What now? Or ‘Nihilism as a Cure for Nihilism’.

[Pam Seeback]

Santiago Odo: That means that I assert that there really must be — there is — a base of knowledge in which truth and understanding reside and can be found, but that *very few* are aware of what *it* is nor of what it requires.

There is such a base and it is true, very few are aware of it or of what it requires. The base is that of saying and living the I am, the single eye of God. The way to realize the single eye/I has been available for discovery for thousands of years -- it is the way of the mystic, Christian included. The way of the mystic is complex in practice, and I can expand on it if required, but essentially its way boils down to letting go of the ignorance of belief in separation of God into multiple I's or souls.

The single eye (Jesus' expression) is the absolute truth that saves the soul from its dark labyrinth of belief in multiple, contrasting, opposing selves. The single eye is not nihilistic because it is self-caused to express (expand) itself, I am That I am. Are the expressions of I am absolute? Yes. How would the world be changed through I am realization? The way of the mystic is clear: in knowing -- (the intellectus in action) -- there is only the I am, infinite love and compassion most surely follow -- the Mind and Heart of I am realization as one.

So here you have before you a taste of the template of salvation or liberation for the Soul of God in darkness. I am declaring it as the Way, the Truth and the Life. I am not the first, I won't be the last. Am I speaking your language of 'quintessence?'

[guest_of_logic]

Suggestion : speak about your view of or relationship to the issues brought up here. For example, since I am making recommendations about education, or offering opinions in pro of a Eurocentrism, or about ‘identity’, why not spesk about your view of these things? That is, instead of an interrogation a participation?

I think my views are fairly obvious by now, no?

The metaphysic one gets from the Bible - its Grand Narrative - cannot, in my view, be rationally defended. This is not because of any lost meaning, but because it is simply incoherent - as well as implausible. One can perform various apologetics to try to get around this, and/or one can tweak and adjust the narrative such as by adding Gnostic ideas, and/or one can simply "mine" the narrative for, or (re)cast it in terms of, symbolic, ethical, and mystical content. One can also, without committing to any particular Narrative, dive into the rich set of spiritual practices based on this tradition.

But should a so-called Western person be forced, required, or even just expected to do any of this? Should Western people base their identity on the tradition which has attempted to make sense of this Grand Narrative? Should Western people consider their tradition as superior to the many other traditions across the world?

Not in my view, no. But nor should they be prevented from exploring the Western tradition if it interests them, as it seems to interest you.

[Pam Seeback]

Alex, in returning to one of my favourite authors on mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, I found this passage in her "The Essentials of Mysticism" that addresses the value added of Christian mystics to the initial stage of the awakening mystic, that of being disillusioned with the animal and social levels of consciousness in favour of discovering a higher or deeper level of consciousness that reveals the impersonal truth of things:

"This phase in the mystic's growth has been specially emphasized and worked out by the Christian mystics who have made considerable additions to the philosophy and natural history of the soul. The Christian sense of sin and conception of charity, the Christian notion of humility as a finding of our true level, an exchanging of the unreal standards of egoism for the disconcerting realities of life seen from the angle of Eternity, the steadfast refusal to tolerate any claim to spirituality which is not solidly based on moral values or which is divorced from the spirit of tenderness and love - all this has immensely enriched the mysticism of the West, and filled up some of the gaps left by Neoplatonism. It is characteristic of Christianity that, addressing itself to all men - not, as Neoplatonism tended to do, to the superior person - and offering to all men participation in Eternal Life, it takes human nature as it is, and works from the bottom up instead of beginning at a level which only a few of the race attain. Christianity perceived how deeply men are enslaved by the unconscious; how great a moral struggle is needed for their emancipation. Hence, it concentrated on the first stage of purgation, and gave it a new meaning and depth - the monastic rule of poverty, chastity and obedience - and we must remember that the original aim of monasticism was to provide a setting in which the mystical life could be lived - aims at the removal of these self-centred desires and attachments which chain consciousness to a personal instead of a universal life.

Yet this positive moral purity which Christians declared necessary to the spiritual life was not centred on a lofty aloofness from human failings, but on a self-giving and disinterested love, the complete abolition of egoism, this alone, it declared,, could get rid of the inward disharmony - one aspect of the universal conflict between the instinctive and the rational life - which Boehme called the "powerful contrarium" warring with the soul."

On a personal note, although I do not identify as a Christian (and never did despite going to Sunday School for five or six years as a child), it was the Christian mystical language of God as Self (the Father, the Son) that attracted me during my awakening period. I devoured the works of Eckhardt, St. John of the Cross and Teresa d'Avila - there was something incredibly personal about their search for the impersonal that reached deeply into my hungry soul. And when I began to communicate online with seekers such as myself, it wasn't to the Buddhists or Daoists I turned, but to the Christians/those who used Christian language. My attraction to Buddhist thought came later - my way of leaving the personal language of God behind in favour for the impersonal language of philosophical logic - a necessary step for me so the Universal One could be found in the desert of all human language.

To this day, I have a deep fondness for the Christian mystical bridge that brought me to the shore of the impersonal One (as do I have the same deep affection for the bridge of the teachings of the Buddha). Both were gifts of wisdom to be opened when the time was right/ripe. Do you see the value in using whatever means or way that calls to the soul in its search for the Source and/or nature of things, the Mystic's way?

[Santiago Odo]

Over the course of numerous years now I have been trying to make sense of the right-leaning and the right-reactionary pole within the political spectrum. Clearly, in my case, this was a necessary reaction to my own hyper-liberal California upbringing and with that I refer to the decades of the 70s and the 80s principally. These decades in American culture and in the sense I feel that is important stem out of the 1960s. I became aware of the degree to which I was a ‘product’ of 60s radicalism but in the sense that the entire culture, in one way or another, responded to and reacted to this influence.

A book that came my way some years back was Robert Bork’s ‘Slouching Toward Gomorrah’ which came out of the American Conservative camp in the 1980s more or less. It is a very interesting and critical book (it takes a critical position against Sixties radicalism) which is useful, but insufficient, as a starting point for the recovery of a ‘true conservative perspective’. Actually, I was influenced by Noam Chomsky in considering the word ‘conservative’ because he mentioned once that the present conservatives cannot realy be considered as such. The Founding Fathers of the American Republic, therefor, were to be held up as the real conservatives according to his view. But, given that Chomskly is in essence a communist (the actual meaning of Anarcho-Socialist) I cannot see how he could have, in the end, anything but a critical position vis-a-vis these Founders. The entire American Project would have to be seen by him as defective and, of course, it really is.

