Correction

I’ve had to do some back pedaling the last day or so on this blog.  While I don’t like deleting posts and creating a Luminosity-esque environment on this blog, the deletions were necessary.  It was not that I disagreed with the content of my previous post or even that I went into personal history, the issue was that I was endorsing someone that I shouldn’t have. I consider that post a serious lapse in judgement.  In a way I consider what I do here as an act of preserving something that is great and even transcendent.  While I am not an academic, and I don’t pretend to be, I am living a life of  application when it comes to certain principles.  I don’t sell anything here including my authority.  I am always willing to admit to my own shortcomings.

I read this book and then chewed on it for a couple weeks.  For reasons that will shortly become obvious something kept nagging at me.  When I went back to it certain issues began to present themselves which made me realize that I cannot endorse the author or even recommend him on this blog any longer.  It is not that I personally dislike him, it is simply a matter of personal disagreement.  The main issue I have is that Kingsley tends to promote the typical new age “Oneness” agenda, but in a way that is initially very difficult to unmask.  It represents, by far, the most subtle new ageism I have yet encountered.   His Youtube interview, which I posted a couple weeks ago was done by the Global Oneness Project.  These same people are also associated with the Golden Sufi Center out of California who published Kingsley’s books.  They are further connected to Llewelyn Vaughan-Lee who has become one of Oprah Winfrey’s new age golden boys promoting what he terms “the Sacred Feminine” in a dichotomous manner against what he sees as evil, patriarchal, white devils from Christian Europe. Although the emasculated Vaughan Lee is clearly not man enough to admit it, his writings and interviews only prove that what I am about to write is true.

Vaughan-Lee pretends to be a Sufi, but clearly fails to understand that a real Sufi is not divorced from the exoteric aspect of his religion.  In a word, Vaughan-Lee is a typical new age poser selling his spiritual wares and confusing being nice with being spiritual.  There is a big difference. The Oneness that Vaughan-Lee sells is a cheap oneness, he is not discussing the Pleroma or a transcendent type of oneness, he applies it more as a platitude of the interconnection of life in the physical world.  Like all Agenda 21 social engineering propaganda goes, Vaughan-Lee promotes an ecologically minded ethos. But once a person realizes what lies beneath Agenda 21, it becomes quite obvious how these groups get funding and fanfare, and how they manipulate the way people think until they finally become malleable subjects at the whim of their anti-human and anti-traditional overlords.  The ultimate goal of Agenda 21 is globalism under the disguise of humanitarianism and “ecological awareness”.  Its ultimate goal (and its natural goal) is to destroy every last vestige of Tradition because it wipes out all uniqueness on a global scale.  To put it more metaphysically, these currents represent the antithesis of an ordered creation which is only healthy when it is truly and naturally diverse.  An imposed pseudo-diversity that seeks to dissolve the differences of nation, ethnicity, and traditions can only destroy the physical domain.  The stark reality is that entire species are dying out daily on this planet. This reveals that the currents that are presently ordering this world are actually tearing it apart. You can’t magically make species re-emerge and you cannot bring entire people and their traditions back to life once they have been stomped out of existence for the sake of “global oneness”.  In a word, Agenda 21 and its many spiritual derivatives are a grenade wrapped in a pretty package that will never present itself for what it truly is until it is too late.

My personal distaste for these people stems from the fact that they present an odd kind of spiritualism that confuses activism with spirituality, but also presents the West as somehow inferior to the East.  In Kingsley’s last book, he attempts to paint the Hyperborean Abaris as a Mongolian (the East) who brought “Enlightenment” to the Greeks through Pythagoras.  I find it much more likely as I am sure many other do, that like the Buddha, Abaris was a Scythian if he existed at all.  So while Kingsley seems to defend the West, at the same time he seems to be attacking it from within by overstepping himself with an idea based on thin evidence.                                                       

 I have been accused in the past of denying peoples credibility due to guilt by association. This stems from my belief that anything or anyone coming out of Esalen Institute automatically loses credibility in my eyes. I have a thorough distrust of every name attached to it. So, admittedly, I agree with that charge and proudly so.  Spending most of my twenties engaged in ritual magic, meditation, and philosophy in the truest sense, I have a very magical view of the universe as unpopular as that may be. So these connections, while they may be meaningless to others,  represent a degeneration that cannot be separated from a person.  While I don’t want to tug on peoples heart strings this is kind of like saying corporations that fund despotic genocidal rulers don’t share in the responsibility for their crimes. They do and really the kind of “guilt by association” I am presenting is no different. But maybe I am way off here.

