{"id":8338,"date":"2015-10-14T22:49:23","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T02:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gornahoor.net\/?p=8338"},"modified":"2020-10-14T23:18:17","modified_gmt":"2020-10-15T03:18:17","slug":"interim-note-on-being-one-with-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gornahoor.net\/?p=8338","title":{"rendered":"Interim Note on Being One with Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nPantheism does not admit the existence of individual beings.<\/p>\n

Pantheism offers only the perspective of letting oneself be lulled by the undulation of the ocean of deified nature. ~ Valentin Tomberg<\/strong>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Giulio
\nThere is a photo of Giulio Cogni<\/strong> in Julius Evola<\/strong>\u2019s Sintesi di dottrina della razza<\/em> with the following caption:<\/p>\n

\nAn Italian Nordic-Aryan type of the body with an Amazonian race of the spirit. Actually, it is a matter of a person, in whose theories an external energetic and almost Promethean aspect is mixed with a Demetrian-Lunar pantheistic vision of the world with a special recognition given to the feminine element.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Giulio Cogni was a philosopher, music critic (a specialist on Wagner), and an author of books on Eastern spirituality. After the German-Italian alliance in the 1930s, there was a scramble among Italian intellectuals to outline a Fascist understanding of race, in opposition to the German\u2019s. The consensus was a more spiritual understanding of race. Thus Julius Evola published several works on the topic. His young friend, Massimo Scaligero, published a book on race based on some ideas from Anthroposophy. Giulio Cogni, who was a follower of the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, tried to reconcile Alfred Rosenberg with the situation in Italy. From the snippets I\u2019ve found, Cogni denied the notion of racial superiority and, not unlike Evola, claimed that \u201cAryan\u201d referred to a spiritual quality rather than a biological quality.<\/p>\n

After the defeat of WWII, Evola more or less abandoned the topic. Scaligero and Cogni, on the other hand, managed to rebrand themselves: Scaligero as an Anthroposophist and Cogni as a Vedantist. As an indication of their success, some of their articles have been republished in the American Yoga Journal<\/em>, with no mention of their Fascist past.<\/p>\n

After the war, Evola\u2019s and Cogni\u2019s life paths diverged. I did find a rather long review by Evola of Cogni\u2019s book \u201cIo sono te: sesso e oblazione<\/em>\u201d (\u201cI am you: sex and offering\u201d), which highlights the differences between the two thinkers and would explain Evola\u2019s evaluation of Cogni.<\/p>\n

In that book Cogni proposes a pantheistic worldview based, as he claims, on the Vedanta: \u201cwe are all one\u201d. That logically leads to an undifferentiated view of the human situation, which includes promiscuous sex, self-sacrifice, and androgyny. Since Cogni articulates in an intelligent and sophisticated way many of the commonly held views in the modern world, the review is an apt essay for discussion. <\/p>\n

Being<\/h2>\n

Cogni bases his ideas on the notion of the Vedantic One, as he understands it to indicate the overcoming of all distinctions. Quoting Hegel, Evola describes this view as \u201cthe night in which all the cows are black\u201d. I noticed this years ago when I participated in a Nisargadatta<\/strong> discussion group. The consensus view in that group was that, as an enlightened being, he more or less disappeared into the \u201cOne\u201d. Nevertheless, as I pointed out, he spoke, responded to his name, etc., but that had little impact on the discussion.<\/p>\n

In that view, there is only undifferentiated Being, so the beings we experience are illusions. \u201cWhose\u201d illusions they are, or why those \u201cillusions\u201d take such a specific form, or why do different people experience a similar world, was never made clear if only the One exists.<\/p>\n

Jacques Maritain<\/strong>, in The Degrees of Knowledge<\/em> provides a more satisfying answer. When I know Peter, I judge him to be a man, but even more fundamentally, I have an intuition of Peter as a being. This intuition is found everywhere, it \u201csaturates all things\u201d. Maritain explains our experience of Being.<\/p>\n

\nBeing is a primordial and general conceptual object which is at once and from the beginning essentially diverse in the diverse subjects in which the mind discovers it. What is primarily known, and in which every object of thought is resolved for the intellect, is being. But nothing can be added to it extrinsically to differentiate it, for all its differentiations issue from its own depths.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, Being is known through beings. Pace<\/em> Cogni, Being is already highly differentiated. In the Western tradition, this is expressed as the doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Logos with Being. Evola expresses the same notion in a slightly different way:<\/p>\n

\nThe One dominates a well-articulated order of differences (a cosmos, in the Hellenic sense).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, \u201cIllusion\u201d has a much different connotation. For Cogni, the illusion is the separateness and distinction of beings, which are ultimately part of Brahman. However, illusion is actually much more subtle, and hence, more difficult to eradicate. The illusion arises from our failure to grasp the meaning of the Whole and how the parts are interconnected. This is due to the weakness of the intellect and erratic emotional reactions.<\/p>\n

Descending and Ascending Movements<\/h2>\n

Evola claims that Cogni fails to distinguish between the subconscious and the superconscious, with the following consequence:<\/p>\n

\nCogni has no sense of the fact that just as an \u201cintegrative ascending self-transcendence\u201d exists, so a divisive descending self-transcendence also exists for the true personality. That is, there are possible openings of the I both toward the higher as well as toward the lower, which also means toward \u201cnature\u201d, toward the unconscious, toward the vital formless bottom.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In an early essay, The Holy Spirit & the Sophia<\/em>, Tomberg describes that downward movement in these steps.<\/p>\n

First the Logos descends to the conscious I. If the I is oriented to the Logos above, it is ascendant. This supersensory \u201cTemple of Wisdom\u201d or \u201cHouse of Sophia\u201d is the knowledge of the Whole (but not of every individual fact).<\/p>\n

However, that movement can continue downward in these stages, each with its own type of intelligence:<\/p>\n