Quotations: Metaphysics

Cosmology

    Were we to read the literature of but one nation, we would conclude that there had been but one flood, one conflagration, one disruption of the created order.  But in reality there have been many floods, many conflagrations—those floods in the time of Deucalion and the fire in the time of Phaeton being more recent than the rest.  (Celsus, On the True Doctrine pp. 55-56)

    The time of the beginning and enjoyment of the greatest good is the same.  (Epicurus, Vatican Sayings XLI)

Fall

     Now the archon who is weak has three names.  The first name is Yaltabaoth, the second is Saklas, and the third is Samael.  And he is impious in his arrogance which is in him.  For he said, 'I am God and there is no other God beside me,' for he is ignorant of his strength, the place from which he had come.  (Apocryphon of John)

      In itself, every idea is neutral, or should be; but man animates ideas, projects his flames and flaws into them; impure, transformed into beliefs, ideas take their place in time, take shape as events: the trajectory is complete, from logic to epilepsy … whence the birth of ideologies, doctrines, deadly games.  (E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay p. 3)

    Adam’s fall is paradise’s only historical fact.  (E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints p. 35)

    Indeed, our cognition relies on Forms, and so the more the soul moves towards what is formless, it glances off the object and is afraid it will have nothing, since it is completely incapable of comprehending the object on account of not being limited by, and, in a way, given an impression by, the variegation of the thing making the impression.  For this reason, in such a situation it gets weary, and takes pleasure in descending from all these things until it reaches sensible, solid reality, which provides a kind of relief.  This resembles what happens when sight, wearied with small things, turns with pleasure to large things.  (Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.3)

    For bodies are hindered by bodies from communing with one another, whereas incorporeals are not hindered by bodies.  So, they are not separated by place, but by difference and differentia.  When, then, no difference is present, distinct things are not present to one another.  That thing [the One], since it contains no difference, is always present, and we are present whenever we contain no difference.  (Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.8)

    Brahma brings forth the world through a kind of fall from grace, or error, but for this he remains in it himself, to do penance until he has redeemed himself from it.  –  Very good!  In Buddhism it originates as the result of an inexplicable clouding, which ensues after a long period of calm, in the sky-blue clarity of the blessed state of Nirvana, achieved through penitence, hence through a kind of fatality, but one that is still to be understood basically in a moral sense.  […]  –  Superb!  –  To the Greeks the world and gods were the work of an unfathomable necessity; this is tolerable inasmuch as it satisfies us temporarily.  – Ormuzd lives in battle with Ahriman – this sounds plausible enough.  But a God such as Jehovah, who wantonly and for pleasure creates this world of distress and misery and then even applauds himself with ‘everything was very good’ – that is unbearable.  If we thus see the religion of the Jews in this respect occupying the lowest rank among the dogmas of civilized peoples, then this is entirely consistent with the fact that it is also the only one that has absolutely no doctrine of immortality, not even a trace of one.  (A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena vol. II §156)

    Nothing can be more effective for patience in life and for casually enduring evils and people than a Buddhist reminder of this kind: ‘This is Samsara, the world of lust and craving, and therefore the world of birth, illness, ageing and dying; it is the world that should not be.  And this here is the population of Samsara.  So what better can you expect?’  I would like to prescribe that everyone repeat this four time daily, conscious of what he is saying.  (A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena vol. II §156n)

Historicism

    The two planes of principle and historical contingency are absolutely distinct, with all respect to the historicist dogma Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht [world history is the world’s tribunal], the favorite slogan of men who lack a backbone.  (J. Evola, Fascism Viewed from the Right Ch. 2)

    In the present period, spiritually impotent and characerized by the worship of every species of baseness, and quite appropriately characterized by the self-fabricated word ‘time of now’ [Jetztzeit] which is as pretentious as it is cacophonous, as though their Now were the Now par excellence, the Now for whose sake alone all other Nows have existed – in this period, not even the pantheists are ashamed to say that life is, as they call it, an ‘end in itself’. – If this our existence were the ultimate goal of the world, then this would be the silliest goal ever posited, whether we ourselves or another posited it.  (A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena vol. II §146)

    The millennium of the Indian Culture between the Vedas and Buddha seems like the stirrings of a sleeper; here life was actually a dream.  From all this our Western culture is unimaginably remote.  And, indeed, man has never—not even in the "contemporary" China of the Chou period with its highly-developed sense of eras and epochs—been so awake and aware, so deeply sensible of time and conscious of direction and fate and movement as he has been in the West.  Western history was willed and Indian history happened.  In Classical existence years, in Indian centuries scarcely counted, but here the hour, the minute, yea the second, is of importance.  Of the tragic tension of a historical crisis like that of August, 1914, when even moments seem overpowering, neither a Greek nor an Indian could have had any idea.  Such crises, too, a deep-feeling man of the West can experience within himself, as a true Greek could never do.  Over our country-side, day and night from thousands of belfries, ring the belles that join future to past and fuse the point-moments of the Classical present into a grand relation.  The epoch which marks the birth of our Culture—the time of the Saxon Emperors—marks also the discovery of the wheel-clock.  Without exact time-measurement, without a chronology of becoming to correspond with his imperativen eed of archaeology (the preservation, excavation and collection of things-become), Western man is unthinkable.  The Baroque age intensified the Gothic symbol of the belfry to the point of grotesqueness, and produced the pocket watch that constantly accompanies the individual.  (O. Spengler, The Decline of the West vol. I, IV.ii.v)

