The Night Is the Light

Spirit of Darkness, Lord of Light

Instant recap, Chapter 1: Beyond the cosmos and its endless repetitions there is the timeless unchanging Absolute, represented by a divine eye watching the eternal conflict between the dualities that comprise the created universe.

Chapter 2, by Ella: The works of Julius Evola & Miguel Serrano provide a left-hand path for Aryans, teaching us to never surrender to God, who is actually an evil entity. Instead we must conquer him with the aid of Lucifer, who is not the Devil but our spiritual liberator. We say NO to the whole of creation and will transcend it by entering the Great Night, which is the true reality.

3. The Night Is the Light

We opened our spiel with an image of an eye in the center of creation, representing the ultimate reality, called the Absolute in Western philosophy. Ella called it “the Unknowable World” and says it cannot be explained nor understood by men nor gods nor anyone. She is mistaken, and her insistence on this point reflects upon the teachers for whom she speaks.

The final goal of all authentic spiritual paths is attainment of identity with the Absolute. Those who succeed acquire an exalted degree of the spiritual knowledge called Jnana in Sanskrit by the ancient Aryans, a word that transliterated into Greek as gnosis. The task of a spiritual teacher is to transmit his gnosis to his students so that they, too, will attain knowledge of the Absolute. A teacher who says it can’t be known is a teacher who has not attained it.

My view of Ella’s two teachers is that Julius Evola’s life and writings prove conclusively that he did not attain the Absolute, but that Miguel Serrano probably did. Before I can validate this view I must provide a clearer picture of the nature of Absolute reality as known by all seekers who attained it, and described by every one of them who became an Acarya ~ the Sanskrit word for a spiritual teacher.

Hinduism and Buddhism as taught by native Eastern Acaryas are full of pitfalls for the Western mind. Fortunately, though, the best first-person account in the English language of the attainment of Absolute gnosis was rendered by one of the finest Western minds, that of Franklin Merrell-Wolff. I’ve written an exegesis of his work titled The Man Who Became What IS. As I explained in the preface, my main task was to “cross-translate” FMW’s exacting cerebral prose into language plain enough for the average person to comprehend.

Much of Ella’s treatise is a diatribe against what she sees as an opposing belief-system, though she flexes this as a lever to express her own. She uses God as a straw man, or a wicker man in which she packs all the doctrines she despises, labels it the “Demiurge”, then sets it ablaze and reduces the offending credo to cinders. With this in mind, the first thing I note is that FMW makes no mention of God, and that his account is entirely free of theological baggage. Even when he uses technical terms like “Nirvana”, he explains them purely in the sense of his personal spiritual discoveries, and they’re easily replaceable by equivalent symbolic words.

Let’s make a point-by-point comparison of FMW’s account with Ella’s, starting with her concept of the Absolute as “the Great Night… outside the creation…. the final of all cycles, the last breath of Brahma… uncreated and eternal. All things that exist were in the Great Night… (where) you can become a conscious, free, autonomous being”.

In chapter 3 of TMWBWI, The NOTHING is the Real; the World is Really Nothing, I said that FMW’s full definition of the Absolute was “Consciousness without an object and without a subject. Informally he also refers to it as the ‘transcendent supersensible reality’ and similar terms, all of them polysyllabic. For ease of expression, I would like to abbreviate the designation simply as OM.” I went on to discuss his attainment of the penultimate state, and how he solved the mystery of its apparent absolute nothingness: when he penetrated the veil he “discovered it to be not blank and empty at all, but filled with the bliss of ‘Nirvana’.”

Photo of Sheer Nothing ~ http://www.panoramio.com

Then in chapter 4, The OM In Itself, FMW describes how he went on to the ultimate: complete identification of the self with the Absolute/OM. There can be no doubt that this is Ella’s Great Night in a first-hand ‘eyewitness’ description of “the Voidness, Darkness, and Silence”. But then comes a revelation that will surely surprise her: FMW realized these three aspects of the seamless OM “as utter, though ineffable, Fullness in the sense of Substantiality, Light in the sense of Illumination, and Sound in the sense of pure formless Meaning and Value.”

So Voidness = Fullness, Darkness = the Light of Illumination, and Silence = ineffable Sound. Clearly FMW had transcended duality, an aspect of OM described by all Acaryas. In chapter 5, Inside OM, I quote FMW: “my self-identity remained unbroken in a series of deeps reaching into impenetrable Darkness, and yet I knew it was the very essence of Light itself.” Ella, I hope you’re ready for the news that the Night is the Light!

We’ll continue comparing the points in:

4. How to Conquer God