Sfaturi, Despre cunoasterea metafizica Optiuni

[shapeshifter]

THE NOBLE MAN

The noble man is one who dominates himself.
The noble man is one who masters himself and loves to master himself; the base man is one who does not master himself and shrinks in horror from mastering himself.
The noble man always maintains himself at the centre; he never loses sight of the symbol, the spiritual gift of things, the sign of God, a gratitude that is both ascending and radiating.
The noble man is naturally detached from mean things, sometimes against his own interests; and he is naturally generous through greatness of soul. [Esoterism as Principle and as Way, Frithjof Schuon].


Generosity
Generosity is the opposite of egoism, avarice and meanness; nevertheless let us be clear that it is evil that is opposed to good and not inversely. Generosity is the greatness of soul which loves to give and also to forgive, because it allows man to put himself spontaneously in the place of others; which allows to one’s adversary all the chances that he humanly deserves, even though these be minimal, and without prejudicing justice or the cause of right. Nobility comprises a priori a benevolent attitude and a certain gift of self, without affectation and without failing to do justice to things as they are; the noble man tries to help, to meet one halfway, before condemning or acting severely, while being implacable and capable of speedy action when reality demands it. Goodness due to weakness or dreaming is not a virtue; generosity is beautiful to the extent that man is strong and lucid. There is always, in the noble soul, a certain instinct of the gift of self, for God Himself is the first to overflow with charity, and above all with beauty; the noble man is only happy in giving, and he gives himself above all to God, as God gave Himself to him, and desires to give Himself to him.

Piety
Transcending oneself: this is the great imperative of the human condition; and there is another that anticipates it and at the same time prolongs it: dominating oneself. The noble man is one who dominates himself; the holy man is one who transcends himself. Nobility and holiness are the imperatives of the human state.
The noble man is naturally detached from mean things, sometimes against his own interests; and he is naturally generous through greatness of soul. The pious man, for his part, holds himself detached from the things of this world — either within the framework of a legitimate equilibrium, or else by breaking this framework —because they do not lead to Heaven, or to the extent that they do not contribute to this end; and he is generous as a result of his love of God, because this love allows him to “see God everywhere”, and because “God is Love”. The fact that the two dimensions, horizontal and vertical, are linked in depth, results from the nature of things: the one conditions the other and the one proceeds from the other, and they are destined to coincide, if they do not already do so.
It is perhaps not superfluous to insist once more on the double significance of the notion of morality, that is to say on the distinction between what is good according to the law and what is good according to virtue. The two do not always coincide, for a base man can obey the law, be it only through simple constraint, while a noble man may be obliged, exceptionally, to transgress a law out of virtue, to put pity above duty, for example. [Logic and Transcendence].


Perception of the world
To have the sense of immanence — parallel to the discernment between the Real and the unreal, or between Reality that is absolute and that which is relative or contingent, or in consequence between the essential and the secondary, and so on — is to have the intuition of essences, of archetypes, or let us say: of the metaphysical transparency of phenomena; and this intuition is the basis of nobleness of soul.
The noble man respects, admires and loves in virtue of an essence that he perceives, whereas the vile man underestimates or scorns in virtue of an accident; the sense of the sacred is opposed to the instinct to belittle; the Bible speaks of "mockers." The sense of the sacred is the essence of all legitimate respect; we insist on legitimacy, for it is a question of respecting, not just anything, but what is worthy of respect; "there is no right superior to that of the truth."
It may be added that the noble man looks at what is essential in phenomena, not at what is accidental; he sees the overall worth in a creature and the intention of the Creator — not some more or less humiliating accident — and he thereby anticipates the perception of the Divine Qualities through forms. This is what is expressed by the words of the Apostle “ for the pure all things are pure”.
The noble man, and consequently the spiritual man, sees in positive phenomena the substantial greatness and not the accidental smallness, but he is indeed obliged to discern smallness when it is substantial and when, in consequence, it determines the nature of the phenomenon. The base man, on the contrary, and sometimes the simply worldly man, sees the accidental before the essential and gives himself over to the consideration of the aspects of smallness which enter into the constitution of greatness, but which cannot detract from its greatness in the least degree, except in the eyes of the man who is himself made of smallness.


