Hell is the Other

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The man of today is drowning in the ocean of subjectivity, in phenomena, falling for his own shadow, falling a second fall. By continuous feeding of our little desires we have made a mistress out of them; mental and physical needs become more subtle, and we have developed a consciousness for them; we have become too conscious of every disturbance, and we struggle to suppress it one way or another, like a madman trying to calm the waters by pressing down upon waves. But this growth of desire has no end, a shoreless ocean it is; it opens up indefinitely like a fractal.

We are so mesmerized with the dance of forms that we can’t remember our exalted station. Man is a frail and fragile creature, a transient phenomenon; but what is within him, or what animates him, is immortal and indestructible. It is the androgynous perceiver of all the states of reality. It perceives all points of view at once; It sees through all eyes: It is the beholder of every now and then, of every here and there. It is what it is; “I am that I am.”

This universe is a one-man universe. There is no one else in it but you; there is no “other.” It is like when we reenact a situation or lost opportunity in our head, playing all sides and conversations by ourselves! This world, this diversity of subjects and objects, it is one of those situations in the mind of the Solitary One. And you are that One, the One without a second, the only One; and there is nothing like it.

If you see the success of others, why jealousy! In them, in their hearts, it is you; their gaze is your gaze. So their achievements should make you better and happier; their success is yours and their failure too is yours. Who else is in this world!? When you judge you judge only your own perceptions. If you are true to yourself, if you are objective at all, you must realize that you see nothing but your own perceptions. So, if the world is hell for you it is the hell of your own perceptions; and if it is heaven, it is the heaven of your own perceptions.

The otherness of the other is just another perception. The other is a manufactured reality, a notion, an alien interpretation read into the Current of Forms. I am all alone; I am the only reality. The diversity of subjects and objects, giving rise to the illusion of multiplicity, has its cause in a greater and higher intelligence beyond the mind. Being one and alone, It perceives within itself an apparent diversity, much like when a single mind can perceive such diversity in a dream state. As it is in the nature of light to shine, it is in the nature of consciousness to project, to make an image of its ideas. So the reality of the image is not to be found in the image itself but in the consciousness that projects it. All we perceive is light; world, diversity, is an interpretation: “The face of Truth is concealed by a golden vessel.” (Isha Upanishad)

In this world there is no such thing as equality. There are greater men as there are lesser men. What shines in them is the same; the difference is only in what they reflect of that Intelligible Light. The difference is in the degree to which they reflect in the outside world what is reflected within them. It is the matter of concentration and utilization. The psycho-physical constitution of a man, and indeed of this modern people, is such that the intelligence shining in him is mostly dissipated by mundane curiosities and irrelevant information; the attention is leaking out every which way.

As sun shines equally on everything, pure intelligence too shines equally in every being and animates it; but the receptivity of the spirit to this light always depends on our spiritual/intellectual orientation. If your mind-body complex is consuming most of your intelligence, then you are moving toward intellectual dullness and stupidity. Here lies the difference between literacy and knowledge, between mere information and true wisdom: Literacy doesn’t make noble men; it doesn’t impart virtue. Books don’t make men; it is men who make books. We see more crookedness, arrogance, and awkwardness in the merely literate than the illiterate. While literacy concerns itself with the letter, or the most superficial reading of it, knowledge is concerned with the spirit behind the letter, i.e. the transcendent and immutable meaning of things.

The imperative has always been the same: Know thyself. Know, first, that by knowing which everything else is known.

We produce informed but not wise men. We produce readers but not seers. We produce sterile beings. It is by the admission of our scientists and philosophers that “the more we know we realized how little we know.” That this knowledge, this outward curiosity, adds not to knowledge but to our ignorance. Then, how can it be called knowledge when by possessing it we feel less knowledgeable. Simple is the answer: This cannot be knowledge in the true sense of the word if it does not remove ignorance and instead multiplies it. That is why the more we fill ourselves with this world-knowledge, the more empty and arrogant we become. This is the difference between knowledge and literacy; in the latter we accumulate letters, a pile of names and forms, something even a tiny flash-drive can do; while in knowledge we accumulate nothing; we only peel off the many layers of ignorance; we add no more conceptions but stand behind all conceptions. By reaching the ground of Being we stand under everything; then and only then can we say we truly understand.

