The Gaze of Heaven

Introduction

All extant things are but symbols for, reflections of the Divine. Our knowledge of symbols is determined by acts of interpretation, culminating in the verticality by which we apprehend the necessary principle underpinning the symbol’s existence.

We higher-know by permitting the recognition of this principle to transmute our selves-as-manifest into something closer to our selves-as-essential.

This transformation illuminates, inspires, arms, and embodies us (in that order of priority).

It takes place via the descent of recursive self-hood by which the Inner Guru pushes us down a path by which we see what we’re meant to be in the Outer Guru, become more ourselves, and then recognise more of what we’re meant to be.

To become virtuous is to become one’s higher self: to shed what one currently is for what one is meant to be.

To become what one is meant to be is to fall towards the Divine, as if in love.

As we currently understand it, Virtue is predicated upon the:

1. Processive downward activity of Mercy and Wrath, by which principles elicit symbols which depend on them, how the Divine unfolds Creation

2. Recessive upward properties of Humility and Fidelity, by which symbols recognise the principles upon which they depend, how Creation sees the Divine

3. Recursive, inward dispositions of Sincerity and Integrity, by which a symbol seeks the disclosure of its essence

From here, we will discern that:

1. to see correctly is to see under the gaze of Heaven

2. man is simply the medium by which the Divine is apprehended

3. each man discloses a specific set of Divine Names, and the Divine appears to him only as such

4. the self is, therefore, to be formed rather than simply informed

5. adab or etiquette is the technology of self-formation

6. the self, the moral subject, is in fact the object of ethics

The Gaze of Heaven

To see truly is to see sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of the Divine.

This is how alignment at the register of Intelligibility manifests within our cognition of ourselves and the world around us.

Let’s say you look out at the world, phenomenologically or “from the inside” as it were, and encounter something. It could be another human being, or an animal, a rock, a star, an artefact, a text, a piece of music. It could even be a feeling, or an impression, or a thought, or a dream, or an idea, a conviction.

To truly see it, that is, to interpret in it all that the Real wishes to disclose in it, is to apprehend the necessary principle that elicits it at the Register of Intelligibility, which grounds it, and which in turn is grounded by the Absolute. This is not so much to see the object but to see the Real that elicits it.

This is, after all, what it means for the Real to disclose itself in the object.

From this, we are led inevitably to conclude that the Divine fundamentally mediates all relationality.

In all existence, in every distinction, in every form, in each structure, and in all their exemplary manifestations, what you see when you apprehend a thing, and attempt to determine not what it seems to be, but what it really is, i.e. to see it as is and not to see it as manifest, you are looking for God.

"To God belong the east and the west, so wherever you turn, there is the Face of God. Indeed, God is All-Encompassing and All-Knowing." — Quran, 2:115

The extent to which this is possible is parametrised by the receptivity or purity of the Self to the Divine as disclosed in the thing, and this is what I refer to when I discuss that we see things not as they are but as we are.

Once knowledge is understood as the transformation of the interpretant by Reality, ethics begins where that transformed interpretant encounters another symbol through the Divine ground that discloses them both.

To expand the breast, then, to perfect the Self, is therefore, understood to be the (virtuous) clarification of the self such that the Real being disclosed by the encountered object can be apprehended by the Real within the subject.

To encounter Reality truly is to make room for the Divine disclosed through you to encounter the Divine disclosed by something else.

The extent to which this encounter is encumbered, occluded, confused or contradicted is the re-assertion of the ego, the self, and the prevalence of epistemology rather than ontology. To correct this is the basis of receptivity or tazkiyah al istidad (purification of one’s nature).

To see Reality is to see it sub specie aeternitatis, as both eternal subject and eternal object. To see Reality is to not be there at all.

“(Moses) said: "O my Lord! expand me my breast; ease my task for me, and remove the impediment from my speech, that they may understand what I say.” — Quran, 20:25-28

This is the transformation of the soul that higher objectivity refers to. Thinking through this more carefully, however, we recognise that even the self-as-is, that is, your higher nature, your teleological end-point, still remains fundamentally determinate.

It is something and not something else, and therefore is limited by what it is. This is important, for it fundamentally limits the character, colour, flavour, and tilt of the Divine it is even possible for you to encounter.

All that you know of God, and all that you can know of God is contingent on who you are. The Hero sees God as heroic, dynamic, fiery, intense, passionate, creative, intimate, and immanent. The Ascetic, on the other hand, sees God as wise, static, immutable, eternal, vast, detached, and transcendent.

Definition: We refer to these archetypes, these profoundly fundamental principles that undergird the possible manifestations of the Divine as the Divine Names.

