This is my favorite translation. I consider it fairly invaluable. Bonus..
I found this very useful for learning the Abjad. It's partially here just for me to come back to, haha.
Regarding the ‘authority’ of Prophet Muhammad, I argue, using the Koran, that the Prophet Muhammad is nothing beyond a Rasul, a messenger, for a religious call, working purely for the sake of the call on behalf of Islam. With respect to the ‘authority’ of God, I first argue that in Anarca-Islam “there is no compulsion in religion” (The Holy Koran, Chapter 2, Chapter of “The Cow:” Verse 26). That is, according to Anarca-Islam and in line with the Koranic verse cited, anarchists are not required to accept Anarca-Islam’s God, only to recognize the right of a Muslim to believe in God. Second, I argue, in line with Newman, that “God has not been completely usurped…as has always been claimed [in anarchism]… only reinvented in the form of essence” (2001: 6). According to this analysis, anarchists ought to acknowledge the difference between resisting God and resisting institutionalized religion. When anarchists resist God, God is not truly the subject and object of resistance. Rather anarchists are resisting institutionalized religion. There is a difference between the two and therefore the two must not to be conflated.
From a theoretical standpoint, the non-dichotomization of religious and radical identities is explained in two ways. Polland (2007) argues that historians have taken their cues from ‘the rabbis or the radical leaders’ who tended toward greater ideological rigidity, whereas at the popular level ideological fluidity prevailed. Turk and Cohn (2018) contend that it is not simply a matter of distinguishing between the elite and the masses, but also between different ways of understanding Judaism. A similar position is also adopted by Carolin Kosuch (2019). Among radicals, those inclined to reduce Judaism to orthodoxy (and certain forms of orthodoxy at that) tended to reject it altogether, while those prepared to tolerate or to embrace religion also understood Judaism in more pluralistic terms. Hence the secularized theologies of anarchists such as Aharon David Gordon and Martin Buber, who had exited the fold of traditional observance but continued to draw deeply on kabbalah and hasidism.
Matthew 25:31–46 is not only the end and summation of Jesus’ teaching; it is also a vision of the end of the world. In effect, it is a hellfire sermon. Hellfire sermons are no longer popular, and perhaps this is one reason why Matthew 25 is not more frequently quoted. Actually, it is a heaven-and-hell- fire sermon, but it is not built around the usual sins and virtues. There is nothing about sex in it. The only questions asked are, “Did you feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the shelterless, visit those who are sick or in prison?” No questions are really asked, of course. The Son of Man sits on his throne and separates the sheep from the goats. He knows. He does not have to ask questions. He tells the sheep, “I was hungry and you gave me food…. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” And to the goats, “I was hungry and you gave me no food…. Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Both groups, surprised, ask him, “When did we do this to you?” And he responds, “Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.”
The central objective of the Mysteries assumes three interrelated aspects: the arousal, shaping and projection of energy; possession by the wilderness or chthonic energies; and liberation of the involuntary through the gateway of the voluntary. In the process of achieving this triple objective, there results an erosion of ego boundaries, a concentrated assault on individuation intended to transfigure any incipient tendencies toward characterological — and hence social — authoritarianism. Each of the senses and faculties are sensitized to fever pitch prior to derangement into a liberatingly integrative synaesthesia. Belief remains irrelevant: emphasis falls on participation and experience, traditionally experience of the three observances, the things visualized/envisioned, vocalized and enacted. Ultimately, this process becomes ecstatic and convivial, but the initiation process remains daunting because of its extreme nature, its alluring aspects notwithstanding. Greater danger, however, threatens those who linger this side of paradise. There are fewer perils in the initiation process because coercion remains absent there. The routes to the ecstatic release of the involuntary are always voluntary. The individual volition retains its will until it becomes subsumed within the wilderness, at which juncture coercion becomes impossible.
The process begins with purgations, both inner and outer. Fasting signifies cleansing: it purges inner poisons, those imbibed through consumption, and lays the basis for more intense experience. The effects of drinking alcohol on an empty stomach are well known. Fasting prepares the ground, adds an edge, an appetite. The pangs of hunger prefigure other intractable urges, beyond rational control, which Mystery rites evoke. Immersion — physical submersion, particularly in the sea or other saline water — complements fasting by cleansing the corporeal exterior, and also presages the later total immersion in the oceanic consciousness.
