[materialists] fear judgment. Because the future brings retribution for the past, people deny both the moral world order and the future in the sense of that moral world order. ~ Valentin Tomberg
One generation creates the destiny of the next. ~ Valentin Tomberg
Although the sequence differs between Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13, these are the three temptations:
- To turn stones into bread
- To jump off the pinnacle
- To rule the world
The first item to note is the symmetry between the beginning of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Genesis sets the stage for the emergence of the First Adam and the three temptations in Eden:
- Listening to the serpent. The serpent was cunning and shifted the perspective of Adam and Eve from the vertical to the horizontal.
- Seeing fruit as a delight to the eyes.
- Eating of the fruit
Adam and Eve succumbed to each of those temptations, and then experienced the corresponding effects.
First of all, Eve allowed the voice of the serpent to have equal influence with that of God. This was an act of disobedience and the result was doubt, i.e., having two minds in conflict with each other.
This put the tree in a new light, for now it seemed desirable. Doubt wants to be resolved by experience, i.e., to actually taste the fruit of the tree. That is greed, the opposite to poverty.
Eating the fruit, i.e., actually undergoing the experience is unchastity.
The New Testament begins with the stories of Jesus’ origins ending with the Baptism in the Jordan. He is led to fast for 40 days in the wilderness. There, Satan tempts him, but Jesus resists each one of them. The following sections show Tomberg’s analysis from each of the four works mentioned.
Anthroposophic Meditations on the New Testament
In this work, there are two chapters devoted to the temptations in the wilderness. The NT starts with the human and leads to the divine. Curiously, Tomberg begins his discussion with Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche experienced loneliness and isolation in their depths. That is, he knew the wilderness and its temptations, yet yielded to them.
His emptiness led him to seek the fullness of life in the instincts and the will to power. Then from the mountain top, Nietzsche came up with the idea of the Eternal Return. This means that the Earth has no future, but is condemned to repeat itself endlessly. Nietzsche claimed to have been inspired by superior forces. Yet then led him to devalue God, spirit, soul. The same temptations exist today, although few succumb with the same intensity.
Jesus in the wilderness was likewise isolated; the angels did not minister to him until afterwards. For, according to Tomberg, it is human freedom that must resist the temptations. The wilderness represents the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age. That is the temptation of humanity as a whole, which we see constantly repeated. Suprasensory experiences are rare because people have not yet decided:
- Whether to rule or to serve (power or obedience)
- Whether to possess the kingdoms of the past or to wander destitute into the future (wealth or poverty)
- Whether to desire miracles of knowledge (the authority of miracles or the chastity of knowledge)
People are exposed to these temptations in diverse forms and Tomberg provides examples.
First Temptation. Stones into Bread
The tendency is to substitute a quantitative numerical value to everything qualitative and specific. But quantity is death and the property of quality, the living, cannot be reduced to it.
Tomberg considers money as an example of converting metal or paper into a “basket of bread”. The value of money is arbitrarily set while bread, which supports life, is subjected to the power of number. The prime example of this is in the USA where the major concern in elections is the GDP, as the spiritual and intellectual level of society declines precipitously.
Second Temptation: retreat into the subconscious
This temptation is to seek the source of life in the instinctual life of the subconscious. This is jumping from the pinnacle into the abyss, the domain of hidden instinctive urges. Thinking is difficult so the temptation is to expect miracles from the subconscious.
The true source of life, however, is the superconscious and the free life of thinking.
Third temptation: materialism
Materialism is the temptation to see the world as having no moral or spiritual guidance. This view grants them freedom from responsibility. However, when materialism is followed all the way through, the ruling intelligence behind matter will be seen to be the “prince of the world”.
The path of materialism leads through hallucination to insanity and from insanity to demonic possession. These terms are not meant in a clinical sense, and the symptoms are certainly noticeable in our time.
