Concerning Idealism, Evolution, Psychology and other Modern Errors

 

 

 

There shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders: insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect.

 

Matthew 24:24

 

When a man stops believing in God, he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything.

 

 

 G.K. Chesteron

 

 

 

When we originally published our essay on the topic of Anthropic Realism, Böhme and Erigena, we received a comment asking us whether we had heard of Bernado Kastrup, an analytic philosopher and scientist, who “has been has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism” (according to his own website) and who has taken it upon him to revitalize Schopenhauerian metaphysics in light of contemporary science. While we were certainly vaguely aware of Mr. Kastrup at the time, we hadn’t really engaged with his work in any meaningful way. But, having recently become acquainted with some of his books, we think it might be fruitful to lose at last a few words on a topic that does not seem wholly without interest for these latter days. Our aim here is not to give an in-depth criticism of Kastrup’s work which would lead us far off field (for there is much to be criticized), but rather to use it as a kind of ‘springboard’ to address some broader issues surrounding “Rationalist Spirituality” (as Kastrup terms his own thought) or what could be called the ‘New Age’ at large, of which the Kastrupian idealism is but one variation

Under ‘New Age’ (we might also say ‘neo-Gnosticism’) we characterize here the broad currents of post-modern “spiritualities” that have been welling up (from which malefic source only God knows) at least since the 60’s and which play a large part in what Guénon called the ‘counter-initiation’ (cf. The Reign of Quantity). While these pseudo-spiritualities often reject the classical Galileo-Cartesian model of a machine universe split between an ‘objective world’ of waves and particles and the ‘corporeal realm’ of the experiencing subject with all its colors, sounds and shapes etc., they nevertheless more often than not profess to base themselves on truly “scientific” grounds, to be indeed a “rationalist spirituality” tailored for the needs of modern man, which claims to represent a ‘reasonable’ alternative to the profane materialism of most of our contemporaries one the one hand, and the “outdated” religious traditions, with all their “dogmatism” and “mythological baggage” (which obviously no sane modern person can believe in anymore), on the other. However, though these alternative ideologies (at least superficially) reject the materialistic mythos that still reigns supreme in much of contemporary science (and which is ‘baloney’, as the title of one of Kastrup’s books proclaims) they are in fact far more dangerous to the spiritual health of mankind at large, for while the former simply rejects all religious claims as primitive ‘superstitions’ or infantile ‘delusions’, the latter profess themselves to be quite sympathetic to what they broadly call ‘spirituality’ and try to ‘revitalize’ or ‘modernize’ it, for example by mixing (what they take for) eastern doctrines with scientistic theories like evolution or quantum physics.

Now all these things are of course in principle nothing new and the question of the ‘pseudo-spiritualities’, or at least certain aspects of it, have long been dealt with by better authors than us and more extensively so.^[1] However because we think that this question is of an utmost importance and can for many even be quite literally a question of (eternal) life and death, we still want to address it at least cursorily, for as the ‘reign of quantity’ is rushing towards its conclusion we have seen more and more ‘false Christs’ emerge and spread their falsehoods in all kinds of domains, whether they be religious, political or technological.^[2]

As such vigilance is required; for Christ being the eternal High-Priest (“who entered heaven itself, now to appear on our behalf in the presence of God”, Hebr. 9:23), so the Anti-Christ too (being the ape of God in every regard) is a priest, the hierophant of an inverted and unholy cult that has been casting its shadow ever since the times of Cain but which shall become fully manifest before the final revelation of the Lord. We for our part are convinced that this ‘one-world-religion’ (the inversion of true catholicity) will be made up of a diabolical mix of syncretism, social progressivism, scientism and psychology, as well as a kind of ‘spiritual evolutionism’; errors that, through many a crack, have already penetrated the walls of Holy Mother Church itself.

Thus, while we would usually pass over Kastrup’s work as just one more variant of the neo-Gnosticism that is popping up everywhere without paying much closer attention to it, it seems worthwhile to dwell on it at least a little bit, for it seems to us that we find here all the modern aberrations listed above condensed in one unholy synthesis.

His system is really quite simple: Reality is ultimately mind (what he calls ‘mind-at-large’), a unified field of boundless, all-encompassing consciousness. However this ‘mind-at-large’ is yet lacking awareness for the very reason that it is unique:

 

Without a separate background reference on the basis of which it could define itself as an entity to be discovered and understood, an all-encompassing consciousness would not have been aware of itself … (For) without a conception of the self, derived from contrasting the self against something that is not the self, self-awareness is logically impossible … Boundless consciousness could only conceive, understand, and become aware of itself if it could experience not being itself as such. It could only conceive, understand, and become aware of its own all-encompassing nature if it could experience limitation (Rationalist Spirituality, VIII).

 

Thus ‘mind-at-large’ (or the ‘cosmic consciousness’) has to enter into fragmentation and self-alienation; it does so by dreaming up the world as an ‘other’ and entering into it (as ‘limited consciousness’) in order to come to an awareness of itself.

 

The ‘fragmentation’ of unified consciousness allowed an individualized ‘fragment’ of consciousness to interact with other individualized ‘fragments’, accumulating understanding about their behavior, motivations, aspirations, feelings, etc. That, ultimately, means an accumulation of understanding about the unified self. By means of ‘fragmentation’, unified consciousness could learn about itself through the observation of ‘fragments’ of itself by other ‘fragments’ of itself; the creation of subject and object from a unit, for the purpose of self-understanding (ibid.).

 

However having thus conjured up the ‘external’ world, it loses itself in its own imaginings and becomes caught up in its own dream, ‘entrapped’ in the fragmented state of individuality and limitation, thereby forgetting its ‘true nature’.^[3] As such it is now on us to remember that we are indeed ‘universal mind’ becoming aware of itself and to contribute to this realization. For, as Kastrup tells us, the meaning of existence is nothing other than the “enrichment of consciousness”, unlocking the not-yet-realized potentials in the ‘cosmic consciousness’ by our experience, thereby bringing the universe to an complete awareness of itself and ultimately effecting a “return to its intrinsic, boundless state of unity, but now enriched with complete understanding and infinite, recursive self-awareness” (Op. cit. X).

Now obviously we are dealing here with a kind of vulgar Hegelianism^[4] with all that entails: the undifferentiated ‘abyss’ (bythos) plunges himself into the fragmentation of a ‘divine self-alienation’ that is however necessary, for without this ‘shattering of the pleroma’, which results in the creation of the universe, God simply couldn’t ‘evolve’ towards his self-understanding. In summa:

 

This material world can be thought of as a kind of dream in which God incarnates through sexual reproduction and evolutionary biology in order to reflect back on itself and come to know itself inside the dream. We are all living in God’s brain (Kastrup, More than Allegory, Introduction).

