fragments

the following are fragments from a conversation i’m having with my friend Jack (who i hope to convince to have a blog, at the very least). through this exchange, i was able to clarify some things for myself, or express them better than i did before. so i thought it was worth sharing.

as my interlocutor put it:

‘there are thoughts and parts of oneself that find the most expression when you share them and work on them with other people for whom these topics are just as vital’

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on Mary and Jesus

a mission can be covert. and by all indications the mission of Mary and Jesus seems to have been. part of the risk in coming here is that there's forgetfulness, so both Mary and Jesus had to remember who they really were. it's hard to imagine they had the same exact difficulties as us, or to the same extent, but it's more a question of degree, and in a sense they went through the same as anyone who comes here.

but not everyone who does has such a lofty mission. to say that they could have been anybody seems to me way off the mark. and absurd.

Jesus could have failed, but I don't think his particular mission could have been accomplished by another. in part because i believe the Yahweh of the OT (and some other gods by other names), is the preincarnate Jesus. and he was the main creator of this world, not the Father. but this is not the most important reason.

i think he did have an ordinary birth, much like a king is born on earth in the same way as a peasant. he was incarnate as a human. with all the challenges and opportunities this implies, and there are both. and they are both part of the trial of coming to earth, of being humbled. but the point is precisely to allow everyone to rise to their nature, and Jesus’ was an exceptional person by nature, as obviously was his mother and father.

it’s not that he is divine in a way that we could never be. i think we can. or some can. or may. but this is part of why he came. we are of the same nature, broadly speaking, of the same species. but some people have higher fates and better natures. and whoever denies the fundamental inequality of people is blind.

and in the same way I don't think that any person with any mission on earth can do it in the same way as any other, but each has to accomplish it in a way and format that only they can accomplish. and some missions are great and some are small. but they are all individual.

lastly, i should say, that the only true vision/mystical experience i have had was with Mary, through an icon, and I cannot deny the experience, nor communicate exactly what was given to me. it might not be relevant for anyone else. and a lot of what I think about her, and by implication, about the whole story of the cosmos, is a way of making sense of the experience.

nature and freedom

behind everything there are wills. multiple and in endless combinations. thus the world is, to an extent, chaotic. but precisely because we are dealing with wills, it's possible to navigate that sea, which much like the ocean is only chaotic on the surface.

there are fallen aspects to all beings. but there have been many falls, and not all apply to all. to give but one example, the plants and animals are innocent of the building of the tower. they still speak the holy tongue. even the stones, since they refused to participate, and the tower could only be built with bricks, stones whose will has been broken into conformity.

as i understand life is death, renewal and birth, and not just one thing, a process. and much like a person can become evil, a whole species can become evil or at least deformed, twisted, etc. consider, for example, parasites. it makes no sense to me that such a form of life is required for the functioning of things. if anything the opposite. especially if we're dealing with less individual beings like, say, ticks.

the way i see heaven is tied to this. heaven is an exclusive place, opened and cultivated by the will to participate in love and creation. this process requires death too and a parasite prevents death. it keeps things going in a halfway state, a zombie state, instead of allowing death and renewal. and this is how i see evil too.

the two characteristics in humans for me that exemplify this are envy and indifference, much more so than pride. to me these are the sorathic and ahrimanic influences, respectively. hence defilement and destruction on the one hand, and tyranny and totalitarianism on the other. they both, in the end, are engaged in making everything equal, everything static.

some wills in nature are indeed corrupt. but i don't see, for example, the fierceness of a lion, or the brutality of the ocean, as being evil. much like our own impulses for good things, they can be and are often disordered, also because no one lives in a vacuum, or without history. because beings are not just flesh, many things persist beyond it, and are meant to. can i really blame, say, a boar for coming after me if i happen to stumble onto it and its babies, after all the humans that have hunted them for centuries without even a word of respect for their race, that have destroyed their natural places, and reduced some of their brothers to little more than meat machines, without showing any appreciation or giving thanks for the body and spirit they have provided to the human species.

metaphors, symbols and patterns

a metaphor is not 'just' a metaphor, as people use the word. literally it means to transfer over. a metaphor is an application of the law of correspondences. which is why symbols and patterns matter, they are the structure of all reality everywhere, and each case can be scaled back and forth, up and down.

