I notice that while I have promoted the Silence as a primary context for
reorientation, the ground upon which one can stand as well as the sky above
that meets it. and reaches through us to itself – a numbing phenomenon of
constant zero response meets it. The former blogpost is part 1 of a series
I must write; it’s not even pleasant to do so. I should perhaps given a personal
background for it, something to which it could attach, zoom into the place where
I part company with the great shout for Revolution, Armageddon, Justice and Purgation of
Paradise; why I must evaluate our modernity with one foot in the trenches.
Understanding, in any private span of thought, is not capital letter “T” Truth, it is
intimate and ideally part of who you are – it situates you right in what you understand,
there are no sense of distance in it. Therefore we need to have a conversation. We really
do, about what we understand, and how it is even possible to do so. Language is a trap,
but it is more of a beartrap than a hole covered over with branches and filled with spikes –
to be safe from calamity, you have to spring it, with a twig or a branch or something
expendable. Transport it all into the situation of mind, and you will see voluntarily
sidetracking into thoughts which has fleeting, transitory function looks the part, and
as long as we keep trying to keep up with the world, it is of infinite supply.
The What here is; the “world” has already ended, the “end” of time is here, and whenever
it is acted upon, whenever it is understood, engaged, I pass through it all into the other
side of it. That’s what I understand. It continually focus my attention elsewhere than
the difficulties of passing correct and precise judgment on myself or other sentient beings.
That enables me to engage what was once the world, and what passed for time – paradoxically,
every time, every day, or at least every time I am reminded of it. And I am being reminded of
it, it occurs in an encounter, a brief conversation with another human being, the exchange of
looks, a re-cognition of what transpires of entireties in moments and glimpses.
The How here is; as already indicated the assimilation of anything understood occurs
in the Nous, the mind, and everything that is indicated participates in a continuous
progression from the unknown to the known, from hidden to that which is revealed,
through the medium of Being which we, the knowers of the unknown, the revealers
of the hidden, and the resurrection of that which was buried, participate in as well as
act upon.
This also where it attaches to the teachings on Reintegration in more recent Christian
esotericism, and the Apokatastasis Panthon among the ancients, exclaimed most lucid
and most overtly by Saint Origen of Alexandria.
The selfsame transmission that begun in Pantaneus, the first teacher of the cathetical school
situated in Alexandria, even engaging the Library and Platonic academy at the time,
continued with the brightest student from the same, Clement of Alexandria, and mediated
outside of the Alexandrine context through the exile of Origen and the beginnings of the
school of the Desert Fathers addressed that which would become a great and overarching
initiatory transmission beginning in France through the inspiration of among others,
Louis Claude de Saint-Martin.Both the former and the latter emphasized complicity and
participation, and recommended a practise that begun with the withdrawal of arbitrary,
“re-actionary” judgment – continued into a stilling of three centers in man, through
silence, and effectively manifested itself through the emptying out of the “ego”,
the containing mind, all contents, particulars, fragments into their origin. The Soul
as Bride, as Monarch, as Hero, as Quintessence – was thusly, practically accorded not
only an abstract metaphysical “origin” that is other-worldly, or transcendent, but accorded
the confidence to find itself demonstrated and revealed in and through individual human beings.
Three Gnostic texts that was discovered barely sixty years hence, or at least was largely unknown
until fairly recently in any case – Trimorphic Protennoia, The Secret Book of John, and
The Gospel of the Egyptians – engage this theme more explicitly than most other sources,
which is astoundingly numerous, so it is not an exclusively Gnostic concern, even though with
some good will, all the aformentioned explicitly Christian thinkers, teachers, mystics, mystagogues
and philo-sophers could be accorded the same name of Gnostic, but as with the theme of the reintegration, and restoration of the fallen intelligences and their splendour, through us, can
even be called an universal concern.
Solve (dissolution)
refers to the particulars here – “the world”, or rather the sum of parts that produce it,
and “time”, as the state in which the parts produce it; you remove the sum of parts from
its state of fixedness, you end up with chaos – which is the mirror image of that order which
was produced by its conjunction. I wish I could demonstrate this a little better, but it suffices
to say that if we remove the fixed focus of the mind, and allow it to actively engage Silence,
rather than passively receive everything else – this “chaos”, or dissolution, or annihilation
demonstrates itself successively through the recline of the image of order itself.
That is why the “psyche” part of consciousness is feared by philosophers, who, after all,
has sat on the knee of their uncles, the rhetorists, for most of their upbringing – are
primarely concerned, to the degree of obsession, with the making, or fabrication, of sense,
and the solidity of images. The Gnostic visionaries was capable of not only retaining the
memory of having seen, not a succession, but a triplicity (or further into tetrads etc.)