 

However this “universal process of enrichment” is effected not, like in Hegel, through an increasingly unfolding ‘self-conceptualization’ of Spirit by ways of abstract philosophy, but simply by accumulating ‘experience’.

 

Through your experiences, as an individualized consciousness, the universe goes a step further in understanding itself and becomes more self-aware … Every minute you live, every experience you go through, pleasant or not, rewarding or not, painful or not, contributes to the ultimate universal goal of understanding and self-awareness (Rationalist Spirituality, XIV).

 

Ye, we are even told that simply by ‘eating a nice meal, making love and traveling to beautiful places’ we are already contributing to God’s growing self-understanding (More than Allegory, X). How convenient! the answer to the eternal question of the meaning of life lies simply in ‘making love’ and stuffing our bellies full of our favorite food! (someone should’ve told the Buddha before he almost killed himself in pursuit of liberation). The creed of this ‘rationalist spirituality’ certainly sounds nicer than that of all traditional religions which unanimously proclaim that ‘whoever shall find his life must lose it’ and demand an ‘extinguishing’ of ourselves (nirvana, al-fana) – “He who does not hate his soul cannot be my disciple”. However as it turns out we can fulfil our existential telos (nay, even God’s telos itself!) simply by living our best life! it looks like the Kingdom of God does lie ‘in meat and drink’ after all.

We see here already the inverted truth that’s hiding behind all such ‘spiritual evolutionisms’, for the supposed ‘evolution’ of an ‘collective consciousness’ is nothing but the caricature of the spiritual realization of the individual. However this ‘evolution’ (which is only ever a becoming of what we already are) obviously adds absolutely nothing to God whatsoever for the whole of creation considered in itself is strictly speaking purus nihil in regards to Him who is the Being of all beings. God does not evolve, He is the Ancient of Days as well as the Ever-Young, eternally birthing Himself out of Himself, and while humanity grows ever more senile, He is as youthful as on the first day: “For we have sinned and grown old and our Father is younger than we” (Chesterton); Ibn Arabi saw Him at the Kaaba in the form of a boy.  

This inversion presents a typical ‘horizontalization’ of the vertical in which the ultimate telos is posited to some future time or ‘Omega point’ towards which we are ‘evolving’, thus replacing the ‘above’ with the ‘ahead’; a ‘horizontalization’ that is obviously closely connected to the ‘horizontal eschatologies’ of most modern ideologies from progressivism to Marxism and which runs counter the traditional conception (as well against the second law of thermodynamics) that “All is perishing  – except His Face” (Quran, 28:88), and that posit a continuous degeneration from the paradisiacal ‘golden age’ to the these latter days of the kali-yuga.[5] Such an inversion should not come as surprise though, it is in fact only logical; for what other purpose is left for modern (and ‘scientifically-minded’) man than endowing evolution itself with a quasi-mystical quality (the best example of which is provided by the causa Teilhard)? Ye, having lost Heaven and dissatisfied earth, there remains only the ‘flight forwards’, whether it be towards the emergence of a ‘higher consciousness’, the Nietzschian ‘super-man’, or the communist utopia.

While the affinities to Hegel are thus immediately obvious, it may come as a surprise that Kastrup choses in fact his great antipode Schopenhauer as the patron for his ‘rationalist spirituality’ (a patronage that is likewise quite fitting, Schopenhauer being somewhat of a ‘founding father’ of a westernized and heavily distorted Vedanta). Thus ‘mind-at-large’ is equated with the Schopenhauerian Will and the phenomenal world with its Representation. All things are intrinsically will (viz. mind) and this intrinsic reality is, as Schopenhauer tells us, “completely and fundamentally different” from its outward presentation which is “wholly foreign” to the ‘world-in-itself’ (cf. Kastrup, Decoding Schopenhauer, II). And here we touch on one of the most fundamental pitfalls of all idealism, namely that the world is ultimately a lie.

 

 

1)     The Problem of Idealism

 

It has been rightly observed that the dialectical tension between materialism and idealism which has characterized much of modern philosophy can only ever emerge once there is an implicit agreement on both side that the phenomenal world that we experience in our day-to-day life is indeed the only world there is, i.e. once natura naturans is almost entirely equated with the ‘laws of nature’ or physical/material nature more generally (which is itself but a fraction of natura naturata). For once this general consensus is reached, it is only logical that the natural world (lacking all self-subsistence) must subsequently be either declared a subjective illusion or completely reduced to the material processes of the ‘clockwork universe’ alone.

Thus the materialist holds that all non-observable phenomena like consciousness are reducible to functions of physical process and as such, in themselves, ultimately illusory. The idealist on the other hand, having understood the lack of self-sufficiency of the material world and at least intuited some of its unreality, must reject all notions of ‘objective reality’ as such, making it a mere product of consciousness, whether that be our subjective consciousness (Fichte) or some ‘universal mind’ of which our subjectivity itself is but one more illusion (as is the case with Schopenhauer).

However it seems that this is a false dichotomy and the benefic meson between the two is to be found in the idealism ‘of a true name’, namely that of Plato. Certainly, Plato would agree that the phenomenal world is ultimately ‘unreal’, the ‘shadow of a shadow’ as his famous cave-allegory so vividly shows us, and thus mâyâ as the Hindu might say. However mâyâ is not only ‘illusion’ (it is only illusory when it is taken ‘literally’ and endowed with a final reality it doesn’t possess) but also the ‘divine art’ the ‘manifestation’ of divine Wisdom, its external projection or irradiation. Although there is thus an undeniable ‘qualitative potentiation’ from the lower to the higher states (so that every lower might indeed be called ‘ignorance’ or ‘illusion’ with regards to the higher), each manifestation is connected to its eternal archetype by its analogia (“the most beautiful of all bonds”, as Plato says; cf. Tim. 31C), the cosmic reverberation of the Logos, traversing through all existential planes.

