Oeaohoo

Haha. "I am God", obviously! "You could be Milarepa", don't be so foolish!

...or you would be Milarepa, or you would be Abhinavagupta, or you would be a monk, priest or nun living in a Christian monastery or hermitage, or you would be a humble peasant regularly attending mass and abiding by the law laid down for you, or you would be part of a Jewish or Islamic contemplative order, or you would... Even if you were a "barbarian" you would likely be extremely devoted to the religious customs of your society and make regular offerings to the gods. We are the spiritual barbarians! As far as why some people progress faster than others, it seems a bit absurd to ask this question whilst simultaneously excluding any explanation based on the prior existence ("soul") of the person because most of it comes down to precisely this. It's like asking "why do cars break down?" whilst claiming that any explanation based on road wear and service quality is just "low-hanging fruit".

Some highlights:

I understand this. I don't know the exact video but Leo will often say that Absolute Reality must contain everything within itself (otherwise it wouldn't be absolute). Given this, everything that exists (whether it is unconscious, conscious or superconscious) must be included within Absolute Reality. Therefore, all the phenomena that are witnessed - even if they are presently only witnessed "unconsciously" from the point of view of the ego - are part of Absolute Reality. There are similar concepts in Eastern thought: the pātāla are the subterranean realms of the universe in Hindu cosmology, and the Diyu and Naraka of Chinese and Buddhist cosmology respectively could easily be aligned with Western models. Psychoanalysis is essentially a lop-sided secular cosmology, however, and so many Easterners were very critical of it: I very much agree with this analysis. OSHO has an excellent lecture in which he outlines the levels of consciousness from the Eastern perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFBV3RopGRI.

Yes. However, the subconscious and the superconscious are both unconscious to the ego. The "unconscious" in modern parlance tends to refer to that which psychoanalysts like Freud, Adler and Jung were obsessed with but this is generally only the subconscious and not the superconscious. Some examples: one day you might realise that you hate swimming because when you were young you almost drowned: this would be a revealing of the subconscious. One day you might realise that you dreamed up your whole existence: this would be the superconscious revealing itself.

The unconscious is only a function of the ego. Even the "unconscious" is absolute reality, because it is not really unconscious; it is only unconscious relative to the ego which does not want to know about it. The most basic function of the ego is to deny the consciousness of absolute reality.

This is petty nonsense and has nothing to do with the original subject of this thread.

Here’s a funny little protest song to conclude.

With this invocation, the Russian composer Scriabin commenced his Preparation for the Final Mystery. This was not to be any ordinary musical performance but a spiritual preparation for the eschaton, the End of the World. It was to combine music, poetry (as above), dance, and even olfactory art and the distinction between performers and audience was to be utterly dissolved in the totalising unity of Art. Given that we are all still here, it is evident that this annihilation never took place. This would not have mattered to Scriabin because he understood that the real purpose of art is to experience what it means to be a creator, as a final preparation for the realisation that one is and has always been the Creator. Scriabin is often considered by mediocre minds to have been a heretic if not a lunatic, mostly for having made the following statement: (I have abbreviated this poem towards the end because it would take up too much space). In his earlier life Scriabin was influenced by the romanticism of the 19th century. Only in later years, under the influence and occasional guidance of the profounder aspects of modern philosophy (the religious idealism of Bishop Berkeley, Schopenhauer's conception of the World as Will and Representation and Nietzsche's anti-dualistic gospel for the future), the Wagnerian desire to create a Gesamtkunstwerk (a total or ideal work of art which would synthesise all of the arts), the Theosophy of the Russian H.P. Blavatsky and direct study of various ancient texts, in likely combination with his own experiences, did his music start to become a paradigm of spiritual awakening. The shift is very apparent by the time we reach his Fifth Sonata and his third symphony, the Poem of Ecstasy, both of which can easily be found if you wish. Though Scriabin died before he could ever complete even the Preparation for the Final Mystery, one of his final works - Vers la flamme, or "Towards the flame" - encapsulates the apocalyptic ecstasy which he so desired to express: By far his most profound work, however, is his final symphony Prometheus: the Poem of Fire. Prometheus was of course the Greek Lucifer, the light-bringer who stole the fire of the gods from the Olympian realm of Being, ruled by Zeus, so that he could distribute it among humanity. The associations with the Renaissance cult of "Humanism" and everything that has followed it (the "enlightenment", democratic empowerment, and so on) are thus obvious. Scriabin, however, plays on the ambiguity that is present in the Greek myth, evoking the eternal tension between the principle of Cosmos and Chaos, Creation and Destruction, the Masculine and the Feminine. Of course, music of this calibre cannot be understood from a single superficial experience. If you truly wish to understand it, you will have to engage with it repeatedly until your entire body, soul and spirit resonate with it in a unity of blissful dissolution. Maybe then you will be able to say with the composer himself:

