Forking Paths

Introduction

Phenomenologically, what motivates the virtue of a symbol?

It’s worth here distinguishing between two manners of approaching the Real. For simplicity, we will call these:

1. Salvation
2. Liberation

Salvation

Salvation is characterised by:

1. Covenantalism: there is the promise of reward for virtue, and punishment for vice. The Divine has blessed you with life, but He has a Plan, an Agenda: you are not here for nothing. You are here to worship him, to submit, to obey the Sacred Law, to do good. In exchange for this, you have rights upon the Divine, namely, for good favour, access to Paradise.
2. Multiplicity:
   1. God vs Man: there exist strong distinctions between the Divine and Creation mediated by the principle of Lordship; the created stands before the Divine fundamentally distinct.
   2. Good vs Evil: similarly, there exist strong distinctions between righteousness and iniquity. This is usually construed of at the level of action, or more nobly, at the level of intent.
3. Agency:
   1. Divine: God does things beyond simply affording Being: He blesses, avenges, protects, exhorts, forgives, punishes, judges, saves, curses, and enlightens.
   2. Human: Creation is meant not only to “Be” in the abstract, but also act in accordance with the norms, rituals, and sacred law.

Liberation

Liberation, on the other hand, is characterised by:

1. Recognition: there is simply an apprehension of Reality, a focus of attention on Being at its most profound, and no expectation of reward or punishment; those categories don’t even make sense here.
2. Union:
   1. No-Self vs All-Self: the self construed as distinct from the underlying fabric of Reality is to firstly be recognised, and secondly dismissed, as a stubborn illusion. Depending on the symbolic representations of this experience, we see either cataphaticism or apophaticism. The self is nothing or the self is everything.
3. Intelligibility:
   1. Divine: God does not do anything or desire anything in any sense that creatures do. He simply is.
   2. Human: Creation’s task is to return primordially to the Divine, its Source. Much of this involves the inner transformation of recognising that the self was never independent of the Divine to begin with.

There are natural distinctions that arise in the theology downstream as a result of this register distinction between the two conceptualisations.

Most apparently, Salvation tends to stress free will and man’s ability to determine his lot in the scheme of Reality (Heaven vs Hell), whereas Liberation tends to stress Fate and the recognition that ultimately all of Creation will ultimately proceed in line with the Divine Will itself an expression of the Divine Essence.

Register Confusion

In both instances, the created exists in a state of penury in the face of his Lord. The dependence is manifest, but dependence here manifests at distinct registers.¹

All in all, our purpose here is to eliminate two sources of obfuscation:

1. Absolutisation: error arises when mistaking one register for the whole. Salvation absolutised becomes rigid formalism at best, irrational fundamentalism at worst. Liberation absolutised becomes spiritual mist at best, and gnostic vanity at worst.
2. Pride: error arises when confusing simply the ability for a soul’s high-register participation in the Divine as superior to the sincerity of a soul’s participation in the Divine at any register.

Note: Each of the absolutisation and pride we refer to here correspond to failures in the fidelity and humility of the symbol in its disclosure of the Divine, and therefore, vice according to our definition in The Grammar of Disclosure.

These are both instances of Register Confusion i.e. incorrectly understanding the just place of things within the Hierarchy of Being.

Let’s consider specific traditions now.

The reason the primary monotheistic traditions are often considered predominantly salvific, rather than liberative, is down to two things, both of which occur in order:

1. Universality: the Tradition extends to the realm of Becoming
2. Flattening: the low-register interpretations in the realm of Becoming are absolutised

For instance, many pseudo-literates in the West are enamoured with Buddhism: they see in their native Christianity precisely this flattening and literalism, and while their intuitions seek approach with the Divine through the lens of Liberation, the categories with which they construe the very recognition of Buddhism betrays the essence it is attempting to convey. The Truth is perverted, instrumentalised, in the light of their misunderstanding, and they with it. Meditation becomes not a sincere recognition of the fundamental unity of Reality, but instead, a means to calibrate their cortisol levels, to train their attention spans, to feel healthy, and “wholesome”.

The mercantile spirit seeks and confuses itself into feeling like it has received relief from “suffering” construed as material desire or pain or lust or envy or anger or pride, whereas what is really offered and unattended is the “suffering” of divorce from the Real.

They remain fractured since, while they intuit the need for the Truth encapsulated in the Tradition at this high register, they simply do not have the faculties necessary to inhabit it.

They have not been initiated, and there is no Opening. They are not pure and are therefore simply uninvited.

But this phenomenon highlights another failure which is the obfuscation and dwindling of high-register forms of engagement with the Christian Tradition.

That is, the esoteric, high-register, liberative formulation of modern Christianity has grown sufficiently enervated in the zeitgeist, that even reasonably intelligent people are simply unable to recognise the deep mystical tradition available to them.

