Eschatology

The Machine Will Never Triumph, part fifty-three, the final chapter

Death lies not
in not being able to communicate
but in no longer being understood.¹

At last—

When things get very bad, they pass beyond tragedy.
And then the only thing we can do is to keep quite still
and guard the last treasure of the soul, our sanity.

Since, poor individuals that we are,
if we lose our sanity
we lose that which keeps us individual
distinct from chaos.

In death, the atom takes us up
and the suns.
But if we lose our sanity
nothing and nobody in the whole vast realm of space
wants us, or can have anything to do with us.
We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots
the howl of the utterly lost
howling their nowhereness.²

Things now have become very bad; so bad that they have passed beyond tragedy. Most of the technologically advanced world has now succumbed to the mechanistic mindset and become enchanted by the promise of salvation by modern technology, to the point of revering what Lawrence (and others) poetically call “the Machine.” Such devotion to the “God of the Machine” leads to a kind of collective insanity. Most people in the Western countries, and urban areas of nearly every country today, swim in that insanity. Sometimes, when all else seems lost, the last and best recourse is to escape to the desert, even if it is a metaphorical desert, to attain a state of peace, silence, and tranquillity. The most important job at any time, but especially in these times, is the cultivation of the soul. A man who cultivates his soul will be saved by the grace of the Divine, but the man who gives himself over to the insanity that results from worshiping the Machine is lost, lost forever to the howling dust-storms of the deserts of the cosmos. If there is one insanity above all others in the modern world, it is the disease of consumerism. In fact, the most “normal” people are the most diseased, and sometimes one can find rare glimpses of clarity and sanity among outcasts, homeless, and such, who have not been afflicted by the disease, but the only true way to sanity is through the cultivation of the soul and its connection to the Divine. As Lawrence writes:

Our civilisation has one horrible cancer, one fatal disease: the disease of acquisitiveness. It is the same disease in the mass as in the individual. The people who count as normal are perhaps even more diseased than those who are neurotic. The neurotic at least show that something is wrong. But the normal consider the disease part of their normality. They carry on the hideous insanity of acquisitiveness in masses, or solitary enterprise, with a firm conviction that it is the right thing to do. […] The whole process is one of helpless insanity. All the complexes that were ever located are swallowed up in the grand complex of helpless acquisitiveness, the complex of the swollen ego. It possesses almost every individual in every class of society in every nation on earth. It is a vast disease, and seems to be the special disease of our civilisation or epoch. If you haven’t got the disease, you are abnormal. […] It is useless to talk of the future of our society. Our society is insane.³

People who care

People who care, who care, who care
and who dare not die for fear they should be nothing at all
probably are nothing at all.⁴

It is well known that often the worst people, who have no connection to the Divine, live long and healthy lives, whereas great and saintly people have been known to suffer many afflictions and sometimes died at a very young age. In our own time, one can’t help but think of Lawrence and Simone Weil as part of the latter category. This does not contradict divine justice, but actually confirms it. Those who are minions of the Machine, and care of nothing but the world, have nothing to look forward to after death, but saintly, devout individuals are taken back into the nurturing hands of the living God. The irony is that it is only those who fear death who have something to fear. Those who have faith in the divine nature of reality, know there is nothing to fear.

The only thing one truly should fear is the fall from the hands of the living God into the cold clutches of the Machine. Those who fear death have very likely already fallen into the cogs of the Machine, since it is the lower-self, the ego, that fears, whereas the immortal soul is connected to the Fire and has nothing to fear. Through our collective fear of death, we create a death-world. Our towers of Babel are prisons that keep us at a distance from all that really matters, namely the Divine. Lawrence writes:

[T]he soul fears above all things its fall from individual integrity into the mechanic activity of the outer world, which is the automatic death-world.

And this is our danger today. We tend, through deliberate idealism or deliberate material purpose, to destroy the soul in its first nature of spontaneous, integral being, and to substitute the second nature, the automatic nature of the mechanical universe.⁵

Salvation

The only salvation is to realise that we know nothing about it
and there is nothing to save
and nothing to do
and effort is the ruin of all things.
Then, if we realise that we never were lost, we realise we couldn’t be
      saved.
For you can’t save that which was never lost
at the worst, you can only save it up
and once you realise that you never were lost
you realise the fatuity of saving up against possible loss.
The one thing easiest to lose is savings.⁶

The dark God didn’t cause our fall, the Gods didn’t cause our fall. We alone caused our fall from grace. Our souls are immortal, and are immaculate from birth. We cover our bright shining souls with multitudinous layers of veils, so we must save ourselves from ourselves. But, if we were to stay clean, stay away from the Machine, and stay in communion with nature, the cosmos, and the Gods, then we would already be saved. A man who dies does not cease to be a man. He may change forms; he may come into closeness with a God, or become godlike himself, with an ethereal and subtle body of light, but he was, is, and always shall be, now and forever more:

That which is, is. It does not cease to be when it is cut. Death cannot create nor destroy. What is, is.⁷

Fatality

No one, not even God, can put back a leaf on to a tree
once it has fallen off.

And no one, not God nor Christ nor any other
can put back a human life into connection with the living cosmos
once the connection has been broken
and the person has become finally self-centred—

Death alone, through the long process of disintegration
can melt the detached life back
through the dark Hades at the roots of the tree
into the circulating sap, once more, of the tree of life.⁸

It is no use asking whether God or one of the Gods can make a person come back into touch with Reality. Humans have free will, which is a gift of grace, so if a man chooses to go against the Divine, then that man must face the consequences. Additionally, though some manifestation of the Divine could force a man back into touch, it would be an act of the will of the God against the will of the man, and that is not how salvation works. If a man’s portion is nothingness, Hell, or purgatory, that is due to his actions and his choices. Hell is not locked from the outside but the inside. A man who is far from the Divine in this world must make a much longer journey to reach the thrones of the Gods in the next world. One’s connection to the Divine is elastic: a man can sin, drift away from the Gods, and live a life lacking in goodness, but up to a point there is still a connection, no matter how stretched, to the Divine. But, once the connection snaps, and man has become machine, then it is done, and not even one of the Gods could save that man. A man who becomes machine-like may be saved, but a man who has become machine in his very essence, as so many today have, can never be saved, because he is no longer truly a man. A machine cannot be saved, so man become machine cannot be saved. As Mark 3:28–30 states, “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” To pledge oneself to the Machine is a sin against the Holy Spirit, since our souls are made of fire, and connected to the primordial Fire through the mystical process of the Holy Spirit: and to disown one’s soul, through the rejection of one’s innate divine nature, is to sin against the very heart of the cosmos. Christianity is, strangely enough, one of the religions that can save us, but also one of the religions most responsible for the Machine. How is this possible? Only by realizing that Christianity is not one religion, but many religions. There have been good Protestants (such as William Blake), but most of Protestantism is lifeless and gave way to the Machine. Catholicism is now in a severely degraded state. Orthodoxy has much potential, but only the true Orthodoxy of the Saints and Fathers, and not that of certain war-mongering politicians and their lackey patriarchs. For a religion to be salvific, it must bring us into touch with the cosmos in a living, vital manner. Anything else leads to death and the Machine.

The cosmos became anathema to the Christians, though the early Catholic Church restored it somewhat after the crash of the Dark Ages. Then again the cosmos became anathema to the Protestants after the Reformation. They substituted the non-vital universe of forces and mechanistic order, everything else became abstraction, and the long slow death of the human being set in. This slow death produced science and machinery, but both are death products. […]

It is the long, slow death of society which parallels the quick death of Jesus and the other dying gods. It is death none the less, and will end in the annihilation of the human race—as John of Patmos so fervently hoped—unless there is a change, a resurrection, and a return to the cosmos.⁹

Lawrence called on those who would hear him to change. Only by calling upon God and the Gods to fill our hearts with their light, may we be resurrected here and now.

Souls to save

You tell me every man has a soul to save?
I tell you, not one man in a thousand has even a soul to lose—
The automat has no soul to lose
so it can’t have one to save.¹⁰

We are stridently against the doctrines of conditionalism and annihilationism. Unlike the conditionalists, we believe that the soul is immortal, and is not made immortal; and we believe that, in contrast to the annihilationists, all that lives shall be saved, no matter how grave their sins. We agree with Origen and Gregory of Nyssa that a sojourn through Hell is not eternal, although for souls on that sojourn, it may seem so. Hell is never eternal. But, and here is the great caveat, if a person makes a Faustian bargain, selling his soul to the Machine, and hence sins against the Holy Spirit, then he no longer has a soul to lose, and so unlike the rest of creation, including the birds, the beasts, and the flowers, that man’s end is the abyss. This is the caveat of free will: All animals will be saved, and all men, no matter how evil, will be saved, eventually, so long as they remain men. We are the only species in existence that has the power to give up our immortality, our great gift from the dark God, and for those who do so, it is a tragedy beyond comprehension. Let us all pray, along with Lawrence, to never fall into the clutches of the Machine: “Give me the mystery and let the world live again for me! […] And deliver me from man’s automatism.”¹¹

Now, how does a living man, with an immortal soul, become a robot? It is through sheer egotism. The man who thinks he is a God is certainly far less than a man. When the egoistic man loses all connections with the Divine and gives himself over to computers, science, technology, and engineering, especially if this is done for egoistic and hubristic reasons, he eventually becomes an automaton, an animated machine. As Lawrence writes:

Men have reached the point where, in further fulfilling their ideals, they break down the living integrity of their being and fall into sheer mechanical materialism. They become automatic units, determined entirely by mechanical law.¹²

Contrary to this mechanization and automatization of man, there is the natural way, which men largely followed throughout history. Man has a body but is a soul. As Lawrence writes:

Man is essentially a soul. The soul is neither the body nor the spirit, but the central flame that burns between the two, as the flame of a lamp burns between the oil of the lamp and the oxygen of the air.

The soul is to be obeyed, by the body, by the spirit, by the mind.

The mind is the instrument for registering the soul in consciousness.

The soul is instinctive. Real education is the learning to recognise and obey the instincts of the soul.

The most subtle and sensitive thing in life, is the recognising and responding directly to the instinctive soul. All men do it in their own degree. But to catch the finest and ultimate flickers of intimation that can come from within needs a rare, pure, burning soul, a pure body, a sensitive, strong spirit, and a quick, imaginative mind.—And this is rare.

So men are really arranged in hierarchies of the soul, from the finest down to the dullest, in hierarchies of the soul. […]

Body and spirit both must learn to obey the soul, since both are consummated in the soul. The soul is a flame that forever quivers between oil and air, between body and spirit, between substance and non-substance, between the senses and the mind. It is born of both and partakes of both and consummates both and surpasses both. But it is always midmost between the two.