The Divine Names are therefore principles which are instantiated down the registers from Intelligibility, through Determination, Mechanism, and ultimately Actuality, into all of extant Creation.

Note: This is the distinction Ibn Arabi correctly draws between the Divine as Allah or God which is the Divine as the union of all possible Names, and who, by virtue of our limited natures, is inaccessible to us, exceeds us and lies beyond us behind the shroud of Divine Mystery; and the Divine as Rabb or Lord which is the Divine as presented or disclosed to each of us, which is the highest, total, and perfected expression of the Divine Names that lie within each of our grasps.

Importantly, since it is in fact the Divine that mediates all relationality, and therefore observes itself disclosed in another via itself disclosed in us, we recognise at once that our natures, our ends, and our teleology all encapsulate and disclose a Divine Name, and that Divine Name is what is looking for itself in another thing. When it succeeds, that is, when it finds itself in another, the other is seen sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of eternity, with the gaze of Heaven.

This is why two men of different natures apprehend fundamentally different things when seeing the same object. The Divine Name disclosed in one man seeks itself in that object, while the distinct Divine Name disclosed in another does the same in parallel, even if it appears as if their understanding coincides perfectly when reduced to syntactic transmission, communication, or representation.

To recap, we have the object, which is a finite disclosure of Divine Names, we have the subject, which is a finite configuration of Divine Names, and higher knowledge emerges as the resonance or self-recognition between the Names in subject and object through the Divine Ground in both. This is the basis of the participatory character of higher knowledge.

The purification of the soul (i.e. tazkiyah) is the expansion of receptivity, the broadening of the horizon or the clarification of the self. The more clarified the soul, the more clearly it will be able to apprehend the Divine Names that beget it and the more faithfully will it be able to represent them.

To become oneself, one must learn to see with the gaze of Heaven.

The straight and narrow path to the Divine then finds each of us in a state of vice (contraction, distortion, instrumentalisation, confusion or even absolutisation), after which we ascend to virtue by clarifying our participation in the Divine Names disclosed through us, finally attaining sanctity via the Fourfold Path, resulting in the comprehensive disclosure and harmony of the Names comprising our telos, and finally, maximally to become the Insan-al-Kamil or the Complete Man, who, in his essence gathers, discloses, and apprehends all the Divine Names of God.

Note: The Divine as Lord/Rabb and the Divine as God/Allah therefore coincide precisely only within the apprehension of the Complete Man, the Insan al Kamil. Bear in mind, however, that even God as Allah as the union of all the Divine Names does not exhaust the Divine Essence or the Real qua the Real, which remains fundamentally beyond all limitation or unlimitation.

We are each different men, and that sentence means precisely that God shows each of us the many different sides of His Face.

This is what it means to say that God is personal.

Appropriate Relationality

Once the appropriate Divine Name apprehends itself in another at the Register of Intelligibility and determines a goal, namely the clarification of the subject or object, what happens next, at the Register of Mechanism or Actuality?

If virtue begins as appropriately trained vision, the apprehension of the Divine Name animating something, then how does it end?

Definition: We define Adab or Etiquette as the practical art of acting or relating to a symbol in accordance with the Divine Name it discloses. It is not simply “manners” but the general scheme of appropriate relationality.

This will necessarily involve:

1. Firstly, to recognise the symbol’s higher self

2. Secondly, to apprehend the symbol’s self-as-manifest

3. Most importantly, the humility to recognise that there will invariably be an admixture of the self (the subject) which either clarifies or distorts the subject’s apprehension of either. After all, we only see as we are

In the absence of such a humility, there remains the risk of either determining within or imposing on another symbol expectations of a nature and subsequent activity that are anathematic to it.

In the absence of (epistemic) humility, we may well distort more than clarify.

You cannot force a scholar on the battlefield, neither can you demand theorems from a merchant.

Adab is therefore first and foremost a question of appropriateness. To encounter the symbols of Reality with the right recognition, the right comportment, the right proportion, the right order, the right disposition, and ultimately with the right set of activities.

Appropriateness here is, to be clear, a fundamentally relational idea, and only makes sense in the context of the interaction of two symbols, each of which seeks the Divine it understands in the other.

Some symbols seek and find (!) a great deal of the disclosure of the Divine in the other, leading to resonance, consonance, and naturality.

For an explicatory example, this is the basis of great loves or friendships. You meet somebody new, know very little about their lives or circumstances, and yet feel like you’ve known them all your life.

You feel like this because in the deepest possible sense, you have. The Divine Name that grounds your telos, and therefore your Inner Guru, has found novel expression in the person you’re resonating with.