The fundamentals of materialism are force, chance, matter
- Blind force is the opposite of spiritual light, a denial of the Holy Spirit
- Blind chance is the opposite of the Logos, or Son
- Spiritless matter stands in contrast to the cosmic First Cause, or Father
Force is unspiritual time, chance the lack of causality, and matter, the mechanization of life. The results are sleep, prostration, and death. The following meditation contains the opposite tendencies:
- Out of the Godhead is created humankind.
- In Christ death becomes life.
- In Spirit’s cosmic thoughts, the soul awakens.
Inner Development
In the series of lectures published with the title Inner Development, there is a brief discussion of the three temptations. The context is a critique of the three currents of contemporary intellectual life, viz., religion, art, science
Religion
Religion has succumbed to the temptation of reckoning with the Prince of this world. It has succumbed to the temptation to organize the world with the help of a power principle and take possession of it with the help of a centralized power organization. This is the temptation to rule the world, provided one bows down to Satan.
He then criticizes the Roman Church which, he claims, “strove to bring the world and its glories under its dominion.” However, in the Meditations, the view becomes more balanced. He came to recognize that the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ, i.e., a real entity. It is the egregore of the Church, a factitious creation, that succumbs to the temptation, not the Mystical Body.
Art
Tomberg then turns his attention to art:
Artistic creation is increasingly becoming a situation whereby the artist creates out of the deep dark underworld of his subconscious.
That is because the artist succumbs to the temptation of jumping into the abyss.
The artist leaps from the pinnacle of the temple of clear consciousness into the sphere of impulses, instincts, whence something is supposed to arise that is to be regarded as angelic revelation.
The art of popular culture is now plagued with vulgar, scatological, and sexual innuendo. For some reason, this is considered to be a deep insight into the human condition
Science
Science succumbs to the temptation to turn stones into bread:
Modern science is based upon the conception that the dead mineral world can be the foundation of everything, and that everything living is only a consequence of movement in this mechanical, dead world. i.e., all bread arises out of stone.
Summary
Tomberg related the temptations to the political forces rampant at that time. The specifics might not be so important now, but the temptations still arise in different contexts.
World history is essentially nothing other than the continual karmic confrontation of humanity with the first, the second, the third, or all three temptations.
Degeneration and Regeneration of Jurisprudence
In this PhD thesis, written shortly after his conversion, Tomberg reformulates the temptations in the context of jurisprudence. Instead of religion, art, and science, the concern is now law, ethics, and religion.
A view which presumes law, ethics, and religion to be a structure unity cannot avoid recognizing a kind of “fall” in the history of jurisprudence in the 19th and 20th centuries. A fall consists of succumbing step by step to the same three temptations to which Christ was exposed in the desert.
First Temptation
The turning away from the ideal of reason, and the turning towards the instinctual is, seen morally, nothing but the leap from the pinnacle of the temple into the abyss, hoping that there angels of God will lift the one falling. i.e., intelligence reigning in the darkness of the instinctual.
Thought should be oriented toward the divine, but the temptation is to sink.
The height of pure thought (pinnacle) oriented towards the divine (temple) has been left behind to find the reign of the nation’s subconscious force (angels) in the instinctual (abyss). This is the path from faith to superstition.
Just as an individual’s personal instincts may be made, so too are the national instincts. Hence, there is a risk or a leap into the unknown. This temptation is to put the irrational above reason.
Second Temptation
Historically, there have been no intervention of angels to break the fall. Only the ground can break the fall, leading to the cult of materialism.
Hence, one generation creates the destiny of the next, although not necessarily a repetition of what came prior. Culture and morality were assumed to be determined by mechanical and material forces. Hence, the materialist generation reversed the order of the higher and the lower. In particular, the revolutionary movements of the 19th century were rooted in the primacy of the material. Quantity placed above quality.
This is the temptation to transform stones into bread. The transformation of inorganic and dead stones into organic bread is actually a reversal of the above and the below.
It treats culture (law, ethics, religion) as the product of the material (amoral and irrational).
