When last we left my reflections on David Beth\’s essay introducing Craig Williams Cave of the Numinous we had begun to touch on what is referred to as \’night-consciousness\’. Feel free to re-read Part 1 to refresh your memory, because I think this is vitally important – we\’ve discussed the logocentric concept of spirit, and the tension betwixt it and the soul. We\’ve seen how the quintessential \’I\’-ness of Ego has its interplay with the acquistiveness and self-referential nature of the monoculture which attempts to conquer and subvert all others into itself.

\”Rather than recognizing and realizing the immediacy and non-deducibility of the thoroughly sacred and enthusing World-All (Welt-All), man, under the yoke of the spirit now tries to deduce the phenomena of the world from one cause.\” – David Beth, Supreme Katabasis: Kaivalya and the Kosmic Gnosis

It\’s interesting to me that Welt-All is used as a descriptor. Long before I had  encountered the Kosmic Gnosis, I called the dynamic beingness of the world, the All-at-Once. It was the only way I could express the multi-directional nature of the raw experience, the  awe-inspiring interdependency of origination. One could not, I realised, divide a leaf from a tree, a hand from an arm; the sheer breadth of contact between all things required no lines of thought connecting points together for causation, but whole inhabitable realms and planes of in-betweens and throughouts. As an analogy, each atom is mostly combosed of space, a fuzzy might-be-ness that belies analytical notions of fixedness and solidity. To be able to immerse onself in that flux hiding within notions of form would be to participate  in \”the holistic visionary experience of the living daemonic souls/images.\”  This to me is the \”World of Essences, of ever-changing and unique ensouled images (which communicate themselves to the soul)\” as David puts it.

The sheer onrush of existence has not only been denied us, whe have been taught to fear the unmooring from restraint that it brings. Our senses are contoured and bound into reflexive action and response – the biological feed-back loops and responses have been sealed away from our awareness by carefully crafted epistemolgies designed to preserve the status quo – stillness, stasis, quietude and passivity have been cast like a cloak over the raw flux of Life. In curtaining away the animating axiomata, the manifold streams that feed  into the soul  which we call the Life Principle, a fear of death this been engendered.  This fear echoes forth into all attempts to apprehend meaning – we grasp it in a death-grip so as not to be lost in the onslaught of nihilism. The  acquistiveness of the ego becomes the terror of loss, of nothingness.

We fear blindness, absence, disability, impairment. We fear that which we believe may be taken from us, mistakenly believing that anything can be granted to us in the first place. As if we believe, deep down beyond all conception, that some vast Absolute must be appeased in order for us to  continue. As if we have completed all the metamorphoses we shall ever undergo and are now inviolate, pinnacles of creation. Is this not ego mirrored again?

\”What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under...\” – Nietzsche

It is this in-betweeness, the intermediary state, which spirit denies us – neither one thing nor the other, but always Ourselves. In this, the distinction between the aloneness of the Kosmic Gnostic and the inflation of the egoic-I-ness found in modern conceptions of the individual is made quite clear. Within the realms of existence, we are estranged from the default, instead seeking a methodical subversion of those habituated and habilitated calls-and-responses in the echo chamber of the Kali Yuga.

\”Kaivalya in our system encompases both \’isolation\’ and \’alienation\’. Rather than signifying any kind of metaphysical escapism, the kosmic \’isolation\’ implies a supreme distinction and awakening: The kosmic isolation is the distinction of the soul from the spirit.\” David Beth, Ibid

Such a distinction requires rigorous work – our actions, thoughts and responses must be examined repeatedly throughout our travels on the path, not for moral or ethical purposes, but for those of evaluation. This does not mean that this evaluation prices a certain kind of behaviour or process over another; to do so would be antithetical to the necessities behind such observations. Perhaps for this reason, as Craig mentions in the Cave of the Numinous,  the \’shutting up of the senses\’ can be key.

