Emergence from Silence, to silence?

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.

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Blogging Hotspots: The Legacy of Henry Corbin


Blogging Hotspots:

The Legacy of Henry Corbin

On the initiative of Professor Tom Cheetham a blogspot has been created for the dissemination and
discussion of the relevance of Henry Corbin’s work today.

Presently the site is quite focused on brief,concentrated bits of excerpts,summaries upon choice
topics from Henry Corbin’s ouevre. It’s quite what I need sometimes and an excellent supplement
for my own study. In the future it will surely attract the posting of events, presentation of papers,
debates and what else which this medium allows. Which I am looking quite forward to.

For anyone interested in the exegetical and philosophical contribution Henry Corbin have made,
especially in the field of esoteric studies and Oriental philosophy – I recommend Cheetham’s
The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism, and Christopher Bamford’s
introduction to Henry Corbin’s work, titled Esotericism Today:The Example of Henry Corbin,
in Henry Corbin: Voyage and the Messenger:Iran and Philosophy, North Atlantic Books, 1998,pp XIV-LX.

Apokatastasis Now! – I.(Preface, or cation)

A broadsheet catalogue of dissenters in 1647 APOKATASTASIS NOW!

A Catalogue of the Severall Sects and Opinions
in England and other
Nations: With a brief Rehearsall
of their false and dangerous Tenents
. Broadsheet. 1647

Source:British Museum,1647. Wikimedia.

Soul-searching amidst another age of heresies and dissent.

I. Preface (or Caution)
1: I am talking with you, I am not talking about you.
2:There is no body here but you and I.
3:What goes between us, stays between us.
4:I would not have spoken, if I did not wish you to listen.

5:An old word of advice goes; the way of ascent is precisely the same as the way
of descent. In this situation of ours, that way is language.

0.
First of all,an apology to all of you: I write what I will write –
exercising that freedom,however, is neither the object nor direction that this blog has,
it is not the be all and end all of me, my opinions, or whatever quarrel you and I might
have. Lately I have noticed that I do react to certain trends in the media treatment of
religious conflict, even within Christianity – whose practice redeems itself of its manifold
transitory errors, while leaving us in the green fields of nowhere if we remain deattached
from this selfsame practice. I have been talking about a cross lately, and while to the outsider
hyperbolic and contrived, to the insider it is quite evident that it is not an instrument of
division I speak of, or rather, following the Solve et Coagula sequence, not only division.
The Vision that penetrates the darkest moment of engagement with history and sees through
it into a different landscape, has endured, it has prevailed and survived centuries and millenia
it is not the exclusive property of an elite, nor of an elite culture,religion or civilization.
Redemption and Salvation does not belong to secular law – whatever justice emerges from
secular law depends on a jurisdiction that can only extend to the boundaries of the known,
the revealed and the situational; a judgment that cannot be understood is useless.
Heresy trials, as illustrated by the charming little cartoon over the viles and evils of englishmen
on the footpath to perdition, at least as far as the Privy Council could see it – demonstrates this
situation above all others. Please be adviced I count the contrived Witch trials of europe and the
americas both as participant in the same phenomenon, while we are at it.

 

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Crux Invictus – Solve et Coagula

I.

With the discovery of an other self, an other soul, an other mind, an other thought –
closer to your self than your “I” ; Space opens itself to an existence which consists
in a dialogue, in a continuous exchange.
But the site has become silence – the world recedes, and no longer affirms itself
in thought, in sensation, in mind, in soul, in self – opening itself to another place,
revealing an absence of reality.

Silence dissolves our relationship with reality objectified – that which engage the senses
and the mind, to make true and affirm objects as the anchors for the real.

The affirmation of the Word became Flesh does not consist in a deterioration or denial
of Spirit: rather the Spirit lifts up, and lifts in – the Body to its own context.
It’s place is Silence, the Incarnation, wherein history expires.

Without object the senses and the mind becomes completely subordinate the Other,
since they no longer maintain a passive observation of things as Being.

