This article was written in 1999 and still marks the foundation of all that I have written and taught since. I was never able to take this forward, as I had to get a job and enter the belly of the beast. But the Orphic visionary poet-philosophers will reincarnate and will revivify this dry and dusty world. And the Wasteland will become Garden once again.
---
There are various forms of freedom. But none of them are any use without freedom of the imagination. In many years of studying 'esoteric' literature, I discovered that virtually all who presented themselves as experts recognized the great power of imagination. With increasing horror, I saw that most systems offer ways to chain and limit the imagination, encouraging participants to become obsessed with certain symbols, and to cultivate certain emotions to the exclusion of others. This is most obvious in the case of 'cults'; but the deeper you go into the New Age, the harder it is to draw the line between cults and any 'programs of spiritual development'.
These observations are not meant to demean the information contained in 'spiritual systems'. Quite the reverse: these systems work highly effectively. For example, any system that encourages intense concentration and emotional involvement with a particular symbol, (for example the crucifix, rose-cross, or a particular guru) locks the participant into a certain 'mind-set'. First, the person becomes 'telepathically' linked with all others who have practised similar self-programming. Second, the psyche is altered by the concentration: the 'visual' faculty becomes much more vivid, the emotions become more powerful. One becomes a 'magical' being, with unusual powers.
But is this kind of power any use? The essential premise of this article is that such methods are generally only useful if you want to robotise yourself, or perhaps make yourself an obsessive or fundamentalist of some kind. Lots of people want this after all, and perhaps the 'secret societies' that practised such methods should simply have been honest, promising the end of freedom and psychic narcosis to recruits!
Plenty of teachers offer methods of mind-alteration, for nebulous ends. But where are the teachers of spiritual freedom? From one perspective, there are many. The whole Zen tradition is a wonderful antidote to emotional-mental fixation. In our time, Krishnamurti was an outstanding teacher in this mold.
However, in many ways this is only the negative side of something. The positive side has been obscure for thousands of years, but in our time we have the privilege of being able to see its return. I contend that if there's any truth to the 'New Age', it lies here...
Where? There are a few clues: the philosophy of Nietzche and the existentialists he influenced; the novels and poems of D.H.Lawrence; the great poetry of Rilke and Lorca; and the psycho-biology of Wilhelm Reich. But by far the greatest teacher of this now-awakening spirit is William Blake, the visionary poet and painter. This article is not, of course, a full account of Blake's teachings. However, it should show why Blake is essential reading for all seekers in 1999, and point to where we should be going.
The True Materialism
Many 'spiritual teachings' are ascetic: they ask us to draw our interest away from the world, imply that poverty is a sign of holiness, talk about destroying the 'ego', make us indifferent to joy and sorrow, praise a kind of holy 'calm' above all. In Christian thought, this was summed-up in the image of the voluptuous woman as enemy of spirituality: the Whore of Babylon etc.
Yet, through the millennia, people have carried on enjoying beautiful clothes, love-making, objects d'art and all sensual things. However, we seem to live in a world of extreme materialism: a world of hoarding without beauty, of greed without the ability to enjoy.
Mostly, our cultural thinking splits into religious-ascetic and the heedlessly materialistic. Or that's how it looks at first. But, are we really 'materialists'; do we live in an overpoweringly sensual world? The answer is clearly NO: especially in the traditionally Protestant cultures of England and America, we live in a world of fanstasy, of ciphers.
The most blatant sign of this is, of course, the rule of money, on its way to becoming pure data. Materially-speaking, we are well on our way to becoming a mere bank- account. Also, the profound ugliness of our art and architecture, and the fact that its partisans (unlike the public at large) have no idea of art left. It is seldom challenged that art should be conceptual, should 'say something' (however stupid). Likewise, the fashion-world seems more intent on 'saying something' than on beauty.
No, we live in a world of ciphers, maintained by our 'heads'; a world of 'data'.
The most poignant illustration of this is the ruining of sex in the media. Anyone of sensitivity finds the increasingly-blatant pornography which advertising rubs in our face as profoundly unerotic as could be. This is because it is so blatantly external: breasts, legs, revealing garments, panting, formulaically-loud orgasms. Looking at the media's understanding of sex, it would be easy to think that a malicious, sci-fi computer with no understanding of love, but a desire to enslave humans, was churning out cliched images to beat us into submission, and make us want want want... to pay pay pay.
