Saint Silouan

 This is a good book about the Russian peasant and Orthodox saint Silouan (1866-1938) who after military service lived as a monk in Mount Athos.

Just one little extract where a presumably learned priest was mystified and perhaps affronted by the growing impression this unlearned man was having on others, and particularly visiting scholars:

“I can’t understand how a scholar like you can take pleasure in going to see Father Silouan, an illiterate peasant. Haven’t we anybody cleverer than that? . . . I wonder why you all go to him? After all, he reads nothing.”

“He reads nothing but fulfils everything, while others read a lot and perform nothing,” was the reply.

Though while he obviously was not centred on intellectualism, I presume he was literate. Another extract I see from the previous page to the above, when Silouan was asked by a priest about something he’d been reading about in a newspaper:

“What do you think, Father Silouan?”

“Batioushka, I don’t like newspapers with their news.”

“Why not?”

“Because the reading of newspapers darkens the mind and hinders pure prayer.”

“How odd. We live here in the wilderness seeing nothing, and gradually the soul forgets the world and becomes shut up in herself. But when I read newspapers I see how it is with the world, how people suffer, and that makes me want to pray, I entreat God for all mankind, for the whole world.”

“When the soul prays for the world,” said Father Silouan,”she know better without newspapers how the whole earth is afflicted, and what people’s needs are. She can pity men without the help of papers.”

“How can the soul know of herself what goes on in the world?”

“Newspapers don’t write about people but about events, and then not the truth. They confuse the mind and, whatever you do, you won’t get at the truth by reading them; whereas prayer cleanses the mind and gives it a better vision of things.”

“I don’t quite see,” said the father-confessor.

We all waited for Father Silouan to reply but he sat on in silence, head bent, not suffering himself to explain in the presence of a father-confessor and older monks how the soul can, in spirit, know the life of the world and the needs and tribulations of men when, remote from things, she prays for the universe.

Father Silouan was too unassuming to do more in general conversation than give an intimation of what he thought; and because of this his great wisdom and quite exceptional experience often escaped the notice of those who talked with him.

Le Pont de Mantes

 

By Camille Corot. What a beautiful, rhythmic balance to the painting. Calm but not static.

The Narrow Path

 Matthew 7:13-14

"Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few."

 

I’ll try to take a quick look at those lines. I have seen in Orthodoxy, teachers speaking of the errors of going to the right or the left of truth, falling into error for example into a self-righteous Puritanism on let’s say the right hand of the narrow path, or indolence and sloth regarding discipline on the left side. One absolute key aspect of the incarnation of Christ into the world is the sacralising of the life within the material world, of the reconciliation of spirit and matter. Let’s say on the right of this path is the idea of life in the material world as a painful embarrassment to the spirit, which cannot come to terms with something so fallen; i.e. so obviously full of sin and error. Life is so considered Maya or illusion, a contradiction to truth, the creation in gnostic thought of even of an evil god at odds with he true god, and so truth is in a sense disembodied, we have to somehow disincarnate ourselves. Here a term like ego can be shallowly thrown around as a justification for escapism from incarnation. This overall ethos plays even into things like abstract art, where initially at least this was considered a means of escaping the fallen material world. By abstracting ourselves from it, we can return to disembodied perfection.

On the other hand, what I’ll call the left hand of the narrow path away from reconciliation with incarnation - not just Christ’s but our own incarnation in this life - is falling into materialism, a shallow rationalism leading to atheism. Whereas the right side of the narrow path falls into sacrificing life as spiritually superfluous and false, the left side sacrifices the spirit as superfluous and false. This leads onto all kinds of horrors of lack of faith in life, with everything crumbling to dust in its hands, 

I haven’t time now to go any further into this so I’ll just post it as is. But anyway, the narrow path is the true path!

What Happened to Feminism

Why would people of either sex who considered themselves advocates of women’s rights, of feminism in general, then bow down to allowing men compete as women in women’s sports, of males saying they are female and using female’s restrooms and changing rooms, and so on? 

One story lately regarding sports is of Aspen Hoffman who finished 72nd in  Seattle cross-country league finals as a boy. He then switched to competing as a girl for his school, Seattle Academy, and finished first, breaking the school’s record for girls at that distance, though if competed as a boy, with that same time Aspen would apparently have come 48th. 

There’s other obviously inevitable stories of girls being sexually assaulted in their own restrooms, with their being put in danger seemingly of no consequence to the former typical advocates of women’s rights. Being an advocate of women’s rights of course must recognise the considerable discrepancy physically between the two sexes, and hence the safeguarding of girls’ and women’s vulnerability in this regard. This safeguarding has however by the vanguard of the modern left or liberals or progressives has been simply discarded, and a toxic position of supposed equality adopted, and a male just having to say he’s a female, and oh well, so much for the women’s rights we were championing a minute ago.

So why has this been happening and allowed to happen? I’ll try and be simple and brief. The fuel for the furthering of leftist ideologies has always been to employ a dynamic of victims and oppressors. Even though the origins of intellectual theories of socialism is from the educated bourgeoisie, for instance in the first wave of socialism in the Soviet Union, it was all supposedly about workers’ rights, who were by definition absolutely good, while the “decadent bourgeoisie” were absolutely bad. The ideology is intentionally utterly opportunistic however, and so we saw recently in Canada how the truck drivers were utterly demonised by the liberal left, their bank accounts frozen and so on. So much for the formerly sanctified workers whose cause was the highest of causes. The working classes have long ceased to be considered useful fuel and apt “victims” for the movement, whose goal is a state of totalitarian rule with no opposition tolerated - hence “cancel culture”where opposition is cancelled. Demonise the opposition, silence them, freeze their bank account, send them to the gulag - that kind of stuff. Of course there’s loads of misguided, well-intentioned proponents of the cause, but let’s say there’s a car going somewhere; we’ll the thoughts in the heads of passengers about where they might be going doesn’t change the nature of the destination!

