Oeaohoo

I haven’t yet listened to all of it but it seemed to be an evocation of the fluid aspect of consciousness, the alchemical prima materia which is pure formless substance that can consequently take any shape. It also reminded me of Lovecraft’s fiction, without of course his reactionary politics… In a literary-historical context, a peculiar mix of modernist stream of consciousness and desert Burning Man psychedelia!

Why not go all the way? Two cheeks of the same arse! It’s been a long time since conservatives actually conserved anything… Besides, particularly in America, what do you really have that is worth conserving? Very little in the way of deep-rooted traditions, sacred sites or proven pathways to higher states of being; just Puritanical Protestantism and a stupid constitution declaring the “self-evident truths” that all “human beings” have the “right” to “live” as animals, to debase themselves in the name of “liberty” and to “pursue happiness” at the expense of all spiritual accomplishments… I say: Get rid of it! Not that the situation is much better in most other places. As I understand it, the real meaning of modern progress is expressed in Nietzsche’s phrase: ‘that which you can’t teach to fly, teach to fall faster!’ You are right, though, that progress without conservatism is essentially suicide: welcome to what Burnham called the ‘Suicide of the West’!

That is certainly one possibility. Others might temporarily retreat to a concern for their own development, whether material or spiritual, and wait for a more auspicious time to engage with external events. Some might even engage with political matters whilst recognising the futility of it, either for it’s own sake or for the possibilities it might offer in terms of their personal development. Also, I don’t mean to prescribe a universal formula: it is possible that some people in “Tier 2” will feel called to act in some way in our current political climate and find ways to do worthwhile work within it. I just can’t help but feel that it is mostly wasted effort. In some sense all earthly endeavours are a compromise; after all, Truth, Love, Wisdom and all the rest of it are metaphysical realities of which the physical world is only a reflection. Our aim should be to make this world as clear of a reflection of these realities as possible. However, it is one thing to compromise with Truth itself, another to compromise with a healthy social order, and another still to compromise with an unhealthy one. To quote a typical passage of one of our last British Sages, Thomas Carlyle: To me, at least, working within the present system can only be a form of “ignoble conservatism”! Well, within the model “Stage Yellow” represents a shift back towards individualism and away from collectivism. “Stage Green” can therefore confuse this with the individualism of prior stages.

I would suggest that “Tier 2” is not compatible with a political system reduced to a system of compromises, which are essentially partial allegiances with the forces of “Tier 1”. In such a system, everything from a “Tier 2” perspective comes down to how one conceptualises history as a system: those who view history in terms of universal and linear progress will side with the most “spirally developed” “Tier 1” candidate, whilst those who view history in cyclic terms relative to a given civilisation will side with those who are most appropriate for the political moment. The former is what is generally seen around here. I would also like to say, though it isn’t necessarily relevant to this discussion, that the distinction between “Tier 1” and “Tier 2” is really just a liberal form of the ancient distinction between patricians and plebeians. It is not a matter of “stages of development” but of leaders destined to rule, who therefore require a direct connection with the divine and a capacity to think systematically, and of people destined to obey, who therefore require a mediated connection with the divine and to confine their concern to their own livelihoods; only the disdain for innate difference which abounds today requires everything to be framed in terms of “personal development”. That is not to say, of course, that the difference between the ruling and ruled classes is entirely innate and that there can be no social mobility. After all, the real “Tier 2” ambition is to create an Augustinian City of God as a pure physical reflection of metaphysical reality, and I don’t see much likelihood of that happening today… Why would anyone in “Tier 2” want to waste their precious time with this hopeless world of compromises? Better to let it destroy itself, as it understandably seems all too willing and able to do, and see what can emerge out of the ruins.

Beautiful. It is worth drawing out something that is implied in this: satanic pride is a deviated form of the heroic impulse. It is a failure of a trial, the result of pursuing a goal for which one is not qualified or prepared; in this case, “a state pure souls alone were able to attain.” Initiation, particularly in the pre-Abrahamic world, was often a matter of trials of this sort, ensuring that only those deserving of the highest truths would be able to receive them. After all, there is something audacious and almost arrogant in the pursuit of ultimate liberation: one is seeking to go beyond society and all human knowledge, the limitations of embodied existence and even of all gods as they are conceived; Buddhism in particular emphasises this aspect of conquering the gods themselves. If one deviates from the path during this pursuit, one danger is that the arrogance which was necessary in the beginning becomes inflated and takes on a titanic or even demonic form. In medieval chivalric literature, which also had an initiatic dimension in the sense that I have described it, this temptation was represented through the female figure of Orgeluse, whose name is literally the Old French word for “Pride”.

