Now, the wheel is the alchemical hieroglyph of the time necessary for the coction of the philosophical matter, and consequently of the coction itself. The sustained, constant and equal fire, which the artist maintains night and day in the course of this operation, is for this reason called the fire of the wheel. Moreover, in addition to the heat necessary for the liquefaction of the philosophers’ stone, a second agent is needed as well, called the secret or philosophic fire. It is this latter fire, sustained by ordinary heat, which makes the wheel turn and produces the various phenomena which the artist observes in his vessel:

I recommend you to go by this road and no other.
Only take notice of the tracks of my wheel,
And, in order to give an equal heat overall,
Do not rise or descend too soon to heaven or earth.
For in rising too high you will be burnt by heaven,
And in descending too low you will be destroyed by earth.
But if your course remains set in the middle
The route will be plainer and the way more sure.

(De Nuysement, Poeme philosophic de la Verite de la Phisique Mineralle in Traittez de L’Harmonie et Constitution generalle du Vray Se/. Paris, Pgrier et Buisard, 1620 and 1621, p. 254. Cited in Fulcanelli’s Le Mystere des Cathédrales, p. 50)

Robert Mariani’s recent post was very exciting to read, especially when he acknowledges the animalistic mechanics of decision making and pleasure seeking as requiring some evaluative (a word I prefer to “moral”) standard with substantial independence from, if not supervening influence on, the social system in order for that system to ascend any status more dignified than an orgiastic ebb and flow of raw energy.

It is not my intention here to lay out a predictive or a prescriptive program for “exit,” much less articulate one “direction” among many, which movements will have to “pick” if they are to be successful. Let me state here that progress is dead unless something living abides in it, something continues. That said, sometime in the past millennium (opinions differ wildly as to exactly when), the vehicle of history became fully automated, and the majority of institutional energy since has been drawn with increasing rapidity and increasingly refined exclusivity into inquiring how, exactly, we can make this thing go faster.

Whether corrective attempts to accelerate, sustain, or slow the progress of time, the process of keeping the universe from falling apart at the seams has never been “walkaway safe.” By this very same token, attempts to secure the dignity of this sacred undertaking have brought the whole process embarrassingly close to an absolute halt many, many times throughout history. Attempts to preserve Tradition have, all to often underestimated the natural resilience of secret knowledge.

The propositional integrity of Traditional forms has always rested in their wholeness, their comprehensive grasp on all the imitations they propitiate in profane orders. As such, any divisive sophistry doing business in thoughtless excretions and regurgitations which merely describe virtue (themselves in fact mere adumbrations of these forms) necessarily falls short of any edifying potential.

Any conflicts which arise between different aspiring receivers of tradition reflects poorly on the characters of these individuals, who must then examine and scrutinize themselves to a degree which may surpass the actual scholastic demands of intellecting the forms. Cultures of critique (specifically Hebraic currents for which I feel a special affinity) have always arisen in a desire to maintain the sanctity of the Traditional contents of the customary forms (a neat little inverse analogy), the inner meanings which do not change the way outer appearances do. Tradition itself is immune to critique in the very same sense that “hot” is immune to “cold;” substance may fluctuate between the essential poles of Tradition and the critical self-awareness which enables it either to reject vain customs and the claims of duplicitous individuals, or to reject itself. But neither quality can “become” the other any more than the color red can “become” the color blue.

Discourse terminates, trains of thought break down, affiliations die out, and moral standards fluctuate, yet generative activity never ceases. To those with an inadequate grasp of the life giving virtues of Tradition, its forms may seem at odds with many temporal projects aimed at overcoming adverse conditions or developing favorable ones.

But those who understand the esoteric, double meaning of the term recognize in the Latin tradere both the positive connotation of “passing down” or conveying, and the negative sense in which it is taken to mean “betrayal.” Even the most degenerate customs which could not have less in common with one another, which could not bear less of the likeness of their source, share just such a source in common all the same, in a manner which is all more striking for the apparent contradiction which inheres in it.

True likeness, then, is not a necessary condition for succession. It is, however, as telos, sufficient grounds for the faith requisite to provide substantial continuity, the potentia requisite to fully evidence and reflect an otherwise unseen future.

We are empowered, moreover, in the common sense recognition of smoke as evidence of fire, activity, to intuit an original, inner generative conflict, the inner struggle which, in the same virtue by which friction produces heat, is the source of spiritual evolution. Attempts, however destined to fail, to project this conflict on the world are indeed necessary and integral to processes of individuation, but are in the same stroke only substantial imitations, partial temporal likenesses of this essentially creative form of strife.