Third Temptation
The materialist generation gave way to the positivistic generation:
Law is only what was laid down by a power according to its will and sanctioned by force. The good is only what leads to the set objective. And that objective is defined to be “truth”.
Matter is no longer fundamental, but force is. In man, force is actualized as the Will.
Will is the reality in the life of a human—ultimately it creates and directs everything—including all of civilised and legal life. But for legal life this means a decisive change in its foundation: might replaces right.
The temptation is to become the authority over all the kingdoms of the world, provided on bows down and worships Satan. This is predominantly the situation we find ourselves in today.
Meditations on the Tarot
The three temptations have a prominent place in the Meditations. However, they are always put in contrast with the temptations in Eden, and in relation to the three vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity.
The three vows are, in essence, memories of paradise, where man was united with God (obedience), where he possessed everything at once (poverty), and where his companion was at one and the same time his wife, his friend, his sister, and his mother (chastity).
The work of redemption begins with the three temptations in the wilderness. However, this time the tempter was not the serpent. Rather, the tempter was the prince of the world (the new man, the superman, or other son of man who, if incarnated, would be the realisation of the promise of freedom made by the serpent.
The three temptations of the Son of Man in the wilderness were his experience of the directing impulses of evolution, namely the will-to-power, the “groping trial” and the transformation of the gross into the subtle. They signify at the same time the test of the three vows—the vows of obedience, chastity and poverty.
Bread and stones
The first temptation came after Jesus’ forty day fast:
Hunger of the spirit, the soul and the body is the experience of emptiness or poverty. It is therefore the vow of poverty which is put to the test when “the tempter came and said to him: If you are the Son of God. command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Matthew iv, 3). “Command these stones to become loaves of bread”—this is the very essence of the aspiration of humanity in the scientific epoch, namely to victory over poverty. Synthetic resins, synthetic rubber, synthetic fibre, synthetic vitamins, synthetic proteins and. . .eventually synthetic bread! —When? Soon, perhaps. Who knows?
Forty-five years later, we can begin to answer such questions. Synthetic meat is being grown in the laboratory and will soon be mass produced. Of course, the advances in artificial intelligence are seen as a threat. Synthetic humans are already being produced for specialized purposes (i.e., sex).
Through the media, the population is being prepared to accept these androids as fully human. Some even predict them to be the next root race that will replace biological humans.
In cultural terms, this temptation leads the intellectuals to deny life, which is regarded as merely complex molecules. In the political realm, economic life is regarded as primary.
Groping Trial
This is the temptation to jump off the pinnacle into the abyss, assuming God will come to the rescue. In practical terms, it is the idea of evolution over creation. Creation is the accomplishment of absolute wisdom and absolute goodness.
Evolution, on the other hand, proceeds blindly by trial and error, from one species to the next. Evolution is actually guided by the serpent, or prince of the word. This temptation is opposed to chastity, and fornication is threefold: spiritual, psychic, and carnal.
The principle of spiritual fornication is therefore the preference of the subconscious to the conscious and superconscious. of instinct to the Law, and of the world of the serpent to the world of the WORD.
Transformation Temptation
The third temptation is directed against obedience. The temptation is the will-to-power, the desire to rule over the world.
It is a matter, therefore, of accepting the ideal of the superman (“fall down and worship me”), who is the summit of evolution (“he took him to a very high mountain”) and who, having passed through the mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms, subjecting them to his power, is lord over them, i.e. he is their final cause or aim and ideal, their representative or their collective concentrated will, and he is their master, who has taken their subsequent evolution into his hands. Now, the choice here is between the ideal of the superman, who is “as God”, and God himself.
Obedience is faithfulness to the living God.
Fundamental Law of Magic
A fundamental law of sacred magic is this:
That which is above being as that which is below, renunciation below sets in motion forces of accomplishment above and the renunciation of that which is above sets in motion forces of accomplishment below.
This means:
When you resist a temptation or renounce something desired below, you set in motion by this very fact forces of realisation of that which corresponds above to that which you come to renounce below.
