Post by dudetyson on Sept 6, 2011 17:00:43 GMT -6
“I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.” (John, 10:9)
Yog-Sothoth, anyone?
CUTTING THROUGH TO THE ESSENCE
The first quote I want to bring up gives me delight, and I bring it up first because it defines the spirit which has guided my exploration of the Bible thus far. It is an older scripture which the New Testament repeated because Jesus quoted it, as he sometimes did.
These people honor me with their lips,
But their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
Their teachings are but rules taught by men.
(Isaiah 29:13)
I love this passage because it is extremely anti-fundamentalist. By that I mean, it dismisses people who believe in mechanically following the letter of the law. It instead asks people to move their hearts away from mere vocal or legalistic obedience, toward the reality of God, THE ESSENCE. In my readings I have not been so concerned with proving, disproving, or finding in/consistency in the Bible, so much as – what wisdom can I gain from it? What is THE ESSENCE? So against mechanical fundamentalism I propose a pursuit of the Essence.
And this pursuit of Essence turned out to be more than simply my method for reading the Bible, but also what I found contained within it.
SEEKING THE KINGDOM OF GOD
“It” has many different names depending on the culture, the religion, whatever. Even Christianity contained a few different names for it – becoming Born Again, finding the Kingdom of God, and of course the Holy Grail inherited from the pagans. The medievals called it the Philosopher’s Stone, the Prime Ingredient of alchemy, or the Language of the Birds. The Nazis had their own pantheon of “It” going on, including the Grail, the Swastika itself depending on interpretation, and a few others, like a bizarre belief that the world had once been inhabited by giants.
What is It, then?
Not an easy question. Perhaps It is nothing but a tidbit of nonsense which allows you to descend/ascend into an alternate state of consciousness. Perhaps it is the conviction that, no matter what happens in the material world, your spirit may always persevere. Perhaps it is total submission and surrender to higher forces. Perhaps it is living according to your True Will, your deepest emotions – maybe compassion, maybe hatred, maybe both.
My reading of the Gospels had made me conclude that It is all of these. To sum up the four primary methods briefly: total self-sacrifice, total compassion, hostility against Life/the World, and faith.
However, actually following these lifestyles has dire consequences for both yourself and others. That’s why most people don’t do it! Point is, actually achieving “It” placed Jesus in a position of Messianic Insurgency, turning him into an Insurgent Miracle-Worker. And now I analyze each.
SACRIFICE AND ITS PERILS
“He must become greater; I must become less.” --John the Baptist, Gospel of John, 3:30
Sacrifice is the cornerstone of living. For beings residing in the luxury of a nice ideal reality far superior to our own, they don’t have to make choices. We who live in material reality have to make choices constantly. And that means picking one thing and letting another thing go.
Therefore, you could look at sacrifice as central to the LHP as well. However, the Christian meaning of sacrifice was for a different reason than simply knowing what you want and having the discipline to choose it over other things. It was a devotional practice of self-sacrifice to reach a state of holiness.
This in itself is fine. In fact, it’s awesome, it’s a great idea. However, we get into a problem when we run into the fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity. Again, I am against the fundamentalist interpretation, seeking the Essence and not the way it was clumsily articulated by the ancient human beings who experienced it.
The fundamentalists believe in sacrificing to God. And they do not mean a nice metaphor, signifying sacrificing your false personality to your Higher Self or something like that. They mean, put everything you’ve ever wanted on hold, and devote everything to a specific other being. Follow his instructions exactly how we wrote them out. Don’t exist as an individual thinking and desiring entity, except insofar as you dedicate yourself to God.
This is a really double-edged sword. There is the obvious LHP objection – I just gotta be me! However, the debate goes deeper than that. The radical break from what you considered “yourself” may be just THE TICKET for assaulting your false personality and reaching that higher state within. How far do you have to go with sacrifice to become Yourself? Do you, as Christ said, find Yourself by losing yourself in him? Should we really worry about individualism? If we achieve a higher Selfhood through submission, isn’t that still LHP?
But how do we know if this sacrifice is really our own self-becoming, and not just what it originally seemed to be – a self-annihilation pure and simple, which does NOT restore or heighten the self?
No easy answers here…
COMPASSION IS TRUE WILL – BUT SO IS EVIL
Compassion has gotten a really horrible reputation among the Left Hand Path, and let’s just spit it out, among Satanists. Many will correct you when you say that – they will say, no, see? LaVey had a compassion ritual alongside lust and destruction! But if you take an honest look at the way people talk to each other and treat each other, you will have to conclude that many Satanists have strong disdain for compassion.
