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[MN 1.301]
“What is samadhi for? Samadhi, friend, is for making the citta sovereign.”
[AN 1.196]
“With citta emancipated from ignorance…this designates the Soul has become
Brahman.”
[AN 1.147]
"How is one ‘Lord of the Soul’? He has made the citta sovereign and quelled,
so is he ‘Lord of the Soul’, for he dwells in the purity of the Soul. This,
followers, is how one is deemed ‘Lord of the Soul’".
WHY
SKEPTICISM IS BULLSHIT (152 KB PDF)
[AN 1.124] “What, followers, is a
being who has a diamond-citta (vajirupamacitto)?
That one who has destroyed the taints (asavas) and has both a liberated
citta and is liberated by wisdom. Just as there is nothing which a diamond
cannot cut, be it stone or gem; so to is one with a diamond-mind who has
destroyed the taints and has both a liberated citta and is liberated by
wisdom. This is one who possesses a diamond-citta.”
PAGE
3 OF ATTAN.COM
[AN 1.6] "I
do not have, followers, insight into anything or any dharma which, when
made to become and made to expand that brings greater bliss than the citta.
The citta, followers, when made to become and made to expand, brings the
greatest bliss."
DID
ARISTOTLE UNDERSTAND PLATO? AN EXCELLENT ARTICLE ON PLATONISM
“The Abhidhamma is opposed to (the
Nikayas mention of) an intermediate state (between death and rebirth).”
[Nettippakarana-Att.
VRI 229 (mentioned at SN 4.59)]
(Dukkhino cittam na samaadhiyati
) “Suffering befalls him whose citta is inchoate.” [SN
4.78]
“The citta well fixed [upon itself] (cittañca
susamaahitam),…this is the path for attaining Brahman (so maggo brahmapattiyaati).”
[SN
4.118]
[AN 1.10]
"The citta is primordially luminous, but due to defilements which come
from without, it is defiled. The citta is primordially luminous (once
again), when defilements which come from without are cleansed from it."
|
Or, that there is no first cause of Soul’s descent. The alpha principle behind Emanationism Copyright 2-2008 webmaster attan.com 
Plotinus, the greatest metaphysician who has ever lived, upon whose shoulders us very few have seen further still. The most ancient and unsolved mystery of the
cause, impetus, reasoning, logic behind the soul’s descent is something
unsolved by all save Platonism and Buddhism/Advaita/Vedanta, and sadly
though Buddhism was correct to deem avijja as, so to say, first cause in
its descent metaphysics as embodied by Buddhism’s paticcasamuppada plan,
its founder lacked the wisdom and foresight to see the necessity of a full
metaphysics for his ministries survival and denied outright his followers
any elaboration into the metaphysics of same, including the specifics for
the soul’s descent. We might include half-truths in the models of heavily
veiled metaphors and analogies as found in some ancient systems regarding
partially true explanations for the soul’s descent, however these same
symbolically drenched religious systems were and are highly counterproductive
to a sharp insight into the logical system of the whys and hows of the
metaphysical mechanics behind the embodiment of souls.
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Or, against the reductionistic fallacy of modernity that “killing is wrong”. Or further, proper killing is a noble virtue Copyright 2-2008 webmaster attan.com  Like the gun or the sword, both tools, so too is the body the tool of the mind of man, his spirit (in the case of the Aryan) takes charge and is control, of which the body and its deeds are blameless in all instances, but that the laws of man cannot punish the Aryan spirit, but rather imprison the body, and that “men see not the minds of others, rather the deeds and actions which are committed by their bodies”, such is the case that men are often judged not in spirit or intent, but in deeds. Whilst some actions could near never be rationally justified as having a noble premise in the mind, such as necrophilia, or pedophilia; killing is certainly nothing near either of such as these. The reductionistic pseudo logic of modern ‘peace-mongering at all costs’ pacifists is that “killing is killing, regardless”; however none of philosophies great-men have held such an ignoble position, this is something found only recently and most commonly in European minds, and that of far left-wing American pacifism. The false view that pacifism is the moral principle that the use of force is wrong for any reason is a metaphysical fallacy in that it sees all actions as reducibly equal, but this is not, cannot be the case, for body as a tool cannot ever be accused of equally reducible deeds in light of the mind, or spirits intent. The pacifists growing consensus (= profane, non-Aryan, low, base) to wit “it is wrong to kill another” cannot be justified or enjoined by any with wisdom, for the mother in her home who has been attacked upon by a madman set upon her demise and that of her sleeping children has no fault to slay to death that very same man; that such a one as her is “equally to blame” as, say a Jeffrey Dahmer or any other crazed murderer, is a reductionistic and fallacious position as held by those with irrational and illogical minds who are driven along solely by their feelings and hormonal emotive bundles. Self defense, by gun or by fist, of oneself and those who are innocent is rationally noble, is Aryan; is indeed and undeniably an Aryan virtue and necessity. These same sort of non-Aryan minded peoples might insanely say that a time traveler who goes back to 1943 and puts a bullet in the head of Adolph Hitler out of the Aryan will towards millions of innocent Jews, and Europeans, is “equally to blame” as, say, Jack the ripper. The historical Gotama himself praised the Aryan deed of killing by his own hands of another: "I got good merit (in a past life) for killing the evil man"-Gotama Buddha [Jataka 4-197]. Certainly it would be true that many a demented and demonic tyrant or dictator has pathetically rationalized killing (but which is rather murder) of innocents; this ignoble rationalization in no way diminishes the Aryan and “blameless” (Digha Nikaya1 and elsewhere: Arhants who “took the knife blamelessly”) who have killed out of love, for either self-defense or love of others in saving the lives of innocents from the insanity and rage of a demented and evil Samsarin (profane worldly, a vile non-Aryan). Even the mass-murderer Anguilamala, in the Majjhima Nikaya of Buddhism’s earliest texts, became an Arhant in very short order in the Anguilamala Sutta. This is an important and defining characteristic between Buddhism and Jainist pacifism, which very few make any distinction thereof. Jains themselves ignorantly deny that wisdom can transcend karma (actions) ‘in an instant’, of which Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta do indeed claim. All actions (karma, Pali: kamma) are equivalences to avijja (agnosis, ignorance) in that the atman or soul is ignorantly seen as an agent (karmin) in and of samsara, which it is fact not. The false and common conception that Buddhism is pacifistic is utterly without a basis in its doctrine and rational postulation. Modern histories famous pacifists (since pacifism is a foreign concept near entirely in the distant past) have themselves been ones to recognize the needs and Aryan nobility to kill another in defense of innocents, be that oneself or another. "If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun." [The Dalai Lama, in The Seattle Times, May 15, 2001]. "Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of guns, as the blackest deed." [Mahatma Gandhi- An Autobiography : The story of my experiments with truth, by M.K. Gandhi, p.238]. Japanese, Italian and Nazi aggression that precipitated World War II often is cited as an argument against pacifism. If these forces had not been challenged and defeated militarily, logically many more people would have died under their oppressive rule. A frequently used quote is from Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. “Being a pacifist between wars is as easy as being a vegetarian between meals” - Ammon Hennacy. “Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi”- George Orwell. It has been argued by pacifists and unintelligent idiots that no one need carry around with them a weapon as any Aryan is ought and in the right to do, given that a 911 call to the police dept. is recourse for such emergencies. Laughably shortsighted as this is, it must be stated that in a dangerous self defense situation the average elapsed time is two minutes from start to end, and the average American 911 response time is fourteen minutes; leaving a mere twelve minutes for one to either bleed to death, or mentally prepare for the passing from this life! In an equal regard pacifists and Leftists have deemed those who carry concealed weapons to be ‘cowards’, in fear of what ‘most likely will never happen’; while this is, regarding the later, partially accurate, the boy scout motto is a worldly truism “be prepared!”. Peoples (including pacifists) don’t own fire extinguishers, buy medical insurance, and elsewise out of being ‘fearful’ or ‘cowardly’, nor still does the Aryan who carries a gun with him everywhere fear the unknown, but rather knows the nature of existence and the varieties of evil men who lurk the world, looking to pray upon the weak (= pacifists). You cannot reason with a rabid dog, nor either a rabid and deranged human either hell-bent on rape, murder, etc. To think otherwise is extremely unintelligent; any policeman knows this very well. Dependency is sister to evil itself; the Aryan does not rely upon either the govt. or the police when danger is upon him. The last irrational position by the loony Leftists in their defense (sic) of hatred for justified killing of another is to attack the tools of killing, namely guns. “Those evil guns” as they are wont to say, but it is rather instead true that ‘fools fear guns, whereas the wise fear only a fool with a gun’. These ‘anti-killing’ peoples are the same sort of demented fools who claim a lifeless hunk of steel, a gun, is inherently evil in and of itself, as if a gun has ever jumped up from a table and accosted someone, or killed another. They vociferously claim “there are many reasons to control the use of guns” however gun control is less about guns, than about control, for criminals do not follow the law, to them gun control pertains only to those who obey the law & its controls; to control guns is only to control the normal citizen, not the criminal who cares not for laws. It has been their refuge to blame the tool rather than the handler as a last defense, for they are often to say “guns kill people”, however the Aryan cannot capitulate to the insane notion that lifeless steel could jump up and kill a man; only a fool blames the tool rather than the wielder or same. Again, there are no evil actions, only an evil mind. The body is a tool, just as a gun is a tool, used either to murder, commit evil, or in the case of the Aryan, to save, protect, defend “those who are most certainly innocent”. There are no rational men who hold to a position of “evil tools”. All tools carry the responsibility that the owner know the manner in which to use it and have the intelligence enough to rationality and correctly use the tool they own or purchase. Just as is necessary here in life are not only guns needed, but also coffins, for all men die, so too medicine for the foul body which is bound to corruption, and all the other necessities of living. It has been said by those against the killing of another for any reason: “If you want peace, be peace” this sort of pathetic reasoning would assume that a chaste, pure of spirit lovely woman might tread thru cities at night with no worry of the dark and deranged souls who would lurk and pounce upon her. The Aryan knows that the Absolute and its metaphysics are “beyond good and evil”, for in the Absolute there is not deed or misdeed by wisdom alone which has caused one to acquire that attainment. To “love peace” and “be a pacifist” are most certainly not the same thing. The Aryan who “loves peace” has not “gone against his nature” in either defending himself, his kin, or those innocents who cry out for “the righteous!” |
|
Or, the story of a successful failure 
Copyright 2-2008 webmaster attan.com Advaita has remained nearly 100% intact in its message over these many centuries, whereas Buddhism is entirely dead. Books such as “The Rise and Decline of Buddhism in India” and likewise have attempted to answer this question, giving correct reasoning for its decline such as 1. the creation of countless schisms and myriad short-lived sects 2. the explosive expansion of ritualized fetishism in the form of Mahayanism 3. Brahmanical hostility and campaigns against Buddhism 4. Pessimistic nihilism on the part of later-day Buddhism which over emphasized suffering alone 5. Royal persecution 6. Muslim massive destruction of temples and killing off of Buddhist monastics 7. Decline in patronage 8. No genuine decline of true, or earliest Buddhist metaphysics but its gradual reassimilation back into Vedanta of which Buddhism was merely a reestablishment thereof. All of these however pale collectively, as the reasoning behind Buddhism’s utter demise in time as compared its missionary nature and its utter lack of metaphysics. Before getting to the main reason for Buddhism’s complete death it should be noted that none have made note that, in the Nikayas Buddhism does in fact espouse and instruct a “spread the word” missionary position by its founder Gotama. Anytime an Aryan metaphysics has given into this position it is short order for its message’s utter corruption and dissolution. However Buddhism’s current popularity is such that this very same perverted missionary faith was spread far beyond the Ganges valley into Afghanistan, Iran, China, and the Ashokan pillar edicts mention Buddhist missionaries as far west at the lands of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, the ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt; fools instructing even more unintelligent fools in the ‘message of Gotama’. That Advaita specifically was always a relatively small and close-to-the-master (upa-ni-shad, to sit up close [to the master]) faith and therefore there was little room for misunderstanding and corruption of the teachings, is only a portion of the reason for Advaita’s intact nature after all these centuries. The Advaitins, rightly so, were called Mayavadins by their peers for the sensible reason that Advaita was highly keen on debating the nature of maya, of avidya (agnosis, or rightly meant Brahman’s attribute) in a highly detailed and specific manner, i.e. the philosophical and metaphysical werks of the Absolute, as to how things material and immaterial have come to be in the system of Advaita’s model of the cosmos, just as the Neoplatonists themselves became notorious for. Buddhism’s coffin nail came directly from Gotama himself both in primarily refusing repeated requests to establish the metaphysics of his system and secondarily for being a poor teacher. Unfortunately Gotama suffered the same fate he makes mention of regarding others in the Anguttara Nikaya where he declared that though a man may be fully illuminated he is not therefore so endowed with the mental prowess to pass along the methodology to achieve same amongst others. Such notable positions as when Gotama is asked to elaborate upon the meaning of avijja (paticcasamuppada #1, i.e. the cause of the descent of Being into embodiment) Gotama merely declares “avijja to mean not knowing the four noble truths”. Pathetically the only approach to a pseudo-metaphysical explanation in the entirety of the Nikayas by Gotama regarding avijja is [AN 5.113] Followers, the beginning of ignorance can never be discerned (beginningless) such that it cannot be said “Here is the First where ignorance is not, here is the contingency which generated it.” Such that it should be discerned, followers, “ignorance is a condition”. That in Monism, the most important metaphysical principle requiring explanation, the cause of descent of Being, receives one obscure sentence from Gotama and same receives endless volumes from, initially Samkara, and far more still from his immediate disciples, cannot be ignored as anything less than the primary factor for Buddhism’s death and Advaita’s survival. Metaphysical systems are not survived in numbers (of followers) but in the expanse and accuracy its metaphysics. As mentioned 1-9 earlier, as grounds for Buddhism’s decline, Buddhism has survived, but in name only, its message is completely and irrefutably deceased. Buddhism alas could have easily withstood 1 thru 9, but not its founders myopic ignorance in refusing to establish the metaphysics of his system. It is a truism of philosophical history that nothing true is popular and nothing popular is true. Gotama’s refusal to establish a metaphysics has left a pathetic religious façade of Mahayanists, oriental and farcical Zen, and far worse the survival since its inception in the early centuries C.E., Theravada materialism, or properly physicalism. Rightly so in Gotama’s time, life was both short and harsh, and his position to teach a crash course in, firstly, disobjectification by becoming disgusted with formerly desired after objective phenomena and lastly assimilation (samadhi), was worthwhile and noble, but only so long as he remained around to direct others towards same. Without an expansive and solid metaphysics, which precedes the methodology, sans the teacher there is right quick dissolution and intent of the methodology as well. In Buddhism’s instance, the failure to establish elaborately the nature of the atman, of avidya specifically, as Advaita had so carefully constructed, it became quickly apparent that the extensive via negativa approach of Buddhism without an accompanying metaphysics for same, lead its heirs to acquisition anatman as implied reality rather than an objective qualifier (A,B,C,D are anatman, are not-atman, are na me so atta ‘not my Soul’). In so taking anatman, incorrectly, subjectively, Buddhism’s heirs have to wit negated the endgoal of the very methodology which Gotama spelled out in full “atman as light and refuge” [DN 2.100 etc.]. In teaching this quick and expedient means of liberation sans a detailed metaphysics, Buddhism had from the start doomed itself to failure. It might be asked by the unintelligent that since Buddhism is a popular (= profane, common, base, unaryan) religion (secular mirage of metaphysics) how could it be said that Buddhism is at all dead? This question loaded brim with ignorance however presumes that quantity outstretches even miniscule quality. Plato, and his heir Plotinus, the two most brilliant metaphysicians and true philosophers who have ever lived are, today, possessed of far less than a handful of those who would be rightly deemed and self-professed ‘Platonists’, however these few are genuine metaphysicians and philosophers endowed with nobility and worth. Gotama, while an illumined sage and knower of the Absolute did not possess the mentality, the intellectual prowess to transfer his revelation across the ages. His unwilling attitude towards illuminating his metaphysics and instead focusing in upon his expeditious methodology ultimately doomed his methodology in the end. Philosophical and metaphysical systems in great detail are not required to ‘reach the far shore’, however time and logic have shown irrefutably that those same metaphysical systems are required to alay sectarian divisions, squabbles over the endgoal if any, and the premise of the methodology itself. Gotamas vehicle (yana) sped along with its followers, but after his passing, his lack of illuminating the metaphysical works of his vehicle to liberation left his heirs with a vehicle to which they were and are clueless as to the hows, whats, wheres, and whys of its operation, akin to a stranded driver along the road with a broken vehicle of which he himself is utterly ignorant to know how to repair. Buddhism is today a successful failure, not much apart from Creationism or Atheism however its in profane standing as apart from nobility; is little more than a Humanistic affirmation of mundane ethical things irrelevant to the original article, or as Dr. A.K. Coomaraswamy had said “Buddhism is most famous today for everything it originally never taught”. Gotama was a miserable failure in the most important fashion, that in which he failed to see or to realize that without a metaphysics, his ministry was forever doomed from the outset. In this point there can be no contention; Gotama was not wise enough to ever realize the magnificent error he made which has evolved into a successful and dismal failure we call ‘Buddhism’ today, but which should be shown nothing but contempt by the wise few. |
