inTerjeCted

"In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Ain-Soph, Jah, Soph-Iah.
With an unutterable, terrible and almighty name
I adjure the gods, demons,peoples and all living beings.
Gather into one the rays of your power, enclose the source
of your desire and be the participants of my prayer:
let us exert outselves to catch the pure azure of Zion,
let us discover the priceless pearl of Ophira, and may
the roses and lilies be united in the vale of Sharon.
The most holy Divine Sophia, the essential image of
beauty and the joy of the all-high God, the radiant body
of eternity, the soul of the world and the unique queen
of all souls, with the boundlessness of thy unspeakable and
gracious first and beloved son I beg of thee: descend into
the prison of the soul, fill our gloom with thy brilliance,
with the fire of thy love having melted the shackles of
our spirit, present unto us the light and freedom, in a visible
and substantial way manifest thyself unto us, incarnate
thyself in us and in the world, resurrecting the fulness
of the ages, that the deeps may be encompassed and that
god may be all in all."

Vladimir Soloviev.

Amen

Posted by terje at 12:56 PM | Permalink

I notice that while I have promoted the Silence as a primary context for
reorientation, the ground upon which one can stand as well as the sky above
that meets it. and reaches through us to itself - a numbing phenomenon of
constant zero response meets it. The former blogpost is part 1 of a series
I must write; it's not even pleasant to do so. I should perhaps given a personal
background for it, something to which it could attach, zoom into the place where
I part company with the great shout for Revolution, Armageddon, Justice and Purgation of
Paradise; why I must evaluate our modernity with one foot in the trenches.

Understanding, in any private span of thought, is not capital letter "T" Truth, it is
intimate and ideally part of who you are - it situates you right in what you understand,
there are no sense of distance in it. Therefore we need to have a conversation. We really
do, about what we understand, and how it is even possible to do so. Language is a trap,
but it is more of a beartrap than a hole covered over with branches and filled with spikes -
to be safe from calamity, you have to spring it, with a twig or a branch or something
expendable. Transport it all into the situation of mind, and you will see voluntarily
sidetracking into thoughts which has fleeting, transitory function looks the part, and
as long as we keep trying to keep up with the world, it is of infinite supply.

The What here is; the "world" has already ended, the "end" of time is here, and whenever
it is acted upon, whenever it is understood, engaged, I pass through it all into the other
side of it. That's what I understand. It continually focus my attention elsewhere than
the difficulties of passing correct and precise judgment on myself or other sentient beings.
That enables me to engage what was once the world, and what passed for time - paradoxically,
every time, every day, or at least every time I am reminded of it. And I am being reminded of
it, it occurs in an encounter, a brief conversation with another human being, the exchange of
looks, a re-cognition of what transpires of entireties in moments and glimpses.

The How here is; as already indicated the assimilation of anything understood occurs
in the Nous, the mind, and everything that is indicated participates in a continuous
progression from the unknown to the known, from hidden to that which is revealed,
through the medium of Being which we, the knowers of the unknown, the revealers
of the hidden, and the resurrection of that which was buried, participate in as well as
act upon.

This also where it attaches to the teachings on Reintegration in more recent Christian
esotericism, and the Apokatastasis Panthon among the ancients, exclaimed most lucid
and most overtly by Saint Origen of Alexandria.
The selfsame transmission that begun in Pantaneus, the first teacher of the cathetical school
situated in Alexandria, even engaging the Library and Platonic academy at the time,
continued with the brightest student from the same, Clement of Alexandria, and mediated
outside of the Alexandrine context through the exile of Origen and the beginnings of the
school of the Desert Fathers addressed that which would become a great and overarching
initiatory transmission beginning in France through the inspiration of among others,
Louis Claude de Saint-Martin.Both the former and the latter emphasized complicity and
participation, and recommended a practise that begun with the withdrawal of arbitrary,
"re-actionary" judgment - continued into a stilling of three centers in man, through
silence, and effectively manifested itself through the emptying out of the "ego",
the containing mind, all contents, particulars, fragments into their origin. The Soul
as Bride, as Monarch, as Hero, as Quintessence - was thusly, practically accorded not
only an abstract metaphysical "origin" that is other-worldly, or transcendent, but accorded
the confidence to find itself demonstrated and revealed in and through individual human beings.
Three Gnostic texts that was discovered barely sixty years hence, or at least was largely unknown
until fairly recently in any case - Trimorphic Protennoia, The Secret Book of John, and
The Gospel of the Egyptians - engage this theme more explicitly than most other sources,
which is astoundingly numerous, so it is not an exclusively Gnostic concern, even though with
some good will, all the aformentioned explicitly Christian thinkers, teachers, mystics, mystagogues
and philo-sophers could be accorded the same name of Gnostic, but as with the theme of the reintegration, and restoration of the fallen intelligences and their splendour, through us, can
even be called an universal concern.

