God: This means, that the soul is perpetually in the content bliss of metaphysical joy, thus the ego, the machine being driven by the will of the soul, is to be constructed in a way that its cognitive faculties are apt to experiencing reality as it is, making reality manifest as it is. Making the ego capable of operating the values of the soul, if you will. What is needed from the soul is programming, just pure programming. Every internal conflict of values will create at least a bug, even make the whole system crash – go crazy, self destruct. Ego cannot alone build a solid base, it needs the soul to drive it to create a true paradigm of reality
The ego twists itself away from reality, being unable to relax in its inbuilt survival instincts inherited from animals, being just a new version of a system based in the same code - whilst the soul does not need to bother with survival, assuming now it being eternal. See a conflict of interests here?
Julius, can we read between your lines the meaning of the lineage behind this d n a?
Julius Evola: The qualities that characterize the aristocrat and the warrior (rather than the priest strictly speaking) and that, once integrated in the sacred, reproduce the 'solar' peak of spirituality, are the foundation of the well-known fact that in the highest traditions the priests, in the higher sense of the word, were chosen only from among the patrician families; initiation and the transmission of transcendent knowledge was reserved to these families alone
God: Genes are said to thrive towards survival, towards domination, pretty much like the ego does. Dear Ayn, could you elaborate why would art serve survival?
Ayn Rand: Just as man's physical survival depends on his own effort, so does his psychological survival. Man faces two corollary independent fields of action in which a constant exercise of choice and a constant creative process are demanded of him: the world around him and his own soul (by soul I mean his consciousness). Just as he has to produce the material values he needs to sustain his life, so he has to acquire the values of character that enable him to sustain it and that make his life worth living
He has to discover both - and translate them into reality - and survive by shaping the world and himself in the image of his values
God: Does this mean that a man needs to aim at the true metaphysical joy to be seen in the horizon of existence, just to keep going?
Does this mean a man needs ideals?
Ayn Rand: Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal. Without the assistance of art, ethics remains in the position of theoretical engineering;
art is the model builder
Wikipedia: Iddhi is a Buddhist term which refers to supernormal powers. These powers are physical, as opposed to mental
Julius Evola: Other iddhi considered by the texts consist of appearing and disappearing, of walking on water without sinking, of moving great distances in a moment, of 'wielding power over one's body right up to the world of Brahma (namely THE unconditioned state)'
In order to understand that such phenomena are possible we must start from the production of the body 'made of mind.' In the text to which we are principally referring this state occurs immediately after the contemplation-projection of one's own person and is given in the following terms:
'With this firm, purified, tense, sincere, unblemished, malleable, ductile, compact, incorruptible mind, he [the ascetic] turns toward the production of a body made of mind. From his body he extracts another body having all its organs and all its faculties, furnished with form, but supersensible, made of mind'
God: I can only go along with you if you speak about mind as I speak about ego construcion. On my opinion, it comes down to the base which is to become complete, greased motor producing sweet harmony. The ego, the car if you will, needs to function properly and be as reliable as possible, for the soul to manifest itself in action and in character. Ego needs knowledge to derive from, to not to get tangled into the obstacles of this material world. The more it knows, the smoother it operates (also, obviously, the knowledge needs to be harmonized in order for the machine to work properly)
Ayn Rand: Growing from a common root, which is philosophy, man's knowledge branches out in two directions. One branch studies the physical world or the phenomena pertaining to man's physical existence; the other studies man or the phenomena pertaining to his consciousness. The first leads to abstract science, which lead to applied science or engineering, which leads to technology - to the actual production of material values. The second leads to art
Art is the technology of the soul
God: Psyche of the ego is the machine to drive, and for it to work well we need art, which is in its best when providing an experience of that dear metaphysical joy. This is only possible if the work of art is created by the soul using all the incredible faculties of the ego - the memory as a treasure chest to be looted with associative abilities, the senses as a tool to know how to draw the attention to give even the brutest of brutes a glimpse of the bliss of reality, and the logic to master time and space, just to mention few
Immanuel Kant: Time and space are two sources of knowledge, from which, a priori, various synthetical cognitions can be drawn. The sphere of phenomena is the only sphere of their validity, and if we venture out of this, no further objective use can be made of them
Ayn Rand: If man experiences an emotion without existential objects, its only other possible object is the state or action of his own consciousness. Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man's concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts
Julius Evola: I have previously pointed out that the difference between traditional and modern man is not simply a matter of mentality and type of civilization; rather, the difference concerns the experiential possibilities available to each and the way which the world of nature is experienced according to the categories of perception and the fundamental relationship between I and not-I. For traditional man space, time and causality had a very different character than they have in the experience of modern man
The mistake of epistemology of Kant is to assume that these fundamental forms of human experience have always remained the same
God: The capacity to convert experiences into parts of a coherent system can be seen flowing in both ways - towards integration and disintegration. Those of us who take time and space more seriously seem to be thinking that this process is seen in both the lives of individuals and the products of society, I mean, art
Surveillance: Kant, you can walk into the oven now
Immanuel Kant: Yes
God: Wait wait wait, let the man say what he has to say on aesthetics before leaving our company!
Immanuel Kant: In order to prevent any misunderstanding, it will be requisite, in the first place, to recapitulate, as clearly as possible, what my opinion is with respect to the fundamental nature of our sensuous cognition in general
Our intuition is nothing but the representation of phenomena; that the things which we intuite, are not in themselves the same as our representations of them in intuition, nor are their relations in themselves so constituted as they appear to us; and that if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear; and that these, as phenomena, cannot exist in themselves, but only in us
Erwin Schrödinger: I have a cat that is...
Immanuel Kant: What may be the nature of objects considered as things in themselves and without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility is quite unknown to us
God: To finish this half-baked notion I have to remind that it is in the interest of the ego to remain in the sphere of space and time - for, well, it is most likely the easiest place to hang around in for the I's
Julius Evola: In speaking of 'I' one can no longer concretely understand the ātmā, the unconditioned principle; that it appeared no longer as direct consciousness; and that therefore, apart from speculation, it could only be considered as an end, as the limit of a process of reintegration with action as its basis
Ayn Rand: Disintegration is the preface to the death of a human mind
A sense of life is not an irreducible primary, but a very complex sum; it can be felt, but it cannot be understood, by an automatic reaction: to be understood, it has to be analyzed, identified and verified conceptually. That automatic impression - of oneself and of others - is only a lead; left untranslated, it can be a very deceptive lead. But if and when that intangible impression is supported by and unites with the conscious judgment of one's mind the result is the most exultant for of certainty one can ever experience
it is the integration of mind and values
Disintegration is the keynote an goal of modern art – the disintegration of man's conceptual faculty, and the retrogression of an adult mind to the state of a mewling infant
Julius Evola: We are entitled to ask ourselves under these circumstances, what a system, based rigorously on knowledge, free from elements of both faith and intellectualism, not tied to local organized tradition, but in reality directed toward the unconditioned, may have to offer. It is evident that this path is only suited to a very small minority, gifted with exceptional interior strength
God: I believe Julius is speaking about the unconditioned in the same way that I spoke about the soul, and how Rand speaks about values. Immanuel, I am sorry but I refuse to try to comprehend your a priori but have a hunch it might almost align with us
Michael Jackson: The meaning of life is contained in every single expression of life. It is present in the infinity of forms and phenomena that exist in all of creation
Surveillance: Michael Jackson is more better at being diplomatic than God