The Cross
dissolves the world – with the Incarnation it was fixed to the context of
the Logos, with the Crucifixion the Logos no longer serve as context for the world,
which is why, additionally, the denial of it becomes central to the exoteric religion;
Christ, anointed. New world, New age, New man – a progression towards the Logos
through which everything came into being, through whom it returns to its origin,
and with which it resurrects into being which surpasses the vicarious meaning which
came into being because the world did not receive it, yet it became alive and a source
of light to the entirety, so dimmed and darkened by refusal in ignorance, in Man.
On the other hand, exoteric religion allows the world to be projected upon the Logos, attaching an
ontological “ground” upon a pre-cosmic Being, baptizing it Pantocrator and Rex Mundi;
witness an infant carried out from the womb and sacrified on an altar which is this
earth, this soil, upon which our feet are planted – to a Divinity which is turned into a moral investment,
value to family, value to institution, value to tradition, value to continuity through the
naming and numbering of days,hours,minutes. If you say of a golden calf you have crafted
in the perfection your craft allows you, that it is well-crafted, that is beautiful in kind,
that it’s form evokes thoughts of , for instance, the arrangement of nature, the power
of fertility, the accumulation of worldly riches – you perform no blasphemy in your words,
if you name it God and leave behind everything which raised your gaze, which informed
you directly, which lives in and through you – you perform apostasy, you complete blasphemy.

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Beneath me, the Stars

Beneath me, the stars
a pattern scattered upon the waters,
a labyrinth etched behind closed eyelids

I stand,
awoken by the briefest touch,
distance broken,
a vessel that held everything,
in a moment,
shattered into tiny specks,
beneath my feet.

disappearance/reappearance – Gnosis Archive

The Gnosis Archive is online again.
First impression is that it will take a little reconstruction work.
It also gave me a moments pause – it actually means something
that both “our side of the story”, that contemporary human beings
respond to, rediscover deep meaning,have a sense of affiliation
with a two thousand year old hushed down,slandered religious
,philosophical and metaphysical tradition – and find a praxis and a
reorientation in it – as well as the fact of these texts, the access
to them in the English language, would become lost.

The Gnosis Archive developed in tandem with my social interaction
and continued dialogue with people who have gone through the same
experiences,troubles and triumphs that I had gone through: In the
autumn of 1994 I met several subscribers of the Gnosis magazine
in a forum dedicated to on-topic/off-topic banter in the ambience
of the topical issues of that magazine; one of the first to present a
less sectarian, less biased, less doctrinaire investigation of the Western mystical traditions… from those discussions, from that exchange of material – an affluence accrued,grew – Thomas Leavitt put it on a site
on the server of his company, Web Communications. Eventually Right Revd.Lance Owens took over editing, announcements was made for the lectures Dr.Stephan Hoeller held at the Gnostic Society, about mid-1996 I was exasperated with the Societas Gnostica Norvegia webpages, I was trying, after all,to create,to make way for a physical space for communication and exchange – so I donated what was then a significant amount of material of transcribed material to the Gnostic Society Virtual Library, from that project/site.
In that way, countless hours spent musing over the wisdom of these tradtions travelled across Atlantic and into a legacy which was greater than anything I could have made on my own. I am very relieved that we are on the way of recovering it. Pax Pleromae

Um,No, that world is not an Illusion. No,sorry,nor is matter.

The

concrete world, far from being illusionary, is quite

immediate,
relevant and approached by the capacities which exist

within the soul.
The soul cannot afford to be passive because the

world is participatory
in its essence and emerges out from it;

darkness repress and separates it
from its light, conforming it

into its own – this darkness, while emerging
out of forgetfulness

is nevertheless part of the evil which is real.

The world, material

conditions, the lower soul, the counterfeit spirit
and evil –

while we may find ourselves to exist in a twilight between them and
the Pleroma – has such claim upon us that

it is nonsense to speak of any kind of illusion.

An illusion is some phenomenon which briefly, or in a period of extension, appears

to be real, to be “solid” – in terms of the language applied by our positivistic empiricism inherited from the thinkers of the age of enlightenment and their successors in philosophy – but which, and this is important, reveal themselves to be unreal, to be a fabrication forged by the senses, by faulty interpretation of such, or as a cluster of beliefs which in a brief period of disorientation manifests itself as immediate, solid and verified by perception. “Illusion” as a figure of speech isn’t even a valid argument for or against any phenomenon, deattached from perception and the interpretation of perception.
It is impossible for you to sit down in your chair, turn your computer on, log onto the internet and open this blog, and read these words – without this sequence of events, and your interaction with certain apparatus – apart from the world of matter.

This is observed also by the Gospel of Phillip, which argues that the resurrection will occur to a body, and this body is also matter :

But tell me what will rise, that we may honor you. You

say the Spirit in the flesh, and it is also this light in the flesh. (But) this too is a

matter which is in the flesh, for whatever you shall say, you say nothing outside the

flesh.

