The Lost Community (and the Paradise of the Past).

The Lost Community and the Paradise of the Past.

Progress is definitely a RECENT invention.

It was really the product of the work of Hegel, a rather stuffy German intellectual of the eighteenth century.

As it turns out, Foucault was right in saying that every student of philosophy would find Hegel standing at the end of every corridor of contemporary Western thought. Yet Foucault made one classically French mistake: he excluded the Uninitiated Public. It is not only the philosopher who encounters Hegel. EVERY one encounters Hegel! Yet few know it.

This is not unlike the paradox of Samadhi. All beings are enlightened, but only the Initiated Few are aware of this fact. Elitism and egalitarianism are a duality that the ascetic yogi leaves behind.

Hegel was of course the teacher of Marx. And Marxism suffuses contemporary neo-Liberal thought, which permeates our media and social common sense.

Marx insisted that, as in the Hegelian model, history is a MARCH OF PROGRESS. Yet Hegel, the hyper-rational Virgo, (whose notorious Taurus pupil was of a common Earthly Element) had made the mistake of excluding any Religion that could not be rationalized. And so it would be with the man who famously uttered the words that “religion is the opiate of the masses.”

Consider what is considered the oldest Human Religion: (at least by its own estimation, which has not been out of accord with the findings of contemporary Aristotlean physics) Hinduism. According to Hinduism, Time is Cyclical. It comes not in waves but rather cycles. (I do not preclude that it can come all so in waves, but let us make the idiomatic accommodation for one moment.)

The Yuga Cycle begins in a Golden Age that is longer than any of the following Ages, and this is a period of Peace devoid of even the conception or the hint of Evil or Discord. Then the Cycle proceeds into the Silver Age, wherein Evil is first introduced in dim shades and creeping, unsettling whispers, not yet shocking but novel and disquieting. Evil bubbles up to the surface over those millennia, until it reaches Balance with Good in the Bronze Age. It is interesting to note that people are in our age often puzzled by Star Wars; “How can one restore Balance to the Force by destroying half of it?” The half is of course Evil, or the Dark Side. The Balance that our contemporary mind conceives of is the Warlike balance of the Bronze Age, and it speaks volumes of our depravity that we can think of balance only in terms of Equal Grounds for violence between two warring factions. The Balance that the Jedi speak of is of course the HARMONY of the Golden Age, devoid of the disturbing CHAOS that is Evil and Ignorance.

The Final Stage of the Yuga Cycle is the Iron Age. This is all so referred to as the Kali Yuga, the Age of Black Time. In this stage, Shiva takes the form of Kali, a daemon that enshrouds the Manifest World in Darkness and Despair. During this age, time speeds up, the Teachers of the Ancient Wisdom Disciplines are totally marginalized and ignored, and Evil triumphs over Good. The consequence is a cataclysmic event that has been Universally promised throughout the World’s Religions: The End of the World. At that point the Cycle begins anew, and Balance is restored.

We are living in the Kali Yuga presently.

We have been for a while.

It is said to end around 2025 or so.

Considering this perspective it is easy to see that progress is sort of a silly idea. Yes: science, reinforced by the Hegelian superstitions of the eighteenth century, (as well as those of the SEVENTEENTH century which Hegel himself drew upon) creates the illusion of progress. But think of the arts, for instance. Alan Watts said that we have to walk with two feet forward, that every step of one foot deserves a step by its opposite; that in short technological progress must be accompanied by an increase in SKILL in the use of that technology.

Yet the music industry shows otherwise. Musicianship is no longer respected as either a tradition NOR some thing that one can “just pick up” as though from a past life. The CORPORATION runs EVERY aspect of it. It tunes all the music to the same frequency, (A = 440 Hertz, a.k.a. Goebbels’ Frequency) exhibits an egregious and even barbaric degree of Compression (Bill O’Reilley once Fascistically denied that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were being used to torture prisoners from the Middle East, whose sensibilities for music would of course be of a surpassing subtlety, and his denial is despite the fact that audiophiles have called that very band “unlistenable” owing mainly to their Absurd compression tendencies), and confines our ears to four-chord songs by people who cannot sing artfully but are still praised for having won the vocal “competition” necessary to get a record deal. We all know that this Emperor is not wearing any clothes, but we subject ourselves to the monotony of redundant radio airplay because we are discouraged from complaining if we cannot Do, we are discouraged from Doing is we cannot Succeed, and we are told that we cannot Succeed unless we Conform, meaning, upon the reflection we perform in isolation, that we would simply Become-the-Problem by trying to solve it. And since we are all ostensibly “equal”, the isolated critic does not even think to raise his voice in Absurd Protest, for to do so would be to state a redundant fact, and if HE cannot do it, why should he believe that any body else (any one “better than him”, which he refuses to imagine) CAN?

