Red-pilled Spirituality
For some spiritual consciousness opens their eyes to the madness of the progressive world order. Yet others promote a spirituality that is immersed in the illusions of the clown world matrix. Sadly, in the minds of many, spirituality is associated with nauseating leftist drivel. What is the difference between Red-pilled spirituality and its leftist doppelganger? To answer that I will first discuss red pilled spirituality and then describe the degraded spirituality of the left.
Saint Bonaventure, in The Journey of the Mind into God, provides the key to an authentically red-pilled spirituality. The very title of his book gives part of the key in that it is the journey of the mind into God. Red pilled spirituality has a cognitive element. In the prologue to this great book Saint Bonaventure talks about cognitive spiritual knowledge and the burning desire of the soul for this knowledge.
Bonaventure advocates a noetic, that is cognitive approach to spirituality, which he calls speculation. Since it is “though the lightning of speculation, by which the mind thoroughly turns itself [se convertit] most directly and most intensely towards the rays of light.” He writes that one can only taste God after: “the mirror [speculum] of our mind has been wiped and polished.” The saint teaches that is through metaphysical and mystical speculation that “you raise your eyes towards the rays of wisdom glittering in His reflections [speculis].” For this reason Bonaventure counsels that one must not hurry through metaphysical speculations “but ruminate (on them) with the greatest of lingering [morosissime].”
It is important that when we discuss words like mind, wisdom and speculation we understand how the saints and sages of antiquity used these terms. In my blog post Ancient Wisdom, Leftist Folly, I wrote:
Words like mind or wisdom have been trivialized by modernity and have lost their ancient meaning. For us the mind is the analytical reason celebrated in the modern academy. For the ancients it was different kind of faculty altogether. The mind for them was capable of a higher order cognition hidden from modern academics. The mind was capable of an intuitive form of cognition which could lay hold of absolute reality. It is this kind of cognition that the ancient sages and saints called wisdom. Wisdom is an intuitive grasp of the sacred divine absolute. Wisdom is the presence of God intuited in the intellect.
Mankind was created to love and know this holy divine wisdom. Nothing has value without wisdom. Nothing is good when joined with folly. Wisdom is the realization of the highest faculties of mankind; thus, to become wise is to know both inward peace and bliss.
It is this higher order intuitive cognition that Bonaventure calls speculation. The foundation for a radically red pilled spirituality is found in a deep intuitive gnosis of both God and of Christian Platonist metaphysics. Christian Platonism is the metaphysical tradition of both the ancient Fathers of the Church and of medieval Saint Bonaventure.
The other factor that Bonaventure mentions is desire. This desire is for gnosis. This is true philosophy, that is authentic love of wisdom. This desire cleanses and purifies the mind and prepares it for gnosis. This desire is necessary for gnosis because as Bonaventure writes, “one has not been disposed in any manner [modo] to divine contemplations, which lead towards mental eccesses [excessus], except with Daniel one be a man of desires.”
This desire Bonaventure connects with the blood of Jesus shed at the crucifixion. At the cross one sees the desire of God to be known by man. When the desire for God to be known is met by the desire of man to know, then one enters into heavenly wisdom “through the Blood of the Lamb as through a gate.” Another source for this understanding of the mystery of the blood of Jesus is Meditations on the Tarot by Anonymous. Anonymous being, in this case, the great esoteric Roman Catholic Christian thinker Valentin Tomberg.
In contrast modern leftist spirituality is basically emotive and anti-noetic. At the same time, it is mechanical and lacks desire. These defects can be seen in the mess moderns have made of Centering Prayer. Centering prayer is a modernization of an ancient prayer technique famously associated with the fourteenth century work the “Cloud of Unknowing.” The Cloud of Unknowing presents a valid spiritual technique that involves the repetition of a monosyllabic word to focus one’s desire on this spiritual gnosis of God. The unknowing refers to the suppression of the lower mind so that nothing would obstruct the mind from true spiritual gnosis.
But the modern teaching totally dispenses with the desire for true spiritual gnosis. The modern teaching seeks to suppress cognition itself in the belief that when thought is suppressed somehow God shows up. The idea that an empty mind is full of God can be nowhere found in the Christian tradition. This is a distortion of the teaching of the Cloud of Unknowing. The source of the idea is found in Transcendental Meditation. Centering prayer advocates have twisted the Cloud of Unknowing to fit the template of TM. The result is mindless emotive talk of unity and oneness combined with a politics of globalist egalitarianism.
Those who have true gnosis understand that being is ordered hierarchically, with the varied levels of being tied together analogically. Duality and non-duality are to the wise equally ultimate. Therefore, reality cannot be reduced to egalitarian sameness. Thus, those with true gnosis are red pilled and see through the lie’s progressives tell about the sexes, and sexuality, and equality. Those with true gnosis know the horror that awaits mankind when all ethnic, cultural, and sexual differences are blended in the promised globalist egalitarian soup.