The day before I posted that “Making Fear Your Friend” post, something odd happened.  I began to practice my own exercise of “going within”, which is likely very similar to what Kingsley presents in his book “In The Dark Places of Wisdom”.  It’s probably also very similar to what Shamans do when they enter into other worlds.  I awoke into a clearing where I found myself walking with another individual.  I was walking on what seemed like a platform toward a train.  The individual that was with me was very somber and telling me that the city I was about to travel to was not a place that accepted “my kind”.  This individual pointed toward an old chalk board with the words,  “Destination: The City of Kingsley.”  This was the “city” the train I was boarding was traveling to.  This individual with me went on to say things like, “How can I dissuade you from traveling to this place?” and “Perhaps your mother might set you straight.”  I then said something to the effect, “I am a grown man. What does my mom have to do with it?”  As I got on the train and got my first look at the face of the guide, I am convinced that I was looking at a young Henry Corbin.  However, to be clear, I believe that the Seraph or Daemon of an individual clothes itself in whomever it chooses for dramatic effect.  Regardless of this exchange, I wrote that post anyway, which I shouldn’t have done.

It is important to explain that this event is not the first time I have had an encounter with what presented itself to me as Henry Corbin.  But it didn’t end there.  Yesterday afternoon I rented out a place for my daughters birthday party.  I was sitting down in one area with my oldest daughter when a woman walked into the studio we were in.  My jaw almost dropped and so did my daughters because this woman looked almost exactly like my deceased mom, even down to her voice.  Immediately my adrenaline began to kick in and my hands shook.  She looked at me and told me that she was looking for the owner of a vehicle who had left their door open.  I quickly asked around if anyone at our party owned the silver vehicle in question.  They didn’t.  She then walked out and got into the exact same vehicle my mother used to drive (same year, make, color), a car that she gave to me shortly before she passed on.  This car even had a small dent in the same spot as my mom’s car.  I was stunned to my core.  While this truly may have been nothing more than what it appeared to be, I find it incredibly bizarre considering the words of Corbin during my excursion.

Now as I went over “Reality” after these nagging questions wouldn’t go away a few things really stuck out to me.  I think that Kingsley made the same mistake as Douglas Harding in that they find a certain state of consciousness, a state that I really cannot describe, and mistake it as the pinnacle of all things.  The only way I can describe finding this state is by sitting down and learning to perceive yourself perceiving the world around you.  It soon becomes apparent that there are actually two of you and not just one as you have always thought.  This discovery reveals the physical domain as something other than it appears to be.  It is not an external reality, which you are trapped within, but an internal reality that is held in place by an awareness that almost seems posterior to you.  As one person rightly said, it feels as if the back of your head is open to infinity.  Then after that another shift occurs.  Instead of there being an inward and an outward, there is no separation at all, everything strangely becomes continuous.  There are times when you can literally see the divine world in the physical domain.

Kingsley, strangely seems to present this gnosis to mean that transcendent worlds where visions and other amazing things take place don’t exist.  The only thing that is real is the present “now” in the physical domain from which there is no escape. In a word this “posterior awareness” that seems to encompass life is all there is or needs to be. The problem with this idea is that this is not really the pinnacle of anything.  It is merely a birth into the transcendent or timeless substratum.  By saying all that is real is “now” seems to seriously reduce the importance of this state and even drag it down to a strictly earthly thing.  Douglas Harding himself in some of his books began explaining to people that his discovery of this “headlessness” is really not that big of a deal.  In fact, to him, it was just the natural state of humanity.  In the same vein, Harding never spoke or wrote about these other worlds.  I truly believe he mistook his own discovery as the final word on his own life, which in a personal way was dissolved in his “headlessness”.  Considering that I have personally experienced this state, and can do it pretty much by looking within, I do not believe for a moment it represents the end all of the human journey. 

I believe that a major part of the problem stems from the fact that a hundred years ago when the West was indoctrinated by the Theosophists and the Ramakrishna Vedantists, who really represented the worst spirituality modern India had to offer, they began to tell us about inward “states” and giving them names like “Nirvana” “Moksha” and “Enlightenment”.  The idea of Heaven or other worlds became a primitive and even laughable affair among the newly emerging spiritualities of the modern world.  This mindset, sadly, has never truly left us especially here in America.  So many are infected by it, particularly those that promote the superiority of the East over the West and claim to be buddhists or Vedantists without truly understanding either.

I believe in the Celestial domain and many other domains between here and there because I have personally witnessed them.  While they do NOT exist in the physical sense, they do exist in what Corbin calls “Spaceless Space” or “Na Koja Abad” the very same place that men like Swedenborg and so many others witnessed in their own excursions within the seamless reality of the Pleroma.  The traditions of the east and west have also revealed to us in various places the reality of these places and how we might get there.  While I do not deny that this may be a big misunderstanding of Kingsley’s work on my part, I simply cannot endorse his books especially when they appear to be the antithesis to the work I am trying to carry out in my own writings, however feeble they may be.