It is not hard to imagine that we are living in the End Times when one considers just this one example. Our strides in technology, which Hinduism Itself had prophesized as the Mastery of the Electricities, have afforded us a studio abounding in recording hardware and software which remains in the hands of an Elite who control most of our Media and Common Sense. And what do they do with it? Devoid of tradition, save for that of the twentieth century, (when the Nazis were in power and had gained psychic influence, ostensibly, over the London Orchestra) the Industry ABUSES its technology and allows its puppets to be street-rats and vengeful degenerates who want only a skyrocket to success in place of the laborious process that it takes to MASTER something, REGARDLESS of whether or not one is ultimately Known for it. The Way of the Lone Ascetic Yogi has all but vanished; nothing is enjoyed for its own sake any more, for it is all ways made to serve a Utilitarian Process that would ultimately re-enforce the Consumer Capitalist Culture. Yet all the while liberals preach progress and pretend that civility is a product of the last seventeen years, and the very people who should be fighting the Corporate State are its staunchest advocates, every bit as much as they had been in 1970.

NOW do you believe me that the World is Coming to an End?

In context, it is laughable (though one shudders to laugh openly in public about it) when some millennial insists that the Past was Great if You Were White. The Hindus were not white, though the personification of their Saints was. The Zen Buddhists were not White, though they prized that colour above diamonds and rubies. Enlightenment and Purification is a Universal Human Theme. And it is ultimately the totalization of Individual Potential. So it would follow logically that the measure of a Culture’s Health is in relation to this Higher Good and Spiritual Greatness. So a hierarchy of cultures is totally appropriate and necessary; to live without it would be to delve into madness.

Discrimination used to be a term of masculinity, alongside its synonyms discernment and discretion. Decadence was a mark of shame; to have “class” meant to have attained great progress, or to have been born into a noble tradition and raised in accordance with it. To be “aristocratic” was lauded by even the most egalitarian of intellectuals, to be seated “upon a high horse” meant that one was courtly and sophisticated, and one met condescension with respect, for it was an opportunity to Learn Something. To be “old” was to be Wise, and no one spoke of Equality without sounding pretentious and self-entitled, for while there are standards by which to assess Superiority, and even these standards had to be tested, how can one assess Equality? Would any one ACTUALLY subordinate one’s self to the values of a total stranger just based upon that stranger’s WHIM? Who is HE to preach his own conception of Equality? In whose God’s Eyes are we Equal, that I might not be allowed to point out the error of another’s ways?

And this is not peculiar to our generation. It was a problem as early on as in Kierkegaard’s time. Yet as the problem grows so does ignorance of it. Once a theory is “disproven” by the Scientific Community, it is forgotten, however effective it was in enriching and even saving the Individual Life. Hence Jung’s work remains not only unfinished but untouched throughout the world of psychology, so that the vast majority of psychic data (the Unconscious) is left untapped and only a standardized set of tautological, self-contradictory theories about the Conscious mind – that do not even admit to their own contradiction, as Kierkegaard, Jung, and Buddha would! – is left in its place, like a stopper on the Soul.

What was life in the past, then?

In the past: it did not matter “who you were”. The millennial argument that Generation So-and-So was “good if you were white” etc. is silly because the notion of being “white” is in fact ALL SO a recent invention. Even if it was around at the conception of the United States, the traditions that DROVE that conception and its immediate aftermath reached back MUCH further, drawing on rich traditions as a mature Oak draws nutrients from its loamy home via its roots.

What made the Past GREAT was that what mattered was NOT “who you were” but WHAT SOCIETY WAS. No matter WHO you were in respect to the social hierarchy of your culture, you were a contributor TO this culture, and its collective greatness was yours. And this Goal, once attained, was of such brilliance that it could ubiquitously surpass any individual ambitions one might have. Even the LOWLIEST life form, the parasitic villain whose envy threatens to destroy the civil social fabric, was a Part of the Whole, and that is not distinct from the Beatific Vision that all the world’s religions since the early days of Hinduism have expressed. Yet the poetry is lost on the contemporary person who is so upset by the expression of his own “lowliness” (though it is not explicitly stated in his case; his own conscience and insecurity simply supplement the details.) that he ignores the point, which is literally the Bigger Picture: the WHOLE!!

