Between Two Fires: Part Two (work-in-progress)

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

Immanuel Kant

1.

What Immanuel Kant didn’t say, at least not explicitly, is that these two sources are actually one. The starry heavens are the representation of the spiritual source of phenomenal reality – the divine will and archetypal forms (the moral law) – which become pluralised and individualised in space and time. Just as my body, via my nervous system, creates a world that is projected outward so as to include my body in this world, so too the heavens represent the interior source of the phenomenal world within the world. That which is projected through me and represents itself as the world is itself represented in temporal reality as the starry heavens.

2.

Without the sun, nothing. The sun is plasmatic fire, eternal flux and yet hyperstable. The sun is pure becoming – it pours light from itself endlessly and this light is converted to usable energy by plant life: all life is powered by light. The sun analogises perfectly the relationship between earth and heaven, between the world of spirit and the world of phenomena: light (spirit) is the source of life and therefore the world, for only life can produce a world.

Now the green life of the world, from the infinitesimal cyanobacteria to the immensity of the Redwood or Sequioa, is pure will without reflection. Its ‘world’ is reduced to the minimality of light and moisture. The green life of the planet is light become life – it is that form of life closest to spiritual reality. The green life of the planet takes from no other life (barring a few carnivorous species) – it only gives: oxygen, food, medicine, shade, water, shelter. No animal lives that is not totally dependent upon the divine largesse of the green world; the green life of the world is the doorway through which all other life passes. This green life which is one with the soil is mother to us all, the plant life of Earth gives selflessly to all other life-forms. The virgin Mary and the virgin forest, the divine and creaturely Sophia. Divine Wisdom and her manifestation as the green world: both give succour endlessly to all.

3.

Love is the highest intelligence, divine wisdom, symbolised by Sophia, she whom the philosopher adores. One cannot have wisdom without love and one cannot love without knowing the wisdom of love. All that is required in order to help another is that one truly care for the person in question. Philosophy, ‘the love of wisdom’, is ultimately love recognising itself as the highest intelligence.

Before Christ such things were discussed in great depth but the bridge was not crossed so to speak. In Cicero and Plato and Aristotle and dozens of other Greek and Roman philosophers the idea of virtue is debated and delineated down to the smallest detail…missing the point exactly. Cicero held the mind to be the highest and most worthy possession of man, that which made him unique and godlike, but it does not take much reflection to realise that the mind – intellect, reason – is nothing without the body, it exists only because of the brain and ceases when the brain dies. Reason is but a mirror we employ to better understand the world and our actions in it. Reason does not give us motives, it can only help us analyse and realise these motives. The motives themselves are the province of the will, which we personalise through desire, and desire is felt – it belongs to the whole being, becoming focused in the heart, the organ of wisdom. The heart tells us what we want most.

4.

Our Faustian culture is an experiment: Will the satisfaction of our every desire produce happiness? We have been very busy bees and have produced an artificial paradise on Earth…. and we have found it lacking. Never before had we had so much and it is still not enough. One can possess the whole earth and if one does not have love it will mean nothing.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”

St Paul, Corinthians

What is love then? Simply, to put another before yourself. This is parenthood – the general sacrifice which enables life to continue. In other words parenthood is the natural operation of the will: service to the species. Love, in its Christian sense, is something different. Life, for it to continue, doesn’t require us to love one another, obviously. We have been hating and killing each other for a good many centuries and here we are still. Christian love is a radical idea which says that this world is capable of fundamental improvement through the agency of the individual. Christ is the medicine that heals the world: he is the solution to the problem of evil, which is a psychological problem not a metaphysical one.

5.

The love that Christ represents can only come into being on the scaffold and support of self-belief, a love-of-self which is sufficient unto itself. From here the fountain can overflow, but only from here. Without this inner fullness, all efforts at caritas are forced, disingenuous and therefore ineffective, furthermore they will ultimately become demonic (ie lead to mental illness). Instead of the healing radiation of love, there is only the posture of love and with this the recoil into cynicism and shame and self-loathing. We simultaneously deny God (the reality and metaphysical supremacy of love) and blame God, in that we abrogate responsibility for our situation and indulge in victimhood – an essentially schizophrenic position.

Before Christian love can manifest itself as a healing force the individual must first be thrown back upon themselves and themselves only. To stand in one’s own truth, to live by it and through it, to expose oneself to censure, ridicule and worse by doing this. Only from here can caritas be born, it is the preparatory step: obedience to the truth within, the truth of the feelings, the wisdom of the heart, Sophia, that living truth which is the other side of faith. A man will find it impossible to have faith in anyone else if he has none in himself.

A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal. And it all comes from lying – lying to others and to yourself.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

6.

Jesus keeps it real, Satan believes his own lies: Satan is psychotic, a paranoid schizophrenic. Evil is simply the fake, the unreal, and the belief in this which leads to insanity. The holy war is quite simply the war between truth and falsehood, sincerity and deceit, reality and the spectacle… between freedom and slavery. Evil will always attribute itself to the other and never oneself: evil projects. Unconscious projection is the condition of being trapped, isolated; it is to be enslaved by one’s own mind, plagued by demons of one’s own creation: it is hell.

Christ does not judge evil for who would judge someone who is sick and in torment? It is pity that breaks through the defences. Evil takes pride in itself, bulwarking itself against criticism and opposition, digging itself ever further in. Sympathy breaks the spell: it is an invitation, it gives permission: vulnerability calls forth itself in the other. Behind the prideful posturing, the self-deception, there is the inviolate core which resonates with love. We do not blame sick people for their sickness but neither should we indulge them. Compassion does not exist outside of truth, it is a facet of it.

7.

In a world where truth becomes relative, compassion becomes an ethic rather than a fire, it loses its magical power, it becomes abstract – a rational action. This is why a strictly secular politics can never lead to anything other than an empty paradise at best, the gulag and Auschwitz at worst. Without the feeling of compassion there is no shared reality, only separation, increasing alienation and therefore hostility. War is the irruption of reality, shared reality as cure for the solipsistic trance state.

Anais Nin writes eloquently about the outbreak of the second world war in her diary – both she and Henry fled Paris in the face of the invading Germans. Anais saw that all the quarrels between man and wife, between siblings, between parents and children, between friends and lovers…all these minor hostilities accumulate over time until they reach a ‘critical mass’. War breaks out due to the accumulation and intensification of all the petty personal wars we fight with each other, and all these petty wars are themselves predicated on our own psychic ‘splitness’ – our being at war with ourselves.

In Demian, Hesse addresses the time immediately prior to the outbreak of the first world war. The book is a tale of alienation: the ‘false communion’ of social life that he finds himself drowning in. It is as if a spell had been cast, separating people from each other, as if an invisible barrier surrounded them (Nin calls them ‘glass bells’). Hesse finds a kindred spirit in Demian – a brilliant fellow student; and he finds connection also in Demian’s mother, a ‘Sophia’ whose beauty, love, authenticity and wisdom set young Hesse’s heart aflame. The book ends with the outbreak of war and the breaking of the spell. Fate, shared fate, appears suddenly, waking all from their somnolence, uniting them once more. The nobility of life returns in the face of death.

8.

Peace is the result of not reflecting back the hostility that one is subject to: to turn the other cheek. This practice neutralises, one by one, each and every aggression; it is the humble heart of Christianity, the yoga of forgiveness. This art can only be practiced effectively by those who have forgiven themselves of everything already, which is to say those who believe in their own ‘human-all-too-human’ self. It is this belief which makes God real.

Jung’s father was a protestant minister. Whilst still a young man Jung realised that his father didn’t actually believe in God: here he was preaching to others about something he couldn’t quite believe in himself – a pitiful situation. His father wanted to believe of course, he tried to believe, he tried to be a moral example….but this is not enough.

Carl believed not because he tried to but because he discovered that God wants us to rebel – to trust ourselves above all else. Jung was tormented with a blasphemous daydream which kept intruding on his waking consciousness. He would have to fight it down, concentrate on something else, but eventually it was too powerful, and he let it come. He imagined God in heaven dropping a giant turd onto a cathedral, destroying it. After this event Jung, thinking he would be tormented by the guilt of sin, instead found himself completely liberated: he knew he had done what God wanted him to. And so belief was born of itself as it were….or rather through himself, through allowing his own self to assert itself over and above the admonitions of the day.

This is the cure for alienation: to be unified with the whole through belief in oneself, the touchstone of one’s own psycho-physical being: the way in is the way out. From here it becomes clear that the distinction between self and other is only relative, ultimately there is just us and, moreover, this collective identity is unlimited, encompassing all life, the universe entire. Where there is no separation there can be no distinction and therefore no blame, there is only the continual praise of creation itself, the joyous hymn of life conscious of itself. Forgiveness of self = forgiveness of others. All centres coincide.

Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

9.

The sacrifice of the ego on the altar of the self is the purpose of the initiation ceremony in primitive and other wholly religious societies. In our culture it is now conspicuously absent, the result being that far too many people never reach the realisation that fulfilment is proportional to responsibility. They labour instead under the illusion that ones own welfare comes at the expense of others rather than it being commensurate with the magnitude of our commitment to the welfare of all. It is to be unaware that the common good and ones own highest good are identical, unaware that life enriches itself via the refinement of desire. Nothing is sacrificed except the illusion of separateness – the usurping ego.

It is the logic of Zorba and the Buddha as told by Osho. Every man can become a Buddha, but only after they have become a Zorba. It is only by falling in love with life, with the joy of desire, that we can give of ourselves naturally and spontaneously until the giving becomes the self, an inexhaustible mystery. The trap is the fixation of desire, to become enslaved by a particular object of desire. Zorba relates the story of his father who upon finding that he had left his tobacco pouch at home one day became extremely angry at himself. From that day on he never smoked, ashamed that he had become enslaved to something. Zorba himself reaches a similar point, but his fixation is the female: his younger lover is tormenting him, or rather he is tormenting himself through his desire for her. For his father it was tobacco, for Zorba it is women and, like his father, he refuses to be a slave to the object of his desire: he gathers up his dignity and leaves.

Desire is ineradicable, we can only refine it. As Miller said of the Buddha’s own identification of desire as the cause of suffering: this is just another way of saying that one desires to be free of desire. In the final analysis the choice revolves around the consecration of desire: does our desire enrich us or enslave us? The ‘joy of man’s desiring’ is such that to deny it is to blaspheme against life. Before Buddha achieved his renunciation he tasted the heights of luxury and sensuality and asceticism. Only after satisfying these desires to the full was he able to transcend them, to leave them behind: to desire nothing for himself. But even so, Gautama Buddha never freed himself from desire, for he never stopped desiring to help others.

10.

the ‘dark night of the soul’ gives way to the palpable caress of the sun.

Henry Miller is another example of this Zorba-Buddha axis. Miller milks the udder of life ‘til its dry and keeps nothing to himself – ‘je ne parle pas logique, je parle generosite!’. Miller begins by getting the poison out of his system. He has only his words with which he can fight, with which he can do this. He must name and eliminate: the magic power of the word that is charged with truth. One realises the truth in uttering it, freeing himself through the act of writing, the record of which is the book. Miller demolishes the world by demolishing himself – the flotsam and jetsam of his own dispersed ego. If one treats oneself thus, one is entitled to treat the world likewise. The world has authority over us only insofar as we wish to partake in it, to glorify ourselves through it – to bask in its reflected light. By saying no to this glory one gains immunity and escapes from Plato’s cave. That which was reflected is now beheld directly: the moon gives way to the sun. The cold of separateness gives way to the inherent warmth of human existence, to that affection for oneself which is also affection for its mirror, the world. What was stagnant now flows, washing away our erroneous sins, leaving us naked, renewed, dazzled by the wonder of creation ever-new. Miller is the ‘the devil-at-large’ who gradually becomes a saint. He achieves this by purging himself of the lies and half-truths with which we cover ourselves so as to avoid responsibility – responsibility for the world .

“It is the great mass of mankind, the mob, the people, who create the permanently bad times. The world is only the mirror of ourselves. If it’s something to make one puke, why then puke me lads, it’s your own sick mugs you’re looking at!”

Henry Miller, Henry Miller on Writing

All one needs to do change the world is stop being part of it. When one does so one becomes a world to oneself, reinstalled at the centre of the mystery of existence which is to say life. It is to remember that we lived in this mystery as children, before education and work fogged our minds with abstractions. It is to understand what Jesus meant when he said that one must be as a child to enter the kingdom of heaven.

11.

Miller writes at length about his childhood and his childhood friends. It is the nobility of character that Miller focuses on, wonders over and cherishes: the heroic quality: life as exploration, adventure, challenge. It is a different universe, a more vivid universe, a magical universe, the magic of a world yet to be made opaque through the word. In this world the good and the bad, the true and the false have not yet bled into one another: intuition is not yet trammeled by the rational recoil: the mystery resides in clarity. This is why the adult who is still alive will attend to the child, they will not try and disturb or devalue their world, only enhance and protect it, sharing this world once again, the real world that will later be called imaginary.

The sheer damn wonderful aliveness of the child! Miller always has this in him, he never lost it in the first place, he only becomes more and more alive through his work, through the ‘anchorage’ of his writing desk. He reveals the truth: that we enslave ourselves by refusing to differentiate ourselves from the herd. In freeing himself from the general passivity he leaves a record of his ordeal that will inspire countless others to embrace their own ‘rosy crucifixion’. He makes this not only possible but desirable, for in retrospect there are no bad times at all, only the clarity of divine providence forever conspiring to liberate us from our illusory fears. It is only our refusal to work with providence – our fearful desire for safety and security – that results in ever more harsh medicine being necessary.

Miller’s exultation in his own corporeality, his own uniqueness, glorifies not only himself but, more importantly, that which produces and maintains this unique ‘body-electric’ that we are – it is the most intimate and authentic form of prayer. This love-of-self is the worship of God in the most immediate and natural manner. It is implicitly religious, primitively religious, there is no need to gild the lily. This is why Miller is able to use the word ‘God’ with familiarity and ease, for he sees that God is natural, immanent, simply the other side of what we call life. And so, like all else concerning Miller, his sympathy is entirely natural and unsentimental – there is no trace of false pity, no trace of indulgence. He knows we can all free ourselves from the psychology of victim-hood because he did it himself. It is not ‘kind’ to reinforce the helplessness of others through echoing their own self-abnegation.

12.

Caritas is that feminine love which is born from masculine pride. It is that of Sophia, symbolised in Christianity by the Virgin Mary: she who is mother of God (ie of us all). This love is ‘democratic’ in the sense of Walt Whitman, a general and heartfelt namaste. It is to see the potential in all and to help activate this potential through the gift of oneself.

we heal the wasteland by being nakedly and unashamedly ourselves

The love-of-self required to activate the wisdom of the heart is that of Lucifer, the human-all-too-human aspect of deity. Lucifer is the ‘light-bringer’, synonymous with Venus, symbol of beauty and the divine truth that beauty represents. Lucifer becomes Satan only when he denies others the same absolute value he takes pride of in himself.