Pictures of food instead of food; sanitisation instead of mucky reality. Ciphers.
We need an antidote to this mechanical-materialism. But not asceticism, which is after all a colluder in it, if it springs from the hate of life. The only answer is the true materialism. And this is the real impetus of feminism and ecology.
Unfortunately, it's not so easy. Many people just drown in insane sensualism, which is always forced (your body knows when to stop), or create fantasies of a 'benevolent mother', as if all were well with the world; or become fake-tantrists, infecting their minds with their ill lusts.
The rock-bottom question is this: is there a 'spiritual way' which doesn't have an ultimately forced, ascetic effect? Apparently not: we have to make some kind of effort. Yet, this effort could be artistic.
The key is: the emotions. The emotions are the seat of magic, that element which is traditionally coerced and manipulated in the schools of magic, where the emotional realm of magic and imagination degenerates into technique.
Occultism in our time puts great emphasis on the emotions, and the less conscious parts of our being, on humanity's relationship to nature... indeed, on the inner child and the less rational, more emotional parts in general. For they are our life, and it will not do to exploit them for the purposes of 'magic'.
Of course, this is only part of it; the totally-sensual life is hopeless. It is in any case impossible, as life itself wakes us up and makes us think of mortality and higher things.
The Delusion of Rationality and the Dehumanisation Delusion
'Man, the rational animal, is master of his own destiny. Having thrown away the superstitions of the past, and discovered the true scientific method, he will end disease, world hunger and religious war. There is nothing intrinsically mysterious, just the illusions of magicians'.
If this is so, why do we see a never-ending escalation of irrationality? Why, in this scientific age, are so many people sceptical of the pronouncements of scientists, yet who claim scientific support for absurd theories. The pseudo-science of books about Ancient Egypt and lost civilisations appeals to many who have lost faith in true science and in true spirituality.
Of course, the word reason can be made to mean what you want it to mean. Usually, it is just a brickbat for use in argument. Every fanatic in love with his own intelligence considers himself 'rational', and others 'irrational'. But what is evident is that the word irrational is a term of fear: it evokes images of things not 'behaving', of unpredictability, insanity, of a dreaded world of goblins, sprites and all the elements of popular superstition.
In other words, its a strictly historical term, referring to the mood of the Reformation, with its hatred of 'enthusiasm', its craving to leave behind the mystical, imaginative or imaginary or magical. It speaks of the battle between scientists and witches or alchemists. Thus, whenever a modern human being feels menaced by disquieting forces, he reassures himself that he is rational and the 'other' irrational.
But, religion gets progressively stupider and the average person seems to have become ever less interested in reason and quality in terms of culture. Mental illness has reached unprecedented levels, and more sinister, the number of people who feels mentally lost and confused, wounded by the scepticism of others without any resources to anchor themselves in truth, is overwhelming.
Ultimately, The Age of Reason makes people Irrational
Empirical science is, of course, one of humanity's greatest achievements. But does it, and the technology it enables, promote rationality at large? I think it is obvious that it systematically undermines it. Take the scientists themselves, for example the well-known propagandist and populariser of atheism Richard Dawkins. In the laboratory, he is capable of applying the scientific methods developed by others. But outside his laboratory or univeristy, and talking about things he is unfamiliar with, such as the nature of religion or society, and he begins to froth at the mouth! And in fairness to Dawkins, he is by no means unusual in this, nor is it a failing unique to scientists.
Or again, the Internet: a powerful tool for disseminating 'information', but how is anyone to distinguish good from bad.
The obvious conclusion is that rationality is only on the surface. It has no civilising effect on our deeper nature, quite the reverse in fact, as the biographies of academics and other 'intellectuals' show. Historically, at least in the West, this is the result of the decoupling of religion and science in the 'Reformation'. Scholastic philosophy was the cutting edge of thought in its time, the product of the greatest minds in Europe over hundreds of years. Although philosophy was definitely 'subordinate' to religion in one sense, this was, after all, not the main problem for the Catholic Church which was really the subordination of religion to international power politics (The Catholic Church as the continuation of the Roman Empire).