So, as said, it’s a completely opportunistic ideology where the ends justify the means - the ends being total rule with no opposition permitted. So the media for example is intentionally a propagandist tool, not a truth tool, in their hands. The cementing of power is always the reason for everything. That is “truth” within this system. Think of a factory producing packets of corn flakes. So “truth” here, the whole meaning of everything in the factory, is the efficient churning out of packets of corn flakes. A worker can’t imagine he can in this environment strive to produce cans of beans instead, Within socialism, the one party totalitarian state is “truth”. That’s why a relatively apolitical writer like Boris Pasternak after writing Dr Zhivago could and did find himself in trouble for deviating from that truth. An artist should of course be serving truth, striving for it, but that’s not “truth” within a progressive, leftist state! 

So anyway in the dynamic of victims to be championed and oppressors to be demonised and defeated, workers were useful, now discarded as not useful - and of course there is little more unpleasant to the typical bourgeois liberals than actual contact with the working classes! So race is especially of late, massively pushed as fuel in the dynamic. And here we come back to the starting point of this piece. Women and their rights used to fit like a glove in the victim/oppressor dynamic, but in this utterly opportunistic ideology or mode of being, transgenderism is now considered, for various undermining reasons, the more useful fuel as victims, and so tough luck to the female athletes at Seattle Academy. We used to love you but now we don’t give a shit. And so the feminism advocates recognise, perhaps subconsciously, that females have been superseded in the hierarchy of victimhood, and so they roll over and stay quiet, or even champion the beauty new cause.

Interview

I am delighted to be able to show an interview with Bill Gates about one of the great contemporary issues below.

“So Bill, this is a great honour. As one of the great medical pioneers and are here of course to talk about viruses, vaccines and such like. First of all, could you explain to everyone your medical background and credentials. Why have you been placed in such a prominent position regarding people’s health? Where did you study, what fields of  research have you engaged in, and so on - those obviously are the kinds of questions our audience will be interested in.”

“Well actually I’m more of a computer guy. I don’t really have any medical background as such.”

“Are you serious? So why the hell are you positioned as some kind of medical expert?”

“I’m not sure. It just kind of happened and I went along with it.”

“And there wasn’t any kind of mix up where you got confused with some actual medical expert also called Bill Gates  - an epidemiologist, a biochemist or whatever?”

“No, there was nothing like that.”

“Ok, we’ll wrap it up there so.”

Holmes

 For evoking or bringing on a kind of traditional Christmas feel, I think this is great.

Bellver Castle at Night

 

By Joaquin Mir Trinxet.

United Front

There are few sights more heartwarming than a collection of celebrities displaying a united front in support of a worthy cause. Before I got any further, I better explain why that sentence ended where it did. Those words were initially intended to lead onto the main point, with the sentence continuing on in that direction, but actually, now that I’ve written it, I see that it’s an important enough observation to stand autonomously in its own right rather than merely be the prelude to some other truth or fact. 

Anyway, as this year winds towards its close, it is the turn of the music world to awaken our individual and collective consciences, and so it is that icons of the industry - old, middle-aged, and some even quite young - have joined forces and are releasing an assault on the charts that will no doubt unite us all. The song is called Vaccinate the Shit Out of Me. 

As well as the army of musical legends, Michael Jackson’s still living former pet chimpanzee Bubbles features in both the audio recording and the video, in which we see Bubbles humbly lining up to receive his vaccine booster shot amongst a queue of ordinary but still valuable Americans. “Even with all these musical legends on board, the presence of Bubbles lends an air of gravitas and solemnity to the song and message that it may otherwise have lacked,” explained a Rolling Stone journalist who compèred the launch of the single.

The Polish Rider

 

Generally considered to be a Rembrandt painting from the 1650s.

Happy Announcement

In an unexpected announcement, Bill Gates has revealed he is pregnant with who he believes to be the antichrist. “This is a great honour for Microsoft, myself and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” declared a masked employee of multiple and indeterminate genders speaking on behalf of a clearly elated Gates.

Insiders say George Soros, the oldest man in the world, is the likely father, though Klaus Schwab, another ancient fuckwit, is said by some to be an alternative paternal possibility. 

Moonshine

 

By Paul Klee, 1919.

Book Launch

Bill Gates has just launched his new autobiography, titled Not a Psychotic Nerd. In case you don’t know who this modern messiah is - shame on you if this is the case - a little snippet from yesteryear featuring Gates giving a very strong impression of, let’s be honest, being a psychotic nerd, but an impression which is of course entirely misleading. He’s not a psycho; he’s in fact astonishingly benevolent.

In the book, Gates describes how he intends to save the world from various threats such as too many people living on it, and how to actively reduce their number. (Fortunately for Bill, he doesn’t seem to include himself among this “too many people” problem.)  

Jeffrey Epstein is described tentatively in the book as “ahead of his time” and “misunderstood.”

Re-Release

In a powerful response to Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter and its new belligerent policies regarding certain behaviours, Deep State Cabal have re-released their song from late last year, Leave Our Pedos Alone.

New Radical Art

“Have you done much painting since your last exhibition?”

“I’ve actually just started on something new. I think it may be my most important work yet. For me anyway it’s very exciting.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It just came to me in a flash of inspiration. Basically it’s a painting of a big cock.”

“You mean like a large penis?”

“Precisely. And the best thing about it is the title. Can you guess what it’s called?”

“Big Cock?”

“No.”

“Toxic Masculinity?”

“No.”

“This is all very intriguing. Tell me.”

“It’s titled Woman.”

“Oh that’s wonderful! How liberating! You’re being so daring and cutting edge!”

“I am, amn’t I. To me it all feels very radical and challenging and revolutionary, but also comforting and inclusive.”

“Yes, yes. This will sort out the philistines from the rest of us.”

“It certainly will.”

Great Sporting Moment

This above is almost certainly the single standout highlight of the current football World Cup, as well as one of the great eternal sorting moments. On the right are standing the men representing the African nation of Senegal, ethnically as one can see all black. On the left, kneeling, but internally standing up for the rights of the black people of the world, are the more diverse but mostly white English side. A great achievement by the English side there. The sociologically backward black men of Senegal may be hopelessly ignorant and lacking in their duty to stand up for the black lives of the world, but not so the benevolent Anglo-Saxon warriors, whose captain Harry Kane and stalwart defender Harry Maguire  each earn about 200,000 sterling a week (€233,000), defender John Stones 250,000 sterling a week (€292,000) while Raheem Sterling, who came on as a late but ineffective substitute in the game against France where England and their universal compassion sadly left the tournament, earns a hard-working weekly wage of 350,000 British pounds (€408,000). You can afford a very good level of social awareness with that kind of solid income. Not only are you unlikely to go hungry, you’re also unlikely to go stupid.

