This is the second volume of Amin Ramin’s “Man in Islam”. The first volume can be purchased on Amazon at this link.
In these parts of our series, we are identifying the basic structural elements of Western thinking, which are essentially the “programming codes” that every Westerner or, more broadly, every modern person relies on without even knowing what they are or where they came from. Any modern man, be he a banker, a hired manager, a physicist, or a driver, has some kind of programming code in his head, even if he has not read Augustine, Descartes or Kant and does not know who they are. His consciousness nevertheless works according to the program of modernity.
Western civilization has a certain “engine” by which it functions. It is hidden and not visible at first sight, just as in a car, the engine is hidden under the hood, and some people drive perfectly well but have no idea how the engine is built. We are trying now to look under the hood of this car to see the secret mechanisms and the hidden logic by which Western civilization works.
And here, it should be noted that when I say “the West,” I am not referring to everything and everyone who was and is in the West, but to a certain axial line that led to the birth of the so-called “modern world” with its well-known trends – secularization, desacralization, mechanization, calculating science and technology, capitalism, etc. In the West, many different currents and personalities have gone against what is called “modernity.” Take, for example, the Renaissance or the same traditionalist school in the 20th century. They are also part of the West, but they represent an alternative or an opposition to the West we know now. But the fact is that this “modern” trend has defeated all alternatives and become completely dominant, both in the “West” itself and throughout the world. And so, now we are trying to understand why this is the case.
We talked about the decisive importance of the figure of Death in the Western version of Christianity. This is about thinking of the world as a kind of black space, corrupted by original sin. So, what is going on here, in the age of modernity (the “New Age,” from about the 17th and 18th centuries onward), is that concrete content, a kind of backbone (what one might call “being,” “life,” or “the underside”) seems to be washed out of a variety of things. It is as if a kind of darkness covers the world. The golden threads of meaning leading to heaven are cut. And this means that every thing – a tree, an apple, a table, a chair – has no foundation, leads to nothing: its foundation is darkness. The lining of the carpet of being is equally black everywhere. This equalization of being is the fundamental premise of New Age ontology and logos. The whole world is a flat mirror with black amalgam.
Previously, every thing, every topos, every time had its own ontology, its own subtle rays, going to the “other side.” Now they are all the same, they are all equal because the “other side” no longer exists. “Other side” is the black amalgam of the mirror. This is how the qualitless (empty) space and time of the scientific picture of the world are born.
The “qualitlessness” or “emptiness” means that space and time cease to be defined by some sacral forces that stand “behind” them. In the traditional world, “behind” the earthly time, there was a citadel of Eternity – an unchanging Being to which the earthly time referred. In modernity, such a gap disappears. Being itself becomes time. There is no timeless Being, no thing that stands “behind” time. Time becomes a calculable, quantifiable, linear flow, running in one direction.
It is the same with space. Previously, continents, countries, and cities were considered to be bearers of special forces, their own pathos, their own life, where one entered the realm of heterogeneous influences and subtle structures. Now all over the world, space is homogeneous. In the New Age, the idea of a qualitless, quantifiable, “universal” space of the Newtonian picture of the world is born. This space is the same everywhere. No sacral forces are acting “behind” this space, giving it a different quality or modifying it. Instead of a bearer of sacred forces, space turns into an empty tin, indifferent to its contents. In every point, this space is homogeneous. Hence the idea of globalization.
Thus, one of the defining tendencies of modernity is the flux of the lack of quality and deontologization. Instead of living things and people, there are empty guises that interest the observer only from the point of view of their external properties. The treatment of people as “human capital” or “material for communism” became possible only after this. “Flesh” was removed from being; it was thinned, replaced by masks, shells, and lurves. There is no bottom, no foundation, no support.
And hence the belief of modern science that the physical laws are the same everywhere. Modern physics or astrology assume that the laws under which the universe functions are the same everywhere, millions of light-years away or billions of years back in time. In fact, such an assumption is an unprovable hypothesis arising from the general understanding of space and time in the modern age. There is nothing and no way to prove that at least ten thousand years ago, there were no other physical laws in the universe or that they would not be different at some distance from Earth.
