The Most Good You Can Do for the World
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We are now in the midst of an upsurge of biopolitics again, where our biology is now being controlled: we can be told to wear masks, to be locked down, to be mandatorily vaccinated with something that hasn’t even been approved or approved to be valid—but we have to trust the elite when they tell us this is science. We’re not allowed to think for ourselves. And so this biopolitical shift in society was noted by Foucault, and it was a very important development that philosophers up until then had overlooked.
Well, the situation, of course, became worse and worse through the years, and it wasn’t long until an Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, developed an idea that the social elite want even more than that—they want to be able to reduce you to what he called “bare life”: to be less than an animal, to be able to be put in a concentration camp, put a number on you, be treated completely without concern for your subjectivity whatsoever. He saw that this was a part of the death drive now taking over. We could call this thanatopolitics. And he saw this—what had already arrived—but he saw this becoming normalized.
And from there, it was a few years later before another thinker, Achille Mbembe, invented a term of necropolitics, which is not only that are they doing this for particular cases, but there is an enmity, a hatred of the adult, the grown being, the being who can think for himself or herself, that threatens the system, who will often be terminated with extreme prejudice. There was a politics of killing. The death drive became aggressively activated in the social order. And he saw this developing ever more and becoming collectivized. And this developed even further into a total nihilopolitics, in which we have completely lost all meaning, all sense of values, all understanding of what constitutes a human. Recently, we saw in the US, the Supreme Court Justice couldn’t define a woman—we can’t even have gender determinations—the buddhi has been completely undone, and no one is able to think clearly about anything anymore, including, you don’t know if you’re a man or a woman, and you don’t know if those terms even have any meaning any longer.
So all of the social order has been deconstructed and destroyed so that we are not able to think, we’re not able to use our intelligence, and therefore we are more enslaved to the social order. And now, I think, we have entered a period that I would call eschatopolitics. The eschaton, in religion is the final day, the doomsday, and the politics, now, is leading to the activation of the doomsday. And, literally, we are in the world war that will bring that about for most of the human population, along with the food shortages that are being deliberately engineered, so that if you survive the mushroom cloud, you’ll still starve to death in a short time, and if you don’t die from the delayed effects of a vaccine or of some other cause.
But the number of factors that are leading toward the eschaton now are maximalized, and they are politically engineered and designed; it’s not simply accidental. It is also happening at a geological level, and happening at a cosmic level. So, all of this: as above, so below; there is a synchronicity that we have to face and be able to bear, and be able to think clearly through, and to understand, in order to be liberated in this illusory bardo, in order to achieve the fulfillment of our divine purpose. So the pressure is mounting, because only under tremendous pressure does the coal of the ego become the diamond of the Real Self. But that pressure will continue to increase day by day. So that’s the situation that we are now in.
So as we develop, and did develop, in the past, our capacity for artistic creativity, we were able to harmonize the Apollonian and the Dionysian drives within the human being. The Apollonian wants order. It wants the perfection, almost like Bach music, of its mathematical purity and equanimity and equality, and all of that kind of, let’s say, solar orderliness. But you also have the Dionysian moon of total wildness and freedom, and absolute differentness and newness, and radical creative flights of imagination, that have to break the order that has been established in order to be able to bring in an ever-higher level of order. And those two drives have to be harmonized and integrated so that they serve one another, not that they oppose one another. And until the intellect gets to that point, it will not be able to activate the upper death drive. And that’s the beginning, then, of being able to conquer over all of the factors that are now oppressing us.
Does this all make sense so far? OK, I’m going to keep going then, because I want to get to the ultimate point of what are the implications for us here and now. We said that the trinity of principles were: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty—but there’s a problem here. There’s a glitch, which is that, for the ego, beauty means the beauty of form—but God is formless. So rather than TGB, as a trinity, we need a quaternity—we need TGIF—which most people prefer anyway, but the “IF” in this case doesn’t refer to Friday, but it refers to Intelligent Formlessness. OK? Because God’s beauty is formless, it’s the beauty of Absolute Intelligence.
And a scientist will appreciate the beauty of a theory, a chess player will appreciate the beauty of the brilliance of a chess combination—in every field of the arts, there will be an appreciation for the formless beauty that underlies an idea, an archetypal concept, that is in itself not something that can be formulated in language, but enables the formulation of creative ideas to proceed. And it’s that core of Intelligence that is the source of beauty that we have to get to, and not be stuck on the beauty of form, because it was our stuck-ness in the beauty of form that then created the fall into the desire to possess beautiful forms, and to ravage them—whether it’s the form of a human being or the beauty of nature—but the beauty of the world itself was mistreated, as a result of the ego’s desire to possess it, to control it, or to be it, and to display it, and to use it for the will to power.
So we have to transcend the Logos, reach real truth, and we have to transcend form to reach the source of beauty. And we have to transcend even our conventional ideas of goodness if we are to reach God-consciousness, because many people say, well, there can’t be a good God, because how could a good God allow such a world of evil to exist? And that means that we are seeing things from an egoic perspective—we are not seeing it from the good that is God-consciousness, and until we are humble enough to transcend our own opinions about what goodness is, we will never get beyond egocentric thinking, and never be in touch with the Real.
So in any case, one reaches a point in one’s psychospiritual development, and I think this is universal, but it’s certainly the pattern you see with philosophers and with sages in both the West and the East through time, whose testimony, whose life stories, whose charitras are well known to us—and this is the point where one reaches when one realizes that the most good I could do for the world would be for my ego to die into God; that would be the best gift I could give to the world—not to use my ego to rule the world in a better way, or to try to change things from my compassion, and my goodness, and my appreciation of beauty, but to let the Will of God completely take over, and have no residue of egoic interference. When one reaches that realization, that’s when the spiritual journey becomes serious, and it begins, but not really until then. And that’s when one becomes, one is able to become one-pointed in one’s focus on the Real, to the point of burning away the ego. This is where the fire of yoga really becomes a bonfire—one’s hair is on fire to achieve liberation.
So one then enters a different…
This Post Has 3 Comments
Mohammed Farooque
24 May 2022God Allah Khoda Vogoban is the name
FormLess Form within around and beyond
_AnWiseEnergy
Eamonn
25 May 2022I listen to Shunya most every day and thank you all for providing these teachings in these difficult times .
Iffat Hussain
25 May 2022Wow, the poignancy and profundity of thought in these words is immense!!