In true knowledge we add nothing but subtract everything until the true Self shines, until its beams emerge from underneath a pile of forms and letters. Literacy makes a man heavier, less flexible, less immortal; but knowledge, i.e. knowledge of universal principles, makes a man light, more flexible, and closer to immortality. At the summit, when the last veil, i.e. your human cover, drops and His face, your true Self, is beheld, then immortality is realized. And it is the immortal man who hovers over the surface of the waters, the waters in which the literate man of today is drowning to his demise.

Some make their own truths, and some let themselves be made by the truth: To be made is to be hammered.

 

The Overman

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Much has been said of the coming of the Overman. The Overman doesn’t evolve; the Overman descends. It was not Nietzsche that spoke of the coming of the Overman; it was the Overman that spoke through Nietzsche of his own coming.

In Overman the real has become the ideal and the ideal the real since in him the ideal is fully realized. It is at the transcendent summit that idealism and realism stand united, while in the manifest order they appear to be distinct and standing against one another.

But when comes to man, this little worn out image, whose fragmented world is a reflection of his own fragmented soul, the Overman must blow in him again. We are all born and live on a life support machine. What is then the life of man?

The life of man is the journey of a shadow; he rises from nothingness and falls back into nothingness. But the Real Man, the Transcendent Man, i.e. the Overman, that which casts the shadow, remains unmoved throughout this journey, for He is the perfect image of the Unmoved Mover.

The Overman is not an individual; he is no historical figure. The Overman is not in the world; it is the world that is a thought in the Overman. He may take up the mask of Krishna, Christ, or Muhammad and become a bridge; or He may tease us through Nietzsche without giving him a taste of His face, leaving him in the madness and confusion that precedes eternal sobriety; but He can’t be understood in terms only of one or another individual. The person of a saint is nothing more than a passing appearance in which we can see the reflection of Truth, our own real Face shining in eternity. So there is in reality only one saint projecting many images of itself on Nature. The various religions and traditions are the petals of one and the same flower.

The Truth cannot fit in a theory, image, or idea; yet every theory, image, and idea is an expression of one of Its intelligible aspects. Art, religion/philosophy, and science/technique, constitute various neighborhoods in the city of Truth. We cannot oppose these to one another because they are united in their principle, the spirit; they are, so to speak, various sense organs by which man confronts reality in the form of a world. They address the different needs of a man. As the eyes cannot touch and the hands cannot see, religion sees but doesn’t build while science builds but doesn’t see. And we all know that the best and the most majestic of architectural masterpieces belonged to periods in which makers were both builders and seers, where wisdom and action were still united.

A science opposed to religion is a like a headless man. Religion by nature cannot possibly oppose science, for religion is about man and reality in an entirely different sense than that used in science. If fans of popular religion and even some religious authorities see an opposition, and sometimes even a competition, between scientific facts and religious doctrines, it is only because they have misunderstood religion altogether; their fundamental mistake is in confusing form with essence: The subject matter of science is form while the subject matter of religion and true philosophy is essence. As the subject matter of each is different, their methods of inquiry are as well different. We cannot apply the methods of one expecting to reject the claims of the other or confirm those of our own. Metaphysics, in its true sense, is the root of both science and religion, and also of art, and is a field of knowledge far from speculative. Metaphysics is the field of self-evident realities and also the source of all evidence in any rational inquiry. We can only say this, that compared to the truth and self-evidence belonging to metaphysics, the degree of evidence in pure mathematics is but a pale reflection. The essential content of art, religion, and science, is always metaphysical.

In Metaphysics we step into a new domain, the oldest reality, where world and man have no place, where the abstract becomes the living and the living the abstract. Sartre mistakenly thought that in man existence precedes essence; but it is known that in man existence is the essence.

Metaphysics is the universal and immutable form of the Real. Thus, metaphysics, the highest form of knowledge, is still a superposition on the surface of the Real. There is a higher stateless state, the Real Itself, in which there is no more metaphysics nor anything else. There is where nothing can creep in, no expression and no man, except total death and annihilation. Even God must die in order to return to the Godhead.

Be Not

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All doubts are removed, all past and future gone, with one sublime glance of the Solitary One. Pray for the unconcealment of that blessed moment in which His glance catches yours and annihilates all separation and duality, and all things merge in one eternal glance.

You mad people of this age, with your heads cut off and running aimlessly with a bleeding soul! Truth is the simplest of all things only if you could See. Alas, Seeing is forgotten. The seeing you take for knowledge is a veil over the unblinking eyes of the One.

