Crisis of the modern world

  • Ego rules the world: Anti-“God”, Anti-“Humanity”, Anti-“Nature

Our civilization is in decay. Because we have blown-up our ego. Cosmic Balance has been disturbed. The Origin – Cosmic Womb/Vacuum – “doesn’t tolerate” this. With the help of Her two Cosmic Forces of “Death and Rebirth” (“Stirb und Werde” – “Die and Become”-J.W. von Goethe) She breaks down our ego-accumulations, thus restoring the Original Balance.

Current decadence, greed, evil, falsehood, corruption, violence, injustice, exploitation, thus have a Cosmic undertone. It is a “Cosmic Law” that civilizations which have become megalomaniacal will inevitably collapse. Because all levels of existence are corroded – including the religious realm – only a Dimension that is beyond – META – God and the world can redeem us.  “God hasn’t created the world out of nothingness, but Nothingness (Cosmic Womb) is giving birth to God and the universe, the latter continuously returning to the Origin”.

One of the many disastrous consequences of an ongoing repression of this trans-personal Ground of Being – and the mistaken assumption of the Absolute by a relative entity or self – is epitomized in our techno-industrial pursuit to convert the earth into one large global factory – reinforced by multinational monopoly. Herein, nature is viewed simply as exploitable “raw material” for a “manufacturing” process aimed at churning out “products” for the “consumer.” This apparent narrowing of human perspective is the logical result of paradigmatic trends linking back to the so-called Age of Enlightenment.

With the advent of Positivist philosophy, Cartesian dualism and the resulting scientific reductionism – and hence an increased denial of all metaphysical realities – these paradigmatic trends were naturally followed by a human failure to correctly grasp the reality of the Divine Absolute and a corresponding inability to perceive nature and cosmos as sacred theophany. These misperceptions and repressions consequently and inevitably created destructive inversions of essential timeless truths, and these distortions now find projection in society as inflated “absolutisms” – psychologically and ideologically perpetuated by the materialist self as it wanders in narcissistic ignorance.

Until humanity attains cognition of the fact that the eternal and unbounded Spirit is primary and hence sovereign to the limited and temporalself, and that every human, and indeed the entire seen and unseen cosmological order, is sustained by this trans-personal Divine Absolute (the true domain of “Greatness,” “Majesty” and “Oneness”), then human vice will continue to be the governing factor in a consequently imbalanced and unjust world. It is important to note at this point that no human has more, or less, Spirit than any other; we just have more, or less, self-ishness masking the divine centre or reality of Being. For example, perceived racial superiority is misguided in the sense that only the Spirit (rûh) is truly superior (al-Azim / al-Mutakabbir) and sovereign (al-Malik) in relation humanity, nature and cosmos. These recognized divine attributes should not be taken out of context and assumed as an appellation or attribute of the relative / temporal self, race or corporate entity. Commercial attempts to “exploit” and ultimately oppress nature in the name of ‘development’ or ‘progress’ and to establish a (now) promethean human species as the only (believed worthy) species in the universe, are clearly reflected in statements of the following kind: Our goal is to destroy, to eradicate the environmental movement… We want to be able to exploit the environment for private gain, absolutely…and we want people to understand [that this] is a noble goal.

Evidently this is a misguided and ultimately destructive reading of the natural environment; a distorted interpretation of the human as “steward” or “guardian” of cosmological order. Not only are our natural landscapes fast being degraded and replaced by overbearing marketing billboards – selling artificial, ever-elusive or impossible dreams – but our bodies and minds are becoming increasingly eroded by seemingly disconnected consumer-related agendas and abstract “post-human” techno-philosophy.

