Gwynfydd

From John Michael Greer, three weeks ago:

The secrets of occultism aren’t secret because somebody chooses to hide them. They’re secret because you can’t understand them unless you’ve had certain experiences, and you won’t get those experiences unless you put in a lot of hard work…

One of the consequences of two thousand years of Christian moral preaching is that people in the Western world have gotten very, very good at tarting up grubby desires in virtuous drag…

If you read The Cosmic Doctrine the way that Fortune asks you to read it, you’re going to get a first-rate training in discursive meditation…

Unpublished until 1949, and then only in a privately printed edition, Fortune and her followers considered the material too dangerous for general release.

From JMG, last week:

With this post we begin a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your belts; it’s going to be a wild ride…

“The Unmanifest is pure existence.”..

“Manifestation begins when duality occurs.” Duality—or, to give it another name, polarity—is the most important theme in The Cosmic Doctrine. The short paragraphs that follow outline our first sketch of polarity, by way of the usual interplay of image and idea. Imagine interstellar space, and then imagine some of it beginning to flow, forming a current—a current of space, in space, moving through space from space to space. Now imagine the two forces playing on the movement—the slightly stronger desire of space for momentum and the slightly weaker desire of space for inertia; imagine the second force pulling slightly on the first, making it curve; imagine the curve extended over immense distances until the current becomes a vast ring—the Ring-Cosmos…

Once the Ring-Cosmos is established, it begins to draw more empty space into its flow, and the Ring-Cosmos turns into a spinning disk. Think of it as the spinning wheel in a gyroscope, or an old-fashioned vinyl record spinning on a turntable. As it spins, it sets up stresses in the empty space beyond its outer edge, and those stresses eventually set another current of space in motion at right angles to the original current. If you picture the Ring-Cosmos as spinning horizontally, like an LP on a turntable, imagine the second current starting out vertically from a space out beyond one edge of the Ring-Cosmos. The same paired forces have the same effect on the second current as on the first, so it curves as it flows, arcing over the Ring-Cosmos, descending vertically past it off beyond its far side, and then circling back beneath the Ring-Cosmos to return to its starting point.

That gives you two rings: the Ring-Cosmos and the Ring-Chaos, spinning at right angles to each other. The Ring-Cosmos is a disk, the Ring-Chaos is a ring outside the disk at right angles to the plane in which the disk spins—all, as our text says, to the nearest approximate metaphor. (“These images are not descriptive but symbolic…”) Once again we have a polarity, just as we did when space first started flowing…and once again the dinergy between the two opposed but unequal forces gives rise to something new…

Imagine the Ring-Cosmos as a flat horizontal disk of metal. Imagine the Ring-Chaos as a ring of metal larger than the disk, positioned vertically so that the disk fits inside it, and the two touch at two points, where the ring passes just outside the disk. Imagine that the ring and the disk are connected at those two points by a pair of pins on which the disk can pivot. Now imagine the disk pivoting on those pins, one side rising up, the other dipping down, until the disk is in the same vertical plane as the ring—but the disk keeps pivoting, so that the side that rose is now dipping and that which dipped begins to rise. The disk moves faster and faster, and as it moves, its outer edge traces a sphere.

That sphere is the Ring-Pass-Not, the third of the Rings that define a Cosmos. The Ring-Cosmos is primary; the Ring-Chaos takes shape in response to it, as a function of the resistance of space; the Ring-Pass-Not takes shape out of the interaction between the other two rings, as a function of their mutual attraction and repulsion…

In the traditions of the Cabala, they are the three pillars of Force, Form, and Balance; in the symbolism of Masonry, they are the three pillars of Strength, Wisdom, and Beauty…

Fortune assigns several descriptive labels to the Ring-Chaos. It’s the prime stillness of the cosmos; it’s the thrust-block that resists the force of the Cosmos; finally, it’s the Prime Evil…

It’s especially challenging for thinkers who are committed to those monotheist faiths that claim the universe was created by one and only one almighty, omniscient, and infinitely loving deity; a vast number of unsatisfactory arguments have been deployed to try to explain why such a deity would have created a world as well-stocked with misery and brutality as the one we experience.

The Cosmic Doctrine Kindle Edition

From JMG in August:

Research into near-death experiences dovetails neatly with the findings of research into apparent past life memories, to such an extent that in most other fields, so detailed a consensus of evidence on the subject would be enough to justify acceptance of reincarnation as a working hypothesis until and unless some solid disproof emerges…

To the occultist, spirit is the ultimate reality, and matter is the last and least stable product of that reality. Matter seems solid to us only because it’s what our senses perceive. Thus the death of the physical body isn’t the end of the real person; it’s the shedding of an outer layer, not much more significant than what happens every night when you take off your clothes…

In the Druid teachings, the mineral realm is the material expression of an immense mass of undifferentiated Spirit. The old writings call it the Cauldron of Annwn from which souls are born. (Annwn is pronounced AN-oon.)..

Abred—this is pronounced AH-bred—is the condition of physical incarnation…

To pass through Abred, they say, it is necessary for each of us to be all things, to know all things, and to suffer all things…

Choice doesn’t enter the picture until we reach the uppermost edge of Abred, where it borders on the next realm of being. Over and over again, the Individuality enters into incarnate life, adapts and grows, and then rises back into itself for a time to absorb the results of each life and prepare for the next one…

It took more than a billion years before the first Individualities to emerge from Annwn on this planet got past the single-celled organism stage…

We don’t happen to know when the first souls reached the upper boundary of Abred, the point at which human beings exist now…

Gwynfydd (that’s pronounced GWUN-vuth) means “the luminous life.’ It’s not heaven, not if by this you mean a static end point where the inmates bliss out for eternity. It’s not the end of a journey, but the beginning of the journey’s second half. In Abred, the Individuality is drowned in instinct, enclosed in mental, vital, and material forms, forgetful of its nature; in Gwynfydd the Individuality is awake and aware of itself, with full access to its memories from its previous lives, and its mental, vital, and material forms are freely chosen. One way of putting it is to say that in Abred, the spirit is wrapped up in matter, while in Gwynfydd, matter is caught up into spirit. Physical incarnation, in the sense of landing in another freshly born body, ends when Gwynfydd begins; material manifestation is still available, but it’s in other-than-human forms.

Having attained Gwynfydd, the Individuality now has an immensity of further development ahead of it. The traditional lore is emphatic that there are beings in Gwynfydd who are as far beyond human beings as human beings are beyond bacteria. Druids who prefer the old polytheist language refer to these higher beings as gods and goddesses; Druids who prefer Christian terms—yes, there are a lot of Christian Druids—refer to them in terms of the nine hierarchies of angels.  Those beings were once where we are now. We have the capacity to get to where they are now—and by the time we get there, they’ll be something even further beyond our imaginations. (Human beings are never going to be top dog in the Druid cosmos. Deal.)