More Gnosis

According to Mouravieff (page 47) no possible link exists between the intellectual centre (there are three centers in man, with 6 subdivisions and 957 different permutated possible combinations between these fragmented parts of personality, which are "Legion"). The only possible way for man to be "saved" is to revivify the emotional center by rhythm and effort, for it to contact the higher emotional center (which is divine) and for THAT center to contact the higher intellectual center, which cannot even be represented in form or content by images (as can the higher emotional center). The motor center has no way "out" on its own, and the intellectual center is too slow. The emotional center (which has been moralized and legalized in our civilization, thus crippling it) has to "make the call". Furthermore, the higher emotional center is the Son (an aspect of Him) & the higher intellectual center is the Father in the consubstantial unity of the Holy Spirit.

I am worm , I am slave, I am king, I am God.

Source
Gabriel Derjavine
The thought, here, is that accidental man (man as he develops over time & "thinks" himself to be, his "I") is actually a composite of contingent and luck-based qualities, until he achieves his possible destiny, which is to be reborn anew by the Spirit. He is a worm if he is below the beasts, a slave if he is a normal man, a King if he is a noble man, and God, if he can attain to the divinization of the saints.

Now, there is a continual point to our round in life, a higher purpose, which most of us are dimly aware of at certain special times, which we remember fondly. This purpose could be likened to an aspect of an eternal Spirit which wills to manifest itself (Himself) through us in this particular phase of earthly existence or existence at all. Now, we can achieve this point by an arduous commitment to Truth; yet there is always the possibility that "endgame" can be achieved in any phase of existence, even this one. Rather than the long road, there is a "low road", a sudden illumination, which effectively sets the individual forever within the precincts of God's kingdom. This is what Jesus calls the "second birth". Thus, there is a religion of Christianity that is valid, and there is also a second, faster path or school, which promises greater danger and greater reward - the mystery of the second birth. Christ came to make this second path safe, and to unite it with the "religion" of the first part.

Thus, the individual must become "God's" and also must become God, not by nature, but by participation.

Curse of Hagsgate

Worth reading. For what it's worth, I've always been a closet environmentalist, & now am starting to see how right that instinct is. I think whoever can learn to "do it themselves" and buy "old fashioned" ought to get busy doing that right now. Fish tanks, refrigerators, & air compressors are going to be luxuries that one picks from very gingerly, in the not far distant future. Then again, maybe God will matter then.

The Orion Project

"Well, start with the prime factor of body identification. The society promotes the concept of "you are your body", which results in fear, especially fear of "death", which is tied in with the idea of physical pain. Combine this with religious doctrine and various cultural ideologies, and you have a very fertile ground for manipulation. There is also promotion of identification with the personality and ego. The ego is culturally conditioned to a reactionary state which is encouraged by media and literature to focus on the elements of security, sensation and power. Under these circumstances, individuals are basically disempowered and blind. In terms of cultural activity, individuals are put in a position where they spend most of their time dealing with "self preservation", "self-gratification", and "self-definition". These functions are basically left hemisphere related. The ego structure often becomes fragmented into "partial selves", making the problem even worse. What is missing is the love of truth, life, and the creator that we are all a part of. The idea is to transform "self-preservation" into right action, .. self-gratification" into right feeling, and "self-definition" into right thought."
Before It's News interview

Modern Christianity

”Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into Heaven, it has been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households. It has flown the flag and chanted the slogans of empire. It has assumed with the economists that ‘economic forces’ automatically work for good and has assumed with the industrialists and the militarists that technology determines history. It has assumed with almost everybody that ‘progress’ is good, that it is good to be modern and up with the times… [Modern] Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation.” ~ Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, p. 114

Gornahoor does it again

In the human organism, in fact, we do not have a normal and healthy condition, when by chance the physical element, i.e., the servile stratum, or the vegetative life, i.e., the bourgeoisie, or finally, the uncontrolled and impulsive will, i.e., the warrior caste, assumes the direct and deciding part.