There is good reason for that, of course. Most of it is a reaction against Christianity itself, which demanded compassion and nothing else. That was a psychological imbalance; hence the popularity of LaVey. But that scene is basically now “confused in reverse,” to borrow from Aquino. It overcompensated.
Compassion is the baby that was thrown out with the bathwater. However, not just compassion for people you have a reason to like – UNIVERSAL compassion, Christian compassion. Love thy enemy.
Compassion is True Will because it reaches beyond all boundaries. It is not limited by any category, by any personal circle, by any country, by any race, by any distance, not even economic class (my personally most rigid boundary). 1 John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love.” This captures it perfectly. Universal compassion involves a refusal to avoid any of your emotions, any of your sentimentality. It is a refusal to let your inner life be determined by the petty conflicts of your external life – it focuses on the ideal world rather than the mundane. However, the problem me and many others have with Christianity are the passages immediately following: “But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.” In the context of the rest of the passage, this is not about conquering fear yourself. This is about how love is obedience to God, and if you follow God’s rules you have no reason to fear his hammer. So this great, boundary-breaking Love is absolutely ruined because it is insincere, it is only about avoiding God’s wrath.
There is also this contradiction: if you really love everyone and everything, then you also have to love Hate and Anger, because they are part of humanity; and to love them, you probably have to live them. If the meaning of life is what I believe it is – boundless, lawless self-expansion – then lawlessness is key. You can construct grand systems, and you should. You should build yourself a stable life, be king in your own castle, if that is what you want. However, none of that means ANYTHING if you do not also stay true to the original spirit which constructed it in the first place – the romantic, chaotic spark which desires more, which negates everything you have built by subordinating it to the Next Thing – the simultaneously destructive, and creative, impulse. (For me, this personal dynamism is crucial to the experience of “It.”)
John said “Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness.” (1 John 3:4) And THAT is why I say, then it is good to sin! Then sin, and evil, and bitter, impatient, desiring denunciation of all that exists, is good! Hatred of boundaries is good! Hatred of people who, despite your universal compassion for them, insist on defending or being boundaries, is good! Love them, hate them, all of it.
Catherine Machoun, in her book “On Becoming an Alchemist,” described one of the alchemic processes called “conjunction”: in a situation of conflicting loyalties and emotions, don’t try to simplify a complex situation. In your actions you may have to make a choice, but in your emotions, choose all sides. Don’t try to avoid your compassion for one or the other. Take your whole world into your heart. Feel the conflict, feel the burn, don’t run from it.
ANTI-WORLD/ANTI-LIFE
For such a philosophy of love, you might be surprised to hear that Jesus preached hatred of the world, and hatred of life. But the quotes back it up.
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple… Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)
“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world – the cravings of the sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does – comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.” (1 John 2:15-17)
“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belong to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. “ (Gospel of John 15:18-19)
You have to wonder if all this world-hatred is healthy. Groups such as the ONA critique pretty much all other religion as being “Magian.” By that they mean, having an attachment and longing for the Otherworld, in denial of/antagonism to This World.
I can’t blame them. My initial delvings into LaVey were motivated by a romanticized atheist brutal materialism. I said, rather than hating this world the way God does, instead I will love it. I will not condemn it. I will say that it has a beauty of its own. Instead of scorning “inert matter,” I will celebrate matter’s vibrancy, and delight in the fact that, as one of the Earth’s most powerful material beings, I am among the crown jewels of the substance of reality. “Stay married to the Earth!” cried Nietzsche, and I agreed. To hell with escapists, avoiding the problems of this world by scurrying off to hopes of heaven!
I haven’t 100% given up on this view. However over time it has occurred to me that maybe the mind has a reality of its own beyond the material, and that having this view does not make me any less sincere, authentic, or anti-escapist. In fact, my Will, this very chunk of myself that I can’t materially explain, is the centerpiece of all my strivings, all my overcomings. Perhaps it is, as the materialist determinists explain, merely a case of matter-overcoming-itself. Or maybe it’s not. Having a soul that may continue beyond this life does not necessarily have to dissuade you from seizing the day. Both the threat of death and the threat of a meaningless, uninspired eternity seem equally compelling, when dwelled upon, in persuading a person to live to the fullest.