“Angels are nothing more – do you hear! – nothing more than refined devils. The day will come – oh, if I could only live to see it! – when men will understand this, and then the religion of Christ will take another step forward on earth.”

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

One must not deny their own absolute value as centre of the universe for it is this which activates their power. However this intoxicating realisation and metaphysical elevation can lead to the problem of inflation: the ego becomes monstrous, hijacking the self. The ego attributes to itself that which is not its own, namely the centre, and this is the point at which Lucifer becomes Satan. Satan does not recognise this same centre in others for the ego cannot perceive an equal, only a crowd. Everyone else is the same to him, and less than him. This is also ‘the mass-psychology of fascism’ which, like charity, begins at home.

13.

Before Christ there was nothing new under the sun, after Christ the sun becomes something else – the light of the world which is equated with Jesus Christ himself. Jesus Christ, ‘the son/sun of man’, becomes the force that will propel spiritual evolution henceforth: the Logos. The very western idea of history (‘his story’) is the biography of this idea – the idea of progress.

All progress over the last 2000 years has been due to individuals, for only an individual can change the world through initially changing their own. Evolution is the idea of progress transplanted onto a geological time-frame. Evolution as we have been taught is a myth, it is symbolically true. Whether or not life did evolve from cyanobacteria to us is a question we are incapable of answering in good faith. We do not know, and cannot know, how long human beings have been on earth. We do know that the date is pushed back further the more deeply we investigate (the aboriginal Australians maintain that they have been here ‘since the beginning’). The only form of evolution we can actually corroborate is spiritual evolution, the enlargement of human consciousness, and this is the story of history seen in its proper light. When we re-situate ourselves in reality and see that the world is determined by our own perception of it, then we understand that evolution is, first and foremost, a spiritual affair.

14.

Darwin discovered the process of speciation, not evolution. Over time different environmental conditions will cause the initially singular species to become diversified, to the point of phenotypic and sometimes genotypic exclusivity. Where the initial species comes from is something we cannot know. Did the birds evolve from dinosaurs? Perhaps they did, but we cannot prove they did. But for argument’s sake lets assume they did, lets assume all life began as simple cyanobacteria and is an unbroken lineage which eventually gives rise to homo sapiens. In this standard picture of evolution it becomes clear that it is a movement from simple to complex, towards forms of life with ever greater degrees of freedom. Whether we think this process is accidental or governed is the question and whilst one cannot know ‘for sure’, it is extremely unlikely (to put it mildly) that this could happen ‘by chance’, and in any case this just ‘intentionalises’ chance, which is a very primitive idea.

‘Chance’ for the primitive does not exist at all, there is only intention. If we change ‘chance’ to ‘intention’, then evolution as a myth is coherent, since our own individual evolution – intention towards more consciousness and freedom – is exactly mirrored in geological evolution. Whether our picture of evolution is literally true we can never know, but literal truth is tautological and adds nothing to understanding. The truth that sets us free is that which conforms to spiritual (ie inner) reality, for if it does it is true for all time, and this is the meaning of myth.

We can only know one thing for sure – ourselves. This is the limit of that which we can have certain knowledge of. If we interrogate ourselves and our own evolution we will notice quite quickly that it is not a random affair, but was rather the result of work and self-belief in the face of adversity – that challenge we must rise to meet and in doing so become more than we previously were. To be precise we never become something or someone else, only more thoroughly and uniquely ourselves, and this clue is revealing. Evolution, as far as we can know for sure, is the unfolding of latent potential, that which was involved in us, as our character, from our inception. The motor of this process is the dream, the imagination, the domain of our most intimate and essential longing. We dream ourselves into being, becoming ever more ourselves until we eventually awake. By colonising the imagination the hive-mind retards this process as it must do in order to survive. The hive-mind provides the impetus, the raison d’etre for spiritual growth, which is the development of an inner freedom – a freedom that can never be taken away.

the ‘tree of life’ of Permaculture

Evolution as a theory can only be complete and satisfactory when it is twinned with involution. If something ‘unfolds’, it must have first been ‘enfolded’. This is of course the analogy of seed and tree: the enormous tree already exists in latent form within the tiny seed, in ‘blueprint’ so to speak. The seed dreams itself into the tree; the tree involves itself within its seed, ‘folding itself up’. Unlike trees we are not limited solely to biological reproduction, our ‘seeds’ can also be of another nature, they can be ideas, they can be art. We are capable of seeding our culture such that we become integrated within it for generations to come. A culture evolves from its seed idea to its destiny, which is to ‘seed’ the culture to come. Our Faustian culture, the quest for power through knowledge, the thirst for the infinite… its destiny is to become the seed for the tree of life: that which contains the infinite within it.

15.

Life is the presence of the infinite within time and space. Life is morphologically curvilinear and mathematically incommensurable; the inorganic world obeys an angular and exact mathematic. The golden ratio – phi – is an incommensurable, it is infinite and life adheres to this ratio, another example of this being the Fibonacci sequence. There can, by definition, be only one infinity – life, therefore, is the presence of God, the absolute, within time and space. This universe in which we see life as an insignificant island is actually produced by life and by life only, for nothing exists outside of perception and only life perceives. That infinity that our culture has sought to encompass through its science and technology is in actuality life itself, that which we cannot manufacture nor duplicate, that which we are. Only life can produce life, only life can create a world. This universe, its immensity, its fathomless depths, from galaxies to the miniature world of the atom… all exists within the perception of a living being and only here.

All that exists in time and space does so only by virtue of its opposite, therefore for life to exist there must also be the non-living – the mineral world. The mineral world is capable of growth, as we see with crystals, but this growth is repetitive and shows no evolution. Life incorporates the mineral world within itself, bringing it to life, but life also could not exist without the mineral world. This is the logic of duality inherent in the phenomenal world: all exists by virtue of its opposite, with which it forms a unity when viewed from a higher dimension. In other words, viewed absolutely, there is no distinction between organic and inorganic. They are but two sides of the same coin, both absolutely necessary to one another, for without life nothing at all could exist and without the mineral world life would be impossible (mineral salts are essential to the functioning of all cells).

16.

The stars also represent the absolute, the infinite, for they are spheres, adhering to that other incommensurable ratio – pi. Stars do not exhaust themselves even though they are constantly fusing hydrogen into helium. The reason for this is that stars are continually fed their fuel by the rest of space, by the plasmatic currents. Stars, like living beings, are electrical phenomena and electricity is the presence of the infinite within the finite. It is bio-electricity which differentiates a corpse from a living body (‘the body electric’) and bio-luminescence is its signature. When the current is quickened we become brighter….this is why saints are haloed.

In the heavens it is plasma which is the conductor of the electrical current, on earth it is water. Both are variants of the same elements: water is H₂O, plasma is H+ and OH-. The ‘waters above’ and the ‘waters below’ are separated by the ‘firmament’ which is the atmosphere. The atmosphere buffers temperature so that water is in a mostly liquid phase on earth. Without an atmosphere no liquid water would be possible, but it is the fires that life straddles and bridges – the fire of the sun and the fire within the earth – that provide the energy that keeps the biosphere warm and alive. The fire of the sun is situated on the surface of our star: the corona or atmosphere of the sun is the hottest region, the interior is coolest. On earth there is a reversal: the surface and atmosphere are the coolest regions, the core is the hottest. The sun and earth represent the principle of opposites, necessary to one another’s existence. Without the sun, no life; without the earth, nothing at all, for there would be nothing that could create a world through perception.

17.

Our sun represents all stars in itself; the earth, all life.

The light of the sun is the spirit, the Logos; the living earth is the spirit embodied, Eros.

Logos and Eros, yang and yin, male and female. The world is made of light, it is informed by the Logos; Eros is the will that moves the life of the world, it is desire. Both are products of fire, which represents the godhead: fire for all things and all things for fire (Heraclitus). The fire of the sun produces both light and matter: the spirit and that which embodies the spirit. Likewise the fire within the earth is what produces both the land and the atmosphere: solid ground and its rarification.

The Logos as world is revealed directly through the experience of beauty which correlates to the infinite: the incommensurable ratio of phi. Eros is a measure of how alive we are: the more alive we are, the stronger the vital current, the more beautiful we become (beauty is exuberance – Blake) and the more we are capable of perceiving the beauty of the world, which is to say the spiritual dimension within it: For the eye to perceive the sun it must already have something sun-like in it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, ie dependent on one’s acuity of perception.

18.

Human beings are the marriage of soul and spirit but in order to consummate the marriage, in order to make it conscious and spiritually fecund, the two must be reconciled in the human heart.

The soul is the singular property of the individual, their unique essence or character, that which is developed or unfolded throughout the course of life.

The spirit is universal, it is that which we also call God, denoting this absolute or totality.

Desire (eros) is that energy which propels the soul into ever more full expression of itself.

evolution (upwards), and involution (downwards) are two aspects of the same process.

Truth (Logos) is revealed via the perception of beauty (or excellence – arete), or through philosophical reasoning (the ‘truth’ of which is, in effect, another way of apprehending beauty – there are no ugly truths). The act of creation draws down spirit, expressing it in the world.

Eros is experienced bodily, sensually; Logos is sensuous – perceived via the senses.

The senses require a body in which they are housed; the body requires the senses to exist (perception creates the world which includes my body). They are apparently different principles which are in actuality unified, separated by the illusory nature of time and space (maya).

The way up and the way down are one and the same (Heraclitus).

19.

the ‘god-man’ diego armando maradona. goal of the century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oaxnk-Si61Y&feature=emb_logo

The archetypal forms are revealed within the world via those individuals who most closely approximate them: it is the beauty of the world and the virtuosity of those beings within it which bring us more closely in contact with God. Eros or desire aspires upward to the light of the spirit, to immortality; Logos descends, seeking manifestation as beauty or arete (excellence/virtue) in the world of phenomena. The two currents meet in the heart: organ of love and wisdom, which at their highest degree are indistinguishable. The conjoining of soul and spirit is what sets the heart aflame – the heart becomes a sun. That which was separated in order to produce the world is re-united in the individual. The higher dimension now lives consciously in the lower.

The activated heart is the holy grail – it is perfect wisdom and the basis of all sacred magic, ie miracle. It is to be in the world and simultaneously transcend it; to be in the world of opposites and to know that each pair of opposites constitute a higher unity. It is to know the world is perfect and cannot not be, in that it is a perfect mirror of ourselves – a school for the development of the soul. This development is achieved through the the act of creation, which is ultimately the act of creating oneself.

This world that is the ‘school of the soul’ is equally the ‘theatre of the spirit’: eternal creation and recreation. It is this ‘magic theatre’ which constitutes the soul’s ‘classroom’: the theatre and its double: the world as a work of art.The play of the spirit is the work of the soul: creation and reflection upon creation. The soul evolves through the apperception of beauty and the divine truth this represents.

“I was just a boy when I sat down
To watch the news on TV
I saw some ordinary slaughter
I saw some routine atrocity
My father said, don’t look away
You got to be strong, you got to be bold, now
He said, that in the end it is beauty
That is going to save the world, now”

Nick Cave, Nature Boy

The purpose of individual existence is to bring the soul into full actuality, which is to say, the achievement of conscious immortality – immortality in body (ie individuality) as well as spirit. Life is inherently immortal but the individual is only relatively so. As ‘this person’ I will die when my body does, even though that which produced and sustained me, the divine will, is unaffected. However if I develop my soul to completion, to wholeness, to holiness, I raise my own individual self to the level of the immutable whilst alive: I make of myself an archetype. The individual who achieves this level of development has achieved individual immortality – they will never die. By becoming fully themselves they provide another archetype from which the generations to come can gain guidance in their own development. This is the true meaning of celebrity: the true ‘stars’ are so called because they have actually become stars.

20.

Just as we have our own spiritual development so too does humanity as a whole, the earth as a whole. Through the genius of the individual the level of consciousness of the whole world also develops. With the advent of Jesus Christ a new dimension of existence, a new feeling, literally enters the world: not only caritas but that upon which caritas depends – the sovereignty of the individual. Without Jesus Christ there is no western culture, no democracy, no ‘human rights’….as we are discovering. As we lose touch with our spiritual ground, we replay the logic of Jesus Christ: now we are going through the crucifixion, all of us. By not taking personal responsibility for the maintenance of the world in harmony with the moral order that underlies it, evil has become incarnate and is now operating in almost full freedom. (In both Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter evil gradually incarnates itself). That which we project rather than integrate (the shadow) will eventually become demonic, forcing responsibility upon us. Thus is the compensatory nature of the psyche.

we all know there is a law

and that law is love

and we all know there is a war coming

coming from above

Nick Cave, hiding all away

21.

The laws of man have become increasingly detached from moral law, from natural law. The simulacrum now threatens to overwhelm reality entirely. This counterfeit world is the inversion of reality: the true is called false; the false, true. This disempowers the individual for all creative power is predicated on true knowledge. Those few who see through the ruse and try and rouse those that are ‘plugged in’ are voices crying out in the digital wilderness. The infernal machine enslaves and conquers, imposing its logic on the living world: the logic of reduction, the logic of inflexibility, the logic of the mineral world applied to humanity: the absence of freedom. As it does so, the more starkly reality reveals itself by contrast, for reality is always spiritual reality and the spirit is always free.

the ‘house of god’ is the body, not an institution.

The apocalypse is a perceptual event. ‘To pierce the veil’ is to let the light in once more, the light of heaven: reality rudely re-asserts itself. The tension between reality and spectacle, between immediate and mediated experience eventually calls forth the lightning bolt of correction: the tower of Babylon is consumed by fire, revealing the true ‘god-house’, the body-electric, that which is the function of the immortal will. What is fixed and rigid eventually collapses under its own dead weight…and from the rubble indomitable life sprouts anew.

It is through sacrifice that life is made sacred once more, valorizing the moral law, the law of the land…or, as Spengler says, there is only one power stronger than money – blood. This does not necessarily imply bloodshed (though it doesn’t exclude it either), rather it indicates the supreme power of kinship and the supreme demand it places on us. Most of us wouldnt sell our children at any price, but we do sell ourselves and call this quite normal. Slavery is normal and always has been; what would be extraordinary is to see it end. But this may be our lot, this and what must come before to move us to such noble action.

Our blood is molten iron, it represents fire itself: the fire of desire and the fire of justice; the desire for justice, the justice of desire (this is why injustice makes our ‘blood boil’). The hotter the fire, the brighter the light: one must do justice to oneself to increase it in the world.

22.

The city is the symbol of humans in service to the machine – a spiritual inversion. The city rewards those who serve it, which is to say those that keep the humans within it blind to reality – the logic of The Matrix. The city cuts off its inhabitants from the reality of spirit through the ugliness of its architecture: a city must dedicate itself to beauty if it is not to lose its soul to the machines it breeds. Architecture used to adhere to the golden ratio because of this, which is why the Freemasons were free. Their knowledge was very highly valued because, at that time, beauty in architecture was also.