There is a seeing that veils and a Seeing that unveils. The seeing that you see veils the Seeing that you can’t see, and you can’t see It because You are It; You are the Seeing: Tat Tvam Asi. 

How can you seek to remove the veil when you are the veil?! Seek not, know not, and be not, for all that appears to exist exists not.

Sakina

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This world is in the imagination of a King sitting on the throne. He wonders “what’s it like to be a subject,” and then he becomes a subject; he falls into the damned river of time and finds himself in a world. The King that rules the Void becomes the void, and he became the void so that the void may become the King.

The lost paradise is without this world and yet it is within man. To seek in the world what is above it, this is the madness and the state of our King that wonders and wanders, seeking in vain the very throne on which He is resting in the Great Peace.

All that man wants is to become real. He lends his own primordial reality to the objects of the world and then seeks after them to collect reality. He empties himself of all reality only to fill himself up again; this is the gluttony that comes of the Fall. But to become real one must go to the giver of Reality, to the King himself, only to find that one is the King. One who realizes the One is eternally realized by the One, and this makes him accessible to his devotees regardless of the conditions of time and place; or as the seers said, “he dwells in the heart of the devotee.”

Religion, like philosophy, was never an end but a way, a true way. Philo-sophia, the love of wisdom, was never identical with Wisdom itself. That is heresy when the means is taken for the end. But what is now regarded as philosophy in the west is in fact a history of personal opinions about that Perennial Wisdom that is to be remembered rather than learnt. Thought, in general, was meant to be a flying carpet, a mere instrument, and not a fancy collectible to be hoarded. “There is no salvation to be found in thinking,” says rightly Martin Heidegger. Salvation par excellence, i.e. Deliverance, is a grace to be bestowed upon man by the Pure Intellect, that which perceives the nature of things as opposed to their transient appearance.

The King cannot, and should not, seek; he must instead wake up to that Intellectual Intuition by which the phenomenality of the world is seen through. This world is a transparent veil over the Face of the King. The Eckhartean Breakthrough, the drop of the veil, the most dangerous passage, comes at a price: The King and the subject both die into the Void, and that is the dark side of God that neither knows nor loves; that is Sakina, the Great Peace.

The eye that looks upon God is the eye by which God looks upon us.

On Truth & Untruth

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Who is He that all the birds sing His name, whose dark light has befallen the fallen! What can be said about Him without whom nothing can be said! What can be thought about Him without whom nothing can be thought? And what name can be given Him who is the Great Pronouncer of all names?!

Are we not closer to Him in our silence than in our words?! In the Face of The Absolute everything burns but the Supreme Silence, that sublime abyss from which we have arisen and to which we shall return, the ever veiled abode of that Sole Dweller of the Void. It is in the seductive charm of that Black Magician that we roam as if freely; we are passing nomads in the imagination of a child.

Behold you tired traveler of time, the path you walk ends in your heart. You are the home you have so much missed. You but not you, You are the veiled face of the One. Drop the mask of time and shine in glory.

I am far too outside this world, of its concerns and consolations. But from the heights of truth, from the mountaintops that pierce the dense clouds of illusion, history and identity, I stand alone and see not what’s below but what is above, the ineffable and ineffaceable glory of Khorshid. Up here even the loudest uproars of the earth can’t reach. You may perceive my shadow but I am veiled with the Light of the Supreme Silence. This world with all its horizontal curiosities and irrelevant questions is nothing but a shadow of a shadow, a refracted Light of the One. Yet here I am standing beyond all reflection and refraction, beyond world and people.

There is a partial truth in the claim, of superficial observers, that religions are means of consolation, but so too are man-made sciences and philosophies: Sciences produce abstract notions and thought stirs them until they solidify into a rigid block of merely accepted beliefs about the world and reality. These abstractions have veiled the face of the One who is Itself the source of all abstractions, and hence Itself the most concrete of all. Religion, too, veils the Face but does so only to protect Its sanctity and also to shield the mass from the fatal radiation of the Face; but unlike tradition the modern veilings introduced by our sciences and scholars made us forget the Face and its sanctity altogether. We mistook the veil for knowledge! This is so because the majority of men rather forget their ignorance than confess to them. But our worldly engagements, no matter how intense they are, will always allow for occasional rifts in which we become world-loose again and remember that despite all appearances we never really know anything at all, that what we think we know is nothing but ideas of our own making. We see, if at all, not only that we are essentially nothing in particular, but that we can never truly become anything, for we are ourselves occasions for all becomings: We ourselves are the veil.

