- Nothing resists the will of man when he knows the truth and wills the good.
COMMENTARY. The Truth is the Idea identical with Being. Will means altering Being in conformance with the Idea. The True Idea is. To will the good is to will the Idea. - To will evil is to will death. A perverse will is the beginning of suicide.
COMMENTARY. Evil is disorder, chaos, formlessness, multiplicity. To will evil, then, is to will dissolution. - To will good with violence is to will evil, for violence produces disorder and disorder produces evil.
COMMENTARY. The Will of God is actionless action. Violence is its opposite and is destructive of order. - One can, and one should, accept evil as the means of good; but one must never will it or do it, otherwise one would destroy with one hand what one builds with the other. Good faith never justifies bad means; it corrects them when one undergoes them, and condemns them when one takes them.
COMMENTARY. Evil increases the virtue of the wise but corrupts the weak.
Moral Purification of the Will
Man’s mind is rapt by God to the contemplation of the divine truth in three ways:
- He contemplates it through certain imaginary pictures.
- He contemplates the divine truth through its intelligible effects.
- He contemplates it in its essence.
Now when man’s intellect is uplifted to the sublime vision of God’s essence, it is necessary that his mind’s whole attention should be summoned to that purpose in such a way that he understands nothing else by phantasms, and is absorbed entirely in God.
~ Mary of Agreda, Mystical City of God
Mary of Agreda has given us the three stages of Hermetic contemplation, which are related to their Yoga counterparts in the following table:
| Hermetism | Yoga | Theophan | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Concentration | dharana | Spoken prayer | Visualization |
| Meditation | dhyana | Mental prayer | Mental Prayer |
| Contemplation | samadhi | Unceasing prayer | Prayer of the Heart |
The Void and the Fullness are Indissolubly Bound
We never start from the “many”, but from the “One” in a state of privation which is correlative to the appearance of others around and against it, in order to move to the “One” in a state of fullness and sufficiency, in which such an appearance is consummated.
~ Julius Evola
To understand the creation of the world, we need to begin with the concept of privation. “Privation” is the absence of a given form in something capable of possessing it. As it is a lack, it has no being in itself, yet it is part of experience. Whatever appears to limit me, whatever seems to oppose my Will, reveals an insufficiency in me, that is, a “privation”. Rather than simply representing a lack or insufficiency, a being may embrace privation and deliberately choose to limit itself. Boris Mouravieff writes (Gnosis, Vol 1):
Orthodox Tradition teaches that the Universe was created by a sacrifice of God. We shall understand this postulate better if we consider that it differentiates between the state of manifested Divinity and that of unmanifested Divinity — which is therefore limitless and free from all conditions. God’s sacrifice is Self-limitation by manifestation.
Where Truth Will Dwell
Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of the Lord, by which the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with the burning heat? But we look for new heavens and a new earth according to his promises, in which justice dwelleth.
~ 2 Peter 3:12-13
In the brief monograph, The Problem of the New Man, published by the Praxis Institute, Boris Mouravieff describes the historical conditions leading up to the issues of today and the necessary solution that will usher in the next Golden Age, ending the current cycle. Mouravieff claims to be revealing the esoteric teachings of the Eastern Churches, which have not been made public until now.
Four moments of the Spirit
He identifies four dominant trends, which we are calling the moments of the Spirit since they are the historical manifestation of a single idea. These are: Philosophy, Religion, Science, and Art.
- Philosophy
- Philosophy is based on the concept which is both universal as idea and concrete as it is expressed as the judgment of particular states of affairs. This judgment is the unity of subject and object, or essence and existence.
- Religion
- Religion denies that reality can be fully expressed conceptually. For the religious consciousness, the concept and the thing, essence and existence are no longer statically givens, as objects of contemplation. The ethical will connects the ideal to existence, which it actualizes.
- Science
- Science, the child of nominalism, then reduces the concept to the practical. Bracketing out any reference to the transcendental, it is autonomous with respect to the ethical. The will is replaced with volition, or desire, whose aim is merely practical. Ideas, concepts, and theories are tools to manipulate the world for practical ends.
- Art
- Art is knowledge of the individual, not the universal concept of philosophy. Its method is intuition, a direct, unmediated, unity. But intuition is real only to the extent to which it is expressed. For intuition, the ethical is the aesthetic.
The Cosmic Hierarchy
The Hermetic Tradition envisions a hierarchical organization of the cosmos. The presence of man portends a split in the continuum: for man, there is an outer world of sense experience and an inner world of thought. However, in consciousness, there is no difference. Thought, in Hermetism, is understood as another sense, along with sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. We recognize objects in the world by experience of the juxtaposition of colour, shape, texture, sound, smell and so on, that signify the object. Similarly, we recognize beings on the inner plane by the repetition of certain thought patterns. As Tomberg describes how this realization came to Plato:
Plato, the father of metaphysical philosophy, had the experience of trans-cerebral thought, of thought not conceived but seen. That is why he could teach the method of the gradual elevation above cerebral intellectuality, the elevation from possible opinion (doxa), to a probable conclusion (dianoia) due to dialectical argument, and finally to the certitude of immediate perception (episteme).
Plato seems to have made the error of giving reality to the ideas as independent beings. Tomberg goes on:
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