 The
works of Julius Evola
MANY KIND THANKS TO: http://thompkins_cariou.tripod.com FOR THE USE OF ALL THESE TEXTS HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION FOR VISITING THEIR SITE: 
THOMPKINS CARIOU PUBLISHING
-articles
by Evola-
Action, Contemplation and the Western Tradition American "Civilisation" The Problem of Decadence On the Secret of Degeneration Disraeli the Jew and the Empire of the Shopkeepers Do We Live in a Gynaecocratic Society? Fascism and the Traditional Political Idea Letter from René Guénon Heathen Imperialism The Concept of Initiation Interview with Julius Evola Presentation of the Jewish Problem The Limits of Initiatory Regularity Matriarchy in J.J. Bachofen's Work Against the Neo-Pagans 'The Occult War' The Order of the Iron Wreath Preface to 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' Race as a Builder of Leaders The Relationship between Judaism and Freemasonry The Right over Life Rome against Etruria The Sacred in the Roman Tradition Scholasticism and the Spirit of Modernity Spiritual and Structural Presuppositions of the European Union The Tragedy of the Romanian 'Iron Guard' The Two Faces of Nationalism Varieties of Ascesis A Victim Of Israel 
-Books
by Evola-
Men
Among the Ruins by Julius EvolaMen Among the Ruins has been called a "dangerous book" and Evola has been called a fascist; however, if we are unable to read these "dangerous books" and decide for ourselves what they have to say then we will never be able to learn anything from outside of the dull conformist mainstream. The introduction to this book explains much of Evola's thought and life, while at the same time explaining the particularly tricky issues of his involvement with fascism, his lectures in Germany, his racist theories (unlike the crass biological racism of certain components of the National Socialist regime, Evola advocates a spiritual notion of race), and his relationship with anti-Semitism including mention of the notorious forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Men Among the Ruins advocates a return to Tradition and a rejection of modern day liberalism, Bolshevism, individualism, collectivism, and the ideals of the revolution. Against this, Evola proposes a return to an underlying Indo-European substratum, authority, and a re-recognition of the necessity for transcendence. The book includes discussions of various aspects of the State, hierarchy, work and the economy, the Roman Imperium, corporativism (which Evola will somewhat reject along with socialism), militarism, and the role of war. Evola also tackles the issues of the "occult war" (including many of the rumors about the Jews - Evola rejects the more virulent forms of anti-Semitism), the "problem of births", and Roman Catholicism as a component of that Tradition. Evola writes specifically about the kind of men that are needed to compose this new Order, including old European families and military leaders. He concludes, "It remains to be seen which and how many men, in spite of it all, still stand upright among so many ruins, in order that they may make this task their own." 
The
Doctrine of Awakening by Julius EvolaAbout the Author of The Doctrine of Awakening:A controversial philosopher and critic of modern Western civilization, Julius Evola (1898-1974) wrote widely on Eastern religions, alchemy, mythology. "Evola ... had a clarity of mind and a gift for explaining tremendously difficult concepts in nonacademic language. His account of the niddana-chain (the twelve stages of conditioned genesis) is a masterpiece. It equips the reader for a whole new understanding, not only of Buddhism, but of the human state in general."- Gnosis Magazine
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Collection
of Bible fallacies
BIBLE FALLACIES 1 BIBLE FALLACIES 2 BIBLE FALLACIES 3 BIBLE FALLACIES 4 BIBLE FALLACIES 5 BIBLE FALLACIES 6 BIBLE FALLACIES 7 BIBLE FALLACIES 8 BIBLE FALLACIES 9
SECOND COLLECTION OF BIBLE FALLACIES (ALL IN PDF FORMAT) BIBLE FALLACIES #2 PDF-1 BIBLE FALLACIES #2 PDF-2 BIBLE FALLACIES #2 PDF-3 BIBLE FALLACIES #2 PDF-4 BIBLE FALLACIES #2 PDF-5 BIBLE FALLACIES #2 PDF-6 BIBLE FALLACIES #2 PDF-7 BIBLE FALLACIES #2 PDF-8 |
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Plotinian
Emanationism
copyright 2007 webmaster attan.com  One proposal sometimes made in order to differentiate a non-creationist from a creationist metaphysics is that in the former creatures exist of necessity whereas in the latter they do not. Indeed, Plotinus does say that what exists does so necessarily and not as a result of the discursive reasoning of the of all.(7)By contrast, Aquinas says in many places that Deus produxit creaturas, non ex necessitate, sed per intellectum et voluntatem.(8) Of course, Aquinas also says that God's knowledge is not discursive, and one of the reasons for this is that discursive knowing implies imperfection.(9) But Plotinus, too, says that the One is perfect and that it acts according to its will .(10) So, whereas Aquinas contrasts the alternatives of acting by necessity and acting by will (and intellect), Plotinus contrasts acting by necessity and acting on the basis of discursive reasoning. This should lead us to conclude that the "necessity" as attributed to creation by Plotinus and "necessity" as denied of God's acting by Aquinas do not mean the same thing. In fact, there are at least two reasons why the necessary existence of things does not entail that the One acts by necessity. First, the term in Plotinus implies constraint from outside. But there is nothing outside the One and it is constrained by nothing. Second, the putative necessity by which the One acts cannot be really distinct from the One or indeed from its will, for this would negate its simplicity. So to say that the One acts by necessity could mean nothing else but that it acts according to its will. Another, albeit esoteric, facet of this second reason is that if the One acted by a necessity really distinct from it, then this would set up, counter to Plotinus's express argument, a real relation between the One and what it produces.(11) This would be so because if there is something really distinct from the One, then the One is limited in relation to it; and what prevents the One from being really related to anything, is that it is unqualifiedly unlimited. Thus, it seems that if "necessity" is understood as constraint ab extra, then the One does not act of necessity. Since Aquinas's God does not act by this kind of necessity either, we can hardly use it to contrast Plotinus' metaphysics with Thomistic creation metaphysics. It is sometimes supposed that what distinguishes an emanationist metaphysics is an account of production by the first principle whereby this principle is emptied of all that is in it.(12) Alternatively, one may think of Russian dolls or a telescoped antenna where what is somehow contained within the whole is separated out from it. There are certainly many texts in which Plotinus says that everything is contained within the One.(13) But none of these texts, or indeed no other that I know of, claims that anything is ever "outside" of the One or separated off from it. Thus, the relation between the One and everything else cannot be construed according to the above metaphors, where what is suggested is a two-phase process: first, everything is in the One, and second, everything is not in the One, but emptied out of or unfolded from it.(14) A somewhat more serious and complex suggestion for characterizing an emanationist metaphysics is to construe its account of causal dependence according to the model of a per accidens series. In a per accidens causal series, as opposed to a per se causal series, A is the cause of B, B is the cause of C, and so on. In a per se causal series, A would be the cause of C, and B would be an instrument of A's causal activity. For example, the tree of Jesse is a per accidens causal series: Jesse begat David who begat Solomon and so on. A man causing a traffic accident with his car is an example of a per se causally ordered series. Applying this distinction to Plotinus's claims about the causal activity of the One, we might interpret him to mean that the causality is according to a per accidens ordered series. Thus, the One would cause to be, would cause soul to be, and soul would presumably cause nature to be.(15) We need to distinguish two different questions here. The first question is whether Plotinus's account of metaphysical causality is per accidens or per se, assuming that these alternatives are exhaustive. The second question is whether the selected alternative does indeed distinguish an emanationist from a creationist metaphysics. Regarding this question, Aquinas is clear that God's creative activity does not operate instrumentally.(16) So, were we to opt for a per accidens causal series, we should not therefore conclude that a per se ordered series is a differentia of a creation metaphysics. Let us turn now to the evidence pertaining to an answer to the first question. The main text supporting the interpretation of metaphysical causality as a per accidens ordered series is a continuation of the text cited above in which the term "emanating" appears: This (Nous), when it has come into being, turns back upon the One and is filled, and becomes Intellect by looking towards it. Its halt and turning towards the One constitutes being, its gaze upon the One, Intellect. Since it halts and turns towards the One that it may see, it becomes at once Intellect and being. Resembling the One thus, Intellect produces in the same way, pouring forth a multiple power--this is a likeness of it--just as that which was before it poured it forth. This activity springing from the substance of Intellect is Soul, which comes into be this while Intellect abides uncharged: for Intellect too comes into being while that which is before it abides unchanged. But Soul does not abide unchanged when it produces: it is moved and so brings forth an image. (5.2.1.10-19)(17) If we employ the concept of a per accidens ordered causal series to interpret this passage, the causal activity of the One is limited to the production of Nous. We could still say that without this first production nothing else would be produced, but the existence of the One would no longer be a necessary condition for the production of soul anymore than the existence of the grandfather is a necessary condition for the production of the grandson. Even if we insist that the One exists necessarily, this existence is irrelevant to the causality of the being of soul, which, in the putative per accidens series, is attributed solely to Nous. The obvious impediments to the endorsement of this interpretation are the many texts where Plotinus says that the One preserves all things in being. It might be thought that the interpretation can be retained if this preservation is construed as a counterfactual.(18) Thus, the One preserves everything in being means that if per impossible the One were to cease existing, then everything else would cease existing as well. We can imagine if we like an Atlas holding the earth aloft, an Atlas who is no part of earthly production, but who could not simply disappear without his burden crashing down. The problem with this construal is that it imports an unacceptable complexity into the One's causal activity. It presumes that the One is the cause of the being of Nous and then operates differently in conserving the being of Nous and everything else. However the activity of the One may be understood, we cannot accept an interpretation which has it do two different kinds of things. How could we make a distinction within the One to account for this? So, either the One is the cause of the being of Nous and everything else or it is the cause of neither. But the latter alternative is excluded by the texts. Perhaps this line of argument will seem problematic. There is, however, another argument against the per accidens interpretation which removes the possibility of construing preserving in being differently from causing being. The of Nous is the ultimate explanation or cause of thinking, life, and .(19) It is sufficient at this point to note that it is obviously not the of that which it receives from the One, the above it. Now if the One is the of the being or existence of Nous, then in no case is Nous the of the being or existence of anything else. If soul, for example, receives not only life, thinking, and from Nous but existence as well, then Nous performs for soul the identical function that the One performs for Nous. Then the uniqueness of the of being, to say nothing of its primacy, would be destroyed. I take it that any interpretation that leads to this result is to be firmly rejected.(20) If, owing to these objections against an interpretation of the metaphysical causality in Plotinus in terms of a per accidens series, we opt for a per se ordered series, then the One is the sole cause of the being of everything else and the role of the other principles is at most instrumental. One of the central texts relevant to assessing this proposal is also perhaps one of the texts most frequently thought of as somehow expressing emanation: All things which exist, as long as they remain in being, necessarily produce from their own substances, in dependence on their present power, a surrounding reality directed to what is outside them, a kind of image of the archetypes from which it was produced: fire produces the heat which comes from it; snow does not only keep its cold inside itself. Perfumed things show this particularly clearly. As long as they exist, something is diffused from themselves around them, and what is near them enjoys their existence. And all things when they come to perfection produce; the One is always perfect and therefore produces everlastingly; and that which it produces is less than itself. (5.1.6.31-8)(21) There are many, many important features in this passage. Of particular interest to us is just what it is that the One produces. From the above arguments, we can infer that the answer is not simply Nous. On the other hand, we must bear in mind that Nous is indeed a product of the One. It is in fact the "first" product, that which is eternally in closest proximity to the source of all.(22) All we are told in the present passage is that what is produced by the One is inferior to it. In order to proceed further we need to adduce another text which will guide us toward the goal: In each and every thing there is an activity of the substance and there is an activity from the substance; and that which is of the substance is each thing itself, while the activity from the substance derives from the first one, and must in everything be a consequence of it, different from the thing itself: as in fire there is a heat which is the content of its substance, and another which comes into being from that primary heat when fire exercises the activity which is native to its substance in abiding unchanged as fire. So it is also in the higher world; and much more so there, while it [the One] abides in its own proper way of life, the activity generated from the perfection in it and its coexistent activity acquires existence, since it comes from a great power, the greatest indeed of all, and arrives at being and substance, for that [the One] is beyond being. That is the productive power of all, and its product is already all things . (5.4.2.27-39)(23) As will I hope become clear, there is no doctrine in Plotinus which better illustrates his original use of his Platonic and Aristotelian sources than the distinction between and . To begin with, the word is apparently of Aristotelian origin. There is no occurrence of the word form in Plato. I would add, though this is perhaps a bit more contentious, that the concept pair is not clearly to be found in Plato at all, though does of course appear in the sense of "power" rather than "potency."