What nowadays passes for knowledge is nothing but the accumulation of verbal notions in the memory; and that is why the learned men and women of today that take so much pride in the size of their baggage of verbal notions are worse off, in their being, than when they started. These so-called educated and cultured men and women come out of their cults, academia, with a flattened intelligence and outlook that cannot recognize, by its nature, anything above their purely horizontal comprehension, or rather incomprehension, that operates only in the plane of subjectivity. Knowledge that doesn’t transform and elevate man’s being, adding to the weight of his presence, an addition imparted vertically and from above rather than learned horizontally and from below, is no knowledge at all. This modern education introduces only mental deformities that pull down the objective intelligence unto its knees, to the level of mere subjectivity and sentimentality which is nothing but the madhouse of competing beliefs and opinions.

The Real, The Absolute, is the most concrete of all; everything else is mere abstraction. Hence, the secretum secretorum: Insofar as I am the individual I do not know The Absolute, and insofar as I know The Absolute I am not the individual.

Oh, deluded man, seek only the consolation of the One. Seek the blessed moment that contains all moments, the permanent actuality of the Self within which we are but crawling possibilities. Behold that blessed moment where His eye burns your “I.” It is that dark light of the Self which conceals Itself by revealing the world. When you wake up in the lower darkness follow the light into the higher darkness where He dwells.

In a phenomenal world man is nothing but a phenomenal man, a passing appearance that veils the permanent essence.

This world is nothing but the bottom of a well. The way out is upwards and not forward. You seek the rope of salvation in vain; you are the rope of salvation. Pull this rope with the longing of the heart. Your ascent is indeed the walls’ descent. Oh my dear essence, you have always been in The Open. The well in which you found yourself was the world you imagined around yourself. You are the sun hypnotized by the lure of its reflection in the well. Lose this petty identity of yours and attain to Supreme Identity.

Spiritual ascent is like the ascent to the surface of air-bubbles in water: Your human individuality is nothing but an apparent form, the bubble, while your essence is the air seeking to merge in its source. The liberation of air at the surface coincides with the extinction of the bubble, the form, the human you. Thus, the summit of spiritual realization is the total Liberation of the essence which comes from the total extinction of the form and individuality as such. Fear not reaching that surface, for it is the bubble that bursts, not You. Fear not that Blessed Moment, for your mortality is nothing but a veil over your immorality.

Every object is both a door to heaven and a door to hell. It is a door to heaven through its essence and a door to hell through its form. Through the essence we ascend toward Unity; through the form we fall and sink into diversity. Seek not what is looked at but the source of all looking, that descending ray of The Sacred Look who is captivated by its own eternal Self-disclosure.

Lord, please forgive my forgetfulness.

On True Love & Untrue Love

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When we come to the realm of spirituality and metaphysics there are no words more misunderstood, and hence abused than the words love and heart. We attribute the origin of this misunderstanding of love and heart in the context of spirituality to the modern conception of human being as a purely individual phenomenon. Individualism can have no consequence worse than a pure sentimentality which has already contaminated the religious and the spiritual side of man. As a result of this sentimentality, love cannot be understood but as sentimental love which is by no means the truly spiritual and metaphysical meaning of the word. In fact, sentimentality as such constitutes a downward movement away from the Principle; it is in all its modalities the antitheses to effective spiritual realization which entails transcending the individual order and all its defects one of which is sentimentality, the essence of all passions.

All authentic spiritual traditions consider the Heart to be a symbol for the center of integral human being. Heart in its traditional conception has nothing whatsoever to do with the physical organ, nor does it imply sentimental love. In all spiritual traditions this Heart signifies nothing but the Pure Intellect, not to be confused with mind and the rational faculty the instrument of which is the brain. This Heart as the seat of the Intellect, the Divine spark in man, has nothing whatsoever to do with emotions or human sentimentality as such. In short, true spirituality has nothing sentimental about it, for it concerns only the principial truths of a supra-sensible and supra-individual nature.

Consequently and from the traditional point of view, Love which is the principal function of the spiritual Heart, i.e. the Pure Intellect, essentially signifies Intellectual Intuition, the Eye of The Heart, which is the means of direct and inward realization; it is the only means by which man can transcend his individuality, and hence his sentimentality, and obtain a direct knowledge of transcendent metaphysical truths.

