"Once again, Gurdjieff listened very seriously, and examined the diagram which I drew to indicate the 'upper' and 'lower' levels of exist-outside of our space and time. He said: 'Your guess is right. There are higher dimensions or higher worlds where the higher faculties of man free play. But what is the use of studying these worlds theoretically? Suppose that you could prove mathematically that the fifth dimension really does exist, what use would that be to you so long as remain here?" He pointed to the diagram and sphere representing whole of space and time. "If you remain here you will have to go down. If you wish to ascend into the world of freedom, then you must do so in this present life. Afterwards, it will be too late." He reminded me of what he had said about the crystallisation of a finer body and added: "Even that is not enough, because that body also under material laws. In order to be free from the laws of space and time, you yourself must change. This change depends on you, and it will not come about through study. You can know everything and yet remain where you are. It is like a man who knows all about money and the laws of banking, but has no money of his own in the bank. What does all his knowledge do for him?""
~ JG Bennett, 'Witness'
In a Substack essay last year, and in my book The Bodies of Others, I raised a question about existential, metaphysical darkness.
I concluded that I had looked at the events of the past two and a half years using all of my classical education, my critical thinking skills, my knowledge of Western and global history and politics; and that, using these tools, I could not explain the years 2020-present.
Indeed I could not explain them in ordinary material, political or historical terms at all.
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I can and she can also but prefers a different myth than freedom. Berdyaev makes a useful distinction between the subjective realm and the objective realm – the subjective realm being characterized by freedom and the objective realm being determined. Any living creature has an interior of some kind linking it to freedom, whereas rocks do not. The objective realm is mostly “a sequence of events.” Some of these events are the result of blindly operating physical forces and some are the results of the actions of agents. Just by looking at the event it might not be possible to distinguish between which are the result of free actions and which causally determined. Once an event has occurred it is in the realm of objectivity and the objective can be measured. However, some events have a symbolic character. Mind, consciousness, Spirit, subjectivity and freedom are all interior phenomena. As such they partake in mystery and hiddenness. They cannot be exteriorized. However, they can be the cause of events or “sequences of events” and these events can point back to their divine, free origins. An analogy could be Paley’s Watch. Paley’s watch is the idea that if someone were to find a watch on a desert island, with no other evidence of human habitation or prior human visits, the watch would indicate that humans had been there. The watch is in no way human, but it becomes symbolic evidence of a human presence in the past. In the same way, music or a painting are symbols of a free, creative act emerging from subjectivity. They are not actually free and spiritual since they now belong to the objective realm. https://voegelinview.com/does-the-concept-of-metaphysical-freedom-make-sense/
https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
https://voegelinview.com/eighteenth-century-christian-political-philosophy-without-a-sage/
https://voegelinview.com/the-wisdom-of-the-ancients-spencer-klavan-review/