Abraxas
The bird struggles out of the egg.
The egg is the world.
Whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world.
The bird flies to God.
That God's name is Abraxas.
--Herman Hess, ‘Damien’
Abraxas begetteth truth and lying,
good and evil, light and darkness,
in the same word and in the same act.
Wherefore is Abraxas terrible.
It is love and love's murder.
It is the saint and his betrayer.
It is the brightest light of day
and the darkest night of madness.
--The Seven Sermons to The Dead—
‘The awakening of any individual is a cosmic event.’
--
7 Comments:
"Know thyself" has got stuck in my head a long time as do the words of Socrates advising me to spend the rest of life getting ready to die. Even time spent as a kind of anti-christ and slagging off the "Fundys" has cluttered up the old inbox in my brilliant mind. I like gnosticism but it seems to have caught the pox like all the rest of them fairground rides and sideshows.
Yawn.
Z
I tend to have little regard for the bored.
Ever wonder if there might be a crucial connection you've yet to make?
There are countless examples of songs like yours...pre and post-epiphany.
And I for the patronising, like how you dangle "epiphany" like some meritocratic morsel at the banquet of life. Sometimes you can sound a tad small-minded within your splendid res cogitens.
Z
Yeah, mea culpa. Sometimes I can sound that way, and for that you've pegged me.
Not so splendid ways of addressing more splendid concepts reveal just how lazy I can be in these responses. You have my apology for sounding patronizing, it wasn't intended, but your yawning struck me similarly.
The idea of personal paradigm shifts should always be considered, and the landscape of undiscovered territory can never be predetermined.
I Saw this and thought of you:
"Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly."
~Andre Gide
Indi - your words are music to the ears, please accept the assertion of my perpetual paradigm-shifting? Most noticeably a shift from christ-centredness to person-centredness thus a new vista on the tomfoolery of religion.
Ever since I read la porte etroite and l'immoraliste (in french) and les faux monnayeurs, I have welcomed Gide as a brother and i can clearly respect what he might have said about self discovery (although Gide himself vaunted self discovery). I am partly aware of inner change and to an equal or greater degree, aware of the weltanschauung of the en-soi all around.
My pedigree? Nietsche, Heidegger/Husserl, Sartre. The more modern, the less sense "they" make. If I am wrong I willingly stand corrected. Your Blog is strewn with references to the here and now which hit its maturity in the sixties and to which all culture harkens even among hip hop and R&B in the culture of the noughties.
I am still a hippy but also a thinker at the cutting edge where the edge cuts, then moves on...
Z
The cutting edge is constant and ceaseless. And whatever one's philosophical bent or effort to connect to oneself in any fundamental way, it takes getting beyond the confines of self to realize anything worthwhile. And this is what all religions are about. Regardless of how they've been corrupted.
Religion is not about the institutions and inquisitors and ridiculous interpretations. So, throw all that out with the bath, but not the baby, if you ever expect to find anything.
Without mythic context, every curious mind on the planet creates one...call it religion, or whatever you please.
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