How can the best-fed, finest clothed, most literate, and scientifically nurtured people in history be so miserable? …The notion that human beings are themselves getting better is quite obviously wrong. The quality of human beings is declining, even while the web of man’s infrastructure grows around him. Modern man is a Wizard of Oz, a shrunken soul in a mighty machine. Thus modern man has multiplied his means of communication with mobile phones, satellites, email, SMS – a whole array of devices – but then finds he has nothing to say or no one to whom to say it. He has a diminishing capacity to make any real contacts. He has prolific external means but no inner reality to share. Ours is the age of the space tourist: truly awesome technology devoted to truly trivial human beings

The attempts by marketing interests to hijack and commercially manipulate influential archetypal principles, the resulting corruption of psyche, the lack of meaningful connection to the realm of the divine attributes, and the (conceptual) collapse of the Absolute, find reflection in clinical psychosis, violent crimes both domestically and socially, ongoing ecological destruction and a forever increasing narcissism. In this scenario there is no anchored perspective of ‘self’; no guiding reference to the Divine Ideals (by which, universal law and the cosmological order is governed); no ultimate aspiration towards an inherently unified pure consciousness that is our sacred centre of Being. In other words we seek guidance from the fickle and morally-bankrupt worlds of marketing, fashion, soap-operas and consumer research – all of which are based on adversarial politics and a divisive economics, rather than an ethos of interconnectedness and harmony.

It is thus critical that we do not misread or distort these sacred archetypes and theophanies in unexamined pursuit of entertainment, or hanker after subjective expression within the limited confines of the personal psyche believing this to be the objective goal in life, or lose awareness of the more subtle zones of higher consciousness, all of which is ultimately sustained by the primary, unconditioned and unbounded pure consciousness: the divine ground. Kabir Helminski ( in Soul Loss & Soul Making) brings necessary clarity to the issue:

When it is proposed that modern man has lost his soul, one meaning is that we have lost our ability to perceive through the Active Imagination59 which operates in an intermediate world, an interworld between the senses and the world of ideas. This Active Imagination is the imaginative, perceptive faculty of the soul, which cannot be explained because it is itself the revealer of meaning and significance. The Active Imagination does not produce some arbitrary concept standing between us and ‘reality,’ but functions directly as an organ of perception and knowledge just as real as – if not more real than – the sense organs. And its property will be that of transmuting and raising sensory data to the purity of the subtle, spiritual world. Through the Active Imagination the things and beings of the earth will be made incandescent. This imagination does not construct something unreal, it unveils the hidden reality. It helps to return the facts of this world to their spiritual significance, to see beyond the apparent and to manifest the hidden. …For some, whom I will call the psychological polytheists, the mundus imaginalis is the playground of “the gods.” They have appropriated the concept of the interworld for very limited purposes. The mundus imaginalis is not to be unlocked by either fantasy or intellect, but by the purified heart, understood here as a subtle but penetrating cognitive faculty of mind beyond intellect. [Please note that in the tradition of sophia perennis, this faculty of ‘heart’ is referred to as the (higher) Intellect – not to be confused with what is commonly known as intellect (which is referred to as ‘reason’ or ‘rationation’)60] The function of this power of the soul is in restoring a space that sacralizes the ephemeral, earthly state of being. It unites the earthly manifestation with its counterpart on the imaginal level, and raises it to incandescence. Isn’t this what is sought by most of those who are drawn to paganism, mythologies, and mystical eroticism?

All true spiritual work is based on the unity of these different aspects of our being. An alternative to the conception of the human being proposed by psychological polytheism and other regressive pathways, and one more consistent with the highest wisdom traditions, would be the following model which is based on three essential factors combining to form a whole. The terms that must be used in English are, unfortunately, somewhat vague and imprecise. By defining our terms, however, we can give these terms a more exact meaning within the context of our studies.

1. The “ego” (or natural self, eros), a complex of psychological manifestations arising from the body and related to its survival. It has no limit to its desires, but it can supply the energy necessary to aspire toward completion, or individuation.

2. The “spirit” or “spiritual self” (essential self, essence,logos, nous), the center which is capable of conscious reflection and higher reason and is in communication with the spiritual world. The essential self can help to guide the natural self, limit its desires to what is just and reasonable, and, more importantly, help it to see the fundamental desire behind all desires: the yearning to know our Source. It can help to establish presence on all levels of our being.

3. The “soul,” sometimes called “the heart” (including the psychic functions, active imagination, presence), and interior presence which includes the subconscious faculties of perception, memories, and complexes, and which can be under the influence of either the ego or the spiritual self. When we speak about involving ourselves “heart and soul” we are speaking about this aspect of ourselves. Living from the heart, having a pure heart refers to a deep condition of spiritualized passion. Losing one’s soul refers to a condition of having the soul dominated by material, sensual, and egoistic concerns. Such a “heart and soul” is veiled, dim, unconscious. The heart is the prize that the “animal self” and “spiritual self” struggle to win, but when it is dominated by the “animal self” it is not truly a heart at all.

