Summary

This is a symphony in four movements. The overture introduces the global, superhistorical territory of the subject. The second movement lays out a theory for religious pluralism to account for the differences in religious experience. The third movement re-applies religious experience to its political consequences. The finale is a conclusion on discerning inner will which has transcendent origins from the mundane desire of lower planes of being.

I: Multi-Polar Geopolitics of Mystic Purism

“Mere dry reasoning—I spit on it! I have no use for it! [Sri Ramakrishna spits on the ground.] Why should I make myself dry through mere reasoning?”

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

The multi-polar world will return to a subtle form of epistemic-moral imperialism, carved out as usual by geopolitical lines rather than philosophical worthiness, unless there is a provocatively persuasive eruption of intellection that grips the neck of thought leaders from within their respective cultures. Belief builds an egoic pleasure palace that fortifies the subject from dangerous thoughts which beckon doubt and reexamination of ingrained principles. Culture is the social scaffolding supportive of secluding subjectivity within private universes of mutually exclusive dogmas.

In this sense, culture must be undermined before personal belief can be affected. So long as the individual is permitted to receive social rewards for withdrawing away from dialectical warfare and retreating into egoic private beliefs he will do so. The culture also will not readily welcome a rewriting of itself for no reason. Therefor there must be a Trojan Horse interception of those spiritual-intellectual forces that carry out indoctrination and ideological self-preservation. The nature of these processes is such that any interception must take on the same form as the targeted religious-ideological tradition.

In fact, this is exactly what has happened as historical epochs decohere into liberal egalitarianism. Ultimately it is due to erosion of those sacred pillars upon which culture is raised to the heights of glory and which were built by supra-rational spiritual faculties of knowledge. Dark clouds of ignorance entered into religious authorities blocking the higher light all the while yet disguised as the same beacons of truth of yore. The agents of transmission and implementation of religious ideas lost contact with the supra-rational plane of knowledge but were yet still responsible for the conveyance of such.

Instead of admitting (or recognizing) the loss of this ascension of consciousness to higher planes such priesthood castes doubled-down on the dogma of papal infallibility. All the while knowing very well that it only applies to a mystic revelation from higher planes. The lack of divine reception was the very thing which was unable to be disclosed for their position as religious authority required them to maintain appearances in order to guarantee faith amongst the public. They could forsee that faith was the substance that enables further mystic revelation to be possible for later generations.

In short, decadent religious institutions still possessed the wisdom to inspire hope, faith and spiritual values admidst the loss of direct divine locution. For to confess the line to Him had been severed would be true only in a temporal, relative sense that would be mistaken by the unlettered populace. The community’s relation to Him could never be lost in an Absolute sense and so forth were appearances maintained. Unfortunately as generation after generation attempted to keep the salvific flames of faith alive the expectation that holy priesthood would one day hear from Him again grew dimmer and dimmer.

Likewise, the reversal is also to occur through the same sphere by which our link to the divine was lost. Specifically by not trusting the philosophical chain of custody handed over by unremarkable religious institutional heads whom have been selling humanity short on account of their own dim-witted will and lackluster spirit. The greatest examples of supreme wisdom have all come from direct mystic experience and not from devoutedly following religious life customarily.

The mystic path is one of calling upon divine knowledge to manifest itself into one’s life from the depths of the seeker’s aspiration and the breadth of his humility. There are accounts in the canons of mysticism from every religious faith of devotees who opened their consciousness through their hearts to receive knowledge with a faculty transcendent to the ordinary mind. It is through these instances - through the manifestation of the supra-rational into the mental mind - of saintly revelations that gnostic (i.e. knowing) religion will be enthroned back to its seat at the helm of human progress.

In the absence of infiltrating traditional religious structures with gnostic blessing, the ruling hand of the divine will continue spreading its knowledge into variegated offshoots disconnected from fertile geopolitical soil. It is difficult for the observer from afar to discern the credulity of these minor sages due to their sheer multiplicity and rapid multiplication into splintering tribes with their own incidental legions of loyalty. What is needed is an alliance in gnosis of those spiritual-intellectual forces upon whom man is carried in his quest for scientific, religious and philosophical truth. More than an unveiling of even higher suprarational tenents and principles is needed a social arrangement upon the already existing implications drawn from mystic testimony. At present human life is structured from ancient regimes from a bygone spiritual age that has long lost its claim to vitality. We are living inside tombs and looking for light flickering off of mummies and fossils.

