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Magician without a conscience
Wednesday, 9 October 2024 at 22:04
Spinoza
Magician without a conscience
If God were only One, be that an infinitely distant Jehovah, or the solipsistic ‘I am I’ of the idealist philosophers, or Spinoza’s Substance, he would not be the God of whom John says:
God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (I John 4:16)
He would not be this, because he would love no one other than himself, but more than this, he would be the Magician without consciousness, or conscience. He would have, however, the status of being, which is, after all, the Spinozist claim, i.e. that God is not love, he is being, universal being. This claim is applicable to the mineral realm, sufficing to arrive at the morally neutral idea of being. For the mineral is. In contrast to being, love is not neutral from the point of view of moral life, but rather at the heart of it, which is critical to the understanding of ourselves as human beings. The seeker of truth in being will lose himself in a state of depersonalisation. Coleridge and Buber, amongst others, have made this their central criticism of Spinoza. Tomberg argued that the same criticism could be made of the Bhagavan, the Buddha, the masters of yoga and the ancient philosophers who really lived out their philosophy, above all the Stoics. It is this depersonalisation which is the goal of Tikkun in the Lurianic Kabbalah, the reabsorption into the One, Ein Sof. It is the death of the self in Spinoza’s secularised Judaism, the dehumanising result of Spinozism rejected by Buber. It is epitomised by the amoral realm of money which is the basis of the Spinozist ‘Republick of Merchants’.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Two... is the number of love
Tuesday, 8 October 2024 at 22:01
Valentin Tomberg
Two... is the number of love
Like Spinoza, Fichte and Gentile, we can choose monism and argue that there is only one sole being. Or we can choose dualism and see that there are two principles in the world: good and evil, spirit and matter. After all, did not Zarathustra, Prometheus and Jesus of Nazareth epitomise the good confronted by evil? And in the same way that Buber called this dualistic mode the ‘encounter’, (the mode of I–Thou), insisting that it is best described as love, Tomberg also argued that:
Two...is the number of love or the fundamental condition of love which it necessarily presupposes and postulates... because love is inconceivable without the Lover and the Loved, without ME and YOU, without One and the Other.
If God were only One, be that an infinitely distant Jehovah, or the solipsistic ‘I am I’ of the idealist philosophers, or Spinoza’s Substance, he would not be the God of whom John says:
God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (I John 4:16)
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Upon reflection
Monday, 7 October 2024 at 22:06
Upon reflection
The second tarot card, the High Priestess, is the reflection of the pure act of the Magician card. In short, it is the card that reintegrates the active and passive elements of consciousness. Tomberg explained:
As we have pointed out, one becomes conscious of the pure act of intelligence only by means of its reflection. We require an inner mirrorin order to be conscious of the pure act or to know ‘whence it comes or whither it goes’. The breath of the Spirit - or the pure act of intelligence - is certainly an event, but it does not suffice, itself alone, for us to become conscious of it. Consciousness (conscience) is the result of two principles - the active, activating principle and the passive, reflecting principle.
Once more there are echoes of Coleridge, which are emphasised still further by Tomberg’s parenthetic expansion upon the word consciousness, with the word, conscience.
The Magician’s act can be likened to Gentile’s pure act. Gentile’s pure actin itself, the act of the undifferentiated subject and object, cannot be grasped. It is only its reflection which tenders it perceptible, comparable and understandable or, in other words, it is by virtue of the reflection that we become conscious of it. The fact that Gentile reflected, communicated and fixed his Actualism, or the philosophy of the pure act, in books is evidence of this. Consciousness of the pure act needs more than the act itself. Consciousness, from the Latin conscius, itself from con, a form of com ‘together’ + scire‘to know’ is about knowing something with another, the result of the active, activating principle and the passive, reflecting principle. In order to know from where the pure act of intelligence comes and where it goes, something, or someone is required to reflect it.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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The pure act cannot be grasped
Sunday, 6 October 2024 at 22:09
Le Bateleur
The pure act cannot be grasped
Tomberg suggests a kind of spiritual attunement or atOnement on the part of The Magician, a connection with the Divine – that results, quite literally, in grace-full creativity. In the magician’s deftness of hand, Tomberg presents an analogy of being that is concentration without conscious effort, which is magical. But this standpoint of atOneness is not without its limitations as we have already discovered. Both the genius and the limitations of the Magician are summed up at the beginning of Tomberg’s second meditation as follows:
But the pure act... in itself cannot be grasped; it is only its reflection which tenders it perceptible, comparable and understandable or, in other words, it is by virtue of the reflection that we become conscious of it...
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Creative spontaneity
Thursday, 3 October 2024 at 20:48
Creative spontaneity
In meditating upon the tarot card that has the image of the Magician, Tomberg describes an adept who is perfectly at ease with his craft. What the Magician does with his hands is with perfect spontaneity: it is easy play and not work. The Magician himself does not follow the movement of his own hands, his gaze is elsewhere.
The Magician represents the man who has attained harmony and equilibrium between the spontaneity of the unconscious (in the sense given to it by C. G. Jung) and the deliberate action of the conscious (in the sense of ‘I’ or ego consciousness). His state of consciousness is the synthesis of the conscious and the unconscious - of creative spontaneity and deliberately executed activity. It is the state of consciousness that the psychological school of C. G. Jung calls ‘individuation’, or ‘synthesis of the conscious and unconscious elements in the personality’, or ‘synthesis of the self’.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Consciousness is the mystery
Tuesday, 1 October 2024 at 22:23
Valentin Tomberg
Consciousness is the mystery
Having travelled the long and hard road to individuation to develop and purify the active element of being, it was hard to accept that consciousness needs another element, a passive element. However, there is no consciousness without these two elements, and the suppression of this duality in the Substance, or the Absolute I of Idealism, must necessarily lead to the extinction not of being but rather of consciousness.
Consciousness is the mystery, not being. Consciousness is where the magic lives and encounter opens the door to it. Where better then to turn than to a Magician, as Valentin Tomberg did in his Meditations upon the Tarot?
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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