4. The “individuality” (the result of the relationship of the other three). When the spiritual self has been able to harmonize with the natural self, and “heart and soul” have been purified, then the human being exists as a unified whole, fully responsive to the divine, creative will.

Crisis of the modern world:

René Guénon also known as ʿAbd al-Wāḥid Yaḥyá  expalin this crisis in the book Crisis of the modern word – see here- . For Guénon, history is only the reflection of a vast cosmic process taking its source in a metaphysical dimension (according to his metaphysical doctrine). From the traditionalist perspective, the temporal, phenomenal world is an outflow and manifestation of an unseen metaphysical reality that forms the origin and basis of the material, historical reality human beings perceive with their five senses. It has been pointed out by several authors that such a conception of History is radically different from that of Hegel who on the contrary locks his in the sphere of time. More precisely, as Georges Vallin explains, in Hegel’s thought, the timeless mystery of non-duality, of the “coincidence of opposites” found in Guénon, is replaced by “a time-based dialectic of thesis and antithesis.” For Vallin, this notion of confinement in time of the human condition, in opposition to the “metaphysical perspective” of Guénon, continued with the conception exposed by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. For Guénon, such a confinement of History in Time, cut off from any transcendent reality, takes on a satanic dimension that explains the fall of the modern world.

Charles Upton (poet) writes that:

in the Reign of Quantity, Guénon sees history in terms of the Hindu concept of the manvantara, the cycle of manifestation composed of Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron ages; […] This cycle is an inevitable descent from the pole of Essence (or forma) toward the pole of Substance (or materia). […] Essence is qualitative while substance is quantitative; As the cycle progresses or descends, the very nature of time and space changes.[…] In earlier stages, time is relatively eternal, as the cycle moves on, however, time begins to take over and accelerate, but this constant acceleration of time can’t go on forever. Time, the “devourer” ends by devouring itself. At the end of time, Time will be changed into space again. […] This ultimate timeless point is simultaneously the end of the cycle of manifestation and the beginning of the next.[…] Before this ultimate transformation, in the latter days of the present cycle certain final developments must take place. Since quantity has particularly to do with matter, the Reign of quantity must also be the reign of materialism. The age of miracles ceases, the world becomes less permeable to the influences of the higher planes of reality.]
hereby the book on pdf.

look also: Goethe, the “Refugee”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Servants ask Allah and He grants more and more through His attribute, Al Karim. He grants endlessly. Those who reach the point of being forgiven reach their highest aspiration but the servant’s happiness makes shaytan unhappy. It creates problems for him and the servant becomes hopeless. Man is oppressing his own soul. He can only be free when the ego is crushed. Then, no evil can be created, nor any devil followed. Only Truth can be seen. Man must not worry or be hopeless of Allah’s Mercy. The Holy Quran therefore prescribes: kill your selves (egos).”

  • In his book Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis in Modern Man
Seyyed Hossein Nasr  explores the relationship between the human being and nature as found in many religious traditions, particularly its Sufi dimension. The author stresses the importance of a greater awareness of the origins of both the human being and nature as a means of righting the imbalance that exists in our deepest selves and in our environment. Read more
  • In Praise of Folly by Erasmus

In Praise of Folly, also translated as The Praise of Folly (Latin: Stultitiae Laus or Moriae Encomium; Greek title: Μωρίας ἐγκώμιον (Morias enkomion); Dutch title: Lof der Zotheid), is an essay written in Latin in 1509 by Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam and first printed in June 1511. Inspired by previous works of the Italian humanist Faustino Perisauli [it] De Triumpho Stultitiae, it is a satirical attack on superstitions and other traditions of European society as well as on the Western Church.

Erasmus revised and extended his work, which was originally written in the space of a week while sojourning with Sir Thomas More at More’s house in Bucklersbury in the City of London.[1] The title Moriae Encomium had a punning second meaning as In Praise of More.

