America & Books

It’s a curious feature of American history that some of its major turning points are best summed up by books. In the years just before the American Revolution, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was the book; it had a huge role in focusing colonial grievances to the point that they were ready to burst into flame. In the years before the Civil War, it was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; that’s the book that made the North redefine a troubled national dialogue over a range of regional differences as a moral debate over slavery, pure and simple, and so pushed both halves of the country into positions from which they couldn’t back down short of war.

This is quite true; now, we are defined "as a propositional nation", not by propaganda via books, but by the Great Stereopticon, the Television set, which tells us, not what to think (they don't care what factoids we choose to swallow, and which to refuse), but how to think, a mindset. They set the parameters of Thought, or what passes for thought these days. For instance, when the "talking heads" come on the tube, we know that something important is about to be announced, beyond the day-to-day bombardment of tripe. They then "debate" the "issues", either "burning questions of the day" or "critical events": their "real meaning" or their "import". After endless shouting or droning on, there is a final question: "So what can we take from all this?" (the great American bottom line). There is then a "zinger" or quip or (more sadly) sentimental moral tripe, or (worst of all) "moral outrage". Again, we are free to choose one of these modes ourselves, and modulate it (with sensitivity) the critical impact of the event (eg., joking about racial issues is off limits, always, although one can get away with some amount of sangfroid if phrased with political correctness.

Art & Magic

Thanks to Joel Dietz
"Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose…

…Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. - And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it."

Rilke

"This other order of things is far deeper, for it is the original and the direct one; in its presence the common laws of nature, which are simply formal, are unavailing; therefore, under its immediate action neither time nor space can separate any longer the individuals, and the separation impendent on these forms presents no more insurmountable barriers for the intercourse of thoughts and the immediate action of the will. In this manner changes may be wrought by quite a different course than the course of physical causality, i.e., through an action of the manifestation of the will exhibited in a peculiar way and outside the individual himself. Therefore the peculiar character of all the aforesaid manifestations is the visio in distante et actio in distante (vision and action at a distance) in its relation to time as well as in its relation to space .
Such an action at a distance is just what constitutes the fundamental character of what is called magical; for such is the immediate action of our will, an action liberated from the causal conditions of physical action, viz., contact.”

Schopenhauer, Paregea

Prophecy of the North & of the West

Their Lord they shall praise,
Their language they shall keep,
Their land they shall lose -
Except wild Wales..."
- Taliesin

Who Made Who?

This sounds like Darth Vader called to talk to Lando Calarissian.

Casanova

I believe in the existence of an immaterial God, the Author and Master of all beings and all things, and I feel that I never had any doubt of His existence, from the fact that I have always relied upon His providence, prayed to Him in my distress, and that He has always granted my prayers. Despair brings death, but prayer does away with despair; and when a man has prayed he feels himself supported by new confidence and endowed with power to act. As to the means employed by the Sovereign Master of human beings to avert impending dangers from those who beseech His assistance, I confess that the knowledge of them is above the intelligence of man, who can but wonder and adore. Our ignorance becomes our only resource, and happy, truly happy; are those who cherish their ignorance! Therefore must we pray to God, and believe that He has granted the favour we have been praying for, even when in appearance it seems the reverse. As to the position which our body ought to assume when we address ourselves to the Creator, a line of Petrarch settles it: 'Con le ginocchia della mente inchine.' Man is free, but his freedom ceases when he has no faith in it; and the greater power he ascribes to faith, the more he deprives himself of that power which God has given to him when He endowed him with the gift of reason.
Reason is a particle of the Creator’s divinity. When we use it with a spirit of humility and justice we are certain to please the Giver of that precious gift. God ceases to be God only for those who can admit the possibility of His non-existence, and that conception is in itself the most severe punishment they can suffer. Man is free; yet we must not suppose that he is at liberty to do everything he pleases, for he becomes a slave the moment he allows his actions to be ruled by passion. The man who has sufficient power over himself to wait until his nature has recovered its even balance is the truly wise man, but such beings are seldom met with.

Via Joel Dietz

Amerika

Slide [26] It's important to understand that the Soviet Union achieved collapse-preparedness inadvertently, and not because of the success of some crash program. Economic collapse has a way of turning economic negatives into positives. The last thing we want is a perfectly functioning, growing, prosperous economy that suddenly collapses one day, and leaves everybody in the lurch. It is not necessary for us to embrace the tenets of command economy and central planning to match the Soviet lackluster performance in this area. We have our own methods, that are working almost as well. I call them "boondoggles." They are solutions to problems that cause more problems than they solve.