(24) Nevertheless, the use to which Plotinus puts the concept of, particularly in reference to the One, is most un-Aristotelian. For Aristotle, the most perfect in the universe is the noetic activity of the unmoved mover.(25) This activity of self-contemplation is the antithesis of an activity "in another"; and it is precisely because the unmoved mover is perfect that its activity is unqualifiedly immanent. To have an actuality outside of itself would mean that it had a potency in relation to that actuality and hence that it is imperfect in some respect. Thus, insofar as the actuality of an agent is in the movable, the agent is in potency to that actuality even if it is itself the movable.(26) Aristotle does in fact make a distinction between something like an "internal" and an "external" , as in the case of sight, on the one hand, and building a house on the other.(27) But these are different species of , and there is no suggestion at all that an internal has connected with it an external one necessarily. For example, what would be the external following necessarily upon seeing? So when Plotinus makes the distinction between and he may reasonably be thought to be quite consciously diverging from Aristotle's use of the concept of . For a concept of external actualization we naturally look back to Plato. There are at least three relevant passages. First, there is the famous text regarding the Form of the Good which produces knowability, existence, and being in the other Forms.(28) Though this text does not clearly distinguish between what the Form of the Good is or does in itself and what it produces outside itself, the analogical representation of it by the sun and the unique attributes it possesses, such as being , make it reasonable to conclude at least that some such distinction is in harmony with Plato's intention. The second relevant text is the description of the Demiurge in the Timaeus. The Demiurge is good and so without grudgingness.(29) He desires that the world should be as much like himself as possible. So he creates order out of chaos. Notice that in the Demiurge benevolent desire cannot be capricious or transitory. He is permanently well-disposed. But here one hesitates--well-disposed to what? Not to a nonexistent creation, nor to the inchoate heaps of disordered quasi-elements which represent the necessity the Demiurge must overcome. Reflecting on an answer to this question, it is natural enough for Plotinus and indeed for an entire tradition to surmise that the Demiurge or of all or God or the gods are essentially benevolent in the sense that their goodness is always overflowing. Whether the result of this overflowing goodness is an adjunct to a product or the product itself, the idea that bonum est diffusivum sui can be traced back to this text. The last text that should be mentioned is from the Symposium, where Diotima declares that the of love is birth in beauty.(30) More precisely, all men love to possess the good everlastingly and in their possession of it they produce beauty, particularly, as the passage goes on to say, the beauty that is true virtue.(31) So here, though it is not goodness that is itself diffusive, it is association with goodness that spontaneously, or better, naturally, produces.(32) As suggestive as these three texts undoubtedly are, they do not quite amount to the distinction between and as this is applied to the One. The Form of the Good works exclusively on the other Forms; these other Forms are, if anything, the causes of the being of their participants. This would reflect the per accidens series we have already rejected. The Demiurge, which in neither Plato nor Plotinus is equivalent to the Good or One, quite explicitly works on a preexistent chaos, whereas for Plotinus there is no room for an independent "from below." So, the pressing question is not merely why Plotinus endorses the axiom of the diffusiveness of goodness but why he reinterprets this, using or perhaps misusing an Aristotelian concept. I answer this question as follows. When Plotinus rejected the primacy of Nous as postulated by Aristotle, he thereby rejected the primacy of . Since represents limitedness or distinctness in nature, the immediate consequence is that the of all is going to be beyond and so beyond limit.(33) This much could be inferred alone from a reaffirmation of Plato's account of the Form of the Good in opposition to Metaphysics 12. It is Aristotle who identified primary with ; it is Plotinus who reasoned that if the of all is beyond, then it is beyond the kind of that is , not beyond tout court. For, of course, that the One is beyond does not mean that it is beyond existence or being altogether. Suggestions to the contrary are just misunderstandings of Plotinus's so-called negative theology. What Plotinus rejects in reference to the One is language that implies limitedness or complexity. We must suppose that at this point in the reasoning Plotinus had to ask himself whether or not was so tied to that to attribute it to the One was wrong. There is a text which clearly indicates his answer. Nor should we be afraid to assume that the first activity is without substance, but posit this very fact as his, so to speak, existence. But if one posited an existence without activity, the principle would be defective and the most perfect of all imperfect. And if one adds activity one does not keep the One. If then the activity is more perfect than the substance, and the first is most perfect, the first will be activity. (6.8.20.9-16)(34) It is not too difficult to see why this must be so. The reasoning leading to the positing of an of all in the first place is reasoning from effect to cause.(35) The first cause is not an essential cause, for that role devolves upon , which does not explain the datum that the One is needed to explain. The only kind of cause that the first cause can be is an efficient cause. Thus, for the One to be the of all it cannot be deprived of. To deny of it would be to deny causal efficacy to it. For being an efficient cause means acting as an efficient cause. Arguing in this way, we reach a primary , but we do not yet have the premise that distinguishes its causal activity according to a per accidens or a per se ordered series. One might suppose, that is, that the of the One is just Nous alone. This, however, would imply a kind of limitedness in the One: its causal activity operates so far and no further. Yet there is nothing in the One to account for this limitedness; indeed, everything said of the One speaks against it. Another way, albeit rhetorical, of making the same point is to ask, Why should the One stop here, or here? Must not it operate up to the limit of logical possibility?(36) An unlimited or infinite cannot, it seems, produce its proper effect restrictedly. If this is so, then the of the One is neither Nous alone nor just that which Nous receives from the One. It is not the former because Nous or does not as such have an . That is, essence does not have an essential cause. It is not the latter because that would imply a limitation in the One. The is rather the being of everything that can possess being, from Nous down to and including matter. If this were the whole story, we could simply conclude that Plotinus's metaphysics is creationist in the sense that the proper effect of the first principle of all is the being of everything else. But this would be an oversimplification. In rejecting a per accidens ordered series for metaphysical causality, we still have before us the alternative of a per se ordered series. As we have seen, according to Aquinas at least, if a per se series involves instrumentality, then it is not creationist. Surely the fact that Nous and are in themselves should give us pause. In fact, I have hitherto suppressed an important distinction in this matter: that between being and existence. To this I now turn. I shall not now recount the philological evidence, which is in any case ambiguous, though not as ambiguous as some would suppose. Several texts are, however, most revealing....because it [the One] is not enslaved to itself, but is only itself and really itself, while every other thing is itself and something else. (6.8.21.32-3) But where absolute substance [the One] is completely what it is, and it is not one thing and its substance another, what it is it is also master of, and is no longer to be referred to another insofar as it is and insofar as it is substance. (6.8.12.14-7) But if it [the One] is needed for the existence of each and every substance --for there is nothing which is which is not one--it would also exist before substance and as generating substance. For this reason also it is one-being , but not first being and then one; for in that which was being and also one there would be many... (6.6.13.49-53)(37) Note that in the last text it is said that the one is needed for the existence of every , and that the reason for this is that there is nothing which is not one. Since the One is unqualifiedly simple, the immediate inference is that the oneness and the existence received from the One are the same thing. Thus, it is false to suppose as some have that if the existence of things other than the One is to be accounted for at all, then that is to be done otherwise than by the One, for the One is simply and solely the cause of oneness. Perhaps a salutary reminder in this regard is that "One" is no more of a correct description of the of all than is any other description, including, I must add, "of all." So, the One is the cause of the existence of . As is seen in the second text, there is no distinction within the One between what it is and that it is, between its essence and existence, if you will. By contrast, in everything other than the One, such a distinction needs to be made. The distinction will be a real, minor one in Scholastic terminology, but that is not my main point here. Rather, I am concerned to show that in these texts what is presumed is a distinction between that which is the proper effect of the One's causal activity, namely, existence, and the recipient of this endowment, which is strictly and literally . But apart from existence has no reality for Plotinus; it is eternally in possession of its endowment. By "being" I mean whatever it is that is in possession of existence, an existence really distinct from "what" it is. With the distinction between existence and being, we can see the problem facing Plotinus. On the one hand, or Nous must be an distinct from the One, for the of essence must be sufficiently complex to serve as the guarantor of all eternal truths. On the other hand, if the One is to be the of all, must be subordinated to it. Indeed, it is, but only by having its existence caused by the One. itself is a distinct . If the One were understood as the cause of being as opposed to the cause of existence, it would assume an illicit complexity. In one place he does actually say that the One has all forms in itself "indistinctly" ().(38) In fact, the reason given for the One's having the ability to give existence to everything is just that it has everything in it "beforehand." It must have everything indistinctly, however, because otherwise this would compromise its simplicity. Such language encourages the view that the Forms are eminently as well as virtually in the One. This view obscures the specific causality that the One exercises: for it suggests that the One give essence as well as existence to Nous. If this were so, one might then suppose that Nous does the same for what is below it. Against such a view are the texts in which Plotinus says that "there is no necessity for something to have what it gives," and "the form is in that which is shaped (that is, Nous, but the shaper was shapeless."(39) How then can we reconcile the indistinct existence of Forms in the One with the claim that it does not have them? Let us recall that Nous eternally achieves its good by contemplating the Forms with which it is identical. The indistinct existence of Forms in the One cannot be a superior mode of existence for these Forms for several reasons. First, Nous is the of Forms. Second, the Forms in Nous are not an image of Forms in the One. If they were, then Nous would not have knowledge of Forms, but only of images. Finally, indistinct Forms are not Forms at all, for the entire point of positing Forms in the first place is to explain distinct intelligible contents in the sensible world. If then Nous achieves its good by contemplating Forms, can we give any meaning to that good achieved over and above Nous itself? Yes, it is nothing but perfect noncomposite being, that is, existence. Forms are not an image of the One; the divided existence of Nous is such an image. The perfect simplicity of the One prevents it from having the Forms eminently. But the fact that the goodness in the life of Nous is identified with imperfect oneness makes the Good or the One over and above it a necessary superordinate principle. The problem of the equal versus subordinate status of Nous in relation to the One comes plainly to the fore when we ask about the cause of the being of everything else, especially everything else below , which is of course another and the source of an analogous problem. When Plotinus analyzes the being of things in the world he will analyze them into essence or image of essence and existence, positing the of each as Nous and One, respectively. That is, the One's proper effect here is evident solely as the existence of things, not their , which derives from the second . The One, then, is represented as primary cause of existence, but is the instrumental cause of being. Since there is no being without existence, the One's causal activity is completely instrumental, including even itself, which as such does not require a cause outside itself. In the being of , the One uses as an instrument. So also with everything else. An objection may occur to some. Does not the instrumental activity of or Nous place some constraint or limitation on the One, counter to its purported unlimitedness as explained above? This is an important objection, one which strikes a vital nerve. It is precisely owing to a suspected denial of omnipotence in Christian creation metaphysics, coming out of the Plotinian tradition, that Aquinas refuses to join instrumentality with creation. I think that the correct answer to this objection is to admit that it does place a constraint upon the One, but to deny that it is the sort of constraint that Plotinus means to deny in saying that the One is unlimited. In endowing things with existence, the One is unlimited. It does not run out of power or goodness. There is nothing that could exist that does not. Yet what could exist is not the One's business. That birds and bees can and do exist, that griffins could exist, but do not, and that square circles cannot exist, are owing to facts about , to put it crudely. When the One produces existence, it uses the template of . Its causal power is a pure stream, flowing out and over whatever it is that can receive it according to its own nature. No doubt Plotinus saw a certain advantage in instrumentalism. For example, he did not see it so much as a limitation but as a way to divest the One of responsibility for evil. The ultimate explanation of evil is to be found in what things are, and for this the One is not the . Ironically perhaps, Plato would have found it easier to assimilate to the Good, but only at the cost of making matter a separate , independent of . Yet Plotinus does come tantalizingly close to undercutting the separateness of the of when he says that all the Forms exist in the One indistinctly. One may perhaps usefully compare this with Anaximander's , which at least on Aristotle's testimony appears to be a unique in which all things are contained indistinctly and from which all things come.(40) Although Plotinus's One is obviously a more sophisticated metaphysical principle that is the of Anaximander, there must be something in the nature of or in the nature of the One which prevents Plotinus from collapsing the former into the latter. It is well to be clear about the alternatives facing the philosopher who has arrived at this point. Either , shorthand for the locus of eternal truths, is a really distinct albeit subordinate , or it is merely a conceptually distinct description of the One. I think we should resist concluding that Plotinus neatly accommodates both alternatives when he calls the One . For this would be to undervalue his unqualified insistence that is an . To reject the first, Plotinian, alternative is either to introduce real complexity into the One or to reduce all eternal truth to a single truth, perhaps least misleadingly represented as "the One exists." I have of course left aside the theological adaptation of the first alternative wherein becomes identified with the second person of the Christian Trinity. Returning to the question with which I began this paper, Is Plotinus's metaphysics creationist or emanationist? if it is allowed that instrumental creation is a legitimate species of creationism, then the answer is the later. If, on the other hand, one insists that there is no common genus for a metaphysics that holds that the existence of everything depends on the first principle and a metaphysics that holds that the being of everything depends on the first principle, then Plotinus's metaphysics is not accurately called creationist at all, but the sheer efflux of the ONE sans a Being willing same, thereby Emanationism. Creation in all cosmic models must be admitted, just as the complex cosmos must be admitted, rather the nexus for said creation, sans a Supreme and self-willed Creator, we do not have Creationism in Plotinus but the true Pythagorean Emanationism, or proodos, the logos-phi efflux of the attributive and extrinsic ‘side’ of the Absolute, which is will in principle, but also will in attribute (willing outwards, to other, to objectivity).
