True bhakti
Bhakti, which comes to mean “devotion” or “love” in later literature, is one of the central concepts of Hinduism.
In the Logos and the New Mysteries, Massimo Scaligero spends the first three quarters of the book labouring the point that we live in a state of fallen thought. This is the state of ‘deprivation’ in which the ‘I’ is divorced from the Logos. That deprived state will not be overcome until the Divine becomes the experience of the ‘I’.
In establishing a direct connection with the suprasensory realm, Scaligero emphasises the power of the will, but that will is nothing unless self-consciousness of our deprived condition is first realised.
This is probably the reason for Scaligeo’s heavy labouring of this fallen condition for over half the book.
This self-consciousness is of immeasurable value. It offers the pathway to the ‘dimension of autonomy’. ‘Passing over it can only be the illusion of whoever cultivates the cushy force, or the simple calm, or the effortless devotion.’
However, having achieved self-consciousness, the will can be directed towards the divine end.
The willed idea, from the centre of its own “forming,” connects the “I” with the Logos, because for it the thinking passes over into the current of the will. The idea, willed from the depths of its own form, frees feeling from the subjective prison and allows it to reconnect with the heart. The harmony of the three forces, thinking, feeling and willing, is the threshold to the New Mysteries. (86)
Self-consciousness amounts to the freeing of the ‘I’, or the resurrection of the ‘I’, and this must come before all else. Normally, the ‘I’ is not distinguished from thought and perception, but the ‘I’…
…that notices the manifesting of thought, truly possesses thought, and within thought it grasps the will. From thought’s rediscovered correlation with the will, there springs the liberated life of feeling - the true bhakti. (88)
© John Dunn.
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From the archive:
Gregory’s way to Eleusis
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Just a thought:
In undertaking the journey of writing this book, I never expected to end up where I did - and it all started with a question. Those who would also resist the subsumption of the self into the amorphous, commodified and brutalised herd must first ask the question too - ‘who am I?’ Come with me, the road is long and hard, but unless travelled all is lost. (Child of Encounter) John Dunn
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