Secularism and the Mystique of Nothingness (9.30.10)

As I have gnosissed on many occultions, the current divide between left and right, between a deeply illiberal leftism and the classic American liberalism of our founders, mirrors a hauntological divide that goes back to the very Origin and Center of the cosmos. Looked at in one way, the Origin and Center are situated in the distant past, where history blurs into myth. Looked at from an other angle, they can only be situated in the now.

Human beings are fallen creatures in a fallen world. This concept is thoroughly misunderstood by the secular mind. In fact, “misunderstood” is perhaps not strong enough a word, because it presumes that one may understand it from the outside. However, as is true of all important metaphysical ideas that are couched in religious language, they can only be comprehended from the inside. One must first be in a religious world to know the world from which religion arises. Otherwise you are somewhat like a music critic who happens to be deaf.

For similar reasons, many people believe that you must first somehow decide whether or not God exists before joining a religion, but the opposite is true. One becomes religious so as to make God present in one’s life. Whether or not God exists is a separate issue. The important point is to make him present and real, and thus inhabit the space where our true humanness emerges. Anything short of this makes you merely human, which is necessarily to say less than human, in the sense that a person who does not transcend himself sinks beneath himself (i.e., we are speaking vertically, not of wordly civil responsibilities and the rights that that derive from them).

Once upon a timeless, human consciousness made a choice that brought this fallen cosmos into being. In a sense, this choice was an inevitable consequence of our uncontained curiosity. What would such a world be like? A world of contingency, relativity, of separation from our source. Let’s do it!

It’s not a matter of assigning blame, because in order for there to be a cosmos at all--a mamafestivus for the rest of us--there must be a fall, for to say “manifestation” is to say “relative” is to say “other than the Absolute” is to say “alienation” is to say “remote from God.” And here we are.

So we make the leap from up to down and inside to out. We exchange essence for existence and plunge headlong into the starry naught, the cosmic nothing. The link with the invisible world is broken, and a visible world fills the void. Bang! What a strange, eery, beautiful place!

Having said that....

“We must distrust the fascination abysses can exert over us; it is in the nature of cosmic impasses to seduce and play the vampire; the current of forms does not want us to escape its hold. Forms can be snares just as they can be symbols and keys; beauty can chain us to forms just as it can be a door to the non-formal” (Schuon).

The “cosmic leftism” of which Petey, the merciful, the compassionate, speaks, is the fascination of the abyss. In other worlds, it is an extension of the fall as a solution to the fall. If we can only keep falling, then perhaps we will “break on through” to the other side, perfect mankind, create heaven on earth, and win the human race. Thus, on the deepest cosmic level, our puny cultural divide reflects a much larger choice: reverse the fall, or keep on plunging?

Leftists are activists. And they are socially aware. And they are committed. But their frenetic activity is a substitute for being, “the restless and disappointing turmoil of superfluous things”; their social awareness is a substitute for vertical awareness; and their commitment is an ersatz replacement for faith--a false absolute and graven image for purposes of idol worship. This is why leftism generates such emotionality in its adherents--it is religious emotion in the absence of religion.

Taken together, this plunge of illegiance to allusion represents a hypnotic capitulation to the self-created cosmic machine that drags us down, 32 feet per second per second. The reversal of this fall cannot be achieved, much less imposed, collectively. Rather, it can only be achieved through metanoia, repentance, or “turning around,” toward the light of the transpersonal sun and source.

Secularism begins and ends with the material world. Being that the material world is a shifting and transitory world, one can only derive a shifting and transitory metaphysic from its study. Furthermore, one will necessarily confuse the Principle with its manifestation. One will have to adhere to the bizarre metaphysic that the naturally supernatural mind that is able to know absolutely is somehow derived from relative matter. And if you can believe that, you'll believe anything, which is why so much of wackademia is a moonbatument to folly.

Here is what we have heard from the wise. In “reality,” the cosmos is a “message from God to Himself by Himself.” But this should by no means be taken as an excuse for pantheism or narcissism, since the message is nonetheless real. For while God is both Alpha and Omega, sender and receiver, above and ahead, the message is deployed in time, which is one of the names of Eternity. We have received the message when we have achieved our end. Which is to say, beginning. A new beginning. Perpetually born. Existence renewed. At the razoredgeon.

We were children once, still close to God, fleshly reflecting our celestial origin, older than Abraham, young as a babe's I AM. Then we became very old, very adolt, methusalossed in maya. But then we went 'round the bend, where our past and future finally caught up with us. But only now. And again.