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The
Naga, the citta/tchet and the soul
The trans-cultural depiction of same terms with same meanings; no coincidence. Lost symbolism adopted from one culture to another copyright 2007 webmaster attan.com   The earliest existing reference to Egypt in an Indian record is in the thirteenth Ashokan pillar edict wherein it is stated that the “principles of conduct preached by the emperor were being observed in several border kingdoms…of King Tulamaya (Egyptian King Ptolemy II Philadelphos)” who was King of Egypt from 285-246 B.C.E. King Ptolemy II had made Alexandria the capital of Egypt and the leader center for arts (religious iconography most stressed) and dispatched embassies to Rome and India alike [Egypt after the Pharaohs, Alan Bowman]. Many aspects of early Buddhist art are unquestionably traced to Egyptian sources [Mortimer Wheeler, Flames over Persepolis]. The very Persepolitan of bell capital of the Ashokan pillars can be traced to the columns used in Egyptian architecture, with lotus capitals; unquestionably Egyptian architecture is the model for such Buddhist temples as those found at Karle and Bhaja. A bronze satuette of the Graeco-Egyptian god Harpocrates, wearing the unmistakable double crown of Egypt, made about the 2nd century was found in Begram, the ancient Kapisa in Afghanistan. Kapisa served as the capital of the Kings of Kusana dynasty who were all Buddhists. It cannot be therefore logically denied that ancient Egypt (and Greece) had a direct trade of materialists and ideas with that of India since long before the earliest Ashokan records which we have proofs thereof. The Naga, or citta in Buddhist sutta While there is a majority of cases the term naga is an epithet for the Buddha or other Arhant as “elephant” there are many cases in Nikayan sutta where the naga is the cobra, or snake and directly equated with the citta, or will of the Arahant, such as [MN 1.142-145]. The “ant-hill that flames by day and smokes by night”, the Brahman answers, “take the shovel and dig it up”. The deva accordingly digs and unearths various objects, which is told to reject and dig further. At last he comes upon the naga (cobra, as today, abandoned and otherwise ant-hills are sometimes the occupancy places for cobras to escape the heat of day, and rest), and says “a naga, your reverence”. The Brahman answers “let the naga be, honor the naga, do not harm the naga”. When this riddled is posed to the Buddha as to the meaning as to what the objects represent the answer is “the ant-hill is the body built up of food and by father and mother, the fire is actions, the smoke is thoughts, the shovel is Aryan insight, the digging is heroic effort, the tortoise to be ‘thrown away’ is a symbol for the five aggregates, and the naga-serpent is a symbol for the anasava (taintless citta of the) Arahant. In other contexts [SN 5.47] the attainment of wisdoms perfection is compared to the development of young nagas (snake or eels) who are born in the hills (samsara) and make their way down to the sea (Brahman, liberation) by way of the lakes and rivers (insight) only attaining their full development in the sea which is here the equivalent of nibbana, of immortality (amata, always = sea in Buddhist suttic analogy). “The Buddha is one with infinite paster (ananta-gocaram) being without feet (apadam, an kenning for ‘snake/naga’ and implying ‘leaving no track’). The last step to liberation is to fare (with citta/nous) as it were symbolically ‘without feet’, the footless one being the representation of the ontological liberant who cannot leave ‘any track whereby another, or Mara the evil one might seek him out, or know thither he has gone’. The “mighty naga” or wisdom-attained Arahant of the entirety of Dhm. Chapter XXIII is apparent the mighty naga is one equivalent to having attained the soul [Dhm. #322, 328], unquestionably as well Dhm XXIII regards the mighty naga as pertains the purification of the citta, and pulling it “out from the mud [Dhm. 327, 326]. At the same time it must be pointed out that in Greek mythology Zeus may be represented as a snake, but the Hero entombed is also a snake. A massive amount of Buddhist iconography contains the naga arising over the head of the Buddha with spread hoods like the sun, this being the representation for the citta of the Buddha which is fill and unfurled in its liberation-stage. This iconographical representation of the Buddha, the naga, and its equation to the atman-citta is stolen from ancient Egypt. Mucalinda “protecting the Buddha”. In Buddhist painting, the naga is sometimes portrayed as a human being with a snake or dragon extending over his head. One naga, in human form, attempted to become a monk; when telling it that such ordination was impossible, the Buddha told it how to ensure that it would be reborn (again, a symbol for the spirit of man, the transmigrating will/citta) a man, able to become a monk. The term Tchet or will/Self in Ancient Egyptian art Just as the soul, or citta travels from life to life both in Buddhist sutta [Dn 1.81] as well as Egyptian mythos, so was the cobra or naga the symbolic perfection for this ideation in iconography, for as the citta/tchet sloughs off the body for another or to enter the spirit realm, so too the naga sheds its skin and has a renewed body as it were. The tchet-cobra is often seen on crowns, and buriel masks coming out of the foreheads of great Kings and likewise, the mind, or citta/tchet of the King which “rises up”, is the proverbial self (Tchet means oneself/himself in hieroglyphics) which enters and leaves the body of the King, is his soul and equal to the atten (attan/Atman/Soul), or the Solar-Self from which it issues forth. As seen in figures 1-6 below, the naga is the solar emanation earthly manifest of the Supreme aten (i.e. Brahman, the Absolute), being the tchet, or citta, nous and self. Other coincidences which cannot be coincidences between Egyptian and Pali terminology That the terms tchet and tchet, respectively for the terms naga/cobra and the tree being identical, it cannot be ignored that this somehow is the source for the serpent in the tree in the garden of Eden fable of the Bible. It is also no coincidence that the Pali thita (pronounced ‘tchit’) meaning fixed, immortality, immovable and used only in connection with the pali citta and atta (thitatta, or fixed-in-the-soul, and thitacitta, or with-fixed-citta, always being = Parnibbana, perfection/liberation) is from the Egyptian Tchet (or Dchet) pillar, the stylized pole or tree trunk which represents immortality, fixed, immovable, immortality. What is interesting, the Egyptian sign "tchet" (snake/naga) also has two meanings: "snake" as well as the sign "arya" which represents a cobra. These few similarities are but a few in a long list of word for word terms between ancient Egyptian and Pali/Prakrit, including Sothis (sotthi, swastika), the stellar Isis.   
FIGURE 1 FIGURE 2 FIGURE 3   
FIGURE 4 FIGURE 5 FIGURE 6 |
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-WHAT
IS ETHNIC AND SECTARIAN "BUDDHISM"?-
The unbiased truth about Asian perversions of original Indian ontology and metaphysics 
S.E. Asian Buddhism's motto:" There is no Soul, emancipation an illusion, therefore I'm superficially moral because Buddhism is just secular humanism." What
is "S.E. Asian Buddhism”?
Asian, or S.E. Asian Buddhism, i.e. Theravada (called Hinayana by the Mahayanists) is found mostly in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos, Burma, somewhat so in India), half-breed ancestors to Chinese and Pacific-rim Polynesian mix offspring Chinese. Asian Buddhism is typified by its adherence to a late secular work of many versions known as the Abhidhamma and the materialistic commentary of Buddhaghosa. Asian Buddhists are Self denying materialists with a fond pension for petty appearances of external morality and zombie like behavior. The primary belief, in their personal Abhidhamma, is that life is purely unreal, filled with suffering and escape from the horrific cycle of samsara is a type of moralisitic pietism which when perfected culminates in a spiritual absolute-zero stasis wherein one entirely peters out at death like a campfire being pissed out with a resulting ‘sizzle’ sound of frying bacon, poof, then nothingness. Asian Buddhism’s primary principle is that there is absolutely no Soul whatsoever, but there is suffering and its root, being avijja (ignorance), but not that which is ignorant (of its true divinity). Humanism and epistemological purification is advocated by Asian Buddhism wherein the senses are kept in check and "wisdom’s" highest proclamation being a Self-negation paradox wherein both object and the Subjective Witness himself are utterly denied as wholly unreal atomic constructs, or an erected façade akin to a self-animating puppet sans the puppeteer. Philosophical conclusion of Asian Buddhism in a nutshell?: Ten parts Materialism with five parts superficial petty secular humanistism.Closest Western parallel to Asian Buddhism?: moralistic anti-foundational Atheists who scoff at the mere notion of a Soul. Japanese Buddhism's motto: "I wear robes, sniff incense, and sit on a cushion like a dead corpse, no-way is Buddha-way, no-mind is enlightenment. Mu!" What
is "Japanese Buddhism”?
Japanese Buddhism is mostly one of two varieties of revamped Chinese Chan. A Hybrid of Taoism, Confucianism, Naturism, Japanese-paganism, Shinto, and convoluted Chinese Chan; Japanese Zen is a radical farce of hierarchical figureheads who presume authority to teach Buddhism due to a long line of successorship teachers each confirming another and another all the way back to the historical Buddha himself (which is a doctrinal farce). Akin to a spiritual corporate cut-throat hierarchy, Japanese Zen/Buddhism is caught up entirely in external and bodily formalities such as robes, bowing, and snorting Sandalwood incense while seated on a zafu cushion for countless numbers of hours in attempt to self-lobotomize themselves and simultaneously come to the delusion they are enlightened into the ‘Voidness’ of mind, which was the mark of supremacy. Philosophical conclusion of Japanese Zen Buddhism?: existential Humanism devoid of any remnant even resembling original Buddhism as portrayed in its Suttas. Closest Western parallel to Japanese Buddhism?: European Satanism /Paganism where petty rituals and chants are occasioned by fancy robes which revolve around some form of cultish egotistical megalomaniac figurehead whom others pay reverence towards like brainless lemmings. Mongloid Buddhism's motto: "I eschew the vomit of the Dalai Lama and his henchmen, I don't think for myself, for I have others to do it for me." What
is "Tibetan (Vajrayana, i.e. Lamanism) Buddhism”?