Source (Evola)

On the contrary, it is those who "know" & "are" who represent the "living Law" on earth. It is pointless to discuss sovereignty, legitimacy, authority, or justice, if one does not know who the King is, or at least, where his body is buried...

The Maid of Destiny

“Young Mary of the sky-blue cloak,
The lily hands, the dusty feet-
Indefectible awoke,
From her soul’s noetic heat.
She held an angel in her eye,
She spoke the flame with Seraphim-
Interchanging earth and sky,
Shock the changeless Cherubim.
Sublunar Eve in Lim cried out
To see her motherhood respire.
Mary’s prayer upon her brow
Burns with a kenotic fire.
The remonstrance ungilded stood
Before the angel of the Host-
Across the shadowed twisty-wood
Moved a many-colored Ghost.
Paley rose in petals torn
Sprang up within a heart unbound-
Beyond old suns, a rose-gold morn
Moves with us, our God around.
I fell asleep last night and feared
Destroying winds in sphered wheels.
The Lady pure in prayer appeared
Before the angel’s eyes of steel.
God’s heralder unblinds his gaze,
And dolefully unbinds his sword.
He snaps it and before her stays,
Contemplating ancient words.
Across deep heaven’s blue-dark sea
Still sparkling with great Gabriel’s wake,
In golden hours, by silver tree,
A slender youth the fruit shall take,
And eating some, will cast the rest
About our world as he falls dead,
Sinking swiftly with the West,
Rocked in seeming changeless red.
But Mary has a faith that’s swift-
It outruns all the angry dead,
So from the angel’s upward lift,
Her wide eye feeds her heart instead.
The Word is done, the song is winged,
The deeds are named, the Glory burns,
A little maid of clay will bring
The star on which all turns.
Turn, Lady, that your cloak is winged.
Sigh, Lady, that your prayer is thus.
Sing, Mary, with only your eyes,
Breathe out the rainbow out of dust.

In Other Words

Harmonizing Casanova with Bo Yin Ra

Compare this, with the previous post:
"

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."

Channeled via Joel Dietz, at Sundancer

Casanova

The Divine Scintilla of the Spirit

Below are the teachings of Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken. You will find, in them, the teachings (also) of the Catholic Church on purgatory, and the teachings of the early Fathers on what "hell" is. Hell is losing one's "sheep" (personality - the memory of one's struggle). If one's sheep is lost, the continuity between one's eventual reunion with God & one's mortal life disappears, because one did build wisely. Thus, it is quite true to say (in a sense) that hell is eternal for the person - those who go their suffer the second death. It is also quite true to say that "they" shall be saved, but not "they" in the sense of their earthly "work" (either externally or in their personality). What will be saved is "the spirit in man that answers God" and which can no more be destroyed than it can be saved against its own will. The spirit in man will return to God by an inexorable law - fire returns to Fire. This burning will either take the personality with it (if one has labored in the Christian mystery and sacrament of Christ) or it will be vaporized eternally, because it had no existence of itself to begin with. Read for yourself...it rings very true.
(My comments bolded in single sentences)


Source
"Paradise Lies Under the Shadow of Swords" because "Heaven is Taken by Storm". What "storm"? He who does the violence of silencing the mind:

The "force" one needs is not a burst of labored "will," nor painfully effected "concentration," but simply a continuously watchful, resolute rejection of the mind's obtrusive interference; a taming of its arrogant ambition to play the judge in matters it can never comprehend, and in domains from which it is forever barred. To hold the mind in check, however, becomes an absolute necessity if one is to achieve the inner calm and the serene detachment, which are a precondition if all our energies and senses are to be transformed to willing servants of the God within, who is the source of our life and being. If, in other words, the timeless self in mortal man is to arise from its material sepulcher: born anew within the Spirit, as the living form and likeness of its "Father," who has his "heaven" in that newborn self.