There were possibly great and important truths in religious philosophy, but the prime function or religion was beyond that: a moral, unifying, regulating and healing orthopraxy. What the ancient religions knew, and 'reason' doesn't, is that rationality, with its surface appeals to enlightened self-interest, or some kind of altruism or moralism, is completely ineffectual in harmonising society, whereas shared ritual, imagery or words work deeply into the human being and actually rationalise its instincts. Thus, people were essentially healthier mentally, and the kind of fanatical fundamentalist religion we see nowadays did not and could never have existed then.
How many people today really know what a 'world religion' is. Our ancient bonds of society were familial and tribal. People neither knew nor cared about others on the other side of the world, and they believed in killing their enemies; but they loved their friends and family in a way that is almost inconceivable today, when the 'blood' means nothing. For Christians, the shedding of Jesus Christ's blood and the partaking of His body and blood in Holy Communion is a sharing in a higher blood, beyond the limited blood-bonds of race and nation. Likewise, the love of Mohammed and Buddha was essential to the world religions of Islam and Buddhism.
Isolation
But, like it or not, we are virtually all 'thieves' today, all Private Investigators. And we will not find our way back to the love of Humanity by the old rituals.
Hermeticism in our Time
There will never be an intellectual 'system of systems', a 'theory of everything'; or rather, if there ever seems to be, it will be a description of the godless world, and something to be overcome.
The rational mind, as it is and in its purely formal and abstract comprehension, cannot understand the spirit. The mind must be prepared, modulated into something that can understand. Hermeticism shows how this is done through learning to think in symbols: but then, this is not 'thinking' in the normal sense. From this symbolic understanding the hermeticist can derive applied, occult-scientific wisdom, but it never comes out as a closed, logical system because formative spiritual reality isn't closed.
The truly self-generating wisdom is the Holy Ouroboros - but it's shadow, the self-enclosed mind, is the malign serpent. The science and logic of the physical world is indeed applicable to that 'serpent'; it is untrue spiritually, but 'true' in its own fashion. It must be transformed, melted (smelted) and made soft. The real world has fallen away from its spiritual source, but it can be redeemed.
And this is work for the poets and seers. For William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Novalis.
True imagination is redemption and restoration of the world.
James North 1999, uploaded 2015
---
There are various forms of freedom. But none of them are any use without freedom of the imagination. In many years of studying 'esoteric' literature, I discovered that virtually all who presented themselves as experts recognized the great power of imagination. With increasing horror, I saw that most systems offer ways to chain and limit the imagination, encouraging participants to become obsessed with certain symbols, and to cultivate certain emotions to the exclusion of others. This is most obvious in the case of 'cults'; but the deeper you go into the New Age, the harder it is to draw the line between cults and any 'programs of spiritual development'.
These observations are not meant to demean the information contained in 'spiritual systems'. Quite the reverse: these systems work highly effectively. For example, any system that encourages intense concentration and emotional involvement with a particular symbol, (for example the crucifix, rose-cross, or a particular guru) locks the participant into a certain 'mind-set'. First, the person becomes 'telepathically' linked with all others who have practised similar self-programming. Second, the psyche is altered by the concentration: the 'visual' faculty becomes much more vivid, the emotions become more powerful. One becomes a 'magical' being, with unusual powers.
But is this kind of power any use? The essential premise of this article is that such methods are generally only useful if you want to robotise yourself, or perhaps make yourself an obsessive or fundamentalist of some kind. Lots of people want this after all, and perhaps the 'secret societies' that practised such methods should simply have been honest, promising the end of freedom and psychic narcosis to recruits!
Plenty of teachers offer methods of mind-alteration, for nebulous ends. But where are the teachers of spiritual freedom? From one perspective, there are many. The whole Zen tradition is a wonderful antidote to emotional-mental fixation. In our time, Krishnamurti was an outstanding teacher in this mold.
However, in many ways this is only the negative side of something. The positive side has been obscure for thousands of years, but in our time we have the privilege of being able to see its return. I contend that if there's any truth to the 'New Age', it lies here...