Solve (dissolution)
refers to the particulars here - "the world", or rather the sum of parts that produce it,
and "time", as the state in which the parts produce it; you remove the sum of parts from
its state of fixedness, you end up with chaos - which is the mirror image of that order which
was produced by its conjunction. I wish I could demonstrate this a little better, but it suffices
to say that if we remove the fixed focus of the mind, and allow it to actively engage Silence,
rather than passively receive everything else - this "chaos", or dissolution, or annihilation
demonstrates itself successively through the recline of the image of order itself.
That is why the "psyche" part of consciousness is feared by philosophers, who, after all,
has sat on the knee of their uncles, the rhetorists, for most of their upbringing - are
primarely concerned, to the degree of obsession, with the making, or fabrication, of sense,
and the solidity of images. The Gnostic visionaries was capable of not only retaining the
memory of having seen, not a succession, but a triplicity (or further into tetrads etc.)
of forms - when they encountered the revelation that revealed itself to them and through
them;the middleplatonist Plotinus, and neoplatonist Proclus and a myriad others of their contemporaries did not recognize the
names and imagry and addressed how this vision would be proscribed against by the rational
intellect and belonged with other lower beings, among dreaming animals. My enthusiasm for
Corbin not only depend on his vigilant and always alert endeavour to understand and make understandable, sufi saints and illuminist theosophers, but his personal ability to undergo the same himself - as evident
in his visionary experience and exegesis at Lake Siljan:

".. the Earth has come to Thou, visible as an Angel that would perhaps be a
woman, and in this apparition, this greatly green and thronging
solitude, yes, the Angel too is robed in green, the green of dusk, of
silence and of truth. Then there is in you all the sweetness that is
present in the surrender to an embrace that triumphs over you.

Earth, Angel, Woman, all of this is a single thing that I adore and that is in this forest. "

Further into the letter, Corbin admits that man, and with man, himself, there is a poverty
that confronting such splendour makes a heavy burden filled with sighs and nostalgia,
but man is quickened and raised up through the agency of an other - coming towards
the visionary through the resurrection and company of the Christ. In this context, a
Christos Angelos that descends, alternatively - if complemented with the vision of
the Untitled Text from the Bruce Codex, the earth of man and himself ascends to meet
the descent of the revealer, the Repairer of Vision, the purifier of the medium of Light;
which the Barbelo-Gnosis names Zorokothora Melchizedek.

Another image that also meets this "plasticity" or non-locality is found in the recently discovered apocryphal text that has been named The Gospel of the Saviour by its modern translators - where the disciples assembled abruptly sees with their eyes something which is impossible according to their reason, the saviour ascends to heaven, his head through the clouds with his feet planted on the ground, at the mount of transfiguration, where they stand together.

These events that in no wise informs our understanding of History, or with History, or for that matter, the Sciences according to their own virtue - solve, unknit, dissolve the locality of
"world" and deattach fixed time and duration - experiential and metaphysical - while
informing the process of understanding. The disicples, like Prophets of old, fall flat on their
faces at the rupture of reason in the place of the Transfiguration of Christ, as we find the
event in the canonical Gospels - exemplary of the submission to vision which is continually
inspired by the dissolution of those clouds, in mind and psyche, which incapacitate us, "normally",
according to norm, to participate in a visionary unveiling.