When the prisoners in the cave see the shadow of a horse, that is because it is the reflection of a corresponding ‘horse-effigy’ held up by the ominous puppeteers behind the wall and this effigy was in turn (presumably) modelled after the image of a ‘real horse’, such that exist ‘outside of the cave’, i.e. in reality properly so called. We thus see that the shadow of the horse is not a ‘lie’ (i.e. a radical non-correspondence between the ‘thing-in-itself’ and its ‘representation’) but rather a distorted image (or ‘shadow’) of the ‘real horse’. In fact if the ’philosopher’ who, in the cave-mythos, escapes the shadowy realm of mâyâ and ventures outside of the cave into the sunlight of Truth, would encounter a horse there, he might very well recognize it and we could even say that his very motivation to leave the cave in the first place stems from the fact that, in a sense, he has always known this reality, that in contemplating the mimetic shadow he has ‘remembered’ the real thing. For the intellect (or psyché logikê) is the ‘sense of being’ in which “subsist the eternal reasons” as St. Thomas tells (S.Th. I.84.5) and which pierces even through the shadows to the intelligible reality, the ‘essence’ of things (the rationes aeternae in the Logos), even if only ‘through a glass darkly’. Because of this participation in the ‘ideas’ (which are not merely a priori forms of perception, i.e. purely subjective and as such ultimately arbitrary) there is thus a real correspondence between knower and known. For Plato to know is to know reality, at least to a certain degree, and the degrees of knowledge strictly correspond to the degrees of reality (as the correspondence between the epistemic ‘divided line’ and the ontological ‘allegory of the cave’ testifies; cf. Rep. 509 and 514-517).^[6]

Thus the world is not an illusion deprived of any reality whatsoever but an icon of the ‘intelligible place’ (topos noetos), the “moving image of eternity”; ye, to avoid the old Aristotelian misinterpretation of attesting a Platonic ‘dualism’ or an ‘unnecessary copying’ of the ideas, we might even say that the ‘visible bodies’ of the kosmos aisthetos are not mere ‘replicas’ of some far-off ideas but present indeed the ideas themselves under one modality of their manifestation. As we have laid out before, we for our part are even ‘idealistic’ enough to at least consider that that this modus of manifestation (the phenomenal world of gross materiality) is indeed in a very real sense conditioned by human knowing (corrupted by Adam’s ‘fall into the psyche’). We might go even further and say that the kosmos noetos itself is dependent upon – or is at least ‘consubstantial’ or ‘co-emergent’ with – the angelic knowing (for in God’s knowing there are no ‘worlds’ but everything is simply God), contemplating the more-than-luminous rays of the Logos as the ‘place of possibilities’. Thus man interprets the intelligible world, the angels interpret the Logos and the Logos is the supreme Exegete of the Divine Essence itself: “Who dwells at the bosom of the Father, He has revealed (exêgêsato) Him to us” (Joh. 1:18). “The higher world throws her light on the lower”, says St. Dionysius says, the phenomenal world is a symbol of the intelligible one and even the kosmos noetos itself is ultimately a symbol of the unconditioned Essence.

The traditional cosmos thus emanates ‘top-down’, whereas in Schopenhauer we are seeing a complete inversion; here the irrational, ‘unconscious’ (i.e. not-yet-self-conscious) Will blindly strives upwards in its desire to ‘see’; it tears upwards through the different degrees of manifestation, becoming mineral, vegetal and animal until it finally “turns in upon itself in human self-awareness so to reflect or mirror its own experiential states” (Kastrup, Op. cit. VII). Our “intellect” (being a Kantian Schopenhauer obviously confuses intellect and reason)^[7] appears thus like a “tiny beacon of reflection sitting atop a mountain of instinct” (ibid. VI), a small and fickle lamp flickering upon the dung heap of savage nature.

It is needless to say that the balance of intellect and will, which has likewise proven delicate in the course of modern philosophy, clearly tips towards the latter in Schopenhauer. Here too we are, in principle, sympathetic, for we would likewise assert that there is a certain primacy of the will. Now this primacy is of course to be understood purely logically for both intellect and will represent merely the two ‘poles’ of the same spiritual unity (i.e. the ‘person’), the ‘obscure face’ of the mirror and its reflective side, ying and yang, and they are thus not separable in any meaningful way. Yet this ‘obscure face’ is in a sense prior (it is ‘yin and yang’ after all, not ‘yang and yin’) like Böhme’s dark first Principle ‘precedes’ the light-manifestation of the second one as its dark, ‘unintelligible’ foundation.

Schopenhauer however, who lacks all traditional notions of intellect, posits this ‘unintelligibility’ as the only reality (effectively a ‘decapitation of being’). And here lie also the roots of his deep pessimism, for by denying the existence of an intelligible realm, or a ‘divine world’ as Böhme says, of which this fallen world is but an ‘accidental’ corruption (but which still shines through it, if only per speculum in aenigmate), he has to conclude that ‘God’, blindly surging into his idea-manifestation, can never produce anything better than this “world of misery and suffering”, the nature-wheel of death and generation where all beings are locked into a perpetual struggle. Ye, we cannot help but get the impression that as soon as Will has ‘reflected back on itself’ and gained self-consciousness in the mind of man, it immediately regrets this decision and wants to flee back into the blissful ignorance of the primordial soup (O daß wir unsere Ururahnen wären! …, Gottfried Benn); for as Schopenhauer laments in his usual tragic pathos: “It is with highest degree of intelligence that suffering too reaches its supreme point”.

We thus see that the Schopenhauerian Will is a staunch Darwinian.^[8] However this poses the question, how can an irrational, blind will manifest as an apparently rationally ordered universe? How can the dark, unconscious striving enkindle the ‘tiny beacon’ of reason?

 

 

2)     The Question of Evolution.

 

We touch here on the fundamental problem of the evolutionary mythos as such, namely the question how the higher can came from the lower. This basic assertion of transformist evolutionism seems to go against the universal principle that only the higher can contain the lower in all its integrity (such that when B emerges from A it necessarily follows that it was priory contained in A and that A is necessarily greater than B, hence the Kabbalist adage that “alef is never less than beth”): “Only more can do less”. The mainstream materialistic interpretation of evolution is thus absurd since it requires us to believe that intelligence could come from mere matter, which is strictly speaking an impossibility. Contrary to this modern creation myth which posits matter as a kind of ‘first principle’ from which everything else then ‘evolves’, all the religious Traditions of the world unanimously affirm that “in the beginning was the Word”, the Idea and structuring principle (Logos), the spiritual ‘germ’ (hiranyagarbha) or ‘mustard seed’ (Matt. 13:31) in which all possibilities of manifestation are eternally contained (and of which the Darwinist fiction of the ‘primordial cell’ is but the materialistic inversion).

To explain these quasi-miraculous ‘jumps’, materialism, which limits itself to a purely horizontal perceptively, invents magic words like ‘emergence’ which really do not explain anything but are purely descriptive, and ultimately empty, signifiers. What we are dealing with in questions concerning such ‘emergent’ phenomena – whether it be how the ‘atoms’ and ‘molecules’ that supposedly make up my chair become the actual solidified chair I can sit on, or how the ‘evolutionary process’ passes from plant life to animal, from animal to man etc. – are ontological and ‘qualitative’ leaps that cannot be explained without reference to vertical types of causality. An indefinite accumulation of potentiae will never result in an actuality, just like an indefinite multiplication of fractional numbers will never result in a unit (which is also why all forms of ‘constitutive panpsychism’ which try to explain higher-level consciousnesses as the ‘emergent’ result of a combination of many lower-level ones, for example on the subatomic level, don’t get any closer to solving the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ than their materialistic counter-parts)^[9]; the same is true for all evolutionary ‘emergence’.