If the flame of the soul dies out, or is blown out by perverse living, the body begins to go corrupt in life, and the spirit takes on its murderous aspect.

So that there must be authority and discipline.—The soul itself is the source of all authority, and the man of the purest, strongest soul-flame is the highest authority in the world. But even he must discipline his senses, his spirit, his mind and body, all the time, to the fulfilment of the soul. And every man’s life, in so far as it is truly lived, is a long self-discipline.

If the body is disciplined to the soul, then the senses are consummated in the soul, and pleasure is transmuted into joy. And when the spirit is disciplined to the soul, then delight and ecstasy likewise fall into the deeper harmony of joy, without shrillness. […]

There is no absolute Word or Logos, even no absolute Law. All depends on the soul.

Neither is there any One Way. The soul takes many different ways, all of them right.¹³

And so, there are many ways of cultivating the soul, but only one way of losing it, namely giving oneself over to the Machine. To cultivate the soul, one should spend time in nature, perform creative tasks, pray, and invoke the various manifestations of the Divine.

When most men die.

When most men die, today,
when most women die
it is merely a machine breaks down
and can’t be mended.¹⁴

If in the past it was easier to get a camel through an eye of a needle than to get a wealthy man into heaven, then today it would be easier to drive a semi-truck through the eye of a needle than to get the masses of mechanized men into heaven. A wealthy man, at least in the past, could still be a man, but show me one living, breathing man today: Ah! So few, since most are automatons. One cannot help but become nauseated at the thought of this repugnant modern civilization. It makes one’s soul turn back to the old days and answer to the living calls of the ancient writers, such as the John of the Book of Revelation:

John’s passionate and mystic hatred of the civilization of his day, a hatred so intense only because he knew that the living realities of men’s being were displaced by it, is something to which the soul answers now again.¹⁵

Two ways of living and dying.

While people live the life
they are open to the restless skies, and streams flow in and out
darkly from the fecund cosmos, from the angry red sun, from the moon
up from the bounding earth, strange pregnant streams, in and out of the
    flesh,
and man is an iridescent fountain, rising up to flower
for a moment godly, like Baal or Krishna, or Adonis or Balder or
    Lucifer.

But when people are only self-conscious and self-willed
they cannot die, their corpse still runs on,
while nothing comes from the open heaven, from earth, from the sun and
    moon
to them, nothing, nothing;
only the mechanical power of self-directed energy
drives them on and on, like machines,
on and on, and their triumph in mere motion
full of friction, full of grinding, full of danger to the gentle passengers
of growing life,
but on and on, on and on, till the friction wears them out
and the machine begins to wobble
and with hideous shrieks of steely rage and frustration
the worn-out machine at last breaks down:
it is finished, its race is over.

So self-willed, self-centred, self-conscious people die
the death of nothingness, worn-out machines, kaput!

But when living people die in the ripeness of their time
terrible and strange the god lies on the bed, wistful, coldly wonderful,
beyond us, now beyond, departing with that purity
that flickered forth in the best hours of life,
when the man was himself, so a god in his singleness,
and the woman was herself, never to be duplicated, a goddess there
gleaming her hour in life as she now gleams in death
and departing inviolate, nothing can lay hand on her,
she who at her best hours was herself, warm, flickering, herself, therefore a
    goddess,
and who now draws slowly away, cold, the wistful goddess receding.¹⁶

A man can either live his life heavenward or hell-bound. The man who lives in a mechanical way, in touch with nothing, save his mechanical connection to money, machines, and systems, may be successful in this life, but his life is an abject failure. On the other hand, a man who lives his life in touch with the cosmos, the seasons, and all the multitudinous forms of the Divine is a great success even if he has no money, no power, and no possessions in this life. Look to the holy fools of Russia and the wandering dervishes of North Africa: they are poor and possess nothing but the clothes on their backs—which they would gladly give away—and an overwhelming love for all of Creation. When the mechanical man dies, he rots, he becomes nothing but food for the worms, but when the holy man dies, then it is a god who dies only to be resurrected. And as for those who are neither robots, nor saints: they, so long as they still have a soul to save, will travel on a long journey to the Divine. A life lived in God-fearfulness not only makes for a beautiful life, but a beautiful death.

Religion is the life of man, but when religion turns against itself, and starts to reject its own symbols and rites, then it leads man straight to the Machine. As such, Protestantism was a huge disaster, as are all forms of fundamentalism, literalism, etc. Symbols are living realities, and we humans—or at least most of us—need them to come into touch with living divine realities. When we are cut off even from symbols, then we are stranded, afloat in a dinghy upon the vast oceans of being, with nothing to nourish our souls. Lawrence writes of symbols, as follows:

Allegory can always be explained: and explained away. The true symbol defies all explanation, so does the true myth. You can give meanings to either—you will never explain them away. Because symbol and myth do not affect us only mentally, they move the deep emotional centres every time. The great quality of the mind is finality. The mind “understands”, and there’s an end of it.

But the emotional consciousness of man has a life and movement quite different from the mental consciousness. The mind knows in part, in part and parcel, with full stop after every sentence. But the emotional soul knows in full, like a river or a flood. For example, the symbol of the dragon—look at it, on a Chinese tea-cup or in an old wood-cut, read it in a fairy-tale—and what is the result? If you are alive in the old emotional self, the more you look at the dragon, and think of it, the farther and farther flushes out your emotional awareness, on and on into dim regions of the soul aeons and aeons back. But if you are dead in the old feeling-knowing way, as so many moderns are, then the dragon just “stands for” this, that, and the other—all the things it stands for in Frazer’s Golden Bough: it is just a kind of glyph or label, like the gilt pestle and mortar outside a chemist’s shop.—Or take better still the Egyptian symbol called the ankh, the symbol of life, etc.☥ which the goddesses hold in their hands. Any child “knows what it means”. But a man who is really alive feels his soul begin to throb and expand at the mere sight of the symbol. Modern men, however, are nearly all half dead, modern women too. So they just look at the ankh and know all about it, and that’s that. They are proud of their own emotional impotence.¹⁷

Gladness of Death.

Oh death
about you I know nothing, nothing—
about the afterwards
as a matter of fact, we know nothing

yet oh death, oh death
also I know so much about you
the knowledge is within me, without being a matter of fact.

And so I know
after the painful, painful experience of dying
there comes an after-gladness, a strange joy
in a great adventure
oh the great adventure of death, where Thomas Cook cannot guide us.

I have always wanted to be as the flowers are
so unhampered in their living and dying,
and in death I believe I shall be as the flowers are.

I shall blossom like a dark pansy, and be delighted
there among the dark sun-rays of death.
I can feel myself unfolding in the dark sunshine of death
to something flowery and fulfilled, and with a strange sweet perfume.

Men prevent one another from being men
but in the great spaces of death
the winds of the afterwards kiss us into blossom of manhood.¹⁸

We can know nothing of death in our minds, but our hearts and souls already know everything there is to know about death. If we could only, even for a moment, get out of our heads, we would see that there is nothing to fear, and that death is simply another stage on the longest journey. The fetus in the womb is not afraid of birth so we should not be afraid of death since it is not an end, but a new beginning. For a man who is even remotely in touch with the Divine, death is not a painful sundering of soul from flesh, but a marvelous journey towards higher realms. Here, on earth, we choose to alienate ourselves from the Divine, but in death we will be pure in being like the birds, flowers, and angelic beings. Just as there are good ways to live, there are good ways to die. To die in communion with the Divine is a good death, and that good death is infinitely preferable to a poorly lived life based on greed and mechanism. Dying a holy death leads one onward to godhood and eternal life, but living an unholy life is already a living death. As Lawrence writes:

[S]he knew, with the clarity of ultimate knowledge, that the body is only one of the manifestations of the spirit, the dissolution of the integral spirit is the dissolution of the physical body as well. […] [B]etter die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions. […] [T]o live mechanised and cut off within the motion of the will to live as an entity absolved from the unknown, that is shameful and ignominious. There is no ignominy in death. There is complete ignominy in an unreplenished, mechanised life. […] [M]ere routine and mechanical activity. Was not the adventure of death infinitely preferable? Was not death infinitely more lovely and noble than such a life? A life of barren routine, without inner meaning, without any real significance. How sordid life was, how it was a terrible shame to the soul, to live now! How much cleaner and more dignified to be dead! One could not bear any more of this shame of sordid routine and mechanical nullity. One might come to fruit in death. She had had enough. For where was life to be found? No flowers grow upon busy machinery, there is no sky to a routine, there is no space to a rotary motion. And all life was a rotary motion, mechanised, cut off from reality. There was nothing to look for from life—it was the same in all countries and all peoples[…]

But what a joy! What a gladness to think that whatever humanity did, it could not seize hold of the kingdom of death, to nullify that. The sea they turned into a murderous alley and a soiled road of commerce, disputed like the dirty land of a city every inch of it. The air they claimed too, shared it up, parcelled it out to certain owners, they trespassed in the air to fight for it. Everything was gone, walled in, with spikes on top of the walls, and one must ignominiously creep between the spiky walls through a labyrinth of life.

But the great, dark, illimitable kingdom of death, there humanity was put to scorn. So much they could do upon earth, the multifarious little gods that they were. But the kingdom of death put them all to scorn, they dwindled into their true vulgar silliness in face of it.¹⁹

Ship of Death [1]

I sing of autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

Have you built your ship of death, oh, have you?
Build then your ship of death, for you will need it!

Can man his own quietus make
with a bare bodkin?

With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make
a bruise or break of exit for his life
but is that a quietus, oh tell me, is it quietus?

Quietus is the goal of the long journey
the longest journey towards oblivion.

Slips out the soul, invisible one, wrapped still
in the white shirt of the mind’s experiences
and folded in the dark-red, unseen
mantle of the body’s still mortal memories.

Frightened and alone, the soul slips out of the house
or is pushed out
to find himself on the crowded, arid margins of existence.

The margins, the grey beaches of shadow
strewn with dim wreckage, and crowded with crying souls
that lie outside the silvery walls of our body’s builded city.

Oh, it is not so easy, I tell you it is not so easy
to set softly forth on the longest journey, the longest journey.

It is easy to be pushed out of the silvery city of the body
through any breach in the wall,
thrust out on to the grey grey beaches of shadow
the long marginal stretches of existence crowded with lost souls
that intervene between our tower and the shaking sea of the beyond.

Oh build your ship of death, oh build it in time
and build it lovingly, and put it between the hands of your soul.