Maybe it would turn out a little like this joke of mine:

Very nice. Is it all one poem? Starting as being ‘arraigned by the dark Power that hates all bliss’ and ending as ‘rapt in the heart-beats of God’s ecstasy’ seems appropriate. I particularly like the way the earlier poems describe finding oneself entrenched in the machinations of illusion; it reminds me of the mortification and the Black Sun of the alchemical process. Of course. I have no illusions about what is possible or realistic today; we have to face the realities of our situation. If even in Aristotle's day, prior to the ready availability of sensual delights and overstimulation of every kind, it was true that 'the majority of men are evidently quite slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts,’ how much more true must this be today? The difference in our case is that Western society has ceased to serve any other purpose than catering to the tastes of these “slavish beasts". Those who are so mired in externality and the greed for mere experience, living only for the intoxication of the senses, will of course have a frivolous and sacrilegious attitude towards the sacred. There can be no going back, though. In what Hesiod described as the Heroic Age, situated between the Bronze and the Iron Age, there was the possibility of a temporary restoration of the primordial Golden Age. In the Iron Age, however, there can be no restoration: the only way out is through the dark night; excluding of course the realisation that it is all imaginary anyway. I’m sure that will all sound like a lot of made up nonsense to you. Never mind… Nietzsche has a wonderful insight in this regard: I love the sentence: 'Nothing avails: one must go forward — step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern "progress")'! I didn’t mean to imply that Nothingness is actually dark. It is often symbolically represented as such, however, because anything that you positively ascribe to it is false; any ascription is a limitation, and we are talking about that which is beyond limitation. Ah, yes. I actually couldn’t remember where I had heard those funny designations. It must have been when I was reading about him. I’m only really familiar with him through the references of a rather peculiar English occultist called Kenneth Grant. Some of his art seems nice though; that being said, the man he has dubbed “Carl Junk” was undoubtedly a better artist!

I just wanted to quickly refute the idea that the supposed evolution from tribal forms to modern forms is necessarily a shift from individualism to collectivism. This is the sort of thing I was referring to: In this sense, history is a movement away from collectivism towards the differentiation of the individual. Jung often claims that, in the archaic and “primitive” mind, there is a synthetic, lived and holistic vision of the world; the modern mind, he says, is instead characterised by the developments of analysis, detachment and a vision of the world primarily in terms of separation. I understand that this is more or less what models like Spiral Dynamics write off as a “mythic” and “childish state. In any case, I don’t agree with him because I see no reason to believe that the so-called “primitives” he is talking about - for example the tribal Aboriginal peoples of Australia - are really representative of the type of man that preceded modern civilisations. Given that a certain historical framing views things as advancing more or less like this - individual humans in a Hobbesian fight for survival; formation of tribal allegiances; establishment of small cross-tribal villages; development of farming and creation of city-states; institution of nations; international corporatism - it is significant that, in a way, this can actually be viewed as a movement away from collectivism and towards the individual; an individual who, because of his detachment and separation from life, has developed all of the hang-ups and complexes which Sigmund Fraud and Carl Junk were able to make a “science” out of. This is one thing in which I can agree with Jung. The forms of collectivism which he had seen emerging are almost like a sort of demonic inversion of the totems, fetishes, sacrificial scapegoats and individual subsumption into the collective of so-called “primitive” - again, I say so-called not because I think this term is offensive, but because I do not believe that the people to whom it refers are really historically primitive - tribal identities. In this regard, his case that Nazism represented the resurfacing of pre-Christian Germanic Paganism, in particular of the warrior god Wotan, is quite convincing. Of course. I would just question whether the contemporary view of reality is really one with more scope... In the same way that Muslim pilgrims circle around the Black Stone of Mecca, which Muslims around the world face in prayer, and that the Holy of Holies is kept in the inner heart of the Jewish Tabernacle. Think of the way that an ancient temple was structured: Since the ultimate reality is formless and transcendent, symbolic representations of it are generally in some way negative. Hence the concealment and “blackness” of the Kaaba and the inaccessibility of the Holy of Holies, which would only be attended by the High Priest on the day of Yom Kippur. A similar principle underlies the centrality of divine figures such as Buddha or Christ within their religions, of enlightened masters within their communities, or even dare I say of the great Monarchs and Emperors... Of course, these aren’t necessarily idyllic or perfect manifestations; they simply give an idea of what it means for a society to be oriented around the transcendent. Nor should we mistake them for anything more than earthly reflections and symbols of transcendent realities. Then again, the earth itself and all of human existence are ultimately only symbols in this same way. After all, this is just another way of saying that everything is a dream in the mind of God. Certainly. To me it is the ultimate lesson of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The preliminary teachings of Zarathustra, particularly that of the Superman, are only relevant in terms of their leading towards the goal of the realisation of Eternal Recurrence...