Coagula refers to the Contigent, or the Becoming of Being as a context from above rather than below. From the attempted introduction of an understanding of a world of ideas - we have descended
into the flux of random particles and the inexplicable subsistence of consciousness, disjuncted, mysterious - sporadiously involved with the unfoldment of variety according to fixed sets of rules; Being becomes a quality and a verb, ideas a commodity to produce things, to inspire artifice, to the animal dreaming so despised by generations of philosophers and rationalists.
The contigent is less than nothing and more than everything; Pleroma and Kenoma - Jung's Basilides in his Seven sermons to the dead, said of Abraxas - all at once, containing all categories and being the dissolution of category and object itself.

II.

From Revelation to Apocalyptic

Those events prophesied will come to pass in time.
Will pass into Time. And time will end.
As John at Patmos did write, "the seas will be no more."
The waves being continuous symbols of transciency,
of the passing of moments - and the instability of elements.

I have grown up and out of apocalyptic - it's images in 20th century Christianity
(or rather the repackaged 19th century revivalism, that heroically wrestled the beast
of secular humanism, atheist science and the "death of God") participated in my
"animal" dreamlife, I did sweat and I did wet a bed or two, I was a kid, I cared
for what I did not understand, I valued what I did not know; I was told.
There are possibly more books written on the coming battle of Armageddon than
any other religious topic in the west - still whenever it is indicated and intimated
to us, their contemporaries, those who believe the strongest in the scenario does
that discreetly and with a personal, passionate fervour that for just a few blinks
of an eye involves you, the intimate, the confidante - as if a secret was involved.
It's on big banners spanning miles across, you cannot switch through the register
of your television channels without encountering one or more incidents of the scenario
being held out and up to the light, and still it has this mythical,mystical,magical
ability of being best whispered, or quietly and deliberately communicated.
The particular branch of apocalyptic, millenial, chilianist enthusiastic evangelism
which clinged to daily life in my childhood were ultimately concerned with the consequence
of original sin; everything in the world is orchestrated to suit the need of the fallen
angel Satan to inform mankind that it does not need to hear or heed the word of God,
or believe in Jesus as our personal saviour and the atonement for all of our sins;
all we get of suffering comes from that great big hole in our soul our ancestors, from
Adam and onwards, caused to be there. So I was told, I was given education in the
wrongs, quite oblique, of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, of the generation of
Noa, and so forth - of the deluge and the rain of napalm, of pillars of salt, of locusts
and devouring seas, and reminded that I should consider how little pleased God is
with humanity now as compared to then. No lack of guts in God's department, no
deficiency in the Machismo department - once he loosens his armies upon mankind
to separate chaff from wheat, the bad from the good, the wicked from the righteous -
not only will the guilty die, they will never have been. You grow up into a consciousness
of whatever has value, life, beauty, strength in you - you need all of it, and tommorrow,
because you cannot understand what they tell you, you stop, shocked, doubt - think
"Why would God want that?", even the less charitable, "Why would anyone in their right
mind want all of that?"

Aggrieved and depressed families will introduce morbidity in the skills department of their
offspring and unconsciously tend to it and nurture it, sometimes to the detoriation of
other, perhaps more useful developing skills. But we are moved by death, we are troubled
by the process of dying and suffering illnesses, we are challenged at every moment we
make sense of, whenever we answer to the affirmative of life - the more powerful our
embrace of life, perhaps, but not always.

So I "solved" Armageddon and went right past Start without collecting a Millenium.










What emerges is another story, that speaks - and that I understand. I know there are other
stories and other worlds.

Posted by terje at 06:01 PM | Permalink

Blogging Hotspots:

The Legacy of Henry Corbin

On the initiative of Professor Tom Cheetham a blogspot has been created for the dissemination and
discussion of the relevance of Henry Corbin's work today.

Presently the site is quite focused on brief,concentrated bits of excerpts,summaries upon choice
topics from Henry Corbin's ouevre. It's quite what I need sometimes and an excellent supplement
for my own study. In the future it will surely attract the posting of events, presentation of papers,
debates and what else which this medium allows. Which I am looking quite forward to.


For anyone interested in the exegetical and philosophical contribution Henry Corbin have made,
especially in the field of esoteric studies and Oriental philosophy - I recommend Cheetham's
The World Turned Inside Out: Henry Corbin and Islamic Mysticism, and Christopher Bamford's
introduction to Henry Corbin's work, titled Esotericism Today:The Example of Henry Corbin,
in Henry Corbin: Voyage and the Messenger:Iran and Philosophy, North Atlantic Books, 1998,pp XIV-LX.