However, does this even matter? Material or not, there is my will, and there is the circumstances it is up against. There is my Self, and there is everything else: the world. One of us pushes, the other pushes back, we fight for dominance. That is what my life is. That is ALL my life is. In this case, it seems like Jesus was right on target, the fact that he believed in spiritual explanations being of little relevance. He was revolting against his lot in life. He was refusing to let his situation determine his actions. He lived for what he lived for, regardless of the suffering incurred, regardless of the threat of death. His spirit triumphed, or as he stated in the Gospel of John, “I have overcome this world.”
FAITH
Faith is the crowning jewel of this process, I think. If you don’t give a damn about yourself, if you don’t give a damn about preserving your nice, neat inner calm from the emotional turmoil of the world, and you don’t even allow the world and its painful, deadly consequences to deter your actions, then it makes sense that you are pretty much writing your own rules as you go and even reality itself starts to bend in your mind. Maybe you can stay somewhat logical and rational about it at the intellectual level, but at the emotional level, you begin to develop Beliefs and Convictions.
A Christian coworker told me his pastor says, “To deny the Trinity is to lose your soul; to embrace the Trinity is to lose your mind.” And losing your mind is really the point, isn’t it?
“For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.”
(1 John 5:7-8)
Maybe I’m missing some kind of reference here, or maybe it doesn’t even matter. It’s probably something to do with the water and blood that came out of Christ’s ribcage at the end, or maybe it’s a symbol of the Father, Son and Spirit. Ultimately it’s so vague that I have no idea what Jesus is talking about. Even if I did, the sheer power of imagery here serves to elevate what could be a totally logical point to a level of spiritual fervor that just makes you want to kneel before God, throw up a Roman salute, or jam a knife through the heart of an opfer.
Jesus spoke in parables (stories). Some people may think he did this to break things down into nice comprehensible symbols. Actually it’s the opposite – he was trying to confuse everything, so it would only make sense after he died. For the meantime his goal was to mystify:
“The disciples came to him and asked, ‘Why do you speak to the people in parables?’
He replied, ‘The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them.’” (Matthew, 13:10-11)
Anyone listening to Christ must have been entranced. Those who really got the point must have understood, if only instinctually, that the point was not entirely the logic of what he was saying, but the beauty; and the beauty of a teaching that placed this spiritual beauty over mundane rhyme and reason.
“Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” (Matthew 16:24)
The meaning of this contradictory quote can be deciphered more easily, but the point is, IT MUST BE DECIPHERED. It has the ring of a poem or riddle. How can you find your life by losing it? Isn’t that nonsense? The teaching is not experienced as a truth relayed in literal form, but as a symbol to be decoded. The key is the aesthetic seduction of feeling the meaning bloom in your mind, rather than it being immediately evident. The sensations of that very moment of the meaning blooming is, in fact, probably the whole point. It is a “wow,” an alternate state of consciousness, it is “having your mind blown.” It is a holy feeling. It’s the feeling I get from reading Hegel or Lukacs.
Other quotes speak of a holy transcendence which requires a super-rational dissolution of one’s own mundane personality, much like finding the Grail or the Stone.
“With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)
Often such thoughts are dismissed by Christianity critics as fostering an attitude of hopeless dependence. Maybe they are right. It can also be interpreted, however, as parallel to Nietzsche’s advice that man should be a bridge to something, and the overhumans are people who attempt to overcome themselves.
What does Jesus mean about being Born Again? What is this magical water that can quench you of all thirst for eternity? Where is Jebus going when he says, “I am with you for only a short time, and then I go to the one who sent me. You will look for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come”? (John, 7:33) To ponder it is halfway to achieving it. But when he wasn’t being poetic, he spilled the beans outright: “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).
But Jesus really outdid himself when he quoted Psalm 82:6 – “I have said you are gods.”
Well Holy Shit, if this isn’t the Left Hand Path smack in the middle of an otherwise Right Hand Path text, I don’t know what is…
INSURGENT MESSIAH
This is where a lot of the political trouble comes in, though at the same time it seems to preach an avoidance of such worldly involvements. If anything, it is “metapolitical” – a disciple just does what they do, and if their life of uncompromising dedication ends up causing a revolt, that wasn’t the main objective, but it probably doesn’t hurt, either.
As anyone familiar with “Watchmen” or “The Incredibles” knows, people with superpowers tend not to have great relations with the authorities. The mere fact that Jesus was fulfilling the prophecy made him an immediate threat to both the Roman authorities, who feared an assertive Jewish nation, and the sell-out Pharisees who stayed in the favor of the empire by making sure that Jewry stayed obedient to Rome.
