LIBERATIONS

It is the maxim of ancient wisdom that events and all other aspects of life in themselves never count as much as the potentiality of having power over them and therefore the meaning that is attributed to them. The parallel axiom is Christianity itself that was able to speak of life as a trial and was able to make its own the motto: Vita Est Militia Super Terram.

In history’s calm and orderly periods this wisdom is accessible only to a select few because there are too many opportunities for complacency and desertion of oneself to consider the ephemeral important, hence forgetting the contingency and instability of what is by its very nature irremediable. This is the systematized foundation that in the broadest sense can be called the life and mentality of the burgess: it is an existence that no longer recognizes either abysses or heights to such a degree it cultivates interests in affections, desires, passions, as important as they may be from the merely terrestrial point of view, which become small and relative things from the spiritual and super-individual perspective which every human being worthy of the name should reflect upon.

Now, the disrupted and tragic periods of history can cause by the very forces they unleash, a greater number of people to be led to an awakening, toward a liberation. And basically, it is essentially from what is measured the most profound spirit of a race, its indomitability and its vitality in a superior sense. And even today in Italy on the home front, that no longer now perceives the difference between combatants and non-combatants confronted with so many tragic conjunctures, one must be more inclined to turn the eyes away from this and more often than not gaze upon that higher value in existence that unfortunately in the nature of things is commonly absent. From one day to another, more so from one hour to another, an individual can lose his home to a bombardment; what had been loved the most and to which one was most attached to, the very object of one’s most spontaneous feelings. Human existence becomes relative – it is a tragic and cruel sentiment, this – but it can also be the principle of a catharsis, the way to present what is the sole thing that can never be affected nor ever be destroyed. It must be recognized that for a complex set of reasons in the modern West there has tenaciously irradiated the superstition that the value of life is purely human, individual and worldly, a superstition that in other civilizations was and is almost unknown. In this regard, the fact the West professes nominally Christianity, results in it having had only a minimal influence upon this misbelief. The whole supernatural doctrine of the soul and survival in the afterlife did not substantially affect that superstition, it did not cause within the sensitivity of a sufficient number of human beings to understand the evidence of what did not start with birth and that can not end with death had virtually proceeded to act upon their daily life, biologically and emotionally. Instead, they convulsively hold on to a tree trunk which is nothing but the short stretch of an individual’s existence, doing everything to ignore the reality that such a grip does not have greater firmness than that of clinging to a clump of grass in order to save themselves from being carried away by a wild current.

At the present time because this has suddenly become blatantly clear, not as something “cerebral” or “devotional” but rather as a living fact accompanied with a feeling of liberation, all that today which is destructive and tragic can have, at least at best, a value to inspire. This is not about insensitivity and badly understood stoicism. Quite the contrary: it is a question of knowing and nurturing a sense of detachment from oneself, people and things, which should instill calm, unparalleled security and even the aforesaid indomitability. It is like a simplification, a stripping, in the disposition of anticipating, with a firm mind, everything, at the same time feeling something that goes beyond everything. And from this temperament will also be given the strength to always have the ability to start again, as from nothing, with a fresh and new mind, forgetting what has been or has been lost, having a look only for what is creative and positive: this can still be accomplished. A radical breakdown of the “bourgeois” that exists in every man is possible in these times more devastating than in any other. Yet in these very times man can rediscover himself, he can really stand before himself, to look at everything in harmony through the eyes of the beyond, so as to make once more essential and important what this should always be in a normal existence: the relationship between life and more than life, between the “human” and the “eternal”, between the “short-lived” and the “incorruptible”. And to discover the paths along which, to the exclusion of all ornamentation and pomposity, these values must be experienced positively and translate into pure strength for as many people as possible during these hours of trials and tribulations, is undoubtedly one of the main tasks of the political-spiritual “elite” of our nation.