Posted by terje at 02:00 PM | Permalink

A Catalogue of the Severall Sects and Opinions
in England and other
Nations: With a brief Rehearsall
of their false and dangerous Tenents. Broadsheet. 1647
Source:British Museum,1647. Wikimedia.



Soul-searching amidst another age of heresies and dissent.







5:An old word of advice goes; the way of ascent is precisely the same as the way
of descent. In this situation of ours, that way is language.


0.
First of all,an apology to all of you: I write what I will write -
exercising that freedom,however, is neither the object nor direction that this blog has,
it is not the be all and end all of me, my opinions, or whatever quarrel you and I might
have. Lately I have noticed that I do react to certain trends in the media treatment of
religious conflict, even within Christianity - whose practice redeems itself of its manifold
transitory errors, while leaving us in the green fields of nowhere if we remain deattached
from this selfsame practice. I have been talking about a cross lately, and while to the outsider
hyperbolic and contrived, to the insider it is quite evident that it is not an instrument of
division I speak of, or rather, following the Solve et Coagula sequence, not only division.
The Vision that penetrates the darkest moment of engagement with history and sees through
it into a different landscape, has endured, it has prevailed and survived centuries and millenia
it is not the exclusive property of an elite, nor of an elite culture,religion or civilization.
Redemption and Salvation does not belong to secular law - whatever justice emerges from
secular law depends on a jurisdiction that can only extend to the boundaries of the known,
the revealed and the situational; a judgment that cannot be understood is useless.
Heresy trials, as illustrated by the charming little cartoon over the viles and evils of englishmen
on the footpath to perdition, at least as far as the Privy Council could see it - demonstrates this
situation above all others. Please be adviced I count the contrived Witch trials of europe and the
americas both as participant in the same phenomenon, while we are at it.

1. Freedom of conscience.


There has been a long time coming here - but now that we are both here, we should admit
that we do have freedom of conscience. We can even have a row over whether or not this
is a good thing. This selfsame thing opens up the place to all possible kinds and varieties
of opinions, values and ideas - it allows a competition for our attention, it allows a pressing
on all sides of views and perspectives that are not necessarily our own.
This valued, paradoxical principle are far from self-evident, we bear the burden,
individually and as a society - of evidence, we can only demonstrate it through action;
through our interaction with others, by our deepening and widening of certain boundaries
of convention, by allowing charity to be a part of our practice, which is the salt of any theory.

For reasons that are going to be clearer to you throughout this post - I have elected to post
this article in the "religion" category of my blog, there it sits with just one sibling, and a scruffy
old thing it was. I contemplated having it posted in the "rant" category, and considered that
an uncivil post is probably not worth sharing in the first time. The blanket moment of extreme
exhaustion,embarrassment and heart-tugging empathy for human folly - was best dilluted in
several strategies which did not involve vocalization, ranging from the primitive to the more
subtle. But I still allow myself to be exposed to these things, and while some modern Gnostics
are more sensitive to it than other participants in contemporary religious life - it appears to me
that at leas the phenomenon is universal, it is a fate, perhaps, best shared with an other.
I take religious advice from Catholics, Eastern Orthodox,Jews,Hindus,Moslems,Sikhs,Zoroastrians,
Shamans,Buddhists and what do we really have of religions and cultures -
but from what the direction it comes from, at least to me, is less important than what direction it is going, through me.

You see, what direction it is taking, and from where, is the responsibility of the mediator.
It impedes on his or her conscience, just as it is my conscience that is at stake, if I mediate
traditional wisdom, or on the other hand, my impression of it.
Therefore my possible fall into heresy is my responsibility, and moreover, damages me -
whereas the fall into heresy of any other, is theirs. Start believing in righting every wrong on
the planet and you will have no time to sort out your own conscience until the end of time.

There's a modern paraphrase originating, or paralleling what the appearance of Christ to John

during the crucifixion, as told by the Acts of John - it says
"whatever they say about me, that's what I am not" -
in other words, do not allow yourself to be fooled by appearances; look again,

what do you really see?