There must be kindling of aspiration in the mystic minded to terraform the cultural climate of his corner of the earth from the inside-out of prevailing religious kingdoms. Furthermore, the splintering of higher knowledge in small camps rarely happens to inspire dialectical exchange advancing an evolving and productive dissemination of generative understanding. Instead freshly acquired divine teaching when left non-competing settles into a rancid pool and loses all semblence to its source.

Religious truths must be shared to intellects far beyond their own home region in order to provoke the subjective wills on the other side to re-examine the vitality and force of their own ideas. It is often a primordial jealousy that awakens man to his own potentiality. The same is the case for the religious universe in which he inhabits and its doctrines by which he abides. When a man’s own divine authority fails to muster up the grandeur of an distant civilization or a close rival, he has little choice but to double-down on egoic fanaticism protecting a decaying creed or to switch allegiances abandoning his maternal homeland.

The most decayed cultural space at present are the liberal grounds of the trans-sexualized West. Without a religious authority to call their own, it has commodified strands of neo-spiritualism and New Age gimmickry to confuse the legitimacy of all of religious history. It has the intention of throwing a shadow of doubt over the epistemic-intellectual claims to a revealed higher plane of knowledge. Hence it has further warped scientific striving to defend its bias of a horizontal metaphysics which corresponds to its political bent of egalitarian universalism and the indefinite Pac Man capitalization of the cosmos as a numeric field of quantities.

Thus mystic gnosis has a multi-dimensional personality:

1. as the prey of liberalism, to be engineered as the stuff of parody and mockery, and weaponized against religion itself in the form of uncalibrated intellectual presentation that degrades its own very substance
2. as the force of canalizing, entropic dissolution of higher truth into non-competing tribalistic bands to the effect of eroding Tradition’s power of transmission even if no cooperating outside agency (i.e. liberalism) is there to encourage it.
3. as the provocateur of prevailing religious kingdoms, on its own authority as an independent gnostic power, battling them in occult warfare and dialectic confrontation. Even where no competitor takes the stage to challenge the gnostic he advances the spirit manifested into his life with time, history and the earth itself as his witness.

The gnostic will fall into a category of being either weaponized as a neo-spiritualism popularizer pawn of liberalism; or an enemy of Tradition on his own volition due to a small-minded ambition and a debilitated aspiration to spread the higher light against the overwhelming torrents of ignorance that suffocate weak-willed opposition. Even if the inspired subject possesses the light of God he needs the intestinal fortitude to speak it against the tremendous pressures of politically solidified masses of inertia. Lastly, he may rise into his proper role as a philosopher-prince in His service which means fidelity to the light implanted into one’s soul through the mystic experience.

II: Perennialism, Constructivism, Manifestationism

“the limits of thought are not to be assumed as the limits of possibility.”

William Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (1859)

“reason cannot leap beyond contradictories.”

Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance (1440)

Brahman is “that from which speech, along with mind, turn back, having failed to reach it.”

Taittirīya Upaniṣad, 2.9.1

“This Ātman cannot be known through much study, nor through the intellect, nor through much hearing. It can be known through the Ātman alone to which the aspirant prays; the Ātman of that seeker reveals Its true nature.”

Kaṭha Upaniṣad, 1.2.23

This section of the essay is inspired by the excellent book Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna & Cross-Cultural Philosophy of Religion by Ayon Maharaj. We begin with Sri Ramakrishna because he exemplifies mysticism, through an experience he calls vijñāna, as an empirical path of knowledge that brings religion out from behind the curtains of superstition and mere theoretical reasoning.