Obviously the English players, though filled presumably with a warming sense of righteousness, are just mindless obedient puppets with these displays, and with the “thinking” going on behind the scenes - but the level of condescending, narcissistic bourgeois bullshit going on here! 

(Just to add, I feel I should apologise to any sensitive soul offended by the lack of diversity displayed by the Senegalese in fielding such a mono-cultural side.)

Hunter

 

This changes everything.

New York Times Response to Balenciaga Child Abuse

 Child porn is surely for most sane people one of the darkest of phenomena. Well this is a little example of how mainstream media fake news bastions like The New York Times responded to the vile Balenciaga child abuse furore. I’ll just let the words in the two photos speak for themselves (just click on the photos if the writing is too small), but just to add, suddenly for these people all the concern with social justice magically disappears when child abuse comes to the fore. Instead they become protectors of the perpetrators, trying to ward people off from taking a closer look, implying only conspiracy loons would take it seriously. I wonder why that is.

And underneath I’ll put a short video of the unusual sight of a tv anchorman taking a very different and powerful line to the New York Times’ diversion piece.

Gravity, Truth

I’m very far from being scientifically minded or knowledgeable but anyway, allowing for my ignorance, think of gravity, and where from a centre of gravity a force is ceaselessly exerted drawing surrounding physical phenomena to itself. Each physical phenomenon has its own centre of gravity, but the greater the mass the greater the force, and of course here it is the earth itself and its gravitational pull that is the determining factor that regulates and makes possible the system of balance where life can stability can dwell and prosper. Without this centre obviously there is chaos. I don’t know if it can be spoken of precisely from where this gravitational force is being exerted, the location where this mysterious, invisible pull towards itself emanates, but anyway it’s obvious enough roughly what I’m talking about here,

From there then onto truth as a whole. Why are things true? In the physical sense; in the broader intellectual sense, from the intrinsic truth of language whereby we can communicate intelligently to each other; the intrinsic truth of mathematics, and from where all kinds of depths flow into seamless relation to the wider universe; and onto moral truths, and deeper again. Just as with gravity, all these individual truths of life, aren’t just floating around in some kind of hazy neutral environment. The reason, with gravity, we have stability in the earthly domain, is the gravitational pull of the earth towards itself, and thus things aren’t floating around aimlessly and chaotically. The same with truth as a whole. There is an immense pull towards truth in the greatest sense, and without this ceaseless pull, it would be that chaos. 

I don’t want to go on too long so I’ll try to make more short points rather than argue this out. This can’t just be some abstract, hazy force. This is an enormous exertion. Why is it so powerful. The centre of this immense force isn’t simply a force, it’s the person of God. That’s where all this truth emanates, and where it is being drawn to. Just as with the earth though and its gravitational pull also including each lesser physical phenomenon having its own centre of gravity within that greater balancing field of energy, we are granted free will and have our own “gravitational pull” in terms of freedom of movement. We are not coerced into obedience or enslavement to the centre of truth, just as we have within limits, freedom of physical movement on the earth, even while the earth’s gravitational centre and force provides stability.

Constantine Zalalas

At this Orthodox site run Constantine Zalalas is a large audio collection of his talks which I think is excellent. This one series of talks under the title of category title of Kyriakatika, while the entire audio collection is on the left hand side of the page. http://www.saintnicodemos.com/content/kyriakatika.php

Dracula

“You know that place Transylvania?”

“Was that where that whole transgenderism thing started?”

“No, no, no. That’s some other place. Transylvania is where your man Dracula came from.”

“Who was he again, Dracula? Was he some fella made out of bits of machines from out of a bog or something?”

“No. I don’t know who that was. Dracula was the man who used to drink people’s blood and live in a coffin.”

“He was a bit extreme, wasn’t he?!”

“Don’t be so quick to be so judgemental. That’s the kind of life he wanted to live and how he identified himself.”

“I was only saying it was a bit extreme. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“Watch yourself there now. Be very careful.”

The Belldog

 

Eno, Moebius and Roedelius from 1978. Eno being Brian Eno, and Dieter Moebius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius who made up the band Cluster, and were also members of Harmonia in the early to mid 70s.

Balenciaga, Fashion, Sick in the Soul

 

Satanic pedos and the “elites” have gotten a little more coverage lately I think, due a little to fashion house Balenciaga coming to notice for their use of themes of child abuse in their advertising - of which goings-on of course they were completely oblivious. There, that’s explained away. You’d have to be very cynical to not accept that. Anyway, above is a video on Balenciaga and their apparent but in fact innocent interest in satanic child abuse, which I’m sure the devoted little army of shitkicking fact-checkers have entirely explained away long before now. Because the video is on YouTube, it’s not going to be too graphic.

Slightly Blurred

 

Slightly blurred photo of another unfinished piece.

Fact-checking Shitkicker

Solid hardworking music industry outfit, The Fact Checkers, formed of artistically minded former Facebook employees, have just released their newest song, a somewhat melancholic number, titled Fact-checking Shitkicker. A sample of the lyrics below:

I know what I’m doing is right

But it seems I’m just a fact-checking shitkicker to you

I’m checking up on truths all night

But still I’m just a fact-checking shitkicker to you

Without me there’d be

Endless hate crimes and misinformation 

But it pains me to see 

I’m nothing but a fact-checking shitkicker to you

You’re so beautiful.

Sower with Setting Sun

 

By Vincent van Gogh, 1888.

Spirit of Rock n Roll

“Why do you think so many supposedly counter-cultural or anti-establishment musical artists ended up such utter servile arseholes in perfect sync with the establishment, and all their disingenuous totalitarian bullshit? They should surely be the most sceptical about bowing down in docile, gullible servility to the establishment - big pharma, the media, big government, etc - they were supposedly so proudly against.”