So there is their word on it, and then there is something else. We contend against it, from either
side of it , until it is finally gone - then we need to ask, what are we really doing?
A party of two, conversing, debating and occasionally meeting each other's gaze, will only engage
in that contest in a limited space of time - introduce into that a crowd, or the belief that whosoever is engaged on the opposite side has no value and has no business in the debate as such, and everything said and
done are for the benefit of the whole world and generations to come, it is bound to continue for a little longer.

2. Wisdom

So I grow a little chatty and circumvent the juicy bits for a while; this belongs in the religion category because there are really no defending an instance of Gnosis. To my knowledge no one ever has, or at the very least
until very recently. The defense that Guilhabert de Castre presented to another legendary figure, Dominik of Guzmans, consisted in a dispute over the nature of salvation. He chose to engage his opponent with the Scriptures, they ended up contesting each others appreciation of the Scriptures and how they should be read.
I blame neither of the parties, but understanding the others view was reduced to the offer to live being right,
or die being wrong. The truth about the nature of salvation does not dangle on the end of a string of well phrased arguments and detailed theological dissemination - we know that, that is why we practice what we preach and most of us try to keep focused on it. Some of us grow cross-eyed, i'm sure. Anyways, it would be easy to pick at my argument that Gnosis is indefensible, useless as argument and decidedly not an icebreaker.

That is why we have Wisdom between us, we all have Wisdom, She is everywhere, she allows us, worthy or unworthy, to approach Her and drink of her fountain (no pun intended, I mean -please!).There's no cultural boundaries for Wisdom. Whenever someone tries to engage an other in conversation, who is a stranger, who is not part of their own people, they appeal to Wisdom, to Sophia, unconsciously recognizing that this particular presence of truth, naked and translucent, remains a mirror through which we recognize our selves in others.
And it is this recognition that makes us humans human.

Wisdom, however, does not freeze salvation and make it something we can say, and by saying bring an other into it. Religious people wish to have Spirit in them, and above, as an authority, the many things they do and say.Secular people seek sense, they have an appreciation of timeless,naked truth - they just do not see God, Heaven, Angels and everything else that is fixed to religious consciousness at the end of that inquiry.
This means, that provided we are fortunate to be aware of the Wisdom in it, we can exchange particular insights and these insights can join each other and make whole, between us, what was formerly broken.

So, this could have been a secular rant, too. Only, you do know by now where my sympathies lay.
Therefore I will engage the topic of religion from a position which embrace the polyphony of voices and
testimonies, the wealth of images spread across the fertile ground of the human creative imagination,
which is to say: from within heterodoxy. The heresies engaged and combated on that particular battlefield
is different in kind, and consequence - from those engaged from within the battlefield of orthodoxy.
From an orthodox position a (in fact, only one) direct deliberation upon the nature of salvation, on the level that invoke authority from Wisdom in the particular capacities of unique and fixed events of revelation, local prophecy and discourse which build a house for wisdom through ancient and tested building blocks, is necessary. I have already mentioned that
a judgment which is not understood does not carry authority, and its fulfillment has in value been transposed from
a righteous act to a sin: this is what the orthodox position, not only once or occasionally, but always - seeks to avoid.
If this is not given due care in the process, the claim to justice,righteousness and orthodoxy is rendered null and void.

I have earlier given praise for the unique and very challenging positions of Vladimir Solovyov, Henry Corbin and Gilles Quispel - who each in their own field of studies, dissemination and particular affiliations of the humanities - invested, one could even say, sacrificed the latter privilege to avail themselves of the former position, not to engage orthodoxy as an enemy, or to devalue the position of orthodoxy, be it Russian Orthodox, Protestant, Roman Catholic or Islamic - but precisely this, to make sure that what emerges out of either, with a dynamic and lucidity that do influence our cultures and societies, is being understood. My wife graciously asked me when I was pondering over an article (in fact it was The Paradox of Montotheism by Henry Corbin) , why anyone should care - we are after raised up to the words of the psalm that begins

"God is God, if the fields were barren and all men dead.."
(I kid you not, it is even sung at High Mass and Burials!)

And my reply was ;This lives in us, this participates within our lives - this is like homework we didn't do, how can we hope to graduate? How can we redeem ourselves of all of these things we do not understand. The obscurity here, the shadows, the blurs, everything amiss - is human, participates in human nature, is Sophia trapped within the realm of Chaos, our Chaos.
We should care - if this is real, if this is relevant, if this is a mystery within life that we have both feet planted it,
we should bloody well care!