Gold has always been the most highly valued metal. Egyptian pharaohs poured gold into the mixture of every sacred work, the alchemists sought to convert all base metals into Gold, and Zarathustra spoke of the bestowing virtue which compels all things to flow into itself that they may flow out again as love. The diamond, a multi-faceted jewel, is one of the most highly valued objects. It represents the multi-faceted unity of God. Many mystics speak too highly of the heart. They speak the language of the heart, but the heart speaks the language of duality: life and death, love and fear, tension and release. The Sufis refer to these as the states and stations. The alchemists referred to them all as Solution and Coagulation. Music is the art of the aether. The aether is the empty space in which all duality unfolds. It is only by harmonising all of the dualities of existence that everything may be resolved, purified and revealed as the multi-faceted unity of God. Only a couple of modern composers penetrated the true depth of music, the Russian Scriabin and the Frenchman Messiaen. How could it be otherwise without anybody to show them the true way? The path is so multi-faceted and riddled with impurities that it is almost impossible not to be lost without a guide. That is why Virgil guided Dante through hell and Beatrice guided him through Paradise. The mystics who intimately studied sound and music spoke of three different modes of listening. One may listen with the heart, the throat, or the eye of the heart (“third eye”), corresponding to the modes of duality, unity and total annihilation. Only in the final mode may the essence of music be exhaled. One must inhale all of existence to exhale the one true word. The ancient Chinese Book of Rites says: ‘When one has mastered music completely, and regulates the heart and mind accordingly, the natural, correct, gentle, and honest heart is easily developed, and with this development of the heart comes joy. This joy goes on to a feeling of repose. This repose is long-continued. Persons in this constant repose become a sort of Heaven. Heaven-like, their action is spirit-like. Heaven-like, they are believed without the use of words. Spirit-like, they are regarded with awe, without any display of rage. So it is, when one by mastering of music regulates the mind and heart.’ One must regulate the mind and heart so as to finally transcend them. One can be silent and sit still only when one has arrow and bow. Only when the arrow strikes at the heart of midnight will the deafening sound be unveiled. Music is the path to silence.

From what you have said, you aren't sexually repulsed by masculinity. If that was the case, you wouldn't find homosexuality repulsive so much as stereotypically masculine activities. Last I checked, homo-eroticism is not a stereotypically masculine activity! I was suggesting that you might be sexually repulsed by seeing the masculine principle degraded by taking on traits proper to the feminine nature. These things are very complicated and specific to the person though, so you will have to consider what I have said and see if it relates to your situation.

@Carl-Richard Thanks for your reply, I understand your perspective much more clearly now. The problem I have with all of this is that it seems to imply a very one-way relationship between man and truth. It is as though all we can ever have access to are our own models, theories and fantasies, which - whilst they might be able to become ever more refined - are fundamentally empty; better and better approximations to reality but never reality itself. As you've seen, I have made my traditional inclinations quite plain elsewhere on this forum, and I understand that in this context they can probably only seem like Stage Blue retrogression, but all of this stands in direct contradiction to the doctrine of Revelation: a symbol that has been divinely inspired is not just a limited man-made construct that can be deconstructed by the tools of the limited human mind. It is an archetype in the original sense of the word, a potent and and multi-faceted symbol with an indefinite possibility for application and interpretation. To bring it back to the original subject of this post, it is like the numbers that Pythagoras spoke of. These numbers were not just arbitrary symbols for man to use to manipulate reality for his own material and technological advancement, they were symbols of metaphysical principles.

That’s a shame. Do you think this is entirely from Western influence? It could be that these age-old institutions sense they are losing their power and influence to modernity and so are clamping down on everything which is not strictly in line with orthodoxy. I would imagine it is also because they think that such practices would lead to them not being taken seriously on the new "world stage". I sometimes imagine in the future a humorously inverted situation where us Westerners have fully regressed to ape-men and the civilised Orient is forced to come and rescue us. Not that the Hindus and such were really uncivilised anyway. As far as it not having penetrated the mainstream in the West, I would have to disagree: a music video of a gay black man lap-dancing for Satan now has nearly 500 million views; one of the most popular current artists “Megan Thee Stallion” brought out a compilation of her music called “Something for Thee Hotties” (a lame pun on the burning heat of Hell), on the cover of which she can be seen dressed as the Devil; the now world-famous UK artist Jorja Smith sings in one of her hit singles: “See, my little waist can make you switch sides / You never know the devil in a disguise”, the chorus of which goes: “Be honest, you want this / I can be heartless regardless of my conscience”… I could go on all day but you get the point! These are just the latest examples too. Satanism, the cult of the body and the society of the sex obsession have been gradually on the rise in the West for decades, while in the West traditional religion is increasingly forgotten and openly mocked. "Piss Christ" won an award for the visual arts in the American South! To be fair, I don’t think any of this can even be called a Left-Hand Path, because it all leads nowhere. It only leads to that vortex of nihilism and hedonism which could truly be called a “bottomless pit”... Anyway, sorry to hijack your post with these sad irrelevancies! You’re probably right about Siddhis and such and my experience of Kundalini has also been quite damaging to the physical body. However, demanding proof of that sort is not necessarily appropriate. Why would an enlightened person reveal their power to someone with such intentions? It would likely attract a lot of the wrong sorts of people, those who are impressed by flash and spectacle rather than the truth and God. Besides, if pictures did emerge today most would likely think they had been photoshopped.

That's because what it means to be an intellectual has become ever more degraded. The Ancient Greek word Nous, the Sanskrit word Buddhi, the Arabic word al-'āqīl are all words that refer to the intellect but they refer just as much to the faculty for spiritual discernment as that for profane knowledge. These were all associated with the Eye of the Heart or "Third Eye" which was beyond both the heart and the mind. Even in the medieval era, the intellect was understood primarily as an intuitive faculty. It is generally necessary to pass through the mind, take it to its absurd and self-annihilating conclusion and finally realise its futility, a 'self-overcoming of the intellect' as Nietzsche referred to it. For example, while you are right that OSHO read very widely, he was very critical of intellectuals. He liked to call philosophy "fool-osophy" and constantly contradicted himself so as throw off people who listened only with the mind. Here is a typical passage from him: The body, heart and intellect are part of a unity which transcends all of them but that doesn't mean they aren't different on a relative level. Can you stub your intellect on the door-frame?

There are certainly cases in which unusual forms of sexuality could represent a "love with no boundaries" but in many cases it is just the opposite: the narcissistic retreat to the same instead of the other. The sexual union between a man and a woman is a much better symbol of a love with no boundaries because in this case what occurs is a true coincidentia oppositorum and even a hieros gamos ("holy marriage")! P.S Go Hilma af Klint!

Wouldn't your models and fictions become increasingly less useful the more you zoom out? After all, the process of zooming out is essentially one of becoming further and further removed from the immediate situation, which is the only place in which any utility could be applied (unless we mean a sort of spiritual utility). Maybe this is what you mean by the "stage green" postmodern critique keeping "stage yellow" metamodernism within the pragmatic frame? From what you have said, however - and this is certainly how it seems to me - postmodernism is only deconstructive whilst metamodernism reintegrates "construction". This seems to imply that the latter is more pragmatic: after all, "man cannot live by deconstruction alone"! Your prior comment makes more sense now: Why isn't zooming out through levels of analysis a way towards true objectivity? On a practical level you can never zoom out far enough, and so like you said you will always be somewhat bound by "context&construct", but to me it seems that true objectivity could be formulated as something like: the Limit from X to Infinite of Zooming Out.

