprehension further.
We can know God, only in the ways that He has revealed himself to us and one of those ways is his Holy-Wholly Otherness. Or maybe you can create just one small mammal for me, from non-created atoms and molecules and prove me wrong.
I think that the following prayer has light to shine on this, and I'm hoping Jay considers my words without trying to respond to counter what I'm saying here. Just pass it on by and have mercy on me. After all, I may be demonstrating my level of incompetence. But in for a penny, in for a pound, I will say boldly, in all the writings of scripture and the Holy Fathers, all that is explicated are aspect of how God, Himself, has revealed Himself and the words of the Prophet stand true when God's Holy Spirit spoke by the prophet and said, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." - Isaiah 55:8-10 And I would say further from the evidence of things made, from the testimony of creation, from the complexity of life, that the analogous relationship between God's thoughts and our thoughts is so tenuous as to be beyond explication.
I think Jay Dyer is one of the most intelligent men I've come across in my life. Jay has always amazed me in the way he has focused his ample intellect upon the scriptures, the Holy Fathers, and the Orthodox Tradition. After all, most men with that raw intelligence find it difficult to submit to the proper understanding of scripture, to overcome their critical doubt, etc, In the categories of the investigation and explication of scripture and the theology of the Holy Fathers, Jay has excelled. But now like a dull fundamentalist he is stuck on a couple of words, imputing to them eternal significance, when the Apostle told us that words will cease, that our future existence IN HIM, is greater than our conceptual language:
1Co 13:8ff Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
There comes a time, when concepts fail, when words are meaningless, even now, when we groan in the spirit along with all of nature longing for the revelation of the Sons of God and the restoration of all things. Even now the straight jacket of philosophical and theological concepts fail, and we stand our soul naked before him our hearts yearning for what is beyond the eschaton, presently unknowable in any way. Oh, yeah we speak about it in similitude, via analogia, all of which do not hold the ultimate reality "in HIM," which is to come.
I would admonish Jay Dyer to see something he already knows, stated colorfully, yet succinctly by my friend, Rex Christi:
Rex said,
That idea that human conceptual language can comprehend God, as in encompass Him, encompass His reality, is an unexamined presupposition. - Bond Robin.
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