Once outside the gate of this walled silvery life of days
once outside, upon the grey marsh-beaches, where lost souls moan
in millions, unable to depart
having no boat to launch upon the shaken, soundless
deepest and longest of seas,
once outside the gate
what will you do, if you have no ship of the soul?

Oh pity the dead that are dead, but cannot take
the journey, still they moan and beat
against the silvery adamant walls of this our exclusive existence.
They moan and beat, they gnash, they rage
they fall upon the new outcoming souls with rage
and they send arrows of anger, bullets and bombs of frustration
over the adamant walls of this, our by-no-means impregnable existence.

Pity, oh pity the poor dead that are only ousted from life
and crowd there on the grey mud beaches of the margins
gaunt and horrible
waiting, waiting till at last the ancient boatman with the common barge
shall take them aboard, towards the great goal of oblivion.

Pity the poor gaunt dead that cannot die
into the distance with receding oars
but must roam like outcast dogs on the margins of life,
and think of them, and with the soul’s deep sigh
waft nearer to them the bark of delivery.

But for myself, but for my soul, dear soul
let me build a little ship with oars and food
and little dishes, and all accoutrements
dainty and ready for the departing soul.

And put it between the hands of the trembling soul.
So that when the hour comes, and the last door closes behind him
he shall slip down the shores invisible
between the half-visible hordes
to where the furthest and the longest sea
touches the margins of our life’s existence
with wincing unwilling waves.

And launching there his little ship,
wrapped in the dark-red mantle of the body’s memories
the little, slender soul sits swiftly down, and takes the oars
and draws away, away, away, towards the dark depths
fathomless deep ahead, far, far from the grey shores
that fringe with shadow all this world’s existence.

Over the sea, over the farthest sea
on the longest journey
past the jutting rocks of shadow
past the lurking, octopus arms of agonised memory
past the strange whirlpools of remembered greed
through the dead weed of a life-time’s falsity,
slow, slow my soul, in his little ship
on the most soundless of all seas
taking the longest journey.

Pulling the long oars of a life-time’s courage
drinking the confident water from the little jug
and eating the brave bread of a wholesome knowledge
row, little soul, row on
on the longest journey, towards the greatest goal

Neither straight nor crooked, neither here nor there
but shadows folded on deeper shadows
and deeper, to a core of sheer oblivion
like the convolutions of shadow-shell
or deeper, like the foldings and involvings of a womb.

Drift on, drift on, my soul, towards the most pure
most dark oblivion.

And at the penultimate porches, the dark-red mantle
of the body’s memories slips and is absorbed
into the shell-like, womb-like convoluted shadow.

And round the great final bend of unbroken dark
the skirt of the spirit’s experience has melted away
the oars have gone from the boat, and the little dishes
gone, gone, and the boat dissolves like pearl
as the soul at last slips perfect into the goal, the core
of sheer oblivion and of utter peace,
the womb of silence in the living night.

Ah peace, ah lovely peace, most lovely lapsing
of this my soul into the plasm of peace.

Oh lovely last, last lapse of death, into pure oblivion
at the end of the longest journey
peace, complete peace,—!
But can it be that also it is procreation?

Oh build your ship of death
oh build it!
Oh, nothing matters but the longest journey.²⁰

Lawrence’s Ship of Death is one of the great poems in English or any other language. For some, the meaning of certain stanzas may be unclear. For some people, learning and instruction will clear up the meaning. But for others whose hearts are veiled, it will not. Only through rigorous spiritual practice will the sweet nectar of Lawrence’s words pierce their hearts. Life is not an end, but a beginning. Our souls have no end, but they did have a beginning. Life is a good in and of itself, but it is not the only or primary good. Life in this world is only a shadow of the true life lived with the Divine. A man cannot possibly come close to the dark God without preparation, and a life, properly lived, is the preparation for apotheosis. The ship of death is the sum total of one’s acts here in this life, and no matter how young or healthy you may be, you should start building your ship of death now. Without charity, spiritual practice, and love of the Divine, death will be a terrible and terrifying experience, but with the proper training and preparation, death can be beautiful.

One cannot reach the goal of the Divine essence through suicide. To commit suicide is to be ungrateful for the gift of life and to cut oneself off from the Fire. The goal of the long journey of life and death is a new life, one full of peace and love. One has to be willing to die in order to live. Death does not end in nothingness but in fullness for every immortal part of a man, but the ego must die so that the soul may live. For a man who has not prepared, death is a calamity. Without a vital connection to the Divine, one is afloat on a sea of souls. Now, whether that person ends up in Purgatory or Hell the experience is unpleasant to say the least. Pray for the souls of the dead who are not in the hands of God; pray for them, for they need your prayers. Eventually, eventually, they will reach the goal, but their journey is longer and more painful. Build your ship of death now, so that you may be carried over the threshold of death, lovingly, by the hands of the living God.

When a man dies, he must face the facts of his life, and the most painful of things is not a punishment from outside the soul, but the spiritual torment of regrets coming from within the soul. The only way to sail past these regrets is to live a spiritually full life in the only moment that matters, now.

Finally, in the end, the soul attains to godhood, and joins with the Deity, not the way a drop of water joins the ocean, as nihilistic proponents of Buddhism and Vedanta would declare, but in the sense of a fish in the sea. We would be who we always were, but more so, with a luminous body, and divinity. As the Christians say: God became man, so that man may become God. Even if one doesn’t believe in Christianity, those words express a profound truth. The dark God descended into matter, so that the created soul may become godlike. The One became many, so that the many may become many-in-One. The peace one attains upon his attainment of godmanhood is not static, but dynamic. It is peace, but also “procreation.” There are many beautiful moments in life, but the only thing that truly matters is the “longest journey.” As for what happens after death, Lawrence writes that the soul itself is the altar upon which death is sacrificed:

The leopard and the deer, the lion and the bull, the cat and the dove, or the partridge, these are part of the great duality, or polarity of the animal kingdom. But they do not represent good action and evil action. On the contrary, they represent the polarized activity of the divine cosmos, in its animal creation.

The treasure of treasures is the soul, which, in every creature, in every tree or pool, means that mysterious conscious point of balance or equilibrium between the two halves of the duality, the fiery and the watery. This mysterious point clothes itself in vividness after vividness, from the right hand, and vividness after vividness from the left. And in death it does not disappear, but is stored in the egg, or in the jar, or even in the tree which brings forth again.

But the soul itself, the conscious spark of every creature, is not dual; and being the immortal, it is also the altar on which our mortality and our duality is at last sacrificed.²¹

Song of Death

Sing the song of death, Oh sing it!
For without the song of death, the song of life
becomes pointless and silly.

Sing then the song of death, and the longest journey
and what the soul carries with him, and what he leaves behind
and how he finds the darkness that enfolds him into utter peace
at last, at last, beyond innumerable seas.²²

Oh, yes, we should sing the song of death. Death is not a disaster, save for those who have never really lived. We don’t come into life ready for immortality. Mortal life is a training ground and proving ground for the eternal life. So, life is a gift, but also death. Life can be joyous, and death is a gateway to the divine light. Sing the song of death, and go peacefully when it is your time, for what comes next is great beyond your expectations. Life and death are journeys, but they are all part of the longest journey toward the Divine. Without life, death is meaningless and without death, life is meaningless:

Sing the song of death, O sing it!
for without the song of death, the song of life
becomes pointless and silly.

Sing then the song of death, and the longest journey
and what the soul takes with him, and what he leaves behind,
and how he enters fold after fold of deepening darkness
for the cosmos even in death is like a dark whorled shell
whose whorls fold round to the core of soundless silence
and pivotal oblivion
where the soul comes at last, and has utter peace.

Sing then the core of dark and absolute
oblivion where the soul at last is lost
in utter peace.
Sing the song of death, O sing it!²³

Once the soul finds its place next to the dark God, it is in peace, but it is a dynamic peace. Heaven is not boring, but the most exciting thing imaginable. A Christian writer wrote of how goodness is exciting and sin boring, and how a priest came to him exhausted of hearing the same sins over and over. The death of an evil man is boring, having to suffer many long years in regret, but the man who dies close to the Gods is always full of the resplendent glory of the Divine. When Lawrence speaks using words like “dark,” “oblivion,” and “utter peace,” he is not referring to any sort of annihilation, nor even to Buddhist Nirvana, but using the terms of apophatic theology to refer to an experience that is ineffable—beyond description with words. To put the soul’s immortal experience and closeness to the Divine in more positive terms, we can do no better than quote one of the great poems of the English language, by Emily Brontë:

No coward soul is mine
No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere
I see Heaven’s glories shine
And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

O God within my breast
Almighty ever-present Deity
Life, that in me hast rest,
As I Undying Life, have power in thee

Vain are the thousand creeds
That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,
Worthless as withered weeds
Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

To waken doubt in one
Holding so fast by thy infinity
So surely anchored on
The steadfast rock of Immortality

With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years
Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though Earth and moon were gone
And suns and universes ceased to be
And thou wert left alone
Every Existence would exist in thee

There is not room for Death
Nor atom that his might could render void
Since thou art Being and Breath
And what thou art may never be destroyed²⁴

Prayer

Give me the moon at my feet
Put my feet upon the crescent, like a Lord!
O let my ankles be bathed in moonlight, that I may go
sure and moon-shod, cool and bright-footed
towards my goal.

For the sun is hostile, now
his face is like the red lion, (Unfinished)²⁵

Some critics consider these to be the last words written by Lawrence. If so, they are a fitting coda to the life of a man who was filled with the fires of God from the earliest age. Lawrence prayed that he be bathed in the divine light and that he be helped toward his goal of communion with the Divine. He prayed to be saved from a world that had become profane. God willing, Lawrence is now close to the God he loved so much. We should all pray: we can use Lawrence’s prayers, use prayers of the great saints from various religious traditions, or come up with our own prayers, but we should pray without ceasing. One of the great texts to recommend a modern man is The Way of a Pilgrim, which shows the unbelievable power of constant invocation. If you are unsure of where to start, or think that prayer is somehow irrelevant to the modern world, then start with the following poem from R. S. Thomas:

Because we cannot be clever and honest
and are inventors of things more intricate
than the snowflake—Lord have mercy.

Because we are full of pride
in our humility, and because we believe
in our disbelief—Lord have mercy.

Because we will protect ourselves
from ourselves to the point
of destroying ourselves—Lord have mercy.

And because on the slope to perfection,
When we should be half-way up,
we are half-way down—Lord have mercy.²⁶

“Lord have mercy!” I think all of us, no matter our religious backgrounds, so long as we have even a kernel of love for the Divine in our hearts, can agree that we, at this juncture in our collective history, need to shout out to the Lord of the world requesting mercy, pity, peace, and love, or as William Blake writes:

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.