I’m not sure that it does. The questioner here went from discussing the question of individualism-collectivism to the question of progress. I suppose they are related in his mind because the same people who might say that collectivism is superior to individualism would believe in progress, on the basis that over the course of history we have supposedly shifted from limited tribal identities to more universal and all-encompassing ones. I say supposedly… I know that you have read Jung: doesn’t he speak about how it is in fact individualism which is the discovery of so-called “civilised” man? The positive aspect that we would organise ourselves around is obviously God, ideally conceived non-theistically in terms of pure formless transcendence. Feudalism, for example, was somewhat inferior in that it was oriented towards a relatively dualistic and theistic-personal conception of God. As far as life as it is lived, this would be manifested as the orientation of all aspects of existence towards the goal of ultimate liberation. I would view most of these things through the distinction that you introduced to me: fundamental vs. significant. Gender, sex and race are very fundamental realities but they are of little ultimate significance. What significance they do have is more in terms of determining the nature and content of the path that one takes in this life, not in the ultimate destination of that path. For example, the spiritual path of a woman is likely to emphasise some form of devotion or love - whether to children, a lover, a guru or a deity - whereas the path of a man is likely to emphasise truth and self-overcoming, notwithstanding certain exceptions which are nonetheless part of the overall order. A similar line of argument could be developed as regards questions of race and sexual orientation. For example, there are marked differences between the Christian religion as it manifests in Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, Ethiopian Orthodoxy, and Western European Catholicism and Protestantism. These differences are obviously a manifestation of underlying racial differences, which ultimately serve to make explicit the many facets of the Christian faith and the potential variations of its symbology. They do not change the fact, which is the only one of any ultimate significance, that all Christians seek salvation and redemption in Christ. Nevertheless, it is not generally possible to simply bypass fundamental realities. The postmodern attempt - and remember that it is only in the postmodern era that the terms racism, sexism and so on have taken on a unilaterally negative meaning - to deny these fundamental realities is more or less akin to the Marxist attempt to “immanentise the eschaton” which I have described above: it is the ultimate dissolution of all limited forms which is characteristic of a transcendent experience, but conceived in material and not spiritual terms. In short, true universalism does not deny difference but integrates it into a transcendent unity. As Guénon says, “in the principial order all multiplicity is synthetically comprehended in unity itself.” I also won’t deny that a certain part of me seeks to take revenge on a world with which I have so little in common. Blaspheming the sacred idols of today is a way to do that. I accept that this is rather childish and futile but I trust that I will grow out of it soon enough. Maybe it is a sort of left-hand path… By alienating myself from this world I am reminded of it’s unreality. You’ve read Nietzsche, after all: his later works demonstrate a similar tendency in this regard.