3. Heterodoxy


The phenomenon of the actual human exchange over truths that constitute an heterodoxy, or polyphony of
voices - indicate above all that a sufficient amount of us care what participates passively in us.
Paradoxically, the emergence of any orthodox position from that of dissonance,contention (the Apostle Paul
claims this were actually an necessity in the primitive Christian church, presenting it as a vital process
through which the Holy Spirit might engage and transform the community, and through it, the world) and heresy
represents essentially the intensification of such involvement and a sanction of such investments. Neither of
the emergent "positions" are safe, ultimately authorized, or final - neither actually represents a regression
and neither actually constitutes a poverty in values. Their polarization occur in our minds when we try to
determine the right approach, the right position, the right attitude, the right belief.

One is within the other;




you should get a good grip, lift her out of there, before you empty the bath of water.

---

Posted by terje at 10:52 AM | Permalink

I.

With the discovery of an other self, an other soul, an other mind, an other thought -
closer to your self than your "I" ; Space opens itself to an existence which consists
in a dialogue, in a continuous exchange.
But the site has become silence - the world recedes, and no longer affirms itself
in thought, in sensation, in mind, in soul, in self - opening itself to another place,
revealing an absence of reality.

Silence dissolves our relationship with reality objectified - that which engage the senses
and the mind, to make true and affirm objects as the anchors for the real.

The affirmation of the Word became Flesh does not consist in a deterioration or denial
of Spirit: rather the Spirit lifts up, and lifts in - the Body to its own context.
It's place is Silence, the Incarnation, wherein history expires.

Without object the senses and the mind becomes completely subordinate the Other,
since they no longer maintain a passive observation of things as Being.

The Cross dissolves the world - with the Incarnation it was fixed to the context of
the Logos, with the Crucifixion the Logos no longer serve as context for the world,
which is why, additionally, the denial of it becomes central to the exoteric religion;
Christ, anointed. New world, New age, New man - a progression towards the Logos
through which everything came into being, through whom it returns to its origin,
and with which it resurrects into being which surpasses the vicarious meaning which
came into being because the world did not receive it, yet it became alive and a source
of light to the entirety, so dimmed and darkened by refusal in ignorance, in Man.
On the other hand, exoteric religion allows the world to be projected upon the Logos, attaching an
ontological "ground" upon a pre-cosmic Being, baptizing it Pantocrator and Rex Mundi;
witness an infant carried out from the womb and sacrified on an altar which is this
earth, this soil, upon which our feet are planted - to a Divinity which is turned into a moral investment,
value to family, value to institution, value to tradition, value to continuity through the
naming and numbering of days,hours,minutes. If you say of a golden calf you have crafted
in the perfection your craft allows you, that it is well-crafted, that is beautiful in kind,
that it's form evokes thoughts of , for instance, the arrangement of nature, the power
of fertility, the accumulation of worldly riches - you perform no blasphemy in your words,
if you name it God and leave behind everything which raised your gaze, which informed
you directly, which lives in and through you - you perform apostasy, you complete blasphemy.

---

We exist, at every moment – at the boundary between the predicament of a sleeper and
the predicament of someone who has attained wakefulness. We have, each on
his own, received a responsibility to fulfill a function, a role, within this dream; ours is the plight , our
ancestors, our tutors – our confidential trusted ones inform us – to maintain the present order of things.

It appears that we are dependent upon this order of things, while upon closer inspection – it
draws all its power, all its authority, all its «truths» from the abandonment we have allowed,
of these, in their root which is our selves.

We are told that ours is not the right to ask wherefore – for, this is the aggressive assertion of ages and generations past , we know of nothing better – they are confident that we do not want to
increase something lesser or worse. It is easy to be confused about the value invested into the suppression of conscious inquiry and the informed exercise of human volition, because this system is based upon corruption, upon fraud, upon manipulation and the suppression and obstruction of subtler truths.

This conceited Kosmos is created upon that particular premise, it is sustained by such arrangement and continues to exist through such coercion and by a most subtle violence.