We all have an immortal soul, and we are all connected with God, no matter how far away we have drifted. Lawrence’s project of going back to the most ancient religions was in the name of restoring a fructifying spirituality to the human race. We need both the life-giving, and life-loving paganism of the ancient Greeks, but also the apophatic theology of the dark God. Lawrence was both the Orpheus and the Pseudo-Dionysius of our time. In most traditions these two paths to God are sundered, with disastrous consequences, but Lawrence discovered, through the art of the Etruscans, a more holistic view of the soul and the Divine:

[O]ne radical thing the Etruscan people never forgot, because it was in their blood as well as in the blood of their masters: and that was the mystery of the journey out of life, and into death; the death-journey, and the sojourn in the after-life. The wonder of their soul continued to play round the mystery of this journey and this sojourn.

In the tombs we see it; throes of wonder and vivid feeling throbbing over death. Man moves naked and glowing through the universe. Then comes death: he dives into the sea, he departs into the underworld.

The sea is that vast primordial creature that has a soul also, whose inwardness is womb of all things, out of which all things emerged, and into which they are devoured back. Balancing the sea is the earth of inner fire, of after-life, and before-life. Beyond the waters and the ultimate fire lay only that oneness of which the people knew nothing: it was a secret the Lucumones kept for themselves, as they kept the symbol of it in their hand.

But the sea the people knew. The dolphin leaps in and out of it suddenly, as a creature that suddenly exists, out of nowhere, He was not: and lo! there he is! The dolphin which gives up the sea’s rainbows only when he dies. Out he leaps; then, with a head-dive, back again he plunges into the sea. He is so much alive, he is like the phallus carrying the fiery spark of procreation down into the wet darkness of the womb. The diver does the same, carrying like a phallus his small hot spark into the deeps of death. And the sea will give up her dead like dolphins that leap out and have the rainbow within them.

But the duck that swims on the water, and lifts his wings, is another matter: the blue duck, or goose, so often represented by the Etruscans. He is the same goose that saved Rome, in the night.

The duck does not live down within the waters as the fish does. The fish is the anima, the animate life, the very clue to the vast sea, the watery element of the first submission. For this reason Jesus was represented in the first christian centuries as a fish, in Italy especially, where the people still thought in the etruscan symbols. Jesus was the anima of the vast, moist ever-yielding element which was the opposite and the counterpart of the red flame the Pharaohs and the kings of the East had sought to invest themselves with.

But the duck has no such subaqueous nature as the fish. It swims upon the waters, and is hot-blooded, belonging to the red flame, of the animal body of life. But it dives under water, and preens itself upon the flood. So it became, to man, the symbol of that part of himself which delights in the waters, and dives in, and rises up and shakes its wings. It is the symbol of a man’s own phallus and phallic life. So you see a man holding on his hand the hot, soft, alert duck, offering it to the maiden. So today the Red Indian makes a secret gift to the maiden of a hollow, earthenware duck, in which is a little fire and incense. It is that part of his body and his fiery life that a man can offer to a maid. And it is that awareness or alertness in him, that other consciousness that wakes in the night and rouses the city.

But the maid offers the man a garland, the rim of flowers from the edge of the “pool”, which can be placed over the man’s head and laid on his shoulders, in symbol that he is invested with the power of the maiden’s mystery and different strength, the female power. For whatever is laid over the shoulders is a sign of power added.

Birds fly portentously on the walls of the tombs. The artist must often have seen these priests, the augurs, with their crooked, bird-headed staffs in their hand, out on a high place watching the flight of larks or pigeons across the quarters of the sky. They were reading the signs and the portents, looking for an indication, how they should direct the course of some serious affair. To us it may seem foolish. To them, hot-blooded birds flew through the living universe as feelings and premonitions fly through the breast of a man, or as thoughts fly through the mind. In their flight the suddenly-roused birds, or the steady, far-coming birds, moved wrapped in a deeper consciousness, in the complex destiny of all things. And since all things corresponded in the ancient world, and man’s bosom mirrored itself in the bosom of the sky, or vice versa, the birds were flying to a portentous goal, in the man’s breast who watched, as well as flying their own way in the bosom of the sky. If the augur could see the birds flying in his heart, then he would know which way destiny too was flying for him.

The science of augury certainly was no exact science. But it was as exact as our sciences of psychology or political economy. And the augurs were as clever as our politicians, who also must practise divination, if ever they are to do anything worth the name. There is no other way when you are dealing with life. And if you live by the cosmos, you look in the cosmos for your clue. If you live by a personal god, you pray to him. If you are rational, you think things over. But it all amounts to the same thing in the end. Prayer, or thought, or studying the stars, or watching the flight of birds, or studying the entrails of the sacrifice, it is all the same process, ultimately: of divination. All it depends on is the amount of true, sincere, religious concentration you can bring to bear on your object. An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. And you choose that object to concentrate upon which will best focus your consciousness. Every real discovery made, every serious and significant decision ever reached, was reached and made by divination. Columbus discovered America by a sort of divination. The soul stirs, and makes an act of pure attention, and that is a discovery.

The science of the augur and the haruspex was not so foolish as our modern science of political economy. If the hot liver of the victim cleared the soul of the haruspex, and made him capable of that ultimate inward attention which alone tells us the last thing we need to know, then why quarrel with the haruspex? To him, the universe was alive, and in quivering rapport. To him, the blood was conscious: he thought with his heart. To him, the blood was the red and shining stream of consciousness itself. Hence, to him, the liver, that great organ where the blood struggles and “overcomes death”, was an object of profound mystery and significance. It stirred his soul and purified his consciousness, for it was also his victim. So he gazed into the hot liver, that was mapped out in fields and regions like the sky of stars, but these fields and regions were those of the red, shining consciousness that runs through the whole animal creation. And therefore it must contain the answer to his own blood’s question.

It is the same with the study of stars, or the sky of stars. Whatever object will bring the consciousness into a state of pure attention, in a time of perplexity, will also give back an answer to the perplexity. But it is truly a question of divination. As soon as there is any pretence of infallibility, and pure scientific calculation, the whole thing becomes a fraud and a jugglery. But the same is true not only of augury and astrology, but also of prayer and of pure reason, and even of the discoveries of the great laws and principles of science. Men juggle with prayer today as once they juggled with augury; and in the same way they are juggling with science. Every great discovery or decision comes by an act of divination. Facts are fitted round afterwards. But all attempt at divination, even prayer and reason and research itself, lapses into jugglery when the heart loses its purity. In the impurity of his heart, Socrates often juggled logic unpleasantly. And no doubt, when scepticism came over the ancient world, the haruspex and the augur became jugglers and pretenders. But for centuries they held real sway. It is amazing to see, in Livy, what a big share they must have had in the building up of the great Rome of the Republic.²⁷

Bavarian Gentians

Not every man has gentians in his house
In soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.

Bavarian gentians, tall and dark, but dark
Darkening the daytime torch-like with the smoking blueness
    of Pluto’s gloom,
ribbed hellish flowers erect, with their blaze of darkness spread blue
blown flat into points, by the heavy white draught of the day.

Torch-flowers of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark blue blaze
black lamps from the halls of Dis, smoking dark blue
giving off darkness, blue darkness, upon Demeter’s yellow-pale day
whom have you come for, here in the white-cast day?

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of a flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened
    on blueness
down the way Persephone goes, just now, in first-frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness is married to dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice, as a bride
a gloom invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms of Pluto as he ravishes her once again
and pierces her once more with his passion of the utter dark.
among the splendour of black-blue torches, shedding fathomless
    darkness on the nuptials.

Give me a flower on a tall stem, and three dark flames,
for I will go to the wedding, and be wedding-guest
at the marriage of the living dark.²⁸

Bavarian Gentians is a great mystical poem. Lawrence describes the pleas of the dead for light that can lead the way to Hades and beyond. This is a request both to the living, for prayers for the departed, as well as to the daemons and angelic beings for guidance on the longest journey. Everyone needs a gentian to light his or her way towards the Divine. The surest way that a person can have a torch for the afterlife is by setting the soul alight with the fires of Being in this life, and the surest way to do that is through constant mystical prayer. True mystical prayer is fluid, spontaneous, and in touch with the natural world and seasons; it is the prayer of people like Saint Francis, but it is most emphatically not the mechanical and rote prayers of the religious automatons of today.

The final lines of the poem are the most beautiful and profound. “I will go to the wedding, and be wedding-guest / at the marriage of the living dark.” The wedding is that of the soul and the dark God. An individual soul will be married to the God, but will only be a guest—albeit an eternal guest. It will be a union, but a union akin to corporeal marriage where the unified couple retain their individuality, and not like the union espoused by Far Eastern and South Asian religions, in which the soul loses its individuality upon union with the Divine. It will be a union of dark with Dark, the created soul partaking of divine fire, and the uncreated dark God whose essence is the Fire. It is the union of microcosm and macrocosm, light and dark, but it is beyond words to describe. All we can do is point in the right direction and ask questions, such as these:

Where, then, is the meeting-point: where in mankind is the ecstasy of light and dark together, the supreme transcendence of the afterglow, day hovering in the embrace of the coming night like two angels embracing in the heavens, like Eurydice in the arms of Orpheus, or Persephone embraced by Pluto?

Where is the supreme ecstasy in mankind, which makes day a delight and night a delight, purpose an ecstasy and a concourse in ecstasy, and single abandon of the single body and soul also an ecstasy under the moon? Where is the transcendent knowledge in our hearts, uniting sun and darkness, day and night, spirit and senses? Why do we not know that the two in consummation are one; that each is only part; partial and alone for ever; but that the two in consummation are perfect, beyond the range of loneliness or solitude?²⁹

Ultimately, all we can know for certain is that the soul is immortal, the soul retains its individuality even upon apotheosis, and that the consummation of the long journey is a union with the Divine. The unified soul does not stop growing at this point, but stays in flux, and never experiences boredom, finally existing beyond the confines of linear time.

Silence.

Come, holy Silence, come
great bride of all creation.

Come, holy Silence! reach, reach
from the presence of God, and envelop us.

Let the sea heave no more in sound,
hold the stars still, lest we hear the heavens dimly ring with their
      commotion!
fold up all sounds.

Lo! the laugh of God!
Lo! the laugh of the creator!
Lo! the last of the seven great laughs of God!
Lo! the last of the seven great laughs of creation!