Where? There are a few clues: the philosophy of Nietzche and the existentialists he influenced; the novels and poems of D.H.Lawrence; the great poetry of Rilke and Lorca; and the psycho-biology of Wilhelm Reich. But by far the greatest teacher of this now-awakening spirit is William Blake, the visionary poet and painter. This article is not, of course, a full account of Blake's teachings. However, it should show why Blake is essential reading for all seekers in 1999, and point to where we should be going.
The True Materialism
Many 'spiritual teachings' are ascetic: they ask us to draw our interest away from the world, imply that poverty is a sign of holiness, talk about destroying the 'ego', make us indifferent to joy and sorrow, praise a kind of holy 'calm' above all. In Christian thought, this was summed-up in the image of the voluptuous woman as enemy of spirituality: the Whore of Babylon etc.
Yet, through the millennia, people have carried on enjoying beautiful clothes, love-making, objects d'art and all sensual things. However, we seem to live in a world of extreme materialism: a world of hoarding without beauty, of greed without the ability to enjoy.
Mostly, our cultural thinking splits into religious-ascetic and the heedlessly materialistic. Or that's how it looks at first. But, are we really 'materialists'; do we live in an overpoweringly sensual world? The answer is clearly NO: especially in the traditionally Protestant cultures of England and America, we live in a world of fanstasy, of ciphers.
The most blatant sign of this is, of course, the rule of money, on its way to becoming pure data. Materially-speaking, we are well on our way to becoming a mere bank- account. Also, the profound ugliness of our art and architecture, and the fact that its partisans (unlike the public at large) have no idea of art left. It is seldom challenged that art should be conceptual, should 'say something' (however stupid). Likewise, the fashion-world seems more intent on 'saying something' than on beauty.
No, we live in a world of ciphers, maintained by our 'heads'; a world of 'data'.
The most poignant illustration of this is the ruining of sex in the media. Anyone of sensitivity finds the increasingly-blatant pornography which advertising rubs in our face as profoundly unerotic as could be. This is because it is so blatantly external: breasts, legs, revealing garments, panting, formulaically-loud orgasms. Looking at the media's understanding of sex, it would be easy to think that a malicious, sci-fi computer with no understanding of love, but a desire to enslave humans, was churning out cliched images to beat us into submission, and make us want want want... to pay pay pay.
Pictures of food instead of food; sanitisation instead of mucky reality. Ciphers.
We need an antidote to this mechanical-materialism. But not asceticism, which is after all a colluder in it, if it springs from the hate of life. The only answer is the true materialism. And this is the real impetus of feminism and ecology.
Unfortunately, it's not so easy. Many people just drown in insane sensualism, which is always forced (your body knows when to stop), or create fantasies of a 'benevolent mother', as if all were well with the world; or become fake-tantrists, infecting their minds with their ill lusts.
The rock-bottom question is this: is there a 'spiritual way' which doesn't have an ultimately forced, ascetic effect? Apparently not: we have to make some kind of effort. Yet, this effort could be artistic.
The key is: the emotions. The emotions are the seat of magic, that element which is traditionally coerced and manipulated in the schools of magic, where the emotional realm of magic and imagination degenerates into technique.
Occultism in our time puts great emphasis on the emotions, and the less conscious parts of our being, on humanity's relationship to nature... indeed, on the inner child and the less rational, more emotional parts in general. For they are our life, and it will not do to exploit them for the purposes of 'magic'.
Of course, this is only part of it; the totally-sensual life is hopeless. It is in any case impossible, as life itself wakes us up and makes us think of mortality and higher things.
The Delusion of Rationality and the Dehumanisation Delusion
'Man, the rational animal, is master of his own destiny. Having thrown away the superstitions of the past, and discovered the true scientific method, he will end disease, world hunger and religious war. There is nothing intrinsically mysterious, just the illusions of magicians'.
If this is so, why do we see a never-ending escalation of irrationality? Why, in this scientific age, are so many people sceptical of the pronouncements of scientists, yet who claim scientific support for absurd theories. The pseudo-science of books about Ancient Egypt and lost civilisations appeals to many who have lost faith in true science and in true spirituality.
Of course, the word reason can be made to mean what you want it to mean. Usually, it is just a brickbat for use in argument. Every fanatic in love with his own intelligence considers himself 'rational', and others 'irrational'. But what is evident is that the word irrational is a term of fear: it evokes images of things not 'behaving', of unpredictability, insanity, of a dreaded world of goblins, sprites and all the elements of popular superstition.