Sacrificial instinct
The sacrificial instinct, which on the whole coincides with the sense of measure, enters into the very definition of nobleness: the noble man is one who controls himself and who loves to control himself; the sense not only of reality, but also of beauty demands that discipline which is self-mastery. Moreover, the impious man can never be altogether noble, whereas piety necessarily gives rise to nobility, no matter what the social milieu; the pious man is noble because truth is noble.
Especially beauty perceived by a noble man, that is: whose soul is beautiful, precisely. As Socrates said: "If there be something other than absolute Beauty, then that something can be beautiful to the extent that it partakes of absolute Beauty" (Plato: Phaedo).


Noble and Vile Man
"... man must see things according to the spirit of the Creator, not with the superficial, profane and desacralizing view of the vulgar soul. The noble man feels the need to admire, to venerate, to worship; the vile man on the contrary tends to belittle, even to mock, which is the way the devil sees things; but it is also diabolical to admire what is evil, whereas it is normal and praiseworthy to despise evil as such, for the truth has precedence over everything.
The primacy of the true also clearly implies that essential truths have precedence over secondary truths, as the absolute has precedence over the relative. The definition of man according to immortality has precedence over the definition of man according to earthly life.
The noble man respects, admires and loves in virtue of an essence that he perceives, whereas the vile man underestimates or scorns in virtue of an accident; the sense of the sacred is opposed to the instinct to belittle; the Bible speaks of "mockers." The sense of the sacred is the essence of all legitimate respect; we insist on legitimacy, for it is a question of respecting, not just anything, but what is worthy of respect; "there is no right superior to that of the truth."

Acest topic a fost editat de andra_v: 16 Apr 2009, 04:00 PM

[shapeshifter]

THE GNOSTIC


For too many persons the gnostic is someone who, feeling illumined from within rather than by Revelation, takes himself to be superhuman and believes that for him everything is permissible; one will accuse of gnosis any political monster who is superstitious or who has vague interests in the occult while believing himself to be invested with a mission in the name of some aberrant philosophy.
In a word, in common opinion gnosis equals "intellectual pride," as if this were not a contradiction in terms, pure intelligence coinciding precisely with objectivity, which by definition excludes all subjectivism, hence especially pride which is its least intelligent and coarsest form.
For the gnostic — always in the etymological and not the sectarian sense of the term — or for the jnâni, there can be no question of "egoism," since the ego is not "himself." The "I" is for him the "other," objectification, the vital tangible center of the world.
We have written in one of our books that to be objective is to die a little, unless one is a pneumatic, in which case one is dead by nature, and in that extinction finds one's life.


Gnostic & Philosopher
Philosophically speaking, there are two great problems, that of Being, of Reality, and that of Consciousness or of Knowledge; these are problems because of the prejudice which treats the roots of Existence as if sensible objects were in question. For the gnostic — for the born metaphysician — there are no problems; he perceives Being — or conceives of It — through phenomena, and perceiving Being, he knows ipso facto that he "is" what he "knows."
The gnostic — in the original and not sectarian sense of the word — does not ask: "What attitude of will and sentiment is the most contrary to pride?" but rather: "What in this particular case is the nature of things, and what consequently is the positive attitude — of the spirit and the soul — of which pride is the negation or the privation?"
First, the attitude of the spirit: namely, discernment between the Absolute and the relative, and in the relative between the essential and the secondary — discernment which entails ipso facto the sanctifying and unitive contemplation of the Absolute and of the essential.
Then the attitude of the soul, itself governed by this discernment or by this sense of proportion and equilibrium: namely, self-effacement on the one hand, and generosity on the other; for all the fundamental virtues are included in these two qualities.
It is indispensable to know at the outset that there are truths inherent in the human spirit that are as if buried in the "depths of the heart," which means that they are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect: these are the principial and archetypal truths, those which prefigure and determine all others. They are accessible, intuitively and infallibly, to the "gnostic," the "pneumatic," the "theosopher" — in the proper and original meaning of these terms — and they are accessible consequently to the "philosopher" according to the still literal and innocent meaning of the word: to a Pythagoras or a Plato, and to a certain extent even to an Aristotle, in spite of his exteriorizing and virtually scientistic perspective.
One may wonder which we should here admire more: the gnostic who penetrated the mystery or the philosopher who knew how to make it explicit. But if man does what he is, or if he is what he does, why strive to become better and why pray to this end? Because there is the distinction between substance and accident: both demerits and merits come from either one or the other, without man being able to know from which they come, unless he is a “pneumatic” who is aware of his substantial reality, an ascending reality because of its conformity with the Spirit (Pneuma), “Whoso knoweth his own soul, knoweth his Lord”; but even then, the effort belongs to man and the knowledge to God; that is to say, it suffices that we strive while being aware that God knows us. It suffices us to know that we are free in and through our movement towards God, our movement towards our “Self.”