Huge, huge roll the peals of the thundrous laugh
huge, huger, huger and huger pealing
till they mount and fill and all is fulfilled of God’s last
      and greatest laugh
till all is soundless and senseless, a tremendous body of silence
enveloping even the edges of the thought-waves
enveloping even me, who hear no more,
who am embedded in a shell of silence,
of silence, lovely silence
of endless and living silence
of holy silence
the silence of the last of the seven great laughs of God.

Ah! the holy silence—it is meet!
It is very fitting! there is nought beside!
For now we are passing through the gate, stilly,
in the sacred silence of gates
in the silence of passing through doors,
in the great hush of going from this into that,
in the suspension of wholeness, in the moment of division
      within the whole!

Lift up your heads, O ye Gates!
for the silence of the last great thundrous laugh
screens us purely, and we can slip through.³⁰

The silence of the union with God is not nihilistic, nor quietistic, but is a vibrant, living silence. It is the silence of all the cares and worries of the world falling away. It is the peace that passeth all understanding. All the noises of the world will fall away, but it is not a peace without sound, but the peace of the field filled with the melodious sounds of birds, insects, and running water. The transcendent sounds of the union between celestial bride and bridegroom are indescribable, so silence is the most we can say about them. In this world of noise, we must heed the words of Saint Isaac the Syrian: “Love silence above all things.” This sentiment is expanded upon by Kierkegaard:

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply: Create silence! Bring men to silence. The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. And even if it were blazoned forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midst of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God. Therefore create silence.³¹

We must all strive to free ourselves from our mechanistic worldview and servitude to “the Machine,” so that we may experience divine joy. Women, however, are even more trapped within the modern world than men, due to ideologies such as feminism, radical gender theory, and the socialized push to succeed. Men are also trapped within modernity and must struggle hard, ever so hard, to find their inner Hermes, but women, due to the diabolical nature of the modern world must struggle even harder to find their inner Aphrodite. As Lawrence writes:

[N]o one is coiled more bitterly in the folds of the old Logos than woman. It is always so. What was a breath of inspiration becomes in the end a fixed and evil form, which coils us round like mummy clothes. And then woman is more tightly coiled even than man. Today, the best part of womanhood is wrapped tight and tense in the folds of the Logos, she is bodiless, abstract, and driven by a self-determination terrible to behold. A strange “spiritual” creature is woman today, driven on and on by the evil demon of the old Logos, never for a moment allowed to escape and be herself. The evil Logos says she must be “significant”, she must “make something worth while” of her life. So on and on she goes, making something worth while, piling up the evil forms of our civilisation higher and higher, and never for a second escaping to be wrapped in the brilliant fluid folds of the new green dragon. All our present life-forms are evil. But with a persistence that would be angelic if it were not devilish woman insists on the best in life, by which she means the best of our evil life-forms, unable to realise that the best of evil life-forms are the most evil.

So, tragic and tortured by all the grey little snakes of modern shame and pain, she struggles on, fighting for “the best”, which is, alas, the evil best. All women today have a large streak of the police-woman in them. Andromeda was chained naked to a rock, and the dragon of the old form fumed at her. But poor modern Andromeda, she is forced to patrol the streets more or less in police-woman’s uniform, with some sort of a banner and some sort of a bludgeon—or is it called a baton!—up her sleeve, and who is going to rescue her from this? Let her dress up fluffy as she likes, or white and virginal, still underneath it all you can see the stiff folds of the modern police-woman, doing her best, her level best.

Ah God, Andromeda at least had her nakedness, and it was beautiful, and Perseus wanted to fight for her. But our modern police-women have no nakedness, they have their uniforms. And who could want to fight the dragon of the old form, the poisonous old Logos, for the sake of a police-woman’s uniform?

Ah woman, you have known many bitter experiences. But never, never before have you been condemned by the old dragon to be a police-woman.

O lovely green dragon of the new day, the undawned day, come, come in touch, and release us from the horrid grip of the evil-smelling old Logos! Come in silence, and say nothing. Come in touch, in soft new touch like a spring-time breeze, and shed these horrible police-woman sheaths from off our women, let the buds of life come nakedly!³²

Abysmal Immortality

It is not easy to fall out of the hands of the living God
They are so large, and they cradle so much of a man.
It is a long time before a man can get himself away.
Even through the greatest blasphemies, the hands of the living
    God still continue to cradle him.

And still through knowledge and will, he can break away
Man can break away, and fall from the hands of God
into himself alone, down the godless plunge of the abyss;
a god-lost creature turning upon himself
in the long, long fall, revolving upon himself
in the endless writhe of the last, the last self-knowledge
which he can never reach till he touch the bottom of the abyss
which he can never touch, for the abyss is bottomless.

And there is nothing else, throughout time and eternity
but the abyss, which is bottomless,
and the fall to extinction, which can never come,
for the abyss is bottomless,
and the turning down plunge of writhing of self-knowledge, self-analysis
which goes further and further, and yet never finds an end
for there is no end;
it is the abyss of the immortality
of those that have fallen from God.³³

God is good. We did not come into existence to suffer, nor to simply be blown out like the flame of a candle. The Divine wants us to come close, wants us to be lovingly cradled in its hands. The entire history of prophets and saints shows that all the divine forces of the cosmos want the human soul of every person to come into a state of theosis. So, it is very, very hard to fall out of the hands of the living God, but if a person does fall from grace, his or her end is endless nothingness. By the grace of God, the soul is immortal, but for those who have fallen, their end is a loss of spiritual life, a loss of personality, and an eternal abyss. Now, many souls may face suffering and torment of some sort, but are ultimately saved: these souls were still in God’s hands. But when one sins against the Holy Spirit and gives himself or herself completely over to the Machine, there will be no end to their fall.

Afterlife is neither hell, nor purgatory, nor reincarnation, nor nothingness. We cannot say much of what exactly the afterlife is, but it is positive, and the end goal for most souls is deification. After the presocratic philosophers of Greece, philosophy took a decidedly rational turn away from the heart and toward the mind. And since the mind cannot conceive of the bliss of marriage with the Divine, logical thinking ended in nihilism, materialism, and atheism. For any and all who have faith, pray, and do good works, their ultimate end is closeness to God, which is a joy beyond all description. Lawrence writes of this as follows:

The old religion of the profound attempt of man to harmonize himself with nature, and hold his own and come to flower in the great seething of life, changed with the Greeks and Romans into a desire to resist nature, to produce a mental cunning and a mechanical force that would outwit Nature and chain her down completely, completely, till at last there should be nothing free in nature at all, all should be controlled, domesticated, put to man’s meaner uses. Curiously enough, with the idea of the triumph over nature arose the idea of a gloomy Hades, a hell and purgatory. To the peoples of the great natural religions the afterlife was a continuing of the wonder-journey of life. To the peoples of the Idea, the afterlife is hell, or purgatory, or nothingness, and paradise is an inadequate fiction.³⁴

The modern way of life is descended from Greek and Roman philosophy, and it was helped along by certain philosophical currents within Protestantism. But, the ancient views of our connection to the Divine, and nature of our soul’s journey are alive and well in certain religious traditions.

Only Man

Only man can fall from God
Only man.

No animal, no beast nor creeping thing
no cobra nor hyaena nor scorpion nor hideous white ant
can slip entirely through the fingers of the hands of god
into the abyss of self-knowledge,
knowledge of the self-apart-from-God.
For the knowledge of the self-apart-from-God
is an abyss down which the soul can slip
writhing and twisting in all the revolutions
of the unfinished plunge
of self-awareness, now apart from God, falling
fathomless, fathomless, self-consciousness wriggling
writhing deeper and deeper in all the minutiae of self-knowledge,
    downwards, exhaustive,
yet never, never coming to the bottom, for there is no bottom;
zigzagging down like the fizzle from a finished rocket
the frizzling falling fire that cannot go out, dropping wearily,
neither can it reach the depth
for the depth is bottomless,
so it wriggles its way even further down, further down
at last in sheer horror of not being able to leave off
knowing itself, knowing itself apart from God, falling.³⁵

Man’s great gift and terrible doom is free will. Only man in all of creation can fall from God’s hands. The ultimate end of the man who turns to God is theosis, but the ultimate end of the man who turns away from God is nothingness, but not even the nothingness of the Epicureans, which one would not feel or know, but a terrible, infinite, and eternal blackness that one is aware of, and exclusively aware of. For pre-modern peoples it was easier to stay cradled within the hands of God, and for ancients it was easiest of all, since they saw God everywhere:

To the ancient consciousness, Matter, Materia, or Substantial things are God. A great rock is God. A pool of water is God. And why not? The longer we live the more we return to the oldest of all visions. A great rock is God. I can touch it. It is undeniable. It is God.

Then those things that move are doubly God. That is, we are doubly aware of their godhead: that which is, and that which moves: twice godly. Everything is a “thing”: and every “thing” acts and has effect: the universe is a great complex activity of things existing and moving and having effect. And all this is God.

Today, it is almost impossible for us to realise what the old Greeks meant by god, or theos. Everything was theos; but even so, not at the same moment. At the moment, whatever struck you was god. If it was a pool of water, the very watery pool might strike you: then that was god; or the blue gleam might suddenly occupy your consciousness: then that was god; or a faint vapour at evening rising might catch the imagination: then that was theos; or thirst might overcome you at the sight of the water: then the thirst itself was god; or you drank, and the delicious and indescribable slaking of thirst was the god; or you felt the sudden chill of the water as you touched it: and then another god came into being, “the cold”: and this was not a quality, it was an existing entity, almost a creature, certainly a theos: the cold; or again, on the dry lips something suddenly alighted: it was “the moist”, and again a god. Even to the early scientists or philosophers, “the cold”, “the moist”, “the hot”, “the dry” were things in themselves, realities, gods, theoi. And they did things.³⁶

Modern men, on the other hand, can’t recognize God even when He is looking over their shoulders. These materialist automatons have only one hope, namely to turn towards God. God is not just somewhere out there, but is ever-present, everywhere. The key to life is to find God in every flower, insect, animal, blade of grass, and streak of lightning, just as the ancients did:

The most profound proposition of all natural law was crystallized in these words of the poet Pindar: “The race of men is one thing, and the race of gods is another; but both receive their life and their breath from the same mother.” We broaden the scope of that proposition to state that animals, plants, stars, clouds, and winds are all divine, just as all of the creations that appear within the Cosmos are but leaves upon one stem, and limbs of the same symbiotic formation.³⁷

The Ship of Death. [2]

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.

The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.

  II

Have you built your ship of death, O have you?
O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall
thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.

And death is on the air like a smell of ashes!
Ah! can’t you smell it?

And in the bruised body, the frightened soul
finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold
that blows upon it through the orifices.