After miraculously feeding a giant crowd with only seven or so loaves of bread, “Jesus, knowing that they intended to make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.” (Gospel of John, 6:15)
In John 9, Jesus healed a blind man. When the Pharisees investigated the situation, they interrogated the miraculously healed man. However, their “interrogation” revolved around a certain set of answers that they wanted to hear. Simply for swearing that a man healed him, the Pharisees labeled the formerly blind man as a duped follower of this threatening wanderer – and to be labeled a follower of Christ was to be labeled an insurgent against Rome. He merely retorts that “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” (John 9:25)
The most frightening example of Christ’s power was probably when he force-choked a fig tree Darth Vader style. (Again, not in character for the Prince of Peace.)
“Early in the morning, as he was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, ‘May you never bear fruit again!’ Immediately the tree withered.
When the disciples saw this, they were amazed. “How did the fig tree wither so quickly?”
Jesus replied, ‘I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.’” (Matthew 21:18-21)
What was so scary about this was not simply his ability to bend reality, nor even the revelation of his ability to cast Avada Kadavra, but the idea that others could learn his power. Jesus was much like Neo, the Anomaly, from The Matrix. People merely seeing him at work broke all the rules and revolutionized their minds.
One of the most obnoxious traits of Christ for the Pharisees was his reckless honesty. When you hate the world, you have less hesitation about publicly pointing out its shortcomings in front of large amounts of people. This happens to include the shortcomings of the ruling order. This total openness, total fearlessness, discredited the authorities when they attacked Christ because it was clear he had nothing to hide:
“The high priest questioned Jesus about his disciples and his teaching.
‘I have spoken openly to the world,’ Jesus replied. ‘I always taught in synagogues or at the temple, where all the Jews come together. I said nothing in secret. Why question me? Ask those who heard me. Surely they know what I said.’
When Jesus said this, one of the officials nearby struck him in the face. ‘Is this the way you answers the high priest?’ he demanded.
‘If I said something wrong,’ Jesus replied, ‘testify as to what is wrong. But if I spoke the truth, why did you strike me?’” (Gospel of John, 18:19-23)
It’s not like they had no reason to be pissed off. He had talked plenty of smack on them earlier:
“Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely.” (Mark 12:38-40)
“They [the Pharisees] tied up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.” (Matthew 23:4)
Jesus, while certainly God’s gift to the Jews, eventually made himself clear as the savior to all, breaking racial lines. The following passage almost reminds me of 1950s American segregation.
"The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?’ (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.’” (Gospel of John, 4:9-10)
I can almost hear someone saying, “But whites aren’t supposed to talk to negroes!”
Jesus didn’t simply preach this disregard for society’s rules; he lived it. In a break from his characterization as a pacifist, he fucked up the flea market/currency speculation gig that was infesting a synagogue:
“When it was almost time of the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!’” (Gospel of John, 2:13-16)
Ultimately Christ’s vision was that everything would collapse and be replaced with a different order.
“Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.” (Matthew 24:4)
Even in casual conversation he saw doooooom:
“As he was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!’
‘Do you see all these great buildings?’ replied Jesus. ‘Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.’” (Mark, 12:1-2)
This has all sorts of political effects. When people think a catastrophic collapse of their governments is about to occur, some people get the idea in their heads to fulfill the prophecy ahead of schedule. There’s something about giving people a vision of systemic downfall that shakes off the authorities’ veil of invincibility, and lets people think a rebellion can win.
After all, he came not to bring unity but division:
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law -- a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.”
(Matthew 10:34)
There is something important to keep in mind here, though. A Messiah is not like an ordinary political leader. Obviously a Messiah tells much more truth than they do. But it is not simply the things they say, nor the skill with which they say it, nor the public’s usual truth-deprivation. It is not what a Messiah says, but what they Are. All of their external activities, their effects on other people, simply flow out of what they Are. Many people can sense the difference. They are so uncompromising in their wills that they seem to inhabit their own heads more than they inhabit material reality.
A Messiah does not have some ulterior motive for which the religious aesthetics are merely a cover. If a Messiah has a mission in the external world, such as the expansion of their religion or a movement to change something, it is merely the logical outgrowth of what they Are.
There are other ingredients, sure, but a Messiah differs from other spiritual seekers or mundane leaders by their overwhelming drive, and their total practical commitment to it; not to their own petty ambitions, but to some principle. It helps if you’re not an idiot, it helps if you know how to talk to people, and it helps if you have done a good bit of reading and extracted some wisdom. But all of these will come, in time, if you have the drive. Though others may not follow, and such may not even be necessary, a Messiah can always say,
“I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.” (Gospel of John, 13:15)
Yog-Sothoth, anyone?