But what has become very interesting to me is to attempt to assemble a definition of what ‘conservative’ actually means. First, the present and so-called conservatives (that is, of the Reagan-conservative stripe) cannot in my view be considered truly conservative. But in making that assessment one essentially makes a critical statement about the nature of the US Neo-Imperialism and a directing, ruling, business class. When one begins to analyze that (their) position one quickly discovers that that position is a complex one that is tied intimately with the subversion of the original republican values and that this subversion ties back to the emergence of a concentrated national power that arose as a result of the Northern invasion of the South in the Civil War. This was an imperialistic war or the beginning of a peculiar tendency of invasion and assertion which started then but has also continued. In this view, the Phillipine War and the Spanish American War (the invasion and occupation of the Phillipines and of Cuba) began a process by which the original values of a confederated republic, and the democratic machinery which can make such a republic function, were subverted. And they were subverted through war-making enterprises.

In our present, these enterprises have expanded a thousand or a million-fold. In order to understand, then, ‘our present’ but from an American perspective, and of course ‘the Americanopolis’ which might involve the perspective of someone outside of this American System, that is, a meta-political perspective that would be critical of such an Americanopolis (to quote Pierre Krebs), requires some sort of perspectival point from which to make the anaylsis. What shall be and what can be that point of perspective?

This is a labyrinthian question of course when it is taken in its entirety. But the fact is that this Americanopolis has had and is still having a vast an disproportionate influence on all affairs in our 20th and 21st Century modernity. Therefor, an analysis and understanding of this influence (the word Americanopolis will have to suffice) is not only important but crucial. One cannot do without it. And, one has to then make decisions about where one stands in relation to it.

Some part of these reflections have come about as I began an interesting book titled ‘Bring The War Home: The White Power Movement. And Paramilitary America’ by Kathleen Belew (Harvard, 2018). Her thesis is very interesting. That it is to the Vietnam War that one can trace the origins of a modern ‘white power movement’. That is, returning soldiers who were thoroughly disillusioned by that war, saw themselves as having been used and betrayed by the government they trusted and believed in, and who then turned against that governing power in varying degrees and with varying intensity. Similar to those who were radicalized toward the left and the progressive-left (as for example in Stone’s movie Born One The Fourth Of July), those who became radicalized to the Right returned with a radically jaundiced view of America and the ‘power structure’ but began an activism within the radical and fringe White Power Movement(s).

See for example Louis Beam who became on of the ‘fathers’ of the Christian Identity Movement.

Now, with all that said, we are in a better position to see the phenomenon of Donald Trump and to understand why the ‘Establishment’ (the NYTs for example, CNN and many other establishment news-providers, as well as the ‘Deep State’ and their Intelligence operatives : essentially the financial and governmental structure of the US) is so opposed to the resurgence of a populist white power movement. And it is relevant to use the term ‘white power’ and ‘white identity’ because, according to this view and their view (that of this radical popular white-identitarian right), America is defined as a ‘white country’. Founded by Whites and, if you will, invented by Whites. What is interesting is to hear their descriptions of what has happened, why it has happened, and what it means.

Jumping ahead a bit (because Louis Beam was active in the 70s and 80s), we now become aware of another octave of a White Identity Movement. One can for example review the many different interviews on Red Ice Radio (YouTube) to see their interviews with the ‘old school activists’, for example David Duke. Duke was of course allied with the Klan but left it. Yet he is definitely part of a White patriotic movement and also that of Christian Identity. My view is that these people are ‘original Americans’ and not deviant Americans. What I mean by that is not that, to us now, their views do not seem deviant to us (they may or they may not) but rather that it is our modernity and shifting ideas of what is right and wrong, good and bad, which have overtaken this older ‘old school’ America.

What is peculiar, and in relation to the Vietnam War, is how the *narratives* get all confused. For example, these radical White Identity activists, numerous of whom served in Vietnam and were radicalized there, became ultra-disillusioned that they were supposedly fighting communists but that communistic and socialized processes were then manifesting themselves in their own country. That is, that left-progressive radical ideologies began to become mainstream in certain ways. Thus, they fought against ‘communism’ in a far off land but domestically became the *victims* of such odeologies and policies at home. The Left, too, developed similar narratives, but structured identity (American identity that is) on a multi-cultural and pan-racial model. So that in their view to have fought in Vietnam but then returned to a country in which they did not see themselves as full participants led to a radicalization of ‘alternative identity’ politics: Black, Latino, American Indian, etc.

Strange really that the processes of war recoil against the one waging war. I suppose this is a common theme in history excep that in our history it is infinitely more ideological, more politicized. Now, ideas and ideology are interfaces between ourselves and the *reality* that transpires and which, with great difficulty, we attempt to interpret. But whose interpretation is valid? Which one will hold? Which one will win the day?

Therefor, the essence of the conflicts of our present, within the Americanopolis and also outside of it where interpretation must also take place, there is a tremendous narrative confusion. This is dramatic and dangerous.

But the Structure itself, that is the economic and governing structure which includes vast business interests, media systems, international interests and the influence of the Americanopolis within an international setting, has its own designs and interests and these are not in any sense ‘popular interests’. That is, they are not really the interests of States and their inhabitants (as in the sovereign states that were federated in the original design), but rather the interests of an evolution of a powerful National American Government which has become, bit by bit, a bizarre war-making entity and as Chomsky accurately points out one intimately tied to a ‘Pentagon economic and industrial complex’.

In my own view, I see the events of 9/11 as having been undertaken by forces hard to see and name. Because ‘it’ cannot be seen and ‘it’ is by nature invisible, one is led to try to visualize it, but one cannot do that with precision. One *projects* therefor according to the content of one’s imagination and imagination-perception. And so again the *world* cannot really be seen. What one sees is one’s *imagined world* an idea I find fascinating.

My understanding is that *most people* cannot see their world, and cannot see the American present, and indeed they cannot really see The Present in any full sense. They see glimpses through a chink. The best maetaphor is that of Plato’s Cave (as a way to illustrate being in darkness). They have very partial view. But if that is true of the physical manifestation of *reality* as we now understand reality, how much more confused and difficult to see is any world-beyond-this-world. That is, how much more impossible is it really to conceive of *metaphysical structures*.