of forms – when they encountered the revelation that revealed itself to them and through
them;the middleplatonist Plotinus, and neoplatonist Proclus and a myriad others of their contemporaries did not recognize the
names and imagry and addressed how this vision would be proscribed against by the rational
intellect and belonged with other lower beings, among dreaming animals. My enthusiasm for
Corbin not only depend on his vigilant and always alert endeavour to understand and make understandable, sufi saints and illuminist theosophers, but his personal ability to undergo the same himself – as evident
in his visionary experience and exegesis at Lake Siljan:
“.. the Earth has come to Thou, visible as an Angel that would perhaps be a
woman, and in this apparition, this greatly green and thronging
solitude, yes, the Angel too is robed in green, the green of dusk, of
silence and of truth. Then there is in you all the sweetness that is
present in the surrender to an embrace that triumphs over you.Earth, Angel, Woman, all of this is a single thing that I adore and that is in this forest. “
Further into the letter, Corbin admits that man, and with man, himself, there is a poverty
that confronting such splendour makes a heavy burden filled with sighs and nostalgia,
but man is quickened and raised up through the agency of an other – coming towards
the visionary through the resurrection and company of the Christ. In this context, a
Christos Angelos that descends, alternatively – if complemented with the vision of
the Untitled Text from the Bruce Codex, the earth of man and himself ascends to meet
the descent of the revealer, the Repairer of Vision, the purifier of the medium of Light;
which the Barbelo-Gnosis names Zorokothora Melchizedek.
Another image that also meets this “plasticity” or non-locality is found in the recently discovered apocryphal text that has been named The Gospel of the Saviour by its modern translators – where the disciples assembled abruptly sees with their eyes something which is impossible according to their reason, the saviour ascends to heaven, his head through the clouds with his feet planted on the ground, at the mount of transfiguration, where they stand together.
These events that in no wise informs our understanding of History, or with History, or for that matter, the Sciences according to their own virtue – solve, unknit, dissolve the locality of
“world” and deattach fixed time and duration – experiential and metaphysical – while
informing the process of understanding. The disicples, like Prophets of old, fall flat on their
faces at the rupture of reason in the place of the Transfiguration of Christ, as we find the
event in the canonical Gospels – exemplary of the submission to vision which is continually
inspired by the dissolution of those clouds, in mind and psyche, which incapacitate us, “normally”,
according to norm, to participate in a visionary unveiling.
Coagula refers to the Contigent, or the Becoming of Being as a context from above rather than below. From the attempted introduction of an un
derstanding of a world of ideas – we have descended
into the flux of random particles and the inexplicable subsistence of consciousness, disjuncted, mysterious – sporadiously involved with the unfoldment of variety according to fixed sets of rules; Being becomes a quality and a verb, ideas a commodity to produce things, to inspire artifice, to the animal dreaming so despised by generations of philosophers and rationalists.
The contigent is less than nothing and more than everything; Pleroma and Kenoma – Jung’s Basilides in his Seven sermons to the dead, said of Abraxas – all at once, containing all categories and being the dissolution of category and object itself.
II.
From Revelation to Apocalyptic
Those events prophesied will come to pass in time.
Will pass into Time. And time will end.
As John at Patmos did write, “the seas will be no more.”
The waves being continuous symbols of transciency,
of the passing of moments – and the instability of elements.
I have grown up and out of apocalyptic – it’s images in 20th century Christianity
(or rather the repackaged 19th century revivalism, that heroically wrestled the beast
of secular humanism, atheist science and the “death of God”) participated in my
“animal” dreamlife, I did sweat and I did wet a bed or two, I was a kid, I cared
for what I did not understand, I valued what I did not know; I was told.
There are possibly more books written on the coming battle of Armageddon than
any other religious topic in the west – still whenever it is indicated and intimated
to us, their contemporaries, those who believe the strongest in the scenario does
that discreetly and with a personal, passionate fervour that for just a few blinks
of an eye involves you, the intimate, the confidante – as if a secret was involved.
It’s on big banners spanning miles across, you cannot switch through the register
of your television channels without encountering one or more incidents of the scenario
being held out and up to the light, and still it has this mythical,mystical,magical
ability of being best whispered, or quietly and deliberately communicated.
The particular branch of apocalyptic, millenial, chilianist enthusiastic evangelism
which clinged to daily life in my childhood were ultimately concerned with the consequence
of original sin; everything in the world is orchestrated to suit the need of the fallen
angel Satan to inform mankind that it does not need to hear or heed the word of God,
or believe in Jesus as our personal saviour and the atonement for all of our sins;
all we get of suffering comes from that great big hole in our soul our ancestors, from
Adam and onwards, caused to be there. So I was told, I was given education in the
wrongs, quite oblique, of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, of the generation of
Noa, and so forth – of the deluge and the rain of napalm, of pillars of salt, of locusts
and devouring seas, and reminded that I should consider how little pleased God is
with humanity now as compared to then. No lack of guts in God’s department, no
deficiency in the Machismo department – once he loosens his armies upon mankind
to separate chaff from wheat, the bad from the good, the wicked from the righteous –
not only will the guilty die, they will never have been. You grow up into a consciousness
of whatever has value, life, beauty, strength in you – you need all of it, and tommorrow,
because you cannot understand what they tell you, you stop, shocked, doubt – think
“Why would God want that?”, even the less charitable, “Why would anyone in their right
mind want all of that?”
Aggrieved and depressed families will introduce morbidity in the skills department of their
offspring and unconsciously tend to it and nurture it, sometimes to the detoriation of
other, perhaps more useful developing skills. But we are moved by death, we are troubled
by the process of dying and suffering illnesses, we are challenged at every moment we
make sense of, whenever we answer to the affirmative of life – the more powerful our
embrace of life, perhaps, but not always.
What emerges is another story, that speaks – and that I understand. I know there are other
stories and other worlds.