There is very little stopping us, at this point, from integrating with Gurdjieff’s insight, that the energy which “evolves” life is impotent at the level of the individual, and unavailable, by virtue of its comparative scarcity, on a broad social scale of magnification, placing a special emphasis on “the Group” as an intermediary. If this evolutive energy is indeed destruction itself, if life is secretly in essence the same as the fire which consumes it, any pretense to revealing and declaiming some ethically suspect “elitism” dissolves with the recognition, that the only form of ethical choice at any point in time is whether or not to tell the secret, and if so or if not, how and why and against what to endeavor to preserve its integrity.

It would be all well and instructive, too, to dismiss anything but the matter of fact that the Truth only becomes available to those who seek it, that truth in this sense is luxury (“decadence” if it anticipates the wheel’s turn so far ahead/behind its time that its revelation can only be distorted, only finding a vehicle in promoting social instability). To acquire “enough” of this hidden energy to transform all of society at once would be more than abundantly sufficient to destroy it. Conversely, to envision “enough time” for this energy to do its work would presuppose innumerable births and deaths occurring on a cosmic time scale.

Fear of death and the hatred of secrecy are in fact no more than lust for Truth. They are recognizable as forms of lust in a far more thorough sense than anything more virtuous or reliable. There is no way to construe this energy as lovingly, respectfully, or even carefully directed toward the world and its secrets. Truth, as Heidegger encourages us to conceive of it, is a revelatory mode of Being, and cannot exist without a hiddenness.

To intuit, then, the rhythms of occlusion and revelation, is to gain a richer appreciation for a God who plays hide-and-seek, and to realize impermanence precisely as the frivolity of illusion, simply the latin ludere “to play” with an intensifier. Modern, neoliberal quanto-teleology (“when am I going to get mine?” as opposed to perhaps “where?” “why?” “how?” or “with whom?” and often qualified with “and how much am I getting again?”) is essentially the compounded immaturity, impatience and lack of skill sufficient to spoil even the simplest of games, combined with a taste for increasing speeds, any means to the attainment of which will be pursued at all cost and in almost exclusive bad faith.

Let it not seem, at this stage, that a single Group of people can be identified as responsible for the problems of any other. Solhzenitsyn once remarked that the line dividing Good from Evil runs through every human heart; I suspect the same be true of Truth and Falsity, and any other conceived opposable virtues. The precarity with which this truism is elaborated in the multitude is incalculable, and can only be resolved in the recognition of small Groups as precisely the dividing line between individual and collective self-destruction.

The secret of initiation then, can never be “told,” strictly speaking, rather only conveyed; Tradition is best written in riddles and poetry, rather than instruction or description, although even this presupposes a certain modicum of direct intent which is not fundamentally requisite to keep the ball rolling. We risk swinging the pendulum too far, however, in entertaining the sentiment that our responsibility approaches a solely exhaustive position. The eery beauty of Traditional forms is, in fact, their capacity to be found, however far afield from their source, bursting from the confines of profane conditions of expression completely unaware of the ultimate sources of various currents of inspiration which worldly aspirants imbibe liberally.

It is precisely when attempts at expression reckon themselves to have exhausted the mystery in the world, that an addiction to certainty begins to take hold. Unconscious expressions of eternal truths and archetypal energies suddenly abound, albeit in an abundant state of confusion, what Deleuze has so endearingly called the “delirium of culture,” a state of epistemic suspension tantamount to a recurring collective dope-sickness, where no one can remember the last time anyone undertook meaningful inquiry of any kind into what exact substantial combination of the meaning and presence we so desperately crave in order even to begin to hope to thrive at all; anything to escape the inevitable dread of becoming, or responsibility.

There’s been a shadowy cogency to a notion I’ve been vaguely entertaining for some time now, which seems all the more promising emerging in the context of these reflections. Namely, I can’t escape the sense that the virtue of “identity,” in a manner entirely reconcilable (necessarily so) with all the modern uses and abuses of the term is precisely this substance to which we are so addicted. I believe that in essence it is entirely nondual, outside of all distinction. We often experience it briefly, unable to explain why; it manifests in fleeting moments for most, dangerously giddy stretches for others.

The means to attaining untrammeled access to the essential experience of identity is precisely the superhuman feat of abiding with the discipline and patience reconciling all apparent conflict and division, across registers spanning the whole of substantial manifestation, from the coarsest substance to the finest reflection which is still an expression of an inwardness. If we don’t have it in us to wait for the world to save itself, in the unlikely case that there is quite literally nothing in our power to do it, it will be our death.