“Sri Ramakrishna took as his primary empirical data the supersensuous facts and realities disclosed to him by his own mystical experiences”

Maharaj, Infinite Paths, p. 144

“Sri Ramakrishna agrees with such mystics that a paraconsistent approach to God—which, by definition, transcends discursive thought—has to be grounded in spiritual experience rather than discursive reasoning. As a vijñānī, Sri Ramakrishna claimed to have direct insight into God’s paraconsistent nature as the impersonal-personal Infinite Reality.”

ibid, p. 72

I want to summarize one argument made in the book which is centered around the theological implications of infinity. It has special relevance to the above discussion that the differences in religion, especially accounted for by variety of mystic experience, can be academically registered as an expression of a single impersonal-personal Infinite Reality (e.g. God) dual-purposely revealing Himself in different ways according to the love of the devotee as well as according to His own pleasure. To use the language of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, translated from the original Bengali, the former is God as bhakta-vasal (i.e. “God manifests Himself in the form which His devotee loves most”) and the latter is God as icchāmayi. The author, Ayon Maharaj, is also the author of The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno, the editor of the Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Vedanta and recently wrote a scholarly work on Swami Vivekananda.

I’ll first mention two characteristics that are necessary for a multi-polar radical spirituality rooted experientially. It must be religiously pluralist and reject doxastic voluntarism. I’ll allow Maharaj to describe the differences between religious exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism.

”(1) Exclusivism: Salvific knowledge of a transcendent reality is mediated by only one religion (which naturally will be one’s own).

(2) Inclusivism: Salvific knowledge of a transcendent reality is mediated by more than one religion (not necessarily by all of them), but only one of these mediates it in a uniquely superior way (which again will naturally be one’s own).

(3) Pluralism: Salvific knowledge of a transcendent reality is mediated by more than one religion (not necessarily by all of them), and there is none among them whose mediation of that knowledge is superior to all the rest.”

Maharaj, Infinite Paths, p. 97-98

Ramakrishna explained religious pluralism very succinctly.

“What I mean is that dogmatism is not good. It is not good to feel that my religion alone is true and other religions are false. The correct attitude is this: My religion is right, but I do not know whether other religions are right or wrong, true or false.”

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

We may say that the purpose of religion is in its transformative aspect as a result of mystic experience which is itself thrusted into consciousness as a result of an restless yearning for God. Religion in its relation to social cohesion, collective identity and so forth are all downstream applications of mystic experience. One can only be certain about the salvific efficacy of one’s faith after the esoteric practice of following it with a heart bursting with aspiration. Prior to that, one only has hazy, theoretical experience of its doctrinal applicability. It is through intense seeking that spiritual experience occurs and removes all doubt. At that point, one can be certain of one’s own religion but must remain agnostic about other paths.

“The sum and substance of the whole matter is that a man must love God, must be restless for Him. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in God with form or in God without form. You may or may not believe that God incarnates as a human being. But you will realize God if you have that yearning. Then God Himself will let you know what He is like.”

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

To connect religion, with its manifestation into institutional structures, with a potent spiritual-intellectual force it must be receptive to an occult plane of reality that supersedes the knowledge from ordinary sense impressions. Religion must become a path and means of action in the liminal occult realms both below and above the ordinary mental world. Otherwise religion loses all relevance to metaphysics and becomes but an inferior science. Or even worse, an outright malicious tool of social control.

Religious social structures harmonize the esoteric work of direct interaction with the beyond with the exoteric work of cultural cohesion, identity and expression. Religious Exclusivism freezes a single set of revelatory events, usually of the same place and time period, into an spiritual-intellectual monolith antagonistic to all other crowds following other revelatory happenings. Religious Inclusivism expands the acceptable set of revelatory happenings by category. For example, it may claim the perennial truth of all theistic revelations but not of atheistic nirvana, or vice-versa. Religious Pluralism is the most dynamic position of affirming the theological infinity of God according to which He manifests in potentially Infinite forms (and formlessness).

“if God is truly infinite, then God must be capable of manifesting in an infinite variety of ways. The traditional Christian dogma that Christ is the sole Incarnation of God—which Marion seems to accept—turns out to be another form of conceptual idolatry, since it limits the Infinite God to a single human manifestation.”

Maharaj, Infinite Paths, p. 77

It is clear that to avoid any subtle epistemic imperialism at the geopolitical scale there must be a unity at the level of gnosis rather than at the level of freely chosen beliefs. This is why doxastic involuntarism is an essential characteristic of an anabolic spiritual philosophy that metabolizes more Godliness into being. Belief that is freely chosen, especially if it contradicts experience, is a vehicle for hypocrisy and repression.