Just look around you, and you will see boondoggles sprouting up everywhere, in every field of endeavor: we have military boondoggles like Iraq, financial boondoggles like the doomed retirement system, medical boondoggles like private health insurance, legal boondoggles like the intellectual property system. The combined weight of all these boondoggles is slowly but surely pushing us all down. If it pushes us down far enough, then economic collapse, when it arrives, will be like falling out of a ground floor window. We just have to help this process along, or at least not interfere with it. So if somebody comes to you and says "I want to make a boondoggle that runs on hydrogen" – by all means encourage him! It's not as good as a boondoggle that burns money directly, but it's a step in the right direction.

Orlvov

Prophecies....

Christ, Avatar of Avatars, Servant-Emperor, War-Child

The Emperor helped humanity as a whole survive and prosper through the long millennia. In various eras of human history he intervened through various personas, some of them well-known historical personages, to guide Mankind, though such interventions were always brief and shrouded in legend and historical mystery. At the end of the Age of Strife the man who would become the Emperor finally took a direct, public, and permanent role in shaping the future of humanity, believing that the damage done to the human race by 5,000 years of terror, isolation and violence could not be reversed unless he openly guided humanity as its leader. As such, he shed all his prior identities and simply revealed himself on Terra as the Emperor of Mankind, determined to unite the entire species under his stern but benevolent rule and replace a culture of superstition, fear, communism with a culture of knowledge, courage and liberty.

Mary, Empress of the Coming Victory

"Things follow too slowly upon each other, but the great Queen of Heaven is at hand; the Lord's power is Hers. Like mist She shall scatter Her enemies. She shall vest the Venerable Old Man with all his former garments."

Credit to poster HOO @ Gornahoor.net

Medieval Societies

Rees Davies discusses the inevitable and necessary ethnic, religious, and custom components which served as the forging elements of the Western "nation-states". The question is, can modern nation-states transcend this? Should they? Or, are they worth calling "states" at all? Tolkien thought those who used the term should be shot at dawn.

Ethnic homogeneity "was and is" (still) a guarantor of stability. So is stability a legitimate common, public good?

Perhaps one could point out that a kingdom and a people, let alone an Empire, are not the same thing. Ours is a dysfunctional Empire, at best, here in Amerika. Certainly no kingdom. Many peoples, many tongues would be a blessing to a Holy Roman Empire, a curse to a late phase capitalistic technopolity (masquerading as Empire) such as our land. America will never be a "country" or a "nation" like others, more of a commonwealth. But the very idea has been undermined by decades of political attacks and squandering.

I am convinced that ethnicity can still contribute as a "vehicle" to transcendent aims. It is not the most important point in a man's makeup, but it is not meaningless either. However, it is probably right to say that it is the individual as individual who in some sense is the "focus" or "locus" of truth. Will this re-emphasize "race" even with the official dogma attempting to circumvent it? Or will "race" cease to exist? Or will there be a new "race" that evolves? The latter (I think) may be the strongest, and least beneficial, possibility, at least in the short run.

A Utilitarian Argument for Monarchy

Source
His other essays are here.

More good points on monarchy, democracy, etc.

Collectivist democracy was popular in almost every society throughout antiquity, with a few notable exceptions. Indeed, it is probable that democracy is the oldest form of government known. It is not hard to imagine the majority in a primitive tribe of cavemen or nomads controlling the rest of the tribe through brute force and the ‘will of the majority.’ Democracy today is the form of government viewed as returning man to some sort of Golden Age, where all men are free and equal. In reality, democracy is not the ‘rule of the people’ or self-government, but rather the rule of the majority. And in light of the past two hundred years, the majority can be more vicious than any singular tyrant.

Democracy is the ultimate form of socialism in the political sphere. We all become the government, we all become public property – we all become collectivized. The same criticisms that apply to socialized property apply to socialized citizens within a democracy. Collectivized property is over utilized and wasted away simply because no single person or group owns the property; it is merely the property of the ‘people’ and the ‘public.’ Likewise are citizens treated in a modern democratic state. Citizens are taxed, regulated, controlled, drafted, fined, imprisoned; citizens are nothing but naked resources to the officers of government. And because of the democratic system, there is never a singular individual that can take the blame for injustices done. After all, ‘we’ are the people, ‘we’ are the government –the only one to blame for injustice is ‘us.’ So say the Prophets of Democracy.

Source

Another argument against democracy.
Yet our system obliges us to elevate to office precisely those persons who have the ego-besotted effrontery to ask us to do so; it is rather like being compelled to cede the steering wheel to the drunkard in the back seat loudly proclaiming that he knows how to get us there in half the time. More to the point, since our perpetual electoral cycle is now largely a matter of product recognition, advertising, and marketing strategies, we must be content often to vote for persons willing to lie to us with some regularity or, if not that, at least to speak to us evasively and insincerely. In a better, purer world—the world that cannot be—ambition would be an absolute disqualification for political authority.

A Utilitarian Argument for Monarchy

Source
His other essays are here.