A degree of sleeplessness remains important in ritualistic preparation. The lack of sleep breaks down inner resistances and in particular undermines and disorientates codifying intellectual processes. Trains of rational thought are disrupted as the wish to merge into dreamtime increases.
In such conditions satire becomes an effective instrument. Satyrs ridicule and humiliate, but also provoke laughter through ribaldry and the ritual uncovery of the genitals. The use of satire ensures that the whole process will not be regarded with excessive pomposity or piety. Sacred rites are performed in a spirit of play, which includes festivity, ludic fantasy and celebration, not the grave sanctimoniousness familiar from hierarchical ceremonies. Ridicule and mocking humour break down the sense of self, the egotism of self-importance and self-esteem. And when these defences are down, ribaldry arouses laughter, another refractory wilderness force, but one which assumes a uniquely human form.
Dance promotes the initiation process by encouraging enraptured abandonment to a syncopated musical beat. The dancer releases inhibitions, flings aside rigidities, be they postural, behavioural or characterological. Choreography allows a reattunement and a realignment with natural rhythms. And these compelling rhythms constitute another aspect of possession by the sacred wilderness.
Singly or collectively, individuals enter labyrinthine structures, often caves or underground passages, signifying their vision quest through the tunnels and caverns of the spirit. Mystery rites are conducted at night during periods when alignments of cosmological energy — expressed, for example, in the seasons, the phases of the moon, and astrological sitings — are favourable. So contrasts between light and darkness are maximal anyway. But descent into the labyrinth entails quitting this familiar if nocturnal terrain for the total darkness of the Earth and the unknown. The remainder of the initiation process unfolds here, even though the gloom becomes iridescent with illumination. Here the meaning of the Mysteries becomes apparent. The word “mystery” derives from the Greek term myein, to close. Enclosed in complete darkness and silence, the senses and faculties are sealed and fall into abeyance. Subsequently, each will be sensitized and deranged into an ecstatic synaesthesia, and the mystai (or initiates) will become epoptai, beholders. But at this juncture they become physically lost and mentally disorientated. Loss of self provokes bewilderment, amazement, panic — words which all originally denoted a positive surrender of rational faculties to the sacred wilderness. Possessed by chthonic energies who conduct them through the intricacies of the maze, they reach the matrix of the labyrinth. Both physically and spiritually, they enter the underworld, the womb of Mother Earth, the cauldron of transformation, in order to experience a symbolic death and rebirth on an expanded psychic level.
Hallucinogens are administered by facilitators or hierophants, those who reveal sacred things. Psychotropic drugs expedite a further dissolution of socially conditioned rational constraints and liberate the imagination. But because they derive from poisonous substances, they also transport individuals to the brink of physical decease. This remains necessary to facilitate a maximal capacity for kinesis in unlimited dimensions. And it becomes possible because those aspects of the wilderness embodied in the psychotropic properties of certain plants possess the initiates.
Hallucinogenic effects increase the intensity of magical or kundalini techniques. Through magic rituals, energies are evoked from chthonic regions in the identical realms of the Earth and the unconscious. Physical descent into the underworld finds a complement in a spiral downward into the spirit.[12] Once connexions with the Earth and cosmological energies are reestablished, it becomes possible to tap into and redirect currents of elemental energies. These currents can rebalance inner polarities of energy, a process which facilitates ecstatic reintegration.
In turn, kundalini techniques are enhanced by a series of associated practices. Exercises in breath control are utilized. The life currents dependent on breathing are voluntarily regulated to achieve energy transformations. Moreover, regulation and retention of breath evokes yet another uncontrollable wilderness urge: the overwhelming desire to respire, to live, to affirm the life force. Similarly, the voces magicae, the magical words of power, the use of poetry and metre, mantric chanting, arouse energies through vocalization and rhythmic vibration. And mandalas or visual images are employed to inspire revelation through the representation of patterned energies.