Belief, in the sense that mystics use it, is a byproduct of higher knowledge. Belief comes after gnosis not before. Hence gnosis may be pursued voluntarily but the knowledge which descends is involuntary. Religious beliefs which can be manufactured by reasoning from ordinary experiential states are not valuable to the mission of bringing the divine down to the earth to manifest divinity into human civilization. Human culture can only be guided by the Hand of God when manufactured beliefs are replaced by gnosis.

”if God is truly paraconsistent, then He must be both the ultimate ground of the universe and the transcendent nondual Brahman beyond the universe. As Sri Ramakrishna puts it, “Prakṛti or Śakti is the cause of everything in the universe. Brahman, the Pure Ātman, is the Cause of the cause. This Pure Ātman is our true nature.”

Maharaj, Infinite Paths, p. 71

I’ll make a last quick note on doxastic involuntarism. Its implication is that without any gnostic experience one is necessarily limited in their range of beliefs, such as to agnosticism or atheism. Belief cannot be freely chosen but is rather earned. Hence the double-meaning of Manifestationism. If we wish to topple a liberal empire of degeneracy it can only be achieved by manifesting more Godliness into being. Believing, hoping and reasoning about spiritual alternatives at the verbal and theoretical levels are to call upon doxastic voluntarism. Manifesting higher spiritual action into reality is the test of belief.

The geopolitical implications arise from the transformation of being, or as it rendered in academia, salvific efficacy, of the religious path.

Religious pluralism in the view of Ramakrishna (1836-1886) affirms that sui generis mystic experiences from varying traditions are phenomenologically dissimilar yet belonging to the same Reality which manifests itself in different ways. Yet this raises an immediate problem because religious doctrines differ in key details. Any form of religious pluralism must account for the revelatory differences between the forms that religions teach the Absolute to assume.

”For instance, Christianity maintains that Christ died on the cross, while Islam denies this. Hinduism and Buddhism accept the doctrine of reincarnation, while Abrahamic religions—at least in their orthodox forms—do not. Hinduism accepts multiple divine incarnations such as Rāma and Kṛṣṇa, while Christianity accepts Christ as the sole incarnation of God and Islam denies the very possibility of a divine incarnation.”

“Regarding such historical and metaphysical issues, some religions are surely right while other religions are surely wrong. If Christ did in fact die on the cross, then Christianity is right on this issue, while Islam is wrong. If souls do reincarnate, then Hinduism and Buddhism are right, while orthodox Semitic religions are wrong. In light of the mutual incompatibility of numerous religious truth-claims, is religious pluralism even a coherent possibility? Clearly, any theory of religious pluralism that straightforwardly affirms the truth of all the historical and metaphysical doctrines of the various religions would be incoherent, since it would be committed to the contradictory assertions that Christ did and did not die on the cross, that reincarnation is and is not true, and so on.”

”Sri Ramakrishna, I will argue, is not committed to such an incoherent position, since his model of religious pluralism affirms the salvific efficacy of all religions without maintaining that all the doctrines of the various religions are true.”

Maharaj, Infinite Paths, p. 101

It is the mysterious, suprasensuous power of religion to radically alter thinking, willing and feeling. The salvific efficacy of religious practices concerns the efficacy of a certain way of living, practice and study within a particular kingdom of tradition, in transforming perception, being and knowing. These inspired qualities are only aligned with the aims of the reigning culture when the culture is itself pure and dharmic.

Insofar as culture is ruled by darkness, ignorance and weakness then spiritual transformation is directly responsible for the making of occult insurgents, sacred rebels and divine dissidents. Hence religion, in its esoteric-mystic experiential element, is the most extreme device for radicalization. Spiritual transformation leads to irreversible, non-compromising service to an incontrovertible truth and a way of striving over obstacles that occlude one’s path towards the illuminated holy vision implanted by eyes aflame with revelatory passion.

“I have observed that a man acquires one kind of knowledge about God through reasoning and another kind through meditation; but he acquires a third kind of Knowledge about God when God reveals Himself to His devotee… Do you know what it is like? Suppose a man is in a dark room. He goes on rubbing a match against a match-box and all of a sudden light comes. Likewise, if God gives us this flash of divine light, all our doubts are destroyed. Can one ever know God by mere reasoning?”