Tibetan Buddhism, Mongoloid half-breed ancestors to Russian and Chinese mix offspring, also known as Polytheos-Bon Mahayanists is often known as Lamanism, or “Asian Catholicism”. This perverse dogma, of many flavors, is a hybrid faith of native polytheistic Tibetan Bon and late Chinese annihilationist Mahayana. What typifies Lamanism (quasi-chinese Buddhism)?: Copious amounts of spiritual materialism in addition to reading secular non-Buddhist works of counter-doctrinal relevance penned by Lamas, Rimpoches, and other pontificators (Nagarjuna) who have attempted to interpret 7000 years of Indian ontological and metaphysical thought without themselves having read Vedantic materials. Many occult like fetish rituals typify Lamanism and its many splinter groups enjoin hurling warnings of “million-year Hell” scare tactics at those not in parallel to their radical cultist groupies. Its famous: "Bodhisattva-save-all-sentient-beings and be reborn until all are saved" dogma is wholly foreign to original Indian Buddhism and one of the many reasons why the core of this dogma is an evil religion and contrary to the single-minded goal, the escape from samsara by progression in wisdom's unfolding. Philosophical conclusion of Tibetan Buddhism?: Fire and damnation holy rollers and a perverse Eastern version of Catholicism with the Pope replaced by a smiling Neolithic mentality quasi-chinese, the Dalai Lama; himself an ignorant fool proclaiming to be the spokesperson for Sutra, as if Sutra needed any intermediary puppet for its comprehension and interpretation. Closest Western parallel to Tibetan Buddhists?: Catholics who adorn their homes with petty fetish iconoclasm, are told to perform futile and useless external rituals, and think the Pope to be God's personal bitch who in turn tells the ignorant masses what to think and believe. 
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The
Primordial Tradition
A Tribute to A.K. Coomaraswamy By Ranjit Fernando The subject matter of all Coomaraswamy's mature writings can be placed under one heading, namely, Tradition. The Tradition that he writes about has little to do with the current usage of this term to mean customs or social patterns that have prevailed for some time. Coomaraswamy's theme is the unchanging Primordial and Universal Tradition which, as he shows, was the source from which all the true religions of the present as well as the past came forth, and likewise the forms of all those societies which were molded by religion. The particular aspect of Tradition which Coomaraswamy chose as his own specialty -- the one best suited to his own talents -- was, of course, the traditional view of art, now mainly associated with the East, but once universally accepted by East and West alike, as also by the civilizations of antiquity and, indeed, by those societies which we are pleased to call primitive. Coomaraswamy never tired of demonstrating that the traditional view of life and of art was always the universal and normal view until the Greeks of the so-called classical period first introduced a view of life and of art fundamentally at variance with the hitherto accepted view. In his aversion to what has been called 'the Greek miracle', Coomaraswamy is at one with Plato whose attitude to the changes that were taking place in his time was, to say the least, one of the strongest disapproval. Coomaraswamy shows, as Plato did, that the view of life and of art invented and glorified by the Greeks, and subsequently adopted by the Romans was, in the context of the long history of mankind, an abnormal view, an aberration; and that although this view lost its hold on men's minds with the rise of Christendom in the Middle Ages, it was to re-establish itself with greater force at the Renaissance thus becoming responsible for the fundamental ills of the modem world. In all traditional societies, quite apart from his ability to reason, man was always considered capable of going further and achieving direct, intuitive knowledge of absolute truth which, as the traditionalist writer, Gal Baton says, "carries with it an immediate certainty provided by no other kind of knowledge." "In the modem world," he continues, "we think in terms of "intellectual progress", by which we mean a progress in the ideas which men formulate with regard to the nature of things; but, from the point of view of traditional knowledge, there can be no progress, except in so far as particular individuals advance from ignorance to reflected or rational know ledge, and from reason to direct intuitive knowledge which, we might add, by its nature cannot be defined, but which, nevertheless stands over and above all other forms of knowledge being nothing less than knowledge itself. From a traditional point of view, the fault of the Greeks lay in their substitution of the rational faculty for the supra-rational as the highest faculty of man, and in the words of Coomaraswamy's distinguished colleague, Rene Guenon, "it almost seems as if the Greeks, at a moment when they were about to disappear from history, wished to avenge themselves for their incomprehension by imposing on a whole section of mankind the limitations of their own mental horizon." Since the Renaissance, as Baton points out, the modem world has, of course, gone much further than did the Greeks in the denial even of the possibility of a real knowledge which transcends the narrow limits of the individual mentality." Moreover, as we are all aware, that which, from a traditional point of view, appears to be a serious narrowing of horizons, is seen from our modem point of view as an unprecedented intellectual breakthrough! While it is hardly possible in a brief summary, such as this, to further discuss the issues involved, we might usefully ponder on Plato's story of the subterranean cave where some men have been confined since childhood. These men are familiar only with the shadows cast by a fire upon the dark walls of the cave, which they have all the time to study, and about which they are most knowledgeable. They know nothing of the outside world and therefore do not believe in its existence. Coomaraswamy, like Plato, would have us realize that we, too, are in darkness like these men, and that we would do well to seek the light of another world above by concerning ourselves with those things, which our ancestors knew and understood so well. He constantly points out, that modem or anti-traditional societies are shaped by the ideas men develop by their own powers of reasoning, there finally being as many sets of ideas as there are men; he also tries to show that traditional societies, on the other hand, were based on perennial ideas of quite another order -ideas of divine origin and revealed -- whereby all the aspects of a society were determined. A recurrent theme in Coomaraswamy's writings was the traditional view of art. When referring to European art, he repeatedly stressed that Graeco-Roman art and Renaissance art, like all the more modern schools of European art, were of earthly inspiration and therefore of human origin like the philosophies that went with them, whereas traditional art, like traditional philosophy, was related to the metaphysical order and therefore religious in character and divine in origin. We now see that in his earliest works such as the monumental Medieval Sinhalese Art, Coomaraswamy did not as yet fully understand the difference between these two contrasting points of view which were to form the basis of his later and more significant work; in his early writings, his profound understanding of the traditional arts of Greater India, as indeed his already considerable grasp of the true meaning of religion, was a little clouded with modernistic prejudice, the outcome, no doubt, of his early academic training in England which was of a kind that he had, even then, begun to despise. But later, following his association with the French metaphysician, Rene Guenon, Coomaraswamy's writings assumed the complete correctness of exposition and the great authority, which we associate with his most mature work. Insofar as we are able to see that a universalist approach to the study of the world's religions, coupled with an understanding of the true meaning of Tradition, have, at the present time, a special importance for the modern world, we shall also see that two men, the Frenchman, Rene Guenon, and Sri Lanka's Ananda Coomaraswamy, stand out as the greatest thinkers of the first half of this century. A great gulf separates their thought from the thought of nearly all their contemporaries. The second half of this century has witnessed the emergence of a whole school founded on their pioneering work and on the Perennial Philosophy, a movement which has found acceptance in many parts of a confused and bewildered world. It will now be apparent that, if we are to regard Coomaraswamy as an eminent orientalist and art historian, it must first be clearly understood that he stands apart from almost all those other scholars who can be similarly described, in that while they approach the life and art of traditional societies from a modern standpoint {which is both "skeptical and evolutionary", to use his own words), Coomaraswamy, like his few true colleagues and collaborators, takes the view that takes the view that Tradition can only be unerstood by a careful consideration of its own point of view however inconvenient this may be. Once this is realized, it would certainly be true, not only to say that Coomaraswamy was an eminent scholar but, as Marco Pallis has said, a prince among scholars. Coomaraswamy saw that a feudal or hierarchical society based on metaphysical principles is essentially superior to the supposedly egalitarian systems held in such high esteem today. Like Plato, he maintained that democracy was one of the worst forms of government, nor did he view any other materialistic system with more favor. His enthusiasm for such institutions as caste and kingship was based, not on sentiment, but on a profound understanding of the vital relationship between spiritual authority and temporal power in society and government. He would hardly have approved of the road which India and Lanka have taken since achieving their so-called independence, although he would have regarded it as inevitable. It is well known that, from the very beginning, Coomaraswamy deplored the influence of the West on Eastern peoples, and especially the consequences of British rule in Greater India. He has therefore been placed alongside those who in India and Lanka have been regarded as national leaders in the struggle for independence. But here again, a complete difference of approach separates Coomaraswamy from his contemporaries, for it was not imperialism or the domination of one people by another that he was concerned about, but rather the destruction of traditional societies by peoples who had abandoned sacred forms. It was what the British stood for and not the British that he detested; on the contrary, there is no doubt that he loved England because he knew another, older England which in form as well as spirit was so much like the oriental world he understood so well. It would, in conclusion, be appropriate to quote the words of that highly respected English artist-philosopher, Eric Gill, who in his autobiography paid Coomaraswamy this great tribute: "There was one person, to whose influence I am deeply grateful; I mean the philosopher and theologian, Ananda Coomaraswamy. Others have written the truth about life and religion and man's work. Others have written good clear English. Others have had the gift of witty exposition. Others have understood the metaphysics of Christianity and others have understood the metaphysics of Hinduism and Buddhism. Others have understood the true significance of erotic drawings and sculptures. Others have seen the relationships of the true and the good and the beautiful. Others have had apparently unlimited learning. Others have loved; others have been kind and generous. But I know of no one else in whom all these gifts and all these powers have been combined. I dare not confess myself his disciple; that would only embarrass him. I can only say that I believe that no other living writer has written the truth in matters of art and life and religion and piety with such wisdom and understanding." |
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Radical
Traditionalism
By Bill White What follows is the core "story" of Traditionalism, and its major beliefs. Because it is initiatic, the understanding of one idea in the faith is based upon the understanding of other, lesser ideas. By incrementally increasing one's understanding of this wisdom by degrees, one goes from the common understanding one has of the world to a deeper and more meaningful understand of the "hidden" underlying structure of the world. Because this knowledge is acquired by degrees, if one is exposed to the conclusions of a higher degree before one has understood the lesser ideas that support it, the idea is so divorced from the largely manufactured and artificial concepts of the modern world that it seems strange or ridiculous. Imagine being presented with the Bible stories if you had grown up in a culture without a Semitic religion as the dominant faith! However, as Evola points out, this doctrine was "normal" for all non-barbaric people of the world for millenia after millenia until just recently, where doctrines of the "dark side" -- things like progressive-"ism", liberalism, neo-conservatism, Bolshevism, globalism and the like have begun to destroy the real culture of all people, all over the world. What follows is a distinctly normal view of the world, deeply rooted in your history and culture, whether you are Irish or Greek, Persian or Japanese, and it only seems so out of place in the context of the highly abnormal situation that has resulted from the convergence of a number of forces that have been developed over the past few centuries. I find the Traditionalist framework to be the best and most consistent context for understanding and explaining history and human social development, and the most useful in making predictive analysis of politics, culture and what makes a society prosper or fail. I don't ask anyone to convert to it, but I think it is important in judging a candidate to have a strong understanding of their underlying world view. In the beginning, one race of man was civilized, and inhabited an area in the far North and in the Arctic. The other men of the earth were barbarians and animals, and incapable of acts of creation and reason. For reasons unknown -- likely a shift in climate -- the men oof the North were forced out of their homeland, and began to settle the rest of the Earth in two cycles. The first cycle came South through the far North of Asia in what is called the Hyperborean cycle. The second came South through a large continent that once existed in the midst of the Atlantic ocean, and is known as the Atlantean cycle. Approximately 10 millenia before Christ -- circa 10000 BC -- the continent of Atlantis was destroyed in a natural disaster that sunk it beneath the sea. In the time between the beginning of its settlement and its destruction, the people of Atlantis had spread across the earth and had settled North and South America, parts of Europe, Northern Africa, and Southern Asia. The Egyptian civilization in particular always considered itself a colony of Atlantis, and the prehistoric inhabitants of Ireland -- the Tuatha de Danaan -- and Greece -- the Danaans -- were likely offshoot of Atlantean culture. The Incas and the Aztecs, too, considered themselves to have been given culture by a superior sea-faring nation in the far North of the Atlantic. In competition with the people of Atlantis, were the people of the Hyperborean cycle, who spread across the Earth in waves that included the Celtic, Germanic and Slavic invasions of Europe, the Northern invasions that led to the founding of ancient Greek culture, the Aryan invasion in India, the settlement of the Middle East and Persia, and the founding of Chinese civilization. All of the major