To be sure, the mind can, like a draft horse, help us to move forward on our quest, provided we have trained it to that end. Nor is it wrong to think about and intellectually consider what we have spiritually come to know--after the experience. In other words, to build ourselves a logically constructed mental storehouse, a "treasury" in which the jewels of our inner life are carefully preserved. Indeed, without creating such a store, the insights of our spiritual life, the gems of our innermost experience, would actually be in danger of being lost to us in the activities of daily life. They would be scattered to the winds, instead of gaining form and structure and thus enriching our life.

But never must we make the mind our guide when, in the dawn of our first uncertain glimmer of eternal life, we set out on the quest for that which is, for all of us, the everlasting, inextinguishable source of being; our final origin and home; the most incomprehensible of mysteries surrounding our self: the "jewel in the lotus flower."

The Mind is Not Our Home, but is a tool-

As a reliable pathfinder, the mind will follow tracks that lead to insights as to causes and effects within the world of mortal sense perception. And here one certainly should trust it and give it every opportunity to develop its potential; because the intellect as well originates in the divine and, in its proper place, will serve its owner well.

However, if our goal is to experience God, we must not search outside ourselves. And that includes the hidden region of the outer world that many think of as an "inner" realm, simply because their mortal senses can no longer apprehend it. Moreover, even if the human spirit were to search for God eternities on end, and in the highest worlds of Spirit, it never would encounter God as such, in any place outside. For just as in the universe of matter one cannot anywhere uncover nature's underlying energy itself, in isolation, while yet this very energy is manifest in every atom of creation, so too the Godhead only manifests itself within and through the spiritual entelechies it has engendered of itself. In each entelechy the Godhead manifests its being differently and in uniquely individuated form. But nowhere is the Godhead found as such and by itself, not even in the Spirit's highest realms.

The World is Mediated at all Levels, because God is the Mediator

It is within ourselves alone that we must finally discover God in his eternal all-creating life. However, to be able to discover God within ourselves, and not create some mental idol, and thus fall prey to self-imposed illusion, we here must follow the advice to those who have already found their conscious life in God: helpers who have freely offered all their energies to God, as servants of his will, and thus became united with the eternal source that formed them in its image.

It would, of course, be foolish to expect that here on earth, where life is subject to completely different laws, one might encounter--in visible, material form--the highest spiritual entelechies whose self is unified with God. Nor, for that matter, will the human soul be ever wholly free of mortal bonds while it remains attached to its material body. Consequently, even a soul that in this present life has unified itself with God, and thus gained mastery of all its faculties and energies, which then it dedicated wholly to God's service, will never be completely rid of mortal bonds. And even at the highest level of development in life on earth, it only can attain the lowest form of spiritual union with the Godhead. Indeed, even the already God-united soul that serves a Luminary--a mediator of eternal light--as voice and vessel for his task, could never on its own ascend to any of the higher levels of the Spirit's worlds to which it has been granted access.

It is true that, in this planet's spiritual dimension, there also live entelechies at infinitely higher planes than they could reach if they were still encumbered by a mortal organism. But these sublimest beings have either long ago discarded their material forms, or never had been subject to a body's limitations, because they had not known the "fall" from light, to which embodied spirits had succumbed.

According to eternal laws, however, we can perceive these highest beings only from within. And only the completely God-united soul of mortal man is able, under certain very rare conditions, to behold and hear them.

Only the Pure in Heart "See" God

Extremely rare, indeed, are situations under which a human mortal, who still is shackled by the laws of physical reality, can actually perceive these spiritual immortals. Without number, on the other hand, are here the possibilities of self-delusion and one could hardly count all the reports of people who saw no more than phantom images, but felt convinced some spiritual being had manifested its existence to their mortal senses.

All but impossible to overcome would seem the notion that "clairvoyants" are able to perceive these spiritual immortals. And thousands, for that reason, want to learn how one becomes "clairvoyant," because they think developing this sense would let them witness spiritual life by virtue of their inner senses.