…and this is absolute truth, not just my own take. Collectivism always wins but in the same sense that death comes to everybody. The decline of a society is always characterised by the abdication of authority by the ruling class. To fill the void left by this, there is an “uprising” of the ruled class, who are collectivistic mass men by conditioning and generally even by nature, into positions of power. These people then impose a collectivistic order emphasising the well-being of the masses and feminine values - as Gustave Le Bon showed, the crowd is feminine - like safety and conformity. This order is fundamentally illegitimate, having been established by the ruled class whose nature is to serve and obey, and so sooner or later it inevitably collapses. The dawn of collectivism, then, is like the night falling on a human civilisation. This is largely explained by the fact that, despite all of its claims to universalism, the postmodern mindset is very parochial. It’s scope is very much confined to Western history, and since given the myopia of the modern mentality the “pagan” and Christian traditions of Europe can only be conceived in terms of primitive superstition and barbarism, history for it really begins at around the time of the Renaissance. From the Renaissance onwards, it is true that “progress” - conceived in terms of the destruction of all social bonds and a convergence towards the universal hegemony of atomised globalism - has achieved one victory after another: from the triumph of the nation conceived in abstract terms over the organic institutions of the medieval world; through to the so-called enlightenment, the French and American revolutions and constitutionalism; through to the revolutions of 1848 and the establishment of the hallowed Liberal Democracy; through to the emancipation of the slave and the related triumphs of universal suffrage and Bolshevism; and finally to global Socialism and the fetishisation of the worker, the slave and even the pariah. In fact, most people today do not even know about these things: for them, history begins in 1945. The victory of “progress” is then construed in terms of the allied powers winning what Eisenhower righteously called the “crusade in Europe” against Italian Fascism and German Nazism, with a gradual extension of the term “fascism” to refer to all traditional European statecraft. The sacred landmarks of the pilgrimage of progress are in this case: the Civil Rights movement and “desegregation”, “women’s liberation” and “gay rights”; the gradual raising of “living standards” and “quality of life”, ironically accomplished through a combination of international slavery, mistreatment of the animal and plant kingdoms on a totally unprecedented scale, and the perfection of automised mechanistic industry; the democratisation of knowledge itself through the internet and mass media; now finally culminating in the mashing up of all mankind into one caramel-coloured mocha paste of transgendered delight. Thus, we see the scope of history ever-narrowing because the triumph of tolerance is increasingly unable to tolerate anything other than itself. Now… If you make the effort to transcend this parochial postmodern historical framing, it becomes quite clear that progress has not always triumphed: what was once a monumental empire can at any moment be made into a mound of mud; what was once a dazzling dynasty can devolve into depraved decadence or despotic despondency; what was once the crowning accomplishment of human civilisation can be assailed by crusaders or curtailed by corruption, collapsing from conquest to servility and from assertiveness to senility. In fact, to quote the historian Spengler, it is precisely progress which always loses: Lastly, I have just been reading an Egyptian hermetic text from the 3rd Century A.D., Asclepius, in which, after stating that when mankind ceases to honour the gods they will swiftly depart from us, the author laments: Did progress win in this case? It is rather that socialism is an inverted and profane parody of Christianity. Like John Michael Greer points out in his essay, The Religion of Progress: Let us not forget that Marx himself was descended from a line of Rabbis going back hundreds of years… In any case, the key difference is that Christ’s kingdom is “not of this world”; the Marxist end-state, especially given Marx’s extreme materialism, would be entirely of this world alone. This is what it means to lament that modern ideologies seek to “immanentise the eschaton”. Do you think that Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, would have wanted to live under “fully automated luxury communism”?

You see, I am not convinced that globalism is really a broader and less partial perspective. If I may be permitted a short explanation… To me it seems that the various forms of nationalism were a last stand of form against formlessness. As a last stand, they admittedly had an exaggerated and one-sided character. This character is seen in those aspects of nationalism which are tendentiously highlighted by progressive and anti-national forces: an unduly low regard of the female sex, other ethnic groups, and other sexual proclivities being the main complaints. However, this overlooks that even the nation still served in some way to facilitate the individual in their engagement and participation with the world around them. With the advent of globalism, this was jettisoned, because caring about everybody is practically the same as caring about nobody. It is totally impractical to impose globalism on people because in the vast majority of cases, they do not have any way to act upon or change the globe; after all, most people can’t even change themselves! This explains the paradox that while, on the one hand, we live in a globalised society, we also live in the society of the “atomised individual”: the two are synonymous. Globalism is therefore something closer to Nietzsche’s “cold brute”, a snarling monster of narcissistic individualism masquerading as a system of universal compassion, and as such it is the final triumph of what is formless over what gives form.

