I published an article about Online Maneuver Warfare and provided slides from John Boyd’s Patterns of Conflict presentation. One of the slides describes this goal: “Collapse adversary’s system into confusion and disorder causing him to over and under react to activity that appears simultaneously menacing as well as ambiguous, chaotic, or misleading.”
Not long after publishing that article, I was re-listening to a 1996 broadcast of Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM with guest Malachi Martin, a Catholic priest. He made one remark I had to transcribe. He referred to the Mystery of Iniquity and said,
“Evil is allowed, from time to time, to so dull the senses of men and women and to so disturb the equilibrium of their minds.”
That same evening I was reading from Ascent of Mount Carmel by Saint John of the Cross, a Spanish Catholic mystic. Since reading Carl Jung’s Synchronicity many years ago, I started taking notice of times I detect overlapping themes from distinct sources within a short period of time. St John of the Cross noted times God permitted a spirit of confusion to disturb the minds of men.
Rather than attempt to summarize Ascent of Mount Carmel, I will share how Pope Benedict XVI described it,
In Chapter 21, St John of the Cross makes the case that even though God does sometimes answer those who desire to know things by supernatural methods, it is displeasing to God when such requests are made, “and not only so, but oftentimes He is greatly offended and wroth.”
He provides proofs from Scripture.
(Note: There are minor differences between the translation in my paper copy (cover pictured above) and the digital version of the Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. For ease, I will share excerpts from the digital version.)
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Earlier in the chapter, he does address the question, if it is true that God is displeased, why does he sometimes answer?
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