[Santiago Odo]

So here you have before you a taste of the template of salvation or liberation for the Soul of God in darkness. I am declaring it as the Way, the Truth and the Life. I am not the first, I won't be the last. Am I speaking your language of 'quintessence?'

Hello there Pam. I hope all is well.

I fully understand what you have written and I also think I understand why you have written it and what you mean. I have some observations. One is that you are offering a synthesis and a synthesizing view. A syncretism in that sense. You have, I gather, attempted to create a universalized mode of understanding the religious process generally, or the spiritual process (or whatever terms you use to describe what you recommend). I think this is why your gravitated to this particular site, and I also think that your perspective and your viewpoint, despite what you say about it, does indeed fit into a modernistic interpretation of ‘the religious process’ and that it also has arisen, and is connected to, nihilistic processes or nihilistic results.

I do not and I cannot criticize your choices per se yet I see your choices as *sharing commonality* with those of DD & K and, in fact, to an entire post- culture. That is, postmodernist culture.

In my view you have abstracted an aspect of the spiritual lift from out of the totality of a religious undertaking and I am specifically speaking of Greco-Christianity. While it may be true that St John of the Cross described mystical terachings or practices that you and other might practice, St John of the Cross was intimately wedded to his tradition in a full sense. That means, social work, historical work on society over and through time; the establishment of hospitals; and a full and rather total particupation in cultural and social life. That is to say civilization.

Now, the Greco-Christian traditions, if you accept my generalizing phrase, defines a total historical program and relationship to human life. It is teleological. It is specific. It has nothing to do with *enlightenment* as it has been understood and expressed by DD and K (and many others). I have asserted, and I still assert, that this entire notion of *enlightenment* is a part of a false-view. But if I will not be allowed to make such a reaching statement as that I will limit myself and say that what this *enlightenment* is has no part and no relationship to Greco-Christianity. You might describe a Saint, for example, as having an ‘enlightened view’ but that means only that he or she is ‘in Grace’. He is in Grace not because of ‘breaking the bonds of Maya’ or of overcoming the Earth or Life but for very different reasons.

This is in my view a crucial distinction to make. And I place emphasis on this for solid reasons. To engage and re-engage with European Traditions is, in my view, to reconnect essentially with Greco-Christianity in the widest possible sense but yet in very specific senses. One has to define what one is talking about and one cannot talk about just anything. One has to define it.

I suggest that what you are speaking about, and what DD and K are also speaking about, is more related to a form of cultural relativism or, as I say, an expression of syncretism between different traditions and has come about not as a sign of health and, if I may say, engagement, but rather as a symptom of *checking out*. I do not necessarily mean this in the sense of being a malicious choice but rather as an *outcome* of social and other pressures which have *knocked us off our foundation*.

[Santiago Odo]

I think my views are fairly obvious by now, no?

With you nothing is obvious! (I add a :-) because what I have written reads aggressively and I do not mean it this way). There is nothing *obvious* about any part of what you think and say. You may think that you are clear in what you say, or why you say it, but I do not see you in this way. I see you as complex and also knotted. You are, as I have been suggesting with a certain audaciousness, an *outcome* of specific trends which result in where you stand spiritually, in terms of your general health, and also in terms of your understanding of things. Of everything. Therefor, nothing at all is *obvious*.

When I use the word ‘metaphysic’ and when you use the word, I think we are not speaking of the same thing. You seem to mean *the Christian narrative* or Story. You, as a hyper-rationalist (I say this because I think it accurately describes the function of your mind) do not necessarily see the *metaphyscs* behinf the Christian Story. You rather see The Story and The Story has you hung up. You cannot *believe* The Story, as many cannot, but neither can you enter into and if you will *live* the inner content. Thus, in my view, you are (as so many of us are) *locked out*. You peer in from outside but cannot understand. You attempt to rationalize your way to understanding and stumble.

I stumbled when I saw is what Shakespeare wrote for Gloucester. Your seeing is not seeing. Your seeing is an expression of blindness. But you are non-different than so many of us, and we are victims of the same processes. And all of this is part-and-parcel of the larger point I have attempted to make. And it is a difficult one both to make and to supercede. Because it demands a commitment of the whole person, not the fractional man.

Note: I hope that you will understand — it is important that you do understand — that when I write about *you* I am not so much writing about you-as-person but really more about *us*. Since my idea is that of describing *outcomes of processes*, and I am trying to define large meta-social and meta-cultural and meta-ideological questions, I tend to think that the individual qua individual is to a degree eclipsed by larger forces.

[guest_of_logic]

I think my views are fairly obvious by now, no?

With you nothing is obvious!

Aw, thanks for the compliment, but I don't think I deserve it.

In any case, did you not understand that by "obvious" I meant "well-known or predictable [to you]"? I guess I'll provisionally assume that you did and were responding for rhetorical effect.

(I add a :-) because what I have written reads aggressively and I do not mean it this way).

Don't worry, I understand that your intentions are good. :-)

I see you as complex and also knotted.

Well, there is some justification for that. I mean, my advocacy for metaphysical agnosticism at the societal level is concomitant with a strong degree of (personal) metaphysical uncertainty - and sure, that's difficult to deal with. I think it's important to say too that I agree with you that (organised, metaphysical) diabolical forces are operating within our reality, and I say this not least because I have personally experienced them. Add metaphysical uncertainty to diabolical exposure and yes, you might well end up with a "complex" and "knotted" individual (albeit one who rejects the diabolical and advocates for the divine).

When I use the word ‘metaphysic’ and when you use the word, I think we are not speaking of the same thing. You seem to mean *the Christian narrative* or Story. You, as a hyper-rationalist (I say this because I think it accurately describes the function of your mind) do not necessarily see the *metaphyscs* behinf the Christian Story. You rather see The Story and The Story has you hung up. You cannot *believe* The Story, as many cannot, but neither can you enter into and if you will *live* the inner content. Thus, in my view, you are (as so many of us are) *locked out*. You peer in from outside but cannot understand. You attempt to rationalize your way to understanding and stumble.

Let's cut to the chase here. Firstly, your "*metaphyscs* behinf the Christian Story" [sic] are effectively that to which I referred in my post with one being able to:

"mine" the narrative for, or (re)cast it in terms of, symbolic, ethical, and mystical content.