As Schuon observed: “evolutionism in its entirety is nothing other than a hypertrophy, thought out as a means of denying real causes”. What the materialist (by his own self-imposed limitations) cannot see is that, although creatures enter into manifestation at some particular time and place through a particular combination of secondary causes, it is not created by these causes (for this creation is effected omnia simul by Him who dwells in the nunc stans of Eternity, as the Ecclesiast tells us) nor is it limited to these spatio-temporal coordinates.

 

For its roots extend beyond the cosmos into the timeless instant of the creative act … Even the tiniest plant that blooms for a fortnight and then is seen no more is vaster in its metaphysical roots than the entire cosmos in its visible form: for these roots extend into eternity. And how much more does this apply to man! ‘Before I formed thee in the womb, I knew thee’ (Smith, Teilhardism, I).

 

Materialism cuts of these roots of, once more a veritable ‘decapitation of being’, for it denies these very forms, the eternal archetypes, and as such it denies all notions of any ‘stable reality’ whatsoever, submitting everything to the ebb and flow of time, the incessant turning of the nature-wheel (which, according to the materialist, is a wheel without centre).

 

Transformist evolutionism – let it be said once again – is simply a materialist substitute for the ancient concept of the solidifying and segmenting ‘materialization’ of a subtle and suprasensorial primordial substance, in which were prefigured all the diverse possibilities of the a posteriori material world; the answer to evolutionism is the doctrine of archetypes and ‘ideas’, with ideas relating to pure Being – or the divine Intellect – and archetypes to the primordial substance in which they are ‘incarnated’ as it were by reverberation (Schuon, Logic and Transcendence, I)

 

The denial of the forms is thus ultimately a denial of the Divine Intellect, ergo of Intellect as such, which also means the rejection of all teleology, without which the very concept of evolution (that there exists such an adaptive process we do not deny per se) remains unintelligible. As said before, the traditional view of universal genesis is not evolution but emanation, a “crystallization of celestial Ideas in the cosmic substance” (Schuon), the intelligible vapor (the ‘ideas’) congealing into subtle ‘crystals’ (the Platonic ‘effigies’) until finally manifesting as solid ‘snow’ (the ‘shadows’ or aistheta somata of the corporeal realm) – Rorate caeli desuper.

This ‘cosmic substance’ is like a mirror that reflects the activity of the essences, albeit inversely (spiegelverkehrt). In manifestation the seed precedes the tree just like the bud precedes the flower; however, as we have seen, this flower is not limited to its contingent instantiation but ‘extends into eternity’. Its metaphysical root, the perfect, pre-existent form, is ontologically prior and the bud can only become the flower because, ‘essentially’, it has always been it; Die Rose, welche hier dein äußeres Auge sieht, die hat von Ewigkeit in Gott also geblüht.  

Thus, even if we were to accept the (highly doubtful) mainstream interpretation of the fossil record, which tells us about the emergence of ever more complex life forms – not in an undifferentiated ‘spectrum’ but in qualitative ‘jumps’ where new life forms appear all of a sudden (like in the aptly termed ‘Cambrian explosion’) – this in no ways proves their continual and cumulative genesis (cf. Burckhardt, Traditional Cosmology and Modern Science); for the fact that the lesser forms of manifestations (mineral, vegetal etc.) are the first to appear in the visible world, whereas man – the ‘primal form’ – comes last (“like a king entering into his royal lodgings”, as St. Gregory says), perfectly complies with the metaphysical principle of ‘inverse analogy’.^[10]

This ‘analogous nature’ of manifestation can also throw light on some biological homologies between different orders of creatures; the fact that ‘limbs are to mammals what fins are to fish’ for example (a classical ‘analogy of proportion’ where a/b = c/d) does not at all necessitate an evolutionary explanation (just like the correspondences between ape and man do not necessitate a biological relationship but both could simply be said to represent  ‘analogous possibilities’) ^[11]; each form is a speculum unversi (Leibniz), a mirror reflecting all others without confusion and it is this ‘universal analogy’ which witnesses to the ‘Unicity of Being’ (Wahad al-Wujud), for all logoi are ultimately united in the one Logos which contains and transcends them all (cf. Essay #).

However it is perhaps best to take a step back from the supposed “science” of the matter (which is as volatile as the material reality that it takes for its object and whose findings offer themselves to an indefinite number of possible interpretations) and look at the level of ‘semantics’ alone. Indeed in light of the fact there the evidence against (neo-)Darwinist transformism has been mounting up continually in recent years (not only from the side of biology/paleontology but also especially from mathematicians and geneticists) we cannot help but think that the large adherence to the evolutionary mythos is ultimately a sociological, not a strictly ‘scientific’, phenomenon, evolution being a crucial corner stone of the materialist ideology that has to be upheld at all costs and as such, in the last consequence, based purely on ‘faith’ (as even some scientist admit). We thus ask: what is it this mythos wants to tell us? What does it mean?

Looking in such manner at the evolutionary myth from the ‘outside’, we cannot help but note that it has proven to be one of the most powerful narrative tools for the ‘decentering’ of man (for the ‘decapitation of being’ is likewise a decapitation of man, his ‘dethronement’, the exilation of the ‘vertical being’ to the mere horizontal), the attack on the human form and its theomorphic capabilities. This attack on the Abbild obviously reflects back on the Urbild as well, so that the ideology of evolutionism is also an attack on the very idea of the benevolent God, turning Him into some kind of demiurge. Not only has evolutionism thus played a crucial role in the desacralization of the world and the promotion of the atheistic Weltanschauung, but in recent times it is has even contributed more and more to the subversion of traditional religious form within, whether it be Sri Aurobindo in the East or Teilhard de Chardin in the West.

Evolutionism is an ideology; it does not so much propose to be a mere ‘scientific fact’ but a universal principle extending to all possible domains, such that he who is against “progress” (whether it be in society, technology or religion) positions himself against the very nature of things themselves (a kind of inversion of natural law theory). Thus everything is submitted to its iron law such that, ever since Hegel, even Truth itself can ‘evolve’! (an idea that is of course deeply rooted in the Protestant Revolution itself). From this point it is of course only a small step to the evolutionist (counter-)spiritualties of the New Age. One central notion in this context is of course that of an “evolution of consciousness”.

