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The State, like the Church, demands enthusiasm, self-sacrifice and love, and if religion requires or presupposes the 'fear of God', then the dictator State takes good care to provide the necessary terror...... then the ethical decision of the individual not longer counts - what alone matters is the blind movement of the masses, and the lie has thus become the operative principle of political action. We watch chaos unfold into our own logic, yet we still fail to understand. We dont know what we what no more, we know we want extremes. We don't know what they need no more, to bring them to there knees. We hurt each other. We help each other. We kill each other and love each other and generally suffer the slaughter of bored failure in between.We treat people, plants, animals and the Earth with contempt, deceit, unbound venality and slobbering greed. What faith we muster is often blind with self-righteousness or is merely a garbage can lid to keep the flies from making maggots, the dogs from scattering our trash on the front lawn, our dirty little secrets and decaying shame displayed for all to see. And then a small child cuts a crooked cherry limb for a sword, lifts the garbage can lid for a shield, and sallies forth to vanquish the real dragons guarding the real grails, the empty grails depicting in precious stone the marriage of the sun and moon. We didn't change our minds, our minds changed us. There is no drug stranger than reality, because reality, despite our arrogant, terrified, hopeless insistence, doesn't require our perceptions, merely our hopeless presence. To an extent, mysticism and the modern sciences appear antithetical. Mysticism is generally considered experiential and holistic, and mystical experiences held to be beyond expression; modern philosophy, psychology and physics being overtly analytical, verbal, and reductionist. However, through much of history mystical and philosophical thought were closely entwined. Plato and Pythagoras, and to a lesser extent Socrates, had clear mystical elements in their teachings; many of the great Christian mystics were also prominent philosophers, and certainly Buddha's Sutras and Shankara's 'Crest Jewel of Discrimination' (fundamental texts in Buddhism and Advaitan Hinduism, respectively) display highly analytical treatments of mystical ideas. As well, the pursuit of knowledge in the realm of physics has been accepted for much of history as inseparable from understanding the mind of God - up to the 20th c. comment by Einstein that "God does not play dice," referring to the unfathomable discoveries of quantum physics. The rift between mysticism and the modern sciences derives mainly from elements of scientism in the latter: certain branches of the natural sciences, broadly disavow subjective experience as meaningless, misunderstanding the limitations of the ancient languages in describing the abstract. That said, several areas of study in philosophy address the same issues that concern the mystic, and modern physicists now struggle to understand a multiple dimensional reality that mystics' have attempted to describe for millenia. Furthermore, Continental philosophy, tends to be concerned with issues closely related to mysticism, such as the subjective experience of existence in Existentialism. It should be noted that while existentialism suggests a nothingness rather than a oneness, the mystic's pursuit of emptiness - despite its fear producing angst - for the sake of union with the Divine, points directly toward a potential unity between physics and psychology that does not at present exist. The mystic's attempt to describe cause and effect between one's internal state and the miraculous, hints at a close connection between psychological stability (ego transcendence) and the mysterious realm of causality quantum physicists are now deciphering.
Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate pout it's upper limit at about 40 percent of the electorate. Since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man's outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconsistant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the polical groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness. The bird-feed, if it really arrives, will last a long time. We don't need to think beyond that. Who knows what will be by then. In searching out the truth be ready for the unexpected, for it is difficult to find and puzzling when you find it. Since all is a plenum, all matter is connected and all movement in the plenum produces some effect on other bodies, in proportion to the distance between them. Hence everybody is affected not only by those with which it has contact, and thus feels in some way everything that happens to them; but through them it also feels those that touch the ones with which it is in immediate contact. Consequently, everybody experiences everything that goes on in the universe, so much so that he who sees everything might read in any body what is happening everywhere, and even what has happened or will happen. He would be able to observe in the present what is remote in both time and space. Every object has two aspects: The common aspect, the one generally seen or heard by everyone, and the metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals see or hear at moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical meditation. A work of art must relate to something that does not appear in it's visible form. We live in an age when darkness reigns and only the shadows and shapes of love remain. PEACE.
Et quid amabo nisi quod aenigma est
We have learned that human nature has a black side, and that not man alone possesses this side, but his works, his institutions, and his convictions as well. Even our purest and holiest beliefs can be traced to the crudest origins. This way of looking at things even has it's justification, for the begining of all livings things is simple and lowly; we build our houses from the ground up. No thoughful person will deny Reinach's explanation of the Last Supper in terms of primitive toteism is fraught with meaning; nor will they object to the incest-theme being pointed out in the myths of the Greek divinities. It is painful to interperet radiant things from the shadow-side, and so in a measure reduce them to their origins in dreary filfth. It seems to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weekness in man, if an explanation from the shadow-side has a destructive effect. The horror which we feel for such interpretations is entirely due to our own barbaric or childish naivete, which believes there can be heights without corresponding depths, which blinds us to the really 'final' truth that, when carried to extremes, opposites meet.
