A few stray comments along the way:
Smaragd wrote:”But if we can actually reach the spiritual world, its sentient powers will notice that as clearly as we notice a match ignited in the dark. This ignited flame in the spiritual levels will need fuel to live on however, and concerning this the mystic parables should be studied from the 25th chapter of the gospel of Matthew.”
Placing the story on the back of my mind I've come back to it every now and then and found the symbol of rock very much related. Rock is the foundation or the cast by which the whole structure is defined. The ideal structure leads the way from ethics to day-to-day patterns of supporting needs, making way for the burning liquid to stream without obstruction where it needs to.
I am happy to hear this, for the Matthew 25 is very important for a certain kind of occult working, and I have often thought of you in that aspect work. The similarity of what you had realized from that double "flame" & "rock" foundation encourages me to share with the brotherhood members a recent practice about these very same things. I will send it later today, if possible.
obnoxion wrote:I consider despair in a pantheistic way as a form of presence. Even the absence of God is the presence of the absence of God – if you know what I mean.
We have this idiom of "shining one's absence" (to be conspicuosly absent), and I think this shining absence of God is His presence as Satan.
As long as we are on this side of the river, our God is Satan, His seeming vacuum in this seeming tangibility of matter. From matter we can at every moment deduct and even directly see (mentally the telos that is) God, but to meet the hand of God would easily mean to miss the heart of God. To search for the heart of God is, like you said, to assume the black form of those Venerian bees, to fly when the evening star falls. Despair is another form of rapture, for it tells of our already blossomed longing. But, what a terrible mystery, excruciating... At the final stage, even creating a poem would be to block one's vision of God with that poem. The ultimate song is left unsung.
There has also been some talk about what actually is meant by despair. think that despair and hopelessness are like a dynamic and passive forms of the same thing. In hopelessness there is something lazy, something wrong, because it claims to believe that there is not even a theoretical possibility for hope, but still the person making such a claim does not simply die. That would happen instantly, should we lose all our spirit. It is there, ergo, there is hope, and ergo, we must struggle with all our strength onwards, onwards, upwards.
The deepest recess of despair is the point where one's already hardened Will chooses the final hopelessness for his despair's crown jewel, and starts the process of grand implosion. That too is a form of Ouroboros, taking its own tail into its mouth, for such a failed aspirant has united his sins (lastly, despair & sloth) into a perpetuum mobile. With which I do not say we could always blame him. Sometimes such a state is reached because the ardent struggle has been so great that there simply is no spiritual force of will left to renounce the fall; it's a burnout for the soul. But still, "despair" is yet something active, something that can achieve results by burning away veils, but "hopelessness" is just falling. Into a bottomless pit, with no merciful death waiting at the fall's end. For even from avici, new ill flowers will always grow. Thus hopelessness is a form of spiritual laziness, making the circle vicious.