civilizations of world -- the Central American (Mayan), Northern European (Norse-Slavic-Celtic), Southern European (Greco-Roman), North African (Egyptian-Carthaginian), Middle Eastern (Babylonian-Assyrian-Persian), Indian, and Chinese -- thus have their root in one common civilization. That civilization is the civilization of Tradition. When men possessed Tradition, they lived in a state of bliss and perfect harmony with the universe and natural law. As they lost their homeland, and interbred with the lesser people that inhabited the Earth, their culture became diluted and they began to enter into cyclical decline. Key to the structure of a Traditional civilization is the idea of caste. Caste is not a limiting factor, but it is a system of social organization that is designed to let each man best find a method of expressing who they are. There are four castes in every traditional culture, from the Irish-Celtic-Druidic to the Hindu Brahmans. There is the emperor-king, who is a servant of the divine, and who sits above all caste, and there is a religious caste that serves him. There is a warrior caste that enforces social order. There is a merchant caste that tends to material needs. And there is a worker caste that performs physical labor. These castes each have symbolic representations -- gold for the highest, followed by silver, copper/bronze, and iron/lead/stone. Similarly, the two races of men -- those within Tradition and those without -- have symbolic representations in other fundamental dichotomies: male/female, light/dark, white/black, good/evil, North/South, sun/moon, sky/earth, and the like. In Hermeticism and alchemy, for instance, this relationship becomes mercury/sulfur, and the "gold" that the Philosopher's Stone is supposed to reveal is the Lost Emperor and Secret King of the Golden People. Society is declining in cycles of the castes. In the beginning, the golden caste -- the religious caste -- ruled. It's rule was followed by that of the warrior caste. Currently, we are living in a time of the rule of the merchant caste. In time, society will degenerate to the rule of the worker caste, and then society will self-destruct, being consumed in fire in a final battle between the forces of Tradition and the forces of "progress" and anti-Tradition. When the final "progressive" society is destroyed by fire (my guess is nuclear fire, but that's just my guess), from the ashes will arise the Secret King -- the true Emperor that once ruled over the regions of the Arctic -- and he will restore the Earth to the Golden Age. Those familiar with Norse myth can think Ragna Rokkr, Baldur, and the release of spirits from Valhalla. Each cycle of the caste is characterized by its particular vice. Without an Emperor-King, the religious caste loses its center, and cannot function. Without a religious caste to control it, the warrior caste collapsed society into feudalism and war. The merchant caste used this as an excuse to turn them out, and then plunged civilization into an age of greed. The worker states that emerge will be characterized by an age of slavery. Given that decline is inevitable, there is no question of reversing history. However, one cannot abandon society to "progress", either. One has to stand up among the ruins of civilization and conduct one's self according to the codes of honor that have been lost, and one must constantly fight against the suicidal destuction that society is hurling itself toward. By standing up and conducting one's self properly according to one's caste, one transcends one's current material form and becomes a spiritual entity that will be reincarnated in the final confrontation and destroyed to restore to the world its original form. By transcending material reality one becomes eternal and immortal. The body becomes an avatar of the universal spirit and the soul becomes unified with the eternal soul. It's a very good state of affairs to be in, becase material discomforts -- pain, fear, unhappiness and the like -- cease to exist as a state like Nirvana, Zen, or "Oneness with the Tao" replaces normal existence. |
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The
Perennial Philosophy
By W. T. S. Thackara There is an arresting thought in one of Plato's Dialogues, the Symposium (§202-4), that love is the midpoint between ignorance and wisdom, the mediator between humans and the gods, and that through love we attain spiritual understanding. St. Paul, too, spoke of love in one of the most beautiful passages of the Bible: that even if he could speak all the languages of men and of angels, and had not love, he would be as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal; and even had he the gift of prophecy, knew all mysteries and had faith to move mountains, but had not love, he would be nothing -- homage to his Master's commandment, that "ye love one another as I have loved you." And in Buddhism, the ideal human being, the bodhisattva who is "awakened" to the Reality behind life's illusions, is spoken of as possessing mahakarunacitta -- the "great loving heart." He has arrived at the "other shore" of enlightenment guided and strengthened by perfecting in himself the two most important virtues in Buddhist philosophy, karuna and prajna, "love" and "discriminating wisdom" born of altruism (D. T. Suzuki, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism, Schocken Books, 1963, ch. xi). The same theme pervades the word philosophy -- whose invention is credited to Pythagoras -- for the word is a union of two Greek roots: philos, "love" + sophia, "wisdom." Although usually translated "love of wisdom," philosophy may equally denote the wisdom of love or, alternatively, "loving-wisdom." Among the several Greek terms for love, each signifying a different aspect, philos and its cognate philia connote friendship and affection -- as in philanthropy, the "love of man" which motivates charity, and Philadelphia, "brotherly love." Theon of Smyrna (2nd century A.D.) wrote in his Mathematics Useful for Understanding Plato that philosophy may be compared to initiation into the Mysteries, the last part or crowning achievement of which is "friendship and communion with divinity." Thus we may see that the principal aim of Greek philosophy originally, like Buddhism and Christianity, was the perfection of love and wisdom as a means to becoming one with the source of life. Moreover, each of these traditions implied that the spiritual quest actually begins with love, and ends in wisdom; that the portals to the heart of Being open to those seized by passion for truth and a deep concern for the welfare of all. "To live to benefit mankind is the first step" -- this is a universal, perennial message. Equally enduring has been humanity's quest for a unifying, saving wisdom. The idea of a perennial philosophy, of a common denominator rather, a highest common factor -- forming the basis of truth in the world's manifold religious, philosophic, and scientific systems of thought, goes back thousands of years at least. Cicero, for example, speaking about the existence of the soul after death, mentions that not only does he have the authority of all antiquity on his side, as well as the teachings of the Greek Mysteries and of nature, but that "these things are of old date, and have, besides, the sanction of universal religion" (Tusculan Disputations, C. D. Yonge, trans., George Bell & Sons, 1904; Book I, xii-xiv). It was the 17th-century German philosopher Leibniz, however, who popularized the Latin phrase philosophia perennis. He used it to describe what was needed to complete his own system. This was to be an eclectic analysis of the truth and falsehood of all philosophies, ancient and modern, by which "one would draw the gold from the dross, the diamond from its mine, the light from the shadows; and this would be in effect a kind of perennial philosophy." A similar aim, with the goal of reconciling differing religious philosophies, was pursued by Ammonius Saccas, founder of the eclectic theosophical school of Alexandria in the 3rd century A.D. and inspirer of Plotinus and the Neoplatonic movement. Leibniz, however, laid no claim to inventing the phrase. He said he found it in the writings of a 16th-century theologian, Augustine Steuch, whom he regarded as one of the best Christian writers of all time. Steuch described the perennial philosophy as the originally revealed absolute truth made available to man before his fall, completely forgotten in that lapse, and only gradually regained in fragmentary form in the subsequent history of human thought. Orthodox Christianity, in his view, was its purest restoration, and the history of redemption includes the long quest for this wisdom ("Perennial Philosophy," Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Philip P. Wiener, ed., Charles Scribners Sons, 1973, III, 457-63). Prior to Steuch there is, to my knowledge, no mention of the term philosophia perennis, although similar phrases expressing essentially the same idea are to be found in earlier writings. The most notable of these is "the perennial wisdom of God" -- "theosophia perennis" in Latin texts. More recently, about forty years ago, Aldous Huxley compiled an anthology of the world's religious and mystic traditions which describes many features common to this "philosophy of philosophies." In his preface, he defined it as follows: Philosophia Perennis . . . -- the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being -- the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions (Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, Harper & Brothers, 1945; p. vii). Huxley pointed out that he did not turn to the writings of "professional" philosophers in compiling his book, but to a few of those rare individuals in history who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions in his words, by "making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor [humble] in spirit" -- by which they were afforded firsthand, direct apprehension of divine Reality. If one were not a sage or a saint, he felt, the next best thing one could do was "to study the works of those who were and who, because they had modified their merely human mode of being, were capable of a more than merely human kind and amount of knowledge" (Ibid., p. ix). It is not so extraordinary that the core teachings of every major spiritual philosophy are identical, even though the traditions are separated geographically, culturally, and by vast periods of time. For it was the same theosophia or divine wisdom that was universally given forth by every sage and teacher, the "same exhaustless, secret, eternal doctrine" that Krishna had eons ago imparted to Vivasvat (the Sun), and which has been transmitted from age to age and which he was even then communicating to Arjuna, his "devotee and friend" (Bhagavad-Gita, W. Q. Judge recension, Theosophical University Press, 1969; 4:1-3). The most comprehensive modern presentation of "theosophia perennis," with proofs of its diffusion throughout the world in every age, may be found in the writings of H. P. Blavatsky, in particular in her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, subtitled "The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy." Taught herself by more advanced students of the theosophic tradition, she wrote that the teachings, however fragmentary and incomplete, contained in these volumes, belong neither to the Hindu, the Zoroastrian, the Chaldean, nor the Egyptian religion, neither to Buddhism, Islam, Judaism nor Christianity exclusively. The Secret Doctrine is the essence of all these. Sprung from it in their origins, the various religious schemes are now made to merge back into their original element, out of which every mystery and dogma has grown, developed, and become materialised. -- H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I, viii. Besides elaborating the fundamental teachings and showing their analogy in nature, H. P. Blavatsky explains how the secret "wisdom of divine things" has been "revealed" to mankind and periodically renovated through history. Referring to an historical event allegorized in the Garden of Eden story, in the myth of the Promethean fire, and also in the Hindu story of the descent of manasaputras ("sons of mind"), she describes how some 18 million years ago divine beings, "perfected" men of former cycles who are native to higher, invisible spheres of cosmic life, blended a portion of their consciousness with nascent mankind, inflaming them with thinking intelligence. In this act of sacrifice and evolutionary necessity, they indelibly impressed upon the "plastic mind-substance" of humanity life's important truths so that they would never be utterly lost. Here then, also, is the rationale of Plato's doctrine of Anamnesis ("Unforgetting"): that learning is actually a process of "reminiscence" -- "remembering" or "rediscovering" primordial knowledge imbedded in the immortal portion of the soul. Since that ancient time, restorations of the wisdom-tradition in every part of the globe have been regularly attempted, mainly for two reasons: first, because of the erosive forces which in time disfigure each presentation -- namely, that original teachings, usually oral, are imperfectly remembered or forgotten, texts are lost, copies and translations are edited, word meanings change, and people often misinterpret or overlook essential points. The second and more compelling reason is that humanity is evolving, with likewise evolving needs; and when the cry from the collective human heart is sufficient, a response from the right quarters is made which will fulfill the needs of the cycle then opening. It is well known that the messiahs, avatars, buddhas, prophets, and "god-taught" of every nation have come as reformers and transmitters, not as originators of anything but the "earthly garment" of their presentation, woven out of available materials. Yet it is also to be noted that the messengers are seldom known to their contemporaries, nor is the import of their message fully understood. All innovation attracts opposition; powerful dragons surround the grail. Our own age, like every other, is replete with "false prophets" whose often fascinating mixture of truth and error has led many astray into unproductive, even dangerous, sidelines. How then, we may ask, are we to determine what is genuinely of the spirit and what is chaff ? Sensibly enough, though it requires persevering and discriminate study, we can apply the tests of perenniality and universality: is the teaching explicitly stated or implied by all the world's great spiritual teachers through the ages? And, what is equally important, does it bear the hallmark of spirit: is its appeal to the selfless, altruistic side of our nature? The universe, physical and metaphysical, is all one reality; and according to simple logic there can be only one truth, however limited, varied, and seemingly divergent its expressions in human language may be. The divisive influence of dogmatic theologies, of the attempt to arrogate truth under banners of any kind, including those of science and philosophy, can affect human welfare only negatively. Perhaps it is best to remember, then, that like love, most of us are but "halfway" between ignorance and wisdom. If we have intimations of divine realities about which we seek fuller knowledge, or if we seek only to be an active force for good in the world but need a philosophy that will help us to weather the storms of life, and the doldrums, we can be confident that such a knowledge exists which satisfies both heart and intellect. Humanity is not bereft of the compassionate guardianship of the gods and never has been. Both they and their earthly representatives have ever held out the compass of loving-wisdom as the surest guide to our destination. In following the course charted by these advanced wayfarers, not only will we discover what is true in life and what is not, but we will be fitting ourselves to express the unchanging characteristics of spirit. |
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Who
is "Satan" and where is "Hell"?
