LIBER IGNE II: Seele & Self
A real teacher will push you into a corner, blocking all the escapes. - U.G. Krishnamurti
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Before we can begin practicing magic, that is, cultivating honesty, there is an immediate, foundational question to address. The I, me, or myself who is being honest (or dishonest, as the case may be), who or what is that, exactly? Or, more succinctly, who am I?
To answer this question sufficiently, I want to draw on the work of the German philosopher Ludwig Klages, whose magnum opus, The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul, remains one of the most original, vitalizing, and least read philosophical works of the 20th century, and the cosmology, grammar, and internal war that underpins this book are directly inspired by Klages' philosophy, though I use his work as a living tool rather than a system to be adopted wholesale.
The central insight is that man is constitutively divided, and that the abstracting, concept-producing intellect, what Klages calls Geist (spirit), has parasitically colonized and is ceaselessly in the process of destroying the living, image-receptive Seele (soul). I draw this division into my discussion as self and Seele. Keeping Klages' term for the soul because the English translation carries too much religious freight to be useful, and using self for the invading principle because that is precisely what most people experience it-and themselves-as, the thing they take to be most fundamentally, unquestionably themselves. Let us delve then, into who we may or may not be.
Self and seele are not faculties to be balanced or integrated, but principles of being that are in irreconcilable conflict. You cannot improve, refine, develop, advance, or aggrandize the self into seele. They do not exist at opposite ends of a spectrum like black and white or hard and soft, but differ in kind in the way quantity and quality do. As such, the self is the problem by way of its constitutive colonizing and invasive properties, which suffocate life to such an extent that one becomes alienated from reality itself, being transposed into the flimsy and tension-ridden narrative of the self. The self is the false voice that descriptively, frustratingly, and possessively usurps life to such a degree that the very notion of a separate, 'spiritual life' develops as an illusory option, one that the very same self will tell itself we need only sparingly visit. The self, as the architect of all separation, division, and fragmentation, clings and clutches to only those parts of life it finds agreeable to its own story, thereby unconsciously developing friction against everything else which it deems merely as an error against it, as opposed to life fluxing.
Seele is the principle of life itself. Immediate, flowing, feeling-rich consciousness. Open, ever-moving, receptivity to the world's appearing, immersion in the stream of cosmic flux, unity with nature's cyclical rhythm of birth, growth, blossoming, decay, and death. It is the quality of a person you feel when you are genuinely in their presence (and they in yours). Not their opinions or accomplishments, nor their carefully spun yarn, but the state prior, the state immediate, the state grounded and present; the expressive life-principle that one feels when it's not being smothered by the self. Behind the eyes, trembling, seele remains, always. What remains after immolation is seele.
The self is the clutching, self-referential identity that invades life. At its most conceptual, it is mediation, abstraction, and quantification, being dependent, then, on control, security, stasis, and all that allows for the utterance of I to appear coherent altogether. The self is the will to master what appears, rather than receive, lean into, and accept it; a moment-to-moment withdrawal from the living present into the managed story about the present, about how it should be. The living image, now, sensuous and alive, is replaced by a concept or category that hovers outside of time and space. For the self, all that is flesh and breathes, blooms and decays, is but another term for its lexicon of narrative creation; reality, for the self, transformed into the world as to exist solely for it!
The self, that parasite of alienation! The great excuser, the great justifier, each personal leviathan of all misery and woe! The antagonist of vitality! A covert, slippery, hucksterish, mealy-mouthed, naysayer! An armored, fearful, shame-ridden know of self-imposed suffering! A pathetic suit of guilt shrouding the majesty of life! And for what? So that self can proclaim that was I, this is mine, and those were me! Only for that, this, and those to dissipate past the utterance into blissful nothing! The self, for what?!
The self is there, as a phantom, an overlay, when something about what is, is supposedly wrong. The self is talking when it is declared that something should have been otherwise. To invest in being right, in being correct, in having won and winning, he or she who would never make such a mistake, who holds these values, who is not that kind of person, who just cannot stand to be taken that way! To defend, deflect, or shirk, all a maintenance for the voice of self, the infantile I that wants the world all to itself, for whom life can never be, because that would mean conceding there is that which is larger than it! A misery constructed from identity curation, stories that time and again come up against a reality contrary to their proclamations, each contradiction a knot added to the bundle, a further tension in the gut! The self is not miserable, but is misery itself! Discontentment itself, by way of literally being an ongoing, impotent argument against life, against what is!