Gnostic and Believer
Let us here recall once again the difference between the "man of faith" and the "man of gnosis": it is the difference between the believer, who in all things has in view moral and mystical efficacy to the point of sometimes needlessly violating the laws of thought, and the gnostic, who lives above all from principial certitudes and who is so made that these certitudes determine his behavior and contribute powerfully to his alchemical transformation. Now, whatever be our vocational predispositions, we must needs realize a certain equilibrium between the two attitudes, for there is no perfect piety without knowledge, and there is no perfect knowledge without piety.
The difference between FAITH AS BELIEF and FAITH AS GNOSIS consists in this: that the obscurity of faith, in the ordinary believer, is in the intelligence, whereas in the metaphysician it is in the will, in the participation of his being: the seat of faith is then the heart, not the mind, and the obscurity comes from our state of individuation, not from a congenital unintelligence. The faith of the sage — or of the "gnostic" — has two veils: the body and the ego; they veil, not the intellect, but ontological consciousness. Wisdom, however, comprises degrees.
There are various ways of expressing or defining the difference between gnosis and love — or between jnana and bhakti — but here we wish to consider one criterion only, and it is this: for the volitional or affective man (the bhakta) God is "He" and the ego is "I," whereas for the gnostic or intellective man (the jnani)1 God is "I" — or "Self" — and the ego is "he" or "other."
It will also be immediately apparent why it is the former and not the latter perspective that determines all religious dogmatism: it is because the majority of men start out from certainty about the ego rather than about the Absolute. Most men are individualists and consequently but little suited to concretely making an abstraction of their empirical "I," a process which is an intellectual problem and not a moral one: in other words, few have the gift of impersonal contemplation — for it is of this we are speaking — such as allows God to think in us, if such an expression be permissible.
The exoteric distinction between ‘the true religion’ and ‘false religions’ is replaced, for the gnostic, by the distinction between gnosis and beliefs, or between essence and forms. The sapiential perspective alone is an esoterism in the absolute sense, or in other words, it alone is necessarily and integrally esoteric, because it alone reaches beyond all relativities.
The way of love is more or less esoteric as seen from the angle of social religion, and more or less exoteric as seen from the angle of gnosis, and this moreover explains certain somewhat ambiguous aspects of Christianity; but one must take care not to confuse the aspect ‘love’ in gnosis itself with doctrines and methods of a specifically bhaktic, and therefore ‘dualist’ and emotive character.
Religion is to a large extent in the hands of “psychics” and not “pneumatics”; the Word, in descending, adapts to the needs of “sinners” more than to those of the “righteous”; the collective soul collaborates in the outward face of the Revelation owing to the fact that it is the latter’s plane of resonance.
This insistance of a certain esoterism upon the ascetical dimension which is after all merely secondary and conditional, could not be explained if this esoterism did not address itself to a large collectivity rather than to a restricted elite only; for in the latter case, esoterism would be defined by its essence, namely an integral metaphysical doctrine, and such a doctrine is spiritually operative only for the "pneumatics," not for the "psychics"; thus for a minority, not for the majority.