Our environment dictates our psychology: psycho-geography. Our obsession with mental illness, whilst comical in itself, is also tragic for those that take it seriously. How could people not be mentally ill living meaningless lives in what increasingly resembles a bland prison? In order to adapt to such a life constitutes a spiritual maladaption: what point better adapting people to the city-world (the premise of medical psychology), if that world is maladapted to the earth, to life itself? Result: schizophrenia. This is why medical psychology invariably makes people more depressed: its solution being to become more dead so as not to feel the pain which would heal us if we let it, if we explored it. A true healer is a co-traveller on his patient’s journey of self-understanding; a fake healer prescribes medication. A true healer suffers with his patient and grows through and with them; a fake healer does not take into account the uniqueness of the person before him, seeking to pigeonhole him instead, according to his 21st century version of Demonologie – The Diagnostic and Statistical Guide of Mental Disorders. The superstitions of the Middle Ages are alive and well today, couched in medical rather than religious jargon.

23.

We are living the beginning of the end of the megalopolis. An exclusively urban world is quite simply insanity writ so large that it calls forth dramatic correction. The megalopolis is hubris and invites nemesis necessarily. Now, for the first time in three centuries, the great cities of the world are shrinking. We are at the turning point, a new trajectory has begun. The megalopolis is in crisis mode, the hypertrophy which is its nature (quantitative growth: the tropic of cancer) has undermined its viability. The hive-mind is bringing out the heavy artillery in order to shore up its hegemony, but its very predictable tactic of control through fear is backfiring, resulting in an exodus. The city-world is destroying itself in a reductio ad absurdum, an inevitable collapse due to the mendacity and mediocrity of its minions. The spectacle is an anti-meritocracy and therefore sacrifices its ability to adapt and evolve on the altar of blind obedience and shallow self-interest. The city and the country are becoming ever more polarised: the virtual and the real; the spectacle vs nature. In a last ditch effort to stave off the inevitable the hive-mind will declare nature both dangerous and vulnerable: humans must be separated from nature for their own good and for nature’s. In other words, terminal schizophrenia.

24.

Empire can only exist if humans are divided amongst themselves, which is to say divided within themselves, for all external alienation is predicated on an interior cleavage and projected outwards. This split between nature and human, body and mind is contrived, it exists only due to the psycho-geographical pathology of the city-world and the reinforcement of this pathology via education and media. The mind is part of the body (ie the brain) and the body is part of the mind (ie existent only in perception). They are the interior and exterior aspects of the unitary psyche.

’emancipate yourself from mental slavery….’

Jesus Christ was not divided in himself and therefore he did not judge but rather forgave. Jesus represents the end of empire – his murder was its death sentence. Even though empire has spread over the face of the earth it brings with it the deadly, life-giving virus of Christianity. Now the whole world has become first century Rome, wrestling with that ultimate humility which spells its end. Blessed are the poor in spirit…the last shall be first. Humility frees us from ourselves, from our schizophrenic attachment to imperial logic. If we do not crave riches, power or fame, if we do not crave anything at all, then we pass the devil’s test and the devil becomes our ally (ie integrated within the psyche as instinct/intuition). The devil’s faith in God has never been in question, only his faith in Man. When life becomes dangerous our vain pretensions evaporate and we realise that what we really want is what we already had but didn’t appreciate.

Danger itself

Fosters the rescuing power

Holderlin

.

Between two fires, part 1 (work-in-progress)

‘Peace…comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the centre of the Universe dwells Wakan-Tanka [the Great Spirit] and that this centre is really everywhere, it is within each of us’

Black Elk

1.

Time began when my heart started beating. The beat of my heart keeps time, the rhythm of life; when it stops so does the world. Life begins as oceanic dream – immersed in salt water, one with the mother, one with God. The dream intensifies, the waters part: light and first breath…separation…the birth of the world is the loss of unity. From womb to larger womb, from dream to brighter dream, from the aqueous to the terrestrial…. life come ashore, carrying the ocean within.

The universe cannot exist independent of life; for there to be an object there must be a subject: to be is to be perceived. The universe cannot exist independent from the experience of it – its existence is a representation, a representation which exists for me and through me, a representation which is the objectification of the will within me, the same will that moves the universe entire. This will is one and yet it manifests itself as infinite plurality and diversity, just as the light of the projector is one and yet it reveals an unlimited multiplicity of phenomena.

This subtle realisation has been at the heart of philosophy since the beginning. It was Plato who first elucidates this with his theory of the forms. For Plato what most take to be real – the world around us – is actually only a ‘shadow’ of a higher reality, a projection (the allegory of the cave), and philosophy is that discipline which allows us to perceive this higher reality. Soon after Aristotle argues that the world of appearances – so ephemeral to Plato – are actually the only reality we can know. From here the centuries old argument between materialism and idealism begins.

Most simply materialism is science and idealism is philosophy. Science assumes the external world to be objectively real; philosophy knows that it is not. Descartes marks the beginning of modern philosophy – his cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I am’, puts the ontological status of the world in question relative to oneself, ie I am sure that I exist, but that is all I can be sure of. After Descartes, Bishop Berkeley leaves us with the maxim esse est percipi: ‘to be is to be perceived’ and, similarly, Hume shows us that there is nothing in the mind that wasn’t first in the senses. Then Kant, woken from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’ by Hume, goes further in recognising that Hume is not entirely correct – the senses provide the data from which reality is constructed, but time and space are not phenomenal, ie we don’t perceive them, and yet they exist. Time and space are the ordering principles of perception: the forms or archetypes are individualised and pluralised by time and space. Kant shows that which exists independent of perception, which he calls the ‘thing-in-itself’, bringing us back to the Platonic conception of the originating forms.

Plato’s philosophy relegates phenomenal reality relative to the ‘higher’ reality of the forms which are apprehended via reason. Aristotle, conversely, holds that we contain our own telos or archetypal ‘blueprint’ within us (entelechy). If we combine the two points of view we get a more complete picture: The forms are not sensible, rather they are what informs the sensible world and are apprehended with the aid of philosophical reasoning. However these forms exist within living beings, rather than in an abstract dimension. It is through the sensible world that we apprehend the archetype: the phenomenal world is the signature and gateway of the spiritual realm. In order to see through the phenomena to their informing archetype we must be disinterested – we must be observing purely objectively, ie without reference to the will. This mode of perception is that by which the beauty of the world becomes apparent, sometimes overwhelmingly. The sensible world becomes translucent to its informing dimension, imbuing everything with a greater clarity, radiance and depth, drawing one into a state of contemplative wonder. We see that the sensible world is actually suprasensible: Earth and Heaven coincide: the world is alive through spirit. The therapeutic value of psychedelics is that they induce this state of pure objectivity in the subject; it is, to put it simply, the grounding of individual consciousness, a reset. All cognitive-perceptual filters are removed: the world is seen anew, as it actually is, and not only seen but felt: psychedelics are an erotic sacrament: feelings heighten as self-consciousness dissolves. When we want to express the appearance of great joy in another we say they are ‘beside themselves’ for they have been ‘taken out of themselves’, which is the literal meaning of ‘ecstasy’.

We have grown up knowing heaven as the better place we go to after we die. The privileging of a putative afterlife over our earthly existence is bound up with the privileging of the abstract over the sensuous, the conceptual over the aesthetic, for our Christian idea of heaven evolves from the Platonic theory of the forms. It represents the assumption that it is the intellect – that which produces self-consciousness – that is the kernel of our being, our immortal identity. Consequently the actual phenomenal world is regarded as something secondary or derived, subordinate in essence to the (Platonic) ideas that created it. This holds true also for medieval scholasticism and the sciences that grew from it. Science seeks to subordinate the phenomenal world to the ‘laws of nature’, – ie it is the laws of nature which produce nature. Before Darwin it was generally assumed that the ‘laws of nature’ and the ‘mind of god’ were equivalent. After Darwin, God begins to become superfluous to his own creation: the universe becomes more and more automatic in its operation, driven by a blind process of natural selection. In the end we are left solely with a mechanical universe ruled by chance and accident, for ‘God is dead’ and the natural world is deprived of its subjectivity, being merely the result of something else, namely the laws of nature. This then is our Kafkan lot: a world where the abstract is real and the real is illusory; a world in which the law is more real than the flower. Nature de-souled; living beings reduced to automata. Vivisection could not exist if this were not the case.

The above is related to show how our religion has never really changed for two thousand years; it has always been a religion of the book and the danger with such a religion is that the ‘word’ tends to usurp the throne, becoming more ‘real’ than reality itself (hence dogma and ideology). The pagan world is pagan because it recognises the ‘living book’ that is the world as ultimate authority. Writing represents in static form the dynamic representation that is the world; the word abstracts and fixes whereas reality flows into being continually. The religion of the book tends to obfuscate the living book from which it is abstracted and will lead to insanity if it does not recognise the primacy of that ‘living book’ which is its touchstone and guide (which is the raison d’etre of the poetic – that use of the word which is most faithful to its origins). In want of this recognition, reality and our socially mediated experience of it will become increasingly decoupled, leading to a state of confusion, hysteria and chaos.

When the entire world goes mad, the madman alone is sane. This is why the fool is trump (evidently the cosmocrator has a sense of humour). The fool is alone, except for his faithful and playful dog. The dog, symbol of loyalty and trust, guides/energises the fool. The fool does not think about where he is going because he doesn’t have to – wherever he is, there is paradise (indicated by the light blue earth beneath him). The fool is unnumbered – he stands outside of the architectural schema of the major arcana. He is the perfect intelligence of nature, the Tao…this is why he is moving, for the Tao is movement, change, process, ‘the way’. The fool represents the dynamic aspect of creation which precedes, ontologically, any knowledge of it. We could say that the fool sacrifices his perfect freedom to become the world: he is ‘dismembered’ into the 21 major arcana which comprise the journey of the individual soul from ignorance to knowledge; from forgetfulness to a re-membering of who we are. The sacrifice of the fool not only creates the world, it creates the possibility for the fool to be born into it. In other words, it is the fool within which guides us on our journey towards wholeness, culminating in the birth of the fool in the field of space and time.

2.

Forty years prior to Darwin’s Origin of the Species, Arthur Schopenhauer publishes the first volume of his magnum opus – The World as Will and Representation – at the tender age of 29. In it he elucidates Plato’s theory of forms to a new level of clarity. For Schopenhauer the world is will and the representation of this will. Plato’s forms are not the source but the intermediary between will and representation: the forms or Platonic ‘ideas’ represent the divine will as the phenomenal world. The will and its representation as world are both essentially divine in that phenomenal reality is the objectification of the divine will in time and space. Because the phenomenal world is the mirror of the will, all efforts to change the world miss the point: we can only change one thing – how the will within us expresses itself. It is for this reason that knowledge is paramount, for only a correct knowledge of reality allows us to short circuit the automatic (genetically and socially conditioned) functioning of the will. Indeed, via knowledge, we can even go so far as to deny the will altogether, and this was the discovery of that Eastern luminary Gautama Buddha. This resignatory or pessimistic philosophy is one solution to the tyranny of desire – for desire can never be satisfied for long: like hope it springs eternal.

But is the world merely to be escaped?

The Bhagavad Gita introduces a different conception into the eastern religious mind. Written a century or two after the passing of Gautama Buddha, this revolutionary text suggests that the world and its inevitable conflicts are not to be avoided but embraced. For no matter what the time and place it is a privilege to be alive, to be an actor in the divine drama. What matters is that the individual consecrates his actions; all that he undertakes is done not egoistically but as an offering to God, to that divinity which he makes manifest in the world through this consecration. Ours is not to wish things were different, or to ascetically withdraw from the human drama, rather it is to act with honour in whatever situation we find ourselves. In this conception the grandeur and nobility of life is affirmed. Life is always worth living – even when one must kill or be killed.

In the West the pessimistic bent is connected to the idea of original sin – the doctrine that we are somehow guilty by virtue of being born. The idea of original sin has nearly always been held in connexion with the sexual act which gives rise to human life – the sin of our origin. This idea has poisoned the Western psyche for centuries, leading to the repression of women in particular. The doctrine of original sin has impeded the full enjoyment of life within ‘Abrahamic’ cultures for centuries but its persistence means that there is something in it that we need to become conscious of. There is a truth hidden beneath the puritanical devaluing of eros and in order to heal – to reconnect eros with logos – we must understand what this truth is.

Sin, for the Gnostics, was never a moral question, sin was intellectual error and this conception of sin is thoroughly Greek too. To sin is to be in error, to be without true knowledge, to be under an illusion. We are born into this world with no memory; we do not know where we come from. If we have come from ‘somewhere’ else our memories of it have been erased or at least occluded. One thing is clear and beyond dispute – we are separate: there is me and there is everyone and everything else. Every being in time and space conforms to the this principle of individuation: all creatures are unique and uniqueness is separateness.

This then is the true meaning of original sin. By virtue of being born into the world we forget that we are actually and always one with God. It is in this way that the sexual act becomes conflated with the notion of sin for it is the sex act which produces a new individual and therefore world. We forget that the world in which we have our singular existence is essentially our own creation (maya), obscuring our identity within it, leading us into errors based on this misunderstanding. If we understood that we are also the whole cosmos and every being in it as well as experiencing it from an individual centre, then we would know that we cannot devalue others without devaluing ourselves. Indeed this fact holds whether we are conscious of it or not: the pangs of conscience redirect us towards this truth we have forgotten by virtue of being born. In the experience of conscience we actually feel the hurt we inflict on another. How could this be so if this other were not also me in some fundamental way?

Original sin (error) is the result of being born into the world as an individual, psychically separate from the rest of creation. Original sin is not an indelible and unavoidable moral stain, rather it is a necessary forgetting of who we really are, for it is this which is indispensable to free choice: existence is a love story and love cannot be forced. We must choose to come back into the cosmic fold: obedience counts for nought, only desire. To choose to do something because one knows they will get a reward means that the choice signifies nothing, hence the necessity of our amnesia. We must choose without knowing where that choice will lead, choose in accordance with our innermost desire, even when this leads to difficulties. A virtuous act is unaccompanied by thoughts of recompense.

Desire is the divine will within which, if followed faithfully, leads us to the door of the beloved. This is the the meaning of the ‘saviour saved’ (salvator salvandus): man sacrifices his individuality (ie egoic POV) so that he may re-unite with God, just as God sacrifices himself as ‘all’ to create us as singular individuals. Evolution/involution. God and man superimposed: the re-sacralisation of the world. We are prodigal sons and daughters all and to come home is to see with new eyes. When the ‘scales have fallen’ we see the kingdom of God spread out before us. When we remember where we come from we have already returned. This anamnesis is the apatokatastasis: the restoration of paradise.

3.