Importantly, the mechanism of recursive self-hood is simply the extremal case of the mechanism we see at play here as well. Just as the outer guru clarifies the inner guru, which apprehends further the higher self in the outer guru which further clarifies the inner guru and so on, we see that resonance means, at the Register of Intelligibility, the mutual recognition of the overlapping Divine Names disclosed by each symbol, but at the Register of Determination, means the increased determination of the self-as-manifest into the self-as-is.

The feeling of chemistry or naturality or satisfaction or resonance is you becoming more yourself.

The descent from the mutual recognition of the Divine Names to the becoming of the self-as-manifest into the higher self and through to the relationality of a symbol, either to itself or to another, is what Adab really is.

It is the mechanism by which the Divine Names perceived with the gaze of Heaven are immanentised in the relations between us embedded here in the Cosmos.

Note: Once again, it is important to clarify that resonance by itself is not necessarily a good thing: vice and distortion can well beget more vice and distortion. We must, even here, apply strictly the criteria for whether or not this resonance results in the achievement of higher knowing or the further abasement of our natures. Does it illuminate and inspire? Is it useful and practically embodied?

What Divine Name does it disclose?

The Saint is not Spectacular

If we look downwards, Ethics is the disclosure of the Divine Names. If we look upwards, however, we see that Ethics is the formation of the soul capable of Adab.

Adab therefore, in this process of recursive self-hood or self-becoming, is a technology of self-formation.

For more concrete examples, we can consider here all the various mechanisms of relationality we have in Reality that permit Divine disclosure, everything from ritual, habits, liturgy, manners, craft, work, friendship, romance, parenthood, duty, and sacrifice.

But this is not all, there exists Adab for the way in which one walks in the park, or looks at the stars, or sits in repose, or sleeps, or eats, or dreams, or talks, or fights, or loves.

A way in which each of these things can be done that maximally forms the self and discloses the Divine Name within.

Importantly, this may well be distinct for each person, in accordance with the Name entrusted to them. For each Name there exists an appropriate, particular adab, and underneath them all lies a universal adab appropriate to existence at all.

To that end, it is critical to recognise that Adab is not self-expression in the thin, psychological, conceptual sense. Rather it is a question above all of an appropriateness and fit to Reality.

This is not a new idea (there is no such thing), but a re-expression of Confucian Li or Lao Tzu’s Wu Wei or Aristotelian arete or Heidegger’s dwelling or Nishida’s self-formation. It is the bridge between essence and manifestation.

In the extremal case: The Saint is not spectacular, but simply fit to Reality.

"Indeed, the religion is ease, and no one overburdens himself in the religion except that it will overcome him.” — the Holy Prophet, Bukhari 39

“…God does not intend to make difficulty for you, but He intends to purify you and complete His favor upon you that you may be grateful." — Quran, 5:6

“Less and less is done until you arrive at non-action (wu wei). When nothing is done, nothing is left undone." — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Formed, not Informed

We will very briefly remark on the nature of the Submission to the Inner Guru that precipitates the recursive formation of the Self.

The critical thing to bear in mind here is the distinction that Evola correctly draws: the self must be formed rather than informed.

“The modern world has replaced the ideal of inner form and spiritual nobility with the accumulation of facts and abstract knowledge. But a mind stuffed with notions, lacking a centre of gravity and an inner hierarchy, remains spiritually formless - an easy prey to every passing intellectual fad and distraction from below.” — Julius Evola, Men among the Ruins (1953)

This is precisely the higher objectivity gleaned by Submission that we’ve demonstrated earlier.

It is easy to misinterpret this high register account of Adab and self-formation (i.e. as submission) as a sort of passive receptivity by which, by the process of sheer recognition of the Inner Guru and the Divine Names disclosed therein, one begins the process of self-formation.

This is very far from the Truth.

On the contrary, at the Register of Determination, that is, within the scope of ethics and choices, it requires will, discipline, courage, self-mastery, and intense and noble struggle. It requires conquest, both of the self, but also of all the symbols that are contingent upon the self. Both your obfuscations and the obfuscations of all the symbols that are dependent on you, downstream of you, demand rectification by acts of heroic wrath wrought upon the self. This is Initiation from the perspective of the subject.

Initiation remains suffocating, painfully destructive (of our impurities), and constant as we continue to spiral. Once we recognise that it is the Inner Guru that initiates, compels, draws, reels us in, do we recognise that, at the Register of Determination, we alone are responsible for our salvation, beneath the face of God, the Most High. This is the Conquest we are being called to, the shadows we must vanquish alone.

