Discursive Thought and Esoteric Thought
A pre-cognitive analysis of thought
Alongside discursive thought, esoteric thought has always existed, confined to enclaves both in the East and in the West. In India, in Tibet, and in the Western world, the totality of human beings lives immersed in the representation—at the everyday level, at the cognitive-philosophical level, and at the religious level. Then there are small circles of adepts who live outside representation; but the fate of these groups differs between East and West: there they are revered and admired, while in the West they are confined to the margins of society. From here arises the fundamental difference between Eastern and Western civilization, as the difference between ordinary Eastern and ordinary Western thought: the former proceeds from esoteric truth, although expressing it in discursive terms can only deprive it of its actuality; in the West, esoteric thought has been discarded, and thus the rationalist alternative has produced progress. Stated otherwise: Western thought is solely ordinary, that is, founded upon representation and reason (since the esoteric thought of the few has been excluded a priori), whereas Eastern thought, even when representative and rationalistic, has its origin in esoteric thought (regardless of the consideration that only a few may be able to realize it). What is essential, rather, is that esoteric thought has identical content and values in East and West alike: alchemists and yogins, kabbalists and siddhas, mystical saints and bhakti-yogin partake of the very same experiences—of the very same reality, one that differs from the conventional reality which discursive thought takes to be unique and solid. It is therefore evident that adepts from every cultural background and from every corner of the world speak of the same reality, each according to his own mode of expression, for the simple reason that they have access to the authentic dimension of reality—for that alone is what reality truly is; just as the other dimension of reality, the conventional one, is, of course, the same for everyone. Esoteric thought views reason and faith as mere variations within the single theme of representation. Rationalists believe in what their calculating faculties construct from the meagre fragments of reality that fall under the dominion of the five senses, while the religious and the devout believe in what they hope for. Both groups, for the adepts of Sacred Science, lack an immediate and genuine relation to reality; they merely believe—they believe what their mind believes, instead of living reality itself — and this precisely because reality is not experienced directly, but through the veil of representation: this is avidyā. Vidyā, knowledge, on the other hand, is the direct experience of authentic reality, without intermediaries.
Representation is the belief of being the “I”. This is the fundamental error that closes the way to genuine higher knowledge—the conviction that one’s own mind is an “object” enclosed within the subject called “I.” From this there inevitably arises the question of the external world—external precisely because it is, a priori, lived as something outside the mind—and of the things that compose it: hence technē, the impulse to manipulate things. Esotericists maintain that the mind does not coincide with the “I.” The “I” is instead a self-referential illusion, an aggregate of the impressions of sensation upon the mind. For the esotericists the “I” is certainly real, yet it is only a portion of the mind, the water-lily without roots, to cite Kant. Esoteric thought holds that the ground and nature of the mind are void, a mirror in which the “I”—or the multiple “I”s of which one becomes aware—appear as reflections. Reason is the link, or the substance, of which the reflection is made.
This is a conceptual and discursive account of sacred thought, which unfolds in ways entirely unknown to common thought—ways called pre-theoretical precisely because they precede the establishment of the dichotomy between I and world, between mind and matter. This is the essential point that prevents those who do not live it from grasping esoteric thought: it cannot be understood, for it is not made up of concepts or notions, but is intrinsically operative; it comes into being through the very living of authentic reality—a mode of thinking that is closed to those who, living in the ordinary state, do not live it.
The yogas and mystical practices are in fact nothing other than sets of techniques, of the most diverse kinds, all having the same aim: to facilitate the event of finding oneself on this side of representation—that is, on this side of the “I”: upon the nature of mind unwarped by the “I” (warped, as it were, as the gravity of a star warps space-time). One cannot, indeed, will to go beyond the “I,” for the “I” obviously cannot will to go beyond itself; the yogas are rather means for inducing the occurrence of the event, id est the moment in which representation itself evaporates.
Sacred Science affirms itself as a science: it is founded upon the evidence of experiences of states of consciousness prior to the domain of the “I.” Modern science calls itself empirical, yet it carries out its experiments through the coloured glass of representation—upon what it takes as evidence, though perhaps it is not. The corollary is that Sacred Science is repeatable only under certain imponderable conditions, whereas modern science predetermines the very conditions of its own repeatability.
It will by now be understood that these two, the ordinary and the esoteric, are different worlds. Reality appears—or, if one prefers, is—always phenomenically one; yet its structure changes. What is meant is the structure of reality itself, not its psychological or cognitive perception, for that would be merely another variant of representation. When questioned about the nature of authentic reality, the Buddha Shakyamuni was wont to reply that it cannot be described to one who has not attained it, and that one who has attained it has no need of explanations.
And between these two worlds there is no possibility of dispute: each negates the other, or rather discursive thought is founded upon the negation of esoteric thought, precisely because esoteric thought “cannot be communicated like other forms of knowledge,” as Plato says in the Seventh Letter—Aristotle, the first of the rationalists, by contrast, holds that what is must, as such, be expressible through rational logos. For conventional thought the foundation is the pasôn bebaiotátē archē of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the principle of non-contradiction, which for sacred thought is nothing but the expression of a representational obstinacy toward fragments of being (in logical terms, the principle of non-contradiction may be described as the principle of identity disguised as a petitio principii). The esotericist cannot, nor indeed does he wish to, convince or persuade his interlocutor; he can only hint, like the Apollo of Heraclitus, at the fact that some say there are paths other than the web of beliefs that habit inscribes within minds, instilling the persuasion that the world is nothing but saṃsāra, that one must follow the currents, seek shelters, suffer, and die.
One of the principal methods for transcending representation—indicated by the yogins, the Vedantins, the alchemists, and the pre-theoretical philosophers—is precisely that of turning reason back upon itself, making it perceive its own intrinsic and structural self-referentiality. (“Man is entangled in his brain and the sword is also given to him to cut through the entanglement”, as C. G. Jung himself says in Das Rote Buch / Liber Novus, Folio 166.) Of course, this may serve for nothing more than to refine the calculative faculties toward aims other than the domination naturally inherent in reason, or to allow a Platonic form of dialectic to unfold in place of the Hegelian one characteristic of the dualizing mind. And on the other hand, as in every kind of yoga, perfection or realization depends essentially upon a śaktipāt, a descent of power, together with the awareness that everything depends on chance (which, however, in the East is conceived in a different way: as Karman, which is neither merely destiny nor the succession of punishments and rewards)—one may say that the yogas are a making oneself available to the descent of power. And in this perspective, realizing that even the history of humanity’s past may be, in logical terms, other than what it is believed to be (as is shown, to those who have eyes to see, by “my” Sphinx Document), is nothing but a principle of yoga suited to the present age. In these terms, a dialogue between discursive thought and effective—that is, operative—esoteric thought may appear quixotic; yet the perspective might change if one realized that windmills are not merely architectural structures set in their mechanical motion upon small things by the winds, but are also portions of being co-produced conditionally (this is the essential notion of śūnyatā, or emptiness, in Mahāyāna Buddhism, whereas in the tantric currents of Vajrayāna Buddhism emptiness is a state of consciousness prior to the “I” which must be attained).
What precedes is a noetic—that is, pre-cognitive—analysis, proceeding from a region different from the customary ones. From one point of view, it is a synthetic and integrated study describing esoteric systems as they may be read; from another, it is nothing but the taking of a step within the furrow traced by a philosophical line now deemed minor within the continental landscape, where it is still regarded as idealistic—namely, that of Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Zoroaster Clavis Artis (1738), Ms-2-27, Biblioteca Civica Hortis, Trieste