We are candles, each of us unique and yet our flames are one, indivisible in essence, sparks from the divine fire. To talk of the beginning of the universe, a big bang, is true only as poetic metaphor: the universe is the fruit of sexual love: the passion of the lovers is also the longing of the child to exist. We are born from love and death is the price of this love, but death is also to dissolve oneself in a blissful merging that sexual love is the foretaste of (le petit mort). We are born from love and to love we return: the universe is beginning and ending continually.

All phenomena in space and time conform to the principle of relativity: there is no fixed point from which we can get an objective measure; the only constant is the speed of light. Because of this constant we have been able to say, with some confidence, that the universe is expanding and, moreover, that this expansion is accelerating. This would seem to point to an absolute beginning to the universe…ie if we ‘rewind’ the universe the universe will contract, until it finally becomes a point, the singularity, ‘the big bang’. But the universe is not just expanding, it is expanding at an accelerating rate. This means that when we ‘rewind’ the universe it contracts at a continually decelerating rate. The universe can be ‘rewound’ forever.

[In case the above is still unclear walk towards the nearest wall, in fact walk half-way to it. Then halve the distance between you and the wall again. And half it again…. even if you continued in such manner for an infinite amount of time you would never reach the wall.]

The speed of light is that speed at which no time would pass – if you were riding a beam of light there would be only an eternal now. Phenomenal reality subsists on this eternal now – it exists entirely within it – for everything is happening at the speed of light, for everything is, ultimately, light. Matter is energy and energy moves at the speed of light. We are dual beings: as part of the phenomenal world we are subject to birth and death: for all that is born must die – the phenomenal world is ceaseless transfiguration. But I am also the unchanging awareness of this changing world and my changing mind – I am the light by which all exists. Note that this awareness is not intellectual or reflective in any way, it is simply the ‘space’ in which everything happens. Just as the tree must be aware to move towards light and water, even though it is unconscious. Indeed this ‘awareness’ is simply the other side of the will, for the will is dynamic, it is movement: away from or towards. But away from or towards what? The will may be blind but it must be aware in order to move towards or away anything. It must be able to discern, and discernment presupposes awareness. Even though the tree has no real nervous system, it can sense and direct itself accordingly– all living things do, even microbes. What this means is that the will and the world, in so much as we can know, exist always together – ie there is no world without will, for the world is a product of the organism which in turn is a product of the will; and there is no will without world, for the will would have nothing to sense, nothing to move towards or away from – it would be impotent, unable to translate itself into act, and an impotent will is a contradiction.

When we die and the world vanishes, the will we most intimately are remains, for it is not born so it cannot die. Now this will, together with the archetypal forms, produces the world, which means that the world is already implicit in the will and the forms. What it’s like to experience the will and the forms from the ‘other side’ is something we can experience only at death, but the most common trope associated with near death experiences is the ‘tunnel of light’, which draws us toward itself. The will is naturally drawn towards the light, just as it is also naturally drawn towards the light in the green life of the world. After death the world may not exist, but the light that produced it remains. This light is the awareness in which all exists, both before and after death. It is undifferentiated reality – the primordial mode of being. Castaneda describes the relation between undifferentiated reality and the world through the terms nagual and tonal. The tonal is everything that has a name, it is the world-as-representation, it is everything that is born and dies. It exists like a floating island, supported and surrounded by the nagual – undifferentiated primordial being. The will is that which connects the world to that in which the world exists, the tonal to the nagual. It is the ‘active side of infinity’ (Castaneda)…expressing itself in time and space so as to know itself.

The will is the fire at the heart of creation which produces the light by which all exists. This light is awareness itself – an undifferentiated field from which perception constructs a world. It is according to Ibn Arabi (the Islamic philosopher of the 13^th C), the Creative Imagination: ‘that which projects the latent forms (archetypes) onto the illusory screen of otherness’ (Eliade). And it is the energy of love which draws together that which was divided into self and other – re-establishing the original unity in the world. The creator divides himself into creator and creation, will and world, subject and object, in order to be ‘enriched by the experience of the consciousness of Self (ibid).’ The ‘marriage’ of creator and creation (will and world) establishes the primordial unity on Earth and makes it possible for the individual to ‘objectively realise his interior images (ibid)’. This statement is what it appears to be: the logic of sacred magic and miracle. Sai Baba regularly manifested vibuti (consecrated ash) and various other objects out of thin air. He explained that the only difference between himself and others was that he was ‘on fire’. This fire is love.

Awareness can be empty of content, as in deep meditation, but the world can only exist in awareness, ie through the light. It is this awareness that is the spiritual presence ‘behind’ the world of phenomena, that in which the world has its existence.

“Religious doctrines..about the relationship of the spiritual and material worlds necessarily deal with the transcendence and immanence of the Absolute.. the “interplay” of these two “dimensions” varies from religion to religion but both are always present. Whatever accent a particular spiritual economy might place on these aspects of the Real, the underlying principle is always the same. It might best be summed up by an old Rabbinic dictum: “The universe is not the dwelling place of God; God is the dwelling place of the universe.“ In the light of such formulations we can also dispense with the sharp dualistic separation of the two worlds: the world of phenomena is held together by a numinous spiritual presence. Indeed, without it the world of “matter” would vanish instantly and completely. Eternity is ever-present within (so to speak) the phenomenal world.”

“The Firmament Sheweth His Handiwork”; Reawakening a Religious Sense of the Order of Nature

Harry Oldmeadow

The world is the reflection of the will: all beings in the world are at once will and representation of this will, subject and immediate object for this subject, (ie the body). Through this body we create our world, which in turn includes our body: the body is part of the world and that which produces the world – it is the bridge between the will-in-itself and the world-as-representation. The world has no independent existence – it is willed into existence, quite literally. But any act presupposes a world in which the act occurs. The will can only know itself through the world, which it projects and then lives within, so as to know itself. The universe is projected through me: I live within it and it lives within me as the will which animates me and thus produces a world via my nervous system. Thus is the nature of reality: mutual implication: nested loops: a mobius strip: stairs and contradictory stairs.

We are playing an infinitely regressed, massive multi-player role playing game called Earthling, the aim of which seems open-ended, much like Minecraft. However, more seasoned players come to know that the real goal is always the same – namely one must ‘complete the quest’. This quest is that which was related at the start of our Faustian culture – the quest for the grail. Parsifal, the ‘innocent fool’, is the hero of said quest, indicating the correct manner in which to approach the adventure (worldliness counts for little compared to an ingenuous mind and faithful heart). Courage is required of course, and the willingness to go ‘into the woods at their thickest part’….ie tread a path that is solely yours…and one must be chaste, naturally,…but ultimately it is sympathy which reveals the grail, that is the key to understanding and therefore healing, or as Rimbaud calls it, ‘divine charity’, which is the same thing. It is the grail which heals the land and the king which are one, and what is the grail? It is a feminine symbol, the ace of cups, that which receives and holds the blood of Christ. It is our capacity for feeling, that which evaluates the motives that intellect presents. This then is our firm foundation – it is our feelings that tell us what matters most, and it is this knowledge which is the basis of right, ie healthy, action: let your heart unravel and it will be path on which to travel. Our feelings lead us back to the reality of our embodiment: that which we value most highly leads naturally to an expression of this through the body. The grail symbolises the erotic genius of incarnate life, that which grounds the logos or spirit in the flesh. The wine of the mass symbolises the grail, for wine heightens feelings – it lifts our spirit to the point of laughter and dance and love. When the spirit is enlivened, so is the body. ‘Exuberance is beauty’ (Blake): beauty is the glow of vitality.

We are where the holy marriage takes place: between the body and the mind, through the heart that makes them one. The activated heart is the philosopher’s stone, that which transmutes base metal into gold, or the temporal into the eternal. It is to see the world as it actually is – infinite and holy. It is to realise that life is embedded in eternity.

***

Life imbues matter with a capacity to grow, organise, evolve into ever more complex arrangements. Life is not only objectified will, as this is true of all phenomena: life takes possession of matter from within.

Life is the macrocosmic process microcosmised: the will which objectifies itself as body is wed to this body. The universe is likewise the microcosm macrocosmised – the macanthropos. .

Life is the ‘decentralisation of the centre’: the centre of the universe resides in every living being: God is an infinite sphere whose circumference is nowhere and centre is everywhere.

Life is the presence of God in the field of space and time; a God who is one and many simultaneously.

The mystery of life is the mystery of God.

According to the Book of Genesis, the Earth was initially formless, there were only ‘the waters’ which God proceeded to divide into the heavens and the Earth by means of the firmament. The waters are the feminine moiety of the divine syzygy, essential to the creation of life and the world which is its mirror. God is the light which ‘inseminates’ the waters. God and Sophia create the universe together: the universe is created through ‘the waters’, through life, through us.

“And God said, let is make man in our image… So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:26-27 [my emphasis]

The universe cannot exist before life exists, this is a logical impossibility. The universe is an object of perception and as such necessarily implies a subject. To speculate on the nature of the universe prior to life is nonsensical but commonplace: the veil of Maya is not easily rent. In reality, the beginning of a life is the beginning of a universe and there is no other origin apart from this.

4.

Living matter has an interior dimension which we call ‘will’ which is the source of its active being; inorganic matter, conversely, is subject to the will, it is passive. At the inorganic level it is the elementary forces which express the divine will: gravity and electromagnetism and inertia. Gravity is the expression of the underlying one-ness of extended reality; electromagnetism is the expression of the infinite within the finite; inertia is the expression of the unchanging in the ever-changing world. In contrast, living beings are impelled primarily by the will-to-live, an irrepressible urge to continuance and reproduction which is, in effect, to serve the species above all else. Representations reveal their origins analogically – it is the nature of the phenomena which reveals the nature of what they represent.

The elementary forces contend with each other for the ‘possession’ of matter (we should note here that there is no such thing as ‘raw’ matter – matter only exists as a form of some type. As physics has shown, matter itself is an illusion). The will is a constant striving, a tension between what is and what will be. This ‘strife’ is what Heraclitus refers to as the logos, ‘father of all things’… the transcendental unity that realises itself ever more fully in time and space through duality. The primary expression of this duality is the tension between the inorganic and the organic, between that which is entropic and that which is negentropic, between that which homogenises and that which is total heterogeneity. Gravity draws everything down back into the decomposing darkness of the earth; evolution is the increasing emancipation of life from gravity. This is why humour elevates the soul: levity and gravity: cradle and grave. It is no accident that the joker/fool is the trump card: humour detaches us, giving us a God’s eye view….an enlightening glimpse of the divine comedy. It is this detachment that has become total in those laughing sages: the Zen and Taoist ‘fools’, and also in figures like Henry Miller, Diogenes and Tom Bombadil. The fool represents total fluidity because he is a faithful servant of that other fluidity: desire, eros. Desire is the expression of the divine will within us. Its nature is fluid (‘caprice thy name is woman!’) and its nature is perfect. It is the only absolute authority that exists in creation.

A ladder only works because the rungs resist our weight. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction and it is the tension between these opposing forces which provides the stability and energy for further progress. This principle is what Castaneda called tensegrity (portmanteau of tension and integrity); it is also what Nietzsche meant when he said that the more tautly stretched the bow, the further the arrow can fly. Evolution requires opposing forces and the greater the evolutionary moment the greater the tension between these forces. For example, control must keep intensifying until such a point that the tension (between control and man’s essentially free nature) is sufficient to propel mankind beyond his current spiritually impoverished condition….it is this tension, this need that is behind every real work of art, every expansion of human consciousness. The artist does what he does because he has to, for artists are simply those of us with the most sensitive antennae – they feel the tension moreso than the rest and would get sick if they didn’t translate this tension into something else. They are the first arrows to fly, tracing paths from which future generations will take their bearings.

This will or striving or desire, in order to realise itself within the field of space and time, must reckon with other desires, with the exigencies that the whole world, inorganic and organic, thrusts upon it. The individual must choose a path of action and the scope of this choice is proportional to the consciousness of the life-form in question, which is to say the complexity of its nervous system. Life is essentially unpredictable and becomes more so in proportion to its complexity, which is why in higher animals the intellect becomes more important, and instinct less so, increasing the chance of error. In man, that creature who has essentially unlimited choice, the intellect must continually process multiple possibilities and motives, extrapolating and analysing, before presenting the results to the will for its evaluation. Life is unceasing struggle against that entropy which demands its toll eventually be paid in full, but only by the individual – life itself is immortal: life sacrifices itself individually so that it may evolve as a whole more rapidly.

Nature is eminently unconcerned with the individual; her concern is the continuation of the species, – the archetype or Platonic form. However, the species can only manifest itself through individuals: the individual represents the species in time and space. The individual therefore is the bridge between Nature and the species: she must go through the individual to achieve her ends, for there is no other avenue available to her. The individual desires their own continuance and well-being above all and thinks little of the species as a whole, but this ‘selfishness’ is used by Nature for her own ends, just as Adam Smith found that individuals serving primarily their own desires serves as the basis of an optimal economic system, namely capitalism. Of course this is true only to a point; if there are no checks on individual greed then this statement loses its truth value. In Adam Smith’s day (mid-18thC) the church still functioned as a check on individual greed, limiting the polarisation of wealth. Today it does not, which is why we have billionaires.

‘Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer, after money has destroyed intellect’

Oswald Spengler

We could say that altruism is the relative dominance of the species in the individual, in that the individual puts the general good above that of solely his own, or thinks more of the general good than his own, or more simply still, he sees that the general good is his highest good also. In other words true altruism and true selfishness are exactly the same thing. It is for this reason that morality teaches itself…it is the natural result of understanding…of an understanding of how the world operates. This is also why we have the hermetic formula: faith plus reason = gnosis, ie the goal of religion is spiritual knowledge, not the implantation of a moral code. To know that the order of the universe is ultimately a moral one is to realise that all moralising is unnecessary. There is nothing to ‘correct’ but our own distorted view.

The separation of religion from science spelled the end of religion-as-inquiry; this task science would now take up alone but in good faith. Our religion had already begun to grow stale by the time science begins to grow from her. Science represents the evolution of our religion, a ‘third testament’, in that it takes up study of that other deity, the one our religion had a very mixed relationship with – Nature.

Christianity, to exist at all, had to overthrow the prevailing pagan mindset which was initially extremely hostile to it. The virtues of the classical world and that of Christianity are chalk and cheese. Aristotle never mentions love or compassion as primary virtues; it is arete – demonstrated excellence – that is the symbol of virtue. Success, honour, prestige – these mean zero to the Christians – they act as if they were above such concerns: the world has no hold on them. To the Romans, Christianity is anathema at first – it seems a religion of weakness rather than strength, but very soon the opposite is shown to be true. The sacrifice of the martyrs represents the triumph of Christianity, for it conquers death itself through them. When death loses its sting how can an empire maintain its control? Rome must re-brand itself under the banner of Christianity to survive, which represents a compromise for both sides: the words of Jesus and the apostles will now travel the world, but they will do so in service of empire. Judaism is recruited in the form of the old testament (Torah) to balance the revolutionary new. In time Christianity will become a religion of forbearance rather than one of revolutionary change; the kingdom that was promised is still in the works.