In a way what you have said is besides the point. Globalism either exists or it doesn’t; it can’t simultaneously be a kooky conspiracy theory and a reality. And… Of course. That is the natural interpretation of those who assume that: a) mankind is progressing, therefore globalism, since it came later, is more advanced than nationalism; or b) the more people, and even groups of people, contained under a shared system, the better. Both of these are certainly questionable assumptions. I agree with Mr. Bunny in that it seems your question has already been answered. Haha, that would certainly be more honest. Seems a bit ridiculous to have a TOXIC tag on a forum user though.

There have always been and will always be elites: there was an Emperor and a Patrician class in Ancient Rome; there was a Pharoah and High Priests in Ancient Egypt; there was a Shah and Magi in Ancient Persia; there was a Pope, an Emperor and Cardinals in Christian Europe; and so on ad infinitum. This is because human society is a microcosm of Heaven: God is the ultimate Monarch and his servants, which in the Christian tradition at least have been construed as Angels, are the High Priests of this domain. (Now there is “Dark Brandon” and a priestly caste of Zuckerberg, Bezos and Larry Fink. Bravo to progress! Even on this forum we see the same pattern: Leo has the ultimate authority, the moderators have lesser degrees of authority, and “we the people” have still less). We can also give a mundane justification for the inevitable existence and dominance of elites: it is much easier for a minority to organise than a majority. A majority is almost always a chaotic mess; a minority can hone in on a shared vision and purpose. Given this easily explainable tendency towards elite dominance, and given that there has always been elites, why would there suddenly be no elites today? Given that we live in a globalised society, what else can they be but globalist elites? I am not claiming that they are all Jewish, as your triple brackets imply. The only thing which could have given you that impression was a light-hearted joke about the “Christian” Peterson teaming up with the “Jewish” Shapiro to form a true “Judeo-Christian” alliance! If nothing else, it is a placeholder for an identity that was supposed to be instigated by culture, religion and tradition. It is the flag of the secularised world whose “religion” is individual self-expression. To a certain extent, whether it has been promoted by an elite or has emerged naturally to fill the void left by the death of God is unimportant. So… When “right-wing” people talk about globalism it is a totally imaginary conspiracy theory but when left-wing people talk about it is the beautiful and inevitable future that we are openly advocating for and bringing about? Talk about gaslighting. These are the games of the new “priestly” caste. This is exactly what I had described: in this final form of conflict, the opposing side are not enemies but “lunatics”. The capacity for interpersonal relationships has been so diminished by the solipsistic world of postmodern hyperreality that anyone who diverges from an accepted narrative can only be insane.

Exactly, apolitical within the context of the forum. Well, he is “not involved” in the politics section of this forum anymore! All things must pass! Only God is permanent…

Like many others, almost five years ago I had a brief phase of listening to Mr. “It’s Not Obvious” himself but I quickly outgrew it. The mask of fame has eaten into his face and now he too has “sold his soul” to the likes of Shapiro… It seems he really is a Judeo-Christian after all! I suppose it is possible that a little of his influence remains in me but even when I listened to him I basically knew what he was: someone undeserving of the influence he would attain who has mostly only mastered the art of preaching profound-sounding banalities. I will grant you that Dr. Peterson is a genuine “pedantic posturer” if there ever was one. Ultimately though, these are all just the the fake and flimsy pre-packaged oppositions that we are offered today: woke or libertarian; “cancel culture” or “free speech”; Justin Trudeau or Jordan Peterson... It all belongs to the same trash heap, no matter how hard anyone might try to convince themselves of the superiority of one over the other with silly models like Spiral Progress. Globalism is a Faustian project and the rainbow flag is the flag of globalism. In order to maintain a globalist order, it is necessary to destroy all organic bonds between people: of blood, of culture, of tradition, of family and yes, of gender and sex. The paradigm of the non-reproductive sexual union is therefore promoted by globalist ideology as part of the overarching procedure of uprooting and desacralising all of human existence. I might add that this makes just as much sense from those who would analyse the postmodern world with the terms “neoliberalism” or “late capitalism”: the uprooted mass man (or, should I say, the cosmopolitan postmodern nomad!) is the perfect consumer. There is a deep emptiness in the soul of this man, a void left by the absence of God, of Dharma and really of all organic ties to anything other than his own mundane survival, his gratification and his right to proudly express a “self” which for the most part remains completely unknown to him. In truth, most of the time, he doesn’t even have any idea who he is or what he wants! I try to view things in terms of their ultimate significance: the rapid increase in deviant forms of sexuality is just one more “sign of the times”, as the Christians would say. That doesn’t mean that anyone engaging in these practices is evil and undeserving of compassion. It just means that we live in a very exhausted age; an age which seems to have as its principle purpose the exploration of those peculiar possibilities which would not have been permitted in most prior societies. Nationalism, like everything else, needs to be regarded within an overarching historical frameworks. Nation states in the modern sense emerged out of the rather brutal Hundred Years’ War and thus are more or less associated with the “age of expansion” and the degenerating societies of Christian Europe. Viewed in these terms, we can say that the emergence of nationalism was a negative indicator, shifting the political emphasis away from real ties between real people and towards lifeless abstraction and soulless bureaucracy. However, this tendency towards the abolition of all genuine and legitimate social bonds has in our time been taken much further by the ideologies of universal suffrage, socialism and their love child, globalism. It is thus appropriate to oppose all forms of globalising dissolution with the nation even if the nation is itself a decrepit institution from a higher point of view. I specifically used the word postmodernism because I was jokingly complaining about the lack of historical sense that people generally have today. It seems that, where this isn’t just a result of the failures of education, it is motivated by the way that the postmodernist conceptualises themselves as being situated outside of history, almost as having escaped from history. Not only this, but postmodernism claims to deny all grand narratives and history itself is the ultimate grand narrative. Regardless of all of this, the essence of what I had said was simply that, particularly when discussing things like politics, we have to face some basic realities of limited existence. Conflict is a game between friends and enemies, an “us” and a “them”. It is only natural that since this forum upholds a certain idea of what constitutes “us”, anything outside of that will not be tolerated.

Given my inclination to pointlessly try to reinstall some degree of the historical sense into the screen-rotted brain of the cosmopolitan postmodern nomad, I would also like to point out that the phenomenon I described above becomes increasingly apparent as you approach the modern day. The nature of war has degenerated over time in roughly the following way: War as the pure symbol of a spiritual conflict: found in Zoroastrianism, pre-Abrahamic “paganism” and reaching its ultimate expression in the Bhagavad Gita. War as a confused expression of spiritual and material conflict: the two Jihads, Christian Holy War. War as a primarily material conflict: the mercantile feuds of post-Renaissance Europe and the related colonial wars. War as an inverted spiritual, or ideological, conflict: the wars between liberal democracy, fascism and communism. It seems to me that we are now dealing with a fifth case which is more absurd than any of the others: war as anti-war. A war which can no longer even recognise itself as a war but only as the inevitable triumph of the forces of “progress” against any semblance of culture and tradition. If you are on the other side of this war it is not even that you are an enemy: you are insane and utterly irreconcilable with the victorious worldview and thus anything you say can only seem like “toxic gaslighting” to its defenders.

In this context, I think “apolitical” refers to the persons status on the forum rather than any political beliefs they may or may not have: a user is a “apolitical” because their political views are not allowed on this forum, not because they don’t have any. Exactly. We are in a culture war. The usual rules and mechanics of warfare naturally apply: you are either a friend or an enemy; in this case, you are either with the forces of “progress” or you are against them. The only thing which is unusual in our case is that the progressive liberal democratic regime is essentially a systemic denial of this war dynamic: a Faustian effort to transcend all distinctions and unite the whole world under one big Rainbow flag. Thus, enemies can no longer be recognised simply as enemies but have to be dismissed in a more dishonest and dare I say feminine manner: they are genuinely “toxic” negative influences seeking only to “gaslight” you, as opposed to people with a radically different perspective of the present situation. If you aren’t on the side of progress, this probably isn’t the forum for you. Which reminds me… why am I here?

In Islam the two Jihads are not opposed to one another: the “external” and lesser Holy War, which of course like everything else is only a self-projection in the mind of Allah, is accepted as a symbol and a lesser expression of the greater Holy War against one’s own illusion of separation from Allah. One has to remember that these latter-day religions are designed for an extremely degenerate humanity. The doctrine of the Lesser Jihad is a way for the Islamic doctrine to not only accept but utilise the inevitable tendency of fallen man towards projection and externality. Fighting the outer enemy is a way to fight the inner enemy. Therefore, it is not necessarily a matter of ceasing to project one’s devilry onto others but of giving the fight against this devilry a metaphysical, rather than a crudely physical, dimension.