So, you're not really distinguishing your understanding of metaphysics from mine. But secondly, let's say that there is an esoteric metaphysic behind the exoteric Christian metaphysic: in that case, this esoteric metaphysic needs no less to be coherent, plausible, and complete than the exoteric metaphysic - so, by all means, explain why and how, even though the exoteric metaphysic locks many of us out by (in my repeated view) incoherence, implausibility, and incompleteness, the esoteric metaphysic is in contrast coherent, plausible, and complete.

(Of course, I continue to challenge you knowing that you will not submit to any challenge: it's simply not your style. But on the other hand, it is my style to challenge views which seem lacking to me. So, I guess we're stuck...)

[Santiago Odo]

Well, there is some justification for that. I mean, my advocacy for metaphysical agnosticism at the societal level is concomitant with a strong degree of (personal) metaphysical uncertainty - and sure, that's difficult to deal with. I think it's important to say too that I agree with you that (organised, metaphysical) diabolical forces are operating within our reality, and I say this not least because I have personally experienced them. Add metaphysical uncertainty to diabolical exposure and yes, you might well end up with a "complex" and "knotted" individual (albeit one who rejects the diabolical and advocates for the divine).

For me, and perhaps I might say ‘In my case’ the essence of the issue is here. First, I recognize that we live — indeed we do — in *metaphysical uncertainty*. And I have made some efforts to attempt to describe what former certainty had been and what forces have acted on it, and against it, and which have produced Modernity and *our modern condition*. For example I have submitted on GF at various times (mostly in conversations with the leonic Diebert) snips from ‘Seventeenth Century Background’ by Basil Willey.

The reason I have laid emphasis on the period in which the shift in metaphysical view occurs is because, in my view, one must understand it in order to be able to understand ourselves and, of course, the *dangerous condition* in which we find ourselves. The more that we understand about the former metaphysics — what it allowed to be produced which is to say *everything that we are* and all things that we value —the better we will be able to understand what acts against it. But this also means, in my view, what acts against us. The destruction of encompassing metaphysics, the undermining of a sense of what is true in it, produces a destruction of the individual and the undermining of man. When one understand first what was created (that is, the Occidental creation) and how rich and important it is, one achieves a better position to understand what happens when it is undermined by *the acids of modernity*.

As you know, I have used the phrase *master metaphysician* (Willey uses it actually) to indicate the person who has a bird’s eye view of Our World — in the sense of the structure of perception through which the world is seen. I would have wished, and I here contextualize my thesis, that the Lords of Genius Forum would have had greater familiarity with the issue of *defining metaphysical shift* prior to launching into their radical and reactionary reform project. Why? Because they ended up only increasing the nihilistic muck and leading, through struggle against it, deeper into the nihilistic trap.

Now, they have become thoroughly irrelevant and indeed have nothing more to say. I find this amazing! My critique has nothing to do with a personal attack but rather it is an attempt to see and understand what goes on in Our Present which, bit by bit, destroys a sound relationship to meaning and to value. The undermining of the former metaphysics though that metaphysics is in its way metaphorical and as St Paul has said *we see through a glass and darkly* has been for us the lens through which value and meaning have come into our world. But, because we are like fish unable to recognize the water-medium, and because force operates against intellectus and valuable understanding, we lose the ability to see and distinguish. Thus our seeing is not seeing but stumbling. What need of eyes? We stumbled when we saw.

[Santiago Odo]

Note: to say you are challenging is a false assertion. In fact, what you are doing is setting up the stumbling blocks that stand before you and which you cannot overcome. You are setting up the circumstance where you can produce and witness the same stumbling occur and thus cement your own position within a morass.

Very tricky!

I must say that this is how I have come to understand Genius Forum as a ‘loka’ : a place to which a certain sort of person, with certain strengths and weaknesses, issues and problems, congregates. Such places, in my view, arise within this plane of manifestation (Our World) and, as in theatre, the actors assemble and play upon the stage in a brief interlude.

I hope that you can see that I am speaking meta-physically and meta-meaningfully. I am speaking to Our Age and to Our Condition and not to any specific person locked in Time. Everything that I am thinking and writing is, in its way, an *answer*, a response, to what specifically was set in motion when GF was set in motion as part-and-parcel of a reform movement.

But one cannot exit an existential trap so easily, and I will also suggest that one cannot do it alone. That is, without a *metaphysical agent*, without a Guide and without intellectus.

Returning to my delightful metaphor of Gloucester blinded, I remind you that when having vision he did not see. It is when he lost his vision that he could begin to see. The meaning should be clear as a bell ringing in darkness.

You have of course noticed that I have — disturbingly — linked reform movement with certain trends that we notice now in our present. I see DD&K as having responded in some way to the same trend. Or, to put it another way, I came to GF because I felt the stirrings of an inner movement away from the ‘flowey unreal’ and back to the metaphysically sound real. As I assume we all have. It would seem to be *the meaning of our age*, would it not? Therefor, the title ‘Nihilism as a cure for nihilism’ was not (entirely) vain. There is a certain meaning there, and one that certainly needs to be better explored.

Consider for a moment the Sanskrit term loka. I suggest that by availing ourselves of a linguistic and imagined way of setting ourselves above Our World that we can better conceive or and, perhaps, understand our own world : the place where we find ourselves. When we do this, we naturally will begin to approach metaphysics because we are perceiving metaphysically. My own view is that Christian metaphysics is in certain ways lacking. It can be useful for us to explore a wider, more encompassing model, but only — in the best use of such a view — we turn again to our own selves, and to our own traditions and creations, in order to act better in our world.

[Pam Seeback]

Alex: Hello there Pam.

Hi Alex!

I hope all is well.

Very well, thank you.

I fully understand what you have written and I also think I understand why you have written it and what you mean. I have some observations. One is that you are offering a synthesis and a synthesizing view. A syncretism in that sense. You have, I gather, attempted to create a universalized mode of understanding the religious process generally, or the spiritual process (or whatever terms you use to describe what you recommend). I think this is why your gravitated to this particular site, and I also think that your perspective and your viewpoint, despite what you say about it, does indeed fit into a modernistic interpretation of ‘the religious process’ and that it also has arisen, and is connected to, nihilistic processes or nihilistic results.