i think they matter more than ever, now that we must be conscious of them (as of everything). metaphors, analogies, similes, are how we learn about everything. it's even how we do everything. everything is translation, thus, transference, a carrying (phor) over (meta) of meaning. one can believe it to be totally arbitrary. that is a metaphysical assumption. but mine is that they are not arbitrary in the least. this is related to the nature, yin, darkness, question. because the most fundamental patterns of generation and renewal are dual, and again this is not arbitrary. it’s a dance, or a song. everything is made of active and passive. speech is words but also pauses. man and woman, light and dark, etc.

a heaven of only light is precisely what the angels had before anyone decided to come here. this is even what separates, in my mind, the angels from the gods. the latter, to be such, are fully embodied. immortal men in heaven, as Joseph Smith and Hermes put it. and if we were to be like the angels, and dwell in the same exact type of world, there would be no need for incarnation. if the future was only light (which is also only spirit, no flesh) then there would be no point, if half of our experience here is of no use in the future life at all.

all this to say that metaphors, analogies, correspondance, are precisely where i find meaning and when i feel like i learned something. when i pursue too much abstraction i end up alienated from the real world. when i ground my thinking in the basics of life, i feel i can better reach those higher rungs, and that the particular thing is expanded in meaning, and not emptied of it.

things like how a seed grows. the kind of thing Jesus talked about precisely. i don't think it's a coincidence, and that today he would have used cars and computers for his examples. the examples he used are fundamental patterns, as i see it. this is also why i returned (after almost twenty years) to fiction, which really was my first conscious artistic endeavor, back when i was twelve. i really don't think i am inventing much, but rather capturing something. it's hard to believe or explain. but that's what it feels like. like i am learning, more than i am creating. i don't claim the message is relevant for anyone else of course, it might be only to me. but that's the specifics. in the broad sense, of how people and the world and heaven and hell work, the patterns are there, because they are fundamental, one cannot escape them. and even if you subvert them, that subversion is always pointing to the right side up.

the specific icons of the symbols and patterns, however, are less important now than ever. each age kind of has their own anyway. even within Christianity we have had many 'flavors' over the years and locations. they mostly leave me cold, exceptions notwithstanding, and i think they do for most people nowadays. the symbols, and the patterns, however, remain. there is still day and night, there are still seasons, there is still good and evil, and there are still the stories we know to be true. but I am just as Barfieldian and thus know that many are now incapable of relating to the group adaptation of the symbol and need to figure things out for themselves, to create their own icons of the spiritual world. is there danger of idol worship. yes, but it’s in everything. what are trads but idol worshipers, really. well, assuming they are sincere, which most are not.

original and final participation

to conceive of final participation as leaving behind half of the original kind, severs our connection and hinders our resonance with fundamental patterns and symbols. it’s the same idea as leaving behind the shadow, and the night, and the ocean. this is the view of the book of Revelation, and one i do not subscribe to at all. where there is no more chaos or death. which of course means nothing else but stasis. for participation requires active and passive, not just active. in a sense heaven is to be more a sharpening of things than a change. a sharpening, perhaps especially, of the dark side of things, so that there is more silence, and more rest, and activity is precise, and spontaneous, not forced, not calculated, intuitive.

so yes, we don't and cannot relate to the symbols in the same way. we may need to make our own icons. to tell our own stories. or adapt the old ones. (this is precisely what Tolkien did, among many others in many different ways).

whether Jesus and Odin, for example, are the same being (and personally I think so), the fact that they have a similar story is not because the stories aren't true, but because they are necessary. everyone can attempt to tell the story of Jesus and see if it makes sense for things to have gone some other way. just try it. it costs nothing. you will find that the story has certain rhythms and points that, if changed, tell a completely different story, and it’s no longer the same person at all.

and it’s because these patterns were not created by any god, they were mastered by them. in a sea of chaotic material, the Lord saw a pattern and set to organizing it, putting things to one side and others to another. where most would see a word cloud or a dictionary, the Lord saw a story. where most would see an overgrown field, or a bare one, the Lord saw a garden, and a forest. and so on.

another point: it's never considered what the participation of other beings is. in my opinion, they already have final participation. in consciousness, not in each individual body, for now. that's our ultimate goal, the human, to be individual everywhere. but it's not enough to pay lip service to the idea of everything being alive and purposeful, we need to actually take into account living wills in everything. actually, in more than everything, because two wills combined are not two, but three. which is why the mob is one giant monster, and it's unfortunately very real.