  III

And can a man his own quietus make
with a bare bodkin?

With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make
a bruise or break of exit for his life;
but is that a quietus, O tell me, is it quietus?

Surely not so! for how could murder, even self-murder
ever a quietus make?

  IV

O let us talk of quiet that we know,
that we can know, the deep and lovely quiet
of a strong heart at peace!

How can we this, our own quietus, make?

  V

Build then the ship of death, for you must take
the longest journey, to oblivion.

And die the death, the long and painful death
that lies between the old self and the new.

Already our bodies are fallen, bruised, badly bruised,
already our souls are oozing through the exit
of the cruel bruise.

Already the dark and endless ocean of the end
is washing in through the breaches of our wounds,
already the flood is upon us.

Oh build your ship of death, your little ark
and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine
for the dark flight down oblivion.

  VI

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul
has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

We are dying, we are dying, we are all of us dying
and nothing will stay the death-flood rising within us
and soon it will rise on the world, on the outside world.

We are dying, we are dying, piecemeal our bodies are dying
and our strength leaves us,
and our soul cowers naked in the dark rain over the flood,
cowering in the last branches of the tree of our life.

  VII

We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do
is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship
of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.

A little ship, with oars and food
and little dishes, and all accoutrements
fitting and ready for the departing soul.

Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,
upon the flood’s black waste
upon the waters of the end
upon the sea of death, where still we sail
darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.

There is no port, there is nowhere to go
only the deepening blackness darkening still
blacker upon the soundless, ungurgling flood
darkness at one with darkness, up and down
and sideways utterly dark, so there is no direction any more.

And the little ship is there; yet she is gone.
She is not seen, for there is nothing to see her by.
She is gone! gone! and yet
somewhere she is there.
Nowhere!

  VIII

And everything is gone, the body is gone
completely under, gone, entirely gone.
The upper darkness is heavy as the lower,
between them the little ship
is gone
she is gone.

It is the end, it is oblivion.

  IX

And yet out of eternity a thread
separates itself on the blackness,
a horizontal thread
that fumes a little with pallor upon the dark.

Is it illusion? or does the pallor fume
A little higher?

Ah wait, wait, for there’s the dawn,
the cruel dawn of coming back to life
out of oblivion.

Wait, wait, the little ship
drifting, beneath the deathly ashy grey
of a flood-dawn.

Wait, wait! even so, a flush of yellow
and strangely, O chilled wan soul, a flush of rose.

A flush of rose, and the whole thing starts again.

  X

The flood subsides, and the body, like a worn sea-shell
emerges strange and lovely.
And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing
on the pink flood,
and the frail soul steps out, into the house again
filling the heart with peace.

Swings the heart renewed with peace
even of oblivion.

Oh build your ship of death. Oh build it!
for you will need it.
For the voyage of oblivion awaits you.³⁸

We come into the world, and from that moment we begin to die. Life is the art of learning how to die. Now that we are in the end times, not only are all individuals dying, but society is dying as well. We need to build arks to carry us safely across the threshold of death. The most perfect ark is prayer, but only prayer from the heart, not rote, mechanical prayer. With the help of our prayers, our love of the Divine, and the intercessory prayers of others, we can make it across the threshold. We may see horrors, but worst of all, we may experience closeness to oblivion, which is the greatest of hells, and which the Buddhists call Nirvana, and perversely claim is the goal of existence, but with faith in the love of the Divine we can sail on, sail on, out of the darkness and into the light, the majestic light of the Divine. To come to this light we must learn from the great living and departed saints and live the way the ancients lived, namely fully religious in every cell of our body, as Lawrence describes:

Once it was all bright and dancing; the delight of the underworld; honouring the dead with wine, and flutes playing for a dance, and limbs whirling and pressing. And it was deep and sincere honour rendered to the dead and to the mysteries. It is contrary to our ideas; but the ancients had their own philosophy for it. As the pagan old writer says: For no part of us nor of our bodies shall be, which doth not feel religion: and let there be no lack of singing for the soul, no lack of leaping and of dancing for the knees and heart; for all these know the gods.³⁹

The ship of Death. [3]

Have you built your ship of death, oh have you?
Oh build your ship of death, for you will need it.

Now in the twilight, sit by the invisible sea
of peace, and build your little ship
of death, that will carry the soul
on its last journey, on and on, so still
so beautiful, over the last of seas.

When the day comes, that will come
Oh think of it in the twilight peacefully!
the last day, and the setting forth
on the longest journey, over the hidden sea
to the last wonder of oblivion.

Oblivion, the last wonder!
when we have trusted ourselves entirely
to the unknown, and are taken up
out of our little ships of death
into pure oblivion.

Oh build your ship of death, be building it now
with dim, calm thoughts and quiet hands
putting its timbers together in the dusk,
rigging its mast with the silent, invisible sail
that will spread in death to the breeze
of the kindness of the cosmos, that will waft
the little ship with its soul to the wonder-goal.

Ah, if you want to live in peace on the face of the earth
then build your ship of death, in readiness
for the longest journey, over the last of seas.⁴⁰

The Marxists and other materialists want to build paradise on earth, but there can never be paradise for those who have no peace in their hearts, and those who have no connection to the Divine can never truly be at peace. If you want peace here and now, you must, as one of the Athonite saints stated, “go and hug a tree.” Go hug a tree, watch the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, come into touch with the cosmos, and pray to all the manifestations of the Divine, along with the Divine as such. One can come into touch by getting out of the head and into the heart, and the surest path to this is constant invocatory prayer. All lives! This is a truth proclaimed first by Heraclitus, and later by the greatest saints of many traditions. All lives. Come to realize this, and come into touch with the living cosmos, and finally the living God, and you will see that death doesn’t exist. As Klages, building on Heraclitus, writes:

Just as the Eleatics had discovered being, it was Heraclitus who discovered actuality, which he renders in the world-renowned formula: “All things are in flux” [panta rhei]; the flux is the very essence of the world, or, in other words, the world is a happening without a substrate. Heraclitus is not, however, content merely to theorize about the eternal stream, for he also discovers in the world-process the phenomenon of rhythm; in other words, he is the discoverer of polarity. With the aid of that concept, he clarifies the semblance of existence [Dasein] of that which endures as analogous to what we today would call “stationary equilibrium,” i.e., the equilibrium of two contra-directed processes.

For Heraclitus, everything is alive. To him both the living and the dead truly live. Both the living and the dead are but formal manifestations of the primordial life of the world itself. And here we encounter a discovery which distinguishes the speculations of this outstanding philosopher from those of all previous thinkers: the idea that individual life, as the form of arrested, or deficient, life—which takes the “road upwards” to attain to dissolution—can, on the other hand, lead to the highest liberation and to the greatest vital plenitude as well. Thus, death appears as a liberation to a loftier form of cosmic life, as opposed to a temporally-restricted organic existence [Dasein]. Furthermore, sleep as the mediating transition to death, can be seen as a prototype of a fulfilled vitality…Hitherto, the doctrine of Heraclitus has been seen as emerging “all of a piece,” and this doctrine is, admittedly, the most profound of all philosophical systems. Sadly, however, even this philosopher of cosmic life went off the rails when he dragged in the theory of the logos… which he calls an ordering, rationalizing, regulating power, a “law” decreed by the transcendent ruler “Zeus.” And this is not just the misuse of a word!⁴¹

All Souls Day.

Be careful, then, and be gentle about death.
For it is hard to die, it is difficult to go through
the door, even when it opens.

And the poor dead, when they have left the walled
and silvery city of the now hopeless body
where are they to go, O where are they to go?

They linger in the shadow of the earth.
The earth’s long conical shadow is full of souls
that cannot find the way across the sea of change.

Be kind, Oh be kind to your dead
and give them a little encouragement
and help them to build their little ship of death

For the soul has a long, long journey after death
to the sweet home of pure oblivion.
Each needs a little ship, a little ship
and the proper store of meal for the longest journey.

Oh, from out of your heart
provide for your dead once more, equip them
like departing mariners, lovingly.⁴²

All living people who love the Divine should pray for the souls of the departed, even the souls of those they never knew. Sometimes one’s salvation is close to a precipice and the saving grace for that person’s soul is the intercession of a saint, a loved one, or even a simple, God-fearing, humble person. So pray for those who have departed, as you would wish for those persons to pray for you once you have departed.

In this day and age miracles, prayer, intercession with the divine, etc. are no longer believed in, even by many people claiming to be religious. Nearly the entirety of Protestantism does away with the essence of Christianity. When many Protestants deny the incarnation, the virgin birth, the miracles of Jesus, and so on, they deny the core of their own religion. Aside from materialistic atheism, both liberal historical-critical studies of religions, and conservative fundamentalism are poisons. The true religion is the religion of the heart and the imagination. A religion of the head may make one a better person… or it may not, but a religion of the imaginative heart has the power to save. Lawrence writes:

We are full of the wind of thought-forms, and starved for a good carrot. I don’t care what a man sets out to prove, so long as he will interest me and carry me away. I don’t in the least care whether he proves his point or not, so long as he has given me a real imaginative experience by the way, and not another set of bloated thought-forms. We are starved to death, fed on the eternal sodom-apples of thought-forms. What we want is complete imaginative experience, which goes through the whole soul and body. Even at the expense of reason we want imaginative experience. For reason is certainly not the final judge of life.⁴³

Beware the unhappy dead!

Beware the unhappy dead thrust out of life
unready, unprepared, unwilling, unable
to continue on the longest journey.

Oh, now as November draws near
the grey, grey reaches of earth’s shadow,
the long mean marginal stretches of our existence
are crowded with lost souls, the uneasy dead
that cannot embark on the slinking sea beyond.

Oh, now they moan and throng in anger, and press back
through breaches in the walls of this our by-no-means impregnable
      existence
seeking their old haunts with cold ghostly rage
old haunts, old habitats, old hearths,
old places of sweet life from which they are thrust out
and can but haunt in disembodied rage.

Oh, but beware, beware the angry dead.
Who knows, who knows how much our modern woe
is due to the angry unappeased dead
that were thrust out of life, and now come back at us
malignant, malignant, for we will not succour them.

Oh, on this day for the dead, now November is here
set a place for the dead, with a cushion and soft seat
and put a plate, and put a wine-glass out
and serve the best of food, the fondest wine
for your dead, your unseen dead, and with your hearts
speak with them and give them peace and do them honour.