Or
It is not desire which bears magical realisation, but rather the renunciation of desire (that you have formerly experienced, of course). For renunciation through indifference has no moral — and therefore no magical — value.
This renunciation is actually the practice of the three sacred vows, which is the true magical training, and concentration without effort. That is the esoteric value to resisting those temptations.
“renunciation below sets in motion forces of accomplishment above and the renunciation of that which is above sets in motion forces of accomplishment below”
Guénon says that “rites are symbols ‘put into action.’”
If this is the fundamental law of magic, would “sacred magic” then be just one subsection of rites or sacraments? Theurgic sacrifices, whether Pagan or the Eucharist, as well as the Baptismal vows and Penance, clearly adhere to the law, but Matrimony does not. When one marries his wife on Earth, this obviously doesn’t preclude his marriage in Heaven with his soul-sister, much less be an act tantamount to divorcing her. Dante is the easy example here.
Pingback: The Vagaries of Eros – The Bernard Option
Since the whole basis of Gornahoor, as well as the MotT and Gnosis groups, involves “living in the world” rather than retreating to the monastery and imitating Tertullian’s intellectual prejudices, and since this “public space” is really someone’s living room he allows guests in, and spends a large amount of time up keeping and arranging, it’s poor manners and also inaccurate to make these attacks. It should be obvious but I’ll point out that he didn’t condemn anyone to hell, but rather pointed out that being dominated by passions is hell. Which of course is the whole point of liberation. I used to read Civilizing the Beast quite a lot, and appreciated some of the thoughts and insights, so thanks for that; I think I even linked to the blog. But on and at this point, you are reading what you want to see into someone else’s meditations. Of course Creation is destined to share in theosis. But man is not just a microcosm, he is a theocosm (N. Berdyaev). He can’t just ride the elevator to the top and nap along the way, once the wiring is arranged properly. Even if he could, there might be a faster way for those willing to try.
@Arthur Konrad My comment to Klamuse was somewhat rhetorical. Obviously, matter cannot become spirit; matter does not “lead to,” nor can be arranged to become, spirit. All Klamuse’s weird ideology seeks to do is rebel against the natural order of things; to place his own relative and limited vision atop all else. He is confining himself to his own mind and denying everything around and above him unless it conforms to his clunky, preconceived notions.
I think the first controversy arose out of the alleged denial of the material, physical reality in favor of the world perceived by intellect, or spirit. And the second that “religious people” unnecessarily split the two apart, and base their entire case on what is imaginary. But what is the reality behind spirit and matter? Tradition did not delineate the boundary relation between the two in strictly opposing terms. Such conclusion could only stem from superficial knowledge, a fact which I fear is the source of our present disagreement. We consider it a great modern discovery that matter is converted to and from energy, but can’t a similar relationship be conceived between matter and information?
If one reads in a cliff note wise manner, that is to say, taking words in a literal, direct sense, a profound classic text on cosmology and the active, moral link between mind and nature, such as for example the Dao-de-Jing, I fear they would miss out on the crucial point of thinking, reflecting, dwelling upon it on their own behalf.
In my view, great works left behind by history never lay down a weltanshauung inside which every conceivable idea can be circumscribed, but rather provide the intellectual tools and groundwork out of which one can draw, upon personal effort, the necessary conclusions on his own.
Well, Artie, do you always play like a little school girl? it goes like this: no I’m not, yes you are. How many times do we need to repeat that? So this is where that stupid conversation ends.
Obviously, you seem to believe in laws of matter, but not in spiritual laws. And you don’t grasp the distinction between esoteric and exoteric religion.
Since you are unable to participate in the conversation, you have overstayed your welcome.
Of course there is passion involved Mr. Salvo, and not any passion, but a really profound kind of passion – the passion of a religious man. Already one soul has been condemned to hell to satisfy the needs of such a passion, not a small fatality considering the implications.
May I ask gentlemen here, especially Adam, if they are able, to describe to me what “lawlessness” looks like?
