© Nefastos 2002, 2012
“Wherefore I say unto you, all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”
– Matthew 12:31-32
***
Meaning is like breath; immaterial, formless, undefined essence of sanctity that does not mean sacred as “placed apart from the world,” but precisely falling into the world’s innermost being, emanating from it and entwining with its timeless truth. The first sanctity is God, the omnipresent but powerless 1 All-Being of omnipotence. The other is Man, namely the pure, holy, “anointed” man – a Christ, a messiah, master, and redeemer of his own animalistic life and through it of the whole world and of everyone “who believeth in him” (i.e. in his teaching) and who would follow him. For Jesus said: “Ye are gods,” 2 and: “be ye therefore perfect.” 3 These two beings are one in spirit, and this unifying spirit reaches everywhere and is seen by everyone pure of heart regardless of religious form or the nature of his conviction. It may be called by any given name, the Holy Spirit or true and eternal Presence. This aspect of the Trinity explains the others, and because of this its symbol is the dove, pure and innocent mind (“be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” 4). This aspect of divinity is feminine, and it has its correspondences in other myths: the exaltation and worship of the Virgin Mary is an unconscious reiteration of this same aspect.
Life, and life alone, can define good and evil. God living outside time cannot be good or evil, for all evil is a time-bound illusion. The deeper into the folds of slow matter the soul falls, the more coarse and evil it becomes. In other words, the more selfish it becomes. This is only because of the influence and manifestation of the created law. Is not the evil-one then that which has created those unbreakable laws? But as an answer, the Ialdabaoth – the demiurge of the Gnostics – solves nothing. It could have been born mistaken and therefore the possibilities of error already existed. Ergo, the fault is again in the fullness of the Plerôma itself, although it placed (emanated) for itself a locum tenens to create the worlds of suffering. 5 Good and evil are meaningful terms only in a certain moment, as are selfishness and unselfishness, vanity and necessity. When we deal with any given reality as a whole it is always good, unselfish, and necessary. It is only as we break events apart from their natural continuation and their viewpoint of eternity that they can become evil. Therefore, one who is enlightened can act in time completely free and fully bound simultaneously, perfectly right and yet without any kind of moral constraint, for he sees the right and necessary action in every moment. If any given reality is taken as unconditional dogma, then the basis for later suffering has necessarily been cast.
The Holy Spirit, the vague but extremely real possibility for meaningful action is the “narrow path and gate” mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount. This path cannot be designed ready for anyone, but it is born from the essence and action of every moment. There exist no absolute morals. There is nothing but an intention that in its fulfilment becomes meaning. It is in everything small as well as in everything that seems to be great and powerful. Because of this did Jesus command humility and said, “many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.” 6 Because of this did Laozi wonder at the magnificent humility of heaven and earth. This humility does not mean feign of smallness or cheap submission, but only manifestation of Divine Force, the force that manifests through humanity’s own personality just as it manifests through everything that acts in nature. This meaning is the most powerful reality, for it is the only one that endures forever, and at the same time it is the weakest, for the smallest of mistakes would break it abruptly. The slightest selfish feeling, thought, or prejudice can shatter it, and because of this there are so many people who are never truly happy or ever truly alive. Let it be allowed to them, for there is no other possibility; and because of their violent nature they kill and enslave again and again the devoted servants of silence, at the same time bruising one another in their aeonian battle for the accomplishment of their dreams.
These divisions of sanctity may be named in any way – in the way of Christians as Father, Son and the Holy Spirit or as God, Jesus Christ and Virgin Mary; or in the manner of some other religion or custom – the names themselves do not change them. For “Him” there is no meaning at all in the names people equip the idols made of the unimaginable nature of the Absolute. It is one and the same to forbid the possibility of making images as it is to forbid bowing devoutly in front of empty temple walls. The only true worship of divinity is in the search for the truth and in its presentation. With such an open-minded approach to life (in the word’s widest meaning) no psychological, religious or scientific dogma, or fantasy indulged by the personality, can prevent right action in any given situation. Everyone will receive according to that which he does, and different people will do different deeds because they need different nourishment for their souls. This is the reason for the world’s often cruel treatment of humanity, for every person has an unconscious need to enter precisely into those sufferings to which the world draws him. This is a great mystery that can be opened only by understanding the fulfilment of the Meaning. Psychologists can tell you that a person suffering from subconscious guilt can develop a psychosomatic illness or even work insidiously against himself so that the fitting “punishment” will strike him from the outside. All this happens without the cognition of the conscious mind, which believes itself to be acting by its own choice, while being at the mercy of random, chaotic external impulses! There is no such thing. No internal or external, no mind or “objective” reality behind it, no chaotic or ordered world. Everything happens for the One, from the One, to the One. Soul is like light beholding light, and the eye, the background, and the event are light also, although manifesting in different stages because of the magnificent multiplicity of creation. It must be understood that the closer to the absolute spirit a compound object is the greater is its longevity. Soul is lighter than the body and will outlive it, and during the human life this soul lives “from the background.”
Since the world acts from the basis of periodic duality as the times of light and darkness interchange – like sand in an hourglass travelling first into one end and then turned – so also the experiences of the soul must travel in two directions. This can take considerable external time, but in the timeless world of the spirit everything happens simultaneously. He who harms another being harms himself, and this cannot be stopped by any kind of substitution simply because the soul desires knowledge. To deny the soul its own expiation would prevent it from having the real experience-based knowledge which it craves. This fact alone can make the suffering of the world understandable: that every suffering soul yearns for its own suffering. The soul itself wants to suffer, and it endures its suffering with the help of this unconscious will. Those horrible, revolting atrocities and sad sufferings that happen everywhere all the time can be sanctioned only because of this truth. We have neither the revenge of God, nor fortune or misfortune sown chaotically by the blind elements to blame, but simply the experience a soul has chosen for itself by its actions. It goes without saying that this kind of thinking must not cause insensitivity or hardening towards the sufferings of others, because a mortal being is, unfortunately, bound to duality. One recognises only his own suffering, not the eternal peace of his soul. The knowledge of the origin of suffering and its fundamental voluntary nature can only make us perceive meaning in the world that seems to be irrational, not mortify our hearts’ feelings.
Therefore, in the end, there exists only one sin – the sin of pride, the mocking of the Holy Spirit. This original sin, hubris, is the one that creates suffering, and finally the only one that creates manifestation. It, like any other force in the cosmos, is neither vain nor “evil,” although it is Evilness itself. That ideal of evil – or “evil,” the archetype of pride, self-consciousness, intelligence, and rising against the harmony of the absolute – is our holy Satan, the highest one of the angels. Metatron is the “lesser IHVH” (i.e. the second Logos) and Lucifer is the “fallen” Metatron. This being of divine fire, the flame of consciousness, is apparently multiple, for it manifests in many worlds inside each other. In the world of the Spirit it is “good” (like everything is good where dimensions of matter and time do not limit the manifestation of consciousness). In the world of humanity it is “evil.” Evil is an illusion created by ignorance, but since ignorance is undeniably real in the world, evil is also an objective manifestation and thus as much the “responsibility” of the absolute God as knowledge and good. In their original unity, these opposites are not separate from each other, and in their secondary manifestation they are present side by side. Out of this derive the “two faces” of Satan. On the one hand he is the doer of wrong deeds. On the other hand, he is their amender. Satan is the Nemesis, and truly “the Father of Death.” Satan constructs when destroying, and destroys when constructing. Satan is the most absolute and truthful manifestation of the Absolute God. In his hand is the paradox, the most magnificent key to the mysteries of the universe. Understanding the essence of Satan is the same as understanding the being of God Himself.
- The absolute actor does not act at all from the point of view of the consciousness that works in time and matter. This is an illusion of course, but for the lower mind, working with causal terms, it is hard to exceed. ↩
- John 10:34. ↩
- Matthew 5:48. ↩
- Matthew 10:16. ↩
- In all secretly dualistic forms of pseudo-monotheism where Satan or some substitute of his appears, this particular problem can easily be seen. The only rational interpretations that escape impossibilities are that either “God” is both good and evil – and deserves curses as much as praises – or there exists no universal evil but only tragedy, and the evil deeds which are brought about do not satisfy or anger God, but torment only the created beings and in the final analysis the wrongdoer himself. The former is enlightened exotericism, and the latter is the point of view of occultism. As long as we speak of evil as something existing in reality – and not only as expression – our thinking is formal. ↩
- Matthew 19:30. ↩