Or else beware their angry presence, now
within your walls, within your very heart.
Oh, they can lay you waste, the angry dead.
Perhaps even now you are suffering from the havoc they make
unknown within your breast and your deadened loins.⁴⁴

When a person dies who is lacking in belief and faith, and who is greatly attached to the things of this world, his soul finds it difficult to journey to higher realms. When these souls cling fiercely to the things of this life, they hang around the earthly plane, poisoning the air with their debased attachments and howls of regret. Sometimes these spirits are evil, but more often than not, they are simply lost and are in need of our love and compassion. So, we should all pray for the souls of the departed so as to intercede for them and to help them slowly along the longest journey.

Ah, even the great men, saints and prophets of the past haunt us. Lawrence stood alone and it was better for his legacy. So many great, saintly men and women have ascended to the Divine, but their followers, mired in the things of this world, have made a mess of their teachings. Who could have been a greater man than Christ, and yet, who could be worse than some modern Christians (in name only), who claim to follow Christ, yet espouse doctrines of hate. The true Christian message is radical, and a true Christian would have to give up many of the things of this world. But, alas, the men have betrayed the master. Perhaps it would have been better for the prophets to have stood alone, finding God on the mountaintops or in the deserts. As Jeffers writes:

                                    Yes. Alas then, poor ghost,
Nietzsche or Jesus, hermit, martyr, starved prophet,
Were you honest while you lived? You are not now.
You have found your following and it corrupts you; all greatness
Involves betrayal, of the people by a man
Or of a man by the people. Better to have stood
Forever alone. Better been mute as a fish,
Or an old stone on the mountain, where no man comes
But only the wilderness-eyeing hawk with her catch
And feeds in peace, delicately, with little beakfuls,
While far down the long slope gleams the pale sea.⁴⁵

After All Saints Day.

Wrapped in the dark-red mantle of warm memories
the little, slender soul sits swiftly down, and takes the oars
and draws away, away, towards dark depths
wafting with warm love from still-living hearts
breathing on his small frail sail, and helping him on
to the fathomless deeps ahead, far, far from the grey shores
of marginal existence.⁴⁶

Pray, pray for your dead. Your loving thoughts and warm breath will help the little soul to move forward on its journey. Woe be unto you and your loved ones if you don’t pray for their souls. We all, living and dead, need prayer. But, you say you cannot pray because you don’t believe in God. The living and Almighty God is real. You don’t need hundreds of pages of scholastic philosophy to prove it either. All you need to do is open your eyes and see the ever-present living revelation of God that is the cosmos. Lawrence proves the existence of God, conclusively, in a few short words:

Now lest there seem an element of sentimentality or falsity […] let us ask ourselves again, do we really believe in Almighty God, anyhow? Are not the words cant words, nowadays?

From the last corner of the soul comes the confession: There is Almighty God.—With the reason, we think: Ah, in the cosmos of the astronomists, where then is this Almighty God?—But the reason answers herself: The cosmos brought forth all the world, and brought forth me. It brought forth my mind, my will, and my soul. Therefore there must be that in the cosmos which can bring forth all things, including mind and will and feeling. Therefore there must be that in the cosmos which contains the essence, at least, or the potentiality, of all things, known and unknown. That in the universe which contains the potentiality of all things, contains the potency also of thought and act and feeling and will, along with the rest. And this terrific and frightening and delighted potency I call Almighty God. I think of it, and am filled with fear—fear of my own crass presumptuousness,—and filled with a sense of delight and liberation. If there is Almighty God, I care about nothing else. There is Almighty God, and I am delighted, the whole burden of my fear shifts over.

There is Almighty God. The next question, still more serious, is how to come into living contact.

How did men in the past come into contact? The way of Jesus is good, but we want a greater way, a more ample contact. I do not want to be safe in the arms of Jesus. I am not safe in the arms of Jesus, for my soul cries out to seek Almighty God. And I will seek down any avenue.⁴⁷

Now, if you can believe in God, you must then come into contact. How does a person come into contact with the living God? There are many ways, and a man should seek down any and every path, no matter how winding, to find the source of his being. The revelation of nature, the remnants of ancient wisdom, and living spiritual traditions are all valid paths to God. Sometimes the path we least expect opens before us if we are receptive to it. To paraphrase something Simone Weil stated in Waiting for God, sometimes if a person desperately seeks the truth, even if he runs away from Christ, he might run right into His loving hands.

Forget

To be able to forget is to be able to yield
to God who dwells in deep oblivion.
Only in sheer oblivion are we with God.
For when we know in full, we have left off knowing.⁴⁸

If a soul comes to the pinnacle of the longest journey and attains theosis, it does not lose personality, nor it is absorbed into a formless divine essence. Memories remain forever. But, to attain such a state, one must forget all that is inessential, all worldly cares and profane attachments. A man cannot raise himself to God, but must be humble, empty himself, and allow God to raise him up. A man who is full of himself and his ego has no room for God, but a man who empties himself of his egoism, hubris, greed, and attachments can find that God fills the once hollow places. Yield to God, and God will come to you; fight with God or try to storm the walls of Heaven, and you will find nothing. Profane and worldly knowledge about mundane matters, science, and technology are filling up spaces in the head and heart that should be reserved for the Divine. The surest way to reopen those spaces is to escape from the cares of the world, and to perform constant invocation. We all must follow the way of the pilgrim. And yet, we must know in order not to know. We must study ancient philosophy, the revelation of nature, the lives of saintly people, and various sacred writings. We must study these things to replace the worldly technical knowledge we have accumulated, and to help us up the ladder of divine ascent. As Lawrence writes:

Yet we must know, if only in order to learn not to know. The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn how not to know. That is, how not to interfere. That is, how to live dynamically, from the great Source, and not statically, like machines driven by ideas and principles from the head, or automatically, from one fixed desire. At last, knowledge must be put into its true place in the living activity of man. And we must know deeply, in order even to do that.⁴⁹

Know-all.

Man knows nothing
till he knows how not-to-know.

And the greatest of teachers will tell you:
The end of all knowledge is oblivion
sweet, dark oblivion, when I cease
even from myself, and am consummated.⁵⁰

A person who thinks he knows, knows nothing at all. Only through the wiping away of the stain of the modern mindset may a man open himself to divine realities. Even our basic assumptions about logic are flawed: We think yes and no are mutually exclusive, but the ancient Egyptians, certain Greek philosophers, and the early Christians knew something could be both one and many simultaneously. Egocentricity is a form of death. Only through the act of dying to the self in this life, may we attain closeness to the Divine in the coming life. The “sweet, dark oblivion” Lawrence speaks of is the release from all superficial attachments of this world and the death of the self-centered ego. When this happens, it is not the end of life, but the birth of a new, higher life, a consummation and crowning upon the completion of the longest journey. A man reaching this state, reborn, resurrected, would be the man he was in this world, but cleansed of all impurities. Lawrence describes this mystery as follows:

When we know that the unique, incommutable creative mystery of the Self is within us and precedes us, then we shall be able to take our full being from this mystery. We shall at last learn the pure lesson of knowing not-to-know. We shall know so perfectly that in fulness of knowledge we shall yield to the mystery, and become spontaneous in full consciousness. Our will will be so strong that we can simply, through sheer strength, defer from willing, accepting the spontaneous mystery, and saving it in its issue from the mechanical lusts of righteousness or power.⁵¹

The knowing how not-to-know, as Lawrence made clear, is not an emptiness, but a fullness; it is the perfection of man through the communion of microcosm and macrocosm, of Self and God. The man who attains to theosis attains to the fullness of being and can never again be afflicted with the stain of automatism. The divinized man yields to the mystery of the dark God, and receives in return the power to act truly, freely, and authentically within the loving embrace of the Divine.

Tabernacle

Come, let us build a temple to oblivion
with seven veils, and an innermost
Holy of Holies of sheer oblivion.

And there oblivion dwells, and the silent soul
may sink into god at last, having passed the veils.

But any one who shall ascribe attributes to god or oblivion
let him be cast out, for blasphemy.
For God is a deeper forgetting far than sleep
and all description is a blasphemy.⁵²

This poem is one of Lawrence’s most esoteric. Suffice it to say that his use of negative words such as oblivion are not meant in a nihilistic sense, but are a prime use of apophatic theology. In simplistic terms, there is a dark God, who is not only real, but is reality itself. Obscuring our perception of this reality are numerous veils (seven in the Bible being symbolic for a great many), such as the material world, the ego, and our attachments to worldly things. Through the sundering of our connection to these veils, and through our coming back into touch with the cosmos, we may come back into connection with the living God, to dwell eternally. The experience of coming into touch with the living God is so ineffable that even the most beautiful and articulate descriptions in human language are slander and blasphemy. We should all want this ineffable experience. We should all want to experience the cosmos as the ancients did. We should all want to be cradled in the hands of the living God. And yet, for so many people, there is nothing to life more than what they see in front of them, the sun is nothing more than a blazing ball of gas, and God doesn’t exist. Woe be unto you nihilists, technologists, robots, and minions of the Machine! Lawrence, emotionally, states what we should truly want to believe in, in distinction to the common beliefs of the present day:

I would like to know the stars again as the Chaldeans knew them, two thousand years before Christ. I would like to be able to put my ego into the sun, and my personality into the moon, and my character into the planets, and live the life of the heavens, as the early Chaldeans did. The human consciousness is really homogeneous. There is no complete forgetting, even in death. So that somewhere within us the old experience of the Euphrates, Mesopotamia between the rivers, lives still. And in my Mesopotamian self I long for the sun again, and the moon and stars, for the Chaldean sun and the Chaldean stars. I long for them terribly. Because our sun and our moon are only things we know but never feel by experience. By experience, we should feel the sun as the savages feel him, we should “know” him as the Chaldeans knew him, in a terrific embrace. But our experience of the sun is dead, we are cut off. All we have now is the thought-form of the sun. He is a blazing ball of gas, he has spots occasionally, from some sort of indigestion, and he makes you brown and healthy if you let him. The first two “facts” we should never have known if men with telescopes, called astronomers, hadn’t told us. It is obvious, they are mere thought-forms. The third “fact”, about being brown and healthy, we believe because the doctors have told us it is so. As a matter of fact, many neurotic people become more and more neurotic, the browner and “healthier” they become by sun-baking. The sun can rot as well as ripen. So the third fact is also a thought-form.

And that is all we have, poor things, of the sun. Two or three cheap and inadequate thought-forms. Where, for us, is the great and royal sun of the Chaldeans? Where even, for us, is the sun of the Old Testament, coming forth like a strong man to run a race? We have lost the sun. We have lost the sun, and we have found a few miserable thought-forms. A ball of blazing gas! with spots! he browns you!⁵³

Shadows.