Through the gestalt of these techniques and experiences, individuals are possessed by the wilderness in almost every aspect of their persons. Immersed in ecstasy, imbued by chthonic energies, they lose their wills and are healed by becoming vehicles through which the sacred wilderness achieves human expression. Possessed by animistic energies, they become qualified to participate in the enactments, the dramatization of the sacred myths of death and renewal. This dramatization incorporates the hierogamy, the orgiastic coupling with the divine which complements and reinforces the spiritual conjunction through possession. Tantric sexual rites intensify these acts to a frenzy, and unconstrained libidinous desire — the final aspect of wilderness force — overcomes any inhibitions placed on the search for erotic pleasure. The re-equilibration of inner polarities includes a fusion of “male” and “female” energies, and the initiate becomes androgynous, unconcerned with the artificial distinctions of gender in this search. Encountering total saturation, individuals transcend their ego boundaries and their mortality in successive waves of ecstasy.
This ecstatic culmination imperceptibly shades off into the agape, a love feast of wild food. The Mysteries conclude tenderly with re-birthday celebrations. Commensality constitutes a further sharing of energy, and conviviality reiterates consensual relations. But, both ancient and modern commentators agree, the affection and solidarity felt by the revellers comprises the agape’s most important aspect. Diodorus Siculus reports that those “who have taken part in the mysteries become more pious and more just and better in every respect than they were before.”[13] And R. Gordon Wasson relates that “an indissoluble bond unites you with the others who have shared with you in the sacred agape.” The latter evokes “sentiments of awe and reverence, and gentleness and love, to the highest pitch of which mankind is capable.” Participants “feel welling up within them a tie that unites them with their companions of that night of nights that will last as long as they live.”[14] The Mysteries produce an amative disposition, an expansive but informed empathy, a holistic sensibility, which promises a revivification of those harmonious and integrated lifeways that remain cardinal in contemporary visions of anarchy.
The techniques which comprise the Mysteries, a gestalt capable of effecting total transformation, have been outlined. But this description has remained exteriorized: the interior experience has so far eluded examination. Apuleis’s formulation of his vision quest may be useful here:
I approached the confines of death. I trod the threshold of Proserpine [goddess of the underworld]; and borne through the elements I returned. At midnight I saw the Sun shining in all his glory. I approached the gods below and the gods above, and I stood beside them, and I worshiped them. Behold, I have told my experience, and yet what you hear can mean nothing to you.[15]
Perhaps, however, it can mean something. Many ritual elements of the Mysteries — fasting, breath control, hallucinogens — deliver individuals to the verge of physical demise. Whilst others — satire, dancing, kundalini techniques, Tantric sexual practices — propel them toward dissolution as distinct psychological or ethical entities. Apuleis stood on the threshold of death and recognized there was nothing to fear, but maintained the rudiment of subjectivity, the thread (perhaps an umbilical cord) which allowed him to find his way back through the labyrinth to be reborn. Death constitutes the central fascination; simultaneously alluring and terrifying, once confronted it becomes neither:
Death is seductive, for once the frightening threshold is crossed there is no more fear. Fear and hope are both dissolved; all that is left is rest, repose, relief, blessed nothingness, the void. But just as the void, to physicists, is the ‘mother state,’ so the crown of death becomes the circlet of rebirth, and the cords of binding become the umbilical cord to life, and we learn the Great Mystery — not as a doctrine, not as a philosophy, but as an experience: There is no annihilation.[16]
Apuleis resists the seduction, as the Mystery rites intend, and experiences illumination and rebirth. He returns through the four elements which are invoked in the casting of the magic circle that protects his rudimentary self from merging completely with the oceanic consciousness. He stresses rebalancing polarities in terms of chthonic and celestial images, a re-equilibration of sexual and spiritual, or animal and divine energies. When the ego boundaries are lowered, unlimited motion in all dimensions becomes possible. He can commune with the living and the dead, travel back and forth in time, and explore the vast expanses of inner and outer space.