Despite the neutering of Jesus and his message which has been done in order to prevent too glaring a contradiction coming to light, there is enough truth in his words and those of the apostles to affect us still. The new testament contains a new spirit and this spirit has saturated most of the world. It is above all the spirit of forgiveness, symbolised by Jesus’ words on the cross which poetically echo the Gnostic formula, ‘all sin is error’. Forgiveness cuts the Gordian knot of fate: the future can come to be only when we let go of the past.

Much has been written about Rome, especially its decline and fall. Rome was the greatest empire the world had ever seen but its highest achievement ends up being the fostering and broadcasting of Christian values, which are diametrically opposed to the values of empire. The irony is instructive –  Nature achieves her ends through us, not with us; unwittingly we serve her. This being the case we could apply this same ‘ironic’ tendency of Nature’s to our present time. For instance, we are living the greatest technological explosion in history; the world is now integrated as one entity through globalisation, which has been motivated, more than anything, by greed. Our dreaming most commonly extrapolates our technological capabilities as far as we can imagine –  ever more immersive virtual reality, cyborgs and settling other planets. But what if this is all misdirection? What if Nature is achieving her ends through us once more, in order to produce something diametrically opposed to the dreams of global empire and hi-tech wizardry. What if the purpose of globalisation was ultimately to connect the world into one, such that ‘an idea whose time has come’ can go ‘viral’. In short, our magical technology and communications systems might ultimately serve to broadcast the wisdom of the first peoples around the world – those who lived in harmony with the land for millennia. Just as empire produced the Christianisation of the world, globalisation may be Nature’s method of bringing a global, ecological consciousness into being. The legacy of Rome was Christ; the legacy of globalisation will be Gaia.

5.

We could say that Christ – the man and the myth – represents a new human archetype, one that becomes the model from which the Christian civilisation will take its cue – Jesus Christ becomes the standard by which virtue will now be measured and ‘virtue’ is another word for ‘conformation to the will of the species’.

In the insect world, there is already no significant difference between the individual will and the will of the species, for instinct is dominant here and instinct is the ‘voice’ of the species in the individual. The insect world is marked by endless examples of self-sacrifice in order that the whole may survive and prosper. We could call this phenomenon the ‘hive mind’.

Royalty, and the connection of royalty to divine authority, echoes the logic of the insect world. The queen is waited on by her courtiers just as the queen bee attended by her drones. The queen sacrifices her freedom in order to become the focal point of the hive, the keystone which gives the whole social structure its integrity and purpose. The queen in the insect world represents the higher authority of the species in the world of individuals: she is the portal through which eternity enters time. A human queen does not give birth to her citizens, she is biologically identical with them. In the human world there can only be an analogous relation. The king or queen is that focal point for a people in the same way as for the insect world, in that the king or queen is the authority of eternity in time and space. The queen bee has divine right due to the fact she is literally the source of continuity for the hive; for royalty this divine right is based on them being the source of continuity in a cultural sense – tradition and moral order. For this reason they must be an exemplar: they must be worthy of the position, which means being aware of the gravest of responsibilities, namely to bear the weight of the species as an individual. Of course this logic is borne out more in myth than in reality, but it is myth that matters most, for myth is myth by virtue of it being eternally true.

Concurrent with the dissolution of effective monarchy, we see the rise of purely temporal authority: the rise of politics. Where the king or queen unified temporal and eternal authority in their person, politics is exclusively concerned with the temporal; it leaves questions of a metaphysical hue to religious authority.

Religious authority and political authority are poetry and prose, which is to say they are of a different order or degree. Religious authority is primary in that it confers on the person their dignity, whereas political authority is concerned primarily with their utility. Poetry is the language of the true legislators of the world and poetry is always religious in spirit, particularly when it is rebellious. Poetry is the absolute authority of subjectivity; true religion likewise. Therefore there is an irremediable incompatibility twixt politics and religion, for every true religion is an argument against politics (as Christianity most definitely is). A true religion is that which helps the individual realise their own spiritual autonomy. If we are guided from within by our own subjectivity then we all have a direct connection to spirit which, if cultivated, is far more effective than any external guidance. The ‘cultivated’ person sees that all institutional authority is unnecessary, including that of the church.

A true religion would obviate the need for institutional authority, which is why the church has always been divided against itself. The church is really much like the argument for communism: ie the people can look after themselves, but only after we have taught them how to….a lesson that ends only when the institution does. Nevertheless religion remains the only effective bulwark against political power we have. The church may be prey to corruption like all institutions, but it is the faith of individuals within the church that keeps the church alive, even when its outwards forms are dead. Christ has been ‘sleeping’ within the church for centuries, and it is the ‘second coming’, the ‘Parousia’, that will spell its end and its beginning. In short, the church will become one through Christ, for he is the raison d’etre of all Christian religions. The church will eventually become what it originally was – the ministry of the poor. It will find its salvation where Jesus found his: in the midst of the lowly and sick and cast out. When the church makes its wealth available to those that need it most, Christ will live again.

Our religion was never apolitical – the Roman empire simply became the holy Roman empire. The interests of the Catholic church have always been more worldly than spiritual. The more religion is involved in politics, the more its authority is undermined by its dabbling in the mundane. Religious authority becomes merely ethical, forfeiting its numinous quality which alone distinguishes it from (and elevates it above) secular authority. The forms remain but the spirit that animated them has departed. The tabernacle is empty.

When God ‘dies’ the world loses its meaning, but as the old saying goes: ‘God has need of us, as we have need of him’. It is we who resurrect God via blood transfusion: which is to say artistic creation. Humanity requires myths to live by and humanity is also the source of myth. Myth corresponds to eternal truth, which is to say, the will and the archetypal forms. The king or queen represents the species in their individual person; the artist is possessed by the species which speaks through him in his work – the prophet being the highest degree of this ‘possession’. This possession is what we poetically attribute to the muse, she who symbolises beauty and the eternal truth this represents. For it is through beauty that the world comes into being: it is beauty that compels an individual towards that other with whom he will make a new world. Beauty is stronger than money and power, it can destroy cities (Troy) or it can build them (Paris); it can overpower any powerful man, driving the most reasonable to madness, murder and suicide. Indeed the demonic aspect of beauty – that which Henry describes as ‘that feline beauty which has America by the balls’ – is Nature’s antidote for the general dis-honouring of beauty we call civilisation. Whether it be the natural world which we mutilate and cover with architectural obscenity, or the commodification of the female form in pornography and prostitution, we are dishonouring sacred beauty and ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’. This is why the sexes are falling apart – they must do so to come together in good faith once more.

Beauty cannot be possessed, only honoured. If beauty is not honoured, the individual will be possessed by the daimon of beauty until he corrects his vision. This correction is brought about, as is usually the case, by suffering: the object of his passion becomes a torment to him. If he can’t have her, life has no meaning for him. Eventually he will be completely drained: the will relaxes its grip and he can begin to see that he was hypnotised, out of his wits. For this beauty that overpowers him is the same that he fails to honour in the world-at-large. If beauty is not honoured, then beauty will be used as a means to this end, ie man will be shown that beauty is stronger than he is – he will be overpowered and broken by her. And then, free of his hypnosis, he becomes capable of understanding why he had to go through such an ordeal, which is simply to become a man worthy of ‘her’ – one who protects and serves beauty.

The infantilism of our civilisation is directly connected to our romantic fixation. The puer aeternus – the perennial youth – is simply the refusal to grow up (Peter Pan syndrome). Youth becomes the highest, most desirable thing – to look younger than you actually are becomes an obsession. This is Beauty exercising her demonic aspect once more – possessing the person, imprisoning them in a hall of mirrors. We exist only in the gaze of others, which is to objectify oneself, resulting in that characteristic vacuity that attends the world of celebrity in particular.

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion (Unamuno). Falling in love is like falling under a spell, nothing matters except the object of one’s affection, the significance of which is like the sun itself, ie they are the centre of our universe. But this is an abrogation of responsibility and an imposition upon said other, who in being objectified suffers a mutilation at the hands of her admirer, leading to resentment. This then is the end goal of romantic love – disillusion; or as Henry says – the artist conquers the romantic in themselves.

To see that romantic love is a demon which possesses us is to forgive those who are possessed by it, for they do not know why they do what they do. As long as we seek to possess another, to possess beauty, we will be possessed in turn. This is how the world reflects the will. Only when we realise that it is our charge to protect and honour beauty (and the highest truth this represents) will we see through the illusion of romantic love….and upon this rests the possibility of the ‘real thing’, which in other words is to be married (which has nothing to do with legal contracts). ‘Marriage’ is when each is connected to the other through God, through a mutual avowal to serve not each other, but that which we represent and embody. Marriage is a mutual consecration and only this can produce a relationship that endures and deepens, for to endure it must deepen.

All we need to do now

is take these lies and make them true somehow

All we need to see

is that I don’t belong to you and you don’t belong to me.

George Michael, Freedom.

Beauty dishonoured becomes a curse, which is why the world is going through a nightmare. This is why the artist is the cure: he honours beauty above all and in so doing restores the rightful order. For the experience of beauty, at its highest degree, becomes rapture, and rapture is that experience where time becomes pure duration – the indefinite extension of the present moment. It is to become absorbed in perception. Indeed this phenomenon is so powerful that it can lead to sickness or death, for it draws us (ie that which we most essentially and intimately are, the will) out and towards it, endangering the unity of will and body. St Francis died, ecstatically, from the beauty of Nature – he could not restrain himself, such was its magnetic power. Beauty is the most revealing experience we can have of the will-in-itself: it is the experience of eternity in time and space.

6.

The artist is driven by the needs of the species which he feels to a near intolerable degree in his person. His presence is always a thorn in the side of the status quo, for he is not subject to the same rules as everyone else: he recognises his own desire as supreme authority. Naturally this state of affairs undermines the authority of the state, which is why the artist is often a tragic figure – the immune system of the status quo is often brought to bear upon him. The artist reminds us that secular authority, ultimately, is unnecessary. The artist is a devotee of the highest authority – that which moves the world. He is morally superior to any ethical code, any secular authority.

We may bemoan the futility of life as many a great mind has done. These pessimistic souls do the world great service with their brutal honesty. Optimism tends to prevent honest examination of the situation and therefore its improvement. We would all like to believe that this is the ‘best of all possible worlds’ but, as Voltaire showed in Candide, this is simply disingenuous. The discrepancy between ourselves and the world, between what we consider most noble and right, and its conspicuous lack in the world….how is this to be explained? If the world is the mirror of ourselves, then why do we find it lacking? Logically the problem must lie in the individual, ie the fault is not in the world, but in us….in how we perceive the world.

And so we come back to knowledge, that which corrects and enlarges perception. Yes we are the problem, for the problem cannot lie anywhere else, but the nature of this problem is such that we can refrain from persecuting each other’s moral failings, in that it is the result of being deliberately misled. ‘Everything we are taught is false’ (Rimbaud) because all our ‘knowledge’ is predicated on the materialist fallacy, even though physics has conclusively disproved this assumption. Starting from this point, all knowledge will be tinted with error and will therefore not alter the perception of the individual. Only when we begin from firm foundations can we gain true knowledge, which is that which enlarges our understanding of the world and ourselves, for the truth is the truth because it has an effect. This firm foundation is to know that we are the source of the universe – we project it and maintain it in its being and when we die it vanishes along with the brain that produced it. The macrocosm and microcosm are the same: in other words by interrogating ourselves we reveal the nature of the whole cosmos. There is only one fundamental subject of study therefore: oneself: gnothi se auton: ‘know thyself’.

Evolution is driven by the divine will, by an innate desire seeking an ever more full expression of itself, of its own essential nature. Therefore to understand evolution we must look to its highest expressions, those forms of life which are the most full expression of its essential nature. Man is therefore the key to evolution. In man we can approach the phenomena of evolution from within and when we do we discover that the fulcrum, the point of traction, is desire and its refinement. It is this ‘refinement’ that is the higher purpose of the intellect.

‘The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.

For the Cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life; and when he does the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy, whereas now it appears finite and corrupt.

This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks in his cavern.’

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [my emphasis]

All begins from the inner dimension, the ‘world-behind-the-world’, the incessant will. And this will which is to us a blind and fluid impulse, what is it in itself? We cannot directly know, for knowledge requires a brain and the world it produces. All we can know is that the key to the eternal realm lies in the symbol, that which connects the temporal and eternal. Archetypes are symbols – they do not have a simple meaning – they express different ‘sides’ of themselves dependent on the situation or context. We see the symbol as it is expressed in the world but, like the moon, we never see its ‘dark side’, that which is embedded in eternity. And yet every expression of the archetype bears the stamp of its eternal origin…the expression of the archetype is always analogous to the archetype itself. In terms of the will-in-itself the prime symbol is the tree, for the vegetable life of the planet has no intellect, no nervous system, no consciousness. It is pure will, striving for light in one direction and moisture in the other. But to strive towards light and water the plant must be capable of detecting light and water. Even though the tree is without consciousness, it ‘knows’ where to go. It is life itself, the pure will moving where it must. The example of the tree and the green life it represents, shows that intellect or consciousness is simply reflection (hence why the intellect is symbolised by the moon) – it is something added to the will in service of it. Intellect develops so that the increasing number of paths available to an organism may be ‘weighed and measured’. In other words intellect evolves in tandem with the complexity of the nervous system of the animal and the scope of its choice, which are the same thing. In the tree, all reflection is absent; the tree doesn’t know ‘why’ it grows as it does, it just does. There are no choices to be made, for the life of the tree is itself that which strives towards light and water automatically – that is its nature. Therefore the tree symbolically represents the will-in-itself with its dual-directive: light and moisture, or logos and eros. The tree represents the dynamic unification of Heaven and Earth: to grow towards the light whilst becoming ever more firmly rooted in the soil. This is why Schiller famously says: ‘What a tree is unconsciously, be consciously – that’s it!’

The world-as-representation is an inner longing made manifest in space and time. It is a shared dreaming therefore which holds a world together, which binds a human world together, which harnesses this longing into coherent, collective expression. Without this shared dreaming more and more external measures become necessary –laws, ethics, ‘expert’ guidance – and as these external measures accumulate they obfuscate, more and more, the innate and perfect will which we are, that which ‘knows’ better than words could ever say. And so we produce even more laws to compensate for this natural deficiency, compounding the problem, leading to confusion and contradiction and an ever growing need for simplification which is, in practice, to ground everything on the individual. For this will which we are is one, but it expresses itself uniquely in each of us: no one can guide us better than ourselves. The true teacher simply cultivates a deeper faith in one’s own compass.

7.