Hint: It’s not when matter goes around violently, because for the matter to be even able to move, there must exist at least one law.
I have forced myself to read the line of comments. Under the other circumstances I would find it amusing and chuckle so that one can hardly see the dots on the dominos.
But then again, it is rather disappointing to see how a profond occult study as this one and others who have worked in the same stream gets maltreated and ill- used for the purposes of what?
The theme of 3 temptations – which is a central theme of the 3 opposing forces in a human being, is vulgarized? – If one expected it, as You say, Cologero, Satan sends his minions, then why has one putted it in the position to be exposed to it in the first place. I guess that is the double edged sword of the publicity- when one wants to reach many , that one also reaches the wrong kind of people. And what better place to expose it to mock and slander than a public site.
No, Mr Konrad, there is no passion involved. It is more like a weather report. The meteorologist is able to see the upper atmospheric conditions and the hidden wind currents. From that data, he then determines what is happening on the ground.
Poor guy who got called a “Satan’s minion”, he had no idea he got himself into a pot of uninhibited passions 🙁
At that time, on the way home, I noticed a police speed trap on the road. I warned my son, who had just gotten his driver’s license, about the speed trap on 7th Street. Despite that, he got a speeding ticket that day, barely 1 km from home.
The point is that people don’t heed valid warnings. It is no coincidence that shortly after an article on the three temptations, Satan sends one of his minions in an attempt to poach some of the weaker minds that hang out here.
The message is eternal: just believe in matter which is unconscious and unintelligent. Just follow your biological drives which are blind. Then somehow, through trial and error, you will attain “godhead”. That is the metaphysical equivalent of “the check is in the mail”. Just wait, the promise says, as you burn in hell waiting.
You will recognize this as the promise of the serpent to make Adam into a god.
Recent posts have warned against remaining at the level of opinions and likely stories. Yet this minion regales us with “new” opinions which, however, we know to be as old as mankind. You either see that or you are blind.
Muse has arrived here uninvited as my guest. Yet he does not act like a guest, by refusing to engage with the actual content of the texts. Therefore, he has been banned from further commenting.
klamuse
You are fighting the good fight.
Indeed, conservatives would be wise to reclaim the legacy of Spinoza and Hegel from the clutches of their enemies.
Though, I get the impression that your friend got his knowledge of Hegel second hand, trough Schopenhauer and Schelling as well trough the Marxist distortion of him (far from being his follower, Marx loathed Hegel).
@klamuse “Material evolution is the method to ascend to Godhood” is an absolutely absurd statement. It is like saying a man could transform himself into an angel. You are aware that God pre-exists Creation, yes? That He is absolutely anterior to space and time? How could we then “evolve” to that step? What would that even look like?
I doubt if I will change the non-material minds of your spiritual cult, but here is an url that explains more of my theological materialism.
https://civilizingthebeast.blogspot.com/2018/08/theological-materialism-and_9.html
I take it, then, that in your world the likes of Dostoevsky, Bloy, Huysmans, Andreyev… offer no deep insight into the human condition? I’m happy to remain unenlightened, then, and to keep reading the non-art produced by these unworthy exoteric Christians. (bows respectfully and walks away)
klamuse: you are quite correct, it was a quite ill thought of me to use the phrasing ‘evolution in a material sense’, though I do believe there exists also a distinction between “creative evolution” and “natural evolution”, which I won’t go into right now.
However, if you pardon me, it appears that you are leaving matter-of-fact statements as if they are self-evident truths. How does material evolution necessarily lead to Godhood, when the converse of that statement, namely the notion of God providing cause to material reality is inconceivable? Second on what grounds do you even consider it to be Godhood? If we call that which stands at the end of time, being the product of evolutionary development, to be God, then Russell’s teapot might as well be his Prophet.
If this is the gist of your argument, then I must find the nebulous heights of transcendentalism much more plausible.
If anything, modern evolutionary theory seems to reject teleological causality – at every stage, there is a “perfect” adaptation of the system to its environment. The fluctuation of the environment, triggers the evolution of organisms. There’s nothing special about our big brains that wasn’t already conceptually contained behind Titanosaurus’s big butt.