In other words, its a strictly historical term, referring to the mood of the Reformation, with its hatred of 'enthusiasm', its craving to leave behind the mystical, imaginative or imaginary or magical. It speaks of the battle between scientists and witches or alchemists. Thus, whenever a modern human being feels menaced by disquieting forces, he reassures himself that he is rational and the 'other' irrational.
But, religion gets progressively stupider and the average person seems to have become ever less interested in reason and quality in terms of culture. Mental illness has reached unprecedented levels, and more sinister, the number of people who feels mentally lost and confused, wounded by the scepticism of others without any resources to anchor themselves in truth, is overwhelming.
Ultimately, The Age of Reason makes people Irrational
Empirical science is, of course, one of humanity's greatest achievements. But does it, and the technology it enables, promote rationality at large? I think it is obvious that it systematically undermines it. Take the scientists themselves, for example the well-known propagandist and populariser of atheism Richard Dawkins. In the laboratory, he is capable of applying the scientific methods developed by others. But outside his laboratory or univeristy, and talking about things he is unfamiliar with, such as the nature of religion or society, and he begins to froth at the mouth! And in fairness to Dawkins, he is by no means unusual in this, nor is it a failing unique to scientists.
Or again, the Internet: a powerful tool for disseminating 'information', but how is anyone to distinguish good from bad.
The obvious conclusion is that rationality is only on the surface. It has no civilising effect on our deeper nature, quite the reverse in fact, as the biographies of academics and other 'intellectuals' show. Historically, at least in the West, this is the result of the decoupling of religion and science in the 'Reformation'. Scholastic philosophy was the cutting edge of thought in its time, the product of the greatest minds in Europe over hundreds of years. Although philosophy was definitely 'subordinate' to religion in one sense, this was, after all, not the main problem for the Catholic Church which was really the subordination of religion to international power politics (The Catholic Church as the continuation of the Roman Empire).
There were possibly great and important truths in religious philosophy, but the prime function or religion was beyond that: a moral, unifying, regulating and healing orthopraxy. What the ancient religions knew, and 'reason' doesn't, is that rationality, with its surface appeals to enlightened self-interest, or some kind of altruism or moralism, is completely ineffectual in harmonising society, whereas shared ritual, imagery or words work deeply into the human being and actually rationalise its instincts. Thus, people were essentially healthier mentally, and the kind of fanatical fundamentalist religion we see nowadays did not and could never have existed then.
How many people today really know what a 'world religion' is. Our ancient bonds of society were familial and tribal. People neither knew nor cared about others on the other side of the world, and they believed in killing their enemies; but they loved their friends and family in a way that is almost inconceivable today, when the 'blood' means nothing. For Christians, the shedding of Jesus Christ's blood and the partaking of His body and blood in Holy Communion is a sharing in a higher blood, beyond the limited blood-bonds of race and nation. Likewise, the love of Mohammed and Buddha was essential to the world religions of Islam and Buddhism.
Isolation
But, like it or not, we are virtually all 'thieves' today, all Private Investigators. And we will not find our way back to the love of Humanity by the old rituals.
Hermeticism in our Time
There will never be an intellectual 'system of systems', a 'theory of everything'; or rather, if there ever seems to be, it will be a description of the godless world, and something to be overcome.
The rational mind, as it is and in its purely formal and abstract comprehension, cannot understand the spirit. The mind must be prepared, modulated into something that can understand. Hermeticism shows how this is done through learning to think in symbols: but then, this is not 'thinking' in the normal sense. From this symbolic understanding the hermeticist can derive applied, occult-scientific wisdom, but it never comes out as a closed, logical system because formative spiritual reality isn't closed.
The truly self-generating wisdom is the Holy Ouroboros - but it's shadow, the self-enclosed mind, is the malign serpent. The science and logic of the physical world is indeed applicable to that 'serpent'; it is untrue spiritually, but 'true' in its own fashion. It must be transformed, melted (smelted) and made soft. The real world has fallen away from its spiritual source, but it can be redeemed.
And this is work for the poets and seers. For William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Novalis.
True imagination is redemption and restoration of the world.
James North 1999, uploaded 2015