Amerika

One of the interesting people out in the internet-world pointed me to An Outline of Modern Occultism by Cyril Scott:

Meanwhile a short exposition of general tenets of Occult Science is expedient before we proceed to consider the details, to compare occult knowledge with scientific knowledge and religious beliefs, and to show the grounds on which that knowledge is based.

1. The occultist holds that Man is in the process of evolving from comparative imperfection to much higher states of physical and spiritual existence.
2. That the evolutionary process in all of its phases is directed by a Great Hierarchy of Intelligences who have themselves reached those higher states.
3. That the world which is perceptible to normal sight is only a small portion of a much greater world which is perceptible to the trained occultist, and comprises the inner and higher planes of consciousness.
4. That the physical body is not the generator of consciousness, as many biologists assert, but only the densest vehicle of consciousness or a “garment” of the immortal soul.
5. That interpenetrating and surrounding the physical body are subtler bodies composed of rarified matter, which are also garments of the soul. These likewise are perceptible to the trained occultist.
6. That the whole Universe is an expression of energy, and that not only the elements, but all beings both embodied and disembodied are storehouses and transformers of energy.
7. That a law of immutable justice and fundamental beneficience, i.e. the law of cause and effect, governs the entire Cosmos, both visible and invisible.

Such then are the tenets which the occultist holds, and that the doctrine of reincarnation is implied must, of course, be evident, since no man could be expected to reach a stage of even comparative perfection during the span of one short life.

In the theory of a Perennialist, all religions are maps to the same territory or instructions written in different languages for the same task. These maps are esoteric, meaning that the knowledge in them is both specific to each individual and expands in plateaus and ascents as the individual gains more knowledge, each stage unlocking the next.

Altogether those mean that religious knowledge will seem like gibberish until we are ready for it, and that not all of us take the same path or reach the same heights, but that we each have a path of destiny to go as far as we can and to serve a role in the wider drama. “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

That being said, the most interesting aspect of the previous document is its reliance on the Platonic idea of cause-and-effect, namely that for each effect that exists in the world, there is one cause, but this does not mean that every effect of that nature has the same cause; sometimes the street is wet because the sprinklers are on, and sometimes because it rained.

Much of the rest seems to be an expression of its time, specifically the idea of evolution and the notion of energy being all that comprises reality. It seems more like that the German Idealists are correct and reality is mind-like or mind-correlative, but by definition we cannot know the thing-in-itself because it does not exist in our world.

If I had to write my own:

1. All parts of the universe are governed by basic laws of logic such as cause-and-effect, a balancing of risk and reward, a seeking of possibilities, and a narrowing of possibilities by comparison to the whole and selection of what is best adapted.
2. Matter, idea, and energy express patterns in parallel that make up our known world, which obeys logical laws, as well as any other worlds we may encounter, although those may have additional attributes. The rules are the same for heavens, afterlives, and life here on Earth.
3. All things in our world have a cause in a much larger space that is invisible to us, and resembles information more than energy or vibrations, although its patterns may be encoded in either. This space relies on our world as a method of testing the consequences of its notions.
4. All things tend toward refinement but without perfection, so that they may stay in a constant state of regeneration instead of decaying through uniformity or randomness.
5. The world operates like a great machine or ecosystem and needs no conscious guidance.
6. There is no such thing as a “trained occultist”; there are initiates of various levels, both vertical and horizontal in measure, which cannot be quantified or understood by outsiders.
7. The goal of all life is to produce pleasure, beauty, and excellence, and it does this through its first principle, which is consistency.
8. Its second principle, proliferation, means that no option exists which will not eventually be explored, and that option is then tested against the whole of reality to see how compatible it is.
9. Humanity is one of many intelligence species, both in space and time, and it is our intelligence that gives us access to higher understanding, but is also our greatest weakness, because we may deceive ourselves with hubris or cleverness that causes us to act outside of our natural role in the hierarchy of nature, humanity, and the divine.
10. After death, we are what we were before birth, a state we can glimpse only through intuition.
11. To develop, we must focus on self-discipline and knowing our intuition and our world, with one acting as a check and balance on the other. Like all things, this is esoteric, with each person taking a different path to the same mental state in degrees regulated by biology, spirit, and will.

With this list of course, occultism crosses over with the big religions, with two major exceptions: it is monist or believes the rules of the universe are consistent between heavens and Earth, and it is esoteric, or acknowledges the differences in individual ability, drive, and results.

Those latter differences make this religion compatible with reality instead of opposed to it.

Long ago, we lived in an Age of Idols where people worshiped stone gods, golden calves, and mystical spears. These objects represented reality as a whole, both physical and metaphysical, and reversed the cause-effect formula of reality: instead of life being an instance of the divine, the divine became something tangible we could hold.

In that way, representation served as a means for humans to have power over the gods.

The age before that, the Age of Naturalism, consisted of worship of nature-gods like the sun, wind, rain, moon, and seas. These gods were seen as having no central locus, therefore were represented by daily events, but not embodied in them. This allowed the human mind to accept the gods as unknowable and seen only through patterns in the world.

When the Age of Idols took over, with its talismans and scapegoats, the relationship to nature was inverted.

After that came the Age of Symbols, which really was an extension of the Age of Idols, but the ikons became abstract but retained their tangibility because they were concepts which were easy to the human mind: even division, inclusion of all, universal rules, and proscribed methods. They were still controlled by the user.

Not surprisingly, the Age of Symbols produced a time in which humans rationalized or adapted the symbol to what they desired, and used it to argue for the moral rightness of their desires. An explosion of appetites and lusts followed and religions attempted to control them with bureaucratic committee-styled reams of rules.

Even worse, because the symbol contained that inverted representation inherited from the ikons, humans placed themselves in a position of control over nature and the divine, at least in human minds.

We are now leaving the Age of Symbols because it has failed us, since it leads naturally to binaries like good/evil which are used to control each other, something that is negative mostly because it distracts from the focus from having positive goals. Symbols bring about a negative morality through the talisman-scapegoat dichotomy.

Even more, the symbols no longer serve us. They were there for us to control the world by wrapping it up in little human mental devices. With the rise of organized society and technology, the symbols began to lose relevance. Now that they offer us no power, we no longer believe in them, although this is taking time to shake out.

Religion forms part of the core of a culture. The religion must come from the culture; it cannot come from abroad. It cannot clash with the culture, and it cannot clash with reality. It must be a tool for enhancing our understanding and enjoyment of life. Perhaps the future belongs to religions which more of a naturalistic bent.

Tags: german idealism, occultism, perennialism, religion, spirituality, thing-in-itself

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