That puerile language of self, pillared by could, should, but, and if, here this, and know, self haunts. For why open, why lean in, why say yes, why love, when one could act as if everything should have gone the way of their story. To continue with a grimace, to drag non-acceptance beyond the bounds of the situation and complain and whine, to spew a tantrum across the earth, about how it was wrong, how if things had gone a different way, then everything would be right, how it could have gone another way if only a certain person had just understood! Things should be otherwise, but someone, somewhere else, at some other time-definitely not me!-- just didn't do the right thing, and now you all must hear!
The self haunts when you are caught between likes and dislikes. Managed positions that correspond to whim and meme, but not felt experience. The self likes that which other selves like, and so it decides to be the kind of person who appreciates them too. Equally, to dislike is not preferential, but confirmation of agreement or disagreement, not responses to what is, but preemptive decisions made for its story. The self is always its own primary audience. Likes and dislikes are cut from the same cloth of attachment, with one begetting the other. As all that is born shall one day die, all likes have a dislike. Another endless narrative spectrum for the self to rebound within, as if a certain choice from within that selection will somehow negate the whole operation.
When relation is loveless, the self is possessing. It is not that the self is incapable of attachment, for the self can fiercely grasp and cling. Loveless in the precise sense that the quality of relation, communication, or listening is absent. The other person has become a function in the narrative, a character for the story, whose role is to confirm your preferred account of yourself. The self 'loves' what confirms it, and resents what doesn't. Self and love are absolute antonyms.
The self is sourcelessly unhappy. A horizonless dissatisfaction that cannot be located in any external condition because its source is not external. The self produces this alienation as its basic existential condition, because the self cannot, by definition, arrive. It always is, and forever will be, distant from life, someone who isn't quite there. This condition is dishonesty. Not in the dramatic sense of telling conscious lies, but a low-level structural campaign of dishonesty, complete with noble motives, performed responses, and avoidance. A function that has been running so long it has become automatic, forgetting entirely that this is a presentation. And to forget is to forget death, the final foundation of the self. The fear of any and all death. The death of a pet, the end of a job, the breakdown of a car, the end of the year, the slow close of a relationship, the death of a loved one, and the perishing of life itself. The paradoxically ever-close yet ever-distant presence of the self that knows, somewhere just below its own narrative, that it is not quite real in the way it's claiming to be, for if it was, it would not die…and yet. And so it clings! It clings to life, positions, relationships, jobs, versions of itself, phases, ideals, to the future, and to fantasies. It clings to anything that will allow it to say I for just one more second, for death isn't death; it is only ever the end of that which says I, me, and mine.
Before the self, there was, and still remains, that veritable wonder of seele-life! To live in direct unity with the environment, without representations of the world to fit the self-spun tale; not to stand in a position, but to draw breath with rhythm and relation in the cosmic pulse as a wave of the ocean. To lean into image-consciousness, where perception finds not things to be coerced and altered as the self sees fit, but images, fleeting and unique, the unrepeatable mystery that arises and perishes within each second. The image of the predator is already to be gripped by fear! To love as the only love, without condition! Perception and response are not two separate moments, but as joyous, sensuous, living! For it is life that the self smothers, and therein ever-after seeks, in a breathless panic, to control. The manifestation of the self as a legion of illusions that tangle together into a knot, each speaking for the master that is I, each pulling itself, vampirically, into existence off the back of the others out of sheer tension. This tension speaks to itself with an assuming threefold language:
Firstly, conceptual thought. The replacement of the unique, the living, with timeless, unreal concepts. Where seele perceives this sunset, here and now, in its unrepeatable particularity of sense and wonder, the self utilizes the concept 'sunset', which equally applies to all sunsets (real and unreal), and captures the living reality as to control and know it, and therein deny any possibility of being moved by life. Concept replaces image, motive replaces movement, category replaces sense, the map replaces the territory; the self, then, is always dealing in dead currency. Not living an undead life, for that is a contradiction, but merely enduring its lot, exhausting its lies.