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

The relevancy of this section to the previous should be clear. Religion, in the singular, is a way of giving manifold signification to a select lot of revelatory events, such as miracles, divine locutions and holy teachings received from above. The epistemic claim, most clearly enunciated and lived by Ramakrishna, is that in following any single tradition to the mystic point of no return, one encounters an authentic face of God as He has decided to present to you. This includes the seemingly contradictory visions of a personal theistic deity, a Buddhist nirvanic nothingness as well as an Advaitic personal Brahman. It also includes the spontaneous occurrences of a devotee receiving visions of a different faith than his own.

“That Reality which is the nitya [eternal] is also the līlā [temporal play]… Everything is possible for God. He is formless, and again He assumes forms. He is the individual and He is the universe. He is Brahman, and He is Śakti. There is no limit—no end—to God. Nothing is impossible for Him”

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

The nothingness and the personal Brahman we may consider as different expressions, one negative and one positive, of the same vacuum-plenum mystic state. Differing theistic visions are also embraced by this view, which Ayon Maharaj (now Swami Mehdananda) calls Manifestationist, or I would call Mystic Purism, as an authentic encounter with Reality. It defends the moreorless exact reporting of the experience by the subject.

This differs from the two mainstream opinions of Perennialism and Constructivism which both find fault in mystic reporting according to the logic by which these theories reconcile their underpinning metaphysical biases. Perennialism suggests that mystic experiences must be phenomenologically similar and are only textually interpreted differently, including by the experiencing subject’s own mind. In other words, it is the rather unbelievable position that Buddhist nirvakalpa samadhi is the same experience as Isaiah seeing Yahweh. The Constructivist is in an even worse position because he claims that both experiences may be phenomenologically dissimilar but that the subject is merely imprinting their own pre-formed religious ideas onto a hallucination. Thus Constructivists cannot account for surprising or novel mystical experiences.

Maharaj illustrates the Constructivist position through the prominent theologian, and popularizer of religious pluralism, John Hick:

”According to Hick, what mystics experience is only a mentally conditioned phenomenal form of the ultimate reality rather than the ultimate reality itself.”

Maharaj, Infinite Paths, p. 140

A third position is described by Maharaj:

”Sri Ramakrishna champions what I call a ‘manifestationist’ approach to mystical experience, according to which the Infinite Reality actually manifests Himself to different mystics in different forms and aspects.”

Maharaj, Infinite Paths, p. 141-142

”Sri Ramakrishna not only accepts the ontological reality of the personal and nonpersonal aspects of the Infinite Reality but also maintains that mystical experiences of God are direct and unmediated. For Sri Ramakrishna, while every religion captures at least some real aspect of God, no religion captures the whole of the Infinite God.”

ibid, p. 142

There are interesting arguments within Constructivism, such that all mystic experiences are at least “partially” pre-formed by the subject’s psyche and at best, veridical hallucinations. In other words, they convey information from an actual impact with Reality but their exact description is subjectively tampered by the very reception into the subject’s consciousness.

This is not really a new argument but already expressed famously in the first line of the Tao Te Ching. Any mystic with a minimum bearing of self-awareness is eager to preface their speech with the disclaimer that whatever is spoken is necessarily distorted by the limitations of communication.

However, the Constructivist argument would be that upon the very entering into the mystic’s own mind the experience has already been warped. The reply to this reasoning is an occult reference to the planes of reality above and behind the mind “perceive[d] by means of a nondiscursive spiritual faculty of knowledge” (as Ayon Maharaj puts it).

In short, consciousness, in mystic states of absorption, accesses degrees of Truth higher than the ordinary mental can work out for itself using its own reasoning and powers of thought. Hence, it is no use arguing that mystic experiences are warped by the subject’s mind if the subject’s consciousness grasped Reality at a level beyond the elements of distortion (i.e. memory, language, etc.). The fact that an experience was expressed from the mental plane of ordinary language does not mean it was received there.

There are also surprising differences among non-mystic philosophers in what a mystic experience even is. For example, the Perennialist scholar Walter Stace (in Mysticism and Philosophy) defines it as a “nonsensuous experience of undifferentiated unity” which explicitly dismisses any experiences of God.