However, one can neither "learn" to be clairvoyant, nor have clairvoyants ever seen things other than the planet's lower, "astral aura," whose phantom shapes, and typically deceptive denizens, are anything but spiritual in origin and substance.

There are methods, to be sure, by which one may so frivolously overstimulate the human organism's faculty to generate hallucinations that it will let a person see or hear, as tangible, if mock reality, whatever is desired. A person thus deceived may well experience "insights" that interweave reality and error in bizarre confusion. Indeed, he may have visions of the grandiose mirages formed by other minds, or witness self-engendered phantom shapes, and so become convinced of their concrete "reality." But who could doubt that such a "seer" should be pitied far more even than a genuine clairvoyant, who typically is born with his precarious gift and will at least perceive events of actual, if physical reality, even though he may feel certain that he sees dimensions of the Spirit.

It is a thoroughly mistaken attitude to think that one is searching for the Spirit, while at the same time hoping that one shall fairly soon be granted more or less concrete material proofs of the existence of the Spirit's world.

Seek, You Will Find - You always find what you look for - what you are. So meditate on what is good, true, beautiful...

For one thing, it would not spiritually advance a human mortal in the least even if all worlds within the radiant substance of the Spirit clearly stood before the person's eyes. For another, even centuries of constant dialogue with the sublimest beings in the Spirit's world would never make the person rise a single step above the level where the colloquy began. Nor, for that matter, ought one to assume that any human spirit will at once be able, after having shed its mortal form, to discern the Spirit's life on all its many levels.

Within the worlds of Spirit one only can perceive and comprehend what corresponds to one's own nature and one's level of development. And even human spirits who are completely unified with God's eternal life cannot, within the Spirit's realms, ascend beyond the plane that will conform to their own state.

Whenever need arises, there will be spiritual beings who descend from higher planes of being, to offer insight into facts that are disclosed to them. Such is unavoidable, for instance, when a Luminary--a mediator of eternal light--is to be united with his mortal individuality. For beings living in a higher sphere can make the sacrifice of leaving their abode a certain time in order to descend to lower planes. Spirits on a lower level, on the other hand, would in effect destroy themselves if it were possible that they attempted to ascend to spheres above their level, for which they are not yet prepared. (The lower mental influences which anyone is able to receive do not originate within the Spirit, but in the physical domain, albeit its invisible dimension.) All these things are governed by inexorable spiritual laws, and those who truly are the Spirit's own will gladly bow to what these laws demand.

The radiant Light of the Beginning, which shines in all creations of the Spirit, has wisely veiled its blinding rays for the protection of all those who are not yet sufficiently united with the Spirit to be able to endure the living light of God's eternal essence.

For what, indeed, would human mortals benefit if they were able to behold the Spirit's life before they had themselves been wholly integrated with the Spirit?

It would only cause them unimaginable torments. Indeed, no pain in hell invented by sadistic human minds could match in cruelty what any human consciousness would have to suffer if it were able to behold the Spirit's life before its own eternal essence had been united with the Spirit and, thus, were given the ability to take its active part in that eternal life.

One thing alone is needful: to offer--readily and without mental reservations--to the Spirit, to our Living God within, every element within our soul, every sense and feeling of our body, every resolution and intention of our mind: to act as servants to perfect ourselves. In order that God's timeless Spirit may thus, in time, unite itself with our human consciousness and, of itself, return to us anew these very elements and senses, resolutions, feelings, and intentions to be henceforth our own attentive servants, after we have been prepared to master them by virtue of the radiant spiritual scintilla which, in ourselves, eternally brings forth our very life and being.

That is the kind of worship all must needs perform who do not want to lose their mortal human consciousness at death, but take it with them into life beyond; not just for seemingly unending ages, but for all eternity.

"Work while it is day; for the night will come when no one can work any longer."