All this, then, cannot be undertaken without an end in mind which is substantially equivalent to a beginning, appearing only in fleeting instants reflecting a process eternally recurring, outside of time. It is an undertaking which can only take place within the individual. At the very same time it requires far more of the individual and substantially less of the multitude than either is capable of providing.

I neglect to put the word “success” in scare quotes because of the very thorough denotative integrity I see in it. While I grasp the contextual significance of “exit” in all its denotative richness, I nevertheless find in it a heavily qualified sense of what we are trying to do. Exit and success mean the same thing to us today: survival. But we didn’t always want “a way out.”

The structures we have created were once havens for slowly growing things, promising them the success which lay in continuity it could provide. To celebrate the generative power captured in repetition and order, doctrine and practice evolved in a complex interrelationship to provide comfort and stability. And no shortage of lassitude qualified these spaces. Cathedrals have housed pagan festivals since time immemorial; monasteries have always been quietly burning beacons of passion; the Universities which arose from between the walls of these two orders kept the diaphanous fabric of Tradition alive in a state of gradual renewal.

But today we can abide no new enclosures: learning to navigate the inner world is already a monumental task. Who can deny the acceleration of time into the domain of virtue which swells, in a sheerly quantitative sense, with voluminous richness, threatening to exceed, if not already actually outstripping, both our understanding of the vast reaches of our own collective mind, and the resources with which we buy access to our own individual imaginations (at an increasingly dearer and dearer price owing to the indelible manifestation of marginal utility as sensory stimulation as a support to liberation).

What will evolve will necessarily bear the inverse image of the last half turn of the wheel.

To say that we move “through” time, to me, is to perpetrate a major confusion. To realize, instead, our placement in time, brings about a double move. Realizing our placement in time requires some experience outside it, an experience carrying with it both an immanent sense of permanence, and a perceived unmoving quality of time itself. This sense remains in tension: how can something which appears to move from within, be seen as fixed from without? A satisfying answer dwells somewhere in the immediate overlap of two sets of faculties which we often perceive to be radically separate, the perceptual, intellectual on the one hand, and our causal or efficient, “volitional” faculties on the other.  The only meaningfully significant difference between choice and determinism arises within the awarenesses of the individuals immediately involved.

The general spookery surrounding attempts to trace “mind” and “matter” to a common source are none of my concern here. Suffice it to say that what passes for agency today is precisely the license to declaim the radical extent of one’s own spiritual unfulfillment, cast into an epistemic suspension, a superposition of possible causal relationships between this suffering, and that individual’s world.

To make no meaningful prescriptive or predictive statements, on the other hand, to appear passive or even wretched among adverse circumstances often belies a state of inner tranquility, a state reflecting the substance of the only truly meaningful emancipation available, the palpable experience of freedom, security, in total identity with cause, namely, as something which changes things in a transitive sense, but is never itself changed.

We can only opine enough to trust or to be skeptical, and our personal perspectives can inform many predictions or cause us to “pick favorites,” but the only words of meaningful substance worth submitting for the consideration of people in general, out in the world in search of identity today, are words of caution, which can in fact be taken in the same moment, as words of comfort. To advocate for any group or any cause carelessly is only to imitate work of the Paraclete Spirit which we have so far been capable of recognizing as such in the world, to recapitulate its outer, measurable aspects, but only attaining partially substantial likeness to true charity. Instead of seeking orientation or a particular direction to the paths which are properly our own, we look everywhere except the particular direction we find ourselves facing, and risking.

Instead of waiting for first impressions of the eternal vocation that finds us where we are, to remind us that we are ourselves, we impatiently voice expressions of opinion, pretending to such excesses of essential dignity as to present serious epistemic stumbling blocks to future aspirants, threatening serious signal loss in any transmission meant to edify, or even reach those in times other than our own.

It is precisely the full willingness to wait to be called, which, when cultivated to perfection, qualifies one to receive the advocacy of divine intelligence, to commune with that source and so to be just such a source in the world. By the very same token, modern life can be seen as an elaborate anti-practice or anti-spiritual anti-discipline which extolls the virtues of impatience, with an efficacy so great as to belie its essential thoughtlessness, of passing up nearly every chance which life offers to people, to actually learn who they are.

