Committing Spiritual Adultery

It’s always amazing to me how any good sacred text can be read at many different octaves. The Holy Bible can be seen literally, morally, allegorically, or mystically depending on your vantage point. Even the 10 Commandments, which I’ve always seen as literal guard rails for sinners, is actually more nuanced than often considered. 

I refer back to MotT, which for me is still one of the most profound texts I’ve encountered, and we see our Unknown Friend author keyed in to the deeper octave for these Spiritual Laws…

I. Surrender to the living God ("thou shall have no other gods before me");
II. Non-substitution of products of the human mind, or those of Nature, for the reality of the living God ("thou shalt not make for thyself a graven image, or any likeness");
III. Activity in the name of God without making use of his name in order to adorn oneself with it ("thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain");
IV. Practice of meditation ("remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy");
V. Continuity of effort and experience ("honour thy father and thy mother");
VI. Constructive attitude ("thou shalt not kill");
VII. Faithfulness to the alliance ("thou shalt not commit adultery");
VIII. Renunciation of the desire to accept merit which is neither the fruit of one's own work nor the gift of grace ("thou shalt not steal");
IX. Renunciation of an accusatory role towards others ("thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour");
X. Respectful consideration for the private and personal life of others ("thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house").

For the hermetist, the “fundamental law is meditation, i.e. the practice of "remembering the sabbath day, to keep it holy". Meditation is "sanctified rest", where thought is turned towards that which is above.” 

But that’s not to say we don’t support our practice with the other nine laws. Take Spiritual Law VII: Thou shalt not commit adultery. While this conventionally refers to indulging our carnal impulses, our Unknown Friend takes it deeper and notes that we are to hold “Faithfulness to the alliance.” Yes, there is spiritual adultery too. Oops.

He says, “the case when one embraces, for example, the Vedanta or Buddhism, whilst having been baptised and sufficiently instructed in order to have access —given good will —to experience of the sublime Christian mysteries. I am speaking neither about the study nor the adoption of the technical methods of yoga, Vedanta or Buddhism, but only about the case where one changes faith, i.e. where one substitutes the ideal of liberation for that of love, an impersonal God for the personal God, return to the state of potentiality (or nirvana) for the kingdom of God, a wise instructor for the Saviour, and so on.”

Okay, I've transgressed a tad here, but hopefully not too far.

“For nothing is more natural and legitimate than to learn and make use of the benefits of experiences accumulated in the East or West. If western medicine saves the lives of millions in the East, why should not oriental yoga help millions in the West, those engaged in spiritual practice.”

Yup, works for me.

“All the fruits of human experience merit being studied and examined —and, according to their merit, accepted or rejected. But experience is one thing and faith, or metaphysical ideal, is another.”

It does always come back to context. Moreover, is one truly salvaged by their experience or through their faith in God independent of their own efforts and attainments? It would seem to me both would be ideal, and yet many experientially-driven aspirants seem to dismiss the latter.

And how about those entheogens everybody is dabbling with these days (including me)?

“Those seeking transcendental experience by such means evidently want to dispense with the costs of the way of regular spiritual development, in order to obtain cheaply what others obtain only after much effort and sacrifice.” 

See Spiritual Laws II. and VIII. There are no free lunches or shortcuts in spiritual progress. And it shouldn't be any other way, since the struggle builds character and integration of experience and knowledge.

Unknown Friend is a kindred spirit: while he dabbled in other New Thought movements, he ultimately came to the Catholic Church while still working from the edges within. Similarly, I often find I'm too exoteric and respectful of tradition for the "spiritual, but not religious" ilk, and too esoteric and heterodox for traditional followers. I suppose I’m not easily categorizable, but in a nonspecial sort of way. 

“Regrettable or not, it is a fact that religions constitute a scale of moral and spiritual values. They are not equal —being stages of mankind's evolution over millennia, on the one hand, and successive revelations from above, on the other hand.” — Unknown Friend

How The Lord of the Rings Can Refine Your Outlook?

Does our journey from the beginning of time have a story to it, or is it “just one damn thing after another”? I’ve always intuited it has to be a story, albeit not a neat little one you can package in a Hegelian dialectic. In reading Peter Kreeft’s excellent The Philosophy of Tolkein, I realize there is much to be learned from a story about our story: “Philosophy says truth, literature shows truth.”

