Boris Mouravieff – Meditations on the Tarot

2014-08-26

Heat and Fire: Notes for 25 Aug 2014

The task for the week was to deliberately create an internal friction. Entering the esoteric path requires the non-identification with the personality “from which we should be able to detach ourselves at the price of particularly painful efforts.” [Vol 1, IV (6)]

In an essay titled “Fragments of an Unknown Teaching” (“Les Fragments d’un Enseignement inconnu”, Mouravieff writes

The immediate goal is to place the disciple between two groups of forces: attraction and repulsion; to thus provoke in him an anxiety and thereby the most intense possible interior battle of affirmations and negations. This friction of specialized language called to produce heat in order to end up lighting a fire. As expressed in Christian doctrine, “the way towards the truth passes through doubts.” Multiplying doubts in the spirit and the heart of the student offers him the chance to break through the preliminary steps more rapidly.

A similar idea is expressed in a discourse addressed to the monks in India that can be found in Volume 1 of the Philokalia. Although it is meant for monks, we who are in the world (but not of it) can still derive benefit. This was intended as an encouragement to move beyond the initial stages. It begins:

The anguish of soul and hardship that you endure are more precious in God’s sight than surpassingly great virtue on the part of someone living in the world. Your deep dejection and despondency, your tears and sighs of distress, the torments of your conscience and your doubts, your feelings of self-condemnation, the sorrow and lamentations of your intellect and heart, your contrition and wretchedness, your gloom and self-abasement — such experiences as these, which frequently overwhelm those cast into the iron furnace of trials and temptations, are far more precious and acceptable to God than any good actions of those living in the world.

The word for today is “Synecdoche”, a figure of speech in which the part represents the whole, e.g., “Hired hand” for the services of the whole man. Become aware of synecdoche in your own life. It may be that a smaller issues is disguising a larger and deeper issue.

The reading is sections 6 and 7 from Chapter VI of Volume One. The task for the week is to meditate on Figure 20, as suggested in the text. In the meantime, you can use the gnosis mailing list or comments to post insights from the meditations during the week if you like.

Exterior man. Exterior man has not even entered on the exoteric path and is living spiritually in the scrubland or outback. I don’t like the translation of “brousse” as wilderness, since wilderness has a different, and more positive, meaning in the Bible. I will reserve any commentary on these sections until after the next meeting.

2014-08-192014-08-22

Meeting Notes for 19 Aug 2014

The task this week is to deliberately place yourself in a situation that you know will be uncomfortable (but NOT dangerous) for you in some way. You can then use that deliberately created internal friction as a trigger for self-awareness. (In lieu of that, you can continue with any previous task.

The point that is being emphasized is that initiation is at this stage concerned with the development of a strong and healthy emotional center, rather than the accumulations of doctrines. For examples, you can refer to this description of initiations as the conquering of the four elements … not that I am suggesting these particular exercises at this time.

Qualifications for Initiation

The reading was from Section (5) of Chapter VI of Book One of Gnosis by Boris Mouravieff. Here we are introduced to two new centers: the higher intellectual center and the higher emotional center. As transcendent, they work perfectly and, unlike the lower centers, are unaffected by the turmoil of everyday life. However, we remain oblivious to their influences for the most part. By regulating and balancing the lower centers, a permanent tie with the higher centers can be established.

Hence, that is the ultimate goal of the various exercises. The exterior man is stuck in the lower centers and believes that reason is the only tool and hence falls into the errors of positivism, materialism, scientism, etc. He fails to see that a change in the level of being is also required. As we have seen, this is a major theme also in Valentin Tomberg, Hermann Keyserling, and Julius Evola.

The higher emotional center issues from the spark of the Son and the higher intellectual center from the spark of the Holy Spirit. The complements Valentin Tomberg’s Meditations on the Tarot. As the soul life becomes balanced and quiet, then it becomes possible for the Holy Spirit to appear and the second birth of initiation.

Mouravieff introduces a new level of pure consciousness above the consciousness of the real I. This is the level of the universal I. Readers can relate this to other Traditions.

Gabriel Derjavine was a Russian poet renowned for his pithy sayings.

I ordered a collection of Mouravieff’s essays in French. If I find anything of interest, I will make it available.

For more information, please see Achieving Gnosis in Practice.

2011-04-102011-04-10

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.

Please click to continue ⇒

2011-04-092017-04-08

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.