It should be noted that I am not expressing a Fascistic paradigm, but rather its total antithesis, and not an antithesis in the sense of an equal opponent of equal terror and foreboding, but rather an antithesis in the sense of its rightful conqueror. (The former interpretation is a Kali Yuga attitude; the latter is a Bronze Age mentality, and the miscommunication between the two is analogous to the aforementioned distance between the Golden and Bronze Ages.)

Fascism commits the Fallacy of Naturalism. It insists that the Past was Great BECAUSE IT WAS THE PAST, and so only by FORCING OUR WAY we can RECREATE THE PAST. This is archaism. It is the reason that Romanticism has produced Fascism.

MY mentality is not Archaism. I do not purport that the Past is great BECAUSE it was the Past; let me be perfectly clear about that. I insist rather that the Past was Great because it was CLOSER TO ETERNITY. It is by finding ETERNITY that one transcends the Kali Yuga.

So in that sense Progress is possible. And it is only so in that sense. Because this is what transcendence of modernity offers that equality cannot:

Freedom.

Freedom to say what you feel even if others think you’re crazy.

Freedom from Kafkaesque institutions that obligate you to subordinate yourself to what the Corporate State approves of as a sensible state of consciousness.

Freedom to, as Levitch put it, “stand up on a chair in the middle of the room to change perspective.”

Freedom to preach one’s Truth, as part of a Greater Truth, without being condemned by those who arrogantly brag that they have none.

Freedom to love against the rules and to live out of one’s conscience even when it is above the Law.

Freedom from subordinating one’s Joys to the Will of the Group even when those Joys are of a HIGHER QUALITY than the Joys of the Group’s adherents, whose alarm and envy at one’s deviance is just as arbitrary as their own Joys.

Freedom to heal and to forgive those adherents without being taken advantage of BY them owing to the same ignorance that one has to heal and forgive in them.

Freedom to teach and to learn.

Freedom to EXCEL.

Freedom to TRANSCEND.

Freedom to LIVE AT ONE’S TOTAL CAPACITY, or at least to have that hope.

It is not unusual for a contemporary youth to consider the justifications underlying a ban on climbing Mount Everest. Rape cannot be justified to the millennial mind (at least not publically), but murder can. And so can the barbaric murder of our freedom, under the auspices of Our Protection!!

What became of the desire to fulfill that Spiritual Purpose that comes from climbing to the Highest Peak, at great personal risk to one’s petty human life, if only to come near to touching the Cosmos?!?

What became of the desire to grow up as the Redwood Tree does, to live simply by giving and receiving, never TAKING like the parasite does but neither being troubled by its pettiness, forever rooted and yet constantly reaching closer and closer to the Infinite, without NEEDING to dally or change direction and topple?!?

The Voices of the Past speak of these ideals.

And some of these voices are quite recent. They are only forgotten because, as time speeds up, forgetfulness gains in pitch, just as our music has risen by 8 Hertz from its Harmony with the Cosmos.

But it is not impossible to Progress still.

Find Inner Transcendence, and think not that this comes at the expense of External Accountability. It is rather that, as Kierkegaard explained and explicated, the Religious Dimension INFORMS the Moral One. And from either vantage point one can spot a fake or traitor. But ONLY from one of them; an aesthete who has not yet self-initiated his Spiritual Quest, but who has only pretended to it, or who has reached the apex of his Icarean flight and then plummeted into the Diabolical, has no opinion of value. His value is only as a part of the whole, as all parasites are. And as has all ways been known, it is only from a great height that he can be truly loved, for there is so little love from his own perspective. As I have stated, enlightenment transcends egalitarianism and elitism, including both. He too is a part of the Whole, but only by condescension towards him can this whole be seen, for he is blind to it.

And I say “SELF-initiated” not without sincerity.

The longing for the traditions of the past is fierce in many.

But guidance from the elders can do little for us now.

Even they are susceptible to ill persuasion now.

Each of us must find one’s own way.

Yet paradoxically solidarity matters more now than ever before.

One must marry individualism with solidarity.

One must learn to judge by the loyalty of one’s fellows.

Contradiction is not a problem, unless it is a faithlessness. Paradox is a test of faith, for it involves a leap of faith, riding without the training wheels of Reason. We must not confuse paradoxical contradictions for faithlessness. And we must learn to recognize faithlessness intuitively before it tears us apart again.

Namaste.

Dm.A.A.