Schopenhauer and Mysticism
But in the end, much of what makes up the occult are stories. They are narratives designed to transmit something. They are signals that relay a common purpose to reach alterity and make contact. Not so far removed from the use of Scriptures in some religious systems or the deploying of Mandalas in others. The narratives say something about the human condition and the need for supernatural agency. Because believe it or not, there is a real need for ‘Otherness’ in the human condition. This need manifests in the creation of subatomic particles by physicists to explain the universe. It is also evident in the ritualization of myth and folklore into daily lives. It is a need to be moved. Within this pathos is an appeal to communicate a specific feeling. In answer to this appeal, Man creates temple complexes with clear lines that demarcate sacred from the profane. Such is the case at the ‘Villa of the Mysteries’ at Pompeii .
Artistic iconography at the Villa transmits the pathos of life and fertility. As Carl Jung remarked, “Here death is embedded by a female demon, with great black wings, visibly thwarted by the erect phallus of the sacred basket” (Jung 1964). The story portrayed in the Villa walls is one initiation and it conjures the feeling of initiation. The ritual and the subjective experience of undergoing an initiatory journey converge to form an event. And this is the goal of occult pathos. Here there is no separation of object and subject. As Eliade states, “By virtue of his initiation, the neophyte attained to another mode of being; he became equal to the gods, was one with the gods” (Eliade 1989). The ritual and its experience are one in the same. I call this merging the occult law of convergence.
The Object Subject dichotomy is a classic philosophical problem that sometimes manifests in reconciliation of contrasts (duality). Ideas of plurality and distinction are considered mere appearances that distract the practitioner from attaining the oneness or at-one-ment of the sacred. Schopenhauer suggested that when someone mediates, they come into the contact with the Will. This Will is the life-force of that person. He wrote that “it is what is innermost, the kernel of each individual thing and equally of the whole. It is manifest in every blindly working force of nature; it is manifest, also, in the considered deeds of man” (Schopenhauer 1844). The Will, according to Schopenhauer, is that piece of sanctity and fire of life that everybody is born with. A spark of the divine, it is the gnosis and sublimity of being at one with the universe. He goes on to state that
Up to now, the concept Will has been subsumed under the concept Force; but I am using it just the opposite way, and mean that every force in nature is to be understood as a function of Will. For at the back of the concept Force there is finally our visual knowledge of the objective world, i.e. of some phenomenon, something seen. It is from this that the concept Force derives…whereas the concept Will, on the contrary, is the one, among all possible concepts, that does not derive from the observation of phenomena, not from mere visual knowledge, but comes from inside, emerges from the immediate consciousness of each one of us: not as a form, not even in terms of the subject-object relationship, but as that which he himself is; for here the knower and the known are the same. (Ibid)
Akin to the Hindu Brahman, the Will makes distinctions between the Self and the universe unnecessary. Being the universal spirit and the feeling of being in that state are one in the same and anything else is either paradox or absurdity.
A well written piece,,,the Self only knows itself from narrative,it is the language that our subconscious communicates to us in.
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