We can look at how Ramakrishna in his words describes Vijñāna Vedānta as an embracing, as a result of reaching the peaks of mystic experience and descending back into the world, of the immanent and the transcendent as sharing equal ontological footing.

“In the light of Vedāntic reasoning, the world is illusory, unreal as a dream. The Supreme Soul is the Witness—the witness of the three states of waking, dream, and deep sleep… But for my part I accept everything: Turīya and also the three states of waking, dream, and deep sleep. I accept all three states. I accept all—Brahman and also māyā, the universe, and its living beings”

“Do you know what I see right now? I see that it is God Himself who has become all this… I had a similar vision once before, when I saw houses, gardens, roads, men, cattle—all made of One Substance; it was as if they were all made of wax.”

Ramakrishna, 26 October 1884

III: Mystic Militancy and Religious Experience

In this section, I briefly introduce how mysticism as previously mentioned as a defining factor in the destiny of Spirit’s intertwining with man and his geopolitical experience as a class-caste-spiritual subject, is practically manifested as an implementation in living being.

Man in his ordinary state is only manifesting a surface portion, over a small smear of self-centered activity on the mental and physical planes, of his total being. The rest is out of the reach of the machinery of his everyday mind which is largely an autonomic processing, from a conditioned center, of mundane inputs. The total reaches of his being are as if amputated from consciousness with Procustrean violence. Man lives suffocated into a small sphere of feeling all the while dreaming of a home he has never known.

Through religious experiences the fear of death, as the termination of subjective existence, is conquered. Traditions that bear salvific efficacy bring consciousness into higher planes of being transcendent of those which we describe as being affected by death. The attainment of deathlessness opens a channel for these higher planes to be visibly manifested into the lower ones.

It enables the energetically optimal vibratory mode known as bliss or ananda. This descends into parts of the being at different degrees based on the ranges that consciousness has traversed. The introduction of ananda to the mind gives it a punctuating creative intensity that cannot be otherwise substituted for, such as by wild willfulness or emotional fervor. Introducing ananda to the body is a curative that can potentially reverse somatic mutations when focused at profound yogic depths. Ananda is one of the psychic sensations, such as a taste of enthusiastic destined belonging in a particular act, of higher forces colliding on lower planes.

“Mysticism can at least in part be regarded as something affecting the human mind, and it is therefore quite unreasonable to expect that it could be fruitfully explored by confining oneself to literature about or contributed by mystics, or to the behavior and physiological characteristics of mystics and their bodies. No one would willingly impose upon himself such artificial constraints when exploring other phenomena affecting or pertaining to the mind; he would not study perception only by analyzing reports of those who describe what they perceive, or by looking at what happens to people and their bodies when they are engaged in perceiving. What one would do when studying perception, in addition, if not first of all, is to observe and analyze one’s own perceptions.”

Staal, Exploring Mysticism, p. 123–124

“Better than reading is hearing, and better than hearing is seeing. One understands the scriptures better by hearing them from the lips of the guru or of a holy man… But seeing is far better than hearing. At the sight of God, all doubts disappear. It is true that many things are recorded in the scriptures; but all these are useless without the direct realization of God without devotion to His Lotus Feet, without purity of heart”

“Formal worship drops away after the vision of God. It was thus that my worship in the temple came to an end. I used to worship the Deity in the Kālī temple. It was suddenly revealed to me that everything is suffused with Consciousness. The utensils of worship, the altar, the doorframe—all Pure Consciousness. Men, animals, and other living beings—all Pure Consciousness. Then like a madman I began to shower flowers in all directions. Whatever I saw I worshipped.”

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

Religious experience often bring about revolutions of consciousness. I mean by that an novel intellectual leap followed by an experiential turning. An intellectual leap may be spontaneously transcending a mental obstacle, a philosophical breakthrough and/or the passional, obsessive fit that comes with diving into a new subject. One’s being begins moving exponentially after crossing a certain gnostic threshold. The spiri carries with it the mind as an instrument to perfect intangible higher light into concrete manifestation through bodies living in the world.

