6. TRANSITION AND MODERNITY
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6. TRANSITION AND MODERNITY |
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| 6.6.3 A Sufi myth: Fourth Ways,…and The Great Freedom Sutra | ||||
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One of the more
notable anti-modern occult conspiracies springs from the shadow Sufistic world,
as documented by the reactionary mystic Ouspensky. The Islamic oikoumene
generates the remarkable history of so-called Sufism, and this carries a
confused legend of the ‘fourth way’ (beyond ways of the body, emotions, or mind)
as something deeper than the already complex yogas of the world of Buddhism,
whose adherents are world-renouncing, leading to ‘historical termination of its
exemplars’, the premonition of realized Man manifesting his full Will as freedom
in history. Mathematically, such a being ought to exist, but… The Islamic hides
a number of claimants to this category, rarely seen in public. This has nothing
to do with Islam. Such a being would be limited from the start by the historical
conditioning of his time and place. He would, for example, have no knowledge of
modern physics, and live in mystic limbo (not that modern physics is much help
here). A real man of will would require independent soul formation, and some
objective in time, since he would more likely pass beyond the realm of rebirths,
Buddha style. And just this rumor does exist in the corners of Sufistic lore. So
we don’t know. Perhaps this man is a myth, his early exemplars poor imitations
of themselves, too often ‘rogue buddhas’ wreaking havoc on the eonic sequence
with delusive visions. Almost nothing public is known of this, although its
possibility is easily deduced in the abstract, nor is its reality visible in
recorded history, and yet beginning with Sumer or before these still rare
individuals might have begun to emerge, injecting an obscure factor of unseen
action in history, as they mediate remarkable initiatives via proxies. We ought
to be entirely suspicious of any and all New Age mythologies on this issue, and
point out that such individuals are not the ‘secret guides’ of human evolution.
The point is that the early era of In any case, we see
that such beings would be limited to the local knowledge at the stage of
civilization they found themselves in, and the Axial Age, given its stupendous
scale, could not be the result of spiritual guides leading humanity with
prophetic vision. Its scale is too immense, its action mechanized at a level of
sophistication that eludes human intelligence. We can barely observe its
manifestations, and have no idea what it is, save a ‘force of nature’. Founding
a religion via proxies is, however, within their range of such possible types.
Note this point and the clear difference of the ersatz religions arising in the
wake of the Axial Age, as human realizations. Compared to the Axial scale,
Christianity and Islam are different, and show clear ‘initialization’ points. We
must remain suspicious of such isolated source points, our ‘floating fourth
turning points’, that don’t fit into our sequence (and don’t have to), a good
example being precisely the onset of Christianity and Islam themselves, with
their unaccountable sudden success without eonic determination, albeit clearly
in the wake of the Axial Age. We are missing the background! Our model doesn’t
overdetermine history and doesn’t explain the mideonic worlds. The point is that
we must stick to what the eonic sequence explains, and be wary of the obscurity
of much that happens in between. Tracing diffusion is hard enough with tangible
artifacts, in this case it is almost impossible. Thus we have no record of much
that is crucial to history, save useless tidbits, such as the strange appearance
of Three Magi out of nowhere in the gestation of Christianity. To suggest that
Jesus and Muhammad were proxies in such action is unsettling and of course
entirely beyond the possibility of current demonstration, and we can’t pursue
the issue, save to be wary of the standard histories of these two religions
springing form their delimited sources. The odor of occult artifice haunts their
traditions. The idea of the
‘fourth way’ is worthless in its current apocryphal form but suggests its own
original meaning, and that, for the future, the conflict of secularism and
religion is completely false. If one thinks otherwise, consider Karl Marx. The
function of religion, in one sense, to assist the helpless individual in the
mechanizations of the state ideology, or civil domination, succumbs to the
disease it wishes to cure, and this function is wrested from ‘religion’ by an
agent of labor unrest! Quite the religious man! The only real candidate for the
fourth way (whose keynote is the ‘religion’ as the ordinary life in
civilization) is the rise of secular modernism, escaping the dead end of
theocracy. Much in modern life shows the echoing signature of this long lost
‘path of the will’, like a vehicle stuck in first gear.
The Great Freedom Sutra
The modern transition has already stolen a
march on the classic yogas of antiquity with its seminal discourses of freedom
and autonomy, bursting asunder the spurious authority of the gurus. The passage
of free men across the abyss of their freedom might prove so simple, yet the die
is cast, and man is left to the existential reality of his own self-evolution. Non other than Kant
protests the comprised autonomy of the self mesmerized by religion and demands a
‘religion within the limits of reason’, whose vehicle is the will of the
individual. Nothing esoteric here, the simplest of direct pointings to the
‘fourth way’. The right vehicle for this is secular society itself. The catch
lies in the deficit between the ideal and the clear reality of the social
mechanized state. The ‘fourth way’, civilization itself, has expanded to include
all society, and the individual is left to an abstract possibility, one that
existed in all stages of civilization. And yet the formulation is surely the
right one, granting the result is like paper money, and the need to produce an
enzymatic vitamin factor to assist this ocean of floundering wills. The great
religions can be of little help here if they degenerate into ideologies. They
simply put their adherents in cold storage. The question is one for the future.
The apocrophyal ‘fourth way’ can be set aside, and graduate to the philosophies
of freedom that emerge so clearly correlated with the modern transition, and
whose status is something far more fundamental than anything legislated by the
priesthoods of Christianity or the empire projects of prophets.
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