The Right Hand Path & the Death Worship

[obnoxion]

...I don't think we have such different views...

It seems we don't.

[Cancer]

Do you mean that this state of being would be totally harmonius with environment? Being a state of absolute non-resistance?

In a way, yes. But I must stress that I do enjoy myself actively and pursue my interests. Yet there is always a slow but steady process of letting go in progress. And after relatively many years of conscious focus on becoming passive to the world, the process has gained a momentum of its own. It helps that this is a very natural process. As we get older, we face our autumn years, and then, a last, our winter years. Many of us abhor the old age, and cleave to our youth. Yet the elderly so often say that the happiest times of their lives were the very last times. At a somewhat early age, in my youth, I choose consciously to let go of my summer years, and I made haste to cleave to the autumn. I gave up the wish for eternal youth, and the hope of lengthening its wanton excitements. Soon, a lot of my wants and my wishes fell away from me like leaves of brown, of yellow and red. Unless one has experienced the purifying clarity of the sun light in September, there really isn’t a proper way to describe it. Just being here, less and less in the world by each moment, carrying the utter peace of the grave in one’s heart, and finally experiencing such joy of being that one can only dimly recall from some distant, preverbal existence of one’s most immaculate past. And when this process begins, there is no more hurry. When one lets go just a little, one finds that one has enough of everything. And when one still lets go a little more, there is abundance. And the less one holds on to, the more one overflows. Who, then, can imagine the ecstasies of the utter midwinter, or the prolongations of the serene catacombs? The monad truly is like a human skull, like the Kabbalists say; it is white, it is smooth, and in all things it is like the skeletal head of the long-dead.

Your post made a very deep impression on me, Obnoxion. Last night, after reading this thread, I sat up for a long time processing the uneasiness and - yes, even fear that the thought of death as a slow fading-away provoked in me. Perhaps I felt so alienated because it has always seemed to me that letting go of ones interests is bound to be only a substitute for those interests, a result of a fear of failure. This is obviously enough not the case with you, but it would probably be so for me. The motive of giving something up is much more important than what precisely is given up, and I'm still working on freeing myself from any superficial expectations other people may have on my part.

I think old age is usually dreaded so much not only because of a lust for endless excitement, pleasure etc. - though this too is an important factor - but also because its so-called serenity may be simply a result of being completely enmeshed in dry routine and conformist thinking, being, in fact, more bound to this world than youth is. But of course the old people who let meaningless things upset them are not really old people, but young people trapped in old bodies.

As for mortification practices, I haven't succeeded in creating/adopting a thought-out, formal one. In the past, whenever I have tried conscious mortifying, the process has at once become so violent and out-of-control that there has been a risk of - maybe not physical death, but at least truly impairing emotional damage. The fault has assumably been that of applying the "let me have everything right now"-mentality to dying, witch is, now that I come to think of it, actually quite a hilarious mistake. I mean, how stupid can one really be? This thread has however given me a lot to think about - the first thing to do might be letting go of the idea of death as an action - as Obnoxion's posts suggest - and then simply trying to see everything as neutrally as possible. For as long as there is contempt for oneself, fear, or desire to free oneself violently from this world's hindrances, the point of view is still that of life.

Ps.

These old school ways always had an element of violence in them, because in ancient times it was a necessary part of spiritual achievement. Nowdays different methods are more suitable.

What is it precisely that has changed; what, in your opinion, made violence acceptable in ancient times?

[Kenazis]

These old school ways always had an element of violence in them, because in ancient times it was a necessary part of spiritual achievement. Nowdays different methods are more suitable.

What is it precisely that has changed; what, in your opinion, made violence acceptable in ancient times?

Even this wasn't question pointed to me, I started to wonder. Might it be that in ancient times the energies of men were more "in line", more clear, so it was easier to destroy unwanted parts with violence, with better precision and in the process of doing this, not affect in harmful way the other parts. While today the energies are more chaotic, more complex and intermingled, so it's so much easier to "fuck things up" by using violence as a method?

[Nefastos]

Even this wasn't question pointed to me, I started to wonder. Might it be that in ancient times the energies of men were more "in line", more clear, so it was easier to destroy unwanted parts with violence, with better precision and in the process of doing this, not affect in harmful way the other parts. While today the energies are more chaotic, more complex and intermingled, so it's so much easier to "fuck things up" by using violence as a method?

This precisely is how I see it.

Most likely in future - not immediate, mind you - when the collective culture ("race", like the theosophists used to say) has once again developed a holistic view on the world, it will be once again possible to make & execute clear choices. But because the wheel of evolution has been turned by then, even that cutting off of one's hands & eyes (as the Sermon on the Mount put it) will be done in more energetically & with intellectual and/or emotional precise, rather than physical forcing. It will most likely go hand in hand with learning new kinds of surgery, that works with magnetic (i.e. etheric) tools instead of crude physical knives & drills.

[obnoxion]

Fra Kenazis put it better than I'd ever could. As I see it, in the old school, violence in the sense of forcing one's self was not so much an acceptable choice but a pure necessity.

And there remains a strong legacy of violence in each of us. It manifests as a strong belief in the effectiveness of violence. If bombarded with enough worst case scenarios, almost anyone will at least think to himself that there are situations where violence is the only solution. You know the type of scenarios I'm refering to? For example, if all the people you know would be tortured for 10 000 years unless you kill a man, wouldn't you do it? This usually causes one to think that there are situations in life where only violence will do. But are there really? Or is it just in our minds? Because actual life is more complex and more multilayered than these kinds of examples. In many ways it is harder to give up the option of violence in one's mind than it is to actually live a life without violence.

[Insanus]

I think that everything we physically do is a reaction, but a reaction to action, not reaction's reaction. The action is what we do not do. Concentration teaches inner activity: denial of the personal. So denying our personal reactiveness means inner activity: letting go of that denial is death worship. Former results in attention & passivity. Latter results in outer person's action and mental passivity and via this (mortification) process there's no personal attachment to the character & his act because we guided our minds into oblivion (to a state where they are not dependant from their actions) & thus made the receptiveness possible.