the process of putrefaction

having dealt with compost in all stages, and made many experiments, i have a more nuanced view of the creatures of putrefaction. i have observed that there are two types (ticks and parasites are not included here, they are another topic): the maggots and the worms. whenever I start composting from scratch, the first to arrive are the maggots, and other such creatures. they are indeed quite disgusting. it takes a while, perhaps six months, it depends on a lot of factors how long it takes, but the maggots eventually disappear, or dwindle in number as to being negligible. and it's not because you have ceased adding new things in an earlier stage of decomposition. it's because there is already a firm base of compost, pure soil or almost, and there the worms are living. and the worms are not disgusting. i have held them in my hand, and they are interesting and curious creatures. they are not a necessary correction to imbalance (like the more disgusting creatures), but the agents of balance itself.

in any case, it's true there are many disgusting insects, and others that just seem to act too cruelly. what I believe is that some of them, and some of their tasks, came about through our destruction, like i said, correcting imbalances. in a way it’s the same as disease. diseases are signs, their cause is elsewhere, and when the cause is gone, so are they.

i have gained insight into nature by actually working with it. i understand how plants grow, how soil grows, how water behaves, stuff like that. it's not some great mystery. it's just a matter of dealing with it regularly, and thinking on it. and because i know how it's supposed to behave, i also know how it does behave when we interfere without purpose.

people here till the fields and cut the weeds and take away the trimmings, every year, sometimes many times a year, and they do nothing there, nothing at all. the dirt becomes dry and dead. the fields become infested with hardier and hardier weeds and every year it gets worse. voles and ants make it their permanent homes because the soil can no longer hold moisture, and thus life (again, water, and chaos, and renewal, it’s all connected), and they proliferate without any checks, from which they then easily invade the actual places where crops are grown. if we left the fields alone, or actually cultivated something on it, the ants and the voles would live there, but they would share it with many other critters and plants and both human areas and wild areas would be in balance. this is just a small example. but it’s true, and i have learned to see it. and do see it, unfortunately.

it's the same with poisons. you kill the bad bugs and also the good bugs. then the bad bugs come even harder. most beings in nature are trying to help things along. even the weeds, they don't appear at random. if you till the soil deeply and it dries out, weeds whose roots are good at holding it together and keeping moisture will sprout. if the field is burned, weeds that are good at absorbing extra potassium from the ash grow instead. but we keep disrupting this process, which is the initial stage of getting back into balance. just like the maggots are replaced by the worms, the weeds will be replaced by other plants, and more variety, and things will literally grow themselves. the fields i have now, and it’s only been a year, things (i mean crops) are already growing on their own with less and less intervention from me. and the more time goes on, and the more i get to know the place and the climate and all the beings in it, and to treat it how it actually needs and desires to be treated, the more they respond and everything goes well. but we generally do not allow these processes to take place. either through habit or hurry or greed.

if you've ever been in a wild place, or close enough, even tropical, the bugs are no longer as disgusting. things are more in balance. you can actually learn to see degrees of it, and try to tug at those little remnants, and help them, to make things wilder, to help the souls of good things in nature along. obviously, the reason why there is more balance is partly because there are other beings who eat them, and keep them under control, and also because they have less of a job to do. much like a human grows itself naturally, a habitat, and a home, and a community, all these things grow by the cooperation of wills. we have simply ceased to understand other types of will. we used to be able to know that there were people behind things. hence dryads and faeries and stuff like that. we have forgotten.

it's no wonder that noble creatures flee the city, and only ignoble ones remain. like rats and roaches. the exception are the pigeons. they are good creatures. i think they have hope in civilization for some reason. we did use to have a very close and fruitful relation with them for a long, long time, so they helped to build it. and then we abandoned them because machines are more efficient, supposedly.

the cross

a cross is also wood, and thus a tree. all of it is included. I think christianity is to blame for us having forgotten but our ancestors saw the cross and knew it was also a tree. the old texts and hymns are full of this. everyone knew. it was a lingua franca. we have to relearn it and expand it. now we must start from scratch. luckily it was how Jesus started too, with everyday experience. of course, we don't have regular contact with the seasons and the weather and animals and plants. but the problem there is that we should. and only people who make that effort will be able to understand, and grow. and it's always possible to do this. we started doing this while we were in the city. you have to find it where you can, but you have to engage.