CUTTING THROUGH TO THE ESSENCE
The first quote I want to bring up gives me delight, and I bring it up first because it defines the spirit which has guided my exploration of the Bible thus far. It is an older scripture which the New Testament repeated because Jesus quoted it, as he sometimes did.
These people honor me with their lips,
But their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
Their teachings are but rules taught by men.
(Isaiah 29:13)
I love this passage because it is extremely anti-fundamentalist. By that I mean, it dismisses people who believe in mechanically following the letter of the law. It instead asks people to move their hearts away from mere vocal or legalistic obedience, toward the reality of God, THE ESSENCE. In my readings I have not been so concerned with proving, disproving, or finding in/consistency in the Bible, so much as – what wisdom can I gain from it? What is THE ESSENCE? So against mechanical fundamentalism I propose a pursuit of the Essence.
And this pursuit of Essence turned out to be more than simply my method for reading the Bible, but also what I found contained within it.
SEEKING THE KINGDOM OF GOD
“It” has many different names depending on the culture, the religion, whatever. Even Christianity contained a few different names for it – becoming Born Again, finding the Kingdom of God, and of course the Holy Grail inherited from the pagans. The medievals called it the Philosopher’s Stone, the Prime Ingredient of alchemy, or the Language of the Birds. The Nazis had their own pantheon of “It” going on, including the Grail, the Swastika itself depending on interpretation, and a few others, like a bizarre belief that the world had once been inhabited by giants.
What is It, then?
Not an easy question. Perhaps It is nothing but a tidbit of nonsense which allows you to descend/ascend into an alternate state of consciousness. Perhaps it is the conviction that, no matter what happens in the material world, your spirit may always persevere. Perhaps it is total submission and surrender to higher forces. Perhaps it is living according to your True Will, your deepest emotions – maybe compassion, maybe hatred, maybe both.
My reading of the Gospels had made me conclude that It is all of these. To sum up the four primary methods briefly: total self-sacrifice, total compassion, hostility against Life/the World, and faith.
However, actually following these lifestyles has dire consequences for both yourself and others. That’s why most people don’t do it! Point is, actually achieving “It” placed Jesus in a position of Messianic Insurgency, turning him into an Insurgent Miracle-Worker. And now I analyze each.
SACRIFICE AND ITS PERILS
“He must become greater; I must become less.” --John the Baptist, Gospel of John, 3:30
Sacrifice is the cornerstone of living. For beings residing in the luxury of a nice ideal reality far superior to our own, they don’t have to make choices. We who live in material reality have to make choices constantly. And that means picking one thing and letting another thing go.
Therefore, you could look at sacrifice as central to the LHP as well. However, the Christian meaning of sacrifice was for a different reason than simply knowing what you want and having the discipline to choose it over other things. It was a devotional practice of self-sacrifice to reach a state of holiness.
This in itself is fine. In fact, it’s awesome, it’s a great idea. However, we get into a problem when we run into the fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity. Again, I am against the fundamentalist interpretation, seeking the Essence and not the way it was clumsily articulated by the ancient human beings who experienced it.
The fundamentalists believe in sacrificing to God. And they do not mean a nice metaphor, signifying sacrificing your false personality to your Higher Self or something like that. They mean, put everything you’ve ever wanted on hold, and devote everything to a specific other being. Follow his instructions exactly how we wrote them out. Don’t exist as an individual thinking and desiring entity, except insofar as you dedicate yourself to God.
This is a really double-edged sword. There is the obvious LHP objection – I just gotta be me! However, the debate goes deeper than that. The radical break from what you considered “yourself” may be just THE TICKET for assaulting your false personality and reaching that higher state within. How far do you have to go with sacrifice to become Yourself? Do you, as Christ said, find Yourself by losing yourself in him? Should we really worry about individualism? If we achieve a higher Selfhood through submission, isn’t that still LHP?
But how do we know if this sacrifice is really our own self-becoming, and not just what it originally seemed to be – a self-annihilation pure and simple, which does NOT restore or heighten the self?
No easy answers here…
COMPASSION IS TRUE WILL – BUT SO IS EVIL
Compassion has gotten a really horrible reputation among the Left Hand Path, and let’s just spit it out, among Satanists. Many will correct you when you say that – they will say, no, see? LaVey had a compassion ritual alongside lust and destruction! But if you take an honest look at the way people talk to each other and treat each other, you will have to conclude that many Satanists have strong disdain for compassion.