Let us first note (contra the New Age deification of “consciousness”) that ‘consciousness’, as we generally understood in contemporary discourse, “is only a contingent and special mode of knowledge under certain conditions, a property inherent to a being envisaged in certain states of manifestation”, i.e. limited to the human condition (hence why ‘mind’, manas from ‘man’, the ‘rational animal’) and as such “in no applicable to the unconditioned state” of Divine Knowing (Guénon, The Multiple States, XVI). Positing ‘God’ (or the ‘Divine’ in the broadest sense) as merely some ‘cosmic consciousness’ (as has become customary in many quarters) only betrays the anti-metaphysical immanentism of these currents and may even be seen as a distant echo of the nominalist heresy of the ‘univocity of being’. As such this ‘cosmic consciousness’ has not seldom been presented to us as a mere ‘subconscious’ (i.e. not-meta-conscious) mind, a dull ‘feeling’ or evolutionary ‘drive’ (we for our part do not even rule out the possibility that the universe might possess some form of ‘consciousness’, however confusing this anima mundi with the Divine Intellect is again an inversion). 

Secondly is has to be once more affirmed that (contrary to all evolutionist fictions like the ‘super-man’) that man already “infinitely surpasses man”, as Pascal says, for the New Man is already hidden in the old one, only waiting to be ‘actualized’ through spiritual realization. This realization is thus not brought about by some future ‘evolution of consciousness’ but by ‘prayer and fasting’ in the hic et nunc (and ultimately realized only ‘outside of time’) such that every Saint of old was in fact infinitely more ‘spiritually evolved’ than the modern dégeneré.

But of course the evolution-principle is not limit to ‘content’ alone but also extends to the very ‘form’. As such many of the modern counter-traditions stage themselves as an ‘evolved’ kind of religion. Traditional religious forms, so they say, pertain to a more primitive age and correspond simply to a ‘less evolved’ state of consciousness; the new Gnosticism however has ‘adapted’ to the needs of modern man, the age of ‘science’ and ‘reason’ and is thus only the logical next step in the trajectory of mankind. Alas! here too the words of Titus Burckhardt concerning the Teilhardian heresy ring true:

 

The poor saints! They came a million years too soon! None of them, however, would ever have accepted the doctrine that God could be reached biologically, or again through collective scientific research (Mirror of the Intellect, VI).

 

For man is an absolute; even though the Fall may have ‘wounded’ his nobility, the imago Dei, impressed on all men from the first Adam to the last Day, can never be completely erased and, due to our theomorphic nature, being man always already entails (at least in principle) the capability to know God in His fullness (a knowledge which is of course not in any way dependent on some sort of ‘scientific progress’ but merely on the degree of individual realization, or on the ‘grace’ that is given).

 

 

3)     The Physicalist Error

 

And here we also come back to our case at hand, for naturally Kastrup tells us that the Schopenhauerian idealism is thoroughly ‘scientific’ and does in fact perfectly comply with the state of art quantum physics, even offering a reasonable solution for the nagging problem of ‘wave function collapse’. Now let us first note that the Schopenhauerian system manages to avoid most of the problems inherent in the materialist paradigm we’ve just expounded upon by the idealist sleight of hand of simply denying material reality all together; thus intelligible telos is replaced by the blind movement of Will which “spontaneously – thus not deliberately – strive(s) towards a developmental climax” (Decoding Schopenhauer, VII). As for the ‘Platonic ideas’ they are retained by Schopenhauer albeit in an inverted manner for they are in a sense located ‘below’ (thus in a way prefiguring the ‘psychic Platonism’ of Jung which we shall deal with shortly) and represent not so much intelligible principles but rather “lightly self-reflective apprehensions” (ibid. XIV), “the Will’s basic templates of striving or natural modes of excitations” etc. (XV). This ‘bottom-up’ approach is also why we cannot shake the feeling that the Will is still somehow ‘inferior’ to its representation (or to its ‘dissociative alters’), which also brings us to the topic of quantum physics; for, as Kastrup tells us, the ‘world-in-itself’ (outside of its external presentation in space and time) actually exists in a “quantum superposition”, i.e. a state of “overlapping potentialities” (ibid. IX).

It seems that, despite all supposed ‘idealism’ or even ‘non-dualism’, we are on the verge of falling here back into the old physicalist error underlying all Galileo-Cartesian bifurcationism (as well as all kinds of evolutionism), namely that of bestowing the ‘sub-corporeal’ (quantum-)realm with a prior reality, as if the phenomenal, corporeal world would somehow unfold (or ‘emerge’) from ‘below’ out of this infra-formal chaos of pure potentiality and would thus be secondary to it (haven’t some scientist even told us that the universe has “created itself” by jumping out of the quantum chaos like Pallas-Athene from the head of Zeus? - presumbably analogous to how consciousness jumped out of matter). However in reality it is precisely the other way round; as already Heisenberg stated ‘quantum particles’ are comparable to ‘Aristotelian potentiae’, meaning that they are not only ‘sub-corporeal’ but also sub-existential, having in fact no being whatsoever but pertaining rather to the domain of pure quantity (cf. Smith, The Quantum Enigma). These infra-existential quantities are only ‘actualized’ by a ‘vertical act’ of measurement (i.e. intellectual knowing), so that it is in fact the sub-corporeal world (the realm of ‘particles’ and ‘atoms’ etc.) that is but a secondary effect (materia secunda) of corporeal manifestation, located as it were at the very edge of being, “midway between being and nothing” (Smith). The res extensa never existed.  

Now to be sure, the idealist obviously likewise rejects the Democritian proposition that behind ‘sweet, bitter, hot and cold’ there’s in reality “only atoms and the void”, for, according to this view, independent of a conscious observer there is strictly speaking no ‘objective reality’ (or res extensa) whatsoever; the external world of representation only ever emerges once there’s a knowing subject that ‘actualizes’ the phenomena (or the ‘experiential states’ that give rise to them) which, presumably, had been lying dormant in an undifferentiated of mush of potentiality, “a (quantum) superposition outside space-time”^[12] (ibid. XI). In nuce: what is seen (or ‘experienced’) is simply the Will from the ‘outside’ perspective of one of its ‘dissociative states’, i.e. a second person perspective on a first person subjectivity, which inversely also means that objective reality only appears (or ‘presents itself’) ‘inside’ subjective consciousness, such that subject and object, seer and seen, are absolutely identical:  “the universe is dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too” as Schopenhauer said (again a pernicious half-truth).