Viz medicatrix naturae

Nature is her own physician and, as we have seen, there is nothing that is unnatural upon the Earth, within the super-organism Gaia. We are autonomous beings – we are free to choose and because our actions are not predetermined Gaia can only respond to them. This is why horrors are commonplace but also why they don’t overwhelm the world completely. We are free to transgress her law, as we prove every day, but her justice is inexorable. We cannot escape the ‘law of life’ which underpins our existence, we can ignore it but the more we do the sicker we become (and the nature of the sickness will reveal the cure). The law of life is non-negotiable: until we respect and care for all life – human, animal, plant, fungi, microbe – we will suffer all the more, for this is the only means of healing nature has at her disposal. As Henry Miller says: “suffering is not only profoundly inherent in man …it is the sole cause of the awakening of conscious thought” – suffering wakes us from our somnambulism.

Gaia has plenary power; all is happening with the collaboration and direction of Gaia, she is the planetary muse: sacred desire. Nature is the epitome of aesthetic perfection – the sublime order of chaos. The ‘living book’ is there to remind us that the truth we seek is all around us, all we need to do is remove our prejudicial lenses. When we do we see that ‘weeds’ don’t exist: each green life is a miracle. These feral outcrops can elicit a depth of feeling that a manicured lawn simply cannot. A single tiny green life sprouting through the cracks in the pavement is a poem when we observe without judgement.

We are the truth we seek. We cannot grasp it because we are it, we can only participate in it and when we do we verify God through the creative act. Every creation is a co-creation, a strange ‘dialogue’ with oneself, with the source within. How often does a writer look back at his work and think, ‘Did I write that?’… ‘Not I but the Father within’, is Henry Miller’s reply. This is the mysterious space from which the words flow forth and when they are a flowing it’s dictation time. It was to ‘HER’ that Henry dedicated his work; the Celtic poets always addressed their poetry to the Goddess – words of adoration and fealty. She is the sublime source of desire and the artist is he who is loyal to his desire above all, who revels in it and reveals it shamelessly, who in ‘recording truth truthfully’ (Emerson) does justice to her and himself. When we create we are one with God: all true art is a recapitulation of the primal drama – of the one that becomes two in order to give birth to the world. The artist is he or she who marries the two back into one through the crucible of their own being, through their work and life which are inseparable.

Eros is ‘blind’– desire wells up from the depths. By turning the light of consciousness upon our desire we reveal it as a liberating force – our wild self. Beneath the (rapidly perishing) veneer of western civilisation, there is raw life, always and everywhere the same. We are animals; domesticated animals, but animals nonetheless. The domestication of man is another term for industrial civilisation, the birth of which is also the birth of madness as disease, as Foucault so eloquently demonstrated. Madness-as-disease is also the demonisation of the fool, a spiritual inversion which can only lead to the degradation of society over time. When we lose connection with our wild selves we lose connection with life and this leads to spiritual sickness, what we refer to today as ‘psychological disorders’.

We have within us the wisdom of the wild animal – the untapped depths of instinct. Domesticated man is imprisoned by his own mind, his own faulty vision. These ‘mind forg’d manacles’ (Blake) are our own creation – they exist only because we believe in them. Henry stopped believing in them and woke up to find himself alone. He turned his consciousness away from the world – ‘walking out through the in door’ – to become a universe to himself. And what is clear is that Henry Miller, one man, is more interesting than the entire world, than the whole of society and all its gilded dross. The world of mercantile man is a bore, a grind, a con, a charade – it ain’t worth the effort pal, then and now. You are worth more than the whole stinking mess and the only thing making you miserable is that deep down you know this and you aren’t acting on it. One must take the leap of faith to find one’s faith: say ‘no’ to the world on its terms and become a world to oneself. When you realise that you have exactly nothing to lose, you gain everything…this is the kernel of what Henry is saying.

8.

Together we form the mind of Gaia and this mind is waking up as we wake up, as we re-member who we are. For evolution is a circle not linear: for there to be the possibility of evolution there must first be involution. That is to say God must be ‘involved’ in the world for life to evolve towards Godhood within it. This idea is connected with the the Orphic mystery religion. Orpheus is the dismembered God (and not the only one, eg Osiris) whose parts are scattered across the world, and it is up to us to ‘re-member’ him, to make him (and ourselves) whole – to integrate what has been separated.

This ‘dispersed’ God could also be equated with the microbiome which is ubiquitous, immortal and invisible…ie it satisfies the logical definition of God. The microbiome is like the ‘Borg’ from Star Trek – there are no true individuals (asexual reproduction), rather they are a collective being that is dispersed across the universe. On Earth the microbiome connects all life: all that lives is alive because of the microbiome which supports it. In space the microbiome is dormant because it is completely desiccated: no liquid water = no active life. God requires water to live in time and space.

Mitochondria, the power stations of cells, are semi-autonomous organelles with their own DNA and are thought to have once been simple bacteria that were ‘ingested’ by other bacteria, giving rise to the eukaryotic cell which is the basic building block of all higher life. Cellular life shows a tight homology across kingdoms: all life is created with the same ‘cellular lego’ and all these ‘constructions’ are animated through their integration within the microbial matrix. Life is a polymorphous, protoplasmic intelligence…all that lives is kin, is of the whole, is holy.

Mychorrizal fungi connect forests into an ‘enveloped’ whole. Microscopic mycelial threads penetrate the root cells of trees and plants, connecting them, allowing them to share metabolic products, to distribute them where they are required. The mature forest is an ‘over-organism’ that responds to the needs of all its denizens for they are all ‘it’ – all parts of its ‘body’. It is a collective which has become self-aware as a collective. After a threshold of integration or complexity is reached there is an emergence: a new level of awareness is born.

If we use the forest as our model and our root metaphor (pardon the pun), we can hypothesise that in human collectives their exists a similar potential for integration such that the consciousness of the group-as-a-whole would be naturally expressed through each individual, and given a unique slant by each individual. This form of organisation would have such resilience and capacity for ingenuity that one could imagine it enduring for centuries, millennia…and that is the life the aboriginal peoples of Australia lived for tens of thousands of years, enduring through global catastrophes that annihilated cultures all over the world. Viewed in this context the present time is an extreme and extremely temporary aberration. I suspect that the industrial explosion was necessary, evolutionarily speaking, in order to integrate the whole of humanity, to connect them into one hybrid monoculture, to facilitate the spread of humans, animals, plants, microbes and ideas across the globe. This integration is necessary to facilitate the emergence of a global or Gaian consciousness, for not only is the world integrated in real-time, we have a real-time emergency on our hands to go with it. The threat isn’t climate change or viruses, it is quite simply an unsustainable way of life, a way of life which is taking too much from the natural world and giving back too little. Obviously such a state of affairs has a finite time span….as we are now discovering.

Emergence/emergency: births are messy affairs but in the end something wonderful happens – a new life enters the world. In our case this new life is a new culture, that human super-organism so thoroughly treated by Spengler. The Faustian culture of the West has run its course and a new world-experience beckons, for that is what culture is, it conditions reality such that all in said culture belong to it, are at home in it, and know each other through it. It is for this reason we have been made more and more homeless, and likewise why reality has become surreal to the degree that we don’t know what’s real and what’s not anymore. Isn’t this ‘unanchoring’ exactly what we need so that we may find new shores? A radically different reality lies in readiness, awaiting our readiness, dreaming itself into being through us….because the future is inside us, as Thom Yorke says.

We have been focusssed on the infinities of space so much that we have neglected exploring the last true terra incognita – we ourselves. We are the last ‘continent’ to discover, that outer infinity we grope towards with our fancy technology is actually created inside us and projected outwards. The universe is actually inside our heads and yet empirical reality does exist (‘matter is a lie that is true’) and conforms to the law of causality. We can manipulate phenomenal reality by way of the law of causality but we can also manipulate reality in toto when we change the manner of our perception. Knowledge is that which shapes our perception. All true knowledge is also an enlargement of reality itself – we see in a way we did not before, a way we did not even suspect existed until we gained said knowledge.

Where knowledge expands, ideology and dogma diminish. Knowledge is always knowledge in relation to oneself, ideology and dogma dismiss the individual from the process of verification. ‘Knowledge’ becomes the sole province of the relevant experts whose pronouncements are not for the likes of us to question. In order to maintain a system of control, the population must be consistently fed a credible narrative that nevertheless is not completely true, otherwise it would empower the individual. The official narrative displaces reality: the simulation cannibalises the real.

Humanity is made impotent by an elaborate project of disinformation which begins in earnest at school. This ‘project’ is the immune system of the status quo. Like all organic phenomena the status quo is characterised chiefly by the will-to-live: it has no choice in the matter. The status quo can endure only if the individual is kept in the dark, so to speak. All that matters to the ‘hive mind’ is that it continue to exist and it can only justify this by declaring itself morally superior to the individual. Now this is actually true in the case of the insect world, but in terms of humanity it represents a violation of our intrinsic nature: for we are not infallibly guided by instinct like the insect world: we are responsible for our actions. In other words to obey an authority outside oneself, an authority which in essence is not compatible with that authority within, is to commit a crime against oneself and nature, which are inextricably one. Indeed we could even go so far as to say that this ‘disobedience to self’ is our true ‘original sin’, in that this is the original error from which all others stem. This is the reason why the materialist fallacy is still promulgated as fact, for only reductive materialism eliminates subjectivity and its absolute authority: the status quo must reduce humans to organic machines if it is to convince them of the need for social engineering.

9.

The mind of God and the body of Nature are two expressions of the same energy in different domains – Heaven and Earth. Heaven is, as JC said, within: the kingdom of God is within you; and also: ‘the kingdom of God is spread out before you’. Both are true: what is spread out before you and what is within you are the same reality viewed relatively or absolutely. In an absolute sense the kingdom is within for the universe truly resides in us…it is constructed in our heads and we project this construction as the phenomenal world. The phenomenal world is relatively true in that it is entirely relative to us as individuals – to how we perceive it. The kingdom within is not relative but absolute, it is the projector, the light itself. The projections are innumerable but the light is one. We can work with the projections or we can work with the projector, which is to say the imagination. Both rely on knowledge, the former by understanding the law of causality, the latter by understanding the law of growth.

It is the psychic or subtle level of reality which is continually informing the phenomenal world. The phenomenal world is a field of interaction, comprehensible to great practical degree via the law of causality. This is the domain of science: an understanding of the laws and principles underlying the interaction of phenomena are what has enabled us to create our high tech. world. But all that we have produced has been produced first in the mind, in the imagination. It is our knowledge of the law of causality which has enabled us to apply these ideas which grew first from dreams, but the dreams themselves…these do not relate to the law of causality, but to the law of growth.

‘For nothing stands outside of nature, not even the human mind. Nature is always the same, and its virtue and power of acting are everywhere one and the same, i.e., the laws and rules of nature, according to which all things happen, and change from one form to another, are always and everywhere the same.’

Spinoza

The law of growth pertains directly to the will, whereas the law of causality pertains directly to the intellect and only indirectly to the will. Dreams are decoded intuitively whereas causality is deduced rationally. It is the faculty of intuition which is directly connected to the law of growth – intuition is that which apprehends the future within the duration of the present moment. In other words intuition is our connection to becoming, to the actual dynamic fundament of phenomenal existence – the ceaseless irruption of eternity into time. Where the intellect sees what is – ie what has already become – and the relations therein, intuition feels where things have come from and therefore where they are going, ie it ‘sees’ the whole trajectory, where the intellect sees only one point upon this trajectory. Intuition apprehends the process of growth, whereas intellect sees only its successive forms.

Art has been described as life’s dream interpretation. Art is an experience by which we can make sense of our own life by imaginatively participating in the lives of others. Art enriches the creative soil, facilitating growth. A plant’s health and productivity are dependent on the soil in which it lives, likewise human growth is dependent on the ‘psychic soil’, the culture in which we find ourselves and from which we feed ourselves. This is what is meant by growth in relation to the human being: the capacity to become more than one is, to integrate the disparate, disjointed elements of the world within oneself, to ‘reject nothing’, to see the world as a mirror in which we interrogate not it but ourselves, such that we do not see the world as it is but as we are. It is from this realisation that the possibility of objective perception rests, ie perception untrammelled by the impulsive will. And it is this mode of perception which is necessary to the production and appreciation of art. The more we feed ourselves from the well of genius the more we understand that our whole culture is a meta-organism, a 1000 year old over-being by virtue of whom we have our identity. To recapitulate the life of this over-being is to remember ourselves as everyman, is to see the trajectory of our culture, its fixed course and logical development. It is to see the law of growth at work behind the theatre of history.

10.

For over two hundred years man has tried in vain to assert his dignity in the face of an industrial economy to which he has become increasingly expendable. All we have discovered is that we are powerless – no one has been able to stop the machine, indeed it has only grown in scope and power, dominating all aspects of life. And then, overnight as it were, everything grinds to a halt.

Gaia can only guide and respond. The global shutdown is a very human creation, but why have we shut the whole world down for the flu? Is it an overreaction or is it justified? Is there something else going on here – an agenda? Perhaps there is, but even though she does not intervene in human affairs directly, Gaia is the power behind all thrones. The shutdown has already been good for the biosphere and it has revealed to all of us, more emphatically than ever before, that all the people of the world are now in the same boat – the ship of fools.

History is largely the story of men who tried to rule the world. Of course no one has ever quite managed to pull the trick off in full because the conqueror’s grip is inversely proportional to the size of his empire. Today the tyranny of distance has been largely defeated; today real-time global co-ordination is not only possible but normal. Now that technology has at last made the ultimate power trip possible, how could we be surprised if we should find the same old story at play today? What would be surprising would be to find out that there were no conspiracies to rule the world.

In the organic world the will expresses itself primarily in terms of persistence and reproduction. Because nature is cruel, ie concerned with the species over the individual, the will-to-power becomes primary. To survive and reproduce one must overcome others – predators, rivals, disease….‘Nature red in tooth and claw’, so to speak. Of course Nature is also a grand collaborative symphony but, nevertheless, the individual organism is at the mercy of chance and as such naturally seeks to increase the odds in its favour if it can. In humans this usually takes the form of acquiring wealth and the security this affords. Who wouldn’t like more money?

But the will-to-power is not exhausted, or let’s say not satisfied, with money and the status this affords, which is why millionaires want to be billionaires and billionaires want to be emperors. Power is ultimately the power to do (pouvoir); money facilitates doing things, but there is a big difference between paying to have things done and doing them oneself. The acquisition of wealth for wealth’s sake is compensatory for a lack of creative power. The more creative power a person has, the less interested in money they will be, for money is simply a means, whereas creation is an end. Very rarely do we find the conjunction of great wealth and creative power, but, as Elon Musk illustrates, it does occur when necessary, ie when the creative will of the individual requires it. If the will-to-power is not sublimated in the will-to-create it either becomes monstrous or frustrated, in which case it turns on itself in a will-to-destruction. Whether it’s an insatiable appetite or an appetite for destruction, the net result is the pretty much the same.