Because... You Are A HOMOPHOBIC BIGOT. Just kidding. It could be any of the things you mentioned, maybe all of them. I would add however, though some unfortunately might not like to hear it, that there are metaphysical reasons why male homosexuality particularly has traditionally been frowned upon. We have to remember that sexuality is not just a physical phenomenon. Generally speaking, a man's nature is Logos (truth, insight, discrimination) whereas a woman's nature is Eros (love, relationship, interconnectedness). Because woman's nature is essentially erotic (in a much broader sense than merely sexual, as I have just described), female homosexuality is not necessarily a violation of woman's nature. Man's nature, however, is not erotic but logocentric (incidentally, this is why feminism and postmodernism are happy bedfellows). Male homosexuality generally involves one or both men violating their real nature by taking on traits proper only to the opposite sex. This can happen in female homosexuality, too, when one woman "plays the man" and dominates the other. That being said, there are exceptions to every rule and, anyway, when we talk about sex (mostly a biological category, as opposed to gender which is more cultural) we are talking about the extreme ends of the spectrum: it is very possible that homosexual people are those of either sex who are closest to the middle point between the two extremes, or even people whose sex and gender are at odds with one another.

Reflecting on it, I would put you at stage orange. Yes, “not JUST to integrate them into society”. Of course myths function at multiple levels, my point is that people like Campbell and Neumann ignored the highest levels of the meaning of myth because they were unable to understand them. I am not saying that psychoanalysis has no value, but Jung openly confessed to be ignorant of metaphysics and he was by far the most profound of the psychoanalysts It has nothing to do with “primitive peoples”, this is another problem with psychoanalysis. The most materially and technologically advanced civilisations of the ancient world all had an intricate mythology which was woven into everything they did. So-called “primitives” are mainly valuable as a surviving example of the same type of thinking, but we should not rely too heavily on them because they are much more distantly separated from the origins which they themselves claim to be so important (almost every “primitive” mythology includes an original being who established the laws and customs of the tribe). What is the difference between a god and the beings you describe? Maybe this is just a problem of language. Yes, drone strikes and carpet bombings commanded and even executed by people with no skin in the game are far superior to medieval knights inspired by St. Bernard’s mystical prose to use material warfare as the ultimate test of their spiritual virility. How silly of me! Yes, this is what you did last time we spoke. You just say everything I said is silly because you say so. Must be your “stage red” warlord coming out! The only thing to do is fight fire with fire and I can’t be bothered to do that. I don’t know what to say to this, particularly when it is a direct reply to a criticism of postmodernism as the total denial of truth. Here is a nice passage from the Rig Veda describing how even the gods did not exist in the beginning and thus are in fact unreal (in the deepest sense of that term):

@Carl-Richard Interesting response. Some questions: By metamodernity do you mean that which has/will come after postmodernity? Where do you think that zooming out through levels of analysis gets you? Is there a way towards true objectivity? Is there no way out of contexts and constructs?

Very interesting, thanks for sharing. It's not so much exaggeration and projection. The alchemists often talk about how the Great Work will bestow bodily immortality but if you read between the lines it is clear they really mean a spiritual liberation from death. As far as godly powers, these sound just like the Siddhis that many different paths can awaken. Where are you talking about? I would say that in the West for at least the last century the Left-Hand Path has been dominant, particularly in spiritual circles. For example, in the striking year 1888 three foundational events of the New Age movement took place: Helena Blavatsky (a woman, like many other theosophists and new-age spiritualists) published her book The Secret Doctrine, which heavily emphasised an epistemology of direct experience and "channelling" as opposed to stifling scripture; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was established, which held very "progressive" views about gender and facilitated the rise of famous adepts of the Left-Hand like Aleister Crowley; and Nietzsche published his final books The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (in a Christian context, how much more "left-handed" can you get?). In a way, what I have just described is like the Victorian sexophobia that you go on to describe collapsing in on itself and giving birth to a peculiarly one-sided and thus profane fascination with sex that is very noticeable today. Yes, but there are many reports from very varied sources of levitation, walking on water and other such things really taking place. After all, the Awakened One has conquered the dream of life, it is only natural that they will have a certain power over it!

Maybe you just left a sour taste in their mouth!