Second, will. The self doesn't assert as much as it is assertion itself. Assertion, in this case, is understood as that which is against what is, against life. Seele doesn't yield or act meekly, but leans into the movement of its organism, allowing itself to be moved, whereas the self says I will or I will not, thus imposing intention, interjecting a gap between feeling and action, between perception and drive. The ongoing performance of the self, curated by such assertions, substitutes genuine response for a slack-jawed repetition drawn from the robotic reels of comfort. The self does not feel and act as unity, but decides what it should feel (usually nothing at all), retroactively justifies that false feeling (emotion), and acts, now, with a smugness at its apparent, yet false, knowing.
Third, self-consciousness. This gap or split, cultivated by utilization of comfortable concepts, and directed by assertion, transforms into an usurpation of life itself; the observer is ripped from the observed. The infinite recursion of thinking about myself thinking, bolsters the delusional sovereignty of the self infinitely by way of its methodological approach to life. After concept and will, it is no longer a case of sitting with one's feelings, but reading about emotions and 'brain chemicals'; no longer leaning into pain, heartbreak, and mystery, but intellectualizing all into clinically precise patterns, labeling the findings, and using the label as a justification not just reason for stasis, but as justification to not even look at oneself.
From these three, undead pillars, the central tragedy of the self is formed-de-realization. The destruction of life itself by way of reducing all mystery to fact, all feeling to chemicals, and all love to management; the ceaseless replacement of images with concepts as an ongoing murder of life. The self replaces root with rot for the sake of ease!
Consider the concept tree. It applies equally to the ancient oak that stood for centuries in a village square, to the sapling just planted, and to the word tree on a page. Self treats all these as instances of the same, controllable thing, culling the living reality of each for the sake of undead security. A dead reality, of dead concepts, manipulable by logic and reason, and yet without any movement or rhythm, without life itself; for the self, life becomes economized death.
Multiply this entanglement by every perception, every experience, and every moment in life, and we begin to see how the self replaces life with death. Contrary to popular understanding, the more comprehensively the self manages and reasons about life, the less we understand or even perceive it, existing only within our own, separate conceptual fantasies. The managed life, then, is no life at all, but world, the world of self. A dead, economized, quantified husk of reality, the purpose of which is merely to solidify the centrality of the self in its own narrative. The cataclysmic consequence of self as selfishness is life inverted: where once was breath is found a corpse, once reciprocity now clinging, once joy now fear, once yes now no.
The world is a quagmire of the undead. The grey managed swamp takes all with it, down into the nothing of neither this way nor that; an equilibrium found not on pain and attempt, but on bureaucratic fear! Never joyous, only ever entertaining! For everything here is only ever…_fine, not so bad, okay…that persistent, sourceless sense that life is out of reach, and that something is missing. But it is not that any_thing is missing; another addition to the self's mired kingdom of tat is but another weight! Bring fire, bring flame, and set all shells ablaze!
The path forward cannot be one of self-management; it can be no quantified path at all; nothing but the unknown can guide, paradox as master. To immolate the self, to loosen soma, flay mind, and invoke seele with the honest fires of present perception; to see is always to see through, to be moved as to act, oh to be enthused by the harmonies of play and yes-saying! Driven to lean into life, into death! Come pain, come joy!
Come all and everything! Quashing the theatrics and obnoxious opinions of self, the endless chatter, the business, let it burn and to begin feeling, in silence, the reaching out of seele! Rhythm of heart and flesh, rising through bone and blood. There is no audience here to impress, for nothing and no one is separate, and as there is no other, the world is no more. Fearless in melody, the I can no more assert, for affirmation abounds! Life as life!
Exercise 2
Name: Low bows
Details:
For eight days in a row, Sunday to Sunday, go to a public place at a time when it is at least somewhat busy and perform a bow to the East.
The bow is a real gesture of gratitude to everyone who has paved the way before you, everyone who has helped and is helping you.
Bow for them.