It is obvious that such a monism of mind does (at least superficially) away with all kinds of bifurcationism. However it seems that what is ‘chopped off’ in order to avoid even the last traces of the old ‘substance dualisms’ is precisely the qualitative, ‘objective’ pole of being, the pole of essence. For does not the proposition that “will-at-large [i.e. the ‘universal mind’] … consists of a unitary, indivisible (quantum-entangled) whole” (Decoding Schopenhauer, XI) amount to a complete inversion of the ‘formal’ and ‘infra-formal chaos’(or the ‘upper’ and ‘lower waters’), where, in the last consequence, the sub-existential potency that underlies all of the cosmos as its ‘dark, mute foundation’ is confused with super-essential All-Possibility, the ‘more-than-luminous darkness’ of the Divine Essence itself? To put it succinctly: it seems as if the ‘quantum chaos’ has taken the place of Hegel’s primordial negativity, i.e. a pure agglomeration of potentiality which has yet to be ‘actualized’ over time (Kastrup’s process of “consciousness enrichment”); the world has literally been turned upside-down.

While we thus agree with Kastrup’s idealist notion that “concrete physicality comes into being only through a conscious act of observation” (ibid. IX) and that the world we perceive is not a mere ‘effect’ of some external physical forces (electro-magnetic waves etc.) but indeed possesses a relative reality in itself, we have to once more assert, that this reality comes from above, from the ‘Father of lights’; for while numerus stat ex materia it is the ‘substantial form’ (participated by our intellect) which bestows being on this sub-existential chaos (forma dat esse rei) and through this qualitative form (or logos) which originates in the Logos itself, we can even know the Real as such. Thus the idealist rightly infers that objects deprived of all qualitative properties are strictly non-existent, but that these qualitative properties could possess an actual objectivity, even he cannot believe. 

The proposition “that we do not have direct access to objective reality and that all we believe to exist are, in fact, objects in our own consciousness” (Rationalist Spirituality, VIII) is thus to be rejected. The reality we perceive is not limited to our subjectivity (or merely ‘in our head’ as the idealist asserts) but opens itself ‘vertically’ to the objectivity of the Logos via the axis of intellect (the ‘human logos’), which pierces our existential ‘horizontality’ and which is our only way out of it (via salutis). 

In the decapitated cosmos of Schopenhauer however, the ‘tiny beacon’ of reason marks already the upper limit of manifestation such that the only way out of this ‘world of misery’ lies in the regressio ad uterum, the Dionysian ‘submersion’ into ‘will-at-large’, which is really only the caricature of transcendence (a ‘trans-descendence’).

However that may be, to this inversion of the quantitative and qualitative pole of the being corresponds one that is even more fundamental and common to almost all forms of neo-Gnosticism, namely the confusion of the spiritual and the psychic.

 

 

4)     On the limits of Psychology

 

We’ve encountered this already in the overtly ‘psychological’ language employed by Kastrup, who describes the formation of individual consciousnesses as a “dissociates process” similar to what is known in psychology as ‘Dissociative Identity Order’: “Individual subjects arise, analogously to alters, as a consequence of DID-like dissociation from the universal will” (Kastrup, Op. cit. X), such that the Schopenhauerian metaphysics truly present us with “a form of universal DID” (ibid.), a veritable schizophrenia in divinis!

Now it is quite obvious that this idea is nothing but a perversion of  the Âtman-Brahman doctrine and other non-dual teachings, in which the ‘collective (un-)consciousness’ (which Kastup also calls the ‘obfuscated mind’) takes the place of a kind of pantheistic Godhead. Such subtle subversions of traditional (and often esoteric) doctrines like the principal identity of ‘self’ and the ‘Self’ are typical for pretty much all of the New Age counter-spiritualities which deal almost exclusively in half-truths. Of course it is not entirely wrong that ultimately ‘we are all one’ but this unity is vertical and not to be searched ‘below’ in some kind of infra-formal ‘cosmic mind’. As already Guénon^[13] warned us:

 

There is reason to exercise extreme vigilance (for the enemy knows only too well how to take on the most insidious disguises) against anything that may lead the being to become ‘fused’ or preferably and more accurately ‘confused’ or even ‘dissolved’ in a sort of ‘cosmic consciousness’ that shuts out all ‘transcendence’ and so also shuts out all effective spirituality … These things do indeed quite literally amount to an ‘inversion’ of spirituality, to a substitution for it of what is truly its opposite, since they inevitably lead to its final loss, and this constitutes ‘satanism’ properly so called (Reign of Quantity, XXXV).

 

Now, the affinities between Kastrup’s idealism and the so-called ‘depth-psychology’ of Carl Jung (often referenced in Kastrup’s works)^[14] is of course obvious (ye, does he not even go so far as to ‘psychoanalyze’ God Himself!). In fact Jungianism seems perfectly compatible with the Schopenhauerian philosophy, for not only do both assert that the rational ego is but a small dot of light in a vast unconscious darkness, but also does their lack of verticality lead to them to conclude that this is indeed ‘the best of all possible worlds’ and that ‘God’ (or rather the evolutionary demiurgos) must thus be the author of evil as well. 

Psychology sets out to penetrate beyond the merely physical; however this expedition beyond the border of the visible is not a return to the ‘meta-physical’ properly so called but instead embarks with full sails on the stormy seas of the psyche, which harbor many a danger for the unprepared sailor. As already Guénon observed, for all their talk about the ‘subconscious’, most of these psychologisms never once stop to consider the ‘superconscious’ and thus operate (as already the very term ‘depth-psychology’ betrays) only in a downwards direction, that is:

 

Toward the aspect of things that corresponds, both here in the human being and elsewhere in the cosmic environment, to the ‘fissures’ through which the most ‘malefic’ influences of the subtle world penetrate, influences having a character than can truthfully and literally be described as ‘infernal’ (Guénon,  Op.cit.  XXXIV).

 

Now Jung is certainly not wrong when he claims that beyond the borders of the physical world there open up vast psychic frontiers hitherto ignored by modern science. In fact the subtle (psychic) realm is incomparably more extensive that the material world, which is wholly submersed in it “like crystals floating in liquid” (Schuon). Furthermore psychology is not inherently wrong in speaking of ‘subconscious’ strata operating below our usual awareness, for even in our individual psychic make-up there are ‘dark’, ‘peripheral’ regions where the luminous axis of intellect and its dispersed, ‘dianoetic’ light do not reach, such that most of our lower psychic processes (for example those pertaining to ‘vegetal soul’) remain indeed unconscious to us. This is also true for most dreams, which do indeed ‘bubble up’ from these lower strata and can manifest certain subconscious residues pertaining to the infra-rational soul (this is not to say that there are also ‘angelic dreams’, although they’re of course much rarer; the psychic plateau is not called the ‘intermediary realm’ for nothing and both angels and demons have to enter through the same door, hence why the ‘discernment of spirits’ is so essential).

