What Lies Ahead?

4 Responses

1. Excellent.

   Too bad, too many  of our "leaders" have sucumbed to PC cultural suicide.

   Only lots of blood will save the West.

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2. Typically (for David Gontar) brilliant, thoughtful and thought-provoking. The warnings are relevant and necessary. Thank you as always.

   One lighter thought: I might add the words "happiness in and… " to the phrase "pride of sexual differences" ??

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3. Brilliant piece.

   On the statement about Islam being an idea, an archetype, or a permanent possibility of being.

   Is Islam an idea or an archetype? No. But Islam has within it and beyond it something approximating to an archetype, an idea, an essence. Real, living essences, be it noted, surely are not absolutely pure, and in that sense are not strictly essences, at least as the term is often understood in philosophy. But approximations to purity can come close enough to merit the name "essence" nevertheless, as long as one recognizes this name is not absolutely, but approximately literal. 

   Islam is not entirely a permanent possibility, of course. In significant measure it is a particular, time-bound, manifestation of the more permanent possibility of evil. Islam's archetype or idea is perhaps a living, demon-like being in the spiritual world. After all, if we want to get beyond abstractions in talking about archetypes and ideas, what are we really talking about? What is meant by a living idea or archetype? Perhaps we must start conceiving of spiritual beings, which is to say something rather different from the realm of ideas as ordinarily experienced. Ordinary ideas in ordinary consciousness, let it be suggested, are the corpses of living "ideas" that are qualitatively infinitely rich, ever new, and real, every bit as real and variegated as the realm of visible nature. Thinking, I am suggesting, is the nearest and lowest layer of a higher, living, non-physical world.

   What "archetype" do we see manifesting in Islam? We see "demonic" beings of both the "right" and "left." Some have referred to these violently opposed, yet often colluding spiritual beings under the name Lucifer and Ahriman. The soul states of devout Muslims of the Middle East are often "luciferic." By contrast Islam as a doctrine is "ahrimanic." Lucifer feels a certain arrogant aloofness toward the material world, and seeks to avoid or retard incarnation. Lucifer wishes to remain in the past away from matter and in a false, utterly subjective kind of spirituality. Lucifer seeks to escape the advance of time. Ahriman seeks the opposite — to jump into the farthest future and reject entirely the past. He is thus the patron of revolutionary utopias. He is equally behind the idea of communist paradise and what Muslims consider to be "God's law," Sharia, as distinct from human legislation.  Communist revolutionaries and jihadists have some key motivations and beliefs in common (as Bernard Lewis noted long ago). Ahriman is a force behind both. Ahriman also seeks to persuade human beings, often in convoluted and indirect fashion, that spirit does not exist, only matter. One can see this in the Islamic idea of paradise, where sexual bliss and many very earthly comforts and pleasures are center stage. One can see this also indirectly in the Islamic prohibition on the graphic portrayal of ensouled beings. Muslims thus become in some respects masters of abstract, dead patterns (as in Arabesques), which by subterranean influence have contributed to scientistic materialism as life philosophy taken for granted by many people today in the non-Muslim world. Lucifer and Ahriman, though mutually hostile, sometimes collude. These are perhaps the "archetypes" behind Islam.

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4. Addendum to my earlier comment.

   The center cannot hold — Lucifer and Ahriman pull in opposite directions with passionate intensity. Christ holds the balance between Lucifer and Ahriman. Christ holds the center.

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