Sentimental love comes from attachment while true, metaphysical love comes from detachment, and hence has nothing sentimental about it. Metaphysical love is a direct and logical consequence of seeing all things on an equal footing and from an absolutely detached point of view, not because of a profane indifference but because of a profound intuition into the nature of things as the manifestations of one and the same Supreme Principle. However, since the phenomenal world which is the domain of individuality manifests only diversity insofar as human sensibility is concerned, it is only by means of Intellectual Intuition, the inward realization, that a person can penetrate the veil of multiplicity and see the one Principle behind its diverse manifestations.

Therefore, this Intellectual Intuition which can transcend the sensible multiplicity and grasp the intelligible unity is a necessary requisite for the practice of metaphysical love, precisely that to which Christ refers, which derives only from discernment and detachment rather than sentimentality and attachment. In the absence of Intellectual Intuition love reduces to mere sentimentality, and detachment reduces to mere indifference which is itself but another face of human sentimentality, namely the principal impediments in the way of transcendence and realization.

Deliverance From The Middle Class

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What is human life but a journey from relative anonymity to absolute anonymity?!

This journey, however, takes place according to the nature of things. It is the path of the initiate, the way toward the Principle. It is perhaps also similar, in idea, to the 2nd law of thermodynamics stating that nature tends toward equal distribution of its resources among all its possibilities which makes nature a perfect communist. From the purely physical point of view this movement is toward chaos, but from a metaphysical point of view this movement is toward the Supreme Principle, the end being the complete reintegration of the manifestation in the principle. The physical order being the reflection of the metaphysical order, and since all reflections obey the principle of inversion, it is no surprise that what we perceive as chaos in the physical order corresponds to the return to the principal state in the metaphysical order.

The irony is that the life of the middle class, those occupiers of ordinary life and entertainers of mediocre ideals, is a struggle precisely in the opposite direction and contrary to the natural order: It is a struggle, and not a journey, from relative anonymity to maximum distinction, a struggle that remains forever futile for reasons of principle. Hence, the individual of this class, who is eventually meant to break the bonds of individuality, remains always in relative anonymity, i.e. in the relative order of things which pertains to the plane of existence. In other words, a struggle to become distinct, to become something as opposed to something else, is a struggle against a natural current that takes all beings toward Deliverance. We must add that salvation still belongs to states of being prior to Deliverance since a desire for salvation is the individual’s desire to be saved and yet remain that individual; in the absence of a desire for keeping one’s individuality being saved has no place and meaning anymore. Hence, salvation is a possible state of the ego while Deliverance is precisely deliverance from the ego as such and altogether. While salvation is a possibility within the individual order, Deliverance is a passage to the supra-individual order.

Body being the most limited and conditioned aspect of the individual is the inverse reflection of the spirit which is the unconditioned source, of course not of the individual, for the spirit already belongs to the supra-individual order if not identical with it. What lies in between, the psyche, is the dwelling place of the middle class and its aspirations which under its substantial inertia lends itself freely to rationalism which we consider to be the “opium of the people.”

In the ternary Spirit-Soul-Body, the soul or psychological aspect of the individual order corresponds to the middle element of the social order, its middle class, since in both cases we are dealing with the seat of opinion and dogma. Middle class plays the same role in the constitution of social order as the psyche does in individual order: It is the opinionated portion of society, for it is on the one hand obsessed with the prestige of being “cultured,” and on the other hand its attachment to ordinary life and mediocre ideals makes it incapable of direct pursuit of truths due to the degree of sacrifice and objectivity required for such a task. Thus, the reality and worldview of the middle class is always dogmatic, for it is an acquisition merely through passive education and media, books and papers, etc. There is no intuition involved in any of its acquisitions, much less an intellectual intuition. This class is also the control valve of the whole society, for it is their opinion that is used as “public opinion” and fashion, whether as its pseudo-intellectual circles such as academia or still lower manifestations such as malls, etc. a public opinion that is deliberately and easily manipulated through media for the simple reason that the opinions of the middle class are, and have always been, those of the media and the governing class, though they are constantly fed from above with the illusion that they actively and consciously acquired their ideas and ideals.

We may quote Rene Guenon here where he says, “The concept of profane culture is indeed very characteristic of the mentality of this middle class, to which, by its wholly superficial and illusory brilliance, it gives the means of concealing its true intellectual nullity, and this same class is also that which enjoys invoking ‘custom’ in every circumstance.” Which is a reference to the primary function of this class as the seat of opinion and fashionability within the social order.