Where things take a truly ‘satanic’ turn is when these psychologisms become a straight out denial of the Spirit. For, as we know, Jung saw the ‘subconscious’ not only as the source of dreams but of all symbolism, nay, of all religious forms as such. Sacred symbols (or the Jungian ‘archetypes’) are thus likewise seen as ‘eruptions’ from these ‘lower depths’ which Jung famously called the ‘collective unconscious’ and which could be characterized as a kind of “ancestral psychic fund” (cf. Burkhardt, Op.cit.). The Jungian ‘archetypes’ are like ‘residues’ of a more primitive age; ‘fossils’, buried in the psychic depths by the ‘evolution of consciousness’ spanning over millennia, but which are yet ‘stirring’ in those lower recesses; they thus pertain to the ‘pre-rational’ domain and almost seem to approach infra-human states of consciousness like animal instinct. It is needless to say that we are dealing here with a ‘psychic Platonism’ in the fullest sense, a complete inversion of the traditional doctrine according to which the archetypes (or rationes aeternae) are of spiritual origin and ultimately located in the Divine Mind itself, i.e. the Logos.

However once the primordial soup of this ‘ancestral fund’  is identified as their creative agent, it naturally follows that it is quickly bestowed with truly god-like qualities, leading to veritable “deification of the unconscious” (cf. Smith, Cosmos and Transcendence, VI), which, in the Jungian “theology”, even necessitates a ‘deification of Satan’ himself as the ‘dark (unconscious) face’ of God. It should thus not come as a surprise that Jung himself was an unabashed advocate for the rehabilitation of the old Gnosticism and Manichaeism in their worst incarnations.^[15]

All these subversions obvious result from the denial of the ‘superconscious’, i.e. the spiritual domain (which itself comprises the psychic domain in all its totality). Surely, the ‘psychic waters’ acting like a (distortive) mirror, there is found in them a certain reflection of the (spiritual) archetypes; this is simply a metaphysical necessity, for (ut supra dixi) the essential ‘warps’ transverse all ‘woofs’ of existence, even to the lowest psychic strata, such that we will find ‘echoes’ (or ‘reverberations’) of all authentic symbols in all existential planes. However these ‘warps’ or ‘threads’ (sutrâtman) ultimately lead us back to the ‘formal chaos’ of the Logos where they originate. The denial of this spiritual reality brought about in the psychological reductionism (which locates this origin in the ‘sub-individual’ instead of the ‘supra-individual’ domain) is thus an denial of objective truth itself and as such firmly post-modern in character.

Again, in dealing with the ‘psychic plateau’ discernment is needed; a discernment that is only found within the spiritual teachings of authentic religious traditions. However, dismissing these traditions as the relics of a time when consciousness was simply not yet ‘evolved’ enough, most of the modern psychisms chose rather to start their philosophical inquiry from a kind of introspective ‘self-investigation’ which never manages to transcends the merely-psychic domain but stops either at pure discursive reasoning (Descartes) or even at the level of vague ‘feeling’ (Schopenhauer), what Plato would call the ‘irascible soul’, and consequently making it the universal principle of reality as such!, for example by positing the ‘Will’ which is not (meta-)conscious but a vague ‘feeling’ as the supreme Principle, such that Kastrup can even proclaim that: “Reality itself is a feeling” (More than Allegory, IX).^[16]

 

 

5)     Psychedelics as spiritual Ersatz.

 

These self-explorations (among which are also Jung’s self-induced hallucinations which often reveal a truly satanic inspiration) proceed almost always exclusively towards the ‘infernal’ pole of being, where many a ‘fissure’ opens for malefic influences to intrude. Such ‘spirit channelings’, hypnoses, ‘dream interpretation’, and sometimes even supposed ‘extra-terrestrial communications’^[17], play of course a huge part in the whole sphere of the ‘New Age’ with its countless mediums and pseudo-prophets. It should thus not come as a surprise when Kastrup reveals to us (in More than Allegory) that his ‘rationalist spirituality’ was inspired in large parts by a series of self-experimentations which psychedelics drugs which he had undergone (of course) in the name of “science” alone and from which he brought to us the revelation of his psychic Platonism like Moses descending from Mt. Sinai, having (according to his own admissions) spoken there ‘face to face’ with the ‘Jungian archetype of the Self’! (cf. Op.cit. X). 

Now as the very term ‘psychedelics’ already makes painfully obvious, the worlds that the so-called ‘psychonaut’ traverses pertain strictly to the level of psyche alone. The psychic realms are not necessarily ‘malefic’ in themselves (although they certainly carry the potential to be) but merely a realm of illusions (hence their connection to the dream-state), i.e. what some occultist have termed the ‘astral plane’ and what in Muslim thought is sometimes refered to as the ‘imaginal world’ (alam al-mithal), which, coincidentally, is also the abode of the Jinn (Kastrup himself connects this ‘world’ with the Egyptian Amduat which, unbeknownst to him, corresponds precisely to this intermediary plateau, the ‘aerial realm’ that the souls of the dead have to pass through according to the Orthodox notion of ‘toll-houses’, but which is also the realm of the demons, the ‘powers of the air’, as the Apostle calls them in Eph. 2:2).^[18] Thus, when our psychonaut thinks he’s traversing the realms of Spirit or even seeing God facie a facie, this betrays an enormous amount of self-delusion and a plain ignorance of basic cosmology, for these psychic dimensions are really but an inferior prolongation of human individuality which are “mistaken for superior states simply because they are outside the limits within which the activities of the ‘average’ man are generally enclosed” (Guénon, Op. cit. XXXV).

Now we for our part certainly don’t rule out the possibility that such ‘archaic techniques of ecstasy’ (Eliade) could have been employed by traditionally trained shamans in ages past for benefic ends^[19]; in the vast majority of cases however, shamanism today must be said to represent the plain degeneration of a former priest-class (just like all genuine animism/polytheism is but a degeneration of authentic spirituality). This is likewise exactly the case in the modern West where spiritual degeneration has reached a point perhaps unparalleled in human history. ^[20] The western ‘truth-seeker’ that has recourse to such techniques is most always lead into falsehood, taking the illusions of the ‘imaginal plane’ for quasi-divine revelations simply because they experience an ‘altered state of consciousness’ (thereby potentially opening themselves to truly malefic influences as the haunting example of the Aztec and Mayan cultures bears witness).^[21]

This degeneration of authentic spirituality in the West is of course in large parts due to the (so-called) “Reformation” and “Enlightenment” (which were in many ways prepared by the nominalist betrayal of scholasticism), that introduced a radical split into the relation of faith and knowing and effectively lead to the ‘death of intellect’ (the ‘decapitation of being’ common to most all modern errors). The living God being exiled into some far-off region of uncertainty, He could from now on only serve as a Deistic law-giver or as a vague, pseudo-mystical ‘feeling’. Thus religion is reduced either to the plane of mere morality alone (Kant) or withdrawn from all rational investigation into a  sentimental fideism (Schleiermacher), whose only criterion of judgement is ‘emotional experience’ (a split which Baader already saw clearly in the 1800’s and which he combatted in many of his writings). These two ‘currents’ (which are ultimately inspired by one and the same fallen intelligence) branch of into the atheistic ‘anti-Tradition’ (materialist scientism, Freudian psychology, Marxism etc.) and the subversive psychisms of the ‘counter-’or ‘pseudo-Tradition’ respectively (here too then we see the Adversary playing both side, unleashing both Gog and Magog respectively).