{The above article, “Liberazioni” / “Liberations” by Julius Evola was published on the third of September, 1943 in the Turin daily newspaper “La Stampa” whose editor-in-chief at the time was Angelo Appiotti. The article that follows, “Uno Sguardo Nell’Oltretomba Con La Guida Di Un Lama Del Tibet” / A Gaze Into The Hereafter Under The Guidance Of A Tibetan Lama” also appeared in this Piedmont publication on the 19th of December, 1943 still under the direction of Appiotti. Both articles translated by Eric Dennis Antonius Galati}

A GAZE INTO THE HEREAFTER
UNDER THE GUIDANCE
OF A TIBETAN LAMA

The end of existence offers various alternatives, crossroads and possibilities, – visions and awakenings – spiritual disciplines that lead to “liberation” – to be born, to live and to die are but phases of a rhythm that comes from infinity and that goes towards the infinite.

One distinctive aspect in which there is a precise contrast between the views that came to predominate in the West and those that have been preserved – though not always in pure form – amongst almost all the peoples of the East, concerns the conception of death. According to Eastern teachings, the human state of existence is but a phase of a rhythm that comes from infinity and goes towards infinity. Death, in this way is anything but a tragedy: it is a simple change of state, one of the many that in this development has undergone an essentially super-personal principle. And since earthly birth is considered a death compared to previous non-human states, terrestrial death can also have the meaning of a birth in the superior sense of a transfiguring awakening. But in the teachings in question this last idea does not remain as it does for us, abstractly mystical. It acquires a positive meaning of a special tradition related to an “art of dying” and to a science of experiences that are to be expected in the afterlife.

Of this tradition its most characteristic expression is found in some Tibetan texts recently brought to the attention of the Western public through the translation of Lama Kazi Dawa Samdup and Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz. The most important of these texts is called “Bardo Thödol”, a term that can be roughly translated as follows: “Teaching to listen to alternatives”.
In fact, the central idea of this doctrine is that the fate of the afterlife is not univocal; the hereafter offers various alternatives, crossroads and possibilities, so that in this regard the attitude and behaviour of the soul of one, who was already a man, have a fundamental importance.

Asentimental Spirit

What is striking in these teachings is their absolute asentimentality: their methodology is almost that of an operating room, ever so calm, lucid and precise. Neither “anguish” nor “mystery”, sic, is to be found there. In that regard, the translator isn’t mistaken when he speaks of it as a traveler’s guide to other worlds, a sort of “Baedeker Guide to other lands”. Who dies must keep the spirit calm and firm: with every ounce of strength, he must fight in order not to fall into a state of “sleep”: of coma, of swooning, which however, would be possible only if already in life one has devoted oneself to special spiritual disciplines, such as for example Yoga. The teachings that are then communicated to him, or of which he must commit to memory, have more or less this meaning: “KNOWING THAT YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. You will feel this, and this sensation in the body, these forces will impress upon you the feeling that you must escape, your breathing will stop, one sense after another shall cease – and then: from your very depths this state of consciousness will burst, this vertigo will take hold of you and apparitions shall form while you are brought forth out of the world of physical beings. Do not be dismayed, do not tremble. Instead, you must remember the meaning of what you will experience and how you should act.”

Of the Eastern traditions in general, the highest ideal is “liberation”. Liberation consists in achieving a state of unity with the supreme metaphysical reality. Although having the aspiration, he who to such a great extent hasn’t had the opportunity in the life of man to attain it, has the possibility of arriving directly to such a point in death, or within the states that immediately come after death, if he is capable of an act, that almost brings to mind the violence that is to be used to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, which is also mentioned in the Gospels. Everything would depend on an intrepid and lightning capacity of “identification”.