By Dr. A.K. Coomaraswamy It has been recognized that the notion of a Satanic "person," the chief of many "fallen angels," presents some difficulties: even in religion, that of a Manichean "dualism" emerges; at the same time, if it be maintained that anything whatever is not God, God's infinity is thereby circumscribed and limited. Is "he," Satan, then a person, or merely a "personification," i.e., a postulated personality? [4] Who is "he," and where? Is he a serpent or a dragon, or has he horns and a poisonous tail? Can he be redeemed and regenerated, as Origen and the Muslims have believed? All these problems hang together. However the ultimate truth of "dualism" may be repudiated, a kind of dualism is logically unavoidable for all practical purposes, because any world in time and space, or that could be described in words or by mathematical symbols, must be one of contraries, both quantitative and qualitative, for example, long and short, good and evil; and even if it could be otherwise, a world without these opposites would be one from which all possibility of choice, and of procedure from potentiality to act, would be excluded, not a world that could be inhabited by human beings such as we. For anyone who holds that "God made the world," the question, Why did he permit the existence in it of any evil, or that of the Evil one in whom all evil is personified, is altogether meaningless; one might as well enquire why He did not make a world without dimensions or one without temporal succession. Our whole metaphysical tradition, Christian and other, maintains that "there are two in us," [5] this man and the Man in this man; and that this is so is still a part and parcel of our spoken language in which, for example, the expression "self-control" implies that there is one that controls and another subject to control, for we know that "nothing acts upon itself," [6] though we forget it when we talk about "self-government." [7] Of these two "selves," outer and inner man, psycho-physical "personality" and very Person, the human composite of body, soul, and spirit is built up. Of these two, on the one hand body-and-soul (or -mind), and on the other, spirit, one is mutable and mortal, the other constant and immortal; one "becomes," the other "is," and the existence of the one that is not, but becomes, is precisely a "personification" or "postulation," since we cannot say of anything that never remains the same that "it is." And however necessary it may be to say "I" and "mine" for the practical purposes of everyday life, our Ego in fact is nothing but a name for what is really only a sequence of observed behaviors. [8] Body, soul and spirit: con one or other of these be equated with the Devil? Not the body, certainly, for the body in itself is neither good nor evil, but only an instrument or means to good or evil. Nor the Spirit -- intellect, synteresis, conscience, Agathos Daimon -- for this is, by hypothesis, man's best and most divine part, in itself incapable of error, and our only means of participation in the life and the perfection that is God himself. There remains only the "soul"; that soul which all must "hate" who would be Christ's disciples and which, as St. Paul reminds us, the Word of God like a two-edged sword "severs from the spirit"; a soul which St. Paul must have "lost" in order to be able to say truly that "I live, yet not I, but Christ in me," announcing, like Mansur, his own theosis. Of the two in us, one the "spark" of Intellect or Spirit, and the other, Feeling or Mentality, subject to persuasion, it is obvious that the latter is the "tempter," or more truly "temptress." There is in each of us, in this man and that woman alike, an anima and animus, relatively feminine and masculine; [9] and, as Adam rightly said, "the woman gave, and I did eat"; also, be it noted, the "serpent," by whom the woman herself was first beguiled, wears, in art, a woman's face. But to avoid all possibility of misunderstanding here, it must be emphasized that all this has nothing whatsoever to do with a supposed inferiority of women or superiority of men: in this functional and psychological sense any given woman may be "manly" (heroic) or any given man "effeminate" (cowardly). [10] One knows, of course, that "soul," like "self," is an ambiguous term, and that, in some contexts, it may denote the Spirit or "Soul of the soul," or "Self of the self," both of which are expressions in common use. But we are speaking here of the mutable "soul" as distinguished from the "spirit," and should not overlook the extent to which this nefesh, the anima after which the human and other "animals" are so called, is constantly disparaged in the Bible, [11] as is the corresponding nafs in Islam. The soul is the self to be "denied" (the Greek original meaning "utterly reject," with an ontological rather than a merely ethical application), the soul that must be "lost" if "it" is to be saved; and which, as Meister Eckhart and the Sufis so often say, must "put itself to death," or, as the Hindus and Buddhists say, must be "conquered" or "tamed," for "that is not my Self." This soul, subject to persuasion, and distracted by its likes and dislikes, this "mind" that we mean when we speak of having been "minded to do this or that," is "that which thou callest 'I' or 'myself,'" and which Jacob Boehme thus distinguishes from the I that is, when he says, with reference to his own illuminations, that "not I, the I that I am, knows these things, but God in me." We cannot treat the doctrine of the Ego at length, but will only say that, as for Meister Eckhart and the Sufis, "Ego, the word I, is proper to none but God in his sameness," and that "I" can only rightly be attributed to Him and to the one who, being "joined unto the Lord, is one spirit." That the soul herself, our "I" or "self" itself, should be the Devil -- whom we call the "enemy," "adversary," " tempter," "dragon," -- never by a personal name [12] -- may seem startling, but it is very far from being a novel proposition. As we go on, it will be found that an equation of the soul with Satan has often been enunciated, and that it provides us with an almost perfect solution of all the problems that the latter's "personality" poses. Both are "real" enough for all pragmatic purposes here, in the active life where "evil" must be contended with, and the dualism of the contraries cannot be evaded; but they are no more "principles," no more really real, than the darkness that is nothing but the privation of light. No one will deny that the battleground on which the psychomachy must be fought out to a finish is within you, or that, where Christ fights, there also must his enemy, the Antichrist, be found. Neither will anyone, "superstition" apart, be likely to pretend that the Temptations of St. Anthony, as depicted in art, can be regarded otherwise than as "projections" of interior tensions. In the same way that Picasso's "Guernica" is the mirror of Eurpoe's disintegrated soul, "the hell of modern existence," the Devil's horns and sting are an image of the most evil beast in man himself. Often enough it has been said by the "Never-enough honoured Auncients," as well as by modern authors, that "man is his own worst enemy." On the other hand, the best gift for which a man might pray is to be "at peace with himself;" [13] and, indeed, for so long as he is not at peace with Himself, [14] he can hardly be at peace with anybody else, but will "project" his own disorders, making of "the enemy" -- for example, Germany, or Russia, or the Jews -- his "devil." "From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even from your lusts (pleasures, or desires, Skr. kamah) that contend in your members?" (James 4:1) As Jung so penetratingly observes: "When the fate of Europe carried it into a four years war of stupendous horror -- a war that no one wanted -- hardly anyone asked who had caused the war and its continuation." [15] The answer would have been unwelcome: it was "I" -- your "I" and mine. For, in the words of another modern psychologist, E. E. Hadley, "the tragedy of this delusion of individuality is that it leads to isolation, fear, paranoid suspicion, and wholly unnecessary hatreds." [16] All this has always been familiar to the theologians, in whose writings Satan is simply referred to as "the enemy." For example, William Law: "You are under the power of no other enemy, are held in no other captivity, and want no other deliverance but from the power of your own earthly self. This is the one murderer of the divine life within you. It is your own Cain that murders your own Abel," [17] and "self is the root, the tree, and the branches of all the evils of our fallen state ... Satan, or which is the same thing, self-exaltation.... This is that full-born natural self that must be pulled out of the heart and totally denied, or there can be no disciple of Christ." If, indeed, "the kingdom of heaven is within you," then also the "war in heaven" will be there, until Satan has been overcome, that is, until the Man in this man is "master of himself," selbes gewaltic, enkrates heautou. For the Theologia Germanica (ch. 3, 22, 49), it was the Devil's "'I, Me, and Mine' that were the cause of his fall.... For the self, the I, the me and the like, all belong to the Evil Spirit, and therefor it is that he is an Evil Spirit. Behold one or two words can utter all that has been said by these many words: 'Be simply and wholly bereft of self.'" For "there is nothing else in hell, but self-will; and if there were no self-will, there would be no devil and no hell." So, too, Jacob Boehme: "this vile self-hood possesses the world and worldly things; and dwells also in itself, which is dwelling in hell"; and Angelus Silesius: Nichts anders stuerzet dich in Hoellenschlund hinein Als dass verhasste Wort (merk's wohl!): das Mein und Dein. [18] Hence the resolve, expressed in a Shaker hymn: But now from my forehead I'll quickly erase The stamp of the Devil's great "I." [19] Citations of this kind could be indefinitely multiplied, all to the effect that of all evil beasts, "the most evil beast we carry on our bosom," [20] "our most godless and despicable part" and "multifarious beast," which our "Inner Man," like a lion tamer, must keep under his control or else will have to follow where it leads. [21] Even more explicit sayings can be cited form Sufi sources, where the soul (nafs) is distinguished from the intellect or spirit (aql, ruh) as the Psyche is distinguished from the Pneuma by Philo and in the New Testament, and as anima from animus by William of Thierry. [22] For the encyclopedic Kashfu'l Mahjub, the soul is the "tempter," and the type of hell in this world. [23] Al-Ghazali, perhaps the greatest of the Muslim theologians, calls the soul "the greatest of your enemies"; and more than that could hardly be said of Satan himself. Abu Sa'id asks: "What is evil, and what is the worst evil?" and answers: "Evil is 'thou,' and the worst evil 'thou' if thou knowest it not"; he, therefore, called himself a "Nobody," refusing, like the Buddha, to identify himself with any nameable "personality." [24] Jalalu'd Din Rumi, in his Mathnawi, repeats that man's greatest enemy is himself: "This soul," he says, "is hell," and he bids us "slay the soul." "The soul and Shaitan are both one being, but take two forms; essentially one from the first, he became the enemy and envier of Adam"; and, in the same way, "the Angel (Spirit) and the Intellect, Adam's helpers, are of one origin but assume two forms." The Ego holds its head high: "decapitation means, to slay the soul and quench its fire in the Holy War" (jihad); and well for him who wins this battle, for "whoever is at war with himself for God's sake, ... his light opposing his darkness, the sun of his spirit shall never set." [25] 'Tis the fight which Christ, With his internal Love and Light, Maintains within man's nature, to dispel God's Anger, Satan, Sin, and Death, and Hell; The human Self, or Serpent, to devour, And raise an Angel from it by His Pow'r. John Byrom "Spark of the soul ... image of God, that there is ever in all wise at war will all that is not godly ... and is called the Synteresis" [26] (Meister Eckhart, Pfeiffer ed., p. 113). "We know that the Law is of the Spirit ... but I see another law in my members, warring against the Law of the Intellect, and bringing me into captivity.... With the Intellect I myself serve the Law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.... Submit yourselves therefore to God: resist the devil." [27] And similarly in other Scriptures, notably the Bhagavad Gita (VI.5, 6): "Lift up the self by the Self, let not self sit back. For, verily, the Self is both the friend and the foe of the self; the friend of one whose self has been conquered by the Self, but to one whose self hath not (been overcome), the Self at war, forsooth, acts as an enemy"; and the Buddhist Dhammapada (103, 160, 380), where "the Self is the Lord of the self" and one should "by the Self incite the self, and by the Self gentle self" (as a horse is "broken in" by a skilled trainer), and "one who has conquered self is the best of all champions." (Cf. Philostratus, Vit. Ap., I.13: "Just as we break in skittish and unruly horses by stroking and patting them.") At the same time, it must not be forgotten that the Psychomachy is also "a battle of love," and that Christ -- to whom ye should be married ... that we should bring fruit unto God" (Rom. 7:3, 4) -- already loved the unregenerate soul "in all her baseness and foulness," [28] or that it is of her that Donne says, "Nor ever chaste, except Thou ravish me." It was for nothing but "to go and fetch his Lady, whom his Father had eternally given him to wife, and to restore her to her former high estate that the Son proceeded out of the Most High" (Meister Eckhart). [29] The Deity's lance or thunderbolt is, at the same time, his yard, with which he pierces his mortal Bride. The story of the thunder-smitten Semele reminds us that the Theotokos, in the last analysis Psyche, has ever been of Lunar, never herself of Solar stock; and all this is the sum and substance of every "solar myth," the theme of the Liebesgeschichte des Himmels and of the Drachenkaempfe. "Heaven and earth: let them be wed again." [30] Their marriage, consummated in the heart, is the Hieros Gamos, Daivam Mithunam, [31] and those in whom it has been perfected are no longer anyone, but as He is "who never became anyone." [32] Plotinus' words: "Love is of the very nature of the Psyche, and hence the constant yoking of Eros with the Psyches in the pictures and the myths" [33] might as well have been said of half the world's fairy-tales, and especially of the Indian "pictures and myths" of Sri Krishna and the Milkmaids, of which the Indian commentators rightly deny the historicity, asserting that all these are things that come to pass in all men's experience. Such, indeed, are "the erotika (Skr. srngara) into which, it seems that you, O Socrates, should be initiated," as Diotima says, and which in fact he so deeply respected. [34] But, this is not only a matter of Grace; the soul's salvation depends also on her submission, her willing surrender; it is prevented for so long as she resists. It is her pride (manas, abhimana; oiema, oiesis; self-opinion, overweening), the Satanic conviction of her own independence (asmimana, ahamkara, cogito ergo sum), her evil rather than herself, that must be killed; this pride she calls her "self-respect," and would "rather die" than be divested of it. But the death that she at last, despite herself, desires, is no destruction but a transformation. Marriage is an initiatory death and integration (nirvana, samskara, telos). [35] "Der Drache und die Jungfrau sind natuerlich identisch"; [36] the "Fier Baiser" transforms the dragon; the mermaid loses her ophidian tail; the girl is no more when the woman has been "made"; from the nymph the winged soul emerges. [37] And so "through Thee an Iblis may become again one of the Cherubim." [38] And what follows when the lower and the higher forms of the soul have been united? This has nowhere been better described than in the Aitareya Aranyaka (II.3.7): "This Self gives itself to that self, and that self to this Self; they become one another; with the one form he (in whom this marriage has been consummated) is unified with yonder world, and with the other united to this world"; the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad (IV.3.23): "Embraced by the Prescient Self, he knows neither a within nor a without. Verily, that is his form in which his