“Well maybe the most classically perfect arena of servility is the bourgeois mindset - a symbiotic feeling of success in sync with society. Your material success within the establishment marks you out as a winner in life. So spiritually they identify seamlessly with the establishment, or society as is, and its success is their success. Total symbiosis. Well most of these musicians, however countercultural they might superficially seem, were basically from the middle-classes. To be from the middle-class isn’t at all to necessarily be bourgeois in one’s spirit, but it is a very natural progression. So with these musicians, they departed a bit from the expected middle-class pathways, instead went down a kind of bohemian road, but then with the famous ones we’re talking about, they then became very successful, very wealthy, very famous and their egos pampered enormously, and so this was their journey to becoming bourgeois to the very core,p. And so now when you see their being servile mouthpieces for the sociopathic establishment, you’re just seeing the servile, cowardly bourgeois soul in motion. Any threat to the establishment is also a felt threat to them.”

That dialogue might be a bit harshly put, but I think the whole phenomenon is very much covered far deeper in the parable of the sower, which I’ll paste below. I don’t think it needs anything from me to point out the pretty obvious connections.

“Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell along the path, and the birds came and devoured it. Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil. And when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root, it withered away. Other seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no grain. And other seeds fell into good soil and produced grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.” And he said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

— Mark 4:3–9 (ESV)

And he said to them, “Do you not understand this parable? How then will you understand all the parables? The sower sows the word. And these are the ones along the path, where the word is sown: when they hear, Satan immediately comes and takes away the word that is sown in them. And these are the ones sown on rocky ground: the ones who, when they hear the word, immediately receive it with joy. And they have no root in themselves, but endure for a while; then, when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately they fall away. And others are the ones sown among thorns. They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful. But those that were sown on the good soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it and bear fruit, thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.”.

— Mark 4:10–20

Apple, Twitter, China

Apple have been apparently threatening to ditch Twitter from its since Elon Musk took over - presumably they dislike Musk’s alignment with free speech as well as perhaps his success in implementing a strong anti child-porn policy on Twitter. If someone identifies as a pedo, who’s to argue with their inclinations? I presume that’s the progressive, woke position. One love. 

Anyway, the CCP, Chinese Communist Part, by contrast to Musk and in tandem with Musk’s many establishment foes are also not the biggest fans of free speech. Who knows what kind of lies and misinformation the plebs might end up saying if not completely controlled from above? A specialist in viruses might for example say something about viruses that a vaguely educated shitkicking fact checker knows to be wrong. What a mess that kind of scenario would be.

But instead fortunately within a state governed by Marxist principles, like China, the people are the property of the state - thus the real meaning of the phrase “the dictatorship of the people” i.e. the people are governed and owned by a dictatorship. And so below we see Apple CEO Tim Cook, who you can see elsewhere sycophantically praising communist China to the heavens, when asked about the CCP and their brutal behaviours, and lo and behold, unlike his attitude to Twitter and Elon Musk, Pool hasn’t a bad word to say about them. In fact not any words at all. Musk bad, CCP good. I suppose if you’re into totalitarian ideologies, suppression of free speech, slave labour and the like, what’s not to like about the CCP?

View of Semur

 

By Emile Bernard, c. 1906-1908.

Twitter, Children, Hollywood Icons

 Elon Musk within one month of owning Twitter had apparently reduced child porn on the platform by 75 per cent after it had something like free rein under the social justice brigade who used run it. And people are upset about the new direction of Twitter - like Jim Carey. They just don’t like this new ideological  direction the formerly child-porn friendly Twitter is going down. It’s just so wrong. Where’s the tolerance? The inclusiveness?

Abstraction, Banality, Huxley, the Personal Self

I find it almost astonishing how banal and uninteresting the work of most exalted figures of abstract art is, particularly American figures within the parameters of Abstract Expressionism, but very much abstraction as a whole, including people like Mondrian, Kandinsky, etc. This was dealt with in an off the cuff piece here: https://wwwinabstentia-andrewk.blogspot.com/2022/11/rothko.html.

Regarding all this though, something that came to mind is a passage from Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, about his first experience of the psychedelic drug mescaline. In it, the principal effect he experiences is the transfiguration of the visual external world, where “the doors of perception are cleansed”, and the infinite or divine is revealed in ever more miraculous depths. At some stage Huxley closes his eyes, also expecting the transfiguration of this internal world into the mystical realm, but instead he was very sorely disappointed as what changes there were were not particularly beautiful or interesting. Huxley’s view of things was essentially that with the external world, or world of nature, he was in a sense independent of what he was seeing, he was being granted entrance, in some much deeper sense than normal, into the glory of God. However when he closed his eyes, he was forced to see that he was now back in his own untransfigured personal self, and its mediocrity. He experienced it as a painful but helpfully humbling experience! This isn’t to say the inner world can’t be also transformed, but generally the ordinary personal self and its psychological dimensions is a far less interesting phenomenon than the realm of nature. Were nature the outpouring of the human personal self it would be a very banal phenomenon!

With abstract art, the artist separates themselves from the natural world, and is left with their personal world and its outpourings. There may be elevated notions of the spiritual floating around at the start of the movement, as there was with artists like Kandinsky, but the reality very quickly asserts itself that the personal self is left with little but itself, and cut off from its greatest resource, the external world, it descends into repetitive sterility. But of course there is the vanity connected need to believe in and exalt both the personal self and the surrounding culture, and so vast sums of money may be paid for banal works of abstract expressionism, supposing to prove to all participants involved their mutual exaltation. This was touched on in the earlier linked piece.

All He Wants

Bill Gates has embarked on a musical career with the release into the human environment of his debut song, All I Want for Christmas is to Ban All Hate Speech. Gates, who admits to “not getting music”, expects the song to unite everyone this upcoming holiday season.

When asked isn’t hate speech the kind of very nebulous term that can typically be exploited for authoritarian intent, Mr Gates responded that nebulous is a big word.

village

 

Not finished but anyway as it is of now.

Opportunely Positioned

An opportunely positioned musical insider has revealed that fledgling new industry outfit Toxic Blandness have just recorded a new song, titled What Good is a Brain if You Can’t Switch It Off (You Can Be the One to Switch it Off). The song is expected to be life changing for some.

