The Vanishing Point: A Left-Hand Path Reading of Philosophy by Denys Spirin - HTML preview

Chapter 16

Religious delegation is a different species. When a philosopher ontologizes, he installs a substrate and defends it against criticism. When a religion does this, the installation generates a complete architecture — a cosmology, a moral law, behavioral prescriptions, a community that enforces them, and a daily practice that makes the enforcement unnecessary because the subject has internalized the architecture and lives inside it. Plotinus came close to this: he created a theory of virtue, a contemplative practice, and a circle of practitioners who lived by it. Hegel's philosophy generated a political ethics that took itself seriously.

But the philosophical system, however total, addresses the intellect and can be engaged at that level. The religion takes over the entire subject and the ontologization is lived rather than argued.

The earliest and most elaborately articulated instance is the Indian. The Upanishadic identification of Atman with Brahman was examined earlier as a philosophical move, as the intuition of the subject's meta-position in inverted form.

Taken as religious truth, it generates a civilization. There is a single cosmic order ( rita in the Vedic period, dharma in the post-Vedic) and every being has a station within it; it is assigned and enforced across lifetimes through karma, the mechanism by which the ontologized cosmos administers consequences to those who violate or fulfill their place in it. The varnashrama system distributes subjects into positions within the hierarchy, each carrying its own set of duties that the subject cannot revise without tearing the fabric of reality. The practice of yoga and meditation is the prescribed return toward the projected source.

Social order, moral code, contemplative technique, eschatological horizon —

the entire edifice follows from an ontologization of the sixth rung.

The Buddha refused the Brahmanical ontologization and replaced it with dependent origination and emptiness. The religious consequence is a new complete architecture built on the replacement. If there is no self and everything arises in dependence, suffering is the product of clinging to what has no ground, and the only way out of suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path. The monastic 68

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code translates the ontologization into daily behavior — what the monk eats, wears, touches, says, and when. The Buddhist subject lives inside a different projection from the Brahmanical one, but the ontologization still dictates the way of life.

In the Daoist projection, the Dao precedes all naming and all forcing, and the sage does not force. Wu-wei, non-action, is the behavioral consequence. The ruler who governs by wu-wei does not impose distinctions on the people but allows the Dao to operate through him. The Daoist communities cultivated longevity practices, breathing techniques, inner alchemy, and a political quietism that followed from the premise.

The Abrahamic traditions refuse the distribution. The subject's entire meta-position is assigned to a single God who is named and obeyed. As God is personal, the question what is he like becomes urgent in a way it never was for an impersonal order or an unnamed Dao. The answer is the catalog of divine attributes, and each attribute traces to a feature of the subject's activity that has been transformed by the assignment.

The subject can draw any distinction, can invent a boundary that has never been drawn, and nothing prior is needed to authorize the invention. In the hands of a single Being, this becomes omnipotence, the power to do anything.

The subject holds its entire field in meta-position, never losing access to what it has drawn. Received as a property of God, this becomes omniscience, a knowledge of all things — past, present, future, actual and possible. The subject is present wherever a cut is drawn as the condition of the field having positions at all — omnipresence. The subject distinguishes what changes from what persists and finds itself on the side of what persists. This is eternity, and the Boethian-Thomist atemporality is the more accurate rendering, as the subject's relation to time is not a matter of lasting very long. It is never indifferent to its own distinctions; a subject that cared about nothing would distinguish nothing: divine love, God's unconditional care for creation. The world is produced through distinguishing — creation, and the Genesis narrative is transparent about the mechanism: the first act is a separation, light from darkness, and the cosmos unfolds through further separations. The doctrine of creatio continua gives an accurate account of ongoing subjective activity credited to a sustaining agent.

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The consolidation into a single figure is what gives monotheism its psychological force and fragility. Every attribute reinforces every other: omnipotence guarantees that the moral law will be enforced, omniscience means that no violation will escape notice. The subject inhabits a cosmos that is personally super-vised and guaranteed to last.

But any attribute, taken to its conclusion, breaks the theology it was meant to support. Omniscience makes the soteriological drama incoherent. If God knew in advance that Adam would fall, the fall is a scene in a script written by the one who will punish the actor for performing it. If God knew before creating a soul that damnation awaited it, then it is an act of manufacturing the damned.