desire is obtained, in which the Self is his desire, and in which no more desiresor grieves." "Amor ipse no quiescit, nisi in amato, quod fit, cum obtinet ipsum possessione plenaria"; [39] "Jam perfectam animam ... gloriosam sibi sponsam Pater conglutinat." [40] Indeed: Dafern der Teufel koennt aus seiner Seinheit gehn, So saehest du ihn stracks in Gottes Throne stehn. [41] So, then, the Agathos and Kakos Daimons, Fair and Foul selves, Christ and Antichrist, both inhabit us, and their opposition is within us. Heaven and Hell are the divided images of Love and Wrath in divinis, where the Light and the Darkness are undivided, and the Lamb and the Lion lie down together. In the beginning, as all traditions testify, heaven and earth were one and together; essence and nature are one in God, and it remains for every man to put them together again within himself. All these are our answers. Satan is not a real and single Person, but a severally postulated personality, a "Legion." Each of these personalities is capable of redemption (apokatastasis), and can, if it will, become again what it was before it "fell" -- Lucifer, Phosphorus, Helel, Scintilla, the Morning Star, a Ray of the Supernal Sun; because the Spark, however it may seem to be smothered, is an Asbestos that cannot be extinguished, even in hell. But, in the sense that a redemption of all beings cannot be thought of as taking place at any one time, and inasmuch as there will be devilish souls in need of redemption throughout all time, Satan must be though of as being damned for ever, meaning by "damned," self-excluded from the vision of God and the knowledge of Truth. The problem with which we started has largely been solved, but it still remains to accomplish the harder tasks of an actual "self-naughting" and consequent "Self-realization" to which the answers point, and for which theology is only a partial preparation. Satan and the Ego are not really entities, but concepts postulated and valid only for the present, provisional, and practical purposes; both are composite photographs, as it were of X1, X2, X3. It has often been said that the Devil's most ingenious device is to persuade us that his existence is a mere "superstition." In fact, however, nothing could be more dangerous than to deny his existence, which is as real, although no more so, as our own; we dare not deny Satan until we have denied ourselves, as everyone must who would follow Him who said and did nothing "of himself." "What is Love? the sea of non-existence"; [42] and "whoever enters there, saying 'It is I,' I [God], smite him in the face"; [43] "What is Love? thou shalt know when thou becomest Me." [44] Footnotes [1] Margaret Marshall in The Nation, February 2, 1946. [2] Jacob Boehme, De incarnatione Verbi, II.5.18. [3] Jacob Boehme, "Of Heaven and Hell," pp. 259, 260. [4] "Person cannot be affirmed ... of living things .. bereft of intellect and reason .. but we say there is a person of a man, of God, of an Angel" (Boethius, Contra Evtychen 11). On this basis, Satan, who remains an angel even in hell, can be called a Person, or, indeed, Persons, since his name is "Legion: for we are many"; but as a fallen being, "out of his right mind," in reality a Person only potentially. Much the same could be said of the soul, viz. that there is a Person of the soul, but hardly that the soul, as it is in itself, is a Person. Satan and the soul, both alike invisible, are only "known," or rather "inferred," from behvior, which is just what "personality" implies: "personality, that is the hypothetical unity that one postulates to account for the doings of people" (H. S. Sullivan, "Introduction to the Study of Interpersonal Relations," Psychiatry, I, 1938). [5] Plato, Republic 439DE, 604B; Philo, Deterius 82; St. Thomas Aquinas, Sum. Theol. II-II.26.4; St. Paul, II Cor. 4:16; and in general, as the doctrine is briefly stated by Goethe: "Zwei Seelen wohnen ach, in meiner Brust, die eine will sich von der andern trennen" (Faust, I, 759). Similarly in the Vedanta, Buddhism, Islam, and in China. [6] Nil agit in seipsum: axiomatic in Platonic, Christian, and Indian philosophy: "the same thing can never do or suffer opposites in the same respect or in relation to the same thing at the same time," Plato, Republic 436B; "strictly speaking, no one imposes a law upon his own actions," Sum. Theol. I.93.5; "because of the antinomy involved in the notion of acting upon oneself" (svatmani ca kriyavirodhat), Sankara on BG II.17. [7] "Art thou free of self? then art thou 'Self-governed'" (selbes gewaltic = Skr. svarat), Meister Eckhart, Pfeiffer ed., p. 598. [8] "How can that which is never in the same state 'be' anything?" (Plato, Cratylus, 439B; Theatetus, 152D; Symposium, 207D, etc.). "'Ego' has no real meaning, because it is perceived only for an instant," i.e., does not last for even so long as two consecutive moments (naivaham-arthah ksanikatva-darsanat; Vivekacudamani of Sri Sankaracharya, 293, Swami Madhavananda, tr. Almora, 3rd ed., 1932). [9] It is unfortunate that, in modern psychology, an originally lucid terminology and distinction has been confused by an equation of the "soul-image" with "the anima in man, the animus in woman." The terms are even more misused by Father M. C. D'Arcy in his Mind and Heart of Love (London, 1946), ch. 7. Traditionally, anima and animus are the "soul" and the "spirit" equally in any man or woman; so William of Thierry (cf. note 22 below) speaks of animus vel spiritus. This usage goes back to Cicero, e.g., Tusculan Disputations I.22.52, "neque nos copora sumus ... cum igitur: Nosce te dicit, hoc dicit, Nosce anumum tuum," and V.13.38, "humanus ... animus decerptus [est] ex mente divina"; and Lucius Accius (fr. 296), "sapimus animo, fruimur anima; sine animo, anima est debilis." [10] In all traditions, not excepting the Buddhist, this man and this woman are both equally capable of "fighting the good fight." [11] Cf. D. B. Macdonald, The Hebrew Philosophical Genius (Princeton, 1934), p. 139, "the lower, physical nature, the appetites, the psyche of St. Paul ... 'self,' but always with that lower meaning behind it"; Thomas Sheldon Green, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (New York and London, 1879), s.v. psuchikos ("governed by the sensuous nature subject to appetite and passion"); "anima ... cujus vel pulchritudo virtus, vel deformitas vitium est ... mutabilis est" (St. Augustine, De gen. ad litt. 7.6.9 and Ep. 166.2.3). On the other hand, the "Soul" or "Self," as printed with the capital, is Jung's "Self ... aound which it [the Ego] revolves, very much as the earth rotates about the sun ... [its] superordinated subject" (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, London, 1928, p. 268); not a being, but the inconnumerable and indefinable "Being of all beings." We are never told that the mutable soul is immortal in the same timeless way that God is immortal, but only that it is immortal "in a certain way of its own" (secundum quemdam modum suum, St. Augustine, Ep. 166.2.3). If we ask, Quomodo? seeing that the soul is in time, the answer must be, "in one way only, viz. by continuing to become; since thus it can always leave behind it a new and other nature to take the place of the old" (Plato, Symposium, 207D). It is only God, who is the Soul of the soul, that we can speak of as immortal absolutely (I Tim. 6:16). It is incorrect to call the soul "immortal" indiscriminately, just as it is incorrect to call any man a genius; man has an immortal Soul, as he has a Genius, but the soul can be immortalized only by returning to the source, that is to say, by dying to itself and living to its Self; just as a man becomes a genius only when he is no longer "himself." [12] Even the Hebrew Satan, "opponent," is not a personal name. [13] Contest of Homer and Hesiod, 165, where the expression eunoun einai heauto = metanoein ("repentance," i.e., "coming to be in one's right mind"), the opposite of paranoein. [14] The Self we mean when we tell a man who is misbehaving to "be yourself" (en sauto genou, Sophocles, Philoctetes 950), for "all is intolerable when any man forsakes his proper Self, to do what fits him not" (ibid. 902-903). [15] C. G. Jung, The Integration of Personality (New York, 1935), p. 274. [16] E. E. Hadley, in Psychiatry V (1942), 133; citing also H. S. Sullivan, op. cit., pp. 121-134: "emphasized individuality of each of us, 'myself.' Here we have the very mother of illusions, the ever pregnant source of preconceptions that invalidate almost all our efforts to understand other people." [17] William Law, The Spirit of Love, and an Address to the Clergy, cited in Stephen Hobhouse, William Law and Eighteenth Century Quakerism (London, 1927), pp. 156, 219, 220. [18] Angelus Silesius, Der Cherubinische Wandersmann, V.238. [19] E. D. Andrews, The Gift to be Simple (New York, 1940), p. 18; cf. p. 79, "That great big I, I'll mortify." [20] Jacob Boehme, De incarnatione Verbi, I.13.13. [21] Plato, Republic, 588C ff., where the whole soul is compared to such a composite animal as the Chimaera, Scylla, or Cerberus. In some respects the Sphinx might have been an even better comparison. In any case, the human, leonine, and ophidian parts of these creatures correspond to the three parts of the soul, in which "the human in us, or rather our divine part" should prevail; of which Hercules leading Cerberus would be a good illustration. [22] William of Thierry, The Golden Epistle of Abbot William of St. Thierry to the Carthusians of Mont Dieu, tr. Walter Shrewing (London, 1930), sections 50, 51. [23] Kashf al-Mahjub, tr. R. A. Nicholson (Gibb Memorial Series XVII), p. 199; cf. p. 9, "the greatest of all veils between God and man." [24] For Abu Sa'id see R. A. Nicholson, Studies in Islamic Mysticism (Cambridge, 1921), p. 53. [25] Citations are from Mathnawi I.2617; II.2525; III.374, 2738, 3193, 4053 (nafs va shaitan har du ek in bud'and); cf. II.2272 ff., V.2919, 2939. The fundamental kinship of Satan and the Ego is apparent in their common claim to independent being; and "association" (of others with the God who only is) amounts, from the Islamic point of view, to polytheism (ibid. IV.2675-2677). [26] On the meaning of the "Synteresis," etymologically an equivalent of Skr. samtaraka, "one who helps to cross over," see O. Renz, "Die Synteresis nach dem Hl. Thomas von Aquin," Beitraege zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, X (Muenster, 1911). [27] Rom. 7:14-23; James 4:7. [28] St. Bonaventura, Dominica prima post octavum epiphaniae, 2.2. For the whole theme, see also Coomaraswamy, "On the Loathly Bride." [29] Pfeiffer ed., p. 288. [30] RV X.24.5. [31] SB X.5.2.12. [32] KU II.18. [33] Enneads VI.9.9. [34] Plato, Symposium 210A. [35] Nirvana, J. I.60; samskara, Manu II.67; telos, H. G. Liddlell and R. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 8th ed., Oxford, 1897, s.v. VI.2. [36] E. Siecke, Drachenkaempfe (Leipzig, 1907), p. 14. [37] For the Fier Baiser see the references in Coomaraswamy, "On the Loathly Bride." For the marriage, Meister Eckhart (Pfeiffer ed., p. 407) and Omikron, Letters from Paulos, New York, 1920, passim. [38] Rumi, Mathnawi IV.3496. [39] Jean de Castel, De adhaerendo Deo, C. 12. [40] St. Bernard, De grad. humilitatis, VII.21. [41] Angelus Silesius, I.143. Cf. Theologia Germanica, ch. XVI: "If the Evil Spirit himself could come into true obedience, he would become an angel [of light] again, and all his sin and wickedness would be blotted out." [42] Mathnawi III.4723. [43] Rumi, Divan, Ode XXVIII. "None has knowledge of each who enters that he is So-and-so or So-and-so," ibid., p. 61. [44] Mathnawi II, Introduction. |
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The
Principle of Emanation
copyright 2007 webmaster attan.com Nous proceeds from the One (and Soul from Nous) without in any way affecting its Source. There is no activity on the part of the One, still less any willing or planning or choice (planning and choice are excluded by Plotinus even on a much lower level, when he comes to consider the forming and ruling of the material universe by Soul). There is simply a giving-out, which leaves the Source unchanged and undiminished. But though this giving-out is necessary, in the sense that it cannot be conceived as not happening or as happening otherwise, it is also entirely spontaneous; there is no room for any sort of binding or constraint, internal or external, in Plotinus' thought about the One. The reason for the procession of all things from the One is, Plotinus says simply that everything which is perfect produces something else. Emanation is the extrinsic and natural attribute of the One itself, such that what the One is in principle, in nature, is also indistinguishable from what the One ‘does’, i.e. the willing (attribute) of will (nous, the One). In Plotinus’ model of light and its illumination, Principle-attribute are one unity, indistinguishable, and certainly destroys any conception of duplicity in the model of the One. Furthermore it cannot be denied that in the highest simplex things, there is not at least one attribute (lights illumination, waters fluidity, etc.), the same holding true for the One as well, that the indefinite dyad (aoristos dyas) is none other than the extrinsic and attributive ‘side’ of the One. Perfection is necessarily productive and creative. Here his thought is certainly influenced by Plato’s rejection of the old Greek doctrine of divine envy in the Timaeus. But what is stated by Plato as a necessary consequence of supreme moral goodness becomes in Plotinus a law of all being. Perfection for him is not merely static. It is a fullness of living and, productive power. The One for him is Life and Power, an infinite spring of power, an unbounded life, and therefore necessarily productive. And as it is one of the axioms which Plotinus assumes without discussion that the product must always be less than, inferior to the producer, what the One produces must be that which is next to Him in excellence, namely Nous. Plotinus, when he gives a more precise account of how Nous proceeds from the One, introduces a psychological element into the process which goes beyond his light-metaphor. He distinguishes two "moments" in this timeless generation; the first in which Nous is radiated as an unformed potentiality and the second in which it turns back to content and becomes the totality of real existence. Here we meet another of the great principles of the philosophy of Plotinus; that all derived beings depend for their existence, their activity, and their power to produce in their turn, on their contemplation of their source. Contemplation always precedes and generates activity and production. Nous is for Plotinus both thought and object of thought, both the Divine Intellect and the Platonic World of Forms, the totality of real beings. This unity of thought and Forms in a single reality is, to judge from the opposition which it aroused from Porphyry on his first entrance into the school and, apparently, from Longinus, one of the most original features of Plotinus' thought. The Middle Platonists had already taught "thoughts of God" (though the opposition to Plotinus suggests that this doctrine was not universally accepted in the school), but Plotinus goes a good deal beyond this in his assertion of the absolute co-equality and unity-in-diversity of thought, life, and being. The result is a complete transformation of the Platonic World of Forms. It is no longer a structure, logically or mathematically conceived, of static universal norms, but an organic living community of interpenetrating beings which are at once Forms and intelligences, all "awake and alive," in which every part thinks and therefore in a real sense is the whole; so that the relationship of whole and part in this spiritual world is quite different from that in the material world, and involves no sort of separation or exclusion. This unity-in-diversity is the most perfect image possible on the level of being (in the Platonic sense of formed, defined "suchness") of the absolute Unity of the One, whom Nous in its ordinary contemplation cannot apprehend as the One is in the One’s absolute simplicity; so it represents the One’s infinity as best it can in the plurality of Forms. Nous itself is infinite in power and immeasurable, because it has no extension and there is no external standard by which it could be measured, but finite because it is a complete whole composed of an actually existing number (all that can possibly exist) of Forms, which are themselves definite, limited realities. |