Just

Just because you swim in the sea doesn’t mean you are the sea.

city, water, whatever

 

Another piece I’ll hopefully manage to, amidst or in spite of all its tumult, I’ll get it to a finished state.

feminine

 

It’s not finished, and maybe it never will be, but here it is anyway for now.

by the sea

 

Water, Dye

Imagine if water was conscious of its own being, and so here is a bowl of water, translucent. Now imagine some drops of dye of whatever colour, say dark blue, are poured into the water. Now the water is no longer conscious of itself in its true translucent state, but instead is conscious of itself as somewhat blue in tint. The more sin or delusion is repeatedly added to the bowl, the darker the water becomes, and so the more forgetful of its true self. This dye can be at the individual level because of the energies allowed our into our spirit, but of course also at societal levels, especially if united by things like mainstream media and entertainments. So in terms of someone being a successful propaganda victim, indoctrinated at so many subliminal levels, the reason it is both so subtle and yet so pervasive is in the sense of self, it is not a matter of water with a few bits of propagandist, ideological details floating on top, but instead the inner state is dyed, and not in a translucent state. 

So anyway, our natural desire should be to be pure, and not dyed! Though it takes a lot more dedication and effort than simply stating its desirability, and as if from this pure state! “Here I am, talking of everyone else being dyed, while statically pure myself.” That’s something like the essence of the self-righteous, guru temptation. The person may have had some pure experience or taste of the pure, but now is invested in pretending to be that purity in their perpetual state, which is a temptation of pride.

Tapies

 

I don’t know its title, but anyway a painting by Antoni Tapies.

Ioan Ianoilde

The powerful story of Ioan Ianolide, a Romanian, who spent 23 years in brutal Communist prisons for refusing to bow down to the cancel culture and let his spirit succumb to being “re-educated” in their soulless image. It’s in 3 parts, but in total not especially long. 

https://orthochristian.com/149415.html

https://orthochristian.com/149418.html

https://orthochristian.com/149458.html

Spring

 

By Catalan artist Joaquin Mir Trinxet from 1910.

Thoughts, Temptations, the Sealed Self

We live in a world whose underlying ideology is one of materialism, and this is to such a depth and pervasiveness that it is not a matter so much of overt propaganda pushing this materialism, but rather the given base on which everything else rests and proceeds. So it is a matter of this materialism being the blank canvas rather than the painting on top of the canvas. By contrast, with the traditional notion of propaganda the propaganda is rather the painting on top of the canvas, directly seeking to influence the mind of the viewer. Now rather we are in terms of the west so far down the pathway of ideological movements which conclude in atheistic materialism, that the overt propaganda work is considered largely done, and so there isn’t even a sense of things being up for debate; instead as said we grow up in a world where this materialism is the actual “blank” canvas on which we now paint, rather than a theory painted on a canvas that is an open sense of reality.

And what I want to look at in relation to all this is our selves and our thoughts. So within this world or society, we tend to have the notion of the inner self as a kind of sealed, autonomous environment, and so the idea of particularly private thoughts being open to invisible, external psychic influence, as in divine or more obviously demonic, is very difficult for us to initially digest. For one thing, the spiritual is not considered to exist, and secondly even if it does exist, we tend to consider our souls or spiritual selves should be sealed from particularly harmful influence. We shouldn’t be porous in this sense, with harmful entities having access to ourselves.

However it may be helpful to simply consider the nature of things as relates to existence in the material sense. There is nothing remotely like an autonomous self removed from an external environment, shocking as this may initially sound. With all the senses, we continually receive stimulation from “outside” our inner selves, with sight, sound, touch, etc. There is no sealed self apart from this, and thus external stimuli include intellectual thoughts from outside, be it from talking to someone, to listening to the radio, watching the news and so on. So there is continual information or thoughts, not originating from our inner selves, bombarding us from beyond ourselves, and particularly when it comes to things like news, from sources about whose nature we may be painfully  misguided and ignorant.

So on this basic material front, thoughts are continually coming at us from outside, and if our sense of autonomy and self-awareness and self-protection are not healthily active, then our immune system is hopelessly porous, letting all kinds of things have easy, unchecked access to our inner self. 

So in terms of spirituality, we are in the same position. Just because a thought arises in consciousness doesn’t mean it is “our” thought, or has a necessarily benevolent source - in Christian Orthodoxy there is emphasised great importance in not accepting such thoughts uncritically - there may be huge self-gratification for instance in believing oneself to be receiving direct communication from God, which seems a much more common phenomenon than one might expect. Every conman attempts to appear “as an angel of light”, and the same obviously would apply here.

So hopefully this shows how the solidly sealed inner self doesn’t really measure up to ordinary life, and so then how this openness to external, particularly temptation, may continue into the spiritual realm - and which isn’t sealed off hermetically from ordinary life. To add, regardless of one’s belief or not in the spiritual, the same necessity of a self protected from thought applies - for example the thoughts of an anorexic are harming them, wherever their source, simply their psychological core affected by their pathway through life, or malevolent forces exploiting their impaired intellectual immune system to attack them with thoughts designed to ruin them.

And so there is huge emphasis on the wakefulness to thoughts as they arise, and of course obviously ones particularly of the nature of temptation. That is the critical moment to ward them off, as once indulged, things get far more complicated. It’s much better not to ingest a poison than ingesting it and then trying to get it and its effects out of one’s system! And that is also why in Orthodoxy, so much importance is laid in The Jesus Prayer, which is simply “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”, and this is something repeated again and again. The nature of the intellect is that two intellectual thoughts don’t simultaneously occupy its space. So if a temptation comes into one’s inner space - for a gambling addict the thought of gambling, whilst they have genuinely been trying to overcome this passion, well that temptation is in the form of a thought, if they have the awareness, desire and discipline to immediately resort to the Jesus Prayer as described, then the tempting thought is repelled as it now has no place to dwell within that person. Spiritually also a far greater force is being invoked to ward off the malevolent invading force, but even for an unbeliever whilst the prayer would be repeated, just in terms of the spatial nature of thought occupying inner space, this wards off the attack. These attacks, whether considered internal or external, do have the specific form of being focused attacks within short periods; the temptation isn’t just on and on, just as for the gambler an add for gambling he sees on tv is “short and sweet.” But unless we allow the thought in and indulge it, then it is powerless to do anything but briefly appear.

