Homo Hubris and the Disruption of The Numinous
The Genesis of Homo Hubris
Homo Hubris is the name given to that new sub-species of the genus Homo which has, in the last three hundred or so years, become the dominant species inhabiting the industrialized countries of what is called “the West”.
The genesis of Homo Hubris lies in the rise of abstract concepts such as that of national-identity – over and above regional, tribal, differences and local (“clan”) identity – which began to emerge in Europe, and especially in Britain, some time before what has been termed “the Industrial Revolution”. This concept of a national, somewhat impersonal and always abstract, national identity, is prefigured, for example, in the speech by Queen Elizabeth the First of England, given at Tilbury, in 1588 CE, and in the dramatised speech, on St. Crispin’s Day, given by Shakespeare to King Henry V in the play (c. 1599 CE) of the same name, where the “nation” of England is eulogized. A more overt expression of this particular abstraction is the Commonwealth of England, established by Oliver Cromwell in 1653 CE, which in many ways was the forerunner of the modern concepts, the modern abstractions, of nation and State theorized by people such as Hegel and Fichte and brought into being after the French Revolution.
It was, however, what has been called “the Industrial Revolution” – which began in the early to middle 1700’s (CE) – which led to the rapid growth and spread of this new mostly urban-dwelling sub-species, Homo Hubris, in thrall to, and manipulated by others with, such abstract notions as “the nation” and “the State”.
Homo Hubris, by nature, is naturally rapacious, and rather war-like, and can often be distinguished from Homo Sapiens Galacticus by their profane “lack of numinous balance” (that is, their lack of empathy), by a lack of knowing of and feeling for the numinous; by a personal arrogance, by a lack of manners, and by that lack of respect for anything other than strength/power and/or their own gratification. One particular feature of the life of Homo Hubris is their dependence upon, and their need and often respect for, machines and technology, which machines and which technology have at best disrupted our balance with the Numinous, and, at worst, have severed our connexion to the Numinous and thus to Nature.
In outward appearance, Homo Hubris – that denizen of the Western megalopolis – is often distinguished by their lack of ancestral costume or genuine cultural apparel. Instead, they almost always either: (1) garb themselves in mass-produced products of consumerism (which more often than not sport some manufacturing logo or some manufacturing name, making them walking advertisements for such consumerism), or (2) garb themselves in what they regard, or have been informed (by some arm of the modern mass Media) is “trendy” or “fashionable”; or (3) garb themselves in the apparel, the outfit, of some modern urban abstract and un-numinous “sub-culture” which they identify with, which sub-cultures interestingly include the modern Armed Forces of the West, with their anonymizing uniforms.
The majority of Homo Hubris dress thus because essentially they have no personal, individual, style and generally possess a herd-like mentality, being unwilling and/or unable to be different from their pees, or “their mates”, or their friends, or their colleagues. Thus, even when some of them regard themselves as being “rebellious” they are more often than not outfitting themselves (outwardly and often inwardly) according to some “trend” or some passing “craze”, which “trend” or which “craze” are always urban-based, always disconnected from the realness of their own ancestral culture (which ancestral cultures are always rural) and which outward signs of “rebellion” almost always become commercialized, given time.
This outward appearance of Homo Hubris may be said to be an outward sign of their true inner nature, for it is in the nature of Homo Hubris to conform, and to belong to that-which is un-numinous and which lacks a feeling for that natural and dignified humility born from personal experience and/or an innate empathy and sense of honour. Their conformity is most often to some abstraction; to some-thing – such as an idea, a dogma, a creed, an ideology – manufactured by someone else or by some established Institution.
Thus, Homo Hubris is essentially rootless, and prideful. Their “home” is what they make for themselves, and/or for their own family, and this home can be anywhere, for it does not really matter to them where they dwell; and more often than not their sense of belonging, if they have one, is to some modern abstraction, such as some modern nation-State, or to some religion, or to some -ology or some -ism, or to some un-numinous idealized urban place, such as some city or some large national region where they were born, which region is almost always denuded of real tradition and real rural living and culture, and more often than not has been manufactured in some past by some government functionary or some committee and made “real” by some abstract law of some abstract nation-State.
The individuals of Homo Hubris have little or no genuine ancestral culture; nothing that ties them to a real, living (and thus small), ancestral homeland; no sense of belonging to a specific local place or rural area which they have a natural empathy and love for and which they personally know through dwelling there for a length of time of many years. They have no feeling for, and little or no practical experience of, the natural Time – the natural rhythm and cycle – of Nature, but instead only have experience of the abstract measured out causal and urban Time of “clocks”. They have little or no awe of and respect for Nature: of their own smallness and impotence compared to the power and longevity and fecundity of Nature; instead, they exhibit that innate prideful and arrogant attitude of Homo Hubris where they believe or feel – because of some machine, or because of some technology or because of some abstract idea or some ideology or some dogma – that they are “powerful”, or “important”, or have some “Destiny” or can “make some difference” or, worse, that they must and should and can “change things for the better” according to some idea, some ideology, some dogma or some -ism.
They have little or no experience of the slowness and the numinosity of regular manual toil or of manufacturing things using only their hands and hand-tools. Instead, they only have experience of using powered machinery and powered machines which serve to distance them from the materials they are using or which they use to manufacture something which someone else wants or desires or which someone or some oligarchy or some product of capitalism has decreed is necessary for “change”, or for “progress” or from which someone somewhere can make a profit.
They have little or none of that genuine learning and personal knowledge that arises slowly from direct practical personal experience extending over many years and from extended contact with those of a previous generation who have practical skills and practical knowledge to impart, individually, in a natural and slow way. Instead, their knowledge and their learning are abstract, learnt in groups in classrooms or in lecture-rooms or from books or other material published by others, or, now, from the Internet (See Footnote 1) – and is almost always of no immediate, and pressing, relevance to themselves. That is, knowledge, learning, have not grown out, slowly, from within they themselves, and are not rooted in a numinous locale, in an area where they belong by virtue of ancestry and culture and toil. Instead, such knowledge and such learning as they possess are abstract, and have been imposed upon them, by some Institution, or some nation-State, or which they have imposed upon themselves because of some abstract interest or some enthusiasm or because it will help them “get on in life” and enable them to earn more money by toiling in some abstract profession or in some industry or some concern connected to some modern-State or some megalopolis.
In essence, therefore, the fundamental distinction is between: (1) a living, rural and ancestral way of life – which living (and which culture arising from it) always derive from some dwelling in a certain small area by some tribes or some clans – and (2) the artificial, manufactured, living of Homo Hubris: the living exemplified by industrialized cities and towns which towns and cities are now part of some large nation-State.
In the former, there is a knowing of and a respect for Nature, born from personal experience and the often harsh nature of a rural working life, which working life is one of reliance upon hand-crafts, hand-tools and the work of animals.
In the latter, there is a prideful ignorance of and a disrespect for Nature – except, perchance, when Nature touches some individual, bringing thus some misfortune – and a reliance upon powerful machines and machine-driven tools and technology, which powerful machines and machine-driven tools and which technology enable individuals to rapaciously and arrogantly destroy Nature and to rapaciously and arrogantly manufacture and build what is lifeless and abstract and barbaric, inhuman, and urbanized.
Machines, Technology, and The Disruption of The Numinous
Fundamentally, all machines and machine-driven tools – those things which extend the power, the reach, the ability, of a single individual beyond that which they could do, by themselves, during a day of work, with or without the help of other living-beings, such as horses or oxen – usurp the Numinous. That is, they possess the potential to: (1) re-inforce and extend the natural pride and natural arrogance and natural hubris of human beings; and (2) distance the user from Nature and that natural rhythm and natural way of life which encourages empathy and from which genuine (numinous) culture arises. Technology takes this usurpation of the Numinous even further.
However, what is wrong, what is un-numinous and un-ethical, are not such manufactured machines, tools, and technology, per se, but rather, the use to which they have been put, by human beings. Let us consider, for instance, two examples: the automobile, and the agricultural tractor.
1) The automobile – or hubrismobile – has profoundly changed the way of life of not only the countries of the West, but of most of the world. This machine – and similar machines, such as the railway engine – has made travel easy, and often affordable. With the building of roads, and bridges, previously inaccessible areas have been opened up, and developed. A journey that might have taken months on foot, or weeks by horse, could be accomplished in far, far, less “time” and without the rigours and difficulties previously encountered. Isolated communities have been “connected” to towns and cities; and people no longer had to live near where they worked, for they could “commute”, by hubrismobile, by train, by omnibus. People from the cities and the towns could, without much difficulty, swarm into and “enjoy” the countryside, and seek out ever more “remote” places where they, without much effort, could indulge in “leisure activities and pastimes”.
Modern-nations – their people just as much as their governments – enthusiastically embraced these, and associated, new machines. The result has been devastating for rural, isolated, often clannish, communities, their way of life and their culture. Furthermore, the hubrismobile – and similar machines – has distanced modern human beings even further from the realness of Nature and from that slow, natural and necessary toiling effort that walking and riding provided, and which effort enabled the cultivation of empathy and that attitude to life from whence true numinous culture arises. That is, things have been made “too easy” and too disconnected from their realness, from their natural place of dwelling, and as a consequence the haste and the profanity and arrogance of the city and the town have spread, displacing the slowness and toil of walking, the symbiosis required to work with and ride a horse, which slowness, toil and symbiosis engendered a certain numinous attitude to life, a certain natural respect and thence a real human dignity. And it is dignity which is so woefully lacking in Homo Hubris.
2) The agricultural tractor – and associated agricultural machines – have transformed agriculture, leading to the decimation of small diversified family farms, loss of work for farm labourers, and to increasingly large “agri-businesses” which specialize in one, or perhaps, two crops, and which crops are grown for profit and resale and not for the consumption of those growing and tending them.
That is, the emphasis has shifted totally away from small family owned farms whose diversified crops and stock were produced and reared for the consumption of the farmer and his family, with whatever surplus, if any, being sold locally for usually a very small amount of money, or bartered for needed items. Instead, there is now the cult of mono-culture and the agri-business (often employing only a few people and cultivating hundreds if not thousands of acres) which depend on making enough profit to buy and keep (often through usurious loans) the expensive farm machinery required to run such concerns, and which profit motive has required the use of fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, and genetically engineered crops, to artificially increase yields. The result – in places such as rural English counties – has been devastating for both Nature and for the rural way of life, and while it is true that such a machine as a small agricultural tractor can and often has made farming easier on the individual undertaking such work, it has led to unchecked and un-numinous change, and to the spread of the arrogance and the ways of Homo Hubris.
An example may illustrate this. This example concerns a village in a rural English county; what it once was, and what it is now. Less than a hundred years ago, this village was a small collection of cottages and farms. The farms themselves contained apple and pear orchards, and many fields of various crops. These crops had been found to be suitable to the type of soil in the area, and each year several fields were left “fallow” so that the fertility of the soil could be regained following a harvest. Naturally, given the orchards, the village and the surrounding area produced cider and perry – with every farm making its own. Indeed, cider was the regular and preferred drink in those days when the water itself was often suspect, and before tea drinking became common and affordable. The surplus crops, when harvested, were taken to the nearby small town, where there was a thriving market. At this time, most of the villagers worked either on the land itself, or in trades or crafts connected with them. For example, there was a village farrier, and a wheelwright, and thus a relative and local self-sufficiency, for most things the village, the farms, needed for their daily life were made of wood, locally cut, shaped, and crafted: carts, fences, gates, doors, even pumps. And what was not so made and crafted of wood, was more often than not made by the local blacksmith, or of stone quarried from somewhere nearby.
There was a sense of identity among the villagers – they were, for the most part, proud to be from the area, and proud of their local ancestry.
Of course, it is easy to idealize such village life. But there was an awareness of and a real sense of belonging. Life, for most of the villagers, was often harsh, sometimes cruel. But there was real individual and local character in the people. There was a real, living, community which, despite the hardship – or perhaps more correctly because of the hardship - slowly prospered over the centuries. There was a real balance with Nature – with the seasons, and the soil for the most part understood and respected, partly because old ways of doing things were carried on, with these old, ancestral ways having been found to be effective. (See Footnote 2.)
Today, however, in this village, this balance, this understanding and this respect for Nature no longer exist, even on the two farms which still remain. The village itself has grown tremendously. Over three score new houses have been built on land once owned by two of the farms. Dozens of trees have gone, and scores of hedges removed, to make way for these new arrivals. One of the other farms is no longer a “working farm” – it is occupied by a “townie” family, and its Barns have been converted into houses, lived in by other “townies” who commute to the nearby city in their cars. The orchards themselves have gone (save for some apple trees in the garden of one of the farms on the edge of the village) as have the fields of crops. Nearly all the fields now grow the regulation wheat, in large fields made by removing boundary hedges so that machines can plant, cultivate and harvest more. And the tragedy is that this wheat often ends up stored in an enormous warehouse where it forms a tiny part of the great and never used European “wheat mountain”.
Furthermore, even the few farmers who remain seem to have lost their respect for and understanding of Nature, ploughing as they do almost to the hedgerow, spraying the fields as they do with dangerous chemicals, and tearing the heart out of their remaining life-sheltering hedges as they do when they recklessly flail away at the wrong times of year with mechanical flails: stripping the berries and buds off in Autumn and decimating the surviving buds in early Spring. Farming has become a business at worst, and at best an occupation. No longer is the land farmed to provide food for the people who farm, with the excess produce being traded for essential items. No longer is there an understanding of husbanding the soil: of caring for it, treasuring it, for the benefit of future generations.
Nearly all of the new villagers work in the nearby city and the nearby towns. They have little knowledge of, and even less understanding of, Nature and the land around them shielded as they are by their centrally-heated, electric-light houses with its running water and flushing lavatories, and conveyed as they are from place to place by their heated, rain-shielding hubrismobiles. To such people, the place where they live is really irrelevant, as long as it is convenient. One of the few remaining attractions of the village is its lack of street lighting, on even the new estates of intruding houses. Thus can the beauty of the stars still be seen, at night, as there can still be a feeling of rural isolation in the darkness. But of course, the majority of people find this darkness – this intrusion of Nature – dreadfully “inconvenient” and have petitioned the local Council to install street lighting, which doubtless the unfeeling townie technocrats will, in time. Meanwhile, many of these village residents have installed intrusive high-power “security” lights on their houses, so keen are they to dispel anything which is natural, and fearful as they have become due to recent spates of burglaries, often by louts from nearby cities and towns who, of course, have easy access to such “rural” places by means of their hubrismobiles.
In particular, the lives of these new “village-dwelling” people are not connected to Nature: they do not depend on Nature, on the soil, the land, around them. Instead, their living depends on the business, the industry, the commerce, of the towns and cities, with such business, such industry, such commerce being for the most part unnecessary and unnatural, existing only to provide more and more unnecessary luxuries and goods, or existing only to implement abstract political and social policies totally unconnected with the land, and the way and traditions of their ancestors.
The truth is that we still are, and have been, too immature, as a species, to use machines and technology wisely; we have let ourselves be overcome with the power, with the capacity for change, with the pleasure and the ease, that they have imbued us with, just as we have forgotten the natural wisdom that we are and should be toiling, working, human beings who, through the natural toil of our work with our hands or with the aid of other living-beings, such as horses with whom we form a symbiotic relationship, can achieve, can establish and can maintain, a natural and a numinous balance with ourselves, with Nature, and with the community where we dwell. We have forgotten that such a simple rural life, such a way of living, does not need to be harsh if we exist in balance – if we co-operate with – others local to us in an empathic and honourable way for our mutual benefit and for our local needs, accepting that we need a little, but not too much, and eschewing out of choice a life of material wealth and luxury, preferring instead a less materialistic, but more satisfying, numinous way.
Machines, and technology, have undermined and then destroyed this balance, and as a result we have now all but lost our natural connexion to Nature, to other human beings, to other life, as we have lost that natural, slow, rural local way of self-sufficient living which slowly grew, century after century.
Machines, and technology, and the abstractions and artificial goals of modern nation-States and modern ways of material living have grossly allowed us to place profit before individuals, and luxury and personal greed before a natural balance with Nature, a natural balance with ourselves, and with the place where we dwell.
Machines, and technology, and the abstractions and artificial goals of modern nation-States and modern ways of material living have done almost irreparable damage to Nature and to our very humanity. One man with just one machine can now decimate and almost effortlessly destroy in one day acres upon acres of living countryside, of a centuries-old forest, just as one pilot flying one aircraft can in a few seconds, and effortlessly, fire and drop missiles and bombs enough to kill and maim hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands, of human beings.
That is, machines and technology have made us more arrogant, more prideful, and far more inhuman than we ever have been, as they have given us the capacity to be far more barbarian than our so-called “barbarian” ancestors, which barbarity we have, in the past hundred years, shamefully and zealously embraced, as witness the hundreds of millions of people that we have killed, injured and maimed, in our wars and our conflicts these past hundred years, which wars and which conflicts used and use a multitude of murderous weapons and in which wars and conflicts our much vaunted modern technology plays an increasing role.
Allied to the use, and important for the spread and acceptance, of machines and technology, has been the abstract idea of “progress”, which particular abstraction is, along with the abstract concept of the modern, and now increasingly tyrannical, nation-State, one of the most profane and destructive and un-numinous abstractions ever manufactured.
The Destructive Abstraction of Progress
The modern Western abstraction (idea) of progress is inseparably bound up with: (1) a desire for and a belief in “change”and continued “growth”; (2) with the belief that we human beings can and should set ourselves abstract goals, unrelated to anything natural or numinous, and strive to achieve these goals; (3) with the belief that such “change”, such “growth”, and such goals will enable us to achieve such things as “happiness”, “wealth”, “contentment”, “freedom”, and so on etcetera; and (4) with the belief that we can manufacture various “things” (abstractions) – such as, for example, a State, an economy, some laws, some government policy or planning – which will lead us toward the attainment of the aforementioned “happiness”, “wealth”, “contentment”, “freedom”, “equality”, and so on etcetera. For instance, Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte, Marx’s Das Kapital, and Comte’s Système de politique positive, contain all of these concepts, in greater or lesser degree, concepts eulogized by individuals such as John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer.
Furthermore, one of the fundamental tenets of the Zeitgeist of the modern West is that machines, technology and science can aid, ensure and even achieve the abstract progress that is desired, and that some new “invention” will enable us to make even more “progress”.
All these concepts – like all abstractions – usurp or limit or constrain our own individual judgement, which individual judgement – to be numinous and thus ethical – should and must be based upon empathy, that is, upon: (1) a direct and personal knowing of other individuals, of other life, and of Nature; and/or upon (2) a dwelling in a particular area or locality which we directly know, and have experience of, and where such changes as are made, are undertaken by us or others dwelling there in a natural harmonious way with as little disruption, with a genuine respect for the locality and Nature, and in the knowledge that we are but one small and transitory emanation of Nature. All abstractions distort or destroy our correct, and of necessity our individual, perception of other human beings, and of Nature.
In essence. the abstraction of “progress” disrupts, undermines, decimates, and then destroys our natural connexion to Nature, to other individuals, to our past, and to the Cosmos. For instance, this abstraction of so-called “progress” often or mostly requires or involves the rejection of the old, tried, tested ways of the past, which ways have slowly evolved in a natural manner from personal and local experience. In their place, there is some new fangled idea or some new theory or some new, “more progressive”, more “enlightened” way of doing things, all of which derive from somewhere other than direct local experience and local personal knowledge, and all of which disrupt or severe our numinous connexion with our ancestral past, with others, and with Nature.
For instance, this abstraction of so-called “progress” replaces the slow rhythm of Nature’s own Time with the abstract “Time” of some abstraction, such as “achieving prosperity and material success” through change and growth, be this individual, regional or national. Thus, and for example, in the name of such material achievement and prosperity, industrial, or commercial, or retail, or some other type of, development is undertaken, and justified as being “of benefit to the people” and a sign of “commitment to the future”, which development and its associated infrastructure almost always disrupts, displaces, or destroys some aspect of Nature, and often encroaches upon, or undermines, or displaces or destroys, small rural, and often locally self-sufficient, community or communities, with the peoples of such communities then becoming dependant upon or part of the new (often local or national government planned) developments and their infrastructure, effectively making them rootless and severing what was often an ancient connexion with Nature and an ancestral way of living.
Thus is the abstraction of so-called “progress” – and the concomitant change and disruption – either imposed upon individuals, by some abstract entity such as a government, or individuals mistakenly impose it upon themselves, singularly, or in collaboration with others, believing that it is “necessary”, or that some other concept, said to make such progress achievable, will improve or otherwise enhance their own life.
However, the numinous reality is that true “progress”, true and numinous change, is only and ever individual and only ever arises – like wisdom – slowly in a natural way, and only “exists” as a greater presencing of the numinous, a reconnexion of ourselves with The Numen, and an enhancement, and evolution of, that connexion. That is. genuine progress – that which is real because it is not a human-manufactured abstraction we have imposed upon ourselves and upon life – cannot be created or achieved by anything other than an inner change within an individual; by the natural evolution of the individual; or by those small, local, and incremental and generally non-disruptive outer changes (for example to our locality) that work with, and which balance, and which continue, what already-is, based as such small and local changes are on the respect for such natural balance that arises from a knowledge that we are but one small and transitory emanation of, and thus a connexion to, Nature.
Conclusion
What, therefore, are the numinous solutions to the problems of the destructive abstraction of “progress” and of the disruption of the numinous caused by machines and technology? What is the numinous way to proceed to restore the natural balance that Homo Hubris has upset?
The solution – the way – is to return to a more rural, less materialistic, more clan-based, way of living. To return to the slow and natural toil of manual labour and a working in harmony with animals. It is a consciously-made – an evolutionary – decision to honourably co-operate with others who feel as we do in order to slowly bring-into-being new rural and clan-based communities where we can live such a way that our natural balance with ourselves, with Nature, is restored.
It is a consciously-made – an evolutionary – decision to restrain and control ourselves, and control our lust for comfort and for luxury, and to place empathy with and compassion for all Life at the centre of our own lives. It is a consciously-made – an evolutionary – decision to distance ourselves, internally and externally, from the profane, materialistic, egotistic, profit worshipping, machine-worshipping, societies of our age. It is a consciously-made – an evolutionary – decision to appreciate, understand and know our place in Nature and in the Cosmos: as but one small nexion of life, which small nexion affects all other living beings and which small nexion has the opportunity to evolve to be the awareness, to be part of the-being, of Nature and of the Cosmos itself.
It is, in summary, the decision to restore, and to then enhance and to evolve, that connexion to the Numinous which machines, and technology, and the abstractions and artificial goals of modern nation-States and modern ways of material living, have severed, and which connexion has its foundation, in genesis, in empathy, in personal honour and in those small clan-based communities where such empathy and such honour can thrive.
David Myatt
Footnotes:
(1) The Internet itself provides an excellent example of (a) the mis-use of technology by Homo Hubris, and (b) of how such technology enhances the profanity and arrogance of Homo Hubris, and disrupts the Numinous itself.
Genuine learning and a genuine wisdom arises from a reflexion born from personal, direct, practical experience: from an alchemical, inner, symbiosis; from that personal and very individual growth that requires a long period of causal time, often in one place. The Internet, however, encourages and easily facilitates two Homo Hubris like things: (1) the dissemination of abstract, rootless, “knowledge”; and (2) the immediate dissemination of the mostly fatuous, often ignorant and almost always dishonourable opinions and views of the Homo Hubris hordes. In addition, it is increasingly used, and often covertly censored by, functionaries and flunkeys of modern nation-States to spread their grossly un-numinous abstractions and their propaganda; and now possesses a commercialized Media-infested nature.
Thus, there is the availability and the encouragement of the worthless, the profane, the abstract, the lifeless, the un-numinous, the propagandistic, allowing for and encouraging as never before a pretentious pseudo-intellectual type of “knowledge” and of “knowing”, and an immediate spewing forth of personal dishonour.
Thus, instead of being primarily used – as it might have been – as one new means of communication between rational, empathic, enlightened individuals, it has been used and is being used in the service of Homo Hubris, and of those oligarchies and interest groups which have a vested interest in the continuing profanity of Homo Hubris and in the continuing existence of the un-numinous abstractions on which the modern West is based.
As with many things modern, machine-based and technological, the disadvantages of this Internet now far outweigh its few remaining advantages. In addition, and in particular, the truely empathic, the truely wise – those connected or re-connected to The Numen – have little or no need of the immediacy of such a modern medium. The only minuscule value of the medium of the Internet is that it still currently allows the free dissemination of items contrary to the material, un-numinous Zeitgeist of the modern West, enabling those few who might be interested in more numinous matters to reflect upon such matters, and, after such reflexion, if they consider it suitable, to act upon them, in their own species of causal time and in their own individual way.
(2) As I wrote some years, in a letter to a friend:
The toil of earlier times was often much harder than it is now; but the toil that is necessary, now, to live simply, frugally, is not that hard – although it will be so for those who have never done such work! I remember how many people – especially young people – started work in the fields at my previous place of work. Some lasted a few hours; some lasted a week; a few lasted a few weeks. None lasted longer, leaving us two [old farm hands] with our hoes, our taciturn ways, to knowingly smile.
(3) This particular tenet – this particular abstraction – may be said to have its modern origins in the writings of Francis Bacon.
A Brief Analysis of David Myatt’s Philosophy of The Numinous Way
Introduction: Mystic Philosophy of a Modern Gnostic
The Numinous Way is the name given, by David Myatt himself, to his own particular Weltanschauung, his own perspective about life, which he has expounded in a recent (April, 2009 AD) collection of essays entitled Empathy, Compassion, and Honour: The Numinous Way of Life, writing that these particular essays “represent the culmination of my own thinking, and thus supersede all other essays of mine about, or concerning, The Numinous Way, and what I, previously, called The Numinous Way of Folk Culture.” Thus, the majority of my references are to the chapters, and appendices, of this work (1).
Significantly, Myatt states that:
“As for The Numinous Way, I do now incline toward the view that this ethical Way of Life, which I have developed, is now independent of me, a complete philosophy of life, and can and should be judged as all such Ways, all such philosophies are judged, on their merits or their lack of them, independent of the life, and wanderings and mistakes, of those individuals who may have brought such Ways into being, or rather, who have presenced something of the numinous in the causal, just as the life of an artist, while it may or may not be interesting, does not or should not detract from or colour an artistic, aesthetic, judgement of his, or her, works of art.”
Myatt’s particular perspective, or philosophy of life – or apprehension, as Myatt himself calls it – is, in my view, fundamentally a mystical one. That is, it is based on a personal intuitive insight about, a personal awareness of, the nature of Reality. This personal insight is that “individual human beings, are a connexion to all other life, on this planet which is currently our home, and a connexion to the Cosmos itself.” (2)
According to Myatt, this awareness is that arising from empathy; more, precisely, from the faculty of empathy, which he explains is an awareness of, and a sympathy with, other living beings (3), and which he defines, in a somewhat technical way, as “a manifestation, an awareness, of our relation to acausality, and in particular as an awareness of the related and dependant nature of those beings which express or manifest or which presence acausal energy and which are thus described, in a causal way, as possessing life” (4). His other, more simple explanation, is of empathy, in relation to human beings, as “our ability to know, to be aware of, the feelings, the suffering, of others.” (5)
This mystical insight of Myatt’s led him, over a period of a decade, to develop and increasingly refine The Numinous Way, and this development and process of refinement was, according to him, inspired and aided by his own personal experiences and by his quest among, and experience of, the religions of the world. As he states (6), his conclusions are:
“The result of a four-decade long pathei mathos: the result of my many and diverse and practical (and, to many others, weird and strange) involvements (political, and otherwise), and my many and diverse and practical quests among the philosophies, Ways of Life, and religions, of the world. The Numinous Way is, in particular, the result of the often difficult process of acknowledging my many personal mistakes – many of which caused or contributed to suffering – and (hopefully) learning from these mistakes.”
These conclusions have led him to reject all the beliefs and views he formerly adhered to, and which he is publicly known for. Among the beliefs and views he has come to reject, as a result of what it is, I believe, accurate to describe as a life long gnostic search for knowledge, and wisdom (7), are National Socialism and its racialist policies, which he had practical experience of, and a personal involvement with, lasting many years.
As Myatt himself claims, his philosophy of The Numinous Way is emphatically apolitical, rejects the dogma prevalent in established religions; rejects nationalism, racialism and racial prejudice; emphasizes and embraces tolerance, and is fundamentally an individual way of life centered on the virtues of empathy, compassion and personal honor (8).
As Myatt states:
“There has been, for me, a profound change of emphasis, a following of the cosmic ethic of empathy to its logical and honourable conclusion, and thus a rejection of all unethical abstractions.” (9)
A Complete Philosophy of Life
In order to qualify as a complete, and distinct, philosophy – in order to be a Weltanschauung – a particular philosophical viewpoint should possess the following:
1) A particular ontology, which describes and explains the concept of Being, and beings, and our relation to them;
2) A particular theory of ethics, defining and explaining what is good, and what is bad;
3) A particular theory of knowledge (an epistemology); of how truth and falsehood can be determined;
It should also be able to give particular answers to questions such as “the meaning and purpose of our lives”, and explain how the particular posited purpose may or could be attained.
What follows is a brief, and introductory, analysis of how Myatt’s The Numinous Way deals with each of the above topics.
Ontology
Myatt, in the essay Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way, states that, according to The Numinous Way, “there are two types of being, differentiated by whether or not they possess, or manifest, what is termed acausal energy”. That is, he introduces the concept of a causal Universe, and an acausal Universe, which together form “the Cosmos”, or Reality itself.
This causal Universe is the phenomenal world known to use via our five senses, and knowledge of this causal Universe is obtained through conventional sciences based upon practical observation (10). The acausal Universe is known to us via our faculty of empathy, since the acausal is the genesis of that particular type of energy which makes physical matter “alive” (11). That is, according to Myatt, all living beings are nexions, which are places – regions (or, one might say, “bodies”) – in the causal Universe where acausal energy is present, or manifests, or, to use Myatt’s term, is presenced. Hence, according to Myatt, “The Numinous Way adds empathy to the faculties by which we can perceive, know, and understand the Cosmos… Empathy is an essential means to knowing and understanding Life, which Life includes human beings…” (12)
In his earlier essay, Acausal Science: Life and The Nature of the Acausal, Myatt gives a little more detail as to the nature of acausal being, that is, the nature the acausal itself and of acausal energy.
Ethics
The ethics of Myatt’s Numinous Way derive from empathy, and in the section Ethics and the Dependant Nature of Being of the chapter Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way it is stated that:
“The faculty of empathy – and the conscious understanding of the nature of Reality – leads to a knowing, an understanding, of suffering. Part of suffering is that covering-up which occurs when a causal denoting is applied to living beings, and especially to human beings, which denoting implies a judgement (a pre-judgement) of such life according to some abstract construct or abstract value, so that the “worth” or “value” of a living-being is often incorrectly judged by such abstract constructs or abstract values.”
From a knowing and understanding of suffering, compassion arises, and:
“Empathy is thus, for The Numinous Way, the source of ethics, for what is good is considered to be that which manifests empathy and compassion and honour, and thus what alleviates, or what ceases to cause, suffering: for ourselves, for other human beings, and for the other life with which we share this planet. Hence, what is unethical, or wrong, is what causes or what contributes to or which continues such suffering.”
Furthermore, Myatt defines honor (or, more precisely, personal honor) as an ethical means to aid the cessation of suffering (13) and thus as “a practical manifestation of empathy: of how we can relate to other people, and other life, in an empathic and compassionate way”.
In addition, it is worth noting that Myatt views what he calls ‘abstractions’ as immoral, since abstraction obscures, or cover-ups, the essence, the being – the reality – of beings themselves. That is, such abstractions undermine, or replace, or distort, empathy, and thus distance us from life, from our true human nature, and lead us to identify with such abstractions instead of identifying with, sympathizing with, living beings. (14)
Epistemology
In Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way, Myatt writes:
“For The Numinous Way, truth begins with a knowing of the reality of being and Being – part of which is a knowing of the dependant nature of living beings.”
Furthermore,
“There is… a fundamental and important distinction made, by The Numinous Way, between how we can, and should, perceive and understand the causal, phenomenal, physical, universe, and how we can, and should, perceive and understand living beings. The physical world can be perceived and understood as: (1) existing external to ourselves, with (2) our limited understanding of this ‘external world’ depending for the most part upon what we can see, hear or touch: on what we can observe or come to know via our senses; with (3) logical argument, or reason, being a most important means to knowledge and understanding of and about this ‘external world’, and a means whereby we can make reasonable assumptions about it, which assumptions can be refuted or affirmed via observation and experiment; and (4) with the physical Cosmos being, of itself, a reasoned order subject to laws which are themselves understandable by reason. In this perception and understanding of the causal, phenomenal, inanimate universe, concepts, denoting, ideas, forms, abstractions, and such like, are useful and often necessary.” (15)
Hence, Myatt conceives of there being two distinct types of knowing. That of the causal Universe, which derives from our senses and from practical science, and that of living beings, which derives from our empathy with such living beings, from a knowing that we are not separate from those living beings, but only one manifestation of that acausal, living, energy which connects all living beings, sentient and otherwise. (16) This second type of knowing derives from empathy, and is one means whereby we can apprehend the acausal, which is the matrix, The Unity, of connexions which is all life, presenced as living-beings in the causal. (17)
According to Myatt:
“The error of conventional philosophies – the fundamental philosophical error behind abstractionism – is to apply causal perception and a causal denoting to living being(s).” (18)
Praxeology
The primary goal is seen as living in such a way that we, as individuals, cease to cause suffering to other life. This means us using, and developing empathy, and thus changing – reforming – ourselves.
“How can we develope this faculty [of empathy]? How can we reform ourselves and so evolve? The answer of The Numinous Way is that this is possible through compassion, empathy, gentleness, reason, and honour: through that gentle letting-be which is the real beginning of wisdom and a manifestation of our humanity. To presence, to be, what is good in the world – we need to change ourselves, through developing empathy and compassion, through letting-be, that is, ceasing to interfere, ceasing to view others (and “the world”) through the immorality of abstractions, and ceasing to strive to change or get involved with what goes beyond the limits determined by personal honour.” (19)
Why should we pursue such a goal? Myatt answers, in a rather mystical and gnostic way, that:
“Empathy, compassion, and a living by honour, are a means whereby we increase, or access for ourselves, acausal energy – where we presence such energy in the causal – and whereby we thus strengthen the matrix of Life, and, indeed, increase Life itself. Thus, when we live in such an ethical way we are not only aiding life here, now, in our world, in our lifetime, we are also aiding all future life, in the Cosmos, for the more acausal energy we presence, by our deeds, our living, the more will be available not only to other life, here – in our own small causal Time and causal Space – but also, on our mortal death, available to the Cosmos to bring-into-being more life. Thus will we aid – and indeed become part of – the very change, the very evolution of the life of the Cosmos itself.”
The Acausal and The Cosmic Being
Myatt’s concept of what he terms the acausal is central to understanding his philosophy of The Numinous Way. He conceives of this acausal as a natural part of the Cosmos, which Cosmos he defines as the unity of the physical, causal, Universe, and of the acausal Universe. This acausal Universe has an a-causal geometry and an a-causal time, and there exists, in this acausal Universe, a-causal energy of a type quite different from the physical energy of causal Space-Time, which causal energy is known to us and described by causal sciences such as Physics. (20)
This acausal energy is, according to Myatt, what animates physical matter and makes it alive, and thus he conceives as life in the causal, physical, Universe as a place – a nexion – where acausal energy is “presenced” (manifested) in causal Space-Time. Hence, all living beings are, for Myatt, a connection, a nexion, to the acausal itself, and thus all living beings are connected to each other. This connectively is felt, revealed to us, as human beings, through empathy (21). Compassion is knowing, and acting upon, this connectivity of life, since “our very individuality is a type of abstraction in itself, and thus something of an illusion, for it often obscures our relation to other life…” (22)
The acausal is thus the matrix of connectivity, where all life exists in the immediacy of the moment, and where causal abstractions, based on finite causal thinking, have no meaning and no value.
Myatt conceives of what he terms a Cosmic Being, which is regarded as the Cosmos in evolution, becoming sentient through the evolution of living beings. That is, the Cosmic Being is itself a type of living entity, manifest (or “incarnated”) in all living beings, including ourselves, and Nature. (23)
“The Cosmic Being….. is not perfect, nor omniscient, not God, not any human-manufactured abstraction. That is, it is instead a new kind of apprehension of Being: a Cosmic one, based upon empathy, and an apprehension which takes us far beyond conventional theology and ontology.” (24)
Thus, this Cosmic Being is not to be viewed in a religious, theological, way, as some kind of deity, for we are part of this Being, as this Being is us and all other life, changing, evolving, coming-into-consciousness (25).
Pathei Mathos
One phrase which frequently occurs in Myatt’s writings about his Numinous Way – and which he often uses in his private correspondence and his autobiographical essays – is the Greek term πάθει μάθος. Myatt, in his own translation of The Agamemnon by Aeschylus, translates this as learning from adversity. Pathei Mathos is how Myatt describes his own strange personal journey, his gnostic search for knowledge, wisdom and meaning, and his ultimate rejection of the various beliefs, ideologies, and religions, he studied and embraced in the course of this four decade long journey.
A large part of this learning from adversity is, for him, firstly an acknowledgment of his personal errors in adhering to and identifying with various “abstractions” – which he admits caused or contributed to suffering – and, secondly, the sometimes painful and difficult personal process of learning from these mistakes and thus changing one’s outlook and beliefs in an ethical way.
As Myatt states:
“In essence, there was, for me, pathei mathos. Due to this pathei mathos, I have gone far beyond any and all politics, and beyond conventional religion and theology toward what I believe and feel is the essence of our humanity, manifest in empathy, compassion, personal love and personal honour. Hence, I cannot in truth be described by any political or by any religious label, or be fitted into any convenient category, just as no -ism or no -ology can correctly describe The Numinous Way itself, or even the essence of that Way. Therefore, I believe it is incorrect to judge me by my past associations, by my past involvements, by some of my former effusions, for all such things – all the many diverse such things – were peregrinations, part of sometimes painful often difficult decades-long process of learning and change, of personal development, of interior struggle and knowing, which has enabled me to understand my many errors, my multitude of mistakes, and – hopefully – learn from them.” (26)
In addition, he does not make any claims for his Numinous Way, other than it represents his own personal conclusions about life.
“The Numinous Way is but one answer to the questions about existence; it does not have some monopoly on truth, nor does it claim any prominence, accepting that all the diverse manifestations of the Numen, all the diverse answers, of the various numinous Ways and religions, have or may have their place, and all perhaps may serve the same ultimate purpose – that of bringing us closer to the ineffable beauty, the ineffable goodness, of life; that of transforming us, reminding us; that of giving us as individuals the chance to cease to cause suffering, to presence the good, to be part of the Numen itself.” (27)
Conclusion
This short overview of Myatt’s Numinous Way reveals it as a comprehensive and, in my view, rather original, moral philosophy with an ethics and a praxeology which, while having some resemblance to those of Buddhism, are quite distinct by reason of (a) how Myatt relates, and defines, empathy and honor, and how such honor allows for the employment, in certain situations, of reasonable (“honorable”) force (28), and (b) how Myatt views human life in terms of the acausal, and as a means for us to “reform and evolve” ourselves.
The goal of The Numinous Way is seen as us, as individuals, becoming aware of and having empathy with all life, and this involves us using and developing our faculty of empathy, being compassionate, and thus increasing the amount of life, of acausal energy, in the Cosmos, leading to not only the evolution of life, but also to a cosmic sentience, which we, when we are empathic, compassionate and honorable, are part of and which we can become aware of.
In addition, as his many autobiographical essays and his published letters reveal (29), The Numinous Way – as outlined in the recent compilation The Numinous Way of Life: Empathy, Compassion, and Honour – has no relation whatsoever to any of Myatt’s previously held political views and beliefs. Indeed, Myatt is quite clear that he regards both race, and “the folk”, as abstractions which, like all abstractions, obscure and undermine the numinous and which are detrimental to empathy and compassion and, ultimately, unethical and therefore dishonorable. (30) Thus, and rather confusingly given the terminology, this new apolitical Numinous Way – with its emphasis on personal, ethical, change and the cessation of suffering – is completely distinct from his much earlier, now rejected, philosophy which he first called “Folk Culture” and then called The Numinous Way of Folk Culture.
Thus, The Numinous Way, as expounded recently and as developed by Myatt in the past two years, is not only a rejection of all of those previously held beliefs and views of his, but possibly also, as he himself claims, a new moral way founded on his own learning from his experiences and errors.
JR Wright
Oxford
April 29, 2009 AD
1) This work (currently an e-text in both html and pdf formats) appears in some editions under the alternative title The Numinous Way of Life: Empathy, Compassion, and Honour. In addition to citing this work, I have, on occasion, referred to recent private correspondence between Myatt and myself (both written, and e-mail) where he elucidates certain matters in response to a particular question, or questions, of mine.
Myatt admits that, after his conversion to Islam, he did continue to develop and refine this Numinous Way, spurred on by his experiences in the Muslim world, and it was these experiences – and his study of Islam – which significantly contributed to him expunging what he called the “unethical and dishonourable abstractions of both race and the folk from this philosophy.” Private e-mail from Myatt to JRW, January 7, 2009
2) An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life
3) In Compassion, Empathy and Honour: The Ethics of the Numinous Way
4) Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way
6) Introduction, Empathy, Compassion, and Honour: The Numinous Way of Life
7) A Gnostic is someone who seeks gnosis - wisdom and knowledge; someone involved in a life-long search,a quest, for understanding, and who more often than not views the world, or more especially ordinary routine life, as often mundane and often as a hindrance. In my view, this is a rather apt description of Myatt.
8) Refer to Frequently Asked Questions About The Numinous Way and An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life
9) Introduction, Empathy, Compassion, and Honour: The Numinous Way of Life
10) Refer to the section Ontology and The Numinous Way in the chapter A Brief Analysis of The Immorality of Abstraction, and also to Myatt’s earlier essay Acausal Science: Life and The Nature of the Acausal which is referenced in that chapter.
11) A Brief Analysis of The Immorality of Abstraction
12) A Brief Analysis of The Immorality of Abstraction
13) An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life
14) Refer to Myatt’s recent essay, A Change of Perspective, dated 2454949
15) A Brief Analysis of The Immorality of Abstraction
16) Refer to An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life and Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way and also Presencing The Numen In The Moment
17) A Change of Perspective. Also, private e-mail from Myatt to JRW, April 23, 2009
18) A Brief Analysis of The Immorality of Abstraction
19) An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life
20) Acausal Science: Life and The Nature of the Acausal
21) Private e-mail from Myatt to JRW, January 29, 2009
22) An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life. See also The Numinous Way and Life Beyond Death
23) Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way. Also, private e-mail from Myatt to JRW, February 2, 2009
24) Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way
25) Private e-mail from Myatt to JRW, February 2, 2009 and private letter from Myatt to JRW, which he dated 23.iv.09 (CE)
26) Presencing The Numen In The Moment
27) The Empathic Essence
28) Refer to An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life and also The Principles of Numinous Law
29) Among his dozens of recent autobiographical essays are the following:
So Many Tears
Love, Deities and God: Redemption and The Numinous Way
An Allegory of Pride and Presumption
One Simple Numinous Answer
The Empathic Essence
I have collected some of his personal letters in a pdf file entitled The Private Letters of David Myatt, Part 1
30) Refer to Frequently Asked Questions About The Numinous Way, where Myatt writes that “such a concept as “the folk” now has no place in The Numinous Way…” See also The Development of The Numinous Way and Other Questions and especially Questions About Race, The Folk, and The Numinous Way where it is stated:
You have recently written that the practical essential basis for The Numinous Way is a return to small clan-based communities. How, therefore, do such small probably rural and very low-tech communities fit in with your vision of Space Exploration and colonization? For surely such exploration requires high-tech industries and the resources and wealth of a modern nation-State?
A return to a more human way of living – based upon small communities and the law of personal honour – is indeed central to The Numinous Way, which Way rejects as unethical the abstraction of the modern nation-State and the un-numinous ways of living which go with such an abstraction.
As mentioned in The Clan, Culture, and The Numinous Way
As for Space Exploration, this certainly does, currently, in its present form, involve sophisticated technology and certainly requires the industry and wealth and resources of large nation-States.
However, current Space technology is very cumbersome and quite primitive, and – using this type of technology – it will probably be another hundred years before there are large, self-sufficient, colonies on Mars and the Moon. In addition, this technology – even allowing for some advancements in the next fifty or so years – is wholly unsuitable to stellar and Galactic exploration, given the distances involved. After fifty years of manned Spaceflight, there are currently only around five or six individuals, at any one time, living in Space – and they live there for only some months at a time, not permanently; that is, no one yet lives permanently in Space.
Furthermore, due to its complexity and cost, Space Exploration does not currently have a very high priority among those pursuing it, especially as countries such as America prefer to spend money, and use their resources, to maintain their military and political hegemony, and this low priority is unlikely to change in the near future, given current policies and the current ethos that dominates the West and now most of the rest of the world, partly due to Western influence. Indeed, Space Exploration may well have an ever lower priority in the future, given the social, economic and political problems that may well arise.
What is required is something which is technologically simple, relatively cheap (by current standards), and which does not require the vast resources of a modern industrialized country. Currently, Space technology is reliant upon expensive, costly, mostly expendable rockets to take craft above and beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, and even were another type of Earth-to-Space propulsion devised, the problems of interstellar distance, and of costly spacecraft production, still remain.
Personally, it is my view that an entirely new type of technology is required, and it may well be that this will be an acausal technology, in contrast to our existing causal technologies. Such an acausal technology – based upon acausal energy in contrast to causal energy – is still, of course, futuristic.
You are referring, presumably, to your concept of acausal Space-Time and acausal energy, which you outlined in your work The Physics of Acausal Energy?
Yes, and it is such an acausal technology which is certainly compatible with small clan-based communities, and which does not require the wealth and organized industries of modern industrialized nation-States, and which thus does not exploit and denude the resources of, nor pollute, this planet, Earth, which is currently our home.
As mentioned elsewhere:
However, given that such numinous cultures are small – and may often be rural in nature – how can this Galactic, extra-terrestrial, development be achieved, especially since a numinous culture would most certainly not involve large national or supra-national industries, as it would not be reliant upon the usury, and the supra-national trade and commerce, which all modern States and nations depend upon?
It could and should be achieved by means of the development of a new acausal science, and the development of a new type of technology, based on acausal energy. For a numinous culture – and all empathic human beings – are, both in principle and in practice, opposed to the exploitation of the Earth, and the exploitation of the living beings of the Earth, which exploitation is inseparable from capitalism and the modern industries, and technologies, deriving from, and dependant, upon such capitalism, on such supra-national commerce, and on other causal un-numinous abstractions.
The basis for the new acausal technology is the science of causal and acausal, of the apprehension of acausal energy emanating from the acausal universe by means of living nexions.” The Clan, Culture, and The Numinous Way
Do you have any thoughts on what timescale we’re talking about in developing this new acausal technology?
My assumption is that it may take many decades for even the foundations to be developed – that is, for acausal energy to experimented with; for machines which generate such energy to be developed; and for new acausal machines to be developed and used as a means of propulsion for Spacecraft.
Thus, it may well be a century of more before Spacecraft using acausal energy are developed. But, it could occur in a much shorter time, just as it might not occur at all.
What do you mean by saying it might occur at all?
Currently, my theory of acausal energy – and of such acausal energies being the “extra something” that animates physical matter and makes it alive – is just a theory, and a rather speculative one at that, based on certain axioms. It is an interesting theory, certainly, but might not be a valid one: that is, one that becomes useful, and the basis for a new technology, because practical experiments validate it to some extent. Indeed, practical experiments might just as well show that the theory is – or aspects of it are – untenable.
What about your other, concomitant, theory, of a technology based not on acausal energy, machines generating such energy, but instead on living machines?
That is not especially a theory, but rather a speculative extrapolation based on the axioms, of causal and acausal, which axioms form the foundation of the theory of acausal energy.
As I mentioned in a very early essay – my first exposition of the theory -
” One way of capturing the acausal is to develop a truly organic technology – that is, to grow living machines from organic material. Such an organic technology would be totally different from the current concern with “molecular electronics” and “nanotechnology” because these concerns still depend on manufactured, discrete and dead electronic components which themselves are based on descriptions of causal matter using causal time.
Electronics, for example, is a means of describing the changes of a particular type of causal matter – electrons – over causal time, and enables components and circuits to be built to alter and control the flow of electrons. Thus, for example, using organic ‘molecules’ to store data is not a genuine organic technology, because: (i) such molecules are manufactured to do one or two specific, inert, tasks; (ii) such molecules are not basically alive as independent changing organisms – that is, not possessed of the acausal; and (iii) they would still be somehow connected to, and dependent upon, electronic components.
David Myatt
David Myatt, 1993, Spain
One of the fundamental themes of both David Myatt’s early and later National Socialist writings (1) and of many of his other non-political writings, is his vision of a Galactic Imperium. According to what we might call Myatt’s radical and esoteric millennial philosophy, crucial to the creation of this Imperium is the revolutionary leader he called Vindex. This revolutionary leader would, according to Myatt’s early political writings, be Adolf Hitler’s successor, and would lead his, or her, (2) forces against what Myatt euphemistically calls The Magian (3).
The Galactic Imperium is, for Myatt, fundamentally the exploration and settlement of Outer Space – the Final Frontier – by a new breed of warrior clans, and it is this Imperium which will, according to Myatt, provide us with the opportunities and the challenges we need to evolve, as human beings, and to create new societies where genuine, individual, freedom, and honor, are the norm.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that Myatt envisages – or envisioned – hordes of neo-Nazi stormtroopers marauding around the Galaxy and invading other planets. Rather, Myatt initially saw Hitler’s National Socialist Germany and indeed National Socialism itself, as only a prelude, and while in his earlier NS writings he eulogized both Hitler and National Socialism in general, in his later Reichsfolk writings he pointed out some of the flaws of early, German, National Socialism, and came to believe that Hitler had made some fundamental tactical mistakes.
” One mistake was to initiate a war, and to seek new living-space in already occupied lands. Of course, war against NS Germany was inevitable – just like the recent war against Iraq was inevitable. In the case of Iraq the cabal spent over ten years – from the time of the Gulf War – trying to starve the people into submission, and destroying the defensive capability of the Iraqi defence forces.
But Germany should have waited, and most certainly not launched offensives in other countries. The cabal would then have to had resorted to invading Germany, which would have taken perhaps a few more years to organize, giving NS Germany more time to create a genuine NS society, and prepare to defend Germany. More alliances should have been saught, and NS exported as a revolutionary creed. Had the cabal invaded Germany, they would have been on dubious moral ground, and effective resistance could have been undertaken against the occupying forces.
The effort that went into the war should have been directed toward building a stronger Germany, and showing, by example, that NS worked. In addition, scientific research should have been undertaken into spacecraft.
But this, of course, is hindsight. What happened, happened. We have to learn the lessons. One lesson is to evolve NS itself – which has been done, based upon the ideal of honor and the vision of a Galactic Empire or Federation, created by a NS homeland which seeks allies among the various peoples and cultures of Earth on the basis of honor and mutual respect. ” ONA: Aeonic Notes IX, dated 114yf
In respect of the flaws of what Myatt called early German National-Socialism, Myatt in his second (4) seminal text about Vindex, entitled The Mythos of Vindex, writes that:
In practical terms, this error led to invasion and occupation of other lands, as it led to the desire to seek lebensraum in lands already inhabited and settled by others.”
As Myatt explained, the new Galactic Imperium would be quite different from previous Empires:
This means it will not impose itself by force of arms upon others. Rather, it means it will be composed of thinking warriors who uphold honor and who prefer combat to dishonourable modern war. In particular, it means a federation of countries, or nations, who co-operate together in the pursuit of a numinous goal: not an Empire in the old sense of domination and conquest and occupation.
The old type of Empire belongs in the past: it is unsuitable for an honourable, rational, people. Furthermore, the old type of Empire is founded upon a basic error.
The basic mistake is to believe that war can solve problems or be of benefit. Thus to have war as a political policy is stupid. This mistake about war arises from two things: (1) a lack of perspective, and thus a viewing of events in current rather than historical terms; (2) failing to act in accord with the ethics of honor.
Every old type of Empire has a time of glory; as it has to maintain itself by occupation, war, and repression. Every such Empire declines, and is then destroyed. Sometimes an Empire may last a few decades; sometimes a century or more. Rarely, a few centuries. After the destruction of the Empire, there follows a period of chaos, of barbarism, of regression, with only a few positive attributes of the Empire remaining: some stories of glory, perhaps; or some literature; some monuments, or some technological or scientific achievement. But a great deal is lost.
What applies to an Empire applies to the results of terrestrial wars – such as the occupation of a foreign country after victory in a war or after an invasion. Such occupation may well last for a while: a few years; a decade; several decades. But it will inevitably end, through either a successful uprising (often after several failed attempts) or through the withdrawal of the occupiers, for military, economic, or political reasons, and while some elements of the occupying forces may remain (in terms of their culture, ideas, and so on), a great deal is lost. In the meantime, thousands upon thousands of people have been injured, killed, repressed or dishonourably confined in prisons. Furthermore, it is the honourable right and duty of those under occupation to resist, using lethal force – and to try and take away this right and duty, by making it “illegal”, as all occupying forces do, is dishonourable in itself, the act of the bully, the tyrant. It is also the right of individuals to possess weapons, and one of the many dishonourable things an army of occupation does is make possession of weapons illegal.
This old imperial process is incredibly wasteful, and stupid, because the positive, evolutionary, civilized, changes which Empires sometimes bring can be achieved in not only less wasteful ways but also in ways which can ensure much greater, and longer lasting, evolutionary change.
In brief, imperial conquest and colonialism are short-term solutions: in Aeonic terms – in the timescale of civilizations and Aeons – they are failures, detrimental to the long-term evolution that is required.
In terms of acquiring new living-space – often used as an argument in favour of Empires and conquest and colonialism – the honourable, futuristic solution is the colonization of Outer Space.
In terms of war, the new Imperium – or Stellar Federation or Cosmic Federation or Cosmic Reich or whatever we want to call it – would use force only as a last means of self-defence of its own territory or homeland, or when there needs to be an honourable combat between it and its enemies.
In addition, it needs to be understood that modern warfare is for the most part dishonourable, employing as it does cowardly methods – such as aerial bombing – which an honourable warrior would refuse to use, condone, or accept. The warriors of the new Imperium, the troops of Vindex, will seek honourable combat, a fair fight, rather than impersonal war. Honourable combat means personal fighting between groups of warriors, or armies. It means an end to the dishonour which has blighted armies for hundreds of years. It means a return to civilized treatment of captured or surrendering soldiers – allowing them to retain their honor, and go free. It means a conscious decision – based upon honor – to do only that which is honourable, and which befits an honourable warrior.” ONA: Aeonic Notes IX, dated 114yf
National Socialism, Clans, and the Imperium of Vindex
Initially, from the 1970’s to the early 1990’s, Myatt considered his Galactic Imperium would be based if not upon National Socialism itself, then upon an updated version of it; an updated version which he himself assiduously created over a period of some ten years, culminating in his “ethical non-racist National-Socialism” and in his Reichsfolk organization. However, as, in the late 1990’s and the early part of the twenty-first century, he developed this new ethical philosophy – which he first called The Numinous Way of Folk Culture and then simply called The Numinous Way – he moved away from the concept of a strong, united, nation-State which was central to early, German, National-Socialism, even going so far as to describe the State, in The Mythos of Vindex, as “an unethical abstraction that is a great cause of suffering and nullifier of the ethical and numinous principle of personal honour.”
In place of the nation-State, he advocated, in his alter writings, “small, rural, communities, which co-operate with, and which trade with, other local communities for their own mutual benefit. That is, a return to what is human; to the human-scale-of-things, and a moving-forward to a simple, ethical, letting-be based upon personal honour,” (5) and the formation of new clans, or tribes, which, in essays such as The Clan, Culture, and The Numinous Way and The Mythos of Vindex, he described as the basis for a new type of communities and culture, the basis for a new, more evolved, more human, type of society.
In addition, as he further developed his own ethical philosophy of The Numinous Way, he also moved away from the concept of both race and “the folk” as the basis for, or even as a part of, his philosophy, or Way of Life as he mostly described it. Hence, he wrote that:
A clan is a basis for individuals to live in a numinous way, in harmony with themselves, with Nature, and with the Cosmos. The clan is basically just a large extended family, where the individuals are personally known to each other and/or related to each other by family ties, such as marriage. What distinguishes a clan is this personal knowing, these personal, direct, living, relationships – and a certain honourable loyalty, a certain “clannishness”, based on this personal knowing and this personal loyalty.
Furthermore, the clan is the basis for establishing new, numinous, communities based on The Numinous Way itself. That is, new clans can express, manifest, presence, the numinous itself by the members of such new clans living according to the numinous principles of empathy, compassion and personal honor. They are thus nexions, regions where numinous law, based upon honor, can be established, to the benefit of the individuals of such new communities.” Questions About Race, The Folk, and The Numinous Way
Thus, Myatt no longer saw his Galactic Imperium in either political or racial terms, but developed an entirely new and ethical philosophy – his Numinous Way – as its basis.
Since this Numinous Way disdained the modern nation-State and its vast, capitalist based industries – and championed new and small communities based on new tribes – one might wonder how such tribes might develope the type of technology needed for Space exploration. Myatt, however, had an answer to this – acausal technology, based on his own concept of acausal Space, acausal Time, and acausal energy. He wrote that:
However, given that such numinous cultures are small – and may often be rural in nature – how can this Galactic, extra-terrestrial, development be achieved, especially since a numinous culture would most certainly not involve large national or supra-national industries, as it would not be reliant upon the usury, and the supra-national trade and commerce, which all modern States and nations depend upon?
It could and should be achieved by means of the development of a new acausal science, and the development of a new type of technology, based on acausal energy. For a numinous culture – and all empathic human beings – are, both in principle and in practice, opposed to the exploitation of the Earth, and the exploitation of the living beings of the Earth, which exploitation is inseparable from capitalism and the modern industries, and technologies, deriving from, and dependant, upon such capitalism, on such supra-national commerce, and on other causal un-numinous abstractions.
The basis for the new acausal technology is the science of causal and acausal, of the apprehension of acausal energy emanating from the acausal universe by means of living nexions.” The Clan, Culture, and The Numinous Way
He expounded upon this concept of a new acausal science, based on acausal energy, in his essay Acausal Science: Life and The Nature of the Acausal and in his work The Physics of Acausal Energy.
Vindex and Revolution
Despite both his move from, first, the old style National Socialism of Hitler’s Germany to his own ethical Reichsfolk type of National-Socialism, and then, later on, to the development of his own The Numinous Way philosophy as the new basis for his new Imperium, Myatt has never wavered from his belief that what he calls The Old Order needs to be and should be undermined and destroyed by practical revolutionary means, by armed force.
Indeed, Myatt makes it quite clear in his Mythos of Vindex that he believes that the Galactic Imperium will never be more than a dream unless “the current tyrannical Magian order – the abode of Homo Hubris and exemplified by the new ignoble arrogant Amerikan empire and the Police-States of the West (of which modern Britain is a prime example) – is confronted, undermined, and destroyed by armed force, ideological subversion and by the numinosity of a new mythos… This is the supreme and severe challenge before us in these dire and ignoble times, and an opportunity which will not arise again, for were we to fail, then our further evolution as a species is doubtful.”
Myatt considers Vindex as not only a manifestation of the new, warrior, clan-based ethos of Imperium, but also as the pivotal character in the armed confrontation with the Old Order – the person who inspires others to take up arms, and who, possibly initially as a modern type of outlaw, achieves success after success against them, using and developing tactics which nullify the advantages the Old Order possesses in terms of military superiority, weaponry, and wealth.
The ONA and the Vindex Mythos
The Occult group The Order of Nine Angles – which many people consider Myatt founded, led and still leads, using the pseudonym Anton Long – can be considered as one means of spreading not only Myatt’s Vindex mythos, but of practically seeking to bring about, and aid, the Galactic Imperium. That is, Myatt conceived, created and implemented the ONA to achieve certain goals, one of which was and is to counter the Magian ethos and another of which was to train individuals and send them out, into the world, to undermine and disrupt the status quo as a prelude to the practical revolution Myatt has always regarded as necessary for the destruction of the Old Order and the emergence of a new order based upon his law of personal honor.
In addition, one of the stated aims of the ONA was to breed a new type of individual and new types of tribes:
Importantly, the basis for these new tribes is what the ONA calls The Law of the New Aeon, and, unsurprisingly, this Law is Myatt’s law of personal honor, the basis for his Galactic Imperium.
Conclusion: The Quest for Vindex
It is my considered view that Myatt’s primary aim, throughout his entire adult life, has been to find, develope and use means to bring about his vision of a Galactic Imperium. All his various endeavors and involvements – from National Socialism, to the ONA, to his philosophy of The Numinous Way, to his involvement with radical Islam – are all part of this. They are all means to explain, to propagate, to try and implement – through, for example, destabilizing the status quo, confronting the Magian, and agitating for revolution – his Vindex mythos and this vision of a Galactic Imperium.
He has been almost fanatically single-minded in his pursuit of this vision, and, at times, quite ruthless. He has also been exceptionally pragmatic – using whatever means, whatever ideology, whatever tactics, that might help him undermine and confront what he calls “the tyranny of the Magian manifest in the dishonourable Amerikan empire of Homo Hubris.” (6) These tactics have included racist violence, racist and Islamic terrorism, Nazi politics, and using the ONA as a means of subversion and radical change.
Myatt has also been consistent, for over four decades, in upholding and propagating the principle of personal honor, which he wove into his NS writings, which he made one of the foundations of his philosophy of The Numinous Way, and which he made the basis for both the clans of Vindex and the tribes of the ONA.
In addition, he has also expounded at some length (7) on what he calls the new science of acausal energy, which energy he sees as the most viable means of developing the new acausal (i.e. the organic) technology of living machines capable of taking us out among the stars of our Galaxy.
In conclusion, therefore, there is, in my view, a rigorous consistently to Myatt’s life, writings and involvements, which his many, and vocal, detractors have overlooked. Myatt has also undertaken, it seems, something of personal, interior, spiritual, quest – leaving behind the racism of National Socialism (and, now, apparently according to some rumors, also radical Islam) to develope his own, unique and ethical, philosophy, that of The Numinous Way, based on the principles of empathy, compassion, and personal honor; which philosophy he now regards as the way of life appropriate to and for the new type of human beings who, he envisages will explore and settle the planets around the star systems of our Galaxy.
Julie Wright,
Oxford
June 2009 AD
Notes:
(1) Myatt’s early writings about National Socialism – with the notable and important exception of his Vindex: The Destiny of The West published in 1984 – are clearly distinct from his later NS writings. Those early works, written before 1998, were often polemical and sometimes overtly racist. His later NS works, in which he developed what he called the “ethical National-Socialism” of his Reichsfolk organization, were decidedly non-racist. These later works include: (1) The Theology of National-Socialism; (2) The Complete Guide to the Aryan Way of Life; (3) Why National-Socialism is Not Racist; and (4) The Meaning of National-Socialism (Third Edition, 115yf). Around 1999, Myatt revised several of his earlier works in order, as he stated at the time, to remove those aspects incompatible with the ethical principles of honor, as defined by him in several of these later works, including The Code of Honour, given in his The Complete Guide to the Aryan Way of Life, a code he later made minor revisions to for its inclusion in the Reichsfolk publication Ethical National-Socialism: A Collection of Essays, issued in 2009.
(2) Although in his earlier works – including his Vindex: The Destiny of The West - Myatt described Vindex as a male warrior, in many of his later writings he intriguingly stated that Vindex could be either a man or a woman, and might not arise in the West itself:
” Vindex is the generic name for that revolutionary noble warrior who leads the practical fight against the Magian and their allies, manifest as the Magian are now in so-called mis-named New World Order whose twin centres of power (both ideological and practical) are in Amerika and the Zionist entity that occupies Palestine. Vindex thus prepares the way for the Galactic Imperium, whose practical beginnings lie in the establishment of new communities, based around new tribes whose only law is that of Personal Honour. Vindex (who may be male or female) is the embodiment of The Law of the New Aeon of the Imperium, which is personal honor, and who, with his or her victorious warriors, establishes an entirely new type of culture…
Used as the name of an individual, Vindex means “The Avenger”, and while it is traditionally (and semantically) regarded as a male name, with the Anglicized feminine form being Vengerisse, Vindex is now often used to refer to either the man or the woman who is or who becomes this revolutionary warrior leader…
While it is probable that Vindex will arise from one of the nations of the West (which includes Russia, the United States and the lands formerly referred to as Eastern Europe) – and be of Caucasian (European) ethnicity – it is also possible that he or she could arise elsewhere in the world, and be of mixed, or of any, ethnicity. For what is fundamental to Vindex is that he or she is a charismatic and revolutionary leader who inspires absolute loyalty; that he or she fights, in a practical way through force of arms, the forces of the Old Order, manifest in the power of the Magian; and that he or she triumphs in the final battle, enabling the establishment of new communities free from the now broken and discarded and tyrannical Magian ethos…” The Mythos of Vindex
(3) By Magian, Myatt – following Yockey – means both “the Zionists and their allies, such as Amerika”, and what he, in his Mythos of Vindex, calls the “un-numinous and materialistic crypto-marxian ethos, and its decadent and capitalistic culture, which has emasculated and controlled the individual, done away with excellence based on nobility, replaced the law of the warrior – which is personal honor – with the abstract life-less law of tyrannical States, and whose servants and lackeys are hypocritical new barbarians lacking in manners who have de-evolved to become almost a new human species, Homo Hubris.”
(4) His first work on the subject being Vindex: The Destiny of The West
(5) A Numinous Future – Beyond The Abstractions of The State and The Nation
(6)The Mythos of Vindex
(7) See, for example, his essay Acausal Science: Life and The Nature of the Acausal and his, currently still unpublished, work The Physics of Acausal Energy.
Towards The Numinous Dark
Reichsfolk 352
FIRST EPISTLE TO THE ACCEPTION
David Myatt came, and changed everything. Before Myatt there was aimless stupidity in the religions and politics of our species. Aimless as having no real genuine aeonic aim or purpose; except propagation of these institution’s memeplexes. Stupid in that these stagnant religious and/or political dogma, ideology, and orthodoxy were sold and hailed to humanity as jewels of human ingenuity. With his Faustian Spirit, Myatt came and quietly set the proverbial cog wheel of progression in motion. It is too early for the rest of the species to recognize his genius, but as time passes and changes things, he will one day take his place among the great thinkers of our species. Whether it was for National-Socialism, his Numinous Way, or his Order of Nine Angles; he imbued the same Myattian ethos, concepts and vision into all his writings and institutions he fathered. Calling our eyes up towards the Cosmos to awaken us to our galactic destiny and providing us a means for striving for that distant dream.
As with science: there are theories and principles; then there is methodology. Myatt’s Reichsfolk National-Socialism, and his Numinous Way in 352 are the theories and principles of a new and progressive humanity. The ONA is the Methodology thru which those theories and principles are transmutated into future galactic civilization. 352 must be a Myattian Institution through and through; adopting both the theories/principles, and the vehicle of application. The Acception must understand that a principle, no matter how great it sounds – even when such principles are “lived” by adherents – is devoid of the ability to affect the future. Aeonic engineering is required to consciously create a future with theories and principles. Thus the ONA as a means to apply and use such principles via aeonic engineering, to manifest a willed future is a crucial [an alchemical crucible] factor/nexion between the theories and principles we have today – and the evolved humanity and celestial civilization of tomorrow. These theories and principles must first be understood within the frame work or psychological territory of WSA352.
RACE & MIND PARASITES:
Race, as 352 understands it is a Causal+Scalar (time) manifestation or by-product of the Folk or Clan. A Clan is a group of people bound together by blood, loyalty, and mutual dependency. It is only due to a clan’s isolated breeding, and environmental factors, that its future progeny grows to look different from other clan progeny. Race, does not truly define a people – their mentality, psychology, ethos, beliefs, or culture do (the very essence of a folk and clan). Race is a mere by-product of such folkish factors. The Folk, Clan, or Tribe makes the man. Even within the limits of a phonotypical race there will exist competition, rivalry, war, class struggle, and “racialism.” The organic Clan, is the very essence of our humanity, which defines us as a species and people. The Clan itself is a manifestation of a more primordial simian group phenomenon our ape ancestors once lived in – which can still be witness in most monkey and all ape social orders. The Clan is in our very human genetic make up – in the sense that we as causal organisms naturally seek to belong to a group/family. Race does not make us human – it is not ingrained in our evolutionary makeup. Race is only a by-product of Clan life.
There is nothing wrong with being proud of yourself, and your personal “ethnic” makeup. I’m proud of my ethnic heritage (Mexican-White/Italian). Why though be proud of an entire race which doesn’t care for you. There’s nothing wrong with liking to be racist. Just refine your racialism and be an equal opportunity racist and hate people in your own race too that aren’t your Folk and Clanmates. Chances are, if you think about it, that those in power in your own country enslaving and exploiting you are your own race. We have a cool slogan in 352 which summarizes Reichsfolk National-Socialism in a nice rhyme – “Down with the Ku Ku; Up with the Mu Mu” (Ku Ku for the Ku Klux Klan; and Mu Mu for Mad Myatt or Mage Myatt; Mu being the Greek letter M).
The best example of a modern – over grown – Clan are the Jews. Being “Jewish” isn’t really based on a “race,” genetic factor, skin color, or “nationality.” Essentially it is based on a shared commonality – a cohesion factor – which binds and unites this people into a coherent social order: their Judaic culture, which is founded upon a set of unique religious practices. Blood bonds and loyalty to other “Jews” also defines a person as a Jew. Race and skin color has nothing to do with being a Jew. There are caucasian looking Jews; Jews of proto-semetic-arabic ancestory; and negroid-hametic Falasha Jews from Ethiopia. The over grown Jewish Folk is also a great example of how a Clan over time can become it’s own State – the State of Israel. This is very enlightening because understanding that the State of Israel came only after the Folk Jewish Identity had long been established; do we understand that the State, or nationality actually does not define the individual. It is the person’s folkish or Clan association that does. The abstract concept of “race,” as are the abstractions of a “nation,” and/or “state,” are impersonal identity thieves which stands against your personal honor and duty you owe to yourself and your folk.
Nothings says Clan better though than the original Clans of the United Kingdom. The MacDonalds and Burger Kings; the McDoohickies of the highlands. Many of these clans now are composed of many races and racial mixtures; but an O’Brian is still an O’Brian even if one of them is half Chinese.
Such abstract conceptualizations are parasitic memes which usurps your personal sovereignty. Once you have adopted the transpersonal concept of a “race” you become a slave to the will of an abstract – transpersonal – race. In the same way you become subservient and a slave to a nation or state, when you adopt its identity – working for it, paying taxes to it, spending you entire life supporting it’s existence; and what do you get in return? What do you gain from adopting, serving, and fighting for the cause of a transpersonal “race?” Which has absolutely nothing to do with who you are as an individual person or your clan. Which has no intrinsic interest in you and your welfare or your progression as an evolving individual. It doesn’t matter if your skin color is the same hue as theirs/everyone else’s. Ask yourself if your “race” will be there for you in your time of need. Will your race feed you and your family? Will it/they pay your bills when you have no money? You must realize that the moment you adopt such abstract transpersonal identities as “Race,” “Nation,” “Religion,” and “State,” you become a slave to that abstraction’s will. In otherwords, such abstract memes uses you as an organic being to propagate itself: For whom? For you or for itself?
It’s hard to grasp the concept of being used by a mind parasite which consists of nothing more than the genetic material of memes. Not until you allow yourself to consciously be host to one and observe. This is the reason why we consider Insight Roling as an important concept and why we encourage our Disciples to join a street gang, Nazi organization, or political institution for at least a year. After the year is over you realize that your life, energy, and effort was being used by the gang or institution to merely propagate itself, and execute it’s own interests and that it had no other interest in you but to use you for that purpose.
There is a difference between those who use and those who are used – those who are Masters, and those who are natural slaves. To illustrate we will consider David Myatt, since he is the Fountain Head of all three institutions concerning this Epistle. The statement itself is simple: Myatt converted to Islam. The question is – Is Islam using Myatt? Or is Myatt using Islam? Myatt was a Nazi. Was National-Socialism using Myatt, or was Myatt using National-Socialism? Myatt was a Satanist. Did Myatt use Satanism, or did Satanism use Myatt?
The answer to all of those questions is easy to come up with when we study Myatt carefully. In all three institution Myatt “converted” to, he imposed HIS own ideas, concepts, and mind onto them – changing/evolving them – in HIS image and likeness… not the other way around. Islam isn’t using Myatt. Myatt is using Islam for his own private interests. This is clearly seen in the radical Islamic writings he is putting out, which is influencing and inspiring other Muslims.
This concept of Master versus Slave brings up some great food for thought concerning the ONA and it’s Initiates. If the ONA was already existing and one day Myatt entered it – would he be used by the memetic organism of the ONA to progress itself… or would he use the ONA to progress himself? Then ask yourself that very same question with you and the ONA – whose using whom? If all you are to the ONA is a means for it to propagate itself – then you have no power, authority, basis, or foundation, to judge 352 which is doing with the ONA what Myatt would have done to it: Impose it’s own mind upon it to change/evolve it and use it to progress it’s members. Both kinds of initiates are needed equally. We know where we each stand in this regard.
THE CLAN OR TRIBE:
For as long as we have been human – and far into our pre-human existence – we have been living, associating, in small groups of kinfolk. In the past these clans and tribes were all that naturally existed as far as human social order goes.
The Clan or Tribe is a system of Symbiosis. It is a system of mutual aid and mutual dependency. It is a true Causal system. You put in energy and effort, and the Clan rewards you in return with sustenance, protection, and breeding rights. Since everyone is mutually dependent on each other, everyone’s interests and needs are important… as you, as a person, are important to your Clanmates.
Unfortunately, for most humans, Tribal life was crushed by something called the State. The essence of an impersonal State is not symbiosis. It is Exploitation. We cannot condemn mankind for experimenting with Statehood. It is a rite of passage we as a species must experience… from which we learn.
There were good things and bad things about Clan life; as there are pros and cons to Statehood. The down fall of Clan living is that it is prone to not progress or advance. In fact there are still tribes today which are still in the stone ages. This is due to something 352 calls the “IF” Factor. IF standing for “Incoherency of Force.” The IF factor comes from the fact that clans themselves did not pool or funnel their energy into a collective force with other clans and tribes. The State did. When Force is brought into a coherent state and directed towards a purpose it is called Synergy. The first example of state synergy would be militaries. Synergy is perhaps the only valuable – crucial – thing our species has gained for Statehood. Thru the Synergy of taxation, redistribution of tax money to pay synergic corporations and specialized institutions – we end up with NASA, and the ESA. Thru coherent state synergy, we as a species propelled ourselves into the future; explored space; went to the moon, and put rovers on Mars.
But, our states have become a monstrosity of impersonal existence and species psychosis. We are slowly understanding inside each of us that something is very wrong. What’s wrong is we’ve toiled for the Great Impersonal State and have left our primal human nature – our humanness behind: the Clan. This is not to suggest that we do what Pol Pot did and force ourselves into some past non-technological Golden Age. What’s needed is BALANCE. A balance between our humanness and superpersonal synergy. To recollect ourselves into contemporary Tribes and Clans which has our needs, interests, and symbiosis, as it’s motive and modus operandi. If such Clans we will reform – recreate – can pool their energy and resources to produce a cooperative Synergy to continue to advance us as a species… then the State can be thrown out altogether.
This Nexion of ours is thus not just merely another cell of the ONA. It is the Myattian Imperative in action. Our Nexion was designed and intended to grow into a functioning modern tribe through our oaths, and our established unique culture and tradition. We already have the loyalty factor, and the mutual dependency. In time, with eugenics and selective – intelligent – breeding, we will be bound by blood as well. Blood bound thru the children our sisters will have – our future progeny who will breed with each other, and those that resonate with our Way.
From the very beginning, our future Progeny has been the main focus of our Nexion – the reason why our 352 has come into being in the first place. We already have a fledgling Folk culture and coherent Clan identity. The foundation of which are all of Myatt’s work – the principles set forth in Reichsfolk Doctrine of Ethical National-Socialism; the Numinous Way; the Code of Honour; and the ONA. With these, and the unique subculture we have developed, our WSA has become the seedling of a future Clan. It is a matter of time and aeonics to manifest ourselves as a modern Tribe, for the sake and progression of our future Progeny. We are in essence our own Folk, sharing a common identity, culture, a miniature weltanshauung, and vision of a common future.
NUMINOUS SINISTER WAY:
Can those of the Sinister Way uphold the Numinous Way at the same time? I’m sure it’s possible, since both ways came out of the same mind and share many fundamental concepts in common.
It seems contradicting for the Sinister folk of the ONA to have empathy and compassion for all people and care for their suffering. This contradiction is born from a misunderstanding of the ONA and it’s Sinister Way. Sinister here only means the “Left Hand” way, as opposed to the “Right Hand” way which rejects causal-carnal existence and Nature as abhorrent mode of existence to be transcended. Sinister suggests an atonement or harmony with Nature and carnal existence and all it would imply.
What exactly causes suffering in our modern age? First, what does suffering mean? In Pali (the language the Buddha spoke) “Suffering” is “Dhuga.” The word Dhuga is most often mistranslated as “evil.” The word Dhuga means trouble, heartache, worry, or mental, emotional, and physical pain.
Once we understand the basic meaning of suffering, we can then diagnose the cause: the State itself and the condition of being born and living in an impersonal State. Big worries like tyranny, oppression, abuse of personal liberty. Little worries of losing our jobs, loosing our homes, paying taxes, nobody wanting to mate with us because we’re not as pretty as the girl on the magazine.
Why is the condition of existing in a State or Nation a prime cause of human suffering? Because we are highly social organism by default and within the state we are individualized and separated into autonomous, self-reliant units. The same psychosis or mental and physical anguish can be replicated by taking an ape or ant or bee away from it’s folk/group/colony. Although the said organisms can; by themselves eat and forage for food; they will mentally deteriorate and die.
The power and authority of the State is not one of consent, but division, robbery, extortion, exploitation, and forced complicity. If a highly social organism of higher organic order is separated from it’s pack – such as a dog or monkey – it must attach itself emotionally, physically, and psychologically to a surrogate Clan or Tribe, and become dependent on it for it’s survival. Once the State has individualized the Clan into nuclear “families” and further destroyed the mutual dependency of the “family” unit into self dependent Individuals – those individual units emotionally makes the State and/or Corporation as a surrogate Clan or Tribe. Thus the individualized unit becomes dependent on a very impersonal institution which exploits it.
The State is a major cause and source of our human suffering in our modern age, simply because it is impersonal, exploitative, and because it has brainwashed it’s slaves into believing that tribalism is primitive and others can’t be trusted. It’s a game of divide and conquer. They break down the Clan, and having no-one else to depend on, you must depend on the State.
Returning to Clan life – that is – a group of interdependent folk; is not just a hippy vision or nostalgic desire to return to more primal – more human – ways of living. It’s an act of disrupting and sabotaging the power monopoly the State holds. It is an act of personal honour and duty to ourselves and our own children. The very fact that the State passes laws to illegalize certain aspects of Clan life or organized tribalism such as – favoritism, nepotism, cronyism, and poligamy – reveals the State’s underlining fear of a fully functioning, self-sufficiant Clan.
We’ve given State and Nation thousands of years to test itself in the real causal world to prove itself beneficial to humanity as a whole. So far all it has done for the past thousands of years is war, genocide, and exploit humanity. Such a system of existence is detrimental to progression of the Human species and our evolution towards our galactic destiny. It is out of compassion and empathy for humanity, that the Sinister folk work towards the extinction of States and Nations. To once and for all end humanity’s chief cause of suffering.
If we can empathize with our fellow creatures, and feel their suffering… If we have genuine compassion for our fellow humans, and want a better life and existence for them. Then we must desire to seek out the actual cause of their suffering and destroy it: the State itself. Destroying the State to engineer a better kind of human civilization via aeonics, is what the ONA was designed to do in the first place.
The State is not the only cause of modern human suffering: the Corporation and the heartless individuals and families who maintain State and Corporate power and domination are also major threats to our freedom, and human progression. Which brings us to the concept of Culling and Opfers. It not an aimless slaughter of victims sacrificed to Dark Gods. The ONA has rules and guidelines for culling and opfers. There is a method to the madness – a reason. The intended victims deserve to be culled because they are ones that perpetuate suffering. Our suffering, and the suffering of our fellow humans.
We owe it to ourselves… to our personal honour, and the duty we owe to our Clansman, to work to destroy our folk’s antagonists – the very source of our suffering itself. This is done not only by Culling; but also by striving to enlighten and awaken the outsiders; Presencing the Dark; teaching the Numinous Way; Code of Honour; and Reichfolk NS to them and to our own children. We must teach them that recreating Clans – harmonizing ourselves with our human nature – to create symbiotic social orders of mutual aid and mutual dependency will greatly reduce our human suffering in half.
TRANSITION & PROGRESSION:
More than likely – reasonably – we’re not going to blow up States into extinction anytime soon. Such things cannot be forced; because in essence the people who are suffering themselves make up the “State.” Thus enlightening them and encouraging them to form their own Clans is a very important step towards destroying the monopoly of rule of the State.
Reasonably, our own 352, and future Clans and Tribes will take time to grow and evolve into fully functioning self-reliant social orders. When that time comes, colonization of the world’s international oceans is the first step in gaining independence and working towards gaining the experience needed to colonize space. Getting to even this stage of progression from here is an ordeal in itself which requires transgenerational – aeonic – strategy and planning; called “Chronomorphic Incubation” in 352.
Our own Progeny is the KEY factor Chronomorphic Incubation. These children must be raised in Clan culture, then each sent to colleges and universities to study in specific fields which will help us transition from an earth bound Clan into a stellar Clan. Because children are crucial to chronomorphic incubation, Clan sisters are extremely important assets – we make babies.
Each generation must be eugenically and aeonically designed to function at maximum capacity within the era it/they will mature in. For instance, here in Southern California where the Latin population out numbers other races; these Latinos, will in the near future politically dominate this region. It would serve our interests here to have some of our future progeny mixed with Latino blood, to do better in the corporate and political arena here.
Transition and chronomorphic incubation also requires money. Without money transitioning is near impossible unless you raise a small army of rebels and conquer one of those barely functioning African nations. This would mean that our Clan must have business as a fundamental objective. To beat the 10 Percenters (the Enemy); we must learn to play the game as they play it; not as they teach in schools. Going to school to be an employee benefits nobody but the Enemy and prolongs human suffering. Working cooperatively to seek financial independence and the establishment of future corporations helps end suffering – at least our own suffering.
The reason why colonization of the ocean is important is because we must be sovereign to do as we please, without the policies, ethics, and limitations of the State and Religion. We need a place were science can progress and advanced in any direction uninhibited.
The State itself cannot help us manifest our galactic destiny. It neither has the power or money. What money it does have, it spends on military arms build up not scientific advancement and human progression. It’s very own nature – being a State – does not allow it to change itself to become a better form of human civilization. Trying to change the orthodoxy of your State is call treason. We have also learned from recent events that the economy of a State is fragile. The richest State in the world – USA – is near total bankruptcy and will never be able to pay its debt off.
The key to a near future colonization of space rests in the concept of inter-clan cooperation in the form of collective monetary investments in intertribal corporations. By this I mean that corporations are the only current institution with the people power and money to colonize space.
The first steps to colonizing space will be a corporate venture of exploitation and commercialization of space and lunar minerals. It would be up to each Clan to by shares of these corporations. In the same way that old world families bought shares in companies which colonized the new world and India. Many of today’s nations actually began as business ventures of English and other European companies.
CLANAMATION:
As Myatt pointed out, Clans are the future and a causal manifestation of putting the principles of empathy and compassion into real practice. To empathize with our own Clan folk. To care for them, as they will for us. To provide for them, as they will provide for us. To labor for their needs and interests, as they will work to satisfy our own needs and interests. To work together towards self-reliance for the sake of our progeny, so they may inherit a better life, free of the suffering that plagues our own.
By adopting and implementing the “Myattian Imperative,” and working towards a reasonable manifestation of a functioning Clan; our 352 will be setting itself apart from other ONA nexions; and other modern institutions. Taking a progressive step forwards into the future, if you will. Thus, we can’t convert or force others to join our nexion. This nexion of ours must itself attract to it those that resonate with our aura who will live by our oaths, rules, laws, and by the Code of Honour; and the Myattian Way. With time, so long as our children and generations continue to reach for the stars, we will slowly make our way towards that Numinous Dark above.
Kayla of 352
Black Star Canyon
120 yf
Source: http://onanxs.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/towards-the-numinous-dark/
The Nature of Our Being:
Our basic nature is that we are a nexion, a connexion between the causal and the acausal. That is, we – like all living-beings – possess, by virtue of being alive, acausal energy (See Note 1). This acausal energy is what animates us, what makes our physical bodies alive – more than an inert collection of elements, molecules and atoms – and this acausal energy is not destroyed when that physical body dies. This is so by the very nature of that acausal energy – which energy cannot be destroyed, in causal space-time.
In addition, we human beings, of all the life we currently are aware of, possess not only the faculty of consciousness – of causal reflexion – but also the ability to consciously change our behaviour. That is, we can consciously decide to do something, or not do something, and thus we can, to a certain extent, change or evolve ourselves. In many ways, culture is a means to aid us in this evolutionary change, which evolutionary change – according to The Numinous Way – is a change toward empathy, compassion, honour and reason, and this change itself is an acquisition, by us as individuals, of additional acausal energy. Thus, this change in ourselves is a type of ordered presencing of acausal energy in the causal.
This basic overview of the nature of causal beings raises some interesting questions. For example: (a) When a living-being that exists in causal space-time “dies”, then what happens to the acausal energy that animated that living-being? (b) How does such acausal energy come to animate that certain collocation of physical elements, molecules and atoms originally? (c) What effect, if any, does an increase in acausal energy, produced by our conscious evolution – our conscious change of ourselves – have on what happens to the acausal energy after our causal death?
In respect of what happens to the acausal energy, it does not “go back” to or transcend to the acausal, for the acausal is already implicit within causal space-time; or rather, to be precise, the causal is a limiting case of the acausal – where there are only three spatial dimensions and only one dimension of Time, a linear one. That is, there is no physical, causal, separation between the causal and acausal, as might be imagined if we were thinking in terms of causal geometry. To understand the relation, we must think acausally, in terms of an unspecified, unlimited, number of dimensions which are not spatial and which are not limited to one linear Time dimension but which rather have many acausal (and thus un-linear) Time dimensions. All that happens, is that the specific physical connexion between causal and acausal is closed: physical matter in a certain place is no longer animated by acausal energy. Thus, the acausal energy that was presenced in a living-being becomes again unformed, unpresenced, acausal energy.
In respect of whether we can, in the causal, affect what happens to such acausal energy, The Numinous Way posits that we human beings, by virtue of our nature, have the ability to “form” or “pattern” such acausal energy as is presenced in us as living-beings – to increase it, to (in a symbolic way) strengthen it – and as such we can access part of the acausal itself, or have the possibility to do this, both in and during our mortal, causal, existence, and after such causal existence has ended. To access it, we have to “think acausally”, to develope an acausal way of being within us. This means developing, refining, the faculty of consciousness, and especially the faculty of empathy, which is presenced in us and in our cultures by The Numinous, by honour, by compassion, by reason, by an awareness of ourselves as but one nexion among the matrix of connexions which are the living Cosmos, which connexions include Nature, and our own ancestral culture. It means a return to the “slow”, natural time of Nature, of Life, of the acausal, and away from the often manic always unnatural causal time we have created by our abstractions, our lack of empathy, our lack of a cosmic and numinous perspective.
If we so access, so presence, such acausal energy, then there exists the possibility of that which is the essence of our being – the acausal aspect – continuing in a new way in the acausal when our causal existence ends, which continuation can be said to be the meaning of such a causal existence: an opportunity presented by the presencing that is our finite mortal life. As to the nature of such a continuing, all that can be said at present is that it would be – must be, given the nature of the acausal – beyond the causal form which we apprehend as “the self”. That is, it is an evolution of us, as beings; a move-toward an acausal existence which by virtue of the nature of the acausal is not limited, or constrained, by causal time, and not limited, or constrained by spatial dimensions. Thus, causal concepts such as taking causal time to “move” or travel from one point in causal space to another causal point are irrelevant, as is the causal concept of birth-life-death.
However, this continuing is not an imperative of our causal existence – it is just a possibility, an opportunity. It is up to us to achieve it, to bring-it-into-being. If it is not achieved, then the acausal energy which was presenced in one living human being simply becomes un-presenced, in the causal: the causal aspects are lost. Or rather, the causal aspects which exist, which come-into-being, through such a life – such things as memory, experience, the very “personal nature” of such a living-being – are lost. In contrast, in a continuing, these aspects are part of the genesis for the new type of supra-personal being which becomes formed, or which may becomes formed, in the acausal.
In respect of how acausal energy comes to animate a certain collocation of physical elements, molecules and atoms – to bring-into-being a causal life – there can be, at present, only speculation, although it could be assumed that it is natural process, inherent in the process of living-beings, in the very fabric of acausal space-time. That is, the potential to presence acausal energy in the causal – to animate physical matter – is part of of the nature of acausal being itself.
Acausal Existence, Rebirth, and the Illusion of the Self:
One question which arises concerns the nature of the acausal energy which is no longer presenced in the causal by a living-being. This energy simply merges back unformed into the acausal from whence it was presenced, and as such may again be presenced in some way in some living-being some-where, possibly on this planet which we call Earth and possibly in some other form of life instead of a human being. But while this process has some similarities to a process described in Buddhism, it is not identical to that of “rebirth” in the Buddhist (or Hindu) sense – for The Numinous Way is simply rationally describing, using new concepts such as acausal, nexion and presencing, the nature of our being and the processes of life.(See Note 2)
In addition, The Numinous Way describes the causal self – to which we are often attached by causal desires and which often gives rises to or which causes suffering, for other living-beings – as an abstraction, a causal illusion: a manifestation of causality; or, more correctly, as a manifestation of limited “causal thinking”, which thinking is based upon and depends upon abstractions.
For The Numinous Way, the reality of our being can only be correctly described in terms of causal and acausal: as one nexion, one connexion, between the causal and the acausal, and as such as possessed of acausal energy. To think in the reductionist, abstract, causal way – in terms of a distinct, separate, un-connected, self – is to misunderstand the nature of our being, the nature of Life, and the reality of the Cosmos, for this “self” is a trick of causal perception. To concentrate on this “self” reveals a lack of empathy – a lack of insight, and such a concentration on such an illusory self is one cause of suffering, which suffering can be alleviated, or removed, through acausal thinking, through that acausal way of being which is presenced in empathy, honour, reason and compassion.
Conclusion:
In essence, The Numinous Way posits that we possess, by virtue of being living-beings, a certain type and a certain amount of causal energy, and that we – as human beings possessed of consciousness and will – change increase such acausal energy. The acausal energy we possess lives on after the death of our mortal, causal, bodies, and returns to the acausal – to acausal space-time, which acausal space-time, by its nature, is not some separate physical realm but rather the reality of the Cosmos itself.
That is, causal space-time, the physical universe we are aware of through our physical senses, is a special – a limiting – case of the Cosmos, for the acausal is both within and around the causal, by virtue of there being no limited spatial dimensions, and no linear one dimensional time, in the acausal. In one sense, we can consider the causal – the physical universe of three spatial dimensions and one causal/linear time dimension – as a type of presencing of the acausal, with living-beings as connexions/nexions to certain aspects of the acausal itself.
The Numinous Way posits that empathy is a faculty which we human beings can develope, and that such development enables us to “pattern”, to form, what acausal energy we are by virtue of being alive in the causal. If we do not do this, then such acausal energy – after our causal death – returns to its original unformed, un-causal, state in an aspect of the acausal. But if we do this, then in effect we begin the creation of a new type of acausal being, which being may have the ability to exist, as an entity, in the acausal after our causal death. The nature of this acausal being is speculative, but it is assumed that it is not based on the causal pattern of “the self” but is instead an evolution of such a “self” – with an awareness beyond the individual and thus a knowing of the matrix of Life which is the Cosmos. That is, it is a new (to us) type of consciousness.
DW Myatt
Notes:
(1) For a basic, and tentative, description, see the essay Acausal Science.
(2) As noted in some other essays, The Numinous Way, unlike Buddhism, affirms that personal honour – and all that it implies, for example in terms of self-defence – is important, and a manifestation, a presencing, of the acausal. That is, that honour is numinous – one means to affirm life in a moral, ethical, way. In addition, The Numinous Way stresses the value of culture, and the joy, the possibilities, of life, and does not advocate a life of self-denying austerity and “meditation” but rather a true, gentle and ethical middle-way somewhat akin to the wu-wei of Taoism. Thus, while comparisons with both Buddhism and Taoism are possible, The Numinous Way can be considered to be a new manifestation of the acausal (“eternal”) truths about Life, our human nature and the meaning of our lives.
These are the tears that I have cried, that I should have cried – tears which unbidden fall as I listen to Preco preheminencie by Dunstable; and tears which express my longing for that beauty, that love, that ineffable goodness which sometimes someone somewhere has presenced on this grieving Earth.
This is what I am – these tears, born of both suffering and joy, and bearing as they do in memories of light and dark the life which was, is, mine. This is what I am – that quiet look of love; that desire to transcend beyond the moment to where exists a purity of being.
Why has the learning not been learnt? Am I with my life an analogy, an answer? Seeking, questing, plunging often without any thought, reason or plan, into life, knowing thus that exhilaration of existence as when one early Winter’s morning I fastly cycled on roads of snow newly iced by a night of bright moon to give to she whom I then loved just one letter of love – one hour, one moment of existence, of perfect bliss, of perfect union of body, thought, spirit, soul, as when I stubborn beyond myself grimly bore my complaining body on through the stark deathly heat of the desert to reach just one more goal in two weeks of tortured goals whose ending left me briefly suspended between life and death, my being then transcending out as if I had become the desert, the Sun, the water that saved me, the people who in their simple act of kindness took me in and brought me even then to an insight of understanding of their culture, their Prophet, their God.
Seeking, questing, as when I gently cared for a patient, dying, and listened as he told of how he had endured years in those Trenches of stalemate war. There, in a bedside drawer were his medals, brought by his wife – and that last night I stood watching, unseen, as she briefly took them out as he rasped, to breathe his last breath of life.
Seeking, questing – as when I sat on the edge of the bed of she whom I loved who loved me, and held her as she drifted into that last and never-ending sleep. Seeking, questing., forgetting as when, less than a year later I was travelling, writing, speaking words of chaos and of hate, as if hoping such words might change what-was for what I hoped might-be, forgetting, forgetting the pain, the anger, the suffering, even the deaths, caused. Had she, my love, died in my arms in vain? Seeking, questing, as when years later I, grieving, sorrowed as my then wife became troubled, ill, and I knew my blame; forgetting – as when, less than six months later, in a land of hot Sun I was again preaching death, destruction, as if it might again change what-was to what I in arrogance believed should-be…
So much known, seen, felt – so many tears, insights along the Way, and so many times when those tears, insights, were lost. It was as if I had to start all over again, and re-learn what life, myself, in-between, had forced me to forget. As if my questing life each year had to shed its slowly learnt wisdom to vigourously grow, up, upwards to where the pain of remembering merged with the joy of passion; upward, ever upward beyond and between the light and the dark. And I am, was, like them – those who for thousands of years acted to strive to change what-was to what they believed should-be, who experienced, who learned, who forgot and who so acted again. I – the deed; the redemption and the blame. I, they, we – in our tears, our understanding a beginning of what we should and can be.
Seeking, questing, forgetting until I finally distilled the essence – which is of empathy and honour.
Yesterday – as I myself was held, touched, kissed by a woman – I was blessed through her, with her, by her, with another intimation of the divine, another presencing of the numinous, and all I can do to force myself to remember is create these words, only these words, born by tears; born of divine music, presencing: such a poor recompense for five thousand years of suffering, seeking, questing, forgetting, pain, and toil.
David Myatt
Source: Selected Letters of David Myatt, Part 1
A quite relaxing day, for me: a day of unexpected sunshine and September warmth after so many dull and rainy days, and I spent most the hours of the daylight morning in the fields, or sitting by the large pond listening to the song of the birds, watching the Dragonflies, the Butterflies and the pond life, with the afternoon spent in gentle gardening, and then just sitting in the warming Sun.
There has been thus moments of pleasure, peace and joy, as of those remembered times when one’s distant gentle lover comes, if only briefly, to stay with one, again. Thus was I, thus am I, brought back, or moved forward, to just-be in the flow of Life as Life flows, slowly, when we gently let-go of that perception which is our small and often selfish self: to feel, to be-again, not apart from Nature.
Hence I am again but one life slowly dwelling in some small part of a rural England that I strive to keep within me by the slow movement of only walking, or cycling, along the country lanes, and which never takes me far from the meadow fields or from the hills which rear up, wooded, less than half a mile away.
Thus has there been time for that calm thinking that arises slowly, naturally, as the Cumulus cloud arose this morning, early, to briefly shade the Sun before they, the clouds, changed so slowly to leave me where my horizon of sighted landscape ended, far beyond the farthest trees, hedge, and hill that I could see. And thus was there a slow thinking about, a dwelling upon, your question of balance…..
Do you find you are still unsatisfied as to path? Or did you find/are still finding, a synthesis between the many? It’s the Balance I find that I seek, and hope for.
…..and yet, for myself, I feel it is more a question of change than of balance, as if we, as a species, are poised, caught, between the past of our animal ancestral nature and the future that surely awaits us if we can change, evolve, into a different kind of being, perhaps into an almost new species. Thus do I sense us, now, as in transition and yet mesmerized, held-back, even imprisoned, by the things we in our hubris-like cleverness have constructed: by the words, the terms, the very language, we have manufactured in order to try and understand ourselves, others, and this world.
Thus do we now interpret others, ourselves, the world – Reality – by abstractions which we project: which we have mentally-constructed and to which we assign “names” and terms, thus obscuring, hiding, the very essence itself, and thus mistaking such manufactured things for this essence.
Thus have we and for example manufactured a concept called a “nation” and a “State”, and have theories of how to govern such constructs, and manufactured “laws” to ensure some kind of abstract “order” within such places, as millions have given their “loyalty” to such abstract things and fought and died and caused great suffering in order to “defend” them or bring them into-being. Thus have we given “names” to differences among and within ourselves – based on some outward “sign” such as skin colour or on some inner sign such as a perceived or assumed “religious” or “political” belief – and thus dishonourably, un-empathically, used such “differences” as a criteria of worth and judgement, and in the process often or mostly behaving in a quite inhuman way. For all such abstractions – however named or described – seem to me to obscure The Numinous: obscure the simple reality which is of the connectedness, the acausal unity, of all Life.
I am as guilty as anyone in having done such things, for – for nearly four decades – I believed in or upheld some such abstraction or other, and used such things as not only a measure of the meaning of my own life, but also as a criteria of judgement, just as I often used violence in pursuit of such abstractions. It did not matter that I sincerely believed my inner intentions were noble and “good”; what mattered was that all such abstractions caused suffering for someone, or some many, somewhere. For such suffering was a natural consequence of those abstractions, constructed and manufactured as such things were by us in our vain arrogance.
Of course, many have understood this, or felt this, over the millennia – as some Ways have been developed to try and move us back toward the reality of connectedness. But always – always, it seems to me – over causal time, the simple unaffected pure meaning, the suffering insight, becomes lost in the words and through dogma, especially through dogma, and in particular through our very need, our very desire, to strive to “attain” some-thing, or to follow some-thing, or someone.
Perhaps only in music, Art, literature, poetry, a personal loyal love, and such-like emanations – in those things which wordlessly capture if only for a moment the Numinous itself – there is and has been a reminder of what-is, of what can-be. Of what we have forgotten and what we have glimpsed or have the capacity to glimpse, to feel, to know.
It seems to me, finally, that there are no answers, because no questions exist; we only impose questions upon what-is. For we have this need to make complex what is simple; we have this Promethean irritation within us. Certainly, this inner irritation, this inability to be empathic with Life (except perhaps in moments) brings us or can bring us joy, ecstasy, and can move us toward a different and at times exhilarating existence – as I know from my own not inactive, woman-loving, and sometimes warrior-like, life. But such a living I sense and feel is only a stasis, a repeat of our often barbaric, animal-like, past, and not the change, the evolution, we need and which surely is possible now, from the understanding the past five thousand years or so has given us.
Thus, my Path now is my Path – which in my temerity I have called The Numinous Way, and which, as it exists now due to the metamorphosis of recent years, represents the results of my ponderings, my thinking, my feelings, and what little knowledge I have acquired from pathei mathos.
Have you found that the seekers path has brought you as much joy as sorrow?
“Always a dream or a memory
Lead us on
And we wait like children
Trusting in the spirits of the Earth.
We love unsuspecting
While they our lovers scheme,
Succour themselves on our blood
And bleed us dry…”
In truth I have found, over four decades of seeking, more sorrow than joy – and yet the sorrow now seems to have merged with the joy to become some-thing which is of both yet beyond both. A new way of feeling, perhaps; or a new way of being, far beyond any words I know, and certainly beyond any and all the various and many Ways and Paths I have experienced and lived. But, of course, there are times – many times – when the sadness seeps back to bring forth burgeoning tears.
All I have from four decades of strife, seeking, searching, questions – of a learning from my plenitude of mistakes – are some tentative scribblings of my own, manifest in The Numinous way, with its Cosmic Ethics, its emphasis on empathy, compassion and honour, and its understanding of how our manufactured abstractions cause and continue to cause suffering, re-enforce our hubris, obscure our connexion to the Cosmos, and distance us from The Numinous.
DW Myatt
(Taken from The Selected Letters of DW Myatt, Volume 1)
As mentioned in An Overview of The Numinous Way:
“Empathy leads us away from the artificial, lifeless and thus un-numinous abstractions we have constructed and manufactured and which we impose, or project, upon other human beings, upon other life, and upon ourselves, often in an attempt to “understand” such beings and ourselves. And it is abstractions which are or which can be the genesis of prejudice, intolerance, and inhumanity. In addition, abstractions are one of the main causes of suffering: one of the main reasons we human beings have caused or contributed to the suffering of other human beings…”
Historically, The Numinous Way was developed over a period of some ten years, and in the early stages of its development was even called The Numinous Way of Folk Culture, and prior to that, just “Folk Culture”. There was thus some emphasis in those early days on “the folk” as a living-being, which living, changing, being was taken to be a natural part of Nature and was initially regarded as not the same as the abstract concept of “race”. This, however, was an error, based upon not taking the ethic of empathy to its logical, and human, conclusion.
As the development of The Numinous Way continued based on the cosmic ethic deriving from empathy and compassion, the emphasis had to be, ethically, removed from both the concept of the race and that of “the folk” to be upon the individual in relation to values of empathy and compassion, and upon the individual developing such ethical virtues and faculties. This change resulted from the fundamental premise that all human abstractions – all theoretical forms, ideals, and causal constructs – were a move-away from, or detrimental to, empathy and thus a contradiction of not only honour but also of our very humanity. Thus were such human “things” – such human manufactured abstractions – considered to be, at worst, unethical and, at best, detrimental to honour and thus to empathy and compassion, for such “things” either tend toward prejudice, or they are manifestations of prejudice: of that unnecessary and unethical and often irrational and instinctive pre-judgement which we human beings are and have been prone to, but which we can, through empathy, move away from.
Thus, the faculty of empathy – and its cultivation and development via compassion and the ethic of honour – is totally independent of the concept of “the folk”, which concept of the folk is not now, and should not be taken or assumed to be, the foundation of, or part of, The Numinous Way itself. Rather, the foundation of The Numinous Way is empathy: empathy with all life, on this planet, and in The Cosmos. Thus, the fundamental aim of The Numinous Way is to place the individual – regardless of what folk or race or culture they are said to belong to, or they might consider themselves to belong to – in the correct context with Life, with Nature, and with The Cosmos. Expressed another way, the aim is for us, as individuals, to develope empathy, compassion and reason – and to strive to live in an honourable and compassionate manner – so that we can naturally feel and access and be part of the numinous, and evolve our humanity without causing or contributing to suffering.
Thus, The Numinous way is profoundly a-political, regarding all politics, all ideology, all dogma, as detrimental to empathy and the development of empathy, and as a cause of, or a potential cause of, suffering.
Q: But isn’t there a danger of even this Numinous Way, as you call it, becoming a dogma, developing a theology, and thus causing dissent and strife among its adherents?
A: Every Way has some potential to become an abstraction, a dogma. What stops them from doing so is the application of their basal ethics. If the ethics of the Numinous Way are lived, applied, it cannot become so. What might become dogmatic or abstract would not by definition therefore be The Numinous Way, but something else. Thus, so long as the ethics are applied, and lived – so long as there is personal empathy as the basis of living – this cannot or should not occur. The Numinous Way does not claim to be divinely-inspired, as it does not set itself up as the authoritative guide to living, or as some perfect representative, as the sole representative, of what is true and right. It does not claim to have some monopoly on understanding. It is just one answer among many answers – to be considered, or not, to be accepted or not, according to the judgement, the empathy, of each individual.
Q: Are you then saying that the answers of other Ways, of religions such as Christianity, are important and relevant?
A: I can only repeat what I have said and written before, which is that such ethical answers, all such ethical Ways and religions, have, had, or may have their place in presencing The Numen, or presencing aspects of The Numen: in bringing some people to some understanding of ourselves, of the Cosmos, of Life. In providing some people with an ethical guide to living and so aiding the cessation of suffering and the presencing of what is good.
Yet, The Numinous Way is quite simple – positing a simple ethical cause-and-effect, and not requiring a complicated theology, scriptures, or some deity or God. Thus, for The Numinous Way, there is no problem of evil, because there is no supreme, perfect, Being, no abstract moral dichotomy, no sin – only that simple cause-and-effect, that simple understanding of balance, of aiding, or harming, Life; of causing suffering, or ceasing to cause suffering. Of ourselves as being responsible for our actions, our thoughts, with these actions, these thoughts, affecting others, affecting Life, affecting the Cosmos, in a good (not-suffering), or a bad (causing-suffering) way, with what is good aiding that change, that evolution, which is implicit in Life, with such change, such evolution, being toward empathy, understanding, consciousness.
DW Myatt
Source:
http://www.cosmicbeing.info/race_and_folk.html
DW Myatt c.1989
Introduction: Mystic Philosophy of a Modern Gnostic
The Numinous Way was the name given, by Myatt himself, to his own particular Weltanschauung, his own perspective about life, which he developed, and continually refined, over a period of some ten or more years. This now completed Weltanschauung has been expounded in a recent (December, 2008 AD) collection of essays, issued under the imprint of The Numinous Way Foundation, entitled Empathy, Compassion, and Honour: The Numinous Way of Life, which essays, according to Myatt, “supersede and correct all other essays of mine about, or concerning, The Numinous Way, and what I, previously, called The Numinous Way of Folk Culture.” Thus, the majority of my references are to the chapters, and appendices, of this work (1).
Significantly, Myatt states that:
“As for The Numinous Way, I do now incline toward the view that this ethical Way of Life, which I have developed, is now independent of me, a complete philosophy of life, and can and should be judged as all such Ways, all such philosophies are judged, on their merits or their lack of them, independent of the life, and wanderings and mistakes, of those individuals who may have brought such Ways into being, or rather, who have presenced something of the numinous in the causal, just as the life of an artist, while it may or may not be interesting, does not or should not detract from or colour an artistic, aesthetic, judgement of his, or her, works of art.”
Myatt’s particular perspective, or philosophy of life – or apprehension, as Myatt himself calls it – is, in my view, fundamentally a mystical one. That is, it is based on a personal intuitive insight about, a personal awareness of, the nature of Reality. This personal insight is that “individual human beings, are a connexion to all other life, on this planet which is currently our home, and a connexion to the Cosmos itself.” (2)
According to Myatt, this awareness is that arising from empathy; more, precisely, from the faculty of empathy, which he explains is an awareness of, and a sympathy with, other living beings (3), and which he defines, in a somewhat technical way, as “a manifestation, an awareness, of our relation to acausality, and in particular as an awareness of the related and dependant nature of those beings which express or manifest or which presence acausal energy and which are thus described, in a causal way, as possessing life” (4). His other, more simple explanation, is of empathy, in relation to human beings, as “our ability to know, to be aware of, the feelings, the suffering, of others.” (5)
This mystical insight of Myatt’s led him, over a period of a decade, to develop and increasingly refine The Numinous Way, and this development and process of refinement was, according to him, inspired and aided by his own personal experiences and by his quest among, and experience of, the religions of the world. As he states (6), his conclusions are:
“The result of a four-decade long pathei mathos: the result of my many and diverse and practical (and, to many others, weird and strange) involvements (political, and otherwise), and my many and diverse and practical quests among the philosophies, Ways of Life, and religions, of the world. The Numinous Way is, in particular, the result of the often difficult process of acknowledging my many personal mistakes – many of which caused or contributed to suffering – and (hopefully) learning from these mistakes.”
These conclusions have led him to reject the political beliefs and views he formerly adhered to, and which he is publicly known for. Among the beliefs and views he has come to reject, as a result of what it is, I believe, accurate to describe as a life long gnostic search for knowledge, and wisdom (7), are National Socialism and its racialist policies, which politics he had practical experience of, and a personal involvement with, lasting many decades.
As Myatt himself claims, the philosophy of The Numinous Way is emphatically apolitical, rejects the dogma prevalent in established religions; rejects nationalism, racialism and racial prejudice; emphasizes and embraces tolerance, and is fundamentally an individual way of life centered on the virtues of empathy, compassion and personal honor (8).
As Myatt states:
“There has been, for me, a profound change of emphasis, a following of the cosmic ethic of empathy to its logical and honourable conclusion, and thus a rejection of all unethical abstractions.” (9)
A Complete Philosophy of Life
In order to qualify as a complete, and distinct, philosophy – in order to be a Weltanschauung – a particular philosophical viewpoint should possess the following:
1) A particular ontology, which describes and explains the concept of Being, and beings, and our relation to them;
2) A particular theory of ethics, defining and explaining what is good, and what is bad;
3) A particular theory of knowledge (an epistemology); of how truth and falsehood can be determined;
It should also be able to give particular answers to questions such as “the meaning and purpose of our lives”, and explain how the particular posited purpose may or could be attained.
What follows is a brief, and introductory, analysis of how Myatt’s The Numinous Way deals with each of the above topics.
Ontology
Myatt, in the essay Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way, states that, according to The Numinous Way, “there are two types of being, differentiated by whether or not they possess, or manifest, what is termed acausal energy”. That is, he introduces the concept of a causal Universe, and an acausal Universe, which together form “the Cosmos”, or Reality itself.
This causal Universe is the phenomenal world known to use via our five senses, and knowledge of this causal Universe is obtained through conventional sciences based upon practical observation (10). The acausal Universe is known to us via our faculty of empathy, since the acausal is the genesis of that particular type of energy which makes physical matter “alive” (11). That is, according to Myatt, all living beings are nexions, which are places – regions (or, one might say, “bodies”) – in the causal Universe where acausal energy is present, or manifests, or, to use Myatt’s term, is presenced. Hence, according to Myatt, “The Numinous Way adds empathy to the faculties by which we can perceive, know, and understand the Cosmos… Empathy is an essential means to knowing and understanding Life, which Life includes human beings…” (12)
In his earlier essay, Acausal Science: Life and The Nature of the Acausal, Myatt gives a little more detail as to the nature of acausal being, that is, the nature the acausal itself and of acausal energy.
Ethics
The ethics of Myatt’s Numinous Way derive from empathy, and in the section Ethics and the Dependant Nature of Being of the chapter Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way it is stated that:
“The faculty of empathy – and the conscious understanding of the nature of Reality – leads to a knowing, an understanding, of suffering. Part of suffering is that covering-up which occurs when a causal denoting is applied to living beings, and especially to human beings, which denoting implies a judgement (a pre-judgement) of such life according to some abstract construct or abstract value, so that the “worth” or “value” of a living-being is often incorrectly judged by such abstract constructs or abstract values.”
From a knowing and understanding of suffering, compassion arises, and:
“Empathy is thus, for The Numinous Way, the source of ethics, for what is good is considered to be that which manifests empathy and compassion and honour, and thus what alleviates, or what ceases to cause, suffering: for ourselves, for other human beings, and for the other life with which we share this planet. Hence, what is unethical, or wrong, is what causes or what contributes to or which continues such suffering.”
Furthermore, Myatt defines honor (or, more precisely, personal honor) as an ethical means to aid the cessation of suffering (13) and thus as “a practical manifestation of empathy: of how we can relate to other people, and other life, in an empathic and compassionate way”.
In addition, it is worth noting that Myatt views what he calls ‘abstractions’ as immoral, since abstraction obscures, or cover-ups, the essence, the being – the reality – of beings themselves. That is, such abstractions undermine, or replace, or distort, empathy, and thus distance us from life, from our true human nature, and lead us to identify with such abstractions instead of identifying with, sympathizing with, living beings. (14)
Epistemology
In Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way, Myatt writes:
“For The Numinous Way, truth begins with a knowing of the reality of being and Being – part of which is a knowing of the dependant nature of living beings.”
Furthermore,
“There is… a fundamental and important distinction made, by The Numinous Way, between how we can, and should, perceive and understand the causal, phenomenal, physical, universe, and how we can, and should, perceive and understand living beings. The physical world can be perceived and understood as: (1) existing external to ourselves, with (2) our limited understanding of this ‘external world’ depending for the most part upon what we can see, hear or touch: on what we can observe or come to know via our senses; with (3) logical argument, or reason, being a most important means to knowledge and understanding of and about this ‘external world’, and a means whereby we can make reasonable assumptions about it, which assumptions can be refuted or affirmed via observation and experiment; and (4) with the physical Cosmos being, of itself, a reasoned order subject to laws which are themselves understandable by reason. In this perception and understanding of the causal, phenomenal, inanimate universe, concepts, denoting, ideas, forms, abstractions, and such like, are useful and often necessary.” (15)
Hence, Myatt conceives of there being two distinct types of knowing. That of the causal Universe, which derives from our senses and from practical science, and that of living beings, which derives from our empathy with such living beings, from a knowing that we are not separate from those living beings, but only one manifestation of that acausal, living, energy which connects all living beings, sentient and otherwise. (16) This second type of knowing derives from empathy, and is one means whereby we can apprehend the acausal, which is the matrix, The Unity, of connexions which is all life, presenced as living-beings in the causal. (17)
According to Myatt:
“The error of conventional philosophies – the fundamental philosophical error behind abstractionism – is to apply causal perception and a causal denoting to living being(s).” (18)
Praxeology
The primary goal is seen as living in such a way that we, as individuals, cease to cause suffering to other life. This means us using, and developing empathy, and thus changing – reforming – ourselves.
“How can we develope this faculty [of empathy]? How can we reform ourselves and so evolve? The answer of The Numinous Way is that this is possible through compassion, empathy, gentleness, reason, and honour: through that gentle letting-be which is the real beginning of wisdom and a manifestation of our humanity. To presence, to be, what is good in the world – we need to change ourselves, through developing empathy and compassion, through letting-be, that is, ceasing to interfere, ceasing to view others (and “the world”) through the immorality of abstractions, and ceasing to strive to change or get involved with what goes beyond the limits determined by personal honour.” (19)
Why should we pursue such a goal? Myatt answers, in a rather mystical and gnostic way, that:
“Empathy, compassion, and a living by honour, are a means whereby we increase, or access for ourselves, acausal energy – where we presence such energy in the causal – and whereby we thus strengthen the matrix of Life, and, indeed, increase Life itself. Thus, when we live in such an ethical way we are not only aiding life here, now, in our world, in our lifetime, we are also aiding all future life, in the Cosmos, for the more acausal energy we presence, by our deeds, our living, the more will be available not only to other life, here – in our own small causal Time and causal Space – but also, on our mortal death, available to the Cosmos to bring-into-being more life. Thus will we aid – and indeed become part of – the very change, the very evolution of the life of the Cosmos itself.”
The Acausal and The Cosmic Being
Myatt’s concept of what he terms the acausal is central to understanding his philosophy of The Numinous Way. He conceives of this acausal as a natural part of the Cosmos, which Cosmos he defines as the unity of the physical, causal, Universe, and of the acausal Universe. This acausal Universe has an a-causal geometry and an a-causal time, and there exists, in this acausal Universe, a-causal energy of a type quite different from the physical energy of causal Space-Time, which causal energy is known to us and described by causal sciences such as Physics. (20)
This acausal energy is, according to Myatt, what animates physical matter and makes it alive, and thus he conceives as life in the causal, physical, Universe as a place – a nexion – where acausal energy is “presenced” (manifested) in causal Space-Time. Hence, all living beings are, for Myatt, a connection, a nexion, to the acausal itself, and thus all living beings are connected to each other. This connectively is felt, revealed to us, as human beings, through empathy (21). Compassion is knowing, and acting upon, this connectivity of life, since “our very individuality is a type of abstraction in itself, and thus something of an illusion, for it often obscures our relation to other life…” (22)
The acausal is thus the matrix of connectivity, where all life exists in the immediacy of the moment, and where causal abstractions, based on finite causal thinking, have no meaning and no value.
Myatt conceives of what he terms a Cosmic Being, which is regarded as the Cosmos in evolution, becoming sentient through the evolution of living beings. That is, the Cosmic Being is itself a type of living entity, manifest (or “incarnated”) in all living beings, including ourselves, and Nature. (23)
“The Cosmic Being….. is not perfect, nor omniscient, not God, not any human-manufactured abstraction. That is, it is instead a new kind of apprehension of Being: a Cosmic one, based upon empathy, and an apprehension which takes us far beyond conventional theology and ontology.” (24)
Thus, this Cosmic Being is not to be viewed in a religious, theological, way, as some kind of deity, for we are part of this Being, as this Being is us and all other life, changing, evolving, coming-into-consciousness (25).
Pathei Mathos
One phrase which frequently occurs in Myatt’s writings about his Numinous Way – and which he often uses in his private correspondence and his autobiographical essays – is the Greek term πάθει μάθος. Myatt, in his own translation of The Agamemnon by Aeschylus, translates this as learning from adversity. Pathei Mathos is how Myatt describes his own strange personal journey, his gnostic search for knowledge, wisdom and meaning, and his ultimate rejection of the various beliefs, ideologies, and religions, he studied and embraced in the course of this four decade long journey.
A large part of this learning from adversity is, for him, firstly an acknowledgment of his personal errors in adhering to and identifying with various “abstractions” – which he admits caused or contributed to suffering – and, secondly, the sometimes painful and difficult personal process of learning from these mistakes and thus changing one’s outlook and beliefs in an ethical way.
As Myatt states:
“In essence, there was, for me, pathei mathos. Due to this pathei mathos, I have gone far beyond any and all politics, and beyond conventional religion and theology toward what I believe and feel is the essence of our humanity, manifest in empathy, compassion, personal love and personal honour. Hence, I cannot in truth be described by any political or by any religious label, or be fitted into any convenient category, just as no -ism or no -ology can correctly describe The Numinous Way itself, or even the essence of that Way. Therefore, I believe it is incorrect to judge me by my past associations, by my past involvements, by some of my former effusions, for all such things – all the many diverse such things – were peregrinations, part of sometimes painful often difficult decades-long process of learning and change, of personal development, of interior struggle and knowing, which has enabled me to understand my many errors, my multitude of mistakes, and – hopefully – learn from them.” (26)
In addition, he does not make any claims for his Numinous Way, other than it represents his own personal conclusions about life.
“The Numinous Way is but one answer to the questions about existence; it does not have some monopoly on truth, nor does it claim any prominence, accepting that all the diverse manifestations of the Numen, all the diverse answers, of the various numinous Ways and religions, have or may have their place, and all perhaps may serve the same ultimate purpose – that of bringing us closer to the ineffable beauty, the ineffable goodness, of life; that of transforming us, reminding us; that of giving us as individuals the chance to cease to cause suffering, to presence the good, to be part of the Numen itself.” (27)
Conclusion
This short overview of Myatt’s Numinous Way reveals it as a comprehensive and, in my view, rather original, moral philosophy with an ethics and a praxeology which, while having some resemblance to those of Buddhism, are quite distinct by reason of (a) how Myatt relates, and defines, empathy and honor, and how such honor allows for the employment, in certain situations, of reasonable (“honorable”) force (28), and (b) how Myatt views human life in terms of the acausal, and as a means for us to “reform and evolve” ourselves.
The goal of The Numinous Way is seen as us, as individuals, becoming aware of and having empathy with all life, and this involves us using and developing our faculty of empathy, being compassionate, and thus increasing the amount of life, of acausal energy, in the Cosmos, leading to not only the evolution of life, but also to a cosmic sentience, which we, when we are empathic, compassionate and honorable, are part of and which we can become aware of.
In addition, as his many autobiographical essays and his published letters reveal (29), The Numinous Way – as outlined in the recent compilation The Numinous Way of Life: Empathy, Compassion, and Honour – has no relation whatsoever to any of Myatt’s previously held views and beliefs, political, or religious. Indeed, Myatt is quite clear that he regards both race, and “the folk”, as abstractions which, like all abstractions, obscure and undermine the numinous and which are detrimental to empathy and compassion and, ultimately, unethical and therefore dishonorable. (30) Thus, and rather confusingly given the terminology, this new apolitical Numinous Way – with its emphasis on personal, ethical, change and the cessation of suffering – is completely distinct from his earlier, now rejected, philosophy which he first called “Folk Culture” and then called The Numinous Way of Folk Culture.
Thus, The Numinous Way, as expounded recently, and as developed by Myatt over a period of many years, is not only a rejection of all of those previously held political beliefs and views of his, but possibly also, as he himself has claimed, a new moral way founded on his own learning from his experiences and errors.
JR Wright
Oxford
December 27, 2008 AD
1) This work (currently an e-text in both html and pdf formats and published by The Numinous Way Foundation) appears in some editions under the alternative title The Numinous Way of Life: Empathy, Compassion, and Honour. (pdf 465 Kb) This work is due to be published in book format late in 2009. In addition to citing this work, I have, on occasion, referred to recent private correspondence between Myatt and myself (both written, and e-mail) where he elucidates certain matters in response to a particular question, or questions, of mine.
2) An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life
3) In Compassion, Empathy and Honour: The Ethics of the Numinous Way
4) Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way
6) Introduction, Empathy, Compassion, and Honour: The Numinous Way of Life
7) A Gnostic is someone who seeks gnosis - wisdom and knowledge; someone involved in a life-long search,a quest, for understanding, and who more often than not views the world, or more especially ordinary routine life, as often mundane and often as a hindrance. In my view, this is a rather apt description of Myatt.
8) Refer to Frequently Asked Questions About The Numinous Way and An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life
9) Introduction, Empathy, Compassion, and Honour: The Numinous Way of Life
10) Refer to the section Ontology and The Numinous Way in the chapter A Brief Analysis of The Immorality of Abstraction, and also to Myatt’s earlier essay Acausal Science: Life and The Nature of the Acausal which is referenced in that chapter.
11) A Brief Analysis of The Immorality of Abstraction
12) A Brief Analysis of The Immorality of Abstraction
13) An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life
14) Refer to Myatt’s recent essay, A Change of Perspective, dated December 21, 2008
15) A Brief Analysis of The Immorality of Abstraction
16) Refer to An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life and Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way and also Presencing The Numen In The Moment
17) A Change of Perspective. Also, private e-mail from Myatt to JRW, December 22, 2008
18) A Brief Analysis of The Immorality of Abstraction
19) An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life
20) Acausal Science: Life and The Nature of the Acausal
21) Private e-mail from Myatt to JRW, December 21, 2008
22) An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life. See also The Numinous Way and Life Beyond Death
23) Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way. Also, private e-mail from Myatt to JRW, December 22, 2008
24) Ontology, Ethics and The Numinous Way
25) Private e-mail from Myatt to JRW, December 22, 2008 and private letter from Myatt to JRW, which he dated 9.xii.08 (CE)
26) Presencing The Numen In The Moment
27) The Empathic Essence
28) Refer to An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life and also The Principles of Numinous Law
29) Among his dozens of autobiographical essays are the following:
So Many Tears
Love, Deities and God: Redemption and The Numinous Way
An Allegory of Pride and Presumption
One Simple Numinous Answer
The Empathic Essence
I have collected some of his personal letters in The Private Letters of DW Myatt, Part 1.
30) Refer to Frequently Asked Questions About The Numinous Way, where Myatt writes that “such a concept as “the folk” now has no place in The Numinous Way…” See also The Development of The Numinous Way and Other Questions