If you reason that the religious/mystical feeling or experience is nihilistic in any way, then you do not understand what I have written. I say this not just to point out the misunderstanding you have about mystical knowledge and experience that exists between you and I, by extension, with everyone else who tries to express, in words, that which is beyond words. I have asked you in the past if you have actually experienced mystical consciousness or awareness and I do believe you have not answered this question.

I do not and I cannot criticize your choices per se yet I see your choices as *sharing commonality* with those of DD & K and, in fact, to an entire post- culture. That is, postmodernist culture.

Choice had nothing to do with going beyond the rational-historical self into the realm of the intuitive-eternal self. It happened as a result of inquiry into what is real and whole and true.

In my view you have abstracted an aspect of the spiritual lift from out of the totality of a religious undertaking and I am specifically speaking of Greco-Christianity. While it may be true that St John of the Cross described mystical terachings or practices that you and other might practice, St John of the Cross was intimately wedded to his tradition in a full sense. That means, social work, historical work on society over and through time; the establishment of hospitals; and a full and rather total particupation in cultural and social life. That is to say civilization.

St. John of the Cross was intimately wedded to his tradition, but this type of marriage is no longer necessary in order to experience the Presence of God or Life and work to awaken this Presence into the world. I fully acknowledge the gifts the religious mystics brought to the world, they were pioneers of the evolution of consciousness and deserve to be honored and not forgotten, but I truly believe it was in their heart that the time would come when everyone, church-goers and non-church goers alike would find their eternal Self of God (within). It is critical for the mystic to make clear that although his or her journey may or may not have unfolded in the arms of a certain tradition that it is the same experience regardless of the path taken.

Now, the Greco-Christian traditions, if you accept my generalizing phrase, defines a total historical program and relationship to human life. It is teleological. It is specific.

No arguments here. What the Greco-Christian traditions is not however, is ontological.

It has nothing to do with *enlightenment* as it has been understood and expressed by DD and K (and many others).

No arguments here.

I have asserted, and I still assert, that this entire notion of *enlightenment* is a part of a false-view.

No arguments here, to a point. For the mystic of the experience of the wholeness and fullness of reality, the existence of a self beyond rational thought, enlightenment is no more or less that the discovery of the light of the eternal self that always has been present and always will be present. To be enlightened to a mystic simply means the darkness of identification with the historical-scientific-cultural self is ended. Note I said that history and science and culture is not ended for the mystic, only identification with history and science and culture. To the mystic, rational thought is a useful tool but usefulness has nothing to do with the reality/wholeness of the eternal and infinite self.

But if I will not be allowed to make such a reaching statement as that I will limit myself and say that what this *enlightenment* is has no part and no relationship to Greco-Christianity.

Since I believe you are grossly misunderstanding what it means to have mystical consciousness, I also believe you cannot compare it to religious-historical consciousness. I cannot stress enough that until one has experienced the silence of 'just being' and has acknowledged it to be the primary experience of self - emphasis on primary - they should not try and guess or making assumption about its nature/truth.

You might describe a Saint, for example, as having an ‘enlightened view’ but that means only that he or she is ‘in Grace’. He is in Grace not because of ‘breaking the bonds of Maya’ or of overcoming the Earth or Life but for very different reasons.

There it is in black and white - for very different reasons. You suppose you know the reasons for Grace - I propose you have no way of knowing the reasons for Grace.

This is in my view a crucial distinction to make. And I place emphasis on this for solid reasons. To engage and re-engage with European Traditions is, in my view, to reconnect essentially with Greco-Christianity in the widest possible sense but yet in very specific senses. One has to define what one is talking about and one cannot talk about just anything. One has to define it.

The self expresses itself finitely, but cannot finitely define itself. If you can see the difference in these two statements then you have caught a glimpse of the mystical self.

I suggest that what you are speaking about, and what DD and K are also speaking about, is more related to a form of cultural relativism or, as I say, an expression of syncretism between different traditions

I am not going to speak for DD and K, but of my experience of mystical consciousness, it has NOTHING to do with cultural relativism - just the opposite! I am left once again to conclude that the mystical/wholeness/beingness 'experience' is totally foreign to you.

and has come about not as a sign of health and, if I may say, engagement, but rather as a symptom of *checking out*.

If indeed I was speaking of a form of cultural relativism when I speak of the mystical experience, I can see why you would say I am *checking out* but I reiterate, the mystical experience is not a relational (rational/reasonable) experience. If one must use the concept 'healthy' to try and express the nature of mystical consciousness, I would not hesitate to say that mystical consciousness is the healthiest consciousness. Can you think of any experience healthier than that of wholeness, absolute connectivity - the existential knowing and feeling of self?

I do not necessarily mean this in the sense of being a malicious choice but rather as an *outcome* of social and other pressures which have *knocked us off our foundation*.

Ideas, such as 'Greco-Christian' are impermanent, finite things. Impermanent, finite things cannot possibly provide a foundation for, or of, self.

[Santiago Odo]

Since I believe you are grossly misunderstanding what it means to have mystical consciousness, I also believe you cannot compare it to religious-historical consciousness. I cannot stress enough that until one has experienced the silence of 'just being' and has acknowledged it to be the primary experience of self - emphasis on primary - they should not try and guess or making assumption about its nature/truth.

If indeed I was speaking of a form of cultural relativism when I speak of the mystical experience, I can see why you would say I am *checking out* but I reiterate, the mystical experience is not a relational (rational/reasonable) experience. If one must use the concept 'healthy' to try and express the nature of mystical consciousness, I would not hesitate to say that mystical consciousness is the healthiest consciousness. Can you think of any experience healthier than that of wholeness, absolute connectivity - the existential knowing and feeling of self?

What I would say — though I would not wish to say anything against ‘mystical consciousness’ — is that though such a state exist, it is possible to arrive at the state and yet to miss the point. Now, you must keep in mind that I am deliberately speaking to a specific tradition : that of Greco-Christianity. And I am linking it to Europe, to European people, and to the *renovation project* which I am attempting to define. If mystical consciousness exists, fine and good, but the mystically conscious would need, in my book, to demonstrate his (or her) bona fides through a recitation, if you will, of a specific theological dogma. Obviously, I am not using the word dogma or theology in its negative sense. A dogma and a theology connote a defined program. You may remeber reading the following since I have posted it before:

"Professional noisemakers of every class will always prefer the anarchy of intoxication of the mystics to the clear and ordered intelligence of the priests, that is, of the Church. I regret at not being able to join them in this preference either. I am prevented by a matter of truthfulness. It is this: I think that any theology transmits to us much more of God, greater insights and ideas about divinity, than the combined ecstasies of all the mystics; because, instead of approaching the ecstatic skeptically, we must take the mystic at his word, accept what he brings us from his transcendental immersions, and then see if what he offers us is worth while. The truth is that, after we accompany him on his sublime voyage, what he succeeds in communicating to us is a thing of little consequence. I think that the European soul is approaching a new experience of God and new inquiries into that most important of all realities. I doubt very much, however, if the enrichment of our ideas about divine matters will emerge from the mystic's subterranean roads rather than from the luminous paths of discursive thought. Theology---not ecstasy!"