At the Core of the Passions

The passions are the different temptations which become embedded through regular succumbing into the various powerful addictions - drink, drugs, gambling, it could be playing video games, which can be taken to very destructive levels, and today obviously the real global pandemic of porn (and which the world, by comparison with another “pandemic”,  rather than frantically trying to shut down, essentially actively fosters), and so on. And what is the common effect on the person in the midst of his or her addiction that unites all these destructive passions? Selfishness. While in its grip, the addiction completely encloses the person within it, shuts out everyone and everything else as irrelevant, so this is the spiritual core or inner essence of the passions. So a world dominated by passions would be a world of mutual isolation, of people united by their spiritual isolation from each other! Maybe everyone would be wearing headphones.

Accuser

“Why is the devil known as the accuser?”

“Because he accuses us before God, and he accuses God before us.”

“What an asshole.”

Abstract

 What I mean by abstract art below and in general is the attempt at total non-representation of living forms. Picasso for instance was not ever an abstract artist, however removed from straight realism he may have been. 

“Why does abstract art ultimately and maybe even pretty quickly become so unsatisfying?”

“Because we’re incarnated creatures, we’re not abstract creatures.”

St Thalassios, Egypt

Do not neglect the practice of the virtues; if you do, your spiritual knowledge will decrease, and when famine occurs you will go down to Egypt. … The Egypt of the spirit is the darkness of the passions; no one goes down to Egypt unless he is overtaken by famine.

From the Orthodox Christian collection of texts, The Philokalia. The insight and understanding of such people can be so amazing and original to me. In the Bible account, the Jews in time of famine went to Egypt where Joseph had become under Pharaoh basically the governor of the country. Then, after initially prospering, they became slaves to the Egyptians, and I think after 400 years of oppression, after the various afflictions sent by God on the Egyptians, and staggeringly stubborn resistance, finally Moses leads his people out of the country, the Dead Sea is parted, and so on. 

Such people within Orthodoxy, such as here, Thalassios, view this as living spiritual parable, that is as presumably historically true, but simultaneously true on the deepest spiritual plane. And so the wandering in the wilderness before after much ups and downs, tests, tribulations and purging, is the path towards or away from the Promised Land in the spiritual sense, beyond simply the factual sense. 

And so if we fail to safeguard with discipline ourselves spiritually, we will in the subsequent famine of this inner sense, go down into Egypt, which is to fall into the world of the body, and simply sensual plane. After an initial seeming prospering there, in this “Egypt”, we then become enslaved by the passions and sensuality into which we have delivered ourselves. Release from this enslavement then involves all kinds of ordeals, and the self ensconced in this realm doesn’t even wish for release easily, never mind attain that release, and the attempt to gain release is an awful lot harder than accept the lot of remaining “in Egypt.” But of course there is no Promised Land but deepening enslavement otherwise. And this Egypt is self-love in general, and this goes so deep into the reality of our condition that it took and takes the completely self-sacrificing incarnation of the divine into the earth to open real freedom from it; otherwise we keep, however subtly this might be effected, being enslaved and lost in this mess of self-love and all its subsequent debasements; think for instance of the massive openings for vanity and delusion and all kinds of psychological squalor within the world of the gurus; or similarly the mess of our all-too human selves attempting to direct ourselves towards goals of “egolessness”. Even here we are exalted. Our ego attains egolessness! Hooray!

And so Thalassios writes, “Spiritual freedom is release from the passions; without Christ’s mercy you cannot attain it.” 

Incest

 

Oh look, it’s members of the cabal, sorry, I mean members of the two opposing parties in US politics from the glorious  pre-Trump era. They are so opposed to each other it’s almost frightening.

If … a thousand

“If you were given a thousand years to live but they all had to be shit, what would you do?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?!”

“I don’t know, I just thought of it.”

“Well try to think of something else next time.”

Annunciation

 

By Domenico Beccafumi, an Italian artist from Siena, painted in 1545.

By Extension

 (I won’t bother linking to the story above where a man called Brian Nguyen won a Miss America beauty contest somewhere or other; I think the picture tells the heartwarming story of how being an overweight man needn’t stop you from fulfilling your dreams, even if those dreams involve winning a beauty contest for women.)

“Did you see where that big man won the beauty contest in America?”

“I did yeah. The women seemed to be really genuinely delighted for him.”

“Just to ask a kind of random question - how much trust do you think you’d have in the elections of a country where people were successfully having heavy men win beauty contests for women? Like how much dedication to reality do you think such people and forces would have?”

“I’m not sure. If I allowed myself to ponder it for more than say 1.2 seconds, then I’d probably wonder what kind of degenerate lunatic asylum is this place - but because that mightn’t make me feel comfortable and relaxed about things, I’d probably make sure not to ponder it for more than maybe 0.0 seconds.

So anyway, I thought Brian looked gorgeous.”

To add to the above dialogue, accidentally overheard earlier whilst “out and about”, a while ago, and not a very long while ago, if there actually was a psychiatric hospital where the unfortunate inmates held a beauty contest, and the judging panel of inmates chose Brian as the victor, it would naturally be viewed by more or less everyone as a sad if touching display of their madness. But the wheels of Progress have been in motion - Progress can’t stand still, otherwise by definition it’s not progressing - and so things have progressed, in some kind of direction anyway. Obviously, within the belief system of Progress where everything is progressing isn’t what’s important; what’s important is simply the fact that it is progressing.

And a final point: why are those who could be termed progressives (or perhaps liberals or leftists) so servile to the pushed trends of the times, including things like “vaccines”? The answer is that they are in a state of obedience to the ethos of the age, which is progressivism. They have signed up in their core to this religion of the present. And so out of this general state of servility to that ethos, they will be servile in the various details that come along: men winning Miss America contests or bowing down to corrupt politicians and drug companies or whatever.

another image

 

Not Consumed

And the Angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush. So he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire but the bush was not consumed.

Just reading this from Exodus from the Old Testament, I had the feeling that here is the divine, the flame of fire, but rather than the individual self simply dissolving into the great Oneness, the Void, etc when meeting the divine, as is a very common spiritual of sense of things, here now by contrast the individual self maintains his existence within the earthly life, where matter and spirit co-dwell, rather than simply dissolving, being consumed by the divine. There is more now to life than simply seeking “the dissolving of the illusory ego”, or such sensibilities as within Eastern religious philosophy - and which is a general sense of the New Age movement also, where the individual life is something to dissolve, preferably painlessly, into the present, and individual self, summarised as the ego, is whitewashed out of existence. The bush is consumed, we’re back to a divine bliss, and the mess of earthly life and all its difficulties is removed from the equation. Here matter, or the life of physical being, are a sensed enemy of the spirit, a felt contradiction to the desired pure spiritual reality.