The problem behind staging evolution as the basis of a new theology, is at some point it has to point toward something outside of its positivist-materialist framework, that is to say a pure idea of some sort. And here problems begin. This is why our entire discussion here is extremely silly, because God, is by definition not a thing. The original etymology of the Indo European root word “gheu” is “that which is invoked”. This is a concept many people struggle with. The relation of “God” and reality is never a product or a consequence of anything, be it evolution, matter, nature, human imagination, or whatever. It’s an axiom, a statement of cause. There’s no question of its existence, because it is the logical basis from which such a thing as “existence” stems. To discuss the “existence of God” is meaningless. To say that the “end of history uniquely and unprecedentedly will produce Godhood” simply tells that you haven’t really thought about what you’re saying.
We can of course conceive a technological means of using deep neural networks and something of the sort to create a super-AI which de facto fulfills the conditions of being supernatural (in the sense that it didn’t arise from nature) and supermaterial (in the sense that it can potentially envelop possibilities of all matter in its circuitry) at the same time. If you consider this thing your god, then I happen to have an old toaster for your devotional use that I would be willing to part with for an agreeable sum.
In regards to the claim about the alleged hatred of matter from certain religions: if matter is inherently evil, it seems rather odd that the affirmation of that whole bodily resurrection thing would be made the eschatological focal point.
Re: “Whether to desire miracles of knowledge (the authority of miracles or the chastity of knowledge)”
Of = or? …Is that correct?
Han Fei
The fact that you can even ask: “what seems to be in the material sense?” is astoundingly blind since everything including Godhood is in the material sense. Material evolution is the method to ascend to Godhood, God is not reached by way of the transcendental “reality” of even the most sublime ideas.
Because I have noticed several times outside commenters essentially tripping the same wire, and Cologero replying to them in a similar way, I have decided to break my silence.
I don’t consider myself smart or educated enough to compete with them on an intellectual basis. So consider this the opinion of the average man, and the reflection on the possibility of his being persuaded by either of their arguments.
In all fairness I can’t say I’m persuaded either way. Regarding the view shared by people like Tomberg, no matter how aesthetically pleasing I may find his ideas, and to be honest, I find the biological world and the biological explanation of every aspect of our being to be quite repugnant, it is nonetheless equally quite difficult to be convinced of the reality of the transcendent, or even of such a thing as an objective idea without direct experience of it. And indeed, if we are to believe the previous generations were not stupid, lying or hallucinating, there had to be such an experience of the immaterial and supernatural for them to base their entire doctrines upon. I’m not saying of course Plato saw a incorporeal light-bulb with the word “idea” on it, but rather that he understood, on a sensual level, the actuality of the basis from which ideas stemmed, the immaterial, universal space of intellect called the Logos. The question remains – can we see what he has seen? And if not, what good is our belief?
Thus I’m left in a state of intellectual darkness, unable to accept either of the arguments. The human mind, no matter how much empirical evidence it is presented with, simply can’t accept its state to be without any meaning, context or quality that does not stem from a positivist and material source. Even people who do endorse this being the only feasible case, in my view at least, can’t help but undertake it in a fatalistic sense, with the conviction to shut themselves off from the possibility of experiencing a reality both outside their present intellectual and sensual envelopment. This tension is invoked in the classic movie “The Stalker”.
But I must add a word that the ‘scientific’ materialist view appears to me, to only emerge in the comfort of modern civilization where the human being is ironically and essentially isolated from any real awareness of his situation in the world. I use the word “situation” in the strongly literal way here, in the sense that our life is essentially devoid of incidental experience by the nature of regularity of daily actions and phenomena. It is easy from this point of view to talk about the sudden and drastic self reflection that arises from experiencing a fatal incident exposing the human organism to the entire gravity of Being, as a form of paradoelia, a trick played by the mind. But in a world, or rather a consciousness shared by most today’s humans devoid of the grounds for faith, this is the last avenue left open for a genuinely super-sensual experience. The margin between life and death appears to be the last experiment left for us to undertake to become convinced of the truth of our beliefs. But then again this is not something that can be initiated or repeated in a laboratory experiment, therefore I can’t envision it providing a basis for science.