So this flesh goes to destruction with all things that go to destruction – what rises out of the earth, given time, will return to it. In the meantime, as I addressed earlier, the Soul embodied continues to be sacrifice on the part of all incarnate life. There will be comprehension, there will be understanding,there will be wisdom, there will be knowledge – and there will be Gnosis – in the body, in the flesh, with you now, that you are living –
but the body goes to back to its own, leaving behind comprehension, leaving behind consciousness, leaving behind the mystery of breath. So it is true, the concrete, physical
world, with all its matter, with all its limitations, with all suffering – all unions and all separations – will not last, it is not eternal. But it is not an illusion, in any capacity.

About the proper attitude towards matter, the Gospel of Philip says “Do not love it,

and do not fear it” – either way it detains you and substract

from you what is
needed elsewhere, by way of emotion and

disposition. This dispassion with
regards to it is made possible

by not being centered within a conscious
center within us whose

balance is towards “flesh” and “appearance”(untruth),

it might be pertinent to speak of it as the body insofar as the

manifest body is a form with which we are accustomed to. If we are

too disposed towards the physiology and anatomy of ourselves

and others, to the degree it overshadows all else, we grow morbid

-while we
loose ourselves in these things – sensually,

intellectually, creatively –
notion does not escape us that this

appreciation itself does not repair
its condition, which is

dwindling.

The Gospel of Thomas has Jesus diagnose the “rude

awakening” of one which formerly thought to know and possess

the body; “when you have found the body, you have discovered

a corpse”.
I do not mean with this that the Gnostic

dualism has to do with body vs.
spirit, for there is a

tripartition of man`s priority or
consciousness-of-self within

most Gnoses within the Gnostic tradition, and
the three can never

achieve status as dual or duality – also a tripartite
nature of the human being – his creation or coming into this particular form
you

and I have – speaking of all qualities within the former three;

has
also three stadiums and natures – the dualism of Gnosticism is

Spiritual:
There is Pleroma and Kenoma; Fullness and Emptiness,

there is Light and
Dark which are directly relating to the

acquisition of Gnosis – moreover,
and this anchors the Initiatory,

progressive, calculated approach of the
Gnostic Systems; wherein

the Myth of Descent and Ascent, Fall and
Redemption, Forgetting

and Remembering, Exile and Return plays a
significant part –

namely the divide which exist between Spirit and
Counterfeit

Spirit.

In the progression of the Gnostic Myth, Sophia produces an unequated reflection upon herself apart

from the wholeness – while man is disposed to do so from

the
beginning of his life on earth, enforced and encouraged by

wellmeaning
mediators and tutors, by parental upbringing to

education and religious
instruction – this also occurs in his

soul. As such, he receives that
which is excreted out of Sophia, a

particular portion of the Demiurge
containing his essence, and

becomes its container, for most, for the
duration of his life..

whereupon the lion briefly roars and instills fear
in the souls of

this aeon, only to again be brought down into this abyss
of

purificatory preparations of Man interior.

In

one liturgy we are informed Sophia bears twins, this becomes a

subject
for both the Zervanite story of the younger and elder son,

wherein the
younger coming to realization that his destination is

subservience, breaks
through the womb before his brother and waits

there to strangle him at his
arrival – and the medieval Cathar

story of the sons Jesus and Satanael,
born to the unknown Dyadic

“Father”.

The

Myth speaks to no-one else but the soul, that means, not the soul

in
general, but yours and mine. If we are fulfilled in a greatly

focused and
discerning consciousness coupled with all-embracing

compassion for all
life, and particular that of our fellows who

suffers the same from the day
they enter into the world, we may,

through this really extraordinary,
almost unique ,.disposition,

make do without it or similar reminders. But
the world is full of

effective and ineffective, true and counterfeit
“myths”

addressing souls in this capacity, and Tradition more often than
not

are anchored with it, but often, so deep no “traditionalist”

is aware
of it and cultures are bereaved of its benefits.

Christ

is called, in some Christian traditions, “Second Creation” or even

“Second
Nature” – it is Christ, in the selfsame, who

collects and brings
together – the “Christian” himself/herself becomes

the embodiment of this Second Creation and receives it; in one

capacity as Adam, meaning the virgin “earth” which
receives

it (whose symbol the Cross and essence the Ashes, are drawn upon
many

brows on this day without any realization of this) –

another
capacity, active, as Sophia, who in iconography is the

“pregnant Madonna”
bearing within her the complete

Christ (here pious Christian Ikons
actually depict a Docetic

Christ who arrives completely formed and
transfigured out of Mary,

but in a manner of revelation rather than
fleshly form) encircled

by a Vesica Piscis, a Mandorla, a “womb of light”.