The celibate machine itself is not a paranoiac machine, however, Everything about it is different: its cogs, its sliding carriage, its shears, its needles, magnets, rays. Even when it tortures or kills, it manifests something new and different, a solar force. In the second place, this transfiguration cannot be explained by the 'miraculating' powers the machine possesses due to the inscription hidden inside it, though it in fact contains within itself the most impressive sort of inscriptions. A genuine consummation is achieved by the new machine, a pleasure that can rightly be called autoerotic, or rather automatic: the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other unlimited forces. The question becomes: what does the celibate machine produce? what is produced by means of it? The answer would seem to be: intensive quantities. There is a schizophrenic experience of intensive quantities in their pure state, to a point that is almost unbearable — a celibate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended between life and death, an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape and form. These are often described as hallucinations and delirium, but the basic phenomenon of hallucination (I see, I hear) and the basic phenomenon of delirium (I think...) presuppose an I feel at an even deeper level, which gives hallucinations their object and thought delirium its content — an "I feel that I am becoming a woman," "that I am becoming a god," and so on, which is neither delirious nor hallucinatory, but will project the hallucination or internalize the delirium. Delirium and hallucination are secondary to the really primary emotion, which in the beginning only experiences intensities, becomings, transitions. [...]
Nothing but bands of intensity, potentials, thresholds, and gradients. A harrowing, emotionally overwhelming experience, which brings the schizo as close as possible to matter, to a burning, living center of matter: "this emotion, situated outside of the particular point where the mind is searching for it...one's entire soul flows into this emotion that makes the mind aware of the terribly disturbing sound of matter, and passes through its white-hot flame."
Freud wrote a famous paper in 1911 about the homosexual origins of
paranoid delusions on the basis of Schreber’s memoirs. Schreber developed
the “delusion” that Flechsig wished to turn him into a woman, to castrate
him. Freud attributed these “fantasies” to Schreber’s wish to be a woman.
William Niederland was the first to expose the fact that Flechsig really did
castrate women. What Niederland did not know is that Freud had in his
personal library a reprint of this very article. It is exceedingly curious that
Freud did not modify his views once he became aware, through this article,
that Schreber’s fears were grounded in reality. Schreber was not paranoid,
he was perceptive. The elaborate categories for different forms of “paranoid
schizophrenia” in modern psychiatric and psychological textbooks are
nothing more than the refusal to recognize that atrocities such as those
performed by Flechsig exist, that they have always existed, and that they
form the central core of the reality of every so-called mental patient. Every
“paranoia” suggests the presence of a terrible underlying reality.
Gestalt Psychology holds that sensory units have aquired names, have become richly symbolic, and are now known to have certain practical uses, while nevertheless they have existed as units before any of these further facts were added. Gestalt Psychology claims that it is precicesly the original segregation of circumscribed wholes which makes it possible for the sensory world to appear so utterly imbued with meaning to the adult; for, in its gradual entrance into the sensory field, meaning follows the lines drawn by natural organization; it usually enters into segregated wholes.
I find it curious that, other than proper nouns and adjectives, the only word in the English tongue that is capitalized is the first-person pronoun (nominative case) with which this sentence most flamboyantly set sail. The convention is striking and strange, hinting that the word must designate something very important. Indeed, to some people — perhaps to most, perhaps even to us all — the ineffable sense of being an "I" of a "first person", the intuitive sense of "being there" or simply "existing", the powerful sense of "having experience" and of "having raw sensations" (what some philsophers truefer to as "qualia"), seem to be the realest things in their lives, and an insistent inner voice bridles furiously at any proposal that this might be an illusion, or merely the outcome of some kind of physical processes taking place among "third-person" (i.e., inanimate) objects. My goal here is to combat this strident inner voice.
I begin with the simple fact that living beings, having been shaped by evolution, have survival as their most fundamental, automatic, and built-in goal. To enhance the chances of its survival, any living being must be able to react flexibly to events that take place in its environment. This means it must develop the ability to sense and to categorize, having rudimentarily, the goings-on in its immediate evnironment (most earthboung beings can pretty safely ignore comets crashing on Jupiter). Once the ability to sense external goings-on has developed, however, there ensues a curious side effect that will have vital and radical consequences. This is the fact that the living being's ability to sense certain aspects of its environment flips around and endows the being with the ability to sense certain aspects of itself.