Until an individual has examined themselves thoroughly (enough to cease distinguishing between themselves and the world they inhabit), it is quite literally impossible to determine the causal relationship between their experiences conditions that surround them. If we enjoy Hegel’s schematic of the speculative proposition, we will recall the subject enters into and transforms the predicate, itself not to return unchanged.

Or, perhaps, human spiritual development is closer than any other actual situation to the hypothetical Schrödinger’s Cat, and could be helpfully thought of in these terms, with the key qualification: it is the cat that chooses to open the box. If and when the cat chooses to do so, the conditions of becoming will manifestly reveal themselves to the experimenter. An essential asymmetry inheres, namely that only the living cat can serve to definitively rule out its death.

But the box itself cannot provide us with any information as to its contents; until life announces itself, it is absolutely unclear as to whether the cat is alive or dead, x or y, or even desires to leave the box. They don’t often do. But the pole of absolute, qualified non-Being is grasped neatly in this analogy as neglecting, entirely, to participate in any pursuits of Truth or contribute anything substantial for the search. At the same time, this is not a negation, as the saeculum, the “time taken” for the cat to emerge is absolutely integral to facilitate its eventual emergence.

I’d like to close with an eye on a contemporary current in philosophy, namely the marriage of Linguistic Naturalism and Moral Anti-Realism, which embodies a condition of synthesis so apt, it just might appear to have been bespoken directly by the particular character of our contemporary, urgent need to transcend spurious conflicts between “Science and Religion,” “Tradition and Progress,” “Creation and Evolution.”

Joshua Gert has written extensively on the structural compatibility of meta-ethics and color theory, with the essentially similar underlying conflicts proper to each.  That is, both lend themselves to questions asking, how exactly we can come to define “values” given the ways in which, 1) they constitute one another in complex interrelationships which can never be represented definitively, but only recursively; and 2) this reciprocal reconstitution amounts to robust enough an ontology as to appear to persist through and despite (indeed, function as a recognizably hidden, nounemal/objective “source of” or at least the “theme” of) perspectival distortions, evidencing something which resists the cycles of becoming and appearance (and may be in fact the source of their power).

One of Gert’s most exciting concepts has its foundations in contemporary color theory and its epistemic, phenomenological, and ontological engagements. So, he argues, just in the same manner as certain conditions such as orientation in space, or lighting with respect to an object, are constitutive of the observer’s perspective and his or her experience of the values inherent in the colors of objects perceived in extension, these perfectly articulable, coherent relationships extend across scales of magnification to prefigure all questions of ethics in the 4th dimension (for all you R.A.W. fans, that’s the semantic-temporal binding circuit).

That is, our placement in time closer to or farther removed from certain events necessarily conditions our ability to juxtapose them to existing norms and thereby evaluate them, while this qualified perspective feeds the development of future norms. The gist of the term Anti-Realism is effectively to evidence a weariness with questions concerning the “reality” or “unreality” of certain things (highly sensitive to the completely degenerate sense in which the term is often employed to conflate “reality” with “possessing measurable outer traits”).

Norms and virtues are not “brute ethical facts” owing to relations objects would manifest without us as observers, nor are they “pure” projections of an observer separate from those relations. Morality, simply put, lies somewhere in between. We recognize the recurring theme of in-betweenness, reflected here in the invitation to consider the way in which Groups come to create norms, resting points, signposts, from which historical becoming is free to depart in any number of directions at any time.

Just as objects are “made of” the same energy which illuminates them, underlying these values is not some atomic terminus or a physically/intellectually reducible “essence” of the color or the norm, but rather aeviternal, tirelessly oscillating cycles of light marking time of a particular character which becomes the phenomenon, neither res nor eidos.  Figuratively speaking, we “rotate Plato 90º,” and see a two-way response dependence between form and matter, essence and substance, when viewed from a substantial pole (though our amended perspective remains indistinguishable from Platonism when viewed from the pole of essence).

Orthogonal to the objective/subjective distinction, moreover, there is some axis whose own seeming verticality gives us the idea of some virtual hierarchy of Good/Evil or True/False which, I am convinced, revolve with respect to each other to produce the signs of the times. That is, a fourfold symmetry emerges which allows us to think of matter or mind in the “good” or “evil,” “true” or “false,” “eternal” or “temporal” respects of either; divisive dualisms, be they “gnostic” or “cartesian” emerge as diverse, conditioned attachments to the supersensible hierarchy (literally “sacred order”) which becomes manifest only as a condition of perspective. Thus divisive tendencies arise in behavior when one’s own voice and vocation hang in an imbalance; disfunction reigns when the inside and the outside are unable to communicate, when an individual struggles either to open up or to close themselves, attempting to forge identity jealously rather than charitably in a temporally bound myopia.