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

And if, as weeks go round, in the dark of the moon
my spirit darkens and goes out, and soft strange gloom
pervades my movements and my thoughts and words
then I shall know that I am walking still
with God, we are close together now the moon’s in shadow.

And if, as autumn deepens and darkens
I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms
and trouble and dissolution and distress
and then the softness of deep shadows folding, folding
around my soul and spirit, around my lips
so sweet, like a swoon, or more like the drowse of a low, sad song
singing darker than the nightingale, on, on to the solstice
and the silence of short days, the silence of the year, the shadow,

then I shall know that my life is moving still
with the dark earth, and drenched
with the deep oblivion of earth’s lapse and renewal.

And if, in the changing phases of man’s life
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life
is only the leavings of a life:

and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches of
    renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange flower
such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me—

then I must know that still
I am in the hands of the unknown God,
he is breaking me down to his own oblivion
to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.⁵⁴

Shadows is one of Lawrence’s greatest poems. Here Lawrence makes clear that oblivion in God is not death, is not some sort of nihilistic nothingness, but is the final stage on the path to perfection. It is the planting of the bulb in the fertile soil of God so that one may rise up and be born anew, bright-petalled, numinous, a new man. In this life, a person close to God may not only experience suffering, but may suffer more than the average person. Just look to Lawrence, Simone Weil, and many great saints to see how many of those closest to God suffer the most. Why is this? It is because the man in the street is left alone by God, but the saint is being broken down, bit by bit, by the hands of the living God, so that he may end his life in a state of theosis and may join God as soon as his soul departs from this world.

The lights we shower ourselves and blind ourselves with obscure the ever-present reality of the divine presence. The Divine is not found behind a computer screen or under an electric light, but in the shadows. As David Bentley Hart writes:

In the modern world, flooded as it is at all times by shrill, brittle electric incandescences, lit by the leprous white glow of computer screens, we desperately need more shadows… more love of shadow as such. We need those places and moments in which the mind sees nameless things moving in the obscurity, in the dusk, and occasionally even knows itself as conjuring the world out of a more primordial, more timeless dreaming.⁵⁵

To look at life the right way is to see God in the sun and in the shadows. God can be found everywhere! Even death is no longer terrifying when one realizes that it is just the cloudy day of life turning to a temporary dark night of the soul, to be followed by an eternal day, the greatest of days, the day of the soul’s marriage to the great God. Lawrence writes:

[I]f you start to reason, you may argue that the sun is a phenomenal body, therefore it came into existence, therefore it will pass out of existence, therefore the very sun is tragic in its nature.

But this is just argument. We think, because we have to light a candle in the dark, therefore some First Cause had to kindle the sun in the infinite darkness of the beginning.

The argument is entirely shortsighted and specious. We do not know in the least whether the sun ever came into existence, and we have not the slightest possible ground for conjecturing that the sun will ever pass out of existence. All that we do know, by actual experience, is that shadow comes into being when some material object intervenes between us and the sun, and that shadow ceases to exist when the intervening object is removed. So that, of all temporal or transitory or bound-to-cease things that haunt our existence, shadow, or darkness, is the one which is purely and simply temporal. We can think of death, if we like, as of something permanently intervening between us and the sun: and this is at the root of the southern, underworld idea of death. But this doesn’t alter the sun at all. As far as experience goes, in the human race, the one thing that is always there is the shining sun, and dark, shadow is an accident of intervention.

Hence, strictly, there is no tragedy. The universe contains no tragedy, and man is only tragical because he is afraid of death. For my part, if the sun always shines, and always will shine, in spite of millions of clouds of words, then death, somehow, does not have many terrors. In the sunshine, even death is sunny. And there is no end to the sunshine. […] The sun always shines. It is our fault if we don’t think so.⁵⁶

The sun always shines, God always is, and the soul shall never cease to be. One of the great tragedies of the modern world is the loss of belief in the afterlife. Harry Crosby issues a great, passionate corrective against this gross error of the modern world:

So many nowadays who believe there is no after-life. And science has so many seemingly conclusive proofs. But for me there is the soul absolutely without one doubt whether it is a shadow or a tree or a fountain or a sun and I believe this soul is as eternal as eternity, as eternal as the Sun.⁵⁷

Change

Do you think it is easy to change?
Ah, it is very hard to change and be different.
It means passing through the waters of oblivion.⁵⁸

Becoming like unto God is not easy; it is the hardest thing imaginable. To be able to come close to the great, dark God, one must die before he dies, purifying his soul of all the flaws of egoism, selfishness, and so on. A man is not what he thinks he is: a modern man looks at himself and thinks he is a body and brain. But, machines have bodies and computers can calculate and store information. We must die to the self we think we are—which is hard—so that we may become the self we were always meant to be. It is hard for a fetus to come into the world or a caterpillar to become a butterfly, but the end result is spectacular. How sad the world would be if all the caterpillars decided never to change, yet we have come to a point in human history where people not only don’t want to change, but most no longer even think that change is possible. How sad this is:

How dreary things are when they never flicker and waver and change, when they keep on going on being the dreary same, and never rise on tiptoe, nor shake their fingers and become different, but pride themselves on their dead-head fixity. How stupid man has been, craving for permanency and machine-made perfection, when the only truly permanent things are those that are always quivering and departing, like fire and like water. After all, the sunrays and the rain have already wiped away a good deal of the Pyramids, which are so stupid and pretentiously everlasting. Who on earth wants to be a Pyramid, when we are all made up of little flames and rain-drops?⁵⁹

Even the dark God, made up of primordial Fire changes. Only machines never change in essence, always going round and round with the same dull motion. Let us heed the call to change now, and to become greater than we ever thought we could be.

Phoenix

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing?
dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change.

The phoenix renews her youth
only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down
to hot and flocculent ash.
Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest
with strands of down like floating ash
Shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle
immortal bird.⁶⁰

The world is burning and the vast masses of men are being transformed into robots. The principle of evil is ascendant in the form of the Machine. What is to be done? Each individual must change, but that change means the annihilation of the lower-self so that the higher self within one’s breast may shine forth. Do you want to heal the world, then you will need to change. To change, you will need to find a sense of the sacred and put yourself into the hands of the living God, so that you may be broken down and molded anew. The process starts here and now: pray, give away everything you have, retreat to the desert or forest, join a community of fellow sun-men in Rananim, and worship the Divine in all of its myriad manifestations. That is a start, but only a start. Everyone is born dying: the question is will you allow the destructive process of katabolism to break you down into nothing, or will you put yourselves into the hands of the living God to be broken down in order to be born again, a new man? Nothing in this life is harder. No one ever said that the process of theosis was going to be easy. This is why the true forms of Christianity and other religions always emphasized ascetic practices. Two of our greatest modern saints, Simone Weil and D. H. Lawrence became godlike in this world and they suffered for it, but they came out the other side and are resurrected in the presence of God. Build a shrine o ye people to the great saints that have been burnt down to be born anew, for you need their intercession in these times of great turmoil. Build a shrine and burn some incense before your patron saints to symbolize the burning away of your lower self and the ascent of your soul to higher realms to be molded and helped along by those who are close to the great God. The great symbol we need now, more than ever, is that of the phoenix, the immortal bird. Everything is burning now but our souls. Let us put out the fires in the world, but set our souls alight, so that we may be burnt down to nothing, but rise again on a new day, at a new dawn, new men resurrected, godlike, and free from the stain of the Machine.

Bibliography

Brontë, Emily. The Complete Poems. Edited by Janet Gezari. London: Penguin Books, 1992.

Crosby, Harry. Ladders to the Sun. Edited by Tom Jenkins. Sussex: Soul Bay Press, 2013.

Hart, David Bentley. Roland in Moonlight. Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2021.

Jeffers, Robinson. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Edited by Tim Hunt. Vol. Three. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Klages, Ludwig. Cosmogonic Reflections. Translated by Joseph D. Pryce. London: Arktos, 2015.

Lawrence, D. H. Apocalypse. Edited by Mara Kalnins. London: Penguin Books, 1995.

———. John Thomas and Lady Jane. Edited by Roland Gant. New York: The Viking Press, 1974.

———. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious. Edited by Bruce Steele. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

———. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays. Edited by Michael Herbert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

———. Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays. Edited by Simonetta De Filippis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———. Studies in Classic American Literature. Edited by Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

———. The Plumed Serpent. Edited by L. D. Clark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———. The Poems. Edited by Christopher Pollnitz. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

———. Twilight in Italy and Other Essays. Edited by Paul Eggert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

———. Women in Love. London: Everyman’s Library, 1992.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo. The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini. Translated by Stephen Sartarelli. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Picard, Max. The World of Silence. Translated by Stanley Godwin. Eighth Day Press, 2002.

Thomas, R. S. Collected Later Poems. Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2004.

1. Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 333.

2. D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 446–47.

3. D. H. Lawrence, John Thomas and Lady Jane, ed. Roland Gant (New York: The Viking Press, 1974), 99–100.

4. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:528.

5. D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 184.

6. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:528.

7. D. H. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 95.

8. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:531.

9. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, ed. Mara Kalnins (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 79.

10. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:550.

11. D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 105.

12. D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 81.

13. ibid., 389–90.

14. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:550.

15. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 41.

16. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:582–83.

17. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 142.

18. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:584–85.

19. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 187.

20. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:594–97.

21. D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta De Filippis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63.

22. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:597.

23. ibid., 1:637.

24. Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems, ed. Janet Gezari (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 182.

25. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:597.

26. R. S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, 2004), 135.

27. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, 60–63.

28. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:611–12.

29. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, 113.

30. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:612–13.

31. Søren Kierkegaard, quoted in Max Picard, The World of Silence, trans. Stanley Godwin (Eighth Day Press, 2002), 231.

32. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 126–27.

33. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:615.

34. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, 130.

35. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:615–16.

36. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 95–96.

37. Ludwig Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, trans. Joseph D. Pryce (London: Arktos, 2015), 102.

38. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:630–33.

39. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, 54–55.

40. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:633–34.

41. Klages, Cosmogonic Reflections, 66–67.

42. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:635.

43. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 50.

44. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:636–37.

45. Robinson Jeffers, The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt, vol. Three (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988), 23.

46. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:637.

47. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 175.

48. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:639.

49. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, 111.

50. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:639.

51. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 190.

52. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:640.

53. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 51–52.

54. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:640–41.

55. David Bentley Hart, Roland in Moonlight (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2021), 322.

56. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, 237–38.

57. Harry Crosby, Ladders to the Sun, ed. Tom Jenkins (Sussex: Soul Bay Press, 2013), 138.

58. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:641.

59. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, 204.

60. Lawrence, The Poems, 1:641–42.