Did you want a feel good answer? I can say it all again while clapping and occasionally shrieking “Hallelujah, praise be to the Lord!” if you would prefer! Yes that sounds like an accurate enough summary. BlueOak seems to believe in the possibility of progressives instigating change but sees it as largely inhibited by people deferring their authority and agency to figureheads, recent developments in media manipulation and things like that. For my part, I would add finally that if progressivists really want to change the system they should stop whoring themselves out to it. For example, during the last BLM protest the following marginalised groups came out in full support of them: the Queen of England, the President of Canada (in a recent speech Trudeau called people waving the Canadian flag “racist” while giving a nod of approval to the BLM riots), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Disney, and all of the other multinationals. Talk about the downtrodden and “speaking truth to power”! Must be difficult having such little recognition and support from the system… It’s hard to “change the system” when it is bankrolling you: that’s why BLM has recently become “Buying Large Mansions”… The trouble is that the real power today is not in the hands of politicians but in the hands of financial interests. Most news media is being bankrolled by one financial interest or another. Protest is generally an appeal to the political class to change things, but for the most part change is no longer in the hands of the political class! One often notices in recent protests that they don’t even know what they are protesting for, what change they really want, why they are even there. To me, all of these protest movements are little more than the final hysterical paroxysms of a dying body.

Yes, it emphasises the masculine aspect of God: God as unity, Logos, truth, the One. Other paths, which were also popular in the Ancient Greek world, emphasise the feminine aspect of God: God as infinity, Eros, love, the All. Only as the self-termination of the false constructs that had been established at the onset of modern “philosophy”. A real concept is not just an arbitrary social construct, it is a potent symbol with abundant layers of significance. I’d like to see Derrida deconstruct the Sri Yantra!

What “stage” do you reckon yourself? You don’t seem very understanding of alternative perspectives so I would say “stage blue” at best… Don’t facepalm so much or you might give yourself brain damage; if you haven’t got it already, that is! I never said the gods were real: the only real thing is God, the rest is just a dream. I only spoke of the “metaphysical nature of world mythology”, by which I mean that mythology was a means for people to understand existence metaphysically, not just to “integrate themselves into society” or “individuate their egos” as Jung and company would have it, to say nothing of it all as a projection of “libido” and “Eros/Thanatos”. Doesn’t mean there can’t be gods within the dream though. You’re willing to accept that there are other beings, but none of the Gods of the past could possibly have been one of them? Seems like a very biased perspective. Very similar to the argument St. Augustine made against paganism in The City of God; maybe it’s your blue side showing again! Do I really need to to do this? It seems so obvious. Fascism, communism, liberal democracy, and all their multifarious permutations, when it isn’t just a matter of brute power and finance. They are more incorrect because they lack a metaphysical component, except occasionally as a peculiar inverted parody of true metaphysics (like the Marxist historiography of “progress” or the Fascist exaltation of the State as a sort of god). I was simply pointing out that the distinction between actual fact and metaphor was not nearly as tightly defined in the past. For example, Roman history showed very little regard for what “actually happened” except as a means to interpret and motivate action in the present. Your mentioning of postmodernism highlights the confusion that I see as being rampant in these spaces. There is a similarity between the traditional (I don’t mean this in the merely conformist sense) view of the world and postmodernism but only because the latter is a radical negation of the former. God contains all distinctions and thus all distinctions dissolve in God; postmodernism denies all distinctions and thus are there no distinctions in postmodernism. They look similar but they are absolutely antithetical, in the same way that early morning is close to late evening on a clock face!

Campbell was quite a mediocre thinker but I don't find him to be pompous, he is actually quite down to earth and fatherly. If it was simply the style of writing you didn't like, many of his other books are transcripts of various talks that he gave and are thus less dense and easier to follow. As far as it being hard to decipher, most authors of the past spoke in a more complex language because they were speaking to a better educated audience. You could also try reading a book with a very similar theme and published in the same year called The Origins and History of Consciousness by Erich Neumann. Both suffer from the same problems, however. Like Jung and the other psychoanalysts they contaminate the metaphysical nature of world mythology with the "collective unconscious" and the inverted pantheon of "archetypes", pulling everything down to the human and even subhuman levels. Still, they could be useful in helping someone escape from the denatured and desecrated postmodern worldview. Millions of people today are killed over the most absurd -isms and schisms! I would much rather be sacrificed to Odin than to the false idols of modern ideology. Death and sacrifice must be integrated because they are intrinsic to existence. The real question is: how successfully does a society integrate them? Also, the distinction between metaphor and “actual fact” is a modern one. The idea of an "actual fact" implies the setting up of a supposedly neutral vantage point from which to inspect existence in a purely empirical and detached manner, which only emerged with the methods of modern "science". The people who said Vincit omnia Veritas certainly understood all of this!