Thus, after the ‘death of God’, psychedelic ‘experience’ becomes the Ersatz for spiritual realization (like psychoanalysis has long become the Ersatz for the sacrament of penance) and, to compensate for the loss of verticality, spirituality (characterized by a state of clarity and ‘holy sobriety’) is replaced by a horizontal psychic expansiveness, the consequences of which are not seldom disastrous (we need only to mention the thesis according to which the origin of all religions can be simply explained by psychedelic experiences, making them a purely human or ‘psychic’ affair, which is again a plain denial of all spirituality).

 

In toto this psychologizing of the Spiritual, especially in its Jungian version, has proven far more insidious than evolutionism (which most of the times was simply opposed to religion as such) and has even a managed to delude a good number of Church-men.^[22] Whereas Freud displayed a clear hatred for religion and God (dare we diagnose an Oedipal father-complex?), seeing in them not more than ‘infantile’ and regressive pathologies, Jung set out to establish a veritable counter-religion (Jung himself asserted that psychoanalysis – the ‘sacrament of the devil’ as per Guénon – represents “the only form of initiation still valid in the modern age”).^[23] While he was convinced that the ‘old Christianity’ was simply not credible anymore to modern and ‘scientific’ man, he also thought that the ‘Christ-myth’ was too deeply ingrained in western psyche to simply reject it entirely; it needed rather to be seen “in a new light, in accordance with the changes wrought by the contemporary spirit” and of course (as he himself confessed) he only knew too well that “the that voice of one crying in the wilderness must necessarily strike a scientific tone if the ear of the multitude is to be reached” (cf. his Dreams, Memories, Reflections).

 

The beauty of Jung’s system, for those threatened with ‘meaninglessness’ as he liked to call it, was that it offered ‘meaning’ without turning its back on modernity. Jung assured his followers, in effect, that they could remain thoroughly modern without sacrificing the emotional solace formerly provided by orthodox religion … By outgrowing tradition, the fully modern individual gained a wider perspective but unavoidably cut himself off from his more conservative fellows. A ‘fuller consciousness of the present removes him … from submersion in common consciousness,’ from the ‘mass of men who live entirely within the ‘bounds of tradition.’ This is why the solution of the ‘modern spiritual problem,’ as Jung called it, could not possibly lie in a return to ‘obsolete forms of religion,’ any more than it could lie in a purely secular worldview. … Modern man, having ‘heard enough about guilt and sin,’ was rightly suspicious of ‘fixed ideas as to what is right,’ suspicious of spiritual counselors who ‘pretended to know what is right and what is not.’ Moral judgement, in any case, ‘took something away from the richness of experience’ … By providing access not only to the unconscious mental life of individuals but to the ‘collective unconscious’ of the human race, Jungian psychoanalysis excavated the permanent structure of religious mythology, the raw material out of which the modern world might construct new forms of religious life appropriate to its needs … Unenlightened ages past might be forgiven for believing things no educated person could believe in the twentieth century or for taking literally mythologies better understood in a figurative or metaphorical sense; one might even forgive the modern proletarian, excluded from an education by virtue of his unremitting toil … the intellectual alone, in any case, looked straight into the light without blinking. Disillusioned but undaunted: such is the self-image of modernity, so proud of its intellectual emancipation that it makes no effort to conceal the spiritual price that has to be paid (Lasch, Revolt of the Elites, XIII).

 

Like Heidegger, Jung can thus be seen as one of the many pseudo-prophets of modernity, and while the former wanted to stage himself as the prophet of a new ontology (a kind of John the Baptist of ‘being’), so the latter desired to be nothing less than the founder of a ‘new religion’ and from the time of his death unto this day he has certainly not lacked in faithful disciples (we only need to recall the recent phenomenon of Jordan Peterson, who was able to mobilize millions with his neo-Jungianism).

We do not doubt that the motives of people like Peterson, Kastrup, or even Jung are not plainly evil; on the contrary, we absolutely believe that most of them are indeed well-meaning and act from a sincere inner urgency. They are deeply aware of the shortcomings of the materialistic Weltanschauung of the anti-Tradition and might even feel a profound need to render religion viable again in this day and age.  However as Guénon observes even an ‘unconscious satanism’ is in the end no more than an instrument in the service of the ‘conscious satanism’ of those who represent the ‘counter-initiation’ and the results of these attempts at an ‘rationalist spirituality’ have almost always lead to a flood of inverted psychisms that might just be even more dangerous than any profane atheism (although the challenge that these psychisms pose to materialism is quite superficial for they profess perfect adherence to almost all tenets of the materialist mythos of mainstream science). Ultimately, they try to offer a religion without the Cross, peddling ‘meaning’ to the starved masses in subjectivist cults of ‘experience’ or ‘personal development’ which are not ‘spiritualities’ properly so called (for they don’t originate in the Spirit) but mostly concoctions of the ego striving for its self-affirmation. They promise to modern man that he may find meaningful fulfillment without having to cease to be ‘modern’, ‘scientific’ and thoroughly ‘rational’, i.e. that he can be “spiritual but not religious”; no metanoia is needed!, just go on “eating flesh, and drinking wine” (Is. 22:13) and believe in the universe, the singularity, or the coming evolutionary ‘awakening’ of humankind, and all shall be well. But all these promises are empty and come from the Father of Lies.

Alas, it seems that Guénon was right when he predicted that as soon as the ‘great wall’ of materialist rationalism would start to crack the first things to creep through the lower ‘fissures’ would indeed be those ‘malefic influences’ from the infernal pole of being, flooding the world with their falsities. Thus, we who profess to follow Him who is Truth itself have to vigilant “for the night is far spent and the day is at hand” (Rom. 13:12): Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in proelio! Amen.