Perhaps it is really owing to the Biblical Tree of Judgement that belief and knowledge are separated. Of course, you never can tell. But one thing is for sure: Philosophers' essential contribution to culture has been to reflect on the relation between the two. Anyway, since then people have been labouring over this opposite pair of terms. Apart from maybe tribal societies mankind falls into two groups: the one to claim the priority of belief and the one to favour knowledge. Both parties appeal to human reason, and it is a question of belief which is more convincing.
At the latest Enlightenment seemed to have decided for the believers in knowledge who all too often criticized belief in belief as superstitious. But just the way theologists endeavoured to back their belief with knowledge, philosphers realized in most cases they only believed to know something. This quite remarkably disappointed the belief in progress, and the last century gave naive optimism the rest.
But the dilemma of enlightened Enlightenment, post-modernism, -structuralism, deconstructivism is that a pitiless criticism of an only technical rationalism cannot go back behind the watermarks of Enlightenment. It is impossible to conceive that dead gods can be revived, that the Tree of Judgement can be felled. Mark you: Even fundamentalists use the WWW. Reason suggests that belief and knowledge are united on a level that is beyond reach. We have to belief in reason – we cannot know about it and we cannot belief in anything else either.
That quest for unity modern human beings undertake can only be held promising for the price of esoterics. And here there is another price taxing the material countervalue to transcendent illumination: The seminar fees and book prices the cosmic sages raise, whose success is due to the modern dilemma of enlightened Enlightenment, as has been explained above. After all, esoterics differs from rational science in its blunt claim to belief, but from religion in its try to give reason to its belief. Esoterics does not balk at scientific theorems or hypotheses; quite the contrary, it resolves them from their scientific background and recombinates it in its own cosmic context. And is just that manner which safes it from acquiring only a relatively small group of scatter-brains as customers who – owing to their transcendent way of life – have rarely developed a satisfactory attitude towards making money. No, the complementary group is recruited, too, namely those who want to know what to belief – the collateral damages of Enlightenment, the scepticists of modern age.
That is why there is something which is to replace the Tree of Judgement; to remain botanical, let us simply call it Yggdrasil – that cosmic ash-tree in Germanic mythology which is an explanation to everything – including and especially what is beyond human reason. Any seminar in esoterics, any book will fare well at following the Yggdrasil-principle; that is not just to dismiss modern science as a disastrous error, but to (to exhaust botanics) build of the exuberantly growing sprouts of the Tree of Judgement the Trojan Horse. Esoteric creativity will show in the kind of connections it can make; quickly archaeology and ufology can be linked, fantasy and psychology be exchanged. All that is needed is a two-valued symbol which appeals both to rational tradition and to mysticism. How? Well, diagrams, tables and curves are by no means tabooed; all one has to do is to point out they express a Higher Truth. This way metaphysics will be practiced with the aid of physics.
And reversely one will be well-advised to link speculations on the fateful or divine powers with scientific results. No member of the esoteric circle will ask if that works in the first place, for due to their membership the followers have deprived
themselves of their right to do so. This way mythology is not only established, but sold as well.
The one part of the customers poses scrutinizing questions until it believes; the other one does not want to know anything, in order to believe. But they have one thing in common: the strict separation from what esoterics as the hermetic inside world excludes: exoterics, the outside world. After all, exoterics neither comprises the ignorant nor the unbelievers but the non-initiates. Nowadays we can buy our entrance tickets on our own by paying for the access to the seminar rooms or the books.
Let us sum up the Yggdrasil-principle:
1. Turn away from the Tree of Judgement.
2. Turn towards Yggdrasil.
3. Place adverts in the newspapers.
4. Let the hyper-naive and the hyper-sceptic people in.
5. Call them the illuminate
6. Choose a symbol and give it a double content.
6.a. Give the naive something to believe and call it the original power.
6.b. Give the sceptic something to know and show diagrams.
7. Make sure the checks have sufficient security.
At the latest Enlightenment seemed to have decided for the believers in knowledge who all too often criticized belief in belief as superstitious. But just the way theologists endeavoured to back their belief with knowledge, philosphers realized in most cases they only believed to know something. This quite remarkably disappointed the belief in progress, and the last century gave naive optimism the rest.
But the dilemma of enlightened Enlightenment, post-modernism, -structuralism, deconstructivism is that a pitiless criticism of an only technical rationalism cannot go back behind the watermarks of Enlightenment. It is impossible to conceive that dead gods can be revived, that the Tree of Judgement can be felled. Mark you: Even fundamentalists use the WWW. Reason suggests that belief and knowledge are united on a level that is beyond reach. We have to belief in reason – we cannot know about it and we cannot belief in anything else either.
That quest for unity modern human beings undertake can only be held promising for the price of esoterics. And here there is another price taxing the material countervalue to transcendent illumination: The seminar fees and book prices the cosmic sages raise, whose success is due to the modern dilemma of enlightened Enlightenment, as has been explained above. After all, esoterics differs from rational science in its blunt claim to belief, but from religion in its try to give reason to its belief. Esoterics does not balk at scientific theorems or hypotheses; quite the contrary, it resolves them from their scientific background and recombinates it in its own cosmic context. And is just that manner which safes it from acquiring only a relatively small group of scatter-brains as customers who – owing to their transcendent way of life – have rarely developed a satisfactory attitude towards making money. No, the complementary group is recruited, too, namely those who want to know what to belief – the collateral damages of Enlightenment, the scepticists of modern age.
That is why there is something which is to replace the Tree of Judgement; to remain botanical, let us simply call it Yggdrasil – that cosmic ash-tree in Germanic mythology which is an explanation to everything – including and especially what is beyond human reason. Any seminar in esoterics, any book will fare well at following the Yggdrasil-principle; that is not just to dismiss modern science as a disastrous error, but to (to exhaust botanics) build of the exuberantly growing sprouts of the Tree of Judgement the Trojan Horse. Esoteric creativity will show in the kind of connections it can make; quickly archaeology and ufology can be linked, fantasy and psychology be exchanged. All that is needed is a two-valued symbol which appeals both to rational tradition and to mysticism. How? Well, diagrams, tables and curves are by no means tabooed; all one has to do is to point out they express a Higher Truth. This way metaphysics will be practiced with the aid of physics.
And reversely one will be well-advised to link speculations on the fateful or divine powers with scientific results. No member of the esoteric circle will ask if that works in the first place, for due to their membership the followers have deprived
themselves of their right to do so. This way mythology is not only established, but sold as well.
The one part of the customers poses scrutinizing questions until it believes; the other one does not want to know anything, in order to believe. But they have one thing in common: the strict separation from what esoterics as the hermetic inside world excludes: exoterics, the outside world. After all, exoterics neither comprises the ignorant nor the unbelievers but the non-initiates. Nowadays we can buy our entrance tickets on our own by paying for the access to the seminar rooms or the books.
Let us sum up the Yggdrasil-principle:
1. Turn away from the Tree of Judgement.
2. Turn towards Yggdrasil.
3. Place adverts in the newspapers.
4. Let the hyper-naive and the hyper-sceptic people in.
5. Call them the illuminate
6. Choose a symbol and give it a double content.
6.a. Give the naive something to believe and call it the original power.
6.b. Give the sceptic something to know and show diagrams.
7. Make sure the checks have sufficient security.
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