Recapitulation, Avatars, & Buddhahood in Light of the Christ

Original Post

Saint Paul teaches in the epistle to the Colossians that all things will be summed up in Christ, who will then deliver the kingdom up to the Father, as He had it from Him from the beginning. Then, will come and be the “end”. This teaching, along with verses such as “heaven and earth will pass away, but the word of the Lord (My Word) shall endure forever” give glimpses of another doctrine hiding behind the “perspicacious” meaning of sola Scriptura. If “heaven and earth” will pass away, then there is an element of nihilism to Scripture, compatible with the ontological assertions of certain other ancient scriptures. Yet, the passing of heaven and earth is not “the last word” – we can connect this with Tomberg’s doctrine of the “Self (God) beyond the ultimate Selves”. Not only can men like Enoch escape the horizontal circle of the serpent, so can buddhas from the East, and yet their escape remains an inexplicable fact. Avatars are introduced to communicate in the opposite direction, but this, too, is a mystery. Men, said Paul on Mars Hill, quoting Aratus and other Greek poets, seek for God, if “happily they might find him”. The possibility is real, and not limited to the Hebraic tradition. However, the esoteric Christian tradition is not so much that others (such as the Greek) are “incomplete”, but that it is capable of being added to. These are not quite the same things, to be incomplete and to be capable of addition.

But this is not all. From another Pauline epistle comes this: “man’s works shall be burned up in fire, but he shall be saved”.

The Apokastasis used to be the doctrine of the early church, until the needs of holding together an Empire and a marching order of transcendent temple-worship lead to Justinian’s measures. The West was in such dire shape following the barbarian tribal invasions and the imperial collapse that Church fasting requirements were relaxed so that the sick and the poor could eat enough meat to survive – this was common in the West, at least. This was the kind of context into which Christianity stepped to carry the banner of transcendence and order. The original vision of a recapitulation (or re-breathing of God’s breath) gave place to more concrete, useful, and also (in their own way) more accurate reflections of what man needed to know during those dire times. What good was a doctrine of universal salvation if it would be simply used to justify laxity and apathy?

Scripture teaches that Christ loved his sheep (His “body”) as a bridegroom loves his bride-to-be. If Christ intended to not enter heaven without cleansing his bride (and even “harrowing hell“), this leads us to believe that the “path” which he opened as an avatar was intended to embrace the entirety of the human race (including other avatars with a human face), because “if I shall be lifted up, I shall draw all men to me”.

The foregoing overview should make clear the complexity and difficulty of the Christian tradition. It is not so simple as to say that the Church did merely or only this, or that, or that Christ taught only this, or just that. There were multiple facets or aspects of the primordial Tradition being preserved, but being preserved while undergoing a metamorphosis. If we object that much was lost, indeed this is true, yet how can it be “lost” if we know it was? Esoteric traditions, such as the Fedeli Amore, have persisted within Christendom throughout history, down to this day, and one can trace its influence (as above) in the writings of Saint Paul, who had “many things hard to understand” and many other things he “wished to say to you”, but “you were not able”.

Thus, the nihilism of the “heaven and earth being rolled up as a scroll” is consistent with an esoteric doctrine of Christ as final avatar, not to abolish other avatars, but to entirely make sense of them and complete them by adding the cornerstone, which is as great a “mystery beyond the mystery” as esoteric doctrine is a “mystery” to something purely external.

In fact, the doctrine of Recapitulation can be deduced from that of karma and sexual union. If man and woman “become one flesh” (as Saint Paul warns those thinking of undertaking temple prostitution), then the subtle and vital bodies (as well as the physical) are united. Christianity, in fact, does not deny the ancient yoga techniques of retention of semen (the physical body), holding of the breath (the subtle body), and the stopping of thought (the vital body). In fact, it incorporated it into its priesthood. But it argued that there was “another way”. This is true Christian form. As long as the reason is understood all is well. And here it is. If a man loves his woman as Christ loved the Church (with the result that the “one flesh” is totally sanctified, a double burden, or perhaps a double help, in the end), then the karmic chain of carnal relations to the woman will not hold the male out of paradise. Just as Christ “weds” to the Church, so can Christians make of monogamy a chivalric chastity and “second coming of Love”, which can inspire something akin to that which fired the “Dark Ages” of Dante.

So which path is easier? Total abstinence, or devotion to “the one woman” above all else? Either way, it is time for Christians to repent.

The only thing I will add to this essay posted for Gornahoor is
1. I am open to correction (from Cologero Salvo, the editor, or any readership, or anyone reading this blog) and
2. I am convinced that the most pressing need of the West now is to recapture transcendence without losing Christ.
3. Perhaps, also, a few last words to the above. "Salvation" has many meanings, maybe as many meanings as there are persons. Satan has the biggest interest in destroying the relationship between one man, one woman. This is more important even than Church. Mouravieff speaks of it in Gnosis. Man and woman are one, for "the man is not without the woman, nor the woman without the man, in the Lord". Each person sees, in the other, their true angelic Self.