But just to repeat the point, here with the burning bush, by contrast, the divine can be experienced, but no, earthly life and the individual self are not consumed. There’s great meaning and depth in the individual life, the co-dwelling of spirit and matter. Obviously it could be said I’m reading far too much into that one line, but that’s the immediate sense I had from reading it a while ago.

painting

What a Moment!

 Looks like something was spoken loud and clear here.

A Hut

There was a hut, a house rather, though either way a home, made of wood, and around it, a body of water which, whether by accident or design, amounted to a moat, protecting this home from unwanted visitors, enemies we’ll say, however likely those enemies might come upon this building out in the wild. 

But it turned out that somehow or other, rather than danger from without, it seems some kind of danger befell them from within and, however it came about, the building went on fire. So what good was their moat then? Rather than from without, the calamity came from within. Well, actually, it was plenty good, as they quickly rushed with buckets again and again to the water, and managed, with this water and without too much damage, to put out the fire.

Racist

“You know what I think is really racist?”

“What?”

“Giving a Woman of the Year award to a woman, rather than to a man saying he’s a woman.”

“You said it.”

image

 

Confusing

“You know what confuses me?”

“What?”

“It turns out the people who seemed to be the biggest believers in the vaccines are the ones most likely to be still wearing those bloody masks.” 

“You’re right. It doesn’t look like their faith in the vaccines went very deep.”

“But at the same time they’ll probably keep taking them.”

“The vaccines?”

“Yeah.”

“Probably.”

“I wonder why that is.”

“Maybe just a lack of imagination. It’s the best they can come up with in the circumstances.”

Rothko

 “Why do you think Mark Rothko’s art sells for so much?”

“I don’t know. Maybe cos it’s so boring.”

“Why would that get it to sell for so much?!”

“There’s probably a lot of really boring people out there, and some of them have an awful lot of money. And so these people really resonate with boring art, and are willing to pay for all the resonance. Just a theory off the top of my head.”

“Bit of a harsh theory maybe.”

“Maybe so. I don’t have much invested in it though, so I don’t really care either way. Another theory though while we’re at it: people, particularly “successful” people want to believe the society and culture within which they’re having this success is, say, culturally significant, which of course exalts further their success. And so there’s a desire to believe in this society having great artists as a natural outpouring of itself, and the more money paid for the work of these supposedly great artists, the more apparently convincing the proof of their greatness; and on again to the significance of the culture and those successful within it. The same then obviously applies to artists like Damien Hirst in Britain. The huge prices paid serves to prove the significance of the society producing such apparently significant artists, and so in turn magnifying the achievement of those achieving material success within that society. So there’s all kinds of vanity and insecurities involved.

Again though, that’s all just off the top of my head.”

Tour

Exciting music news just in that Deep State Cabal are hitting the road with their “The ‘We Are Not Satanic Totalitarian Scum’ World Tour.” “We are calling it that, “ explained lead singer Klaus SSchwab, “because some people seem to think we are satanic, totalitarian scum. Such people should be eliminated from the atmosphere.”

Wages

A quick look at a very famous line from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans: “For the wages of sin is death.” The wages are the payment, the wages of work is cash which then opens up the doors to food, somewhere decent to live, then onto pleasures such as eating out, holidays, etc. So here the wages are the harvest of the work, and in this case an expansion of the available spectrum of life to the worker. The last thing one would want is the dimishing of this spectrum, rather than its expansion.This would be a very poor form of payment! - but of course would be the reality within for example the 20th century slave camps of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. The payment of one’s labour would be the exhausting of the body, it not being replenished even in the way of food for its efforts. So the wages here of this slave labour, if pushed to its ultimate outcome, as it often was, is physical death.

Unfortunately I see I’ve failed to keep this reined in, and it’s expanding beyond the quick, short point I’d hoped to make . . . Anyway, trying to get back to “the wages of sin is death.” From delving somewhat into the Orthodox Christian world, one sees that the spiritual path intrinsically involves “spiritual warfare”, not focused primarily on the external world, but internally, and the most obvious manifestation of this is the world of “the passions”, which is vice at a very powerful carnal level. Thus, putting it very obviously, someone who is in the grip of dreadful alcoholism, cannot simultaneously be a deeply spiritual person, as otherwise this spirituality is just some meaningless abstraction pm and in reality he is a slave to his alcoholism, this passion or sin is master of him. And what are the wages of this sin? Ruination at all levels from emotional, physical, one’s family life, etc. So this is the pay off here of sin, or the passions. Rather than the expansion of possibilities, such as in the healthy wages/work dynamic, the wages here is, if pushed to its logical conclusion, death of everything. This can of course be very similarly extended into other areas of the passions; for example, the wages of a gambling addiction, if pushed to its conclusion, is economic ruination, but also all the other damage surrounding that, including black shame and despair. So these are the wages! The wages are death, not a happy land of rainbows and teddy bears.

Even for an ordinary person who isn’t an alcoholic, think of the wages at a physical level of getting heavily drunk.  Getting drunk is the “work”, one’s physical being had been literally poisoned, and now the wages is the hangover. If the drunken state was pushed to the extremity, the wages would actually be death on the very same night. So whilst one is physically alive, these “hangovers” - depending on the passion or vice - are a foretaste of the ultimate wages of sin or the passions. It isn’t a punishment, it’s the harvest.

Evidence

“Not a particle of evidence, Pip,” said Mr Jaggers, shaking his head. “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There’s no better rule.”

Spoken by Mr Jaggers, in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Facts

Music group The Fact Checkers, who have been a bit subdued of late, have, with hope on their hearts, released a new song into the cultural atmosphere, titled Don’t Say I’m Irrelevant. Their previous song, It’s Not a Fact Until I Say It’s a Fact didn’t do so well, so it will be interesting to see how this one fares.

Edge of a Lake (Souvenir of Italy)

Camille Corot, 1855-1860.