So, I think you see that I am with deliberateness narrowing down the field of what is considerable as an *outcome* of spiritual revelation. It is not the mystic experience that has value in se, it is what a person does with his consciousness. One might never have had an elevated nirvanic experience and yet might still fully grasp that here, in this Loka, there are specific things to be done : specific uses of the self.

Clear, ordered intelligence is, of course, the *outcome* of encounter with intellectus. But it is also an encounter with Tradition as it has been defined. I again assert that these things, insofar as they can be described as *things*, are part-and-parcel of our constructed selves. They are part of our history. They are tied up with our physical structures as much as they are tied up in our intellectual structures.

So then, if you with your mystical realization also speak of these things (that is, specific engagement) then we can construct an agreement. But I think you operate from another plane.

The question : “Can you think of any experience healthier than that of wholeness, absolute connectivity - the existential knowing and feeling of self?” is only answered by what specific theology is defined when the *experience* is settled.

Ideas, such as 'Greco-Christian' are impermanent, finite things. Impermanent, finite things cannot possibly provide a foundation for, or of, self.

Well, the Earth and all that exists in matter is impermanent and mutable, as you say. But I would assert that this is where the notion of *metaphysic* becomes imperative. Ideas stand outside of material manifestation. In that sense all the great and best ideas existed on some level before anything became manifest. That is what I mean by *metaphysics* essentially. The idea is definitely Thomistic, and certainly connects to the idea of God, and to that of origin and origination, but it is important as I understand things to hold to the understanding that specific and immutable truths came to be understood through the Revelation. Not anything, not merely something, but specific things. And they became a foundation on which Life and certainly civilization were constructed. True, it happened within mutable structures, but the ideas were — and are — immutable and timeless. That is the whole point . . .

Losing the relationship to the *metaphysic* as well as to the Guide — this happens through errors of perception produced in essence through seduction — one deviates from the path, so to speak. It is a downward spiral into — to push on the triloka metaphor — the heavy materialism of the Earth. What is lost is lost quickly and easily. Recovery is hard indeed.

[Pam Seeback]

Santiano Odo: What I would say — though I would not wish to say anything against ‘mystical consciousness’ — is that though such a state exist, it is possible to arrive at the state and yet to miss the point. Now, you must keep in mind that I am deliberately speaking to a specific tradition : that of Greco-Christianity. And I am linking it to Europe, to European people, and to the *renovation project* which I am attempting to define. If mystical consciousness exists, fine and good, but the mystically conscious would need, in my book, to demonstrate his (or her) bona fides through a recitation, if you will, of a specific theological dogma. Obviously, I am not using the word dogma or theology in its negative sense. A dogma and a theology connote a defined program. You may remeber reading the following since I have posted it before:

Whatever path the mystic takes, be it Christian or Buddhist or Hindu, and the paths of each tradition exist, they are ultimately realized to be just that - a path. As the Buddha said, bring your raft, but don't carry it on your back once you reach the shore of truth.

So, I think you see that I am with deliberateness narrowing down the field of what is considerable as an *outcome* of spiritual revelation. It is not the mystic experience that has value in se, it is what a person does with his consciousness. One might never have had an elevated nirvanic experience and yet might still fully grasp that here, in this Loka, there are specific things to be done : specific uses of the self.

No, there are not specific things to be done, specific uses of the self. This would be the mystical path externalized as some sort of objective God-absolute reality, which is in complete opposition to what is revealed to the mystic when he or she 'comes to the end of the thought path.' After all, the word 'mystic' is related to the word 'mystery': to the awakened mystic, God is THE Mystery, and knowing this, he or she is irrevocably changed, in human terms, this change could be said to be one of unconditional loving of The Mystery and of living of this unclinging love.

Clear, ordered intelligence is, of course, the *outcome* of encounter with intellectus. But it is also an encounter with Tradition as it has been defined. I again assert that these things, insofar as they can be described as *things*, are part-and-parcel of our constructed selves. They are part of our history. They are tied up with our physical structures as much as they are tied up in our intellectual structures.

But one does not have to become a Greco-Christian or a Buddhist or a Hindu to use their paths and I do not deny that a path must be used. You have still not answered the question with regards to your own relationship to the mystical path: have you walked the Greco-Christian mystical path?

Well, the Earth and all that exists in matter is impermanent and mutable, as you say. But I would assert that this is where the notion of *metaphysic* becomes imperative. Ideas stand outside of material manifestation. In that sense all the great and best ideas existed on some level before anything became manifest. That is what I mean by *metaphysics* essentially. The idea is definitely Thomistic, and certainly connects to the idea of God, and to that of origin and origination, but it is important as I understand things to hold to the understanding that specific and immutable truths came to be understood through the Revelation. Not anything, not merely something, but specific things. And they became a foundation on which Life and certainly civilization were constructed. True, it happened within mutable structures, but the ideas were — and are — immutable and timeless. That is the whole point . . .

Even if it were true that ideas are immutable and timeless, the truth that man cannot speak himself in terms of immutability and timelessness is evidence that for man, ideas can never express the truth of who or what he is, which by default, means he cannot know, via idea, the truth of who or what God is or what God wants. Ideas come to man as appearances in time and space, not the eternal and as much as man longs to know the eternal via idea - this, in a nutshell, is the great mystical longing to find an objective, absolute metaphysical template so he can be the perfect idea of God - he cannot. But search he believes he must, and in doing so, he finds the (w)holy fire. :-)

[Santiago Odo]

Whatever path the mystic takes, be it Christian or Buddhist or Hindu, and the paths of each tradition exist, they are ultimately realized to be just that - a path. As the Buddha said, bring your raft, but don't carry it on your back once you reach the shore of truth.