    On the surface of history it is the unforeseen that reigns.  Every individual event, decision and personality is stamped with its hall-mark.  No one foreknew the storm of Islam at the coming of Mohammed, nor foresaw Napoleon in the fall of Robespierre.  The coming of great men, their doings, their fortune, are all incalculables.  No one knows whether a development that is setting in powerfully will accomplish its course in a straight line like that of the Roman patrician order or will go down in doom like that of the Hohenstaufen or the Maya Culture.  (O. Spengler, The Decline of the West vol. I, IV.ii.vii)

Impermanence

    Our existence has no other ground or bottom to stand on than the fleeting present.  Therefore it essentially has contant motion as its form, without the possibility of the rest for which we constantly strive.  It resembles the pace of someone running down hill, who would have to fall if he tried to stop and only stays on his feet by running further; likewise the stick balanced on one’s finger tips, or the planet that would fall into its sun as soon as it ceased to hurtle forward irresistibly. – Thus unrest is the prototype of existence.  (A. Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena vol. II §143)

Magic

    The race of Philosophers acts without undergoing the action.  (M. Berthelot, Collection des anciens alchimistes grecques 2:213 qtd in J. Evola, The Hermetic Tradition p. 191)

    The problem of the extranormal and supernormal powers is connected with the view of the world.  When nature is not conceived as an independent reality, but rather as the outward form in which immaterial forces manifest themselves; when, furthermore, one admits the possibility of removing, under certain conditions, the purely individual, sensory-cerebral consciousness of a man so as to allow of positive contacts with those immaterial forces—then, assuming these premises, which are those of every normal and traditional concept of the world, the general possibility of extranormal powers follows as a natural consequence.  (J. Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening p. 183)

    In the "lunar" path, or the path of Isis, what matters is to turn oneself into an obedient instrument of higher entities.  In the magic, "solar" path, or path of Ammon, the most important action is to retain one's being vis a vis these entities; this, however, is not possible other than by overcoming them.  One must wrestle away from them the "quantity" of fate which they carry, in order to take upon oneself their weight and responsibility.  (J. Evola, The Path of Enlightenment in the Mithraic Mysteries p. 16)

    The mere creation of the name Time was an unparalleled deliverance.  To name anything by a name is to win power over it.  This is the essence of primitive man’s art of magic—the evil powers are constrained by naming them, and the enemy is weakened or killed by coupling certain magic procedures with his name.  (O. Spengler, The Decline of the West vol. I, IV.ii.ii)

Mind

    To say "I love," or "I hate," is to presume an imaginary property.  Feelings, in their essence, are universal, cosmic realities which become actualized in various beings, in the same way fire is produced whenever the mechanisms leading up to combustion are present.  One should not say: "I love," but rather: "Love loves in me."  What is commonly called "personality," is actually nothing more than the result of the dynamic interaction of such impersonal forces; thus "personality" lacks a true existence in itself, and it cannot attribute such forces to itself.  (J. Evola, The Path of Enlightenment in the Mithraic Mysteries p. 14)

    To temporarily close the doors and windows of consciousness; to remain undisturbed by the noise and struggle with which our underworld of subservient organs works for and against each other; a little stillness, a little tabula rasa of consciousness so that there is again space for new things, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries, for ruling, foreseeing, predetermining (for our organism is set up oligarchically)—that is the use of this active forgetfulness, a doorkeeper as it were, an upholder of psychic order, of rest, of etiquette: from which one can immediately anticipate the degree to which there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present without forgetfulness.  (F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality II.1)

    The stiff mask of causality is lifted by mere ceasing to think.  (O. Spengler, The Decline of the West vol. I, IV.ii.i)

    The nature of Heaven belongs to Man; the mind of Man is a spring of power.  When the Way of Heaven is established, the course of Man is thereby determined.  (Yin Fu Ching 1.3)

    天性，人也；人心，機也；立天之道以定人也。（陰符經　三）

Soul

    It is [...] silly of these Christians to suppose that when their God applies the fire (like a common cook!) all the rest of mankind will be thoroughly roasted, and that they alone will escape unscorched—not just those alive at the time, mind you, but (they say) those long since dead will rise up from the earth possessing the same bodies as they did before.  I ask you: Is this not the hope of worms?  For what sort of human soul is it that has any use for a rotted corpse of a body?  […]  I mean, what sort of body is it that could return to its original nature or become the same as it was before it rotted away?  And of course they have no reply for this one, and as in most cases where there is no reply they take cover by saying "Nothing is impossible with God."  A brilliant answer indeed!  But the fact is, God cannot do what is shameful; and God does not do what is contrary to nature.  (Celsus, On the True Doctrine p. 86)

Steadiness of mind comes when the air moves freely in the middle.
That is the Manomanī condition, which is attained when the mind becomes calm.  (Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā, 2.42)

mārute madhya-saṃchāre manaḥ-sthairyaṃ prajāyate
yo manaḥ-susthirī-bhāvaḥ saivāvasthā manonmanī