The self-as-manifest is a stubbornly persistent illusion, and to submit ourselves to the Divine, we submit our ends to the Truth, we determine where it is we must go: the practical task remains to hammer and forge the self in the crucible of righteous wrath, to eradicate and shed ourselves of the impurities, occlusions, confusions, attachments, absolutisations, and contingencies that comprise our fallenness relative to our higher nature.

The Veil is thick and stifling and does not yield easy.

It is out of love for the Real, drawn in by the Inner Guru, an act of His Mercy, that we destroy and conquer ourselves, until all that is left of our souls is the polished mirror that reflects His Divine Names unto the rest of Creation. For the Divine, and to the Divine. (This is the Fourfold Path.)

From Registers above, sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of Eternity), this is Submission.

From Registers below, sub specie temporis (under the aspect of Time), this is Conquest. We will discuss this further in later work.

Being a Saint may be easy, but Becoming a Saint is hard.

“Verily, with hardness comes ease,” — Quran, 94:5

The Moral Object

The Self must be formed and not simply informed.

Moving down the Registers, we see that Submission is the recognition of the Divine Names the self is called on to disclose, Ethics is the art by which the self is polished into a faithful disclosure of the Divine, and Adab or Etiquette is the technology of self-formation.

This has the following important corollary: the object of Ethics, upon which Etiquette acts, is the self.

Thesis: The Moral Subject is the object of all ethical endeavour.

More practically speaking, one is not to ask the question: am I doing this act correctly, instead, try: am I becoming the right kind of person?

For another example, the Sacred Law now comes into view in its rightful place within the Register of Mechanism as the canonisation of Adab. It is a Pole of Etiquette, but is not Etiquette itself; a perfected instantiation instead that one is to refer to in order to form the self, and submit to the Real.

Compliance with the Law, or the expression of Adab/Etiquette is to be understood primarily as a matter for ends (the formation of the self, and therefore the disclosure of the Divine Names) and not for means (the mechanism of action, which, when divorced from those ends becomes absolutised).

The Law is to be thought of less as something that confines the subject, but rather as curriculum, a disciplinary and therefore initiatic form aimed at the production of the right kind of person.

The purpose of the law is not its performance: the purpose of the law is to form the sort of person for whom righteousness is natural. (cf Aristotle’s arete, Confucius’ Li, Islam’s tazkiyah)

Once again, we see: the object of the law is not action but actors. This is the high-register clarification of ethics: the world is simply the medium by which the Divine acts via the Inner Guru upon the self-as-manifest.

Mercy and Wrath are therefore the calibration of this self-as-manifest against the self-as-is, not simply the helping or harming of other symbols. Even the Pole (for instance, Saints, the Sacred Law, and even Revelation) is an instrument of the Divine acting upon the self.

Once the self is formed, the law, seen as wrathful, gradually “disappears” into the background, much like water for a fish, or the air for one of us. The grammar of disclosure, in the form of Etiquette, is learned in practice, interiorised, imbibed, and sincerely, humbly, and faithfully expressed. Becoming a Saint is hard, Being a Saint is easy.

Never ask: what have I acquired? Always ask: who have I become?

It is an easy trap and gross misapprehension to view ethics as a form of “prosociality”, a harmful notion perpetuated by hard-and-fast heuristics predicated on notions of reciprocity: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

This sort of view obfuscates entirely the metaphysical ground and the sacred nature of righteous comportment. It also obfuscates the fact that morality is fundamentally grounded at the Register of Determination, and emerges therefore from choice and will as we established in Light and Shadow. A bad thing chosen wilfully that happens to result in positive outcomes is still a bad thing.

When we take the correct view expounded here instead that to be moral is to seek the Divine in all Creation, we recognise that there is, in fact, such a thing as private morality.

"When you have shut your doors, and darkened your room, remember never to say that you are alone; for you are not; but God is within, and your Genius is within..." — Epictetus, Discourses

"There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute. Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself when he is alone." — Zhongyong, the Doctrine of the Mean

“To worship God as if you see Him, for even if you do not see Him, He sees you.” — the Holy Prophet, Muslim 8

There is, in fact, an appropriate morality to express and etiquette to maintain, even in solitude, even if nobody’s watching, even if there are no consequences, even if it has no bearing on your happiness.

This is the basis of ritual activity. The misunderstanding above, that of confusing morality with prosociality, is what has resulted in the denigration, decay, and disappearance of all respect for, and adherence to ritual activity.

Ritual, by its very definition, is the externalisation of morality in a form at the Register of Actuality that is independent of its prosociality.

It is meaningful not because of the effect it has on the world, but rather the effect it has on your soul. It is not about efficiency, but about revelation, about bearing witness to the Divine Names you are being called to express, and through them, to the Real itself.

Things are good because of what they mean, not only because of what they do.