At this point, and without referencing and making additional commentary on the rest, we encounter a solid division. As sometimes happens on forums, and certainly has happened on this forum, one can hash and rehash until the proverbial cow jumps over the proverbial moon, but to no avail.

But — and this is the basic topic of this thread — I suggest that these ideas can lead and often do lead to *nihilistic outcomes*. By your own definitions and admission you have transcended the specific for some sort of mystical other. In the end I suppose the largest influence is Buddhism which is, also by definition, nihilistic, yet I have no good reason to criticize you on a personal level.

But on a cultural or civilizational level I do very much have reasons to criticize the ideas you present. You present them as the *higher truth* and one that supercedes other, specific or limiting truths, and I admit that on some level the ideas are captivating — in a seductive sense — but they will ultimately destroy a man’s relationship to his own traditions, his time, his evolution, his culture and his civilization.

While I cannot say that I know when these ideas came on the scene, I see them as part-and-parcel of idea-sets that arose in posmodernism. They certainly gained power and influence in the 60s with drug-induced revelations and a sort of New Age universalism. And the same ideas are very active and *at work* not only in this spiritual or mystic arena but in politics and economics, in views of culture and race, certainly in gender-related issues.

The more interesting engagement is, I think, to dismantle the core Idea and try to see where it came from and what purpose it serves. I will not say that it is *absolutely destructive* but I can definitely say that it is *often destructive*. You are aware that I use the term *acid* as an agent which breaks down solidities, and you are aware that I see these *acids* as operating in many different areas. Ultimately, the acid you seem to recommend is one that breaks apart the Self itself. The self capable of and interested in creation. Thus, I illustrate how an *acid* as I define it works.

What I do not think you can consider — obviously! — is the relationship of the Idea you present and represent to larger phenomena, and specifically social phenomena. Now, I suggest that you certainly have a link with DD&K in something essential about your position. But I say again that I would not attempt to argue against it if found in one solitary individual. An individual can and will make his (or her) choices as he sees fit. But when such doctrines are brought out and taught in the social sphere, or when these ideas are held up as *higher* or *better*, that is the point that they must be taken down.

I am not really interested in Buddhism or the Indian religions generally nor in their mysticisms. I am interested in Europe both in the mundane and day-to-day sense but also as Idea. And Europe originated not in ‘mystic transports’ but in concrete work in the tangible realm.

[Pam Seeback]

Alex, still you have not answered my question about your personal relationship with the Christian doctrine or defined path of mysticism. Until you do, then you have no authority to discuss the outcomes of having walked that defined path. As for 'mystical transports', should you undertake the same mystical walk as St. John of the Cross or Teresa d'Avila or Meister Eckhart, you will discover that any transports you experience are temporal maps just as are the maps of science and philosophy. They serve a different purpose, yes, but ultimately, their impermanent nature is the same. Many mystics get caught up in their transports and believe, in error, that they have 'found God.'

It's easy to continue theorizing about metaphysics. It is not easy to be a mystic. I'll leave our conversation here.

[Santiago Odo]

My dear Pam, all that I have been presenting in this thread has to do with my relationship with Greco-Christianity. Unfortunately, using language and terminology, one gets locked into terms like *Greco-Christianity*. I picked it up from an essay in a collection of essays titled The Legacy of Greece. The essay is titled ‘Religion’ by WR Inge and deals with the Greek contribution to Christianity.

All I can say about a ‘personal relationship’ is to say that I am working to make it as real and thorough as I can. But I make no claim to any sort of *mastery* nor to any mystical transports. But even this is part of what I am trying to communicate : it seems to me it is about (if you will pardon me the turn of phrase) submitting to the yoke of a group of predicates and ideas. True, there is also the mysterious element which, in my conception, is what comes to one — shall we say — from outside of one’s own conscious self.

I do not think that I would define my *relationship* as a mystical one, so I leave that to others. I do not doubt that mystery and the mystical exist but that those you refer to — d’Avila and St John of the Cross (I know nothing of Eckhart) — were thhorough Traditional Catholics. Not mystic Buddho-Christians or Christo-Hindus. In order to discuss what they were one has to look at them within the tradition in which they served.

You seem to imply (and you are free to do so) that every mystic will arrive at some realization which joins them with every other one and, it seems, separates themselves from their own tradition. I think that is a mistaken assertion.

Therefor, I think that it is wise and necessary to put aside universalizing and syncretizing desires and tendencies and to recover and reclaim the specific. In fact that is one of the cornerstones of the idea-set I am working with : a rather radical counter-proposition to a range of ideas that operate in the present which act *acidically*.

As in many conversations of this sort, those that hit dead-ends, there is a likely solution and I see it as giving you complete validity and even *authority* to speak about mysticism and mystical experience, while I, along with Ortega y Gassett, will continue to work in the area of defined theology. If you read the stuff I write you will see the range that interests me, and why it does.

[Santiago Odo]

A recent article published on the Counter-Currents website that delves into the ‘Christian problem’ in respect to Identitarian Politics. It is worthwhile to read there to gain sense of what — some people at least — are thinking as it pertains to restructuring of conservative and traditionalist ideas. The world of ideas, it sure seems so, is in turmoil. But interesting turmoil!

Anyone reading what I have been writing over the last few years — for example on the thread, now dropped below, begun by a White Nstionalist of some sort or other — will recognize my interest in social and cultural issues which, it seems, are not specifically *spiritual* questions. But that is exactly what I have come to see as not being true. This — *this* — really is our spiritual world and, to the degree we are able, we are required to act in our world. Without wishing to freak-out any sensitive souls lurking here it is in this sense that the notion of a *Church militant* has a great deal of relevance. One has to, of course, satisfactorily define what *Church* means and what *militancy* should be and is.

I suppose, Dear Pam, that the difference we just encountered stems out of *this*, but this *this* is really a very large issue. In fact, in my view, it is the defining issue among a group of defining issues to which we are duty bound to turn our attention. What *this* is, is an attack on ‘the European Body’. I mean, that this is in the most essential sense what is going on in Our Present and is the underpinning of the meaning of our present, yet no one that I am aware of is capable of seeing it and naming it. It is mental and psychic, obviously, but also protoplasmic.

