Final thoughts

A particularly difficult aspect of approaching Wisdom thorough forgiveness is that manifesting eternity in our temporal world destabilizes our habituated phenomenal experience. The ego pushes back against that which is why this is a slow process of purification, otherwise we might end up losing our minds (which happened to me when I tried speed-running ceremonial magic). 

The issue lies in creating a vacuum via the healing where one runs the risk of falling back into previous unconscious patterns of behavior, once more with feeling, because the ego fights to reestablish its dominance when we take steps to destabilize our normalized, subjective reality.

Opening the self up to healing by dethroning ourselves and acknowledging the reality of the God-Man creates this vacuum, from which the light of Christ arises in the intellect but where the λογίσμοι find sanctuary the likes of which they had not encountered before in our ignorance.   

  

“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting place, but it finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ When it returns, it finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and live there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first” (Matthew 12:43-45). 

It is in the absence of God that we either find Him or fall further into evil.    

The mind, being a thoroughfare, needs to be under maintenance through vigilance. As stated before, when we accept the reality of a transcendent Being and an objective, Absolute Truth then we are responsible for our ability to perceive that Truth and cultivate it. It is, in many ways, taking responsibility for our health to start seeing the way things are rather than how we deconstruct the world through our various lenses where “the world breaks up into isolated individual units unknown to one another and therefore hostile” (Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit 168). That is, turning away from evil and coming to the light of Truth, Who is unity.

It is like a spiritual flu season we find ourselves in with the spread of the contagion of evil through its sinful manifestation. While evil, in neoplatonic terms, is the absence of good—a void state that has turned away from the One—it is the opposite of Truth. Evil is not an intelligence or an entity unto itself, “Evil is a meaningless desire for a life apart from reality and apart from God which seeks to invest non-being with the character of being” (Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit 168).

Evil, as we can see, exists in a parasitic hypostasis, only becoming through our being. Evil is formed and defined from the void by our thoughts and actions, which is directly related to our Sophianicity, our being made in the Image of God grants us the ability to turn away from Him and create without Him.

This is slavery where we are defined more and more through deconstruction and becoming vessels from which evil spreads infecting the phenomenal world. Let’s use my own way of engineering evil as an example of the darkness that consumes and spreads. My own issues with rage are a testament to how far removed I am from the love of God, by my own hand, my own willingness to dialogue with the phantom λογίσμοι, and the spiritual captivity of falling under prideful inclinations and perceptions.

This rage is unlimited because of its pulling out of the void and when it is expressed it consumes me in a confused, dark and beastial way (leading to shame that is also a product of pride). This darkness consumes me and makes me a vehicle for its contagious nature projecting out of me and painting the landscape, blocking out eternity like arrows covering the sun. I engineer evil by my own unwillingness to unite myself with Truth, Who is Christ.

This is where I am my most judgmental, intolerant, anxious, resentful—fortified by my presuppositions and prejudices—assuming everything about everyone, ready to explode over debts that I hold within my heart, clouding the image of eternity that rests at the ground of my being, blinding the eye of my soul. The reality that emerges from this state of consciousness is not real and, like the world that lives on the other side of the bottle, is addicting. And what’s worse than being horrendously repressed, holding on to charges that had no release decades ago, is moving through the world with a moralistic, externally pious, and self-righteous demeanor.

How can God exist in my heart when I know better?

And so, by that logic, Satan is wholly dependent on me to gift him the key to my heart… And though it is the demiurgic impulse to assume that I am my own master, it is a trick, because I am really a slave to myself: my desires, egotism, jealousies, and explosive anger. “Being is only free when it is united in that love through which one is allied to God. It is only through God that everything is linked up and brought into unity” (Berdyaev, Freedom and the Spirit 168-169).

Satan divides, the quintessential diabolos, to divide, to throw asunder and in the realm of epistemology is the opposite of knowledge, the opposite of Logos, which is reason, and Who is eternally above reason. The λογίσμοι are meant to pull us away from reason, from logic, and shoot from the hip fueled by our repressed emotions and passions. We are, spiritually and intellectually speaking, weak and we are unfortunately too often led to rely on our own intellect and spiritual progress, but this is itself a product of the λογίσμοι and is following the demiurgic impulse.

