Dontaskme wrote: ↑Tue Apr 11, 2023 11:11 am
What if there was nothing higher than human sentient awareness?
It seems to me you are mixing categories. What you seem to me to be saying is that an aware being, like ourselves, ensconced in matter, as we are,
perceives, and that you ask me to consider that perhaps there is nothing higher than that sentient awareness.
Sure. Why not?
I think what you are objecting to is another definition or a conception bound up with the notion of metaphysics: that of angelical being perhaps. An ultra-refined materialism that has become (as they say in yoga books) 'subtle'. I am thinking of the sorts of definitions that were so much a part of the works of Paramahansa Yogananda: a way of referring essentially to a 'magical' dimension that special people, adepts and "Masters" had learned to access.
What is the point that you are working toward? I get the impression at times that you are a bit taken by the sorts of paradoxical statements made by Zen rebels who felt a need to subvert entrenched ways of seeing, thinking, believing. It is, after all, a way to throw wrenches into the conceptual work of those who are too self-satisfied with their *positions* and their *stances* -- perhaps their authority?
But moving on from this comment. The way I approach this extended conversation which, in the case of my involvement, began on the Christianity thread, is through trying to arrive at an "encapsulating statement" about each of the participants in this strange, postmodern, post-Christian and really post-religious dialogue that goes on here. The way that I frame our situation is first by referring to it as a 'situation' -- an 'outcome'. We exist, we live in, we conceptualize from, a position of ruin. That is to say of collapsed structures. A 'structure' in that sense -- take the Medieval picture of the Church -- is a container, a defined structure, and as such has a very
very real and important function.
But *you* -- all of you really -- are persons who have, in one way or another, in one degree or another, been crushed in the general collapse of a containing conceptual order. It requires a 'hard eye' (a sort of scathing, direct, even merciless eye to *see* you. That is, to see you naked (if clothes are taken as a metaphor for superficial and somewhat false layers that we protect ourselves with).
So the ones that I *see* (or believe that I see) in relief and with clarity are Immanuel Can, Harbal, Gary and to a different degree and for different reasons, Dubious.
Immanuel Can represents the extremely well-developed but former *picture* of an integrated, rational, ordered world and cosmos. Though it is true that he has aligned himself with a peculiarly *perverse* Evangelical and Protestant current, nevertheless the core pattern is still there. He asks that you-all come back to it. To take up residence again in it. To 'believe in it' as he says that he does. There, in it, is what he calls 'salvation'. And attached to this set of assertions is, as we all know, the underpinning metaphor of what will result from disbelieve or failure to heed these dire warnings.
Now, around that well-known and well-understood *candle* there are all sorts of strange *gnats* which swarm around anyone who makes these sorts of professions and declarations. I would locate *atheism* as a large negating category at the center of this 'swarm'. The *gnats* are of myriad variety however. Some quite intelligent, rational, ordered in their discourse, and sensible. But on the other side of the scale are those who speak like agonized, disembodied spirits -- chatter-boxes, insolent underminers, termites really, who 'infest' and 'infect' established hierarchies. Like moths attracted to flames they do not act independently but only relationally to any 'flame' which seems to them (and which often are) those 'pictures' that no one of us can any longer 'believe in'. In them 'pathologies' are manifest. And in them those terrible predictions of Nietzsche seem to manifest: an unlivable nihilism seems to 'possess' them. They become 'negating structures' which are yet perversely bound to those collapsed or collapsing structures which no longer offer support.
Here, and for the sake of the thrust of my discourse here, I will speak about Harbal who, as I have often said, embodies, quite literally, one of these *gnats*. When I speak this directly it is taken as if I am intending to insult, as if I am violating the the rules of "polite society", yet this is far away from my intention which is to *see and label* accurately and fairly. How strange it is that a man can become a 'termite' and yet have so little consciousness of his activity, his life-purpose. A termite simply does what it does. It infests wooden structures, consumes them, and hastens those processes of decay that then result in the recycling of nutrients, matter & energy. If a termite has agency it is a very limited agency.
I use these rather harsh metaphors to describe a wide swath of people who have been formed or 'created' through the collapse of those larger structures through which the Occident defined itself. They do not seem to have a defined *positive purpose* but define themselves by what they are capable of tearing down. They seem to realize themselves through their actions of breaking-apart. Since they have no creative volition their volition becomes destructive: undermining.
Now I will have to address Gary. Yes, I
get the profoundly debilitating problem that is mental illness. Yet I do think it relevant, even necessary, to see the manifestations of mental illness as 'symptoms' and 'pathologies' that become manifest as the 'structures' I refer to are collapsing -- indeed have collapsed (and for this reason Evola's 'man among the ruins' is a valuable metaphor). Gary seem to me what results when the *termites* within the soul of man have done their work. In a sense he is a picture of Everyman, a horrifying Walmart Everyman absolutely bereft of agency. A 'victim' of forces and powers that feed off of him.
What he seeks -- in god, in a conception of divinity -- is a
Momma that will coddle him, protect him, tickle his private parts, feed him, house him, and validate him, even though (and here I will say something with a cruel note) even though he makes himself, and invest in, something that all vital beings recoil violently away from. So here we have a picture of those swarms of deformed beings who waddle along the Walmart isles and who pick up their 'meds' on one side of the superstore while getting their clothes on another aisle and finally their food provisions in another. Not only do they *swarm* in America, but the model that America has created, the beings it grows like in the gestation vats in Brave New World, is exported to other nations -- for example Europe. No longer dystopian warning this brave new world is hard upon us. Masses of people manifest pathologies that no one understands. They seem to have no causal origin that can be traced. But it -- whatever *it* is -- is manifest everywhere. Collapsed people without agency wander like zombies. What word best describes them but 'victim'?
Though in a very very different category -- incomparably superior in the sense of attached to a higher order -- is where I locate Dubious. What has most, let's say, affected me about Dubious's discourse (the message he carries) is the degree to which he is dedicated to an anti-metaphysics. He has obviously transcended infantile theism with bold forward steps, but -- and this of course is my own view and reflects my own stance and objective -- he is still, so it seems, locked into a love-hate dynamic with theism or perhaps theism's ghost (?)
So what I am compelled to do -- it is a survival manoeuvre -- is to transcend each of these "emblematic" positions that have arisen in the general collapse and decadence that is our present. Should I be embarrassed or 'ashamed' that I make reference to either Guénon or Evola who say: beyond all of this, beyond specific constructions and beyond any collapse, there
is a 'metaphysical reality' that cannot and should not be lost nor should one separate from *it*. But what is it? Of what is it comprised? How is it grasped? And when grasped what does it induce?