While

Catholics, ironically the most bitter polemists against

Gnosticism,
Modern and Ancient, today – thinks that the Gnostics

lived in fear of the
flesh and matter, thinking it to be the

essence of evil contradistinct to
an entirely divorced reality of

spirit; they still look toward the
Nativity on December the 25th

as an answer to the fall of man into a
predicament which equals

the fragility, vulnerability and nakedness of all
flesh, and

simultaneously offers thought to the “forebears” earthly

Adam and
earthly Eve, and essentially all mortal men and women

proceeding from them
by the generations -and their fall into this

condition which is what has
been diagnosized as the same by their

“rivals and enemies” the Gnostics;
they still apply

words pointing hope in the direction of a reintegration
into the

Kingdom of God, following the ascent of Christ, in Christ and
through

Christ, as well as a contemplation on the tomb of a man who was
born

in the sight of other mortals, “laying with him in his tomb,

entering
our death through his”. All that is lacking is an

appreciation that the
finitude of “creation” is a

beguiling lie, and the architects of the
notions have for all too

long forget the reasoning behind their craft – to
glorify the

temporal as eternal. I.e. Idolatry.

If

we possess a notion of Idolatry – the notion of a

representation,
wrought by human hands, receiving the glory and

worship True divinity,
True deity deserves; we acknowledge the

Duality of types, and the
possibility of having a relationship

towards true, revealed Reality
contra distinct to the false and

contrived appearance of Reality.

There is no both and same in

Gnosticism; at best we may be reminded of
existing things by

inspecting what is “before our eyes”, as the Gospel

of
Thomas reminds us ; if we “cleave the wood, lift the

stone” – we will see
what is hidden within_and hidden

beneath; but this requires a certain
type of seeing, which only

one certain type of eye might see.
This requires something else

than passive certainity.

Before

anything can be received into me, I must make sure I am the
space

which receives it; it demands an emptying, and a complete
disrobing. In the same way, the verified authenticity of any world,
any being, any thing – depends on there first being a verified authentic
self. If there is any doubt, we must go where it leads, and open up
that about which there is any doubt. In the case of our self, we need
to be able to empty ourselves completely of everything preconceived,
everything that has accumulated without consent, without knowledge –
of that which we know is whole.

Know – Be – Do

Point of departure from consciousness to consciousness
From an Hierarchial, on a Vertical level
to an Open structure (the “Circle”/Circumference) , on a Horisontal level



The Angel communciates with the Angel
The Man communicates with another
The Soul exists as much between us as in us – its
sign of vitality and life is movement between states;
there is a way from a confined way of cyclic movement, to
a free, inclusive and expansive way of cyclic movement.


The reality of the Aeon is a living revelation – from a singular, solitary
and temporary visitation towards a true reflection of the Pleroma itself.



Our proliferation begins with steadfast dedictation – a living “sacrifice”
– not of integrity, but of whatever is detained by our sitation in this world
, it continues with a persisting devotion towards the work itself, a thankfulness – this thankfulness can be shared with others without a word being uttered, without a jot of
explanation – a thanksgiving shared between two – spread out.



This action creates a new ground for our relationship with others

thus having sucessfully overcome the condition, the predicament – the strategies in the mind which resists and reproaches intimacy at this level; our stay – our resolve – our emphatic participation – becomes exemplary as well as mediatory;if we decrease the distance between each other (I mean every one of “us” – that is
humanity, expand it beyond humanity as far as you wish and can, but this is the important thing) in value , in judgement, in celebration (we constantly celebrate the fact of our friendships, our intimacies, our relationships, our “affiliation”- with our closest friends and this is to some degree the substance of our friendships,intimacies and relationships; even if we must fight battles, climb mountains, overcome terrible trials, and suffer the most cruel persecution – all in ourselves; because of our selves – or in spite of it) – we begin to function in this capacity, and this capacity is a mighty and wondrous thing with human beings; for which reason we have survived to this day.

When we forget to remember not to forget – the essential thing – which is to hold, to reside in, to take “shelter” in the True – not as an abstraction, but as the experienced reality, which informs anything lasting, anything valued, anything worth our bother in this world – we loose our self, and when we loose this self, we loose another; we are enstranged because we are enstranged to ourselves.

The first portal to the City of Seven Portals is the answer to the question;WHO AM I? – the further we are from our selves, the more we have forgotten of all that we have received already – the more complex, neurotic and compromised is the path back to the starting point; all the while this is the remembrance of the most basic of all our conscious actions (“thoughts”) – the Silence.

When we loose hold of this knowledge, we loose hold of any consciousness, any awareness concerning that which we do, that which we know, that which our senses bring back to us, that which is subjected to us through the body – that which we are.
KNOW

BE

DO.