There is good reason for that, of course. Most of it is a reaction against Christianity itself, which demanded compassion and nothing else. That was a psychological imbalance; hence the popularity of LaVey. But that scene is basically now “confused in reverse,” to borrow from Aquino. It overcompensated.
Compassion is the baby that was thrown out with the bathwater. However, not just compassion for people you have a reason to like – UNIVERSAL compassion, Christian compassion. Love thy enemy.
Compassion is True Will because it reaches beyond all boundaries. It is not limited by any category, by any personal circle, by any country, by any race, by any distance, not even economic class (my personally most rigid boundary). 1 John 4:18 says, “There is no fear in love.” This captures it perfectly. Universal compassion involves a refusal to avoid any of your emotions, any of your sentimentality. It is a refusal to let your inner life be determined by the petty conflicts of your external life – it focuses on the ideal world rather than the mundane. However, the problem me and many others have with Christianity are the passages immediately following: “But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment.” In the context of the rest of the passage, this is not about conquering fear yourself. This is about how love is obedience to God, and if you follow God’s rules you have no reason to fear his hammer. So this great, boundary-breaking Love is absolutely ruined because it is insincere, it is only about avoiding God’s wrath.
There is also this contradiction: if you really love everyone and everything, then you also have to love Hate and Anger, because they are part of humanity; and to love them, you probably have to live them. If the meaning of life is what I believe it is – boundless, lawless self-expansion – then lawlessness is key. You can construct grand systems, and you should. You should build yourself a stable life, be king in your own castle, if that is what you want. However, none of that means ANYTHING if you do not also stay true to the original spirit which constructed it in the first place – the romantic, chaotic spark which desires more, which negates everything you have built by subordinating it to the Next Thing – the simultaneously destructive, and creative, impulse. (For me, this personal dynamism is crucial to the experience of “It.”)
John said “Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness.” (1 John 3:4) And THAT is why I say, then it is good to sin! Then sin, and evil, and bitter, impatient, desiring denunciation of all that exists, is good! Hatred of boundaries is good! Hatred of people who, despite your universal compassion for them, insist on defending or being boundaries, is good! Love them, hate them, all of it.
Catherine Machoun, in her book “On Becoming an Alchemist,” described one of the alchemic processes called “conjunction”: in a situation of conflicting loyalties and emotions, don’t try to simplify a complex situation. In your actions you may have to make a choice, but in your emotions, choose all sides. Don’t try to avoid your compassion for one or the other. Take your whole world into your heart. Feel the conflict, feel the burn, don’t run from it.
ANTI-WORLD/ANTI-LIFE
For such a philosophy of love, you might be surprised to hear that Jesus preached hatred of the world, and hatred of life. But the quotes back it up.
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple… Any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)
“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world – the cravings of the sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does – comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.” (1 John 2:15-17)
“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belong to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. “ (Gospel of John 15:18-19)
You have to wonder if all this world-hatred is healthy. Groups such as the ONA critique pretty much all other religion as being “Magian.” By that they mean, having an attachment and longing for the Otherworld, in denial of/antagonism to This World.
I can’t blame them. My initial delvings into LaVey were motivated by a romanticized atheist brutal materialism. I said, rather than hating this world the way God does, instead I will love it. I will not condemn it. I will say that it has a beauty of its own. Instead of scorning “inert matter,” I will celebrate matter’s vibrancy, and delight in the fact that, as one of the Earth’s most powerful material beings, I am among the crown jewels of the substance of reality. “Stay married to the Earth!” cried Nietzsche, and I agreed. To hell with escapists, avoiding the problems of this world by scurrying off to hopes of heaven!
I haven’t 100% given up on this view. However over time it has occurred to me that maybe the mind has a reality of its own beyond the material, and that having this view does not make me any less sincere, authentic, or anti-escapist. In fact, my Will, this very chunk of myself that I can’t materially explain, is the centerpiece of all my strivings, all my overcomings. Perhaps it is, as the materialist determinists explain, merely a case of matter-overcoming-itself. Or maybe it’s not. Having a soul that may continue beyond this life does not necessarily have to dissuade you from seizing the day. Both the threat of death and the threat of a meaningless, uninspired eternity seem equally compelling, when dwelled upon, in persuading a person to live to the fullest.
However, does this even matter? Material or not, there is my will, and there is the circumstances it is up against. There is my Self, and there is everything else: the world. One of us pushes, the other pushes back, we fight for dominance. That is what my life is. That is ALL my life is. In this case, it seems like Jesus was right on target, the fact that he believed in spiritual explanations being of little relevance. He was revolting against his lot in life. He was refusing to let his situation determine his actions. He lived for what he lived for, regardless of the suffering incurred, regardless of the threat of death. His spirit triumphed, or as he stated in the Gospel of John, “I have overcome this world.”