God tests Abraham with the sacrifice of Isaac, but an omniscient God already knows the outcome. God permits Satan to torment Job, but the torment reveals nothing God did not already know. The biblical narrative requires a God who discovers, responds, is moved, and omniscience eliminates precisely this God.

Omnibenevolence contradicts the scripture it is drawn from. The God of the Old Testament commands the annihilation of the Amalekites down to the in-fants and the cattle, sends the flood that drowns every living thing and saves one family, strikes down the firstborn of Egypt. The apologetic machinery required to reconcile infinite love with these passages runs on the fuel of redefining love until the word no longer means what it does in any other sentence. And hell, if God is omnibenevolent and omnipotent, fractures the system as a whole: the moral order that promises love as its foundation terminates in eternal suffering, and every qualification works by rebuilding the floor under a building whose foundation has already cracked.

Leibniz saved goodness by relocating the constraint: God's omnipotence is unrestricted (any non-contradictory world lies within his power) but divine wisdom and goodness morally incline the will toward the best of all possible worlds. The limitation falls on choice, not on capacity. Process theology saves it by denying omnipotence outright. Open theism ensures freedom by limiting omniscience. Each attempt is a quiet admission that the theology cannot sustain its own premises. The tradition's final defense is the appeal to divine mystery — the ways of God are not the ways of man and the apparent contradictions resolve at a level we cannot reach. The attributes were presented as

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knowable properties of God, the content of revelation and the theology, and the retreat to mystery concedes that the subject cannot understand what it is worshipping. Another defense is the appeal to personal experience: I have felt God's presence, that resolves what argument cannot. This may be an honest report of a real encounter, and it changes nothing about the analysis.

Islam carried the Abrahamic delegation further than Christianity. The word itself means submission, and the tradition built a philosophical machinery to make the submission total.

Avicenna supplied the ontological base. His distinction between essence and existence ( mahiyyah and wujud) established that no thing carries its own existence. The table or the horse does not exist by themselves; the existence is con-ferred by the Necessarily Existent ( wajib al-wujud), who alone exists by virtue of what he is. Everything else is contingent, its being on loan. Where Plotinus'

emanation let things participate in a source they could not exhaust, Avicenna's contingency means that things do not participate at all — they are held in being at each moment by a donor who could withdraw the loan.

Al-Ghazali radicalized the delegation from existence to causality. In the Taha-fut al-Falasifa the fire does not burn cotton. There is no causal connection between any two events. God creates each effect directly at the moment of the event, and what we take for a law of nature is a habit of divine action that God could interrupt without contradiction. The Ash'arite school formalized the doctrine: atoms of matter are created and annihilated at each instant, and the continuity of the world is God's continuous choice to recreate it in a pattern that resembles the previous instant. The fifth rung has been abolished, and its entire content has been absorbed into the sixth. No other tradition went this far. The subject who accepts this picture inhabits a world in which nothing has a nature of its own, every regularity is a revocable divine habit, and the only stable ground is the will of the one who wills everything.

Ibn Arabi's wahdat al-wujud, the unity of being, holds that everything that exists is a self-disclosure ( tajalli) of a single divine reality. The world is a mirror in which God sees his own attributes; the multiplicity of things is the collection of reflections, not of sources. This is close to Advaita Vedanta, but the conse-

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quence for the subject is different. The Advaitin who recognizes Brahman sees himself; the Sufi who reaches fana (annihilation) has been extinguished as a separate locus of will and persists only as a transparent medium through which the divine acts. The delegation is total: nothing remains in the subject that the subject can call its own.

The same projection, softened and diffused, reappears in the spiritual movements that reject organized religion. The Universe wants the best for you.

Everything happens for a reason. The personal God has been replaced by an impersonal benevolence that still does the same work: it guarantees that the subject's world is ordered, meaningful, and favorably disposed toward the subject.

New Age spirituality, the law of attraction, popular Buddhism stripped of its philosophy, the therapeutic language of the universe sending signs — each of these is a diluted sixth-rung projection that has traded doctrinal rigor for emo-tional comfort and institutional authority for personal resonance.

The esoteric traditions call this direction the Right-Hand Path: the subject delegates its will to a construct it treats as external and superior. Moral systems perform the same transfer without the theological label. Duty, the good, justice, human dignity carry the authority of commandments, demand obedience, and deflect scrutiny by the same device: self-evidence where theology places mystery.