Here, in this present life on earth, the human being still is able to perform that "work." After having left this physical domain, however, the individual shall find itself in the particular condition it had created for itself through life on earth. And now that human consciousness must passively abide until, without its being able any longer to affect its fate, its soul has, sooner or later--perhaps, in human terms, after aeons having passed--at last attained sufficient inner clarity to make it possible for helpers in the realm of Spirit, whose substance is alive in God, to reawaken in that soul the consciousness of its divine scintilla, of its eternal Living God. Then only is the human spirit free to give its will a new direction, and only then can it resolve to offer all its energies to serve its Living God. This resolution finally will bring about the integration of the person's individuated consciousness with the eternal consciousness of God's creative Spirit. And this essential integration cannot be effected any other way, not even by an act of God's own will and grace.

However, at that distant time the human being shall long have lost all memory of ever having lived this mortal life on earth, whose contents will have vanished like a dream that has escaped from its own self.

Purgatory, Heaven & Hell are real Spiritual States

Although that human spirit now is "saved," it never shall be able to recall again its former life on earth, with all its goals and aspirations, its happiness and its consuming toil. In short, that spirit failed to gain the prize of victory; for it did not attain the singular expansion of its conscious life that those acquired for themselves who can recall their cosmic journey through even the remotest realms of being wherein God's presence can reveal its very self and nature.

To be sure, that spirit, too, shall then have finally become a form and vessel for God's Spirit and, being reunited with its eternal male or female counterpart, shall live the Spirit's radiant life in the abundance of eternal joy. But infinitely higher is the kind of self-awareness of those who are alive in the eternal Spirit, but still possess the faculty of recollecting, in all their endless bliss, the consciousness of having once experienced the very lowest depth of being, to which they had descended in their former life as mortal creatures in the realm of matter.

Even as a native of the flatlands may be overcome by feelings of profoundest awe in face of the majestic grandeur of the world's great mountain ranges--sentiments which those who live there do not always fully comprehend--so also can the true extent of inner joy be understood by only those who still are able to recall the consciousness of the abysmal depths they once had known. And as the human spirit rises to ever higher levels of eternal life, albeit in the course of aeons, the less shall it be willing to give up the faculty of recollecting the very deepest levels of existence in its past.

Spiritual life, by virtue of its very substance, remains eternally immutable within itself. As a result, the spiritual ascent that lies before the human soul can never cause the slightest change in the essential nature of the divine creative core by which that soul is given its eternal life.

The Living God within the human being's inmost self, with whose eternal consciousness the human spirit may unite itself already in this present life, remains eternally the same, on every level of the Spirit's life that one can reach through all eternity.

Man will be burnt by fire, and his works will not survive (if of himself)

What does expand in fact is only the condition of the human soul: the state of consciousness the human spirit has within its timeless soul. And so that spirit rises to continuously higher forms of consciousness, and thus is able to experience forever widening infinities of spiritual life.

If it merely were a question of creating--by virtue of the soul's dynamic elements--any kind of individuated consciousness around a person's life-begetting spiritual core, then all the urgent striving to unify one's consciousness with the eternal Spirit already during mortal life would be entirely unnecessary. Given that, according to eternal laws inherent in the Spirit's life, that integration can still be accomplished in one's future life, even if that should require ages. The sole exception would be cases in which a human consciousness condemned itself to total dissolution.

The waking call of all authentic spiritual guides in human history went out, however, precisely for the reason that the soul's sublimest joy through all eternity resides in its retaining full possession of its mortal consciousness and, thereby, having the ability to recollect its former life on earth. Another reason for that call, however, is the fact that conscious integration with the Spirit during mortal life will spare the soul immeasurable suffering, which it may otherwise have to endure once it has left its mortal form.

To show mankind the way that leads the human spirit toward such greatly heightened joy, by sending it appointed guides, has been the task of those in every age by whose authority I, too, now make these insights known. And every word this book contains has but a single aim: to teach its readers the significance of real worship.

May no one who will read these words depart this earthly life of toil and pain before his consciousness has been united with his Living God!