Since we are, indeed we are, living right here and now in *our spiritual world*, then we have to take it seriously and doing so is not easy at all because of all the arrayed forces that 1) have knocked us off our foundation and 2) use methods and means to keep us from recovering our foundation. The *foundation* is The European Body ; the manifested self of specific persons in a specific place and also time. Even the basic definitions are hard to recover because of the ideological pressures that make identitarianism impossible.

A fascinating thing, from my perspective, is to delve into the ideas and symbols of activism that have informed those who began the process of identitarian resistance in Our Present. It traces back to the most right-wing groups that one can image. They seem half-mad in fact. I provided a link to Louis Beam who was, at one time, an active member of the Klan and also an Christian Identitarian and a guerrilla soldier against ‘the powers that be’ that he could only distinguish as through a chink. The way that I conceive of these people is as *messengers* from The Body — the social body, the body where the self is housed. They are in reaction to forces that act against them which, as through a glass darkly they cannot clearly distinguish. But this illustrates the degree that we, too, cannot really distinguish the features of our worlds, either interior or exterior. Again, Plato’s Cave is the best metaphor and so is that of *awakening* *realization* *empowerment* et cetera.

The tool of their imagination is limited and thus the symbols that they assemble to describe what is acting against them are imperfect and, often, skewed. But it is more important to at least be able to see and understand how reaction arises out of the social body even if it is inarticulate. The Klan began as a form of reaction to the North’s military invasion and occupation of the South. The Klan has always been radically identitarian. And there are correspondences to the American Klan in many different nationalistic circumstances now. And my assertion is that to reclaim identity and to make it really real in a manifest sense, and in a spiritual sense, is to become involved with a radical project that will place one in conflict with The Present as regime. In respect to that one must also recognize the fear that people (naturally) feel of being branded as extremists or lunatics. Extremism and lunacy, like a fever in the social body, are symptoms of reaction.

It is a worthwhile exercise to consider a similar circumstance, as for example in Iraq, where radical neighborhood groups arise to fill in a void when the social fabric was ripped apart. These phenomena arose out of war-circumstances and, as I said a few posts above, to understand our American Present one has to turn back to the Vietnam War to understand many different things going on now. Causation. It is quite incredible to turn one’s attention to the destructiveness of war, both in the sense of damage done to the other (the victim) and then how the effect recoils agains the wager of war, as for example now, within the American social body where people are killing themselves off through opioid overdose and other forms of suicide and the culture slips into social hysteria in different manifest forms.

Who is writing about the effect of war on a war-torn but war-making nation?

What I find also interesting is, as I have said numerous times, the fact that the DD&K project began, at least as I understand it, as a reactive movement against what is too-generally called ‘liberalism’. What is *it* though really? Is it just another manifestation of the French Revolution? The overturning of *established order* as a process that never ends? What is the Force that animates this motion in history?

How odd it was to then see D&D come out with a radical defense of the same Liberalism which they were, erstwhiley, in open reaction to, even as *revolutionary soldiers*.

[Santiago Odo]

Epilogue to 'Bring the War Home' by Kathleen Belew, comments to follow . . .



It was, by and large, an interesting read. It provides a very clear and articulate picture of the way that a certain segment of the population — perhaps they might be called ‘social justice warrior-types’ — view the phenomenon of the appearance of Donald Trump.

It is a book that arises in a specific context and it has a specific purpose. It is important to cleartly distinguish that purpose and to *place* it in a historical context. Then, one can better aproach her thesis and its specific intentions. Basically, her assertion is that racism and other forms of social backwardness had not ever been eradicated, though there was, supposedly, a wide-ranging social movement to do so (the Sixties).

These backward anti-government racists stand in opposition to ‘humanity and light’ (to borrow her phrase), but this of course indicates that she knows what side she is on, and it is the side of the ‘light’. And here one has to stop and examine ‘the tenets of the American civil religion’ in its post-Civil war, Lincolnian forms. This post-Civil War *form* as I call it is really a new and different America. A very complex creation really, convoluted and difficult to see and understand. Both idealistic in ways one might describe as ‘humanistic’ yet at the same time strangely, and also darkly, *fascistic*, if I may be allowed to use the term. But if one focuses on ‘the tenets of the American civil religion’ one quickly comes to see them as a fabrication, the projection of an *imagined world*, if you will, and one very ripe for propaganda usage. This needs to be very carefully examined within the historical sweep of the 20th century.

The so-called ‘patriots’ and the backward hicks that oppose this *project* are, as I have said, the more *real* Americans. That is, the United States was not ever intended to have been nor to become what it had in the post-Civil War. It did so because it violated, in the most profound sense, the basic agreements that underpinned the Republic. Therefor, in significant ways what is playing out in our American Present is a battle between two distinct American definitions. But who has the power to enforce definitions? Or better put who holds the reins of power and can better control what definition is established as the one of ‘light’.

Belew is a partisan, almost at a level of religious dedication, to this American post-racist, multi-culturalist American-national model, and in her ‘acknowledgments’ section, offered at the end of the book in 3-4 pages, she lists the wide group from which she drew support. There is a strange timbre in these pages that smacks of ‘virtue signaling’. In fact she goes on for a number of pages listing the people who helped and provided moral support, and mentions one individual who ‘reminded me to seek humanity and light’, which is a strange open-ended phrase. If one did not seek ‘humanity and light’, what the heck else would one seek? Inhumanity and darkness . . . The predicates in this statement are, I suggest, given unconsciously.

What is interesting — in my view and given my recent studies — is that those who oppose the ‘liberal project’ do so because they define humanity and also *light* in different ways. Yet they are making the effort to arrive at definitions. Yet different ones. But this issue of definition and of defining is complex indeed and, as I have alluded, connects to the most important event in American history: The American Civil War.

So, while her thesis — and it is a good one, a very good one in fact — is that present politics and social issues are deeply tinged with war-effects from Vietnam and other recent conflicts, I am of the school that sees the Northern attack on the South as the cataclysmic event in the American social body and one that I think will not turn out well. That is, is not turning out well. All chickens come home to roost as Malcolm X said and it is particularly interesting to notice how, now, this is taking shape. Chickens coming home to roost, in my book, is connected with what rises out of the social body as reaction. Therefor, it all turns back again to definitions of this *reaction* : what it is, why it is, if it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (or evil).

The hyper-liberal machine lunges forward : possessive, assertive, absolutely sure of itself, filled with *light* and working in the *light*. Yet there is a counter-argument, and a counter-movement to it, established on different foundations.