In Praise of Folly starts off with a satirical learned encomium, in which Folly praises herself, after the manner of the Greek satirist Lucian, whose work Erasmus and Sir Thomas More had recently translated into Latin, a piece of virtuoso foolery; it then takes a darker tone in a series of orations, as Folly praises self-deception and madness and moves to a satirical examination of pious but superstitious abuses of Catholic doctrine and corrupt practices in parts of the Roman Catholic Church—to which Erasmus was ever faithful—and the folly of pedants. Erasmus had recently returned disappointed from Rome, where he had turned down offers of advancement in the curia, and Folly increasingly takes on Erasmus’ own chastising voice. The essay ends with a straightforward statement of Christian ideals. “No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side.”

Erasmus was a good friend of More, with whom he shared a taste for dry humor and other intellectual pursuits. The title “Morias Encomium” can also be read as meaning “In praise of More”. The double or triple meanings go on throughout the text.

The essay is filled with classical allusions delivered in a style typical of the learned humanists of the Renaissance. Folly parades as a goddess, offspring of Plutus, the god of wealth and a nymph, Freshness. She was nursed by two other nymphs, Inebriation and Ignorance. Her faithful companions include Philautia (self-love), Kolakia (flattery), Lethe (forgetfulness), Misoponia (laziness), Hedone (pleasure), Anoia (dementia), Tryphe (wantonness), and two gods, Komos (intemperance) and Nigretos Hypnos (heavy sleep). Folly praises herself endlessly, arguing that life would be dull and distasteful without her. Of earthly existence, Folly pompously states, “you’ll find nothing frolic or fortunate that it owes not to me.” Read here the Praise of Folly

In The Manual of a Christian Knight [1501]

Desiderius Erasmus was a Catholic priest and theologian who clearly had Christ in mind when he penned it in 1501. Although it is over 500 years old, I hope you will appreciate the relevance today of these 22 rules in Erasmus’ Manual of a Christian Knight.

The mortal world a field is of battle
Which is the cause that strife doth never fail
Against man, by warring of the flesh
With the devil, that always fighteth fresh
The spirit to oppress by false envy;
The which conflict is continually
During his life, and like to lose the field.
But he be armed with weapon and shield
Such as behoveth to a christian knight,
Where God each one, by his Christ chooseth right
Sole captain, and his standard to bear.
Who knoweth it not, then this will teach him here
In his brevyer, poynarde, or manual
The love shewing of high Emanuell.
In giving us such harness of war
Erasmus is the only furbisher
Scouring the harness, cankered and adust
Which negligence had so sore fret with rust
Then champion receive as thine by right
The manual of the true christian knight.
– Desiderius Erasmus

Here some of the 22 rules:

  • Zelige Sehnsucht –Blessed Longing, Goethe

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the begin of “Modernity”, Goethe warns us in his poem Zelige Sehnsucht –Blessed Longing

Tell no one else, only the wise
For the crowd will sneer at one
I wish to praise what is fully alive,
What longs to flame toward death.

When the calm enfolds the love-nights
That created you, where you have created
A feeling from the Unknown steals over you
While the tranquil candle burns.

You remain no longer caught
In the peneumbral gloom
You are stirred and new, you desire
To soar to higher creativity.

No distance makes you ambivalent.
You come on wings, enchanted
In such hunger for light, you
Become the butterfly burnt to nothing.

So long as you have not lived this:
To die is to become new,
You remain a gloomy guest
On the dark earth.

It is the story of moth and the candle, found first in the Kitáb at-tawasin of the martyr mystic al-HalIáj (d. 922) and then taken over by the poets of Iran and Turkey, that forms the bridge between the poezie worlds of Iran and Germany. Goethe found it in a translation of Persian verses and transformed it into one of the most profound poerns in the German language, Zelige Sehnsucht (Blessed Longing). “Stirb und werde,,‘ “Die and become,” is Goethe’s advice to the reader in this poem, and this idea of dying and being reborn on ever rising levels of existence permeates large parts of classical Persian poetry. It is the song of the never-ending quest, the fulfillment of Love through suffering and deathi expressed in images of the journey through rnountains and deserts to end only in paradise, as Goethe says at the end of the Book of Paradise in the West-Ostlicher Divan:

Bis im Anschaun ew’ger Liebe

wir verschweben, wsr verschwinden . .

Contemplating Love eternal

we float higher and dissolve .