There is something in The Lord of the Rings that expresses the longing for something nostalgic: the bucolic nature of the Shire, the traditional values and heroic virtues of its people, the enchanted world where everything comes alive. But Tolkien knew as much as this would conjure up one’s fascination for “the good old days”, that such longing was not fulfilled by a return to the past but could only be attained in a transcendent future.

Yet, Tolkein does not ignore the immanent past or future. His heroes balance their reverence for tradition that can guide and take responsibility for the future. While he may be seen as more politically conservative (in the sense it is important to know what needs to be conserved within the change), he did not dismiss the notion of progress.

Instead, Tolkein came up with the word eucatastrophe as a joyful happy ending that we are surprised by. But unlike “progressivism”, this is sheer grace than a necessary goal pursued by man. In this, he avoids the Rousseauian optimism (a purely immanent activism) or the Manichean error that evil has the same kind of reality as goodness (a tragic fatalism). His story includes both history and supernaturalism. Sound familiar?

The moral posture of The Lord of the Rings is also often looked at too simply: Good (the Fellowship) verses Evil (Sauron and the gang). “But Tolkein restores the ancient, pre-Cartesian cosmology in which things are not that neat.” In his enchanted world where all things are alive, we also have characters who all struggle with both good and evil. As such, the “source of all external conflict between characters is the internal conflict between good and evil within each character” (see Solzhenitsyn).

“Tolkein is not a psychological absolutist but a moral absolutist: no person is absolutely good or evil; but goodness and evil themselves are absolutely distinct.” And therefore, all our victories against evil in this world are only temporary. What a tough pill to swallow – especially for a lefty!

So while the power of the Ring temps Frodo as well as many others, in the end Tolkein gets us to see that “wanting what you should is better than getting what you want.” The real Power comes not from the Ring, but the Cross — the self-sacrifice through love and the loss of hope that leads to a greater Hope.

So much like The LotR, Tolkein saw a heroic story to life and that such a story “cannot be understood until you have heard the whole of it.”

Chiaroscuro

I recently came across the term chiaroscuro which stems from the Italian words chiaro (meaning“clear” or “bright”) and oscuro (meaning “obscure” or “dark”), and refers to the arrangement of light and shade in a work of art. 

Raft of the Medusa

I appreciate how this word comes through in the work of Geracault's Raft of the Medusa, depicting the horrors in the aftermath of a shipwreck. Yet, it is considered an icon in French Romanticism as it culminates with a glimmer of hope at the horizon of a possible rescue ship. The juxtaposition of lighting and shading do not cancel each other out but instead reveal the moments of intense suffering in the context of Eternal hope. 

Rain, Steam and Speed

J.M.W. Turner is another painter that uniquely showcased chiaroscuro with the convergence of light and shade. Turner was particularly taken with finding ways to integrate Romantic idealism along with his admiration for empirical science. Unlike Blake, Turner embraced the industrial revolution as depicted in his paintings of locomotives and steamships. In his classic Snow Storm, with its “spiraling smoke, surging waves and swirling cloud produce a centrifugal vortex that engulfs the spectator” (Sam Smith), there is also a homage to the modern ship which survives the forces of nature. 

Snow Storm

The “huge, powerful masses of alternating light and dark swirl around an incandescent center of white light” (Ogle), models the asymmetries of nature. Moreover, the classic symmetrical Euclidean geometry is replaced with the asymmetrical irregular arcs in the form of a vortex or spiral. Things are going somewhere albeit with an emphasis of science over spirit. Turner's version of hope is one of man’s conquest over nature in place of one's surrender to Nature. (As an aside, Turner's disposition was mostly materialist, which comes through in Timothy Spall's curmudgeonly portrayal of him in the film Mr. Turner.)

For Turner, “a cosmos generated by the interplay of limitless forces lay in his liberation of color in the depiction of light” (Ogle). He believed the asymmetrical forces of technology would liberate man, where the shadow that falls between the potency and the act could be diminished. 

Yet, as we are more engulfed by immanent technological forces, we can now see deeper shadows emerging. Our emphasis may need to turn again to surrendering to the “incandescent center of white light” as transcendence — or a move upward in order to move forward.