The coronavirus has occasioned many interpretations across the broadest range of contexts. These include biological and economical, political and geopolitical, societal, historical, philosophical and, occasionally, metaphysical ones. Such reflections inevitably lead to a reassessment of the fundamental elements of what is most often referred to as our current reality.
Naturally, the higher the context for the narrative, the clearer the picture we get. Let’s notice, however, that the hierarchy of contexts depicts distinct world-views. To use two extreme examples, a narrative derived from a purely biological context is reflective of a mostly materialistic world-view, while a metaphysical narrative may only derive from a (subjective) idealist one. Also, it is possible to provide a biological, a historical, a societal, even an economical narrative from both a naïve realist and a subjective idealist point of view – to stick to extreme examples – while it is not possible to provide an accurate metaphysical narrative from a materialistic point of view, which, alas, doesn’t prevent people from attempting such a bravado.
In the same token, for someone with a naïve realist world-view it is impossible to understand a pure metaphysical narrative, while those few with a truly subjective idealist worldview, which is the most universal in scope and validity, have no problem understanding practically any narrative. (Understandably, such people rarely provide narratives to the “general public”.)
Perhaps it becomes evident why this is so if we consider something that at first glance seems unrelated to worldviews: the Yugas. Namely, each Yuga is defined by a particular worldview. The worldview of the Golden Age is almost inexpressible, but if we want to be precise, we’d offer Andras Laszlo’s nuanced definition for consideration: “metidealismus transscendentali-immanentalis et immanentali-transcendentalis theurgo-magico-solipsisticus absolutus” – a special category within – or rather above – subjective idealism. The worldview of the Kali Yuga is also almost inexpressible, but for a different reason: its characteristic, especially in its terminal phase, is precisely the lack of worldview, or views in general. However, we must be aware of nuances in the sense that with the unfolding of a particular Yuga, more and more inferior worldviews manifest themselves: at the beginning subjective idealism tend to dominate even the initial phase of Kali Yuga(s)[1], gradually giving way to other worldviews, for example, to objective idealism, and then to various forms of realisms until reaching the state where no views dominate anymore.
Naturally, a “no-view” is also a view, both literally and in the sense that people with no articulated views act as media for spreading well definable, exclusively false views. Why are we so sure about this? Paradoxically, it’s impossible to “spread” correct views, i.e. views that reflect the Truth, passively, as a medium: intellectual passivity corrupts worldviews. Also, when the views are the result of an intellectual ascesis, one doesn’t want to persuade, but to live according to these views. This is why it’s preferable to represent false views with full conviction (presupposing an intellectually active stance) than to passively accept correct views.
Sacred texts provide evidence that people at the beginning of the cycles fully understood the law of degeneration and provided accurate descriptions of the subsequent phases of a given Yuga. On the other hand, there is ample evidence that modern man with his materialistic worldview does not understand past eras – his own past, that is.
How far these views are from each other is well symbolized by the length of the Yugas, which, when properly considered, have symbolic value. For example, the Kali Yuga of Maha-yuga (the big Kali Yuga, which was preceded by three, increasingly longer Maha Yugas) is 648,000 years. This big Kali-Yuga, consists four smaller eras, the last of which is the small Kali-Yuga (Alpa Kali-Yuga), which is 64,800 years long. This in turn consists of:
- a very small Golden Age (alpalpa krta-yuga), which is 25,920 years long, followed by
- a very small Silver Age (alpalpa treta-yuga), which is 19,440 years long, followed by
- a very small Bronze Age (alpalpa dvapara-yuga), which is 12,960 years long, followed by
- a very small Dark Age (alpalpa kali-yuga), which is 6,480 years long.
We are living in this very small Dark Age, which started, depending on the point of view, either in 4182, or in 3102 or in 2022 BC[2] . This is already ungraspable for modern historians, not to mention the big Yugas prior, in which case we’re looking at “numbers” in the magnitude of hundreds of millions of years, or, ultimately, quadrillion years – and this is still incomparably small when compared to the concept of Aeternitas[3]. Let’s note that the materialistic worldview has no sense of time: beyond a certain threshold time becomes an abstraction for modern man, both in terms of history and physics.
We must keep in mind that the Yugas also express a particular mode of consciousness and existence – and this is precisely what we may approach with our consideration of Weltanschauung. If we consider time in a symbolical sense, we may say that the mode of consciousness of man of the Kali Yuga is quadrillions of years away from the mode of consciousness of man of the Golden Age. At the risk of being accused of simplification, we may say that by successfully actualizing a theurgo-magico-solipsistic worldview, we recreate the Golden Age in ourselves.
Actualizing a Weltanschauung is more than accepting it; accepting it is a significant and complex intellectual step, but it’s not enough. The Weltanschauung must become Seinanschauung, Seinanschauung must become Seinerfahrung, and Seinerfahrung must become Seinverwirklichung. The various forms of naïve realism are the de facto actualization of a void, a lack of Dasein – something quite paradoxical, but something that explains modern man’s lack of views and abstract self-experience, which, on this trajectory, inevitably wanes into the sub-human domain.