Invoking the reality of Spirit, I must observe that the system is dependent on its charges, its victims, its slaves and servants, its entire court – and cannot sustain itself for a moment even had
it not been for theft from the Spirit. Having allowed myself to transgress against the Zeitgeist and its current overlords, its "gods" dwelling in intellects of all sizes and formats – by mouth, by tongue, by fingers, by mind – by testimony and action, I have smashed the delicately carved idol of Baal in his own court, and I have, as Elijah did, suggested to his high priests, «let your god sue, if it is within his power».
Now Baal is dust, he will not sue, as he will not lament, or even object – but it is quite possible you will.

---

II.

Unless you spend a nanosecond in this unspoken, forbidden compartment of reality you would have no
opportunity to compare, nor would you possess the ability to evaluate your situation within this our counterfeit. In this ignorance you are a slave to this your predicament, your entire
being serves one purpous and can do not better; providing fuel to the pyre, feeding this dream
and it contributes to the continual enumeration of reasons to stay. A hand clasps your windpipe
and keeps squeezing, suggesting you should consider your mortality and the
great fearful ignorance you have of death and its countless consequences.

Whether you are pulled by your unappeaseable appetites, your libido, your "inner child" and its
incredible obsession with recognition – or naked fear, it amounts to the same, you act before you know what you are doing, you act before you have determined who is you and what it means, you act
before you truly see where you are,you act before you know what the action does to you, to the other and to the world. There is absolutely no distinction between these and the laceration caused by a whip,the shock caused by a stick, the crunching of bones caused by a rack.

Returning to our discovery of the Other, and the clearing of Time and Space, the emptying of the
battlefield, the dispersion of the crowd of voices,attractions, "Ten Thousand Things."
This discovery is necessary for any orientation to take place - without the Other there is nothing and
no-one to lift you out of your predicament; to your ear no voice, no sound, no word would arrive, only
the noise of the undifferentiated consciousness in which you are unable even to distinguish yourself
from any thing or being or condition, within a torrent, entrenched in a deep well.
The images this condition provokes does not suffice to describe this condition - and this condition in and of itself is not available to any comparison to anything particular prior to it being diagnosed, seen. Paradoxically,
that which would motivate any sound will to escape is only readily perceived and understood after it has
been confronted and transcended, to the degree a soul, a mind, a thought - in some way could see it,
grasp it, inspect it.

In sequence we have the erection of the Cross,anterior to which is the antechamber of a trial, a judgment, a procession - the Crucifixion - and Burial. With the Burial, we have loss and mourning - not on account of oneself, but on account of Another; this Other, close or distant ; friend,stranger or foe; receives a host of absences, becomes hollow, finally a hole, a sore, a scar, a wound - in the Soul, and finally becomes invisible. After the image disappears, the voice starts to become slight and all other perceptions grasp upon him atrophy.
Finally he becomes Silence.

Christ became Silence.

This appears to be a lamentable observation. We have received a whole culture because of it, it appears we are trapped in a stupor, convened around an empty grave.

As we have observed already - the World would eternally affirm itself as World, as whole, containing everything and everyone there is, over which it exercise absolute authority, being itself the norm (that is why mystics feel compelled to break it in order to harvest the blood-dripping,horrible legal consequences of such a crime) of all norms (it can see, that is) ; the grave as norm gave up spirit, gave up psyche, gave up flesh and blood, finally gave up bones and dust and ashes - the grave as world presented Death as the shepherd and governor of all living things, for each decrease in the concrete,personal and intimate - it appears to have raised its throne higher into the heaven of heavens.

The Acts of John pares down and dissects this whole appearance of things:

The disciples are by Jesus invited in - to a mystic dance, that revolves around the axis which is the place of descent and ascent - manifestation into this world of appearances, and the restauration of the souls into the world of the real; of which he says;

"Thou that dancest, perceive what I do, for thine is this passion of the manhood, which I am about to suffer. For thou couldest not at all have understood what thou sufferest if I had not been sent unto thee, as the word of the Father."