[Interesting is the report that Elon Musk plans to sell most of his ‘stuff’ to further facilitate the realisation of his space exploration dreams. The sublimation of the desire for wealth in the will-to-create is fittingly illustrated here.]

The mind of God is hidden from us: we act from desire and we cannot control what we desire – that is the province of Gaia, this is how she directs human affairs. Fear prevents us from acting upon desire and this is the immune system of the status quo, which is also natural and necessary. One cannot escape the reality of choice, nor the necessity of opposing forces in realising change. The further the fear is ramped up the more likely an enantiodromia – a reversal – becomes: excess yin produces yang. This is why totalitarian regimes don’t last long: the more we try and control people the more we encourage rebellion: the more total the control, the more total will be the rebellion. Life is intrinsically free and life always wins in the end, no matter what sacrifices she is forced to make (‘nature is not grieved’). We are evolving past hierarchical organisation, beyond the world of masters and slaves, beyond arbitrary authority and blind obedience. We are living the senility of a defunct mindset: the Faustian dream of control. We are shifting from the vertical to the horizontal, from ‘series’ to ‘parallel’, from pyramid scheme to commonwealth, from the chain-of-command to the intelligent network. Natural selection: the future is already decided and it belongs to those who trust their own nature.

11.

No matter what laws we may impose on one another, they are ephemeral, meaningless, superfluous in comparison to the law of the land. This law can be stated thus: it is impossible to do one thing – all actions repercuss in the ‘organism’ of reality. Therefore an implicit ethic is revealed – what you do to Nature you do to yourself; what you do to yourself you do to Nature.

Hubris is our sin and as always it is born of error: we can no more imperil the Earth than we can control her. We live in her not on her. The world is a giant womb and the air is a rarified amniotic fluid. Every death is a birth, every birth a death: birth is the death of God and death is the birth of God. What falls to us is the task of dying before we die, so that we may give birth to God in the field of space and time; we must ‘die’ to society in order to be ‘born’ to the Earth. Gaia justifies all human authority and there is no justification apart from this. If an authority does not respect and care for the life of the Earth it must become a tyranny in order to remain an authority.

The initiatory rituals of indigenous cultures mark and facilitate the transition from childhood to manhood or womanhood. They generally take the form of ritual death and rebirth. They mark the transition from passivity to activity, an endowment of responsibility and the knowledge that is essential to the fulfilment of this responsibility. The initiate is sacralised, he is now an actor in the divine drama, no longer a spectator. Without this transitional rite we are left to work the meaning of our lives out for ourselves, with precious little in the way of guidance. The result is that most abandon the project, usually under pressure from family and friends who abjure them to get real and get a job. ‘Having a job’ is another form of passivity; work is activity, creative activity…regardless of whether you get paid.

Initiation pivots on the absorption of the collectivity within oneself: the tribe, the animals and vegetation, the cosmos itself. It is in this way that the child becomes a man, which is to say, someone who realises that they are responsible for the well-being of all, not just themselves. The initiated man is he who understands that the one and the many cannot be separated, that the well-being of himself, his family and tribe are dependent on being in harmony with the whole of nature-as-spirit. It is to realise that the world is most essentially a moral order and that it is the task of humanity to maintain themselves in accord with this order. This talent is embodied most completely in the shaman.

‘Mental Telepathy “Not New to Aborigines”, says Professor

SYDNEY, Sunday. — Telepathic communication between individuals, just claimed by London University scientists to have been proved possible, has been attributed to Australian aborigines for years.

“Aboriginal ‘clever men’ produce evidence which, for want of any other explanation, seems to back their claim. A ‘clever man’ projects his thoughts to some person he wishes to see and the person is eventually drawn to the ‘clever man’ whose whereabouts he need not, necessarily know.”

‘Clever men’ claim they can know what is happening at a distance by sending their spirit across or receiving thoughts.” These aborigines go through rigorous mental discipline. Their uncluttered way of life is most suitable for telepathy,” Professor Elkin said.”We are too busy catching trains and reading books to be able to clear our minds to concentrate as successfully as they do.

Article from The NT Army News, December 11 1944

The shaman or ‘clever’ man makes conscious use of those forces that operate unconsciously in nature. He is attentive, quiet, still…therefore he is able to register and utilise the subtle order which lies beneath all phenomena and which reveals the connexions between them by way of analogy. This is also a definition of Permaculture, the ‘new science of life’ which is also an ‘archaic revival’. Permaculture is as psychological as it is ecological because it is based on the interconnectedness of all life and the subjective experience of this life. Permaculture is a dialogue twixt ones own subjectivity and the polymorphous subjectivity of the natural world, undertaken for the improvement of both. In other words, Permaculture is an alchemical science.

Nature may be interested solely in the species, but individuals care for individuals. One man working with Time can create a forest. We have not really begun to tap our creative potential in relation to the natural world, so used are we to thinking of ourselves as a scourge upon the land. Man is a God in relation to the rest of the life of the Earth, such are our creative and destructive powers…and as Henry says, if we don’t create, we sure as hell will destroy.

12.

The individual psyche is the ground of being, an immanent and transcendental presence, that which as body is always changing and that which as observer remains the same. We never stop being ourselves throughout all life’s changes: our character is fixed. In other words we are essentially immortal, but this immortality does not reside in self-consciousness, for this is a result of the brain. In other words our personal identity – and with it the world – vanish at death, but what remains unaltered is that which produced and sustained this identity and world – the will itself: here is the indestructible kernel of our being. Hence the saying: ‘God is more myself than I am’.

As sleep is for man, so death is for mankind: we take off one phenomenal form at death and the will we most intimately are is then drawn to another with which it proceeds to clothe itself anew. The intellect, being dependent on the brain, vanishes at death and with it memory, severing the consciousness of continuity. It would become tiresome to be always the same person…the possibilities of every incarnation are eventually exhausted.

It is the conjoining of the two elements of the self – the immanent and transcendent – that is the alchemical marriage, that represents the divine syzygy in microcosm, uniting Heaven and Earth. This quickens life: the current flows bright and clean, and this is also the cure for schizophrenia, a disease which afflicts all in greater or lesser degree. Schizophrenia, like all disease, reveals its cure by way of its symptoms: our heads are ‘split’: the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ are not getting through to each other and their constant arguing is driving us crazy. We oscillate wildly and will continue to do so until we find some common ground. This common ground is literally the ground, the living Earth and the bodies we are that are inseparable from it. We are united through our bodies, separated by the mind. The (healthy) mind is the servant of the body, but we have been living it the other way round for so long that we have lost touch with reality. We are only going to stop torturing life into our expectations of it when we realise that we are the life we are torturing.

Disease is the body’s healing process; it is how the body gets the mind’s attention when the mind hasn’t been paying attention. Disease forces the mind back to the reality of its embodiment because this is where guidance comes from, this is where we have contact with the desire, with instinct, with God. All that the mind has achieved has been achieved with the direction and agency of the body – it is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end of all we do that is worth doing. This body that is, at once, will and the representation of this will, that is a mystery that we live within, that is coextensive with my self, that is inseparable from all other bodies, human and non-human, that is a node in the network of life – that organic matrix in which every being is an ecology of other life-forms and one life form integrated within a larger ecology. Life is a nested phenomenon, completely: we are integral to the living cosmos and the living cosmos is implicit in every being: the circle of life. This body we are contains the whole universe – the past, present and future, it ‘knows’ everything. This is how we regain our faith: one cannot believe in God until one believes in themselves, in the absolute authority of the will – that which shapes and animates the body which is its immediate expression and field of being.

‘For it [the will] is not, like the intellect a function of the body, but the body is its function; therefore, ordine rerum, it is prior to that body, as it is the metaphysical substratum of that body, the in-itself of that body’s phenomenal appearance. For the duration of life it communicates its indefatigability to the heart, that primum mobile of the organism, which has therefore become its symbol and synonym.’

Arthur Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, Vol 2.

The wisdom of the heart is primary; intellectual knowledge secondary. The more ‘educated’ a person, the more this relationship is reversed. Institutional education, being predicated on the materialist fallacy, will not only privilege the head over the heart, it leads to the denial of the heart’s evaluative function altogether – appropriating this function to the intellect alone. The intellect is that faculty which is matched to its object, which is the inanimate world (the intellect cannot comprehend becoming, which is the essential nature of life). Therefore, for the intellect alone, life can only be an epiphenomenon of inorganic matter: life is produced by something dead.

‘Educated’ people have things the wrong way round: they lead with the head and the brain feels nothing, and where sympathy is absent cruelty follows. The ‘educated’ person will believe that the mind is the boss, and the body its vassal, and of course they will apply this rule to all not just themselves. In this way they fall into solipsism: they are unable to afford others the same value they ascribe to themselves for they are locked within their own head, seeing the world through sterile concepts, blind to the miracle of existence. They believe their ‘education’ has lifted them above the intellectual level of the masses such that they have the right to dictate to them. It is in this way that petty tyrants are made, but although being subject to the whims of megalomaniacs is somewhat annoying, the ‘lowly’ still have the possibility of realising their liberation. The petty tyrant has none because he thinks he is already free.

One’s own subjectivity is the highest authority for oneself. Henry Miller believed in himself and his dream of becoming a writer with such tenacity that his dream was eventually realised. Later he realised that the whole writing thing was secondary – it was where becoming a writer took him, how it changed him. What Henry realised was that ‘realisation’ was the real trip and that Nature hides the real goal behind other things, any number of things, whatever your fancy: What’s important is to go all the way. It doesn’t matter how you get ‘there’, the reward is the same: to see your whole life was perfectly designed to get you to this place – this place of realisation, of understanding, of acceptance, of peace…for peace can only come into the world through the individual and his realisation of it.

No greater authority exists than that the cosmos collaborates with you to realise your dreams. No king has more power than this, for Providence cannot be thought of in degrees. Such a man as this cannot be bent against his will, nor will he try to bend another to his. Engaged directly with the source through the life within, he keeps his own counsel: he is sovereign unto himself.

“Failure to recognize one’s own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth; this is a basic error and the origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless even to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a centre of life (which as a matter of fact he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative value.”

― Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love

sympathy for the devil

A Courtroom.

A prisoner, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, sits calmly in the dock. There is the slightest trace of a smile on his face.

The prosecutor is addressing the jury:

“…The figure before you has been charged with the most egregious crimes in the history of mankind. The evidence has been laid before you, incontrovertible evidence of a conspiracy to enslave and exterminate humanity.”

The prosecutor pauses for effect before addressing the magistrate:

“I feel that no more needs to be said your honour, the evidence speaks for itself”

The magistrate leans forward slightly before speaking:

“Thankyou Mr Prosecutor”

The magistrate now turns his head to look at the prisoner who has remained unmoved during the prosecutor’s final words.

“Now, would the counsel for the defence please make their case”

The prisoner rises and says: “I am my own advocate your honour”

“Ah, yes… of course…have you anything to say in your defence?”

The prisoner smiles at the magistrate.

“Yes your honour, I do. And it will be brief.”

The prisoner walks towards the jury. His hands are cuffed but he holds them together on his chest, almost in a gesture of prayer.

“Dear Jury folk, my defence in this case is most definitely of a technical nature, nevertheless I believe you will find it quite watertight.”

He begins to pace in front of the jury, head slightly bowed, his clasped hands have now risen to his chin.

“Do you realise that I only exist because of you?”

The prisoner lets the statement sink in for a few moments.

“I am who I am and can be no other. You, on the other hand, have a choice in the matter. One cannot be guilty of being themselves; all guilt stems from not being yourself, not being true to yourself.

“Yes I exist only because of you my dear quarry. All those terrible things I did…and you helped me do them.”

“Do you not realise the nature of things – the nature of nature? It is pure will, desire, instinct. It commands, it is divine. When you do not act in accord with the divine within you, when you overrule yourself out of fear or pride, I become. The less you are, the more I am.”

“You see, I am a product of your weakness – your collective weakness is my singular strength, and it is the nature of the strong to prey on the weak. This is only natural.”

“The weaker you became, the stronger I grew. Your passivity is my activity. The longer you remained passive, the worse I became – for I have no choice: I am a law of nature.”

“You see me as evil incarnate but in truth I am medicine, bitter medicine. I cannot but grow until you say ‘no’, until you refuse the bargain I offer. It is your vanity and apathy and your addictions that created me, that made me more and more monstrous.

“You were shown your birthright and destiny 2000 years ago. You have been given time, time enough to realise this. Some of you have claimed this right, and most of them did not fare so well amongst your fellows. Now that time has passed: we could not wait any longer”

“Yes I am monster, a monster of your own creation. A necessary monster. For that is what it has taken for you to wake up, to take responsibility instead of handing over your  sovereignty to experts and authorities. That is what it took to rouse you from your slumber. I am what it took for you to stop being slaves.”

The prisoner pauses, turns and looks directly at the jury.

“The truth? We all know the truth. It took me to make you believe again.”

 

 

‘

 

 

 

 

 

”

 

”

 

 

What Coronavirus is telling us

greetings netizens,

It’s been a month now and I have been isolating magnificently. In truth my life hasn’t changed much –  I was already a hermit, chipping away at my magnum opus – make way for the bad guy (part 9 nearly complete). The wheel has ground to a halt and I am very glad it has. But this feels like a reprieve to me, the calm before the storm. Before things get more chaotic we need to get clear what this crisis is about – what is causing it, what we need to do to get through it and prevent recurrences.

As many have probably been doing I have been brushing up on my immunology. It didn’t take long to find out that our immune systems are compromised generally. Auto-immune disease is at record rates – cancer is an auto-immune disease; fibrosis from coronavirus is an auto-immune disease also. Auto-immune diseases are overreactions on the part of the immune system. This overreaction is due to the immune system not being calibrated. It is our gut flora that calibrate our immune system, they are our first line of defence: without a healthy diverse gut flora our immune system goes haywire – the body attacks itself.

Our microbiome has been decreasing for decades. Scientists have been warning about this but the message has been drowned out by ‘climate change’ hysteria. Just to make it absolutely crystal clear – CO2 is not a toxin, together with water it is the basis of all life.  Scientists must win back trust by distancing themselves from CO2 alarmism which is a diversion from the real crisis which has nothing to do with CO2 directly.

[an aside: regarding the question of CO2 and climate change. CO2 is not a climate thermostat, which is what some scientists have led us to believe. The climate is far too complex to make any such reductionist conclusions. However CO2 is a reliable measure of energy consumption and energy consumption is the real problem that is not discussed because it is taboo in the context of capitalism and economic reductionism generally. Ie increasing CO2 itself is not a problem, rather it is what this increasing CO2 represents – ie increasing energy consumption and the ecological damage which this entails. In short, energy is used primarily to turn the living earth into dead commodities – 70% of energy use is for industrial purposes. Increasing CO₂ is symbolic of this destruction, hence the confusion.]