It follows that the world looked very different at the beginning of the current Dark Age than it looks today: people’s worldview and general experience of themselves and the world was also very different from that of our contemporaries. The further we go back in time, through the various very small Yugas, small Yugas and Yugas, the more this is so. Thus the very small Golden Age within the small Kali Yuga of the Kali Yuga of Maha Yuga (the closest Golden Age to us) was significantly different from the very small Dark Age, which we’re living in, and the very small Golden Age of the small Kali Yuga of the Bronze Age differed even more so from our current era, etc.
How should we imagine the differences?
With the unfolding of the Yugas, man’s power in terms of creation, sustenance and destruction (three aspects of power) has gradually diminished. The difference between man and God may be conceived as a degree of power in this sense. A note for clarification: from His own point of view, God is Self. From man’s point of view as a creature, the Self is God. Man’s ultimate aim is to become – by achieving ever-higher degrees of freedom – what he essentially is: the Self.
Taken man’s condition in the current age as one extreme and God as the other, let’s have a look at these three aspects of power.
Creation
“In the highest degree and as the first step, man creates his incarnation; then – descending lower – he chooses it; descending even lower, he freely accepts it; descending even lower than this, he involuntarily takes notice of it: maybe he would like to, but he can’t avoid it; descending even lower than before, he meets it; and finally, he unconsciously falls into his incarnation – into that which originally was freely created by him.”[4]
Man’s incarnation includes his world. Man is not born into a (material) world that pre-exists before his manifestation. Flesh, besides the body, also denotes the corporeal world. Creation takes place by an act of will and this will is reflected in everything that exists. Modern man, however, is not aware of his will, even though, in a certain sense, his whole world is testament to it.
Manifestation, including both the corporeal and non-corporeal worlds (but excluding the created, but non-formal realm), is not universal: it doesn’t contain all potentials, only a range of potentials specific to this particular manifestation.
In the Golden Age man was able to freely return to the Self – the bridges were intact, so to speak. He created himself and his world and, if he wanted, he could return to his state as creator. He could experience himself both as creator and as a creature. As a creator, he possessed the power of creation, as a creature he perceived the world as contained in himself. Man was conscious of both states, even simultaneously.
Naturally, in a state of high creative power one controls what gets manifested out of the range of potentials available to a particular manifestation. The rest is kept on the level of potentialities. The power to keep things in potential is the power of creation itself. Being constantly in such a dominant position means that time as steaming durance (duration fluens) becomes slower and time as a cycle becomes longer.
One of Schuon’s insights[5] is fitting here to describe the moment that in a sense gave birth to the Yugas: “…the symbology of the Adamic androgyne and the creation of Eve may be useful here: only after Love separated itself from Knowledge – meaning that Intelligence and Will turned in opposition – was and is it possible for temptation and the fall to occur. In a certain sense, through the interference of the will – seduced and freed by the serpent from below – the rational faculty got separated from intelligence, which means that it became possible for it to choose between right and wrong; once it became possible to choose wrong, it was necessary for a forceful seduction to appear; reason, i.e. wisdom according to the flesh, is a “natural” child that was born from Adam’s sin. The snake here is equivalent to what the Hindus understand by Tamas: a descending, dark, pressing and in the same time diffusing and dissolving tendency, which, in its personal aspect, appears as Satan. The question: “why is there evil?” may be reduced to the question: “why is there Dasein?” The serpent is in Paradise because Paradise exists. Without the serpent, Paradise would be God.”
Our current age is sometimes described as “promiscuous” from the point of view that there is almost no control over the flow of manifestations: more and more phenomena becomes manifest at an increasingly frenzied pace. Will becomes corrupted, knowledge is forgotten and as soon as the ego emerges, it succumbs to something that’s experienced as Other than the Self, which increasingly dominates it to the degree, that the ego identifies with the Other, rather than with the Self. In this weakened state, the ego becomes a passive witness of the world, merely suffering an increasingly poisonous existence.
Perhaps it won’t be superfluous to highlight for emphasis: phenomena like various epidemics and certain diseases (e.g. cancer); certain animal and plant species, like, for example, wasp or weed; the lowest castes; the high level of solidity of the material world and constricting natural laws are characteristic to the Kali Yuga only, which is, from this point of view, rightly referred to as the age of released poisons, i.e. potentialities that previously, when man’s power of creation was stronger, were kept in the domain of potentialities.
Sustenance
To consider the power of sustaining the world seems paradoxical from the point of view of man who forgot his Self as the creator, and is merely an observer of the flow of events happening to him. If man can’t perceive himself to be the creator, he can’t perceive himself to be the sustainer of the world, either; in the same token, if he can return to his Self, he can experience himself both as creator and as the sustainer of the world. It is infinitely more difficult from his lost and powerless position to approach the Self as creator. There are somewhat more possibilities available for him to perceive the Self as the sustainer of the world, and this is precisely the angle traditional doctrines take to guide those few who may still be able to actualize themselves.
