The deep instinct for how one must live, in order to feel oneself “in heaven,” to feel “eternal,” while in all other behavior one decidedly does not feel oneself “in heaven”—this alone is the psychological reality of “redemption.” A new way of life, not a new faith.
Nietzsche: The Anti-Christ (33)
In our time of crisis, more people are shouting warnings, using the rhetoric of an increasing number of disciplines—economic, political, environmental, and so on. The crisis is also giving rise to an urgent call to act, from the local scale to the global scale, in the face of what seems to be an unstoppable will to destroy literally everything, i.e., every form of life on earth! Something is in its death-throes. Right now, in the United States (Nov 2016), I perceive an animal twisting and writhing, regurgitating its insides out into public view in a paroxysm of self-destructive agony.
No one can help this particular animal. Yet many people, from so many different walks of life, are coming forward and offering possible paths forward in the service of the larger endangered animal—that of our Earth body. It is as if a community of spirits is mobilizing in response to a grave danger—the end of Life! I see less of a mood of arguing or “being right”, and more of a common agreement that we each need to act or we could lose everything. The time for reflection is over. The matter is urgent.
One young man from Australia who saw the harm being done to children in Syria on TV chose to break Australian law and put his life at risk by joining a Kurdish resistance group and killing “the enemy” in Syria:
The 22-year-old Queenslander Ashley Dyball appeared happy, indulging in a passion for hotted-up cars, socialising with his mates at pub sessions and being deeply committed to the sport of weightlifting, having previously successfully represented Australia at the Oceania Powerlifting and Bench Press Championships in 2013. His family seemed a beacon of solid middle-class respectability, running a successful small business in the city’s northern suburbs. … So what then made him suddenly decide to travel thousands of kilometres across the world and risk his life joining a Kurdish “People’s “Protection Unit” known as the YPG of Rojava engaged in a deadly battle with Islamic State terrorists in Syria?[1]
How can we judge such an action? Calm reflections alone could not yield such a morally ambiguous imperative to act. There had to be an “irrational” impulse to act when he saw images of injured children. He obeyed this impulse. When he returned to Australia, he was arrested, of course, but steadily refused to apologize. There was not a shred of arrogance in his refusal. When he was interviewed about his attitude towards the “right” or “wrong” of his actions, he consistently said he didn’t care about any of that and he remains glad that he went. He said he would now do his time in prison if necessary but there is nothing to apologize for. There was no hint of a young man behaving foolishly and wanting “mercy” later on.
I would have to conclude that his action was based on a principle that we have yet to learn and name—a principle of action that has emerged from the depth of Being, in response to the imminent threat to Life. A new principle of unity has burst on the scene and had become a new a basis for “moral” action—action which cannot be judged in terms of the ethics of familiar or traditional cultural practices. This young man suddenly lined up with himself and acted on the basis of a strange unity that has yet to be generally recognized, or even named, as a way of being.
This is what I want to do here, in this short essay. Let’s begin by claiming that the new principle of unity brings to an end a split in the traditional way of being that has defined us as a certain kind of human being—that being whose mind is ontologically split from the grace and wisdom of instinctual life—who thus has to invent moral systems and establish stable cultural practices to guide us, in lieu of the former, infallible guidance of our animal instincts. These moral systems and cultural practices always involve de-potentiating, or outright denial of any role for our instincts, in relation to the question of how to be a human being and how to act in life. We became the “rational animal”, with more and more priority given to the rational aspect of human being. Action that follows reflection or calm deliberations is privileged. We further assumed that action following reflection is action caused by moral reflections, and is therefore moral action.[2] We thus transformed from the kind of human being who could only act infallibly, i.e. before mind and instinct became separated, to the “rational animal” who could err, according to the established ethical or legal standards of given cultural practices.[3]
The young man who acted “impulsively” to go fight ISIS in Syria acted infallibly, in the sense that his mind and instincts were united in his decision to go. He was in a state of at-one-ment, and thus could calmly face grave social and legal consequences with great integrity. I am suggesting here that this young man, in the way he acted, constitutes a new kind of human being, even if briefly—one in whom mind and instincts are united. I am further suggesting that this new kind of human being also corresponds to a new world of appearances in which the suffering of others alone becomes a sufficient criterion for moral action on their behalf.