Having manifested unconditional bliss into life is a metaphysical achievement that depends on no theory. Attaining to a vision of the deathlessness of consciousness is an immanent metaphysical manifestation of immortality.

For example, consider that post-orgasmic bliss is not different than the bliss of what’s called in the academic literature, a Pure Consciousness Event (PCE). When you attain to a PCE through meditation you find consciousness to be a silent sea that exceeds all obstacles and carries one’s being through durational time. The experience simply gets covered up by objects of perception to which we relent our attention. Hence one must seek to live with one foot in both seas.

“All doubts disappear when one sees God. It is one thing to hear of God, but quite a different thing to see Him. One cannot have one hundred percent conviction through mere hearing. After realizing God, one has complete and infallible conviction.”

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

There’s nothing to be afraid of once you have a measure of metaphysical certainty manifested into your life. There is an argument in academic literature over what are called Self-Authenticating Experiences of God (SAGE). Perennialists and Constructivists both explain away the SAGE as either being phenomenologically the same differing only in its interpretation, or as being a partial distortion due to the subject’s psyche. These are both highly problematic to the reconciliation of religious ideas.

”We see God Himself if we but see His Incarnation. Suppose a person goes to the Ganges and touches its water. He will then say, ‘Yes, I have seen and touched the Ganges.’ To say this, it is not necessary for him to touch the whole length of the river from Haridwar to Gangasagar”

Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

Pick any tradition and get radicalized by it. Go deep enough, and we will all meet at the center.

“Why should I produce only a monotone when I have an instrument with seven holes? Why should I say nothing but, ‘I am He, I am He’? I want to play various melodies on my instrument with seven holes. Why should I say only, ‘Brahman! Brahman!’? I want to call on God through all the moods—through śānta, dāsya, sakhya, vātsalya, and madhura. I want to make merry with God. I want to sport with God.”

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna

IV: Occultism of the Will

The last section of this essay is my own intuition of the differences between the words ‘will’ and ‘desire’, especially as interpreted within the preceding context of higher planes of knowledge impinging upon the consciousness of the gnostic individual and the geopolitical responsibilities the divine manifests therefrom.

Desire is that which can be curtailed, dampened or even denied. Will is that which unfolds and is expressed as a result of your inner substance.

Action that arises from will doesn’t sprout from any motivation but is rather inborn as a part of how you find yourself to already be. Living by will makes you a carrier of fate.

Whereas living by desire guarantees frustration in both production and feeling, as you stagger from object to object without any centering orientation beyond the ephemeral targets of the desires evoked in you.

Desire may be satisfied by circumstances whereas will is the modulating background against which all desires arise. Will isn’t alterable but rather an innate temperament which rises to the occasions given to it.

When understood with the light of gnostic experience (see sections I, II and III), living by will is radically dharmic whereas living by desire is avidyic (avidya; ignorance). Will is not “higher desire” that pushes down to manage “lesser desires”. Will is the innermost individuality coming into manifestation moment-by-moment through the channels of the mind. In other words, desires are small currents of thawed, flowing streams running out from the Himalayan iceberg of inner will.

In my experience, the inner will is blinding when you face it directly. The boundaries of the ego dissolve immediately in the light of the will. There are no personal interests for the will. There are cosmic objectives that you are spellbounded, as if by an incontrovertible logic, from opposing. To surrender ultimately means to surrender to this incontrovertible logic at the innermost depths of your being as revealed by mystic quest.

When you turn away from the will to look at desires again, everything is transparent and dreamlike. You can no longer believe in the ego and its concerns, nor in material conditions and the concerns they provoke in us. What actually animates the substance that is behind the workings of our everyday experiences is unrelated to the logic of personal, private pleasure and enjoyment.

Rather enjoyment is the neutral, everpresent background state admist all activity and inactivity. Beyond the enjoyment of experience is an ascending anabolism of spirit. Which is not the same as mental and physical metabolism, but the development of possibilities for the substrate upon which mind and matter both depend.

In other words, consciousness is creating its own conditions for inner-expansion and which we can dreamily intuit through an introspection of will (i.e. not desire).

Further contemplation of these subjects likely yields even more mystic fruits that are transformative to individuals and groups to whom scholars of civilization (e.g. such as students of Yockey) ought to pay rapt attention to.