This poem is an example of the “helplessness that sometimes accompanies love.” He offers it as an example of the way passion causes us to surrender our “common sense, rationality and normal serious reserve;” to awaken to the creative energies, the desires and longing emmanating from the heart. see Goethe , the “refugee”

Read Goethe Message to the 21st century

 

 

 

 

 

 

This awakening is the threshold of “salvation.” To make the realization that you are part of something so vast and lovely, it transcends form and time is like falling in love. It IS falling in love…it is seeing “sameness,” recognizing yourself in the other – realizing that you are One with the Other, falling into the universal mystery that is the Love of God! Love is the nature of this cosmic Spirit-relationship. Love is all there is. Love is who you are, where you came from, how you are to live, and that to which you will return.

Love is the truth and the life and the way.

You are “saved” because you realize the eternal nature of this One Love. You are fully awakened and fully attuned to the music of the universe – the creative flux and flow of the divine and its movement through you and around you and before and after you. And you have no choice but to surrender to it, because it is who you are. As a caterpillar dies to become a butterfly and a butterfly is drawn to the light, so do we transcend ourselves for, by, and in Love.

In love we reach outside of our selves, extend ourselves, open, vulnerable and real we willingly fly into the fires of (com)passion and truth. Our need for love draws us to our Lovingness. There may be pain, but it is sacred pain. And the real tragedy would be “to have cautiously avoided these depths and remained marooned on the shiny surfaces of the banal.”

 

  • One God, Many Prophets

One God, Many Prophets by Zachary Markwith is an exposition and defense of religious pluralism written from within the Islamic tradition. Through selections from the Quran, sayings of the Prophet Muḥammad, and the writings of Muslim philosophers and Sufis, we discover that traditional Islam and Muslims acknowledge the common Divine origin of previous revelations and prophets as cardinal tenets of faith, and also the esteemed status of other revealed religions and those who practice them. This volume also examines fascinating and timely aspects of Islamic philosophy and spirituality alongside other wisdom traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, Greek philosophy, and Hinduism. The themes and principles discussed include Islam and the perennial philosophy, love of the divine feminine, the metaphysics of the Self, Christic, Eliatic, and Hermetic wisdom, and traditional cosmology. The universal and particular wisdom of Islam highlighted throughout this volume is an affirmation of the universal or perennial wisdom of humanity. It challenges us to see Islam and all revealed religions not as competing ideologies, but as “paths that lead to the same summit.”

Read here : One Path, Many Paths A Dialogue on the Role of Religion in Modern Times

And Jesus and Christic Sanctity in Ibn ʿArabī and Early Islamic Spirituality

  • THE ISLAMIC CONCEPT OF HUMAN PERFECTION:

Those dimensions of Islam dedicated to providing the guidelines for the development of the full possibilities of human nature came to be institutionalized in various forms. Many of these can be grouped under the name `Sufism’, while others can better be designated by names such as `philosophy’ or `Shiite gnosis’. In general, these schools of thought and practice share certain teachings about human perfection, though they also differ on many points. Here we can suggest a few of the ideas that can be found in most of these approaches. read more

The Darkness of Materialism

The first step to perfection is recognizing satan, the ‘it’ – the barking dog of the universe, arguing with Allāh. Then leave the modern scholars and scientists who reject the light of spiritual knowledge and insist on the darkness of material knowledge only.

Stephen King’s terrifying classic.’They float…and when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too.’To the children, the town was their whole world. To the adults, knowing better, Derry Maine was just their home town: familiar, well-ordered for the most part. A good place to live.It is the children who see – and feel – what makes the small town of Derry so horribly different. In the storm drains, in the sewers, IT lurks, taking on the shape of every nightmare, each one’s deepest dread. Sometimes IT reaches up, seizing, tearing, killing . . .Time passes and the children grow up, move away and forget. Until they are called back, once more to confront IT as IT stirs and coils in the sullen depths of their memories, reaching up again to make their past nightmares a terrible present reality.

 

The Same Atmosphere

We all live in the same atmosphere, the same world, whether rich or poor, except for those whose love for Allāh makes them real believers, Awliyā’. For them Allāh makes a different world, unaffected by this life. Look for them, look for the ones who remind you of eternal life and hold on to them tightly.