See Me at the Crotch

Posted on by toomajj

There is a dirt road in the very heart of this city; it goes neither to the north nor to the south, neither to the east nor the west; neither to the northwest nor to the northeast; neither to the southwest nor to the southeast. This is not a road to any other dimension, neither is it a road with any orientation. This dirt road goes back, as it were, to the dimensionless seed of all dimensionality; it is a hidden road to a hidden door opening to where I am before extension and duration shoot forth and apart, before my face is washed away by the swaying waves of time and space.

This painter is not in the paining; this painter is the paining staring into the abysmal mirror of the witness. The painting is the reflection of the painter in the eyes of the witness.

This dirt road, this one right here in the heart of the city of the heart, is quite peculiar, for in this journey I am always already at the destination, so that when I arrive I am there to receive and welcome myself. This dirt road completes a journey that has never begun, and yet it is not complete unless it is begun.

The journey from time to eternity has no duration. Infinity is not indefinite extension, neither is eternal life a mere indefinite prolongation. Stumbling upon my grandeur by way of their fortunate birth, men of relative knowledge see in Me their own ignorance while men of perfect vision see in themselves my absolute Knowledge. The principle of all principles: your partial knowledge of Me is the Other, the universe; your absolute knowledge of Me is your Self.

Temporal life is a transparent veil over the eternal life. The absolute, eternal life has not become relative and temporal; and the relative and the temporal have never come into Being. What constitutes this apparent veil over my infinite depth is always Ideation. Drop all that you see and all that you are, and you will instantly recognize the ever shining face of Truth. No one has reached Me by way of position and accumulation; those who find Me come by negation and annihilation.

The dirt road goes from here and now to nowhere and nowhen; it concludes in an all-inclusive singularity in which all times and places have come together for supper. In this silent orgy all masks are dropped at the door, and both notions of union and separation are left behind the slaying edge of the event horizon. We must become naked to the Spirit before It enters us, and in entering us we enter It: we are thrown into that stateless state Turiya. In that blessed moment all opposites are reintegrated in their transcendent principle. The inside phenomenologist Eugen Fink calls this corner of all corners the synthetic unity of antithetic determinations. Dante knows it as the dimensionless point in which everywhen and everywhere is concentrated. Our Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi sees it as the coincidence of all opposites. What a sobering coincidence! Oh, we threw a play in which the king and the clown are one and the same.

This dirt road is infinitely long and infinitely short; it is not for the sane hearted for whom we have laid the highways of religions and philosophies, the expanding ladder of doctrine. Let us say no more but that every human being is a dirt road and a camouflaged portal to eternity. Access code: neti neti.

This heart of mine knows not where to hide; it is sought as it seeks, and it is found as it finds. This heart falls into ecstasy with every glance of the beloved; my beloved stands on every corner of this Bazaar. This hide and seek is a one man game.

If your right thumb aches and you are interested in our way, visit our one convenient location in that black hole right at the crotch of religion and philosophy; park your self outside the hole, and when you enter don’t decorate the hole.

Logos From Eidos

Posted on by toomajj

“The stupid cannot become wise, and the non-existent cannot become existent, nor can the existent go into non-existence.”

Of all beings in this field, the only one capable of turning away from the incessant stream of phenomena, from mundane existence and the life of the field, is human being. This being roams the field while standing on the fence between the two worlds; facing the world he’s standing against The Abyss. But he is standing against the abyss in such a way that one could even say man is the abyss staring into the world.

Every night after a long day of work in the field, after planting my seeds, I takes off this human disguise and withdraw back into that abyss, I return home.

In every man, woman, and child that wakes up from sleep, in all beings starting from the first cause up until now, I alone have been the one returning from the abyss known to you as dreamless sleep. I am the single mover in all movements. I move all things while myself remaining unmoved. I move by a single glance from the abyss, from my transcendent throne: I am the possessor of all masks. I am the Animator. I dwell in eternity and recur eternally.

There is a type among us whose soul suffers much with every small turbulence, as a sensitive tooth does with every wind. In this suffering soul, a layer of spirit is exposed to the harshness of bare existence. The sober soul understands him not, for he/she has not known the spiritual madness for transcendence. This world has no remedy for such souls except a congregation of souls who understand by gnosis the restlessness of a spirit longing for home. Our suffering fellow isn’t aware that he’s been seeking to be restored to the original and primordial state of his existence, that is, to coincide with the archetype of which he is a projection. A dental appointment doesn’t cure this type; he/she needs a transcendental appointment.

A sensitive spirit has residual memories from the good old times its father’s house. This type, coming from that old city of Eidos in eternity, has no tolerance for time and impermanence. This type is the insane one, and his insanity lies in forgetting that the remedies of this world have only an apparent resemblance to the consolations he found in Eidos. The impregnated abyss has come between him and Eidos. How can one bridge a gap that is not even of the nature of space! How can one reach for the Hidden Door that is at once infinitely near and infinitely far!

We suffer from separation, and our only remedy is a bridge, a Logos from Eidos and not a bridge of our own making.

 

Manifestation & Nothingness

Posted on by toomajj

One must look upon manifestation, or phenomenon, as the visible tip of an iceberg. Visible phenomena are rooted in the invisible, yet intelligible, abyss. Veiling and unveiling always occur simultaneously. A visible cup would not be visible if it didn’t have missing sides, sides facing away from the viewer. When one moves around a tree to view different perspectives of it one does so at the cost of letting go of the currently available perspectives. Phenomena always appear in perspective, and to have a perspective is to miss the totality. These instances from the space of vision also hold for all cognitive acts: Phenomena are but the end products of cognitive acts. What appears always appears to the eyes, ears, memory and imagination, reason and intellect, spiritual synthesis or scientific analysis faculties, etc.

The phenomenal world is what it is in virtue of its partial view, its halfhearted givenness to consciousness, which makes for the experiences of time and space. We always experience ourselves as located somewhere in the world, both spatially and temporally, i.e. historically, while the rest of the world, which is most of it, is inaccessible to us at that moment. To make more of the world accessible to us we must leave our location, and hence let oblivion replace the manifestations where we formerly stood.

This universal structure of manifestation also holds for human existence: We are that which is only given to us instantaneously while most of our being is submerged in memories and available only through often subconscious anticipations. Man is essentially located in the abyss; it is his consciousness that holds together the idea of a human person with a well-defined identity. The moment we come to face ourselves we are already snatched by the veiling current of time which at once unveils newer sides of our being from the inaccessible storage unconscious, the unmanifest. In other words, we never truly see ourselves but rather always think ourselves. Or, what we know of ourselves is only the small tip of an iceberg submerged and floating in the ocean of the invisible: From the abyss we rose and to the abyss we shall return is a somewhat misguided interpretation: Let it suffice to know that we never really left the abyss; we are the abyss.

Truth and Tradition

Posted on by toomajj

In the face of truth everything is mere opinion. To face the truth is to face away from opinions, and above all to face away from opinions about truth. What stands between man and truth is the baggage of his convictions. In the path toward the source our ideas and symbols are only to play the role of a ladder, for they are designed to be transcended rather than dwelled upon, and that until we are ready to face the Sun. And facing It is not an instance of looking upon it or an intellectual or rational grasping but rather becoming one with it, for truth being infinite and total cannot be looked upon; it contains all that there is. Knowledge of truth is a matter of self-knowledge. To experience truth is to self-experience oneself in one’s infinite glory. There is nothing more dangerous than the irresponsible New Age spirituality which tries to offer salvation without purging the individual from the malaise of the modern point of view, a point of view essentially Spiritless and utterly false.

A man or woman who looks upon him/herself as a psycho-physical entity lacking a sense of sacred can never truly become spiritual. Spirituality has two indispensable dimensions: Doctrine and method. One without the other can only make life hell for this rotten meatball that man has become. Doctrine is metaphysical and never physical, scientific, or philosophical; thus it must come from revealed traditions which were yet at a safe distance from a series of damnations known as Renaissance, Reformation, and The Age of Enlightenment.

If the traditional man was a sinner it was only relative to God, something infinitely above himself. If the modern man is free and rational it is only relative to the beast, something finitely below himself. Thus, if modernism seems to have made a better humanity it is only because it lowered the ideal from the infinitely above to something below; it never made a better man but a worse ideal: Modern man looks great but feels terrible, for he has no place in the new cosmos. The existential nausea of Sartre speaks to this unfortunate occasion more than we can say about it.

Man and Existence

Posted on by toomajj

Creative Misunderstandings of Existentialism

Jean-Paul Sartre was not a trained philosopher but a brilliant writer; he created philosophical literature but never a rigorous philosophy. He actually never studied philosophy academically, but he was under the influence of the phenomenological movement and its methods.

Sartre’s existentialism is a misunderstanding of phenomenology and its tenets, for phenomenology by no means implies existentialism, whether logically or ontologically. However, Sartre’s misunderstanding of phenomenology contains genuine philosophical insights of which he himself was unaware.

The motto of existentialism which is a statement regarding human condition is “existence precedes essence.”

According to existentialism though other beings are established and grounded in their essence, in their essential being and their whatness, the human person is not so grounded in its essence; the existence of man always comes before what he/she makes of him/herself. As a result, the question of existence always arises for man, and he/she is the only being who has to carry the burden of freedom and choice with regard to what he/she makes of him/herself.

But contrary to Sartre’s supposition man, too, is grounded in its essence, and he is grounded in such a way that he/she can’t escape that essence or choose to be otherwise. It is not that man’s existence precedes his essence; rather, man’s existence is his essence: Man’s essence is not a formal essence like that of other beings, determined by whatness. Man’s essence is existence. Man is not a being: Man is Being itself. The humanity of this existential essence is merely a formal manifestation of the essence.

The essence of man is pure existence.

That man can never find lasting happiness in anything that he makes of himself in this world is because he can never truly be or become that which he makes of himself and he knows this by existential instinct. He/she knows in a pre-reflective manner of knowing that his essence is detached from the form in which it is manifested.

Insofar as man struggles to be something in this world he is never truly himself, for he is fighting his essence, the Absolute and the Infinite. Man is not destined for happiness but for peace and bliss which come only when he embraces his essence and renounces the impulse to become something by constantly negating himself as pure existence.

What constitutes human condition is man’s refusal to be himself in order to be something in the world. However, man is the ground of the world; he is by necessity transcendent to this world, for existence is presupposed in existent. Man doesn’t belong in the world; he is not of mundane origin. In order to be himself once again, in order to win back the lost paradise, man must transcend the world.

The Fall of man consists in the fall from the transcendent into the mundane; thus, his salvation requires a leap of faith over the world in which he transcends the mundane toward pure existence. But can he handle the truth?!

The infinitude of the pure existence that constitutes the essence of man doesn’t let man be satisfied by any amount of finite projection into mundane forms. Man’s true salvation lies in his accepting of his existential essence and his essential infinitude: Man must see and accept that he can never truly become anything, because man is essentially the very becoming of everything that is.

Absolute identification with form constitutes the end of Being, and hence the death of man.

Man is not an existent; man is essentially nothing whatsoever: Man is existence itself.

Man is pure Being.