Wisdom (II)

“To know, according to Wisdom, does not mean ‘to think’, but to be the thing known: to live it, to realise it inwardly. One does not really know a thing unless one can actively transform one’s consciousness into it.” This quote from Evola is connected to the fact that wisdom also requires emptiness—you have to empty everything out (empty the sack). Most people are filled with opinions, beliefs, ideas about how the world should be, ideas that flatter their own position in the world (or provide them with comfort against its harshness).

It’s like Lao Tzu says, the wise man has no specialist knowledge—but he sees much. That’s an aristocratic perspective, by the way—you see a tiny glimmer of it in the way men like King Charles are involved in many projects and organisations, they’re meant to be going around making perceptive observations about the situation that the specialist can’t see. That’s the aristocratic-generalist position—it’s not to have specialist information, it’s to be an initiate who can see. That’s true divine kingship.

Obviously, in modernity, we’re lost amid a sea of people who know all sorts of things—about medicine, art, computer programming, warfare. People know a lot, they’re stuffed with knowledge—stuffed with information (and often proud of it). Yet even if that information is correct it lacks wisdom. It lacks self-knowledge—that is divine knowledge, that is what allows you to see.

It’s like if I walk up to a teenager and he says, “I just, like, really want to, like, um, chat with Caitlin about, um, the school play…because I’m doing the lighting and I want to get the lighting right...for her part…it’s just, um, really important.” Now, some people might humour the boy and talk about “how difficult it is to light plays correctly and what role does Caitlin play and so on”. The wise man just listens quietly and says, “So you want to take this girl as a lover.” That is candid—so it charms. It goes right to the heart of the matter.

However, what many people do is to think, being full of ideas, “oh, um, well I don’t want to embarrass him, it’s awkward at that age…I remember…and, really, who knows what this is all about…perhaps it is about the play really…could be an embarrassing mix-up…so I’ll humour him.”

So they’ll talk about lighting the play, or about the play itself, or the part—and there will be a subtext, and everyone will be excited (because secrets are exciting and dramatic) but there will be no resolution. In these situations, people eventually become hysterical or, conversely, schizoid—you start to talk about “lighting the play” when you mean “to make love”, which can in turn become smutty.

You might think that the example I have given is trivial, but, in fact, our whole society is riven with situations just like the one so described; and so our society is hysterical, dramatic (melodramatic, even), filled with secrets (that would “literally kill us if everyone knew”)—and it’s also, in many respects, schizoid.

Just look at the way people complain about immigration: they talk about how “this is a Christian country”, or they talk about “the economy”, or about how “the country is full”—and the left offers valid ripostes to these points. This comes about because the people who oppose immigration do not have the courage (wisdom) to say, “I want to live in a racially homogenous society.”

And so the debate goes nowhere and they often look like fools, because many immigrants are Christian, and the British aren’t particularly Christian, and the economic case for immigration is mixed. Just like the boy and Caitlin, they talk about “lighting the play”—and everyone gets hysterical, and talks about what you really mean by that. Suspicion grows, schizoid talk grows—“I don’t mean nothing, they could be pink or purple for all I care…”

The wise man has no time for that, because the wise man is not full of himself. He doesn’t want to convince you he is “good” or “bad”—that he’s not a horny teenager or doesn’t care about his race because he’s “a nice guy”. He just observes the situation as it is—he is dead to the world, he is empty. There is the situation.

But, but you can’t embarrass a teenager like that…you heartless monster…Did I embarrass him, or did I just relieve him from his act? Perhaps he should approach Caitlin and say, “Will you have sex with me?” instead of this charade about “lighting levels in the Third Act”.

It is not moral. Wisdom is not moral. What people call “moral” is about emotions and ideas about how the world should be and how people should think you are a wonderful person (as decided this decade—“it was acceptable in the 90s”).

But reality never changes—that is why the Zen masters say the ripples on the pond in moonlight are enough. You talk of God or gods—their nature. But there is the ripple, there is the moonlight. Isn’t that enough? Have you even seen the moonlight on water, or were you too busy in your talk about “God”?

I say Christianity, Marxism, and Freudianism are the same thing invented by the same people, the Jews. And then you scream at me. What do you mean by that? Really? Why do you hate Christ? Don’t you know Marx was an atheist? You have reaction formation. It is an observation, it is so—why do you cling to the fiction?

I have no “Marxism”, no “Freudianism”, no “Evolianism”—I have observations. Why do you want to blindfold me? Why extinguish the light that sees? Who do you serve that hates truthful speech?

Per Evola, wisdom “gets behind things” or “under things”—it’s like Heidegger’s idea that there is something “under” Being, something Aristotle overlooked; it’s like when Jung said “thank you” to his cups and saucers and kettles when he put them away—he merged with those objects, like you merge with your car when you drive it. Do not “think”, become.

It is this inability to become objects—or even people, to merge with them—that has given rise to the subject-object divide, to modern mechanical civilisation. Before, we knew how to activate the supra-natural powers that flow through us—now we are alienated from them, even God is “out there” (an object that we look on as a subject, not a moonbeam). So we have fallen into matter.

I would say it’s sad, but I am a dead man—and dead men feel no sadness. You’re so cold. I’m not cold or hot, being dead—it’s not that I cultivate a “tough guy” persona, like most men. It’s not that I want to weep for progressive points, like Prince Harry. I’m just not here, I’m just a force—just an observer, just wise *