What makes us free is the gnosis of what birth really is.
What makes us free is the gnosis of what rebirth really is.
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I find, to speak generally, that when people, possibly especially Westerners who come out of an overridingly Protestant movement in thought and of course the European Enlightenment, try to fit themselves back into religious moulds, try to readapt themselves to some preestablsihed religious viewpoint whether transcendental or 'nirvanic', they seem to end up short-changing themselves, and they distort themselves, become something they aren't and likely can never really be. In this distortion process---like fitting a square peg into a round hole?---something seems to happen to the personality: it seems to become a parody of an honest, present, direct person interested and capable of simply being present with other people and communicating about itself, about life, etc. The personality gets 'possessed' by a foreign installation but then also seems to fight tooth and nail to defend the installation and that which is distorting the self, rendering it, frankly, 'ugly'.
Obviously, I am speaking not abstractly but concretely. I don't give a flying holy fuck what anyone here---and especially the 'possessed'---think of me or say about me. I don't care if I am seen as aggressive, 'aesthetic', pantheistic, diffuse, 'feminine', or really anything at all. I am not interested in joining your movement or becoming a movement. I am not interested in feeding and supporting your [often incredibly overblown] ego-position nor of networking with you to help you build your ego-monument and then rush out into the world to 'save it from itself.'
I am beginning to realize that the hardest thing to do is just to be a person free of terrible constraints. I have been recently interested in and stimulated by much of what Cory has been expressing, not because I want to play the typical political games that are played here (which, I note, Dennis has played and continues to play openly, evoking in me one of the purest streams of contempt that I have ever felt for anyone in this space to date), but because his expressions are so starkly different and so much more spirited than almost anything I read on these pages.
Whatever he has done, seen, realized so to have gotten out from under this terribly darkening psuedo-intellectuality and pseudo-spirituality that is expressed here (that is strictly my own view), and which if I understand correctly has come in some part from choosing not to be 'submissive', is the kind of doing, seeing and realizing that I too would like to do. I notice a couple of things: it is that energy, that ability to see cleary and to express boldly, that has a strong, notable and immediate effect. I would call that 'spirituality'.
It has recently been prognosticated that whatever is happening here may lead to 'crash & burn', and while such things have happened, and will happen in the course of any man's life and evolution, it may not at all happen in such a way that it supports the prognosticator's RX, which of course (I think) come out of a kind of non-spiritual
submissiveness. That is a very interesting word: submissiveness. No matter how we look at it, how we look at ourselves in society, how we look at ourselves in relation to the world of ideas, or how we see ourselves in relation to all the existing spiritual and religious traditions, I suggest that 'submissiveness' is our direct enemy. And that means too those who serve 'submission' as the highest goal.
It's that thing about either tying knots, or untying knots.
I would---and this is strictly my own thinking and perspective here, no political games, no jockying for position---place whatever is occuring in this spiritual process in a definite contradistinction to what is generally sold on this forum as 'spirituality'. One way-of-being (to all appearances) awakens, fires up, stimulates, seeming too to lead to new and original ways of seeing the same old problems and a freer-flowing expression of the personality; and the other dampens, constrains, asks sumbission to authority, accepts the blows of the authority to the 'student', drowns in rotting rhetorical mush. But let's face it: What it
really does is
destroys spirituality even as it declares itself 'super-spiritual'. I don't think I need to go any further in demonstrating how this can occur than to present our most Illustrious, Rhetorically-driven Fool who does not even have to be named.
I am fascinated how it occurs that the 'thing' or the symbol that expresses the 'portal' that leads to Life, consciousness, truth, beauty, intelligence and all the rest, gets 'possessed' by those who do quite the opposite with it. It is like real estate: they buy it up, they build their little monument or temple, they assume they own it and can now
dole it out, but they drive it down into a pit, ruining it in substantial ways. And they do it shamelessly!
The 'aesthetical' question I am going to answer here: Our language tends to divide and chop things. In truth, aesthetics always arises in a context. In all cases (historically) it is a concurrent expression of design-values with the religious sentiments, the philosophical ideas, the way that men describe themselves and the Reality they describe in which they exist. There is no separate category of 'aesthetics'. Any man who becomes himself will, I suggest, also express himself 'aesthetically'. Meaning, his expression will reflect what he himself is. If it happens, and it certainly does happen, that people disconnect from the 'wellspring' of life, energy, vitality, truth, beauty, creativity or however you wish to express it, that is there for us to discover, imbibe, give form to, and no longer nourish their being in the world and their expression with the very same energy, then it can be said that their 'aesthetics' has become 'mundane'. But mundane is not the word, not really. It simply becomes disconnected from a holistic and vital way of expressing spirituality and religiosity. It becomes fluff, or interior decoration, or intellectual knick-knackery. One could also say 'perverse' and this wouldn't be far from the truth.
Art has to be motivated by core values, core values by 'genuine' connectivity to self, self by awareness and consciousness, and consciousness by fine and varied links to the higher (and lower) dimensions of the realm of existence in which we are, in which we occur. How a man does that, and what he does with that, is really up to him.
An interesting and considerable quote:
- God appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night,
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of Day.
---William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence".
Another:
- Man is in a trap...and goodness avails him nothing in the new dispensation. There is nobody now to care one way or the other. Good and evil, pessimism and optimism---are a question of blood group, not angelic disposition. Whoever it was that used to heed us and care for us, who had concern for our fate and the world's, has been replaced by another who glories in our servitude to matter, and to the basest part of our own natures.
---Lawrence Durrel, "Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness".