Fragment 35

Before I get back to the topic of some of the people who I believe crossed the abyss, I would like to examine my aims for writing the "Fragments". I know in "Fragment 1" I stated my aims, but I have learned a lot since then. I am guilty of conducting my education in public. as Hegel said about Schelling. So let us get to what I have learned. All of us involved in the Great Work are involved in a project we largely do not understand. I think the reason for the misunderstanding is that the Great Work has no determined end point. That we who are involved influence the goal. The older Occultists and alchemists were mostly practitioners of the R.H.P. using Christianity as a model. (I will have a lot more to say about this in future "Fragments"). So they believed that the goal was merging with the One (Aten). I hold that this is a mistake. They were so blinded by the "light' of Aten, that they forgot to turn around to look at the deep shadows they left. This is the freedom to change and control the aims of The Great Work. The R.H.P. along with wanting to merge with the One believes in creating a perfect society. (Utopia) This has been the aim of political philosophers and theologians for a millenium. The building of the New Jerusalem. Of course, it has masqueraded under many names, Utopia, the workers Paradise, the Just Society, etc. It is time to acknowledge this goal has been a total failure. If after all this time that they came up with Marxism show what a failure this project has been. It is hard to believe that there are still Marxists after the disaster of the twentieth century. When Marxism killed over a hundred million people. (Hoggg has a powerful hold on people) This also goes to show how irrational people are, any rational person would have concluded that Marxist experiment was a failure. One of my aims is changing the goal of humanity from building the perfect society to self-deification. Once the goal has changed everything else will change. At last the Christian ethic shall be abandoned. We shall not have to tolerate frauds like Peter Singer. and John Rawls; who just try to out-christen the Christen ethic. Instead, an ethics of self-deification shall arise. Both Nietzsche and Aleister Crowley have made a start, but the L.H.P. is still in its infancy, there is much more work to be done.This is one of the aims of the "Fragments". To provide the materials for a new paradigm for humanity. Now let us turn to another person I believe crossed the abyss: the icy philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677). Spinoza meets my two criteria for having crossed the abyss. His outward life was destroyed and he seemed to know things he should not have known. Spinoza was excommunicated and banished from the Jewish community in Holland. His outward life was destroyed, he left family, friends, and his business. The other criteria of knowing things he should not know, can be easily observed in his writings. I shall take his book "Theological-Political Treatise" for an example. In this work Spinoza anticipates modern Biblical criticism, and much of modern scholarship on the Bible. Many people at the time believed the book was "forged in Hell', because Spinoza debunks the myths and superstitions of the Jews, and Christians by implication. Of course, it is "The Ethics" that is his masterpiece. A work that still fascinates modern philosophers. Spinoza was ahead of his time. Unfortunately, we know very little about the inner life of Spinoza, or what happened to him before he was banished from the Jewish community. My speculation is that as a young man, he had a vision of eternity, and the One. And he spent the rest of his life working out this vision. Spinoza was a man with a message. What little we do know about Spinoza's inner life comes from his book "The Emendation of the Intellect", where he tells us how he got started on the path as a seeker of wisdom. I am using the Edwin Curley translations of Spinoza. A quote from the book: "Whether there was something which, once found and acquired, would continuously give me the greatest joy. to eternity" Spinoza dismissed all the usual pursuits of humanity: wealth, fame, and sensual pleasure. Instead Spinoza pursued wisdom and knowledge, no matter what the consequences. In person he was always polite, but seemed to have a preternatural self confidence. This alo seems to be a characteristic of those that have found their True Self. I want to examine the last part (5) of his book "The Ethics" titled "Of the Power of the Intellect on Human Freedom" This is the most controversial part to "The Ethics". Many modern scholars and philosophers dismiss it as rubbish. But I believe it is the most important part of the book, and the whole reason he wrote the book. The reason it is dismissed is the logical, rational Spinoza seems to have become a mystic. I have often heard him compared to Gurdjieff. So let us try to make some sense of the message of Spinoza, and how to obtain eternal blessedness. Before jumping into Part 5 we must look at Spinoza's theory of knowledge; his three kinds of knowledge. This is found in Part 2 (P. 40), Schol. 2: "1 from singular things which have been represented to us through the senses in a way mutilated, confused, and without order for the Intellect; for that reason I have accustomed to call such perceptions knowledge form random experience 2 from signs for example from the fact that having heard or read certain words, we recollect things, and form certain ideas of them like these thought which we imagine the things these two ways of regarding things I shall henceforth call knowledge of the first kind, opinion or imagination; 3 finally from the fact that we have common notions and adequate ideas or properties of things. This I shall call reason, and the second kind of knowledge. 4 In addition to these two kinds of knowledge is (as I shall show from what follows) another kind of knowledge proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of things. I shall explain all these with one example. Suppose here are three numbers, and the problem is to find a fourth which is to the third as the second is to the first, Merchants do not hesitate to multiply the second by the third and divide the product by the first, because they have not yet forgotten what hey heard from their teacher without any demonstration or because they have often found this in the simplest numbers, or from the force of the demonstration of P.19 in Book VII of Euclid, namely the common property of proportions. But in the simplest numbers none of this is necessary. Given the numbers 1, 2, 3, no one falls to see that the fourth proportional number is 6- and we see this much more clearly because we infer the fourth number from the ration which, in one glance, we see the first number to have the second" I have given this long quotation from Spinoza, for several reasons. So that the reader can get an idea of the icy logic of Spinoza, and to get an idea of Spinoza's third kind of knowledge. The third kind of knowledge plays almost no part in the first four parts of ``The Ethics", only becoming important in the 5th part. There is a lot to unpack in the above quote, and in order to do this we shall have to take a brief diversion for a look at the philosophy of R. Descartes (1596-1650). The reason for the diversion to Descartes is that Spionza chose to describe his vision in Cartesian terms. Everyone has to use the language of their times, and Spinoza chose the best thinking of the time to express his vision of reality. Even though Descartes is considered the Father of modern philosophy, he is also a very misunderstood thinker. Unfortunately, those who followed Descartes chos to concentrate on what Descartes considered the least important aspect of his philosophy. (the Second Meditation) Descartes was much more of a pragmatist and experimentalist than he is given credit for. For our purpose we have to examine Descartes' ideas on freedom. Descartes followed Christianity in separating knowing and doing (Intellect and Will). Im;ole Christianity Descartes had a much broader view of freedom. Freedom was just not the power to make a mistake like in Christianity at that time. Instead freedom for Descartes was the ability to do something new. Descartes did this by separating Intellect and Will. For Descartes the Intellect never makes a mistake, it is the Will that makes mistakes. An example should make this clear. Say you are experiencing a Unicorn. There is no mistake, whether it is a hallucination, a horse with a horn attached, or a real Unicorn. The mistake comes when you act on the experience, lide trying to mount a hallucination. In other words it is only through doing and experimenting that we gain a practical knowledge of the world. The other topic we have to cover relating to Descartes is his dualism and the reason for it. (Thought and Extension) This is why his theory of knowledge works. The mind is not involved in the causality that affects the material world, it is as if the mind hovers over the material world and thus is able to affect it. Descartes knew that getting drunk or dropping a heavy rock on your foot affects your mental state, but you are free to react in different ways to these occurrences. Finally we can get back to Spinoza. Spinoza rejected the separation of Intellect and Will. Spinoza is a determinist. For Spinoza there is only intellect, the different reactions that one has are due to adequate and inadequate ideas. Adequate ideas are ideas that have strict boundaries and one knows the proximate cause. Again I will use an example to illustrate, an example I am sure Spinoza would disapprove of, but he would approve of one part of the example. Let us take the all too common sit-com plot of someone overhearing part of a conversation and misunderstanding the conversation, Then they act like delusional idiots until the whole story is out. Spinoza would agree that most people act like delusional idiots. The whole conversation is context would be an adequate idea. It is bounded and the context would be the proximate causes. Overhearing just part of the conversation out of context is an inadequate idea. For Spinoza the actions that follow an idea are determined. So how can Spinoza speak of human freedom? Let us start with section 4 "On Human Bondage" . When we react to outside affects we are in bondage. That is why the whole example would be dismissed by Spinoza, because it is of the first kind of knowledge. The person who is always reacting to outside stimulus is in bondage and really does not have much existence for Spinoza. When a person has power over how he reacts to outside affects he-she is in control. This should sound familiar to Occultists. It is close to Crowley's finding your true will. How does one gain control of oneself? It is by having adequate ideas. Let us go to Section 5 P.3: "An affect which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we from clear and distinct ideas" For Spinoza every idea is accompanied by an emotion those that enslave one to outside affects are negative emotions those that free you from outside affects are positive emotions. Spinoza "The Ethics" Section 4 Preface:"Man's lack of power to mediate and restrain the affects I call bondage. For the man who is subject to affects is under the control, not of himself, but fortune." Unless a person can form adequate ideas he-she is controlled by outside forces; people who can form adequate ideas are in control of themselves. How is this reconciled with Spinoza's determinism? No matter if you have adequate or inadequate ideas the doing is dictated by the idea. Simply put, those that have adequate ideas act differently than those who do not. Spinoza was not interested in experiments like Descartes. For Spinoza there is a right way to do things, and it is dictated by having adequate ideas. All emotions that cause a person to be subject to outside affects are negative emotions. The emotions that accompany adequate ideas are positive, because they give a person freedom from outside influences. Even though there is much more to say on the topic of freedom in Spinoza's philosophy, I want to move to the most controversial topic of his philosophy: Immortality. Let us begin with a quote from Part 5 P.23: "The human mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the body, but something of it remains." I must break in with some comments about Spinoza's vision. In ethics Spinoza was a combination of R.H.P. and L.H.P., in metaphysics he was all R.H.P. Spinoza had a vision of the One. The One is Spinoza's God. Spinoza, like Descartes, views the mind as hovering over the material world. (I am not going to go into Spinoza's dualism) We directly experience this being a disembodied mind hovering over the material world. The more a person can achieve a state of consciousness of viewing everything from a standpoint of eternity, the more real they become. This should remind everyone of Grudjeff's self remembering. Again let us go to a quote from Spinoza "The Ethics" Part 5 P. 33: "The intellectual love of God, which arises from the third kind of knowledge is eternal" When we identify with eternity, we identify with God therefore becoming more real, since God is the only real thing. Of course, this takes conscious suffering (a lot of work). Those that achieve this state of consciousness are the Blessed. "The Ethics" Part 5 P. 43: " Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself: nor do we enjoy it because we reatrain our lusts, on the contrary, because we enjoy it we are able to restrain it" Like I said, this is only achieved through lots of hard work. I will give the last word to Spinoza, here is the last line of "The Ethics": "But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare."