NIHILISM "POSITIVE"

The Dalai Lama Interview, by Amitabha Pal

000. NOTHING ONLY EXISTS, AND IS ALL THINGS.
00. THERE IS NO LIMIT.
0. THE SUM OF ALL IS BOUNDLESS LIGHT.
Break down the fortress of thine Individual Self, that thy
Truth may spring free from the ruins!

The Heart of the Master, by Aleister Crowley

Satyricon, by Federico Fellini

Journal Review of Religions, by Hazrat Inayat Khan

The Snakepit of Human Suffering Lies Here -- Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

We could, at this point, remind ourselves of the implications of Carl Sagan's statement; "matter is mostly NOTHING" i.e., empty space between sub-atomic particles which engage in a process of accretion to form matter and eventually disengage to do it all over again, "life after life"!

When we understand "matter is mostly nothing" we can begin to approach the attitude characteristic of the Indus Valley civilization.

Indian philosophy teaches that manifestation is Maya, or illusion; a beguiling cosmic dance which has the potential to delude us and enmesh the beholder. Restating this from the perspective of quantum physics, someone said, "there are no nouns" i.e., a person, place or thing lacks substantial reality and is but a twinkling atomic dance possessing only the facade of solidarity. That makes us all "nobody".

The Truth  About Tantra, by Dr. John Mumford

"Buddhahood Without Meditation -- A Visionary Account Known as Refining Apparent Phenomena (Nang-jang)," by Dudjom Lingpa, translated by Richard Barron

One evening after dinner, Dr. North asked, "Lemuel, do you think you could explain your theory of Null-O to me? It's hard to grasp the principle of non-object orientation."

Lemuel indicated the apartment with a wave of his hand. "All these apparent objects -- each has a name. Book, chair, couch, rug, lamp, drapes, window, door, wall, and so on. But this division into objects is purely artificial. Based on an antiquated system of thought. In reality there are no objects. The universe is actually a unity. We have been taught to think in terms of objects. This thing, that thing. When Null-O is realized, this purely verbal division will cease. It has long since outlived its usefulness."

"Can you give me an example, a demonstration?"

Lemuel hesitated. "It's hard to do alone. Later on, when we've contacted others ... I can do it crudely, on a small scale!"

As Dr. North watched intently, Lemuel rushed about the apartment gathering everything together in a heap. Then, when all the books, pictures, rugs, drapes, furniture and bric-a-brac had been collected, he systematically smashed everything into a shapeless mass.

"You see," he said, exhausted and pale from the violent effort, "the distinction into arbitrary objects is now gone. This unification of things into their basic homogeneity can be applied to the universe as a whole. The universe is a gestalt, a unified substance, without division into living and non-living, being and non-being. A vast vortex of energy, not discrete particles! Underlying the purely artificial appearance of material objects lies the world of reality: a vast undifferentiated realm of pure energy. Remember: the object  is not the reality. First law of Null-O thought!"

"Null-O," from The Philip K. Dick Reader, by Philip K. Dick

The only way out is not to see these laws, conceived so that we can live together in some reasonable fashion, as primordial necessities. It isn't "necessary" that the world exist, that we be here, living and dying. We're the children of accident; the universe could have gone on without us until the end of time. I know, it's an impossible image -- an empty and infinite universe, an abyss which for some inexplicable reason has been deprived of life. Perhaps there are in fact other worlds just like this; after all, deep down inside, we all have a penchant for chaos.

***

In 1930, Pierre Unik and I had written a screenplay based on Wuthering Heights. Like all the surrealists, I was deeply moved by this novel, and I had always wanted to try the movie. The opportunity finally came, in Mexico in 1953 ... There's one scene I remember vividly ... in which an old man is reading to a child from the bible, a little-known passage which doesn't appear in all editions but is far superior to the Song of Songs. Of course, the author had to put these words into the mouths of unbelievers in order to get them printed. I can't resist quoting the passage in full; it's from the Book of Wisdom, Chapter II, verses 1-9:

For they have said, reasoning with themselves, but not right: The time of our life is short and tedious, and in the end of a man there is no remedy, and no man hath been known to have returned from hell:

For we are born of nothing, and after this we shall be as if we had not been: for the breath in our nostrils is smoke: and speech a spark to move our heart,

Which being put out, our body shall be ashes, and our spirit shall be poured abroad as soft air, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, and shall be dispersed as a mist, which is driven away by the beams of the sun, and overpowered with the heat thereof:

And our name in time shall be forgotten, and no man shall have any remembrance of our works.

For our time is as the passing of a shadow, and there is no going back of our end: for it is fast sealed, and no man returneth.

The Religious Affiliation of Director Luis Bunuel, by adherents.com

I said eternal DEATH, not eternal life. There's a big difference! The triumph of the Spectacle is eternal death. There certainly is a spirit world, as even a casual acquaintance with Native people will reveal, and the object of the Spectacle is to isolate you from its influence, thereby depriving you of all hope and cutting you off from the source of your own being. To deny the Spirit in the face of so much evidence is to CHOOSE death willfully. This is the fate of all Vermin.

E-Sermon #9, by The Church of Euthanasia

War is the most effective preacher of the vanity of all merely finite interests, it puts an end to that selfish egoism of the individual by which he would claim his life and his property as his own or as his family's. (John Dewey, German Philosophy And Politics, p. 197)

America's Secret Establishment, by Antony C. Sutton

Nonsimultaneously apprehended interactive processing. I see no nouns, I only see verbs. The whole universe, scenario universe, seems to be a verb. Interacting processing. Interacting processing. Tao Duh! That's all I tune in. Interacting processing. No nouns anywhere. I never met a noun yet."

Maybe Logic, by Robert Anton Wilson

Most important, the central doctrine of nazism, that the Jew was evil and had to be exterminated, had its origin in the Gnostic position that there were two worlds, one good and one evil, one dark and one light, one materialistic and one spiritual.

This sheds light on an otherwise incomprehensible recurring theme within Nazi literature, as, for example, "The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks a Soul," [Found in George Mosse's book "Nazi Culture"] by one of the chief architects of Nazi dogma, Alfred Rosenberg, who held that whereas other people believe in a Hereafter and in immortality, the Jew affirms the world and will not allow it to perish. The Gnostic secret is that the spirit is trapped in matter, and to free it, the world must be rejected. Thus, in his total lack of world-denial, the Jew is snuffing out the inner light, and preventing the millennium:

Where the idea of the immortal dwells, the longing for the journey or the withdrawal from temporality must always emerge again; hence, a denial of the world will always reappear. And this is the meaning of the non-Jewish peoples: they are the custodians of world-negation, of the idea of the Hereafter, even if they maintain it in the poorest way. Hence, one or another of them can quietly go under, but what really matters lives on in their descendants. If, however, the Jewish people were to perish, no nation would be left which would hold world-affirmation in high esteem-the end of all time would be here.

... the Jew, the only consistent and consequently the only viable yea-sayer to the world, must be found wherever other men bear in themselves ... a compulsion to overcome the world.... On the other hand, if the Jew were continually to stifle us, we would never be able to fulfill our mission, which is the salvation of the world, but would, to be frank, succumb to insanity, for pure world-affirmation, the unrestrained will for a vain existence, leads to no other goal. It would literally lead to a void, to the destruction not only of the illusory earthly world but also of the truly existent, the spiritual. Considered in himself the Jew represents nothing else but this blind will for destruction, the insanity of mankind. It is known that Jewish people are especially prone to mental disease. "Dominated by delusions," said Schopenhauer about the Jew.

... To strip the world of its soul, that and nothing else is what Judaism wants. This, however, would be tantamount to the world's destruction.

This remarkable statement, seemingly the rantings of a lunatic, expresses the Gnostic theme that the spirit of man, essentially divine, is imprisoned in an evil world. The way out of this world is through rejection of it. But the Jew alone stands in the way. Behind all the talk about "the earth-centered Jew" who "lacks a soul"; about the demonic Jew who will despoil the Aryan maiden; about the cabalistic work of the devil in Jewish finance; about the sinister revolutionary Jewish plot to take over the world and cause the decline of civilization, there is the shadow of ancient Gnosticism.

Gods & Beasts: The Nazis & the Occult, by Dusty Sklar

RILY, quoth Demosius of Toutoscosmos, Gentleman, to Mystes the Allocosmite, thou seemest to me like an out-of-door's patient of St. Luke's, wandering about in the rain without cap, hat, or bonnet, poring on the elevation of a palace, not the House that Jack built, but the House that is to be built for Jack, in the suburbs of the City, which his cousin-german, the lynx-eyed Dr. Gruithuisen has lately discovered in the moon. But for a foolish kindness for that Phyz of thine, which whilome belonged to an old school-fellow of the same name with thee, I would get thee shipped off under the Alien Act, as a Non Ens, or Preexistent of the other World to come! -- To whom Mystes retorted -- Verily, Friend Demos, thou art too fantastic for a genuine Toutoscosmos man! and it needs only a fit of dyspepsy, or a cross in love to make an Heterocosmite of thee; this same Heteroscosmos being in fact the endless shadow which the Toutoscosmos casts at sun-set! But not to alarm or affront thee, as if I insinuated that thou wert in danger of becoming an Allocosmite, I let the whole of thy courteous address to me pass without comment or objection, save only the two concluding monosyllables and the preposition (Pre) which anticipates them. The world in which I exist is another world indeed, but not to come. It is as present as (if that be at all) the magnetic planet, of which, according to the Astronomer HALLEY, the visible globe, that we inverminate, is the case or travelling-trunk -- a neat little world where light still exists in statu perfuso, as on the third day of the Creation, before it was polarised into outward and inward, i.e. while light and life were one and the same, NEITHER existing formally, yet BOTH iminenter: and when herb, flower, and forest, rose as a vision, in proprio lucido, the ancestor and unseen yesterday of the sun and moon. Now, whether there really is such an elysian mundus mundulus incased in the Macrocosm, or Great World, below the Adamantine Vault that supports the Mother Waters, that support the coating crust of that mundus immundus on which we, and others less scantily furnished from nature's Leggery, crawl, delve, and nestle -- (or, shall I say the Liceum, -- the said Dr. Halley may, perhaps, by this time, have ascertained: and to him and the philosophic ghosts, his compeers, I leave it. But that another world is inshrined in the microcosm I not only believe, but at certain depths of my Being, during the solemner Sabbaths of the Spirit, I have held commune therewith, in the power of that Faith, which is "the substance of the things hoped for," the living stem that will itself expand into the flower, which it now foreshews. How should it not be so, even on grounds of natural reason, and the analogy of inferior life? Is not nature prophetic up the whole vast pyramid of organic being? And in which of her numberless predictions has nature been convicted of a lie? Is not every organ announced by a previous instinct or act? The Larva of the Stagbeetle lies in its Chrysalis like an infant in the coffin of an adult, having left an empty space half the length it occupies -- and this space is the exact length of the horn which distinguishes the perfect animal, but which, when it constructed its temporary Sarcophagus, was not yet in existence. Do not the eyes, ears, lungs of the unborn babe, give notice and furnish proof of a transuterine, visible, audible atmospheric world? We have eyes, ears, touch, taste, smell; and have we not an answering world of shapes, colours, sounds, and sapid and odorous bodies? But likewise -- alas for the man for whom the one has not the same evidence of fact as the other -- the Creator has given us spiritual senses, and sense organs -- ideas I mean -- the idea of the good, the idea of the beautiful, ideas of eternity, immortality, freedom, and of that which contemplated relatively to WILL is Holiness, in relation to LIFE is Bliss. And must not these too infer the existence of a world correspondent to them? There is a Light, said the Hebrew Sage, compared with which the Glory of the Sun is but a cloudy veil: and is it an ignis fatuus [Google translate: a fool of fire] given to mock us and lead us astray? And from a yet higher authority we know, that it is a light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And are there no objects to reflect it? Or must we seek its analagon in the light of the glow-worm, that simply serves to distinguish one reptile from all the rest, and lighting, inch by inch, its mazy path through weeds and grass, leaves all else before, and behind, and around it in darkness? No! Another and answerable world there is, and if any man discern it not, let him not, whether sincerely or in contemptuous irony, pretend a defect of faculty as the cause. The sense, the light, and the conformed objects are all there and for all men. The difference between man and man in relation thereto, results from no difference in their several gifts and powers of intellect, but in the will. As certainly as the individual is a man, so certainly should this other world be present to him: yea, it is his proper home.  But he is an absentee and chooses to live abroad. His freedom and whatever else he possesses which the dog and the ape do not possess, yea, the whole revenue of his humanity, is derived from this -- but with the Irish Landowner in the Theatres, Gaming-houses, and Maitresseries of Paris, so with him. He is a voluntary ABSENTEE! I repeat it again and again -- the cause is altogether in the WILL: and the defect of intellectual power, and "the having no turn or taste for subjects of this sort," are effects and consequences of the alienation of the WILL -- i.e. of the man himself. There may be a defect, but there was not a deficiency, of the intellect. I appeal to facts for the proof. Take the science of Political Economy -- no two Professors understand each other -- and often have I been present where the subject has been discussed in a room full of merchants and manufacturers, sensible and well-informed men: and the conversation has ended in a confession, that the matter was beyond their comprehension. And yet the science professes to give light on Rents, Taxes, Income, Capital, the Principles of Trade, Commerce, Agriculture, on Wealth, and the ways of acquiring and increasing it, in short on all that most passionately excites and interests the Toutoscosmos men. But it was avowed, that to arrive at any understanding of these matters requires a mind gigantic in its comprehension, and microscopic in its accuracy of detail. Now compare this with the effect produced on promiscuous crowds by a Whitfield, or a Wesley -- or rather compare with it the shaking of every leaf of the vast forest to the first blast of Luther's trumpet. Was it only of the world to come that Luther and his compeers preached? Turn to Luther's table talk, and see if the larger part be not of that other world which now is, and without the being and working of which the world to come would be either as unintelligible as Abracadabra, or a mere reflection and elongation of the world of sense -- Jack Robinson between two looking-glasses, with a series of Jack Robinsons in secula seculorum.

Well, but what is this new and yet other world? The Brain of a man that is out of his senses? A world fraught "with Castles in the air, well worthy the attention of any gentleman inclined to idealize a large property?"

-- On the Constitution of the Church and State, According to the Idea of Each; With Aids Toward a Right Judgment on the Late Catholic Bill, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

First, there is the place of personality in the gnostic being, -- whether the status, the building of the being will be quite other than what we experience as the form and life of the person or similar. If there is a personality and it is in any way responsible for its actions, there intervenes, next, the question of the place of the ethical element and its perfection and fulfillment in the gnostic nature. Ordinarily, in the common notion, the separative ego is our self and, if ego has to disappear in a transcendental or universal Consciousness, personal life and action must cease; for, the individual disappearing, there can only be an impersonal consciousness, a cosmic self: but if the individual is altogether extinguished, no further question of personality or responsibility or ethical perfection can arise. According to another line of ideas the spiritual person remains, but liberated, purified, perfected in nature in a celestial existence. But here we are still on earth, and yet it is supposed that the ego-personality is extinguished and replaced by a universalised spiritual individual who is a centre and power of the transcendent Being. It might be deduced that this gnostic or supramental individual is a self without personality, an impersonal Purusha. There could be many gnostic individuals but there would be no personality, all would be the same in being and nature. This, again, would create the idea of a void or blank of pure being from which an action and function of experiencing consciousness would arise, but without a construction of differentiated personality such as that which we now observe and regard as ourselves on our surface. But this would be a mental rather than a supramental solution of the problem of a spiritual individuality surviving ego and persisting in experience. In the supermind consciousness personality and impersonality are not opposite principles; they are inseparable aspects of one and the same reality. This reality is not the ego but the being, who is impersonal and universal in his stuff of nature, but forms out of it an expressive personality which is his form of self in the changes of Nature.

Impersonality is in its source something fundamental and universal; it is an existence, a force, a consciousness that takes on various shapes of its being and energy; each such shape of energy, quality, power or force, though still in itself general, impersonal and universal, is taken by the individual being as material for the building of his personality. Thus impersonality is in the original undifferentiated truth of things the pure substance of nature of the Being, the Person; in the dynamic truth of things it differentiates its powers and lends them to constitute by their variations the manifestation of personality. Love is the nature of the lover, courage the nature of the warrior; love and courage are impersonal and universal forces or formulations of the cosmic Force, they are the Spirit's powers of its universal being and nature. The Person is the Being supporting what is thus impersonal, holding it in himself as his, his nature of self; he is that which is the lover and warrior. What we call the personality of the Person is his expression in nature-status and nature-action, -- he himself being in his self-existence, originally and ultimately, much more than that; it is the form of himself that he puts forth as his manifested already developed natural being or self in nature. In the formed limited individual it is his personal expression of what is impersonal, his personal appropriation of it, we may say, so as to have a material with which he can build a significant figure of himself in manifestation. In his formless unlimited self, his real being, the true Person or Purusha, he is not that, but contains in himself boundless and universal possibilities; but he gives to them, as the divine Individual, his own turn in the manifestation so that each among the Many is a unique self of the one Divine. The Divine, the Eternal, expresses himself as existence, consciousness, bliss, wisdom, knowledge, love, beauty, and we can think of him as these impersonal and universal powers of himself, regard them as the nature of the Divine and Eternal; we can say that God is Love, God is Wisdom, God is Truth or Righteousness: but he is not himself an impersonal state or abstract of states or qualities; he is the Being, at once absolute, universal and individual. If we look at it from this basis, there is, very clearly, no opposition, no incompatibility, no impossibility of a co-existence or one-existence of the Impersonal and the Person; they are each other, live in one another, melt into each other, and yet in a way can appear as if different ends, sides, obverse and reverse of the same Reality. The gnostic being is of the nature of the Divine and therefore repeats in himself this natural mystery of existence.

-- The Gnostic Being, by Sri Aurobindo