For Julius Evola, philosophy was never a dry academic discipline, a mincing of words, a defense and attack of various doctrines, or trite rhetoric. For him, it was a matter of self-realisation that transcended the categories of thought, and this by necessity stands above any logic or rationality.
In his Saggi sull Idealismo Magico [Essays on Magical Idealism], Evola relates this Hindu story:
A disciple asked his spiritual teacher, while they were bathing in the river, when he would finally be able to realise Brahman. The teacher, instead of answering, pushed his head under water and held him down until, feeling himself drowning, the student freed himself and re-emerged. The teacher then explained: “When the desire in you to realise Brahman becomes as intense and deep as how you were just driven to reassert your physical life—only then will you achieve satisfaction.”
Evola goes on to explain:
That expresses the whole of magical development: as long as the will and the desire to realise oneself remains in mental shadows, as long as it does not equal, by penetrating into all one’s being, the intensity of that obscure and irrational power that is asserted at the core of our organism, there is no point in expecting any concrete result. With some justice, Jacobi noted that man cannot improve himself by means of ideas or reasoning; what he needs is to be organised and therefore to organise himself.
This explains why Evola is often so misunderstood. He is not teaching a new doctrine or recommending a specific religion. Rather, he is trying to awaken in the reader the desire for transcendence, which can only arise in the deepest parts of himself, prior to ideas, rationality, or convention. Without making the interior efforts at such transcendence, Evola’s entire scheme will remain opaque.
What follows is the opening paragraph to chapter V of the essays:
The Essence of Magical Development
I said, “You are gods” ~ John 10:34
What distinguishes magical idealism is its essentially practical character: its fundamental requirement is not to substitute one intellectual conception of the world with another, but rather to create in the individual a new “dimension” and a new depth of life. Certainly, it does turn into an abstract opposition between theory and practice; already in the theoretical and cognitive as such—and therefore in that which only be given to be revealed to a reader— it sees a level of creative activity, therefore it holds that such a level represents only an outline, a beginning of an effort in respect to a phase of deeper realisation, which is that of magic or practice properly called, in which the former must be continued and fulfilled. The lowering of the “being” of ontology and gnoseology to a “having to be” and the development of the activity of the judgment of value, into which the same theoretical judgment is accordingly transformed, until the judgment of existence, to a cosmically creative act of faith, such is the essence of the present doctrine. Whoever therefore does not know how to convert the principles of magical idealism into power agents in his interior being, to profound needs that impel him towards a concrete and living realisation, he kills that idealism by the tritest rhetoric. The one who can truly say to himself: “If magic didn’t exist, today I must create it by myself”, is rather welcome here.
{In both Judaism and Christianity the focus is on embodiment. The point is not to “escape” this embodiment, but rather, to incarnate fully. Our incarnation is God’s excarnation; or God ex-spires into us and we in-spire God — which is how we oxidize the blood that courses through the arteries of the cosmos.
…
Benjamin Whichcote: “Our Conversation is in Heaven, according to the Measure and Degree of our present State and Condition…. When we set ourselves to do the Will of God here, then Heaven is come down into the World…”
We mustn’t wait until we are dead — or ’til the sun is down, when no man can work. Rather, it should begin “while the soul is in the body. I say more: while yet in the body a soul may reach oblivion of its travail not to remember it again” (Meister Eckhart).
In other words, there can be a kind of egobliteration and resurrection in this life, or at least its “first fruits.” For any transcendence is evidence of all transcendence, which is to say the transcendence of all — which is another way of saying resurrection, or at least rebirth.
William Law: “What could man have to do with the perfection of God as the rule of his life, unless the truth and reality of the divine nature was in him?”
The Russian Pilgrim: “It is possible for man to get back to that primitive contemplative state in which he issued from the hands of his Creator.”
Why? Because you weren’t issued in the past; rather, you are issued afresh each moment. You know, make your resurrections in advance, and don’t forget your peaceport…. De-part and bewholed like in them seers’ dialogues of old, then aim your eros for the heart of the world!
Hakuin goes even further — it’s not only senseless to wait until death for the climb of your life, but it is the most culpable negligence. It’s a kind of philosophical malpractice. It’s worse than a crime, it is a cosmic blunder.
Nope. “He that beholds the sun of righteousness arising upon the horizon of his soul with healing in its wings, and chasing away all that misty darkness” — such a regular feller cares not “to pry into heaven’s secrets, and to search the hidden rolls of eternity, there to see the whole plot of his salvation; for he views it transacted upon the inward stage of his own soul, and reflecting upon himself, he may behold a heaven opened from within, and a throne set up in his soul, and an almighty Saviour sitting upon it, and reigning within him…. It is not an airy speculation of heaven as a thing to come that can satisfy his hungry desires, but the real possession of it even in this life” (John Smith the Platonist).
Amen for a child’s job! (And vice versa.)}