The experience of the individual is often so paltry as to fail to provide comfort sufficient to allow one to even think of undertaking a true risk, whereas the multitude urges you to leap without any intent to help break your fall. The Group, on the other hand, can send you out, and will be there in the end to receive you. And where groups are active in time, there is memory, expression, and history as evidence of Traditional activity, evolutionary moments of shared identity.

When individuals come together to reflect (rites, ecumenical councils, music, feasts, festivals, and symposia), these moments in time, more than any other, demarcate and create (though by no means wholly constitute) ethical stances, through the concentration and diffusion of shared awareness, virtue being the light which reveals right and wrong, connecting and separating beginning from end.

As long as we act in faith, our actions become the evidence of things which were invisible to us before, revealing and entering into living dialogue with past and future wisdom; if we focus our intent on correcting the divisions that were made to be reconciled, we move from the culture of me to the culture of the Cosmic Person, ushering in an age of abundant and positively expressed, uninhibited and sovereign Identity, untrammeled by the jealousy of attachments or the uncertainty of teleological programs.

If this seems too mystical to be conclusive for anyone’s liking, let’s keep it close to the ground with the least glamorous, most meticulous voice arguably grounding Gert’s thought and mine at this stage: Wittgenstein.

Ludwig never rejected the mystical on any terms other than the linguistic. To “pass over in silence” those things closed to our system of language is only to reject them if we are still abject subjects to the “tyranny of the letter,” if we do not find anything of value in silence. The “naturalism” of Wittgenstein is in actuality a quietly damning recognition of language as simply another part of nature, and at the same time an occasion for appreciating the minimal demands the Divine Realm places on the domain of history. God needs no more than the wind in the trees to speak to those with ears to hear; God needs no more than well-intentioned, perfectable animals joyfully exploring his world in order to glorify himself. The quasi-animal behavioralism, without pretensions to civility, which emerges from the elaboration of this current of thought in a sociolinguistic sphere, brings us to a perspective similar to the one with which Robert so effectively furnished, in dire need of reconciliation. The framework Gert provides to construct and orient a project of normative value-recognition provides us with precisely the meta-ethical theater we’re looking for.

The grace which cannot be accounted for, predicted or described in terms of the push-pull of a material or speculative dialectic, or any profane narrative, is the inexplicability of “likeness” and “wholeness.” If ethical stances are indeed constituted largely by a temporal part, a shared sense of time is the very substance of norms. The sense that either nothing is really happening, or everything is happening entirely too much too fast, are the poles of existential suffering out of which Wittgenstein’s own definition of the mystical cuts a middle path, “feeling the world as a limited whole.”

Sammadhi, the type of liberation in Yogic systems, gives us both the words same and sum. The inexplicable, acausal yet ineluctably significant experience of correspondence, when the inner is like the outer, connected and indistinguishable, is the Spiritual potency and miraculous phenomena are not properties of nature or language, though they doubtless require these sets of conditions to initiate manifestation. The mystical is something that does not “come from” nature and language, but certainly puts them to use in order to happen. Theophanies of historical becoming are special events, eruptions evidencing the often unseen power of absolute identity. When something happens, and ordinary language like the word “me” participates in a cosmic alignment, St. Catherine of Genoa says something like “My me is God,” and people come gradually to recognize the ease with which the world is beheld as evidence of one Cosmic Person, and not a source of strife.

Finally, we are able to reconcile a concept of biocosmic evolution with our sentiments in light of very contemporary findings. Evolutionary biology and the studies of ecological systems have revealed that “selection” is a reciprocal process, that organisms of sufficient sophistication can justifiably be said to anticipate favorable traits and select for these in the form of elementary emergence of behavior (cf. Ulanowicz’s A Third Window.)

“Agency,” naïvely conceived, at this stage becomes irrelevant, when we have robust, evolving Traditional forms of identity quite literally composing the natural world around us. As people unite into groups, rather than rebel against one another as mobs or individuals, they learn who they are. If we are to separate right from wrong, it will require equal parts introspection and the observation of exemplary acts.

We would do well to put this power of knowing who we are to use judiciously in our own lives, and learn to recognize it in others. What groups do you belong to? What do you for one another in order to evolve?

I have a suspicion that the words “Tradition” and “Evolution” are indicating and describing, more often than not, one and the same process.

Where in your history, world, and daily life do you see evidence of Traditional activity? How do you recognize Evolution when you see it happen?