Now regarding evolution, I still fail to understand how exactly it falls outside of the quite ancient nation of “phusis”, or the phenomenon of emergence, unfolding and change through time. If we are to accept this being the case, then the condition of cyclicity and eternal return would hold, and Cologero’s argument that evolutionism represents nothing but the process by which things merely obtain their finality, in the degenerative sense, would also be pretty sufficient to persuade me at least. But evolutionism presupposes some sort of over-arching teleology towards a desired goal, usually put in some terms like absolute of complexity or perfection, even though evidence of these kinds of statement can’t be found in nature by their very definition. Again we come back to some kind of substance or idea that is wholly immaterial, that stands at the axiomatic origin to which a statement of purpose is attributed to evolution. So where does this come from, what does this mean, and most importantly what is its relationship with time? Questions which I fear are taken for granted at this point.
So perhaps I shall throw this question to both sides of the debate – can the varied strains of Hermetic methods each of you advocate, guide a person from the state of unbelief, towards, if not an intellectually substantiated persuasion, then at least an indifference to the disturbance these matters cause?
In response to the commenter klamuse:
What you speak of concerns Gnosticism or perhaps some extreme Vedic sects, not Christianity or Islam. The ascetism in both is always balanced with a crucial link to reality and the regular cadence and conduit of life. The lives of the patriarchs in the Old Testament, those of Jesus’s disciples and the lives of Muhammad’s companions are not examples of hardline renunciation of material experience. They were not by and large absolute ascetics. In any case, traditional Christianity, both West and East, unequivocally condemn this anti-material idea that you attribute to them.
Second you keep on speaking the word “evolution”, in particularly what seems to be in the material sense. Did you read even the article?
I spelled supermaterial “supematerial.” I hope my views aren’t judged by my sloppy editing.
No ideas are transcendental, they are not gods, even the gods aren’t transcendental, they are based in the material or supematerial world and have to be evolved to in the material world, no matter how lofty you experience them in your own mind/body.
You have devoted your life to your philosophy, to admit that your spiritual world is not what you think it is would take more courage than you appear to have. I find your mind and your writings to be superior. I don’t mean to hurt you, but enlighten you.
I assume, klamuse, that this comment was in response to the recent post, although I don’t recognize anything at all in it.
The past several comments have been of the same type. I hope for other readers that they — and this one in particular — exemplify “idea blindness”.
That is because you cannot recognize the transcendental reality of ideas. I haven’t “defined” anything as evil. That is your own interpolation.
I don’t know anything about those gurus and ascetics you mentioned, but they are of no interest.
You are apparently unable or unwilling to understand a text and comment intelligibly on it. That is where your material evolution has led you.
It may be shocking to some but it is villainous to define real material life as evil and satanic while defining the complete annihilation of material living as godly, especially if the only way to reach real Godhood is through material evolution.
But that is the way the ascetics and gurus who founded the revealed religions defined life and Godhood, even if their followers tried to lighten things up a bit. They went on to call material life hell on earth, narrowly confining, gloomy, subterranean, in servitude to desire, etc etc.
The way out of this hell—they told their serious followers at least—is to annihilate the desires of material life and the desires of the flesh through various extreme ascetic methods, so that then, minus all material desires, they could dwell in a bliss which they confounded with God.
I assume the gurus knew that heroin is easier than the ascetic way but it hooks your material body to a material drug addiction.
Here is the good news: the way to real Godhood is to channel the evolution of material life toward evolving to Godhood, using science and religion in a great synthesis of knowledge applied to culture.
The old ascetic way has to be religiously turned back on its feet after standing on its head. Not materially evolving is what can bring us real hell.