The root is buried deep in the appearances of things, in this way, whoever falls under the thrall of ignorance about his condition is unaware that he is suffering, neither that it has come to pass nor that it has an end is comprehended by him - our modern and secular reaction to suffering consist in a rationalization: we choose to consider suffering as a more or less integral component to life, even the subtle violence to the soul that strips it of all dignity, all self-esteem, all holiness - which dangles the souls over the very edge of perdition - the further away it appears from our person, the less real it becomes, there are even those in the name of religion declare of our immediate condition that it is "all good", and that the mere pause of hesitation, or indeed, sane cognitive processes setting in, thus questions God, and thereby performs blasphemy.

These appearances work their own charm, they even provoke the creation of intricate theologies of uncommon subtlety and beauty, in language embrodied and gilded like a baroque cathedral, most certainly, but they are seldom declared heretical, even in this day and age. Rather they have become a norm of norms, a privilege of those who today, philosophically rather than by jurisdiction , hold the concept of authority to repress and fight other theologies, indeed, other souls,
other minds and other thoughts.

This our text, the Acts of John, has been declared arch-heretical, treated thus, and made into the exemplar par excellence of the Docetic Christological heresy. It does sit well as that, as long as its contents are alleged to be what they are not, as long as it is not read and studied - as long as the voice which speaks mystically from its pages are not heard.
The account of this dance wherein the mystery embodied in the process which Christ initiated and completed, went to the
grave with those who received it - which is to say, its contents, and that of the mystery of the Cross, participates - in a particular truth which is seldom had in scripture (certain of the Upanishads, especially Katha Upanishad, comes to mind), that is received, always, in an initiatory context. That the descent of the Logos is needed so that men may know their own condition addresses an understanding that is also found in Prologue to the Gospel of John , man receives the light because the world rejects it, it becomes light and life in every man that comes into the world - so that Man is the Light of the World, understood in its proper context it speaks to the opportunity and duty of sentient beings, to be a presence of the Light that does not come from the world, but rather is a Light in the Darkness.

Man is thus lifted up, through the descent of this Light, which is shared with him through the becoming of the Logos, who was before the beginning.
In the appearance of things, however, embedded in "Ten Thousand Things", Man is indistinguishable from the World - and the crucifixion only produces debt in all generations, since it is done instead of that of another, and another; in the appearance there is a balance to be made, there is a serious discrepancy between Man and God and Universe which cannot be made without the spilling of the blood of an innocent.
For all intents and purpouses, it looks like a gesture, an empty one; since there is no comprehension, and thus no meaning, and absolutely no truth, no wisdom to be had; unless it is the cautionary "do not do it again" a parent tells a small child caught with its fingers in the cookie jar. Before all of that comes to pass, Jesus asked his disciples who they thought he was - as the words came tumbling, so he became -

as the Gospel of Phillip suggests:

"Jesus took them all by stealth, for he did not appear as he was, but in the manner in
which they would be able to see him. He appeared to them all. He appeared to the great as
great. He appeared to the small as small. He appeared to the angels as an angel, and to
men as a man. Because of this, his word hid itself from everyone. Some indeed saw him,
thinking that they were seeing themselves, but when he appeared to his disciples in glory
on the mount, he was not small. He became great, but he made the disciples great, that
they might be able to see him in his greatness. "

To one a righteous man, to another a wise teacher, to a third angel - and so forth, and Thomas, according to the Gospel of Thomas, are completely unable to say with his mouth what he is. It is, as is much repeated in Apocryphal Christian literature from the first centuries - a mystery which encompasses and transcends comprehension, received according to the visionary capacity of the recipient, in a form which is nevertheless received and appropriated to understanding, in an individual.
As long as there is any shape or form compared to the mysterious presence within light, within silence - it cannot be fully
received into us; the Cross casts the Logos into a grave, the grave voids its incumbent into absence,
the rumor is deflected by idle ears; as human beings in the world, but not from it - that is to say, human strangers,
we suffer ( meaning, we go through) the same predicament; so, in the world of appearances, where our Wisdom
has been trapped - it can be said that we are nowhere to be found, we are nobody, the mirror is blank; death overshadows
us, forgetfulness buries us, nothingness claims us.


Christ became Silence, whenever souls,minds and thoughts are directed towards the Christ they transgress against the boundaries which caused them to do so - they can recoil at this recognition, in which case they will hear a whole orchestral score of testimonies from such souls as their own, affirming and praising their decision to give in to it - or they can become Silent themselves.In themselves, becoming Silence.

---

III.

Truth has no object,

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