 

Nobody Said

So that photo being a bit small, a response to the quick fire revisionism that no one said the “vaccines” wouldn’t stop you getting Covid, a sample of those above quotes . . . Anthony Fauci said “When people are vaccinated they’re not going to get infected.” Joe Biden said, “You’re not going to get Covid if you have these vaccinations,” whilst CDC director Rochelle Walensky said, “Vaccinated people do not carry the virus and don’t get sick.” Meanwhile on the media front, Rachel Maddox from MSNBC, “informed” her viewers that “Now we know the vaccines well enough that the virus stops.” Of course she couldn’t and didn’t know this since it wasn’t true.

So this was obviously all complete misinformation, but maybe we could argue they weren’t lying. Maybe they’re all just incredibly incompetent. And so possibly their false pretences to knowledge were down to their scientific ignorance and stupid unfounded optimism, rather than duplicity. But then again, admittedly, however stupid and incompetent, since at no point could they know what they claimed to know, it is hard to get beyond lying.

So anyway, regardless, liars or incompetent, if you discover someone, say a salesman of some kind, to having relentlessly fed you a load of crap about some product they were selling whose virtues turned out not at all to match the sales pitch, you should quickly wipe all cynical remembrance of such discrepancies from your mind, and now go on, in a state of beautiful unharmed innocence, to completely surrender your  mind and conscience to their next claims about the same products they were just talking crap about a very short time before. That would be the wise and mature course of action.

Gulag

Extremely hot on the heels of their debut song, Indoctrinate Me Baby (All Night Long), exciting new industry outfit The College Students have another song already primed for release in the coming weeks, titled Gulag, Gulag, Gulag. A sample of the lyrics below:

Gulag, gulag, gulag

Gulag’s gonna get you

If you want my body

Get with my ideology

Or else gulag, gulag, gulag

Gulag’s gonna get you

So if you want my body

Better get with my ideology

Ooohhh

Ooohhh

Ooohhh

All right

It’s obviously rare to encounter lyrics of such sociological depth within the pop environment, so let’s hope the kids are rewarded bounteously for these daring artistic endeavours.

College

It’s almost embarrassing having to be the conduit for some reason or other for so much music news, but anyway here’s some more music news, this time emerging from the bowels of the academic world, with the spawning of a new group calling themselves The College Students. They apparently are ticking all the right boxes with all the right people, and are even said, whisper it, to possibly be set for stardom, especially if they continue to put in the hours on their dance routines, which are as yet considered “explicit but a bit wooden”.

 Their first song is called Indoctrinate Me Baby (All Night Long). Its lyrics advance the notion that complete unquestioning servility beneath the wheels and machinery of an emerging totalitarian world state is the path to freedom and erotic bliss.

I don’t have a thought in my head

Except for what you’ve put in there

So indoctrinate me baby

All night long

It’s what you do best

It gives my head rest

I feel really blessed

Cos otherwise I wouldn’t have a fucking clue what’s going on.

 Just to add, it is yet to be confirmed whether that slightly surprising final line is legitimate or not. 

Brainwash

 The band Fake News Shitstorm have a new song recorded and primed for release, titled Brainwashed. A sample of the lyrics have been leaked, and we present them to you below:

It’s better to have a clean brain 

than a dirty brain

So let us brainwash you today.

Spirit and Matter

“Can matter create spirit?”

“No.”

“Can spirit create matter?”

“Yes.”

A Tree by the Water

 By Camille Corot.

Death and Rebirth

Some mixed news on the music front: consumers will be sad to learn of the demise of the Bill Gates funded girl-band Depopulation Agenda in the aftermath of their previous song Lockdown Me Baby not faring as well in the charts as well as expected. Following this artistic and commercial travesty, both members of the band and management apparently suffered varying degrees of narcissistic collapse. Depopulation Agenda will always be fondly remembered for their timely hit of yesteryear, Mask Me, Vaxxx Me, Any Way You Want Me.

Good news however is that a couple of human fragments from the debris of Depopulation Agenda are now part of new outfit, called Woke, and whose debut release is Living in a Bourgeois Cult. The main lyrics to this song, which is propelled by a driving beat and laid back bass line, are:

I’m living in

I’m loving in

A big bourgeois cult.

Emerged

Unusually quiet for a while, Deep State Cabal have emerged from hibernation with a new song, We Own Your Children (And We Own You). Lead singer and principal songwriter Klaus SSchwab describes this as “a love song to humanity.”

Breath

“If you were under water and you ran out of breath, what would you do?”

“Drown.”

“We’ll I suppose of course you could drown, obviously, but maybe first you should probably try coming up and getting your head out of the water and so you could breathe again.”

Woman with Basket

 Georges Seurat, c.1881.

Leaving

I’m not quite sure how anyone decent and sane could have stuck it out this long with the deranged and pathetic current version of the US Democratic Party, but regardless of the full inner substance of anyone in the public eye, this was certainly pretty powerfully put. 

Just to mention one very obvious point - we just went through the incessant hysteria about Covid and vaccines, but simultaneously to this, the woke Democrats also pushed completely open borders for illegals entering the US, and who would not have to do anything about their Covid status. A legal person could lose his or her job if unvaccinated - this was such an unbelievably serious situation and which had justified, nay demanded the most authoritarian powers and measures by the authorities to control - but simultaneous to this millions of non US citizens could just pour into the country as if in a completely parallel world where there was no pandemic issue whatsoever going on.

How can anyone have so little character as to somehow dwell happily within this kind of schizophrenic reality, and accept it as somehow sane and plausible?

Breton Woman and Goose by the Water

 Paul Gauguin, 1888.

Parody

The devil, or the demonic energies, are said to be lacking in all creativity, but instead to create parodies of truth, to copy truth and make a mocking version of it. Socialism can be seen in this light as a parody of the democratic ideal. Instead of the elevation of the individual level upwards, it seeks to unify by degradation downwards, the unity of reduction to a lowest common denominator, and in which absolutist system all individuality, creativity, is denigrated as “capitalist individualism” or some such category of negation. No one is allowed to be free of the all powerful State control. You step beyond its bounds, you get “cancelled.” The nature of the cancelling depends on its attained level of absolutism, rather than a restraint based on any adherence to morality.

The response of the religious authorities, the Pharisees, to Jesus - their hatred of his setting people free on the Sabbath. The Sabbath had nothing to do with it, what they hated was the setting free. The underlying psychology is the same regardless of the superficial variation in the forms or systems of control.