To make this claim more precise:

1. Protestantism, particularly in its low-church formulations, tends to be metaphysically bereft, the product of register-collapse, and in particular, the absolutisation of the lowest-register interpretations of Salvation Christianity. Sola Scriptura is the absolutisation of the language of the Bible disconnected from the Sacramental Church or Cosmos.
2. Catholicism, on the other hand, continues to maintain high fidelity to sacrality and formality in its institutional and exoteric forms, thereby maintaining a rich, and robust exoteric tradition despite the fact its esoteric, mystical dimension has gradually withered
3. Orthodoxy offers some sense of Liberation in its focus on theosis and the Divine Mystery, even at the expense of Salvific or exoteric universality: it runs, for largely cultural and material reasons, the risk of ethnic or nationalistic exclusivism

This explains the movement of modern Christian thinkers (like Bentley Hart, or Kingsnorth) towards Orthodoxy: i.e. their search for Liberation within the Christian tradition is mostly alive there.

Obviously, this is not unique to Buddhism (which has been caricatured as purely Liberative) or Christianity (which has been caricatured as purely Salvific), but is endemic to all tradition in the Kali Yuga, our age in History.

Similarly, many modern Sunni revivalist movements like Salafism, and Deobandism are products of a low-register absolutisation of Islamic doctrinal practice, and therefore are comparable to Protestantism insofar as they strongly stress the exoteric: law, creed, textual authority, historicity, and blind adherence without either any principled reasoning or even attempt at metaphysical depth or Divine connection.

This is spiritually hollow at best, symbolically obfuscatory and violent at worst.

This is easily seen in the performative and silly contrasts drawn with Sufism construed as something left to “effete mystics” and romantics fundamentally divorced from the onerous demands of political, social, and material reality.

This is not to say that the frustrations that resulted in Salafism or Protestantism were not well-founded.

Salafis only sprung about once the Sufis had failed: their very existence is testament to this.

It is true in each of these cases that the Tradition had ossified, but it is false that what was then needed was a re-affirmation of commitment to the Law and Scripture: instead, what was needed was a re-discovery of the Principles that animate the esoteric dimension, the higher register aspects of the Tradition as a whole, and the re-invigoration of these laws.

The moral intervention was necessary at the level of the failure, which was a failure of principle first, and spirit next, and not a mechanistic, legal, or physical failure.

Right problem. Wrong solution.

Once again, one cannot mechanism-design one’s way to the City of God.

Importantly, recognise here that Salvation is not morally deficient. It is not a mistake, nor is it (by its nature) necessarily a misunderstanding of Liberation, as some are wont to assert.

It’s simply what Divine Disclosure looks like when conceived of at the level of mechanism or actuality (the lower registers): habit, law, ritual activity, and practice. Similarly, Divine Disclosure conceived of at the level of determination or intelligibility (the higher registers) looks like annihilation, effortlessness, wisdom, equanimity, asceticism, detachment, or even ecstasy. More on that in The Taste of Light.

There is no moral deficiency in Salvation as there is no moral superiority in Liberation. They are simply distinct stages in the same emanation.

This is the important bit:

Every soul exists and operates within a given register, and this will necessarily determine the most faithful and humble form of its disclosure of the Divine.

Souls operating at the registers of mechanism or actuality will more sincerely engage with Reality covenantally: their natural inclinations will be to Salvation and this is good for them. Any pretensions to apophatic detachment would result in confusion at best, and spiritual nausea at worst.

Contrarily, souls operating at the registers of intelligibility or determination will more sincerely engage with Reality contemplatively: their natural proclivity will be to Liberation. The concern here, as with all high-register phenomena, is to continue engagement with and to permit manifestation downstream in low-register forms.

The peasant who obeys God sincerely is morally superior to the metaphysician who recounts non-dualism but who does not permit the light to transform him and all his subsequent lower-register activity.

Saints still pray. Ascent without Return is simply not enough.

Moreover, it clarifies further what Ascent in the context of different souls even means.

Nirvana for the average man is not the Nirvana of Rumi. Nevertheless, the Nirvana of Rumi roots and facilitates Nirvana for everybody else. He is responsible for all alignment at registers downstream of him. Causality is top-down.

The question is not: what is the greatest height at which one can speak of the Real? It has always been: what does the Real wish to disclose through me?

What am I here for?

In Conclusion

The Truth is eternal and static, and every Tradition has two modes of its disclosure at two different registers.

What appears, at the highest register, as the annihilation of false selfhood before the Real, appears at a lower register as repentance, obedience, worship, law, reward, punishment, virtue, and vice. The same return is being described from different altitudes. From above, the soul has no independent existence. From below, the soul must choose, act, submit, and be judged. The contradiction is only apparent when we flatten the Truth or confuse registers for each other.

Much of this work here is simply the re-inculcation of this hierarchy and depth when engaging with Reality. This is what it means to rectify the Names.

This is the nature of Metaphysics.