The Veil Will Be Lifted

At the same time, the premise is that man, in his profoundest nature, is identical not just to the various transcendent forces symbolized by the various divinities of the pantheon of those traditions, but also to the Supreme himself. The divine world would not have an objective reality distinct from the ego: the distinction would be a mere semblance, a product of “ignorance”. One believes oneself to be a man, while one is only a dormant god. But upon lifting the veil of ignorance from the body it is ravaged and torn, and the spirit would have – after a brief phase of stagnation corresponding to the undoing of the physiopsychic structure – the direct experience of these metaphysical powers and states, starting from the so-called “lightning – Light”: powers and states that are nothing but its own deepest essence.

There then is an alternative: either we are able, with an absolute impulse of the spirit, to “identify ourselves”, to feel like that “Light” – and at that exact moment “liberation” is reached, the “sleeping god” awakens. Or, if one is afraid, one goes backwards, and then one descends, one passes to other experiences, in which, like a shock given to a kaleidoscope, the same spiritual reality will present itself no longer in that absolute and naked form, but in the appearance of divine and personal beings. And here we repeat the same alternative, the same situation, the same trial.

Properly, there would be two degrees. In the first place, calm, luminous, powerful, divine forms would appear: then, destructive, terrible, threatening divine forms. In the one case as in the other case, according to the teaching in question, one should not permit oneself to be deceived nor frightened: it is the same mind that, almost like hallucinations, creates and projects all these figures in front of it: it is the same abysmal substance of the ego that was objected to, with the help of the images that were more familiar to the dead. Hence, it is acknowledged that the Hindu “will see” the Hindu deities, the Mohammedan the Islamic God, the Buddhist one of the divinized Buddhas, and so on, since they are different but equivalent forms of a purely mental phenomenon.

Everything rests on the “one who has left”, the deceased, to succeed in destroying the illusion of a difference between him and these images and to keep his blood cold, so to speak. This, however, is all the more difficult, as far as he is concerned, under the pressure of dark and irrational forces, to move away from the initial point of posthumous experiences. In fact it is more difficult to recognize oneself in a god who takes on the appearance of a person, and who was always adored as a distinct being, than in a form of pure light; and it is much less probable then that identification can occur in the face of “terrible” deities, unless in life, one hasn’t consecrated oneself to special cults. The veil of disillusion becomes increasingly dense, in a progressive lose of altitude, equivalent to a decrease of internal light. One falls and nears that destiny of passing once again into a conditioned and finite form of existence which, moreover, is not said to be once again terrestrial, as would those who assume it to be a dogma, in a gross and simplistic form: the theory of reincarnation.

The New Life

But whoever “remembers” until the end would have possibilities; in fact, the texts in question indicate spiritual actions, by means of which one is able to “open wide the matrix”, or at least if one succeeds in making a “choice” – one may choose the mode, the place and the plan of the new manifestation, of the new state of existence, among all those who in a last supreme moment of lucidity would confront the vision of the dead. The reappearance in the conditioned world would take place through a process that, in these Tibetan texts, presents a singular concordance with various views of psychoanalysis and which would imply an interruption of the continuity of consciousness: the memory of previous supersensitive experiences is erased, but what is maintained however, in the case of a “chosen birth”, is direction and impulse. In other words, we will have a being who although finding himself again to experience life as a “journey in the hours of the night”, is animated by a higher vocation and is overshadowed by a force from above, that is not one of the vulgar beings destined to “lose oneself like an arrow thrown into darkness” but a “noble”, who having a stronger impulse than himself will push towards the same end in which first trial he had failed, but that now with a new power will be once again confronted.

Therefore, these perspectives reveal these teachings, comforted by a thousand-year tradition. Whatever might be said concerning them, one point is certain: with them the horizons continue to be open and infinite in such a way that in the life of man, the contingencies, the obscurities, the tragedies, cannot result in being anything else but relativistic. In a nightmarish aspect it could be considered definitive, yet it might only be an episode with respect to something higher and stronger, which does not begin with birth and does not end with death, and that also has value as the principle of a superior calm and of an unparalleled, unshakable security in the face of every trial.
Eric Dennis Antonius
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