To acquire the power of sustaining the world, man performs subtle operations on himself, taking control of his thinking, sensing/feeling, perception, and volition. When it comes to volition, the dilemma is the following: “I am not an active participant in the world, the world is just happening to me.” (The subject and the object is separate.) The formula of the solution is the following: “Everything there is, is my will. I will the world”. This formula may trigger a sense of alertness, waking man up from his daydream. All rituals aim at waking man up and keeping him in a state of alert, including prayers, meditation and contemplation. A good life in this sense is one that is lived by trying to remember and, ideally, remembering God or the Self – continuously. As shown earlier, the difference is a question of worldviews. Remembering oneself as the Self (subjective idealism), in this age, is infinitely more difficult than to remember God (objective idealism). However, one may reach the former through the practice of the latter.
In the course of this practice subtle, but significant changes take place in one’s experience of Being (Seinerfahrung) and actualization of Being (Seinsverwirklichung). Events – the Heideggerian Ereignis – present themselves that temporarily – even if just for a moment – remove the very conditions that determine the ego, which experiences a flesh of intuition about a particular aspect of the Self: man remembers. This experience has longer or shorter consequences: a sense of freedom bursts forth that shakes the very foundations of the world and one’s view on it. Possibilities open up that defy the ossified assumptions of false worldviews. For example, it turns out that it’s possible to clear the streets of the swirling crowds almost overnight – even in the most tourist-infected cities; more importantly, one also remembers that this event is willed by the Self. The mechanical processes that lead to such an Event – for Homo Viator, man on his way of becoming the Self – are not important in the face of the power that manifests itself in one’s consciousness. An Event is a possibility for man to wake up to the power of the Self and conquer it.
Of course, when life is ritualized all events are Events. Routine is the opposite of rituals: it may only dominate when the subject is powerless towards the world and views it with an ontological indifference and, let’s not forget, with an existential fear. Rituals, in the proper sense, help man conquering the power of creation and sustenance. To perform rituals man must be awake. He puts himself in the position of the creator above time, thus his acts become eternal, imitating the very first acts of God[6]. When one’s thinking, feeling, sensing, willing, as well as his waking up, cleaning and cleansing, working, resting, etc. are ritualized, man gets closer to the Golden Age and his life is not a promiscuous, uncontrolled, indifferent flow of events. Instead, everything reminds him of God and he consciously perceives various aspects of the Absolute: Beauty, Truth, Love, Hope, Faith.
Aspects of the Absolute may be transcended. At this stage the Self is virtually actualized with only Power (Potentia Pura) remaining to be conquered.
All traditional doctrines agree that for transcending the human state man[7] must create a counter-pole for the Will of the Self. When successful, one kills the ego. This counter-pole is a lack of intent. Fiat voluntas tua may be thought of as Voluntas tua voluntas mea est.
Destruction
Potentia Pura or Prima Materia: not only the principle of matter, the principle of woman, but the principle of any manifestation on any level of Being; even the principle of non-Being. It is the first act of the Absolute: Its negative image. Absolute power capable of manifesting anything. When it’s considered by itself, it is absolute nothing. The return to the Self leads through Potentia Pura. Destruction is Hermetic Incest: the Son penetrates Pure Potential – from which He comes into Being – in its virgin aspect in order to become – as the totality of all potentials – the Father, i.e. the Self. This return is the principle of destruction.
When man ritualizes his life by turning towards God, he destroys his conditioned self. As a progression of this step, when man identifies with the Self, man sustains the world. When man returns to his Self, man destroys the world. In this position, the power of creation, sustenance and destruction becomes one, and Creation, Sustenance and Destruction become the naked principles of all Events.
[1] Fundamentally, one’s worldview is determined by one’s experience (of the self, of the world, of Being). Man’s actual power in the Golden Age corresponds to subjective idealism, man’s lack of power and corresponding experience in the Dark Age is reflected in the opposite view: materialism. On the other hand, hard and complex as it may be, changing one’s worldview affects one’s experience of oneself, the world and Being.
[2] Source: Baranyi Tibor Imre: Fejlődő Létrontás és Örök Hagyomány
[3] Laszlo Andras, Solum Ipsum, 761: (The hierarchical grades of infinite time) Aeternitas is a timeless, and super-temporal, absolute and endless time. Aeviternitas is endless time manifesting together with time considered from the side of timelessness, while sempiternitas is endless time manifesting together with time, considered from the side of time. Perpetualitas is considered to be an endless duration, while diuturnitas is a finite but very long duration. Perennitas – that is eternally valid – is the light and imprint of aeternitas on time.
[4] Andras Laszlo’s Solum Ipsum, aphorism 118
[5] Gnosis – Göttliche Weisheit
[6] See Mircea Eliade: The Myth of Eternal Return
[7] Only those may be considered man whose aim is self-realization, i.e. the realization of the Self.
PRAGUE CONSERVATIVE CIRCLE 