This hermetic hermitage of the senses is a systematic process of creating a kind of metaphorical \’clean room\’ in which the mindstream may be observed without judgement, allowing one to purge the secondhand ersatz images of perception. Once these have been allowed to dissolve, the practitioner will often find primordial insights arising independently. With practice and refinement, these insights may be used to further them in their gnostic coup d\’etat:

\”The grand awakening  of the soul and the successful gnostic coup d\’etat against the tyranny of the spirit grant the sorcerer the crucial continuity  and stability for his explorations of both the inner and outer realms and protects him from losing his way in the very dangerous maze of the occult labyrinth.\”

Here perhaps we should mention the fact that night-conscousness, full of its ensouled images, can be a subtly seductive and dangerous state. Suddenly opened the the fury of the elemental essences which are revealed and mirrored in the coming-together of soul, one inhabits a fierce realm, full the the brim with living entities. No more do the rules of civilisation apply – the supremacy of the individual so extolled by a world so rooted in dayside consciousness means little here.  It is easy to be overwhelmed, stunned by the terrible immensity of the vital kosmos, and the protections so beloved by modernity hold little sway. Ego inflation, parasitisation and delusion are all possibilities for those who do not have the wherewithal to undergo the necessary reconfigurations of their notions of themselves.

For this reason it is important that one have proper structure and forms of transmission and empowerment awoken in oneself by a qualified teacher who recognises the unique make up of the student and has the proper authority to order and arrange things correctly so that the student may achieve maximal protection and effectiveness. This is the root of all true traditions, rather than blind mimesis  and cargo-cultery. Through work, proper intiations and revelation of certain symbols and rituals inextricably linked with primordial images, one achieves a level of kaivalya that renders them  sui-generis.

\”Totally alienated not from his body, his soul or the the soul(s) of other(s) but from the clutches of the enslaving spirit, the gnostic Sorcerer becomes completely differentiated as a particular and non-repeatable being.\”

In this we thus find that individuality as the ego would have it is akin to severing one\’s limbs and expecting the body to function – there is a reason that certain shamanic practices involve dismemberment and reconstruction by spirits into a primordial form. Instead, sorcerer acknowledges and works with the ancestral primordial paths of their own embodied irruption of the kosmos, serving as a transmission station in ways that are currently beyond the scope of this piece.  The multiplicity involved in these practices does not in fact destroy the ego, but places it in its proper context of the realised wholism.

No longer does it seek to be supreme, but instead  to serve the creative and magical impulses of the soul. The bond between spirit, soul and body becomes like unto a blood-brotherhood as the seemingly separate  is brought together and infused with the bloodglow which lights the way and serves as beacon to all other kindred throughout space and time. In this way the sorcerer becomes the vanguard of a horde of holy powers – the spear that opens and the cup that overflows and causes the blood to well forth, sanctifying all actions.

\”The katabasis into the primordial arche through magical realization and recollection produces the radiation of the mysterious blood-lamp. The magical glow generated by the inner and outer kosmic soul substance within the blood and the sexual fluids of the adepts of the eternal flame which never extinguishes or exhausts and which is a symbol of the Open Life: The Dead manifesting within the Living, the Past in the Present, Eternal Becoming.\”

This then is the action of the kosmogonic eros – the constant erotic coming together of polar souls,  the \”passive and pathic soul of the initiate with the active, inseminating soul of the daemonic opposite.\” The Kosmic Gnostic perceives and experiences the kosmos not as a simple abstract principle, but as a lover, with all that creativity, inventiveness and mystery that such a thing as that entails. This why we rebel against transcendence, for we would spend countless existences entwined with that which Loves and is Loving.

This is why we plunge into night-consciousness, beginning the merciless path with recognition of our total weakness in the face  of something unutterably vast and ancient that it could annhilate us without a thought. In this we surrender and devote ourselves to the myriad congeries and configurations and contacts of soul.

Many thanks for reading, friends. I hope my small reflections have been enjoyable.

Be seeing you.