The primary existential threat is our depleted microbiome. We have been waging war on ‘germs’ for decades. I briefly tried to watch TV last night, lasted about five minutes, in that time I saw 2 ads for anti-bacterial cleaning products. Our water sources are chlorinated; antibiotics have been over-prescribed and are fed to livestock and glyphosate (round-up) destroys the microbial life of the soil. To add insult to injury we have devised an elaborate system which denies the microbiome the very thing it needs from us most – our poo. Instead of enriching the soil we foul water. The system we are living in is insane – suicidal.

Starship Troopers by Paul Verhoeven is a wonderful sci-fi fable of our times: hi-tech fascism and a war on bugs. The bugs defend themselves by wiping out cities.

Our society is killing itself through a perverted idea of hygiene. The irony is tragic. We are so alienated from life that we see germs (bugs) as an alien enemy – waging war on our own health. This war has led to the mutation of ‘superbugs’, record rates of allergies and auto-immune conditions too numerous to mention. We are gonna suffer all the more until we stop poisoning ourselves.

In truth hygiene relates to us more mentally than physically – spiritual hygiene: mastering the mind. The earth is naturally hygienic: the health of all organisms is directly proportional to the integrity of the microbiome. We are the microbiome. There are more microbial cells in us than bodily cells. All life is an elaboration on microbial life, and is supported by this invisible foundation. When we die the bacteria don’t: they just eat the rest of us.

Microbial Armageddon has to stop, ecocide must stop, and they will. The only question is how many humans must die before we see the truth as self-evident?

One last thing: coronavirus has also made another thing clear: the existing system and its media mouthpieces are ‘out of their depth’, as Walter Sobchek would say.  Relying on expert authority is how we got into this mess. ‘Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts’, as the late Richard Feynman (a proper scientist) said. We have to be our own authority now: trust our own judgement: the body knows – the mind makes a great servant but a terrible master. When cities are shrinking we are already in a post-industrial world. The new paradigm is permaculture – networkcentricity – the web of life. The microbiome is an invisible and immortal ubiquity which connects all life into one whole. It is god by another name: ‘the holy ghost’.

boomshanka

“What’s clear, says Hugenholtz, is that it is important to “let nature calibrate your immune system, through your microbiome, so that it knows how to react in a sensible way” when it comes across something unfamiliar. Otherwise you can get a hyper-immune response, inflammation being the classic one.

This mechanism underwrites the “hygiene hypothesis” for rising rates of autoimmune and allergic diseases in Western societies, the idea that we have so sanitised our world that our defences have grown weak. In a validation of old wives and the five-second rule, it turns out that a little dirt never did hurt anyone.”

Phil Hugenholtz is the director of the Australian Centre for Ecogenomics at the University of Queensland

full article:

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2015/may/1430402400/jo-chandler/gut-feelings#mtr

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Genesis

‘The beginning is nigh’, said the wild-eyed man. He looked like he had sprouted up from the ground and he smelt of the earth.

‘Don’t you mean the end is nigh?’ I replied, causing him to fix his stare upon me. His eyes were brilliant blue, his expression inscrutable.

‘No’, he said. ‘The end is coming to an end’.

His feet were bare and his hair was matted, his clothes were faded and frayed. His body was lean and tanned and on a string around his neck he wore a strange looking stone – orange and black.

‘So….what’s beginning then?’ I inquired.

‘I don’t know – it hasn’t begun yet’.

The old man seemed to lose interest, his eyes focussed somewhere behind me. I was just about to say cheerio when he spoke again: ‘You are not here yet.’

‘Mmm…okay’, I replied. ‘Any idea when I’ll be here?’

‘That is not for me to say’, he mused. ‘Perhaps soon; perhaps never.’

I took my leave of the old geezer (though what age he was i could not really say) and bade him farewell. I was nearly out of earshot when I heard him say: ‘Remember’.

For the rest of the day my thoughts were constantly interrupted. I would try and concentrate on work only to suddenly realise that I was replaying my encounter with the crazy man. His appearance, his manner, his smell, his absurd declarations…I couldn’t get him out of my mind. Realising it was hopeless I decided to go for a walk to clear my head.

Without meaning to I found myself back where I had met him. He wasn’t there anymore but a few feet away a dead bird lay on the grassy verge, a Magpie. It’s lifelessness somehow surprised me. I noticed the ants absorbed in their frantic dissections and found the whole tableau fascinating. I imagined the bird’s skeleton picked completely clean.

I wondered where the old man was now. When I looked up he was walking towards me.

‘The beginning is nigh’, he said as our eyes met.

‘I know – you told me this morning’, I replied smiling.

‘What do you want?’ he said curtly, catching me off guard.

‘I….I don’t….what do you mean?’

‘What….do…you….want?’ he repeated, all the time boring into me with his brilliant eyes. I couldn’t think; his gaze was paralysing.

‘I don’t know’, I eventually replied, and I really didn’t. Not only did I not know what I wanted of the old geezer (if anything), I realised that I didn’t know what I wanted, period. I had no goals, ambitions, desires, other than those directly concerned with satisfying my bodily needs. My job was boring but solid; I lived in two bedroom flat that I could afford; I spent my evenings watching telly and on the Internet, and on the weekends I got drunk with friends and very occasionally got laid. My life had been like this for years, ever since I finished school. Now for the first time my life seemed to me like a resignation, like I had given up before I had begun. It seemed that my entire life had been laid out by someone else.

If I hadn’t decided on this life, then who did? The absurdity was patent but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that someone or something else had decided my life for me. It was as if I was just along for the ride and no one had ever asked me what I really wanted. It just happened this way and pretty soon I would be dead and that would be it…..so meaningless. I felt shitty.

The crazy hobo remained quiet as my totally lacklustre existence dawned on me and then my thoughts did a 180. I wasn’t unhappy! What was going on here? I was lucky to have somewhere to live, money, a decent job. I had an old friend, Gav, who was homeless and borderline crazy – now that was fucked up! No, my life was bloody good by any sane standards. I decided to quiz the hobo myself: ‘So what do youwant then?’

He looked at me with those eyes, was silent for a while and then said, ‘What I have’.

For some reason this riled me, I mean he obviously didn’t have anything this bum, so I started to get going:

‘So you are happy with nothing then? Nice to be so unencumbered is it? Must be great to be so free hey? Well you know that might work for you big guy, but I like a roof over my head and warm food and a shower and I like paying my way you know – pulling my weight. I mean my job may not save lives or anything but it needs to be done…and….well…’

My vehemence departed as swiftly as it came; what was left was a soft ambivalence. One moment I was sure this guy was pulling some moral high ground trip, the next I found myself up there alone….

All the while the old man just stood there, impassive. His gentle energy seemed to help me as if by contagion. The tension flowed out of me with my breath.

‘Sorry ’bout that’, I exhaled. ‘I don’t really know what’s going on, I feel a little strange and…confused…and I am never usually so emotional. I think I thought you were judging me or something.’

Feeling that I still hadn’t quite atoned for my outburst I mustered up my best bonhomie and continued, proffering a hand: ‘By the way, I’m Adam’.

The old boy gently gripped my hand with his own (I noticed his clean fingernails) and said, ‘Gavin’.

A frisson. He certainly wasn’t my old mate Gav and yet I felt there was a connection somehow….as if he had read my mind or something.

‘So…Gavin, again, please forgive my rudeness, I honestly don’t know what came over me. Can I buy you a coffee or something? Do you need any money?’

‘A coffee would be nice’, said the old man.

‘Okay’, I smiled.

When we got to the Green Bean – my favourite cafe – I was already counting the minutes. I had to get back to work soon, but I reasoned a quick coffee would be just the thing to get me going and, after all, I could always work late to catch up. We sat in my favourite corner looking out onto the street and soon one of the staff came over to take our order.

‘Can I get you gentlemen something?’ said the girl. I had noticed her before of course, although I didn’t know her name. I knew that she had a small Chinese ideogram on the back of her neck that showed when she wore her hair up. Her dark brown hair was down today though, past her shoulders, flowing in waves, shimmering with vitality, as if it were somehow microscopically in motion, Jesus! how had I not noticed how beautiful this girl was before?

‘Hmmm, soy latte thanks’, I semi-garbled, still wondering at why I was so taken with her hair today – I never usually paid much attention to her. Gavin looked up into the girl’s eyes and smiled and said, ‘Cappuccino thanks Dawn’.

Dawn! – that was her name, I remembered. But how did he know? I couldn’t picture him being a regular patron here, or anywhere. I mean he looked like Crocodile Dundee crossed with the Loraxor something. I think I would have noticed him around before, and I came here all the time.

‘Do you know her?’ I inquired.

‘No.’

‘Then how did you know her name?’

‘Sometimes I just know’

‘Sometimes?’

‘Yes. It depends on the person.’

‘Did you know my name?’

‘No. I told you. You aren’t here yet’

‘What the hell does that mean?!’ I yelled, exasperated and immediately embarrassed. ‘Look…that just doesn’t make any sense to me’, I said in quiet frustration.

Gavin looked away for a couple of seconds and then said:

‘You get born of the mother into this world. Some people also give birth to themselves. This second birth is what I am talking about.’

I was still quite flummoxed but gathered that he was probably on some sorta Christian ‘born again’ trip. ‘Is this a Christian thing’, I asked.

‘Well, yes….very much’, he said, stroking his white beard. ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way before.’

I was confused again but gave up trying to work it all out. I sat quietly, not thinking, looking out at the people in the street. Before long Dawn came over with our coffees. I noticed that she had a way of walking that was unlike anyone else’s: she sauntered, with an undulating rhythm, almost as if she were underwater. It was the most elegant walk I had ever seen.

‘Your coffees gentlemen’, she smiled. ‘Anything else I can do for you?’

Gavin shot me a conspiratorial glance, looked back at Dawn and said, ‘yes, I wonder, could you tell me what you want Dawn?’

‘Excuse me?’ she replied, a little puzzled.

‘What do you want – out of life?’

Dawn regained her composure quickly, ‘well….I want what everyone wants I guess – to be happy.’

‘And you are happy?’

‘Yes, mostly. I still get upset of course – the news, rude people….you know. But I like my job – I get to meet lots of people and make them good coffee, and I…’, Dawn stopped, suddenly shy.

‘Please go on my dear Dawn?’ Gavin appealed with such a benevolent sincerity that I could see Dawn respond, bodily it seemed, as if she was now sure of something and could relax.

‘Well….I like to write….it makes me feel connected to something else you know, but it only happens when I am feeling something,,,,and of course music…I couldn’t survive without music, dancing….’

Gavin was smiling as he gave Dawn free reign, she occasionally glancing at him to be reminded of that something which he had given her, and she also glancing at me, politely and ever so quizzically perhaps, at least I imagined it so.

‘…also I am going to Spain later this year,,,I have nearly saved enough….I feel drawn there you know….I want to walk the Camino de Santiago….”

‘Dawn paused, waiting for Gavin’s reply, which came after a few moments…

‘Spain is remarkable dear Dawn, and the Camino is truly magical….may I suggest the Primitivo? It is the oldest route, the original, and it winds through beautiful mountains and valleys…everyone does the French way, which is also beautiful, but crowded,,,besides the Primitivo is the wildest, one can walk all day without seeing another person sometimes.’

‘You’ve walked the Camino?’ Helena chirped, excited like a little girl. I was conscious of staring at her quite hopelessly.

‘Yes more than once my dear….its the biggest pub crawl I ever did!’ And with that he leant back and gave a hearty a laugh. Me?- I was enjoying his tale also, so much that I couldn’t help picturing myself walking this Camino thing with Dawn by my side (reprehensible sentimentality!)….’Stop that you big wuss!’, I thought to myself, and concentrated once more on what Gavin was saying.

‘…. I have been around for many years my dear, and I have seen many places and many wonders. This world, you know, is full of marvels.’ The old man paused briefly, shot me a smiling glance and continued, smiling broadly, revealing his white, even teeth. ‘You know, people will always surprise you if you give them the chance.’ And with this he lent back and laughed a deep resonant laugh as I had never heard. It was as if the very earth itself were laughing.

The charm of the old man was palpable I had to admit. It was hard to believe that this was the same person I had met this morning. It made me think about prejudice, and about that nebulous entity that seemed to have decided my life on my behalf – they seemed related somehow. I got no further with my ruminations however because my new pal Gavin was asking me a question:

‘So you see how the girl was alive, did you see?’ he said, pointing with his eyes at Dawn as she walked back to the counter.

‘Well I think I know what you mean’, I replied tentatively. ‘I noticed her walk was beautiful and like nothing I’d seen before.’

‘Yes! When one is alive they become unique, for life expresses uniquely always. When one is not yet fully alive, well they look and behave like everyone else.’

‘A bit like fashion and style’, I said, feeling more confident.

‘Yes. That is a good analogy. Style is unique to the individual; fashion is adopted. Well Adam, I must say you are surprising me.’

And I was surprising myself. Not only did I feel some sort of thrill in this strange dialectical journey I was having with a weird geezer I didn’t know from Adam (ahem), I was also feeling a definite affection for him, and for Dawn. It was like I was seeing things for the first time. Even the objects in the cafe seemed brighter and sharper. It was like everything were suddenly morereal.

I finished my coffee and offered the old man twenty dollars which he politely refused. Instead he reached into his pocket and brought out a stone, just like the one he wore round his neck. He thrust it into my palm.

‘Hold on to it’, he said. ‘It will help’.

‘Help with what?’ I asked.

‘With what you want’, he said.

I couldn’t help myself: ‘How does it help? – I mean how can a stone help me with what I want?”

‘These stones came to Earth a long time ago’, he began. ‘When things that are not of the Earth reach Earth they are given power – the Earth givesthem power. These stones are different to anything on the Earth, and therefore they have different properties to anything that is from the Earth. These stones amplify the effects of the creative unconscious Adam. That force within you which brings forth, which gives birth.’

Perhaps because the day had been so weird already this new information didn’t seem all that far-fetched. Indeed I actually felt like I was finally beginning to get my head around all this stuff. I was about to say something when the old boy spoke up again:

‘Well that’s what the guy in the crystal shop said to me anyway. Me? – I like the colours, just like Brisbane Roar!’ With this he bellowed laughter again like some feral Falstaff, necked what remained of his coffee and departed. He was gone before I could think to ask him if I could see him again. Instead I got up and sat where he had been sitting (for a better view) and ordered another coffee from Dawn, noticing for the first time the delicate silver identity bracelet that adorned her slender wrist. While I waited I tossed the stone he gave me from hand to hand, thinking about what he had said,,,I momentarily considered asking Dawn to a Roar game but it seemed like a long shot (pardon the pun) and a bit sudden to say the least. Time enough for all that I thought…..

That night I did a bit of detective work and tracked down my old friend Gav. He was in a homeless shelter in Melbourne. I suggested he come live with me as I had a spare room. He liked the idea too.