To follow that impulse is to fall like lightning from heaven.

And so, I guess what I am trying to say is that I am starting off this year by taking ownership of the ways in which I open dialogues with λογίσμοι, because perhaps deep down I am afraid of being liberated from my passions, because that means I would be responsible for myself in a real way; I would be responsible to surrender myself to He Who is not me that I might help manifest eternity in the temporal. I would be responsible for becoming eternal within this temporal existence. And in temporality remember not to take the things of this world so seriously, to let go of what I cannot change and have the courage to change what I can… And both of these come down to forgetting the self and forgiveness. 

This is Wisdom. 

This is becoming Absolute Truth. 

It would be intellectually dishonest to presume that one can come to knowledge via philosophical, mental structuring of the material world. This is cannot, by its own limitations come to knowledge of Absolute Truth, it can only conjure a distorted reality and obscured, refractory images of Truth. This has to do with our own spiritual blindness caused by our poor health in relation to higher realities and it is only an emphasis on our own human reasoning and its arrogance that we would endeavor to seek Truth without God, that’d be like trying to swim without getting wet.

“According to Saint Gregory and the Hesychasts, a philosophical approach is insufficient as a method to know God. ‘A theology that is based on intellectual constructs and not on direct experience of God is philosophy and not theology. It is a human creation that offers neither real knowledge of God nor peace to the heart’” (Markides, The Mountain of Silence 234).

I hope that I have argued successful to show that knowledge of reality can only be pursued in relation to one’s acknowledgement of God and their own inability to perceive Truth due to an unwillingness to let go of their subjective truth. This is not reality, but a subjective construct of a world built around suffering, pride, and idealization. Hopefully, I have made a case that to acquire reality we must forget ourselves and forgive those indebted to us, no matter how difficult it is to do so. The purpose of life is not to obsess over the accumulation of debts held over others, nor is it to be obsessed over our own debts. Sometimes, even these dynamics obscure the attainment of material knowledge. Both of these models are consumptive in nature and do not reveal reality, but mask it.

The purpose of life is to attain absolute good, absolute perfection and to be made well—united to Absolute Truth.

“For if we know God our knowledge of each and everything will be brought to perfection, and, in so far as possible, the infinite, divine, and ineffable dwelling place (Jn 14:2) will be ours to enjoy. For this is what our sainted teacher said in his famous philosophical aphorism: ‘‘Then we shall know as we are known’ (1 Cor 13:12),” (St. Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 53).

So, may we spend this year knowing God as we are known by Him, cultivating trust with the good Doctor and the hospital, His Church.

May we soften this year. May we put off the old man this year, recognizing the demiurgic impulse to sever our connection with God and others by holding onto debts and captivated by the λογίσμοι. May we accept that without Him we live in a deconstructed, subjective reality.

It is there, in the darkness and confusion that “a veil lies over [our] minds, but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:15-18). 

Finally, I feel it is important to recognize where all this is coming from within myself. 2023 started out really intense and difficult; I was unsure of myself, which was leading to me putting myself into situations, and staying in situations, that I… basically, I was allowing myself to be held captive by people and events.

But I did that to myself, I need to take responsibility for my part in being with people who did not care about me, or in situations that I was not comfortable with, generally.

Last year I found myself at a coke party with no one to blame but myself. I found myself in friendships that were taking advantage of my kindness with no one to blame but myself. I found myself blaming others and building resentment, the same way I have operated for years, over a decade to say the least. But I’ve spent the over a decade enslaved to my own assumptions, living with reactivity ignorantly believing myself to be in control.

Eternity must be given a chance therefore I must get out of the way of the Image of God that it might shine brighter from within all of us. So, we might all see that “what has come into being in Him [through us is] life and the life [is] the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness [does] not overtake it” (John 1:5).

Si comprehendis, non est Deus