As our crisis deepens, I suspect that more and more individuals like this young man will emerge from all walks of life, each acting in accord with this new principle of unity of being. They will need our understanding and support because they herald an entirely new way of being, one that has already been configured in the deep background of Being—the response of Being, or Life, to the threat of extinction facing it, or, as I would say, Her.[4]
We cannot simply choose to be such a different kind of human being. Those who carry the new value are (onto) genetically reconfigured—by Being—most often with no theoretical understanding of their new ontological status![5] They simply now must act in new ways that the former culture and society will not understand or will judge harshly. The individual most often will not understand why they are acting in this new way. Those who can perceive the new configuration of human being must teach them.
Who could so perceive this new configuration of human being/world and thus strengthen it in others as it continues to manifest in response to the global emergency?
Such possible teachers must undergo an initiation—an initiation carried out by none other than Being Herself. These individuals are consciously reconfigured. A true initiation opens the initiate’s eyes and heart to perceive hints of the emerging human being in whom mind and instincts are united (even if ever so briefly at this stage). What kind of experiences today would constitute an initiation by Being Herself—an initiation into a new way of being characterized by a unity of reflecting mind and instinctual life?
For our nihilistic age, Being has fallen silent. Nature no longer speaks. Our cultural practices reveal a world to be exploited for our own purposes. All this is taken for granted now. Accordingly, dreams are interpreted subjectively as having to do with the dreamer’s personal mind since only we have minds, as the governing prejudice would have it.
So it comes as a shock to individuals who receive a “dream” that cannot possibly be interpreted this way. It carries too much authority, too much unfamiliarity, and too much reality as a living other. Such dream-visions as I call them, initiate the dreamer by imprinting a message directly in the dreamer’s being, making a life-long claim on him or her in the form of a “task”.
I have learned through my experiences that such initiatory dream-visions arrive with two broad thrusts: one to destroy the present split between mind and instincts and one to open the initiate’s eyes to a world made visible through a unity of mind and instinct. The first thrust has all the fury of a terrifying world-destroyer.[6] Listen to the prophetic words of an angel, the Meggid, as he initiates his auditor into the facts of life:
Your brothers in the West will learn, indeed they are beginning to suspect already, that within each one of them, deep-hidden and hitherto unconscious, their lives a fury of destructive force, beside which the destructive forces in nature grow pale … when they penetrate beneath the lifeless memory-thoughts which the brain reflects; when they begin to reach behind the network to the living thought, which is at the same time the source of life in nature; when consciousness begins to penetrate the sleepy human will itself, then indeed the hitherto unconscious impulse to blot out the given material form breaks through into actual instinct. It becomes the instinct to destroy all form, to spread abroad in the world around them the chaos they have dimly began to divine within themselves.[7]
If the human initiate can survive this fury then the second thrust as I said opens the eyes of the initiate to a new world. How do things appear when there is a unity of reflective mind and instinct—a unity that Nietzsche calls redemptive (see epigraph).[8] This is too long a tale to specify here in a short essay but I can say here that “redemptive” is just the right word.[9] The world appears in its sensual-intelligent character once again. The governing mood of this world is joy or love and its moral features are governed by aesthetics—i.e. something is right or good if it is beautiful. Suffering belongs to this world too in the sense that the new kind of human being becomes open and receptive to the being of the other and this receptivity becomes the moral basis for a new kind of action in the world—the kind that I believe the young man undertook.
To conclude with one small example from my life: As I listen to the news media today, I find myself judging this or that program by a new criterion: whether the sounds of the voices are beautiful or ugly, graceful or harsh, and these aesthetic qualities become the sole criteria for action on my part—whether or not to turn the program off!
[1] Sydney Morning Herald: Dec 11, 2015.
[2] This naïve principle of conscious reflection causing moral action began to unravel with the discovery of the unconscious in the 19th C. For example, Schopenhauer believed that our moral actions were not determined by reason and society but by our unconscious desires.
[3] Greek scholarship understands the last vestiges of this graceful kind of human being as characterizing Homeric Greece. By the time of Plato, our instinctual lives were in tatters and we needed external rules, found through reflection, to guide us.
[4] The deep background of Being or objective psyche can be understood as Being reflecting itself to itself.
[5] Something like a DNA reconfiguration i.e. well beyond conscious control.
[6] I have described my experiences of this destructive power in my book, The Imperative. My “redeemer” dream appears in the same book
[7] Owen Barfield: Unancestral Voice. Wesleyan University Press. 1965, Ch13.
[8] As did my dream-vision, as recorded in my book, the Imperative.
[9] All my books have been my attempt to articulate the contours of this new world and how we may reach it.