Probably because Christianity itself has slowly been becoming a vehicle of the Antichrist since at least the Protestant Reformation. The American deviations seem to emphasise a particularly degraded form of conservatism. Most European Christians are precisely the opposite, hating Trump and jumping on all the progressive bandwagons: supporting refugees, prayers for Ukraine, a cathedral near me even became a centre for Covid vaccinations… On this note, here is an enlightening passage from the book The System of Antichrist: Truth and Falsehood in Postmodernism and the New Age by Charles Upton: By this estimation, I am not convinced that Trump is himself the Antichrist but rather a defining feature in the ambience out of which the Antichrist shall emerge.

@AtheisticNonduality Amazing! I hope that even if you aren’t able to agree with his overall assessment you will still find parts of his analysis valuable and enlightening. ‘Guénon sees history as a descent from Form (or Quality) toward Matter (or Quantity); but after the Reign of Quantity - modern materialism and the “rise of the masses” - Guénon predicts a reign of “inverted quality” just before the end of the age: the triumph of the “counter-initiation”, the kingdom of Antichrist.’ This is the essential premise. Most of all, Guénon does not want to be a “philosopher” with all the vanity and banality that the modern sense of that term, even in the case of undeniably insightful thinkers like Nietzsche, implies. Instead, he sets as his task the simple elucidation of principles; principles which are derived from traditional wisdom and ultimately from the founder of all traditions: God, the Principle of creation itself. One of Guénon’s greatest merits is his constant emphasis on the aspect of inversion: as just one example, the modern understanding of unity as ‘the uniformity of beings denuded of all their qualities’, which is the essential ambition of all progressive political ideologies, is an inversion of true unity, in which all distinctions are included and transcended. The Reign of Quantity demonstrates how this mechanism of inversion has been applied to every aspect of modern existence, culminating in “The Great Parody” which is “Spirituality Inverted”. I could go on but Guénon speaks for himself. I’ll look forward to hearing what you have to say about it. Incidentally, here is a somewhat Leonian passage on the insufficiencies of the scientific mentality: ‘The profane sciences of which the modern world is so proud are really and truly only the degenerate residues of the ancient traditional sciences, just as quantity itself, to which they strive to reduce everything, is no more than the residue of an existence emptied of everything that constituted it’s essence; thus these pretended sciences, by leaving aside or even intentionally eliminating all that is truly essential, clearly prove themselves incapable of furnishing the explanation of anything whatsoever.’

Mr. Volcano has a very negative view of all social, worldly or even human ambitions. That is why he often erupts, laughing demonically as smoke pours out of his mouth and his lava pours down into local human settlements, dissolving all of the pathetic monuments they have erected to their petty ambitions! Joking aside, it is interesting how followers of a spiritual teacher often serve to inflate the teacher’s negative aspects, as I see a subtler form of the same nihilism in Leo’s teachings. It is a bit like the tendency towards “naive skepticism” you described a while back, in which advanced spiritual truths are misapplied to deny more fundamental, if less significant, realities.

If you think panpsychism is baloney, wait until you hear about panprotopsychism!

That has nothing to do with the state of Enlightenment (not my preferred term), only with its expression in the world. I can agree with you though: enlightenment in the past meant transcending all human limitations; today it seems to be more about building muscles and going bald whilst churning out endless “meta-theoretical frameworks”! Bravo to the Sacred Law of Progress! Anyway, this forum has given me what little it had to offer. You are probably the most intelligent person on here, and that isn’t a compliment.

Hahaha, of course it would be… Onwards and upwards we go forever and ever! Even enlightenment obeys the Sacred Law of Progress?! Guénon is making the point that the peak of the ascent is liberation from the cosmos and thus from change itself, the attainment and possession of the eternal. The descent then involves permeating the lower world with this transcendent freedom. Your response is very predictable because you seem to be very attached to “immanentising” the divine.

True, but why not? The world has to be ordered around something. The choice is: God or transgenderism! Take your pick…