FAITH
Faith is the crowning jewel of this process, I think. If you don’t give a damn about yourself, if you don’t give a damn about preserving your nice, neat inner calm from the emotional turmoil of the world, and you don’t even allow the world and its painful, deadly consequences to deter your actions, then it makes sense that you are pretty much writing your own rules as you go and even reality itself starts to bend in your mind. Maybe you can stay somewhat logical and rational about it at the intellectual level, but at the emotional level, you begin to develop Beliefs and Convictions.
A Christian coworker told me his pastor says, “To deny the Trinity is to lose your soul; to embrace the Trinity is to lose your mind.” And losing your mind is really the point, isn’t it?
“For there are three that testify: the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.”
(1 John 5:7-8)
Maybe I’m missing some kind of reference here, or maybe it doesn’t even matter. It’s probably something to do with the water and blood that came out of Christ’s ribcage at the end, or maybe it’s a symbol of the Father, Son and Spirit. Ultimately it’s so vague that I have no idea what Jesus is talking about. Even if I did, the sheer power of imagery here serves to elevate what could be a totally logical point to a level of spiritual fervor that just makes you want to kneel before God, throw up a Roman salute, or jam a knife through the heart of an opfer.
Jesus spoke in parables (stories). Some people may think he did this to break things down into nice comprehensible symbols. Actually it’s the opposite – he was trying to confuse everything, so it would only make sense after he died. For the meantime his goal was to mystify:
“The disciples came to him and asked, ‘Why do you speak to the people in parables?’
He replied, ‘The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them.’” (Matthew, 13:10-11)
Anyone listening to Christ must have been entranced. Those who really got the point must have understood, if only instinctually, that the point was not entirely the logic of what he was saying, but the beauty; and the beauty of a teaching that placed this spiritual beauty over mundane rhyme and reason.
“Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” (Matthew 16:24)
The meaning of this contradictory quote can be deciphered more easily, but the point is, IT MUST BE DECIPHERED. It has the ring of a poem or riddle. How can you find your life by losing it? Isn’t that nonsense? The teaching is not experienced as a truth relayed in literal form, but as a symbol to be decoded. The key is the aesthetic seduction of feeling the meaning bloom in your mind, rather than it being immediately evident. The sensations of that very moment of the meaning blooming is, in fact, probably the whole point. It is a “wow,” an alternate state of consciousness, it is “having your mind blown.” It is a holy feeling. It’s the feeling I get from reading Hegel or Lukacs.
Other quotes speak of a holy transcendence which requires a super-rational dissolution of one’s own mundane personality, much like finding the Grail or the Stone.
“With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)
Often such thoughts are dismissed by Christianity critics as fostering an attitude of hopeless dependence. Maybe they are right. It can also be interpreted, however, as parallel to Nietzsche’s advice that man should be a bridge to something, and the overhumans are people who attempt to overcome themselves.
What does Jesus mean about being Born Again? What is this magical water that can quench you of all thirst for eternity? Where is Jebus going when he says, “I am with you for only a short time, and then I go to the one who sent me. You will look for me, but you will not find me; and where I am, you cannot come”? (John, 7:33) To ponder it is halfway to achieving it. But when he wasn’t being poetic, he spilled the beans outright: “The Kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).
But Jesus really outdid himself when he quoted Psalm 82:6 – “I have said you are gods.”
Well Holy Shit, if this isn’t the Left Hand Path smack in the middle of an otherwise Right Hand Path text, I don’t know what is…
INSURGENT MESSIAH
This is where a lot of the political trouble comes in, though at the same time it seems to preach an avoidance of such worldly involvements. If anything, it is “metapolitical” – a disciple just does what they do, and if their life of uncompromising dedication ends up causing a revolt, that wasn’t the main objective, but it probably doesn’t hurt, either.
As anyone familiar with “Watchmen” or “The Incredibles” knows, people with superpowers tend not to have great relations with the authorities. The mere fact that Jesus was fulfilling the prophecy made him an immediate threat to both the Roman authorities, who feared an assertive Jewish nation, and the sell-out Pharisees who stayed in the favor of the empire by making sure that Jewry stayed obedient to Rome.
After miraculously feeding a giant crowd with only seven or so loaves of bread, “Jesus, knowing that they intended to make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.” (Gospel of John, 6:15)
In John 9, Jesus healed a blind man. When the Pharisees investigated the situation, they interrogated the miraculously healed man. However, their “interrogation” revolved around a certain set of answers that they wanted to hear. Simply for swearing that a man healed him, the Pharisees labeled the formerly blind man as a duped follower of this threatening wanderer – and to be labeled a follower of Christ was to be labeled an insurgent against Rome. He merely retorts that “Whether he is a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” (John 9:25)
The most frightening example of Christ’s power was probably when he force-choked a fig tree Darth Vader style. (Again, not in character for the Prince of Peace.)
“Early in the morning, as he was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, ‘May you never bear fruit again!’ Immediately the tree withered.
When the disciples saw this, they were amazed. “How did the fig tree wither so quickly?”
Jesus replied, ‘I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.’” (Matthew 21:18-21)
What was so scary about this was not simply his ability to bend reality, nor even the revelation of his ability to cast Avada Kadavra, but the idea that others could learn his power. Jesus was much like Neo, the Anomaly, from The Matrix. People merely seeing him at work broke all the rules and revolutionized their minds.
One of the most obnoxious traits of Christ for the Pharisees was his reckless honesty. When you hate the world, you have less hesitation about publicly pointing out its shortcomings in front of large amounts of people. This happens to include the shortcomings of the ruling order. This total openness, total fearlessness, discredited the authorities when they attacked Christ because it was clear he had nothing to hide:
“The high priest questioned Jesus about his disciples and his teaching.
‘I have spoken openly to the world,’ Jesus replied. ‘I always taught in synagogues or at the temple, where all the Jews come together. I said nothing in secret. Why question me? Ask those who heard me. Surely they know what I said.’
When Jesus said this, one of the officials nearby struck him in the face. ‘Is this the way you answers the high priest?’ he demanded.
‘If I said something wrong,’ Jesus replied, ‘testify as to what is wrong. But if I spoke the truth, why did you strike me?’” (Gospel of John, 18:19-23)
It’s not like they had no reason to be pissed off. He had talked plenty of smack on them earlier:
“Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely.” (Mark 12:38-40)
“They [the Pharisees] tied up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.” (Matthew 23:4)
Jesus, while certainly God’s gift to the Jews, eventually made himself clear as the savior to all, breaking racial lines. The following passage almost reminds me of 1950s American segregation.
"The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?’ (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.’” (Gospel of John, 4:9-10)
I can almost hear someone saying, “But whites aren’t supposed to talk to negroes!”
Jesus didn’t simply preach this disregard for society’s rules; he lived it. In a break from his characterization as a pacifist, he fucked up the flea market/currency speculation gig that was infesting a synagogue:
“When it was almost time of the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!’” (Gospel of John, 2:13-16)
Ultimately Christ’s vision was that everything would collapse and be replaced with a different order.
“Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.” (Matthew 24:4)
Even in casual conversation he saw doooooom:
“As he was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!’
‘Do you see all these great buildings?’ replied Jesus. ‘Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.’” (Mark, 12:1-2)
This has all sorts of political effects. When people think a catastrophic collapse of their governments is about to occur, some people get the idea in their heads to fulfill the prophecy ahead of schedule. There’s something about giving people a vision of systemic downfall that shakes off the authorities’ veil of invincibility, and lets people think a rebellion can win.
After all, he came not to bring unity but division:
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law -- a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.”
(Matthew 10:34)
There is something important to keep in mind here, though. A Messiah is not like an ordinary political leader. Obviously a Messiah tells much more truth than they do. But it is not simply the things they say, nor the skill with which they say it, nor the public’s usual truth-deprivation. It is not what a Messiah says, but what they Are. All of their external activities, their effects on other people, simply flow out of what they Are. Many people can sense the difference. They are so uncompromising in their wills that they seem to inhabit their own heads more than they inhabit material reality.
A Messiah does not have some ulterior motive for which the religious aesthetics are merely a cover. If a Messiah has a mission in the external world, such as the expansion of their religion or a movement to change something, it is merely the logical outgrowth of what they Are.
There are other ingredients, sure, but a Messiah differs from other spiritual seekers or mundane leaders by their overwhelming drive, and their total practical commitment to it; not to their own petty ambitions, but to some principle. It helps if you’re not an idiot, it helps if you know how to talk to people, and it helps if you have done a good bit of reading and extracted some wisdom. But all of these will come, in time, if you have the drive. Though others may not follow, and such may not even be necessary, a Messiah can always say,
“I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.” (Gospel of John, 13:15)