Gnostic, Psychic, Hylic
Gnostically speaking, there are the "psychics" who can be saved or damned; then the "pneumatics", who by their nature cannot but be saved; and finally the "hylics", who cannot but be damned. Now Luther practically conceived only of this third category, and theoretically — with reservations and conditions — that of the "psychics", but in no wise that of the "pneumatics", hence all the tormentedness of his doctrine. In reality, in every man there are three seeds, the "pneumatic", the "psychic" and the "hylic"; it remains to be seen which predominates.
In practice, it suffices to know that to say "yes" to God, while abstaining from what takes one away from Him and accomplishing what brings one closer to Him, pertains to the "pneumatic" nature and assures salvation, all question of "original sin" and "predestination" aside; thus in practice there is no problem, save that which we conceive and impose upon ourselves.
The "pneumatic" is the man who so to speak incarnates "faith which saves", and thus incarnates its content, the "grace of Christ"; strictly speaking, he cannot sin — except perhaps from the point of appearances — because, his substance being "faith" and therefore"justice through faith", all that he touches turns to gold. This possibility is extremely rare, being "avataric" above all, but finally, it exists, and cannot but exist.
The "psychic" is saved through "conversion", whereas the "pneumatic" is saved by "nature". The second of these accepts the truth — as did Ali and Abu Bakr — without the least hesitation and from the heart, by virtue of an almost existential "reminiscence". One must bear in mind that in Pauline language, the "psychic" is the earthly and fleshly man, hence practically the "hylic" man ...
Whatever may be the general aspect of Islam, as a Semitic monotheism, one may nevertheless be amazed by the fact that many and even the majority of Sufis, if not the greatest among them, express themselves in the style of a will-dominated and emotional individualism, whereas Sufism itself, by definition, is founded on gnosis and fashioned by it.
The reason for this is that the majority of men, even at the level of sainthood, are “psychics” and not “pneumatics”; they are consequently subject indirectly to the regime of fear, and it would be hypocrisy or temerity on their part to express themselves otherwise than they do; it is true that many amongst them could subsequently have changed their mode of expression, but they sought to remain faithful to what their individual substance demanded of them at the start, more especially as it is better to appear less than one is than to be less than one appears. Account also must be taken of the point of view of religious solidarity, which demands or favors a common language, without forgetting the symbolism of love which readily rejoins the language of sentiments and emotions.
Having spoken of physical and psychic types, we are all the more obliged to take account of what we may term "eschatological types," whose order — like that of the castes — is vertical and hierarchical, not horizontal and neutral. Gnosticism — which despite its errors contains many a truth — distinguishes three fundamental types: the pneumatic, whose nature is ascending; the hylic or somatic, whose nature is descending; and the psychic, whose nature is ambiguous.
Clearly, this hierarchy is independent of ordinary hierarchies, and consequently it gives rise to cases that at first glance are paradoxical; as a matter of fact, we may meet with quasi-angelic individuals among the least endowed as well as among the most gifted men, and others who personify the opposite.
This leads us to the problem of predestination, which is intimately linked to that of initial possibilities and individual substances; of course, the divine foresight also embraces the psychics, whose case seems to be undecided, but who in reality "veil" their substance — and consequently their destiny — by a complex and moving fabric of contradictory and more or less superficial possibilities.
Still on the subject of fear and referring to the Gnostic, terminology, one could also put forth the argument that for the "hylic" or "somatic" type, it is primarily threats that determine the will; for the "psychic" it is primarily all of the promises or the imagery of religion in general; whereas for the "pneumatic," it is the metaphysical idea. But as man is not an absolute unity, we may also speak of man "inasmuch as" he is this or that, in order to avoid the idea that threats concern the "hylic" exclusively, or that the "psychic" — always in connection with volitive assimilation — is necessarily inaccessible to the language of universal principles.


Anti-gnostic satanism
If there exists a "Gnosticist" or pseudo-gnostic satanism, there also exists an anti-gnostic satanism, and this is the comfortable and dishonest bias that sees gnosis wherever the devil is; it is to this mania — which strictly speaking pertains to the "sin against the Holy Ghost" — that may be applied Christ's injunction not to cast pearls before swine nor to give what is holy to the dogs.
For if in the human order there are pearls and holiness, these are certainly to be found on the side of the intellect, which is, according to Meister Eckhart, aliquid increatum et increabile, hence something divine, and this is precisely what annoys and disturbs the partisans of pious superficiality and militant fanaticism.

Acest topic a fost editat de shapeshifter: 10 Apr 2009, 04:45 PM