May none fall victim to the "night," when his capacity to "work" must cease. The "night" from which there can be no escape until the captive's debt has been repaid "to the uttermost farthing."

There still is time--the "day" is not yet spent--and willing hands are offered to all who earnestly seek help and guidance. There is no need for special "schooling" to attract that inner help, nor can personal assistance make that help one's own.

Paradise is Beneath the Shadow of Swords

Source
I begin to sing of Demeter, the holy goddess with the beautiful hair.

And her daughter [Persephone] too. The one with the delicate ankles, whom Hadês seized.

She was given away by Zeus, the loud-thunderer, the one who sees far and wide.

Demeter did not take part in this, she of the golden double-axe, she who glories in the harvest.

She [Persephone] was having a good time, along with the daughters of Okeanos, who wear their girdles slung low.

She was picking flowers: roses, crocus, and beautiful violets.

Up and down the soft meadow. Iris blossoms too she picked, and hyacinth.

And the narcissus, which was grown as a lure for the flower-faced girl by Gaia [Earth]. All according to the plans of Zeus. She [Gaia] was doing a favour for the one who receives many guests [Hadês].

It [the narcissus] was a wondrous thing in its splendor. To look at it gives a sense of holy awe to the immortal gods as well as mortal humans.

It has a hundred heads growing from the root up.

Its sweet fragrance spread over the wide skies up above.

And the earth below smiled back in all its radiance. So too the churning mass of the salty sea.

She [Persephone] was filled with a sense of wonder, and she reached out with both hands to take hold of the pretty plaything. And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, opened up under her.

It happened on the Plain of Nysa. There it was that the Lord who receives many guests made his lunge.

He was riding on a chariot drawn by immortal horses. The son of Kronos. The one known by many names.

He seized her against her will, put her on his golden chariot, And drove away as she wept.

She cried with a piercing voice, calling upon her father [Zeus], the son of Kronos, the highest and the best.

But not one of the immortal ones, or of human mortals, heard her voice.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Being & Logos

Leithart
According to Gadamer (Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts), 405), philosophy essentially began with a nominalist move. The “earliest” view saw an “intimate unity of word and thing,” so intimate that the “true name was considered to be part of the bearer of the name.”

Philosophy “more or less began with the insight that the word is only a name – i.e., that it does not represent true being. This is precisely the breakthrough of philosophical inquiry into the territory over which the name had undisputed rule. Belief in the word and doubt about it constitute the problem that the Greek Enlightenment saw in the relationship between word and thing. Thereby the word changed from presenting the thing to substituting for it.”

This inevitably raised the question of whether language can be true at all, and the pressure of this question led Plato away from language to ideas as the locus of truth:

Having rejected the alternative accounts of language in the Cratylus, “Plato wants to demonstrate that no truth . . . can be attained in language – in language’s claim to correctness . . . – and that without words . . . being must be known purely from itself” (p. 407).

And this, Gadamer thinks, is the source of the problems of skepticism, objectivity, and truth in Western philosophy, problems that can only arise when one needs to compare what we say about a thing to what the thing is, a comparison only possible on the assumption that we have non-linguistic access to the thing to which we can compare our linguistic descriptions.

Philosophy begins not with forgetfulness of Being, but with forgetfulness of Logos, in the specific sense of language. Philosophy begins from forgetfulness of the truth that “in the beginning was the word.”

Is Leithart saying (here) that Plato was mistaken, & that his move was a nominalist, minimalist account of the power of Logos, moving away from seeing that the Word is identical to the Thing? If he is, my understanding of Plato is that this is overly simplistic to the point of error. Plato isn't saying that (for example) chanting the names of God or praying the prayer of the heart can't lead one to a realization of the divine shekinah. He is saying that one must first transcend one's own mentation and linguistics, prior to "seeing" God. This means that the "Logos" is not "wordy"or empirical. The Logos is the Divine Idea of God. Augustine canonizes this tradition, later on, and Plotinus explicates it in more nuance.