And here we come to the question of the origin of Western experimental science in the New Age. This question is very important because experimental science is what gives Western civilization its strength and weapon. This is its “holy of holies” and the tip of its spear. To govern something, you need the resources of power. And the main resource of Western civilization is what experimental science gives it.
What is this science based on? What is its deepest metaphysical premise? Nothing less than the recognition of nature as dead. Scientists do not believe in God, the afterlife, or higher powers – but they believe in Death. Nature is dead, and its corpse can be dismembered, tortured, and experimented on. If you look at an ordinary science laboratory, you sense an obvious resemblance to such places as the Inquisitor’s torture chamber or the morgue. White robes, syringes, test tubes, clamps…
The figure of Death, who reigned over the minds of the people of the Middle Ages, is transferred from man to nature. Nature is already inanimate, and it is tortured by all the means of medieval torture to extract its secrets. Above all, this reigns a common set of ideas that have taken God beyond reality and based the latter on Death, turning the world into a huge, universal corpse. After all, at the heart of Christianity is the myth of the torture of God – the sacrifice of God, the death of God on the cross. That is, this world as such is not just cardinally bad: it is actually a world where God Himself is tortured. And so, an idea might arise here: If God was tortured in this world, why shouldn’t we torture matter?
This is on the one hand. On the other hand, the obvious similarities between modern science and the occult disciplines have been noted repeatedly. After all, the essence of magic was precisely the dream of power: the desire to make nature serve the magician by manipulating its forces. The sorcerer, poking a needle into a doll and reciting his spells, believes that there is a cause-and-effect chain by which these manipulations will harm the real person. It is worth remembering that at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the New Age, the practice of black magic took on an unprecedented scale. And it is not accidental that a symbol of European civilization – Faust – was a practitioner of black magic. The author of the term scientia experimentalis, Roger Bacon, was an occultist and alchemist, dreaming of a steamship, an airplane, and other planets’ conquest.
Today, the problems that academics and Nobel Prize winners in ties and tails are dealing with are the same problems that their predecessors in caftans and caps were puzzling over. “Artificial intelligence” or “cloning” is the same homunculus, “genetic engineering” is the search for a panacea or immortality, “robots” are the creation of a golem…
They might say: the difference is that modern science is based on experiments, while magic is based on speculative things. But in fact, magic also dealt with experiments. It is an experimental science, and modern laboratories historically grew out of alchemical ones.
The difference between modern science and magic runs along very different lines. Magic dealt with the totality of the cosmos – both its dense and “subtle” aspects. In contrast, the western science of the New Age is based on a rigid reduction of the picture of the world, on its truncation to a very limited material slice. Hence its effectiveness. We have already said that modern science does not expand knowledge, as it is considered to be, but narrows it, and exactly due to this narrowing, it achieves efficiency.
Old magic dealt with wider reality, mainly with the “world of images,” i.e., it tried to manipulate the subtle prototypes of things “on the other side” of our material world. They removed the brain and body filters, and their consciousness found itself in that world. As we said, a traditional Pagan man was constantly in an expanded state of the mind. He stood with only one foot in the experiential world, and with the other foot, he swam in the sea of the Barzakh or World Soul. This is still the case in India now, for example. If you look at all these hermits, yogis, and Brahmans, you’ll see that the guys are always smoking something and generally “using substances,” so to speak. That is their normal state. Look at them, and you will understand what the ancient Greeks were like. You have to keep in mind that all ancient Greek philosophy was composed in this state.
Such was Heraclitus or Empedocles, who declared himself a god and jumped into the mouth of the volcano Etna. In ancient Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries were regularly held, which were essentially nothing more than mass psychedelic experiences. It is now established that special mushrooms or drinks were consumed there, the secret of which was kept by the priests. This was similar to the LSD experiments of the 1960s. Only their effects were much stronger because of the collective nature of the mystery, the guidance of experienced priests, and elaborate ritual. The Egyptian priests were especially good at this art, and for centuries they had developed the appropriate recipes so that one inhalation of an incense was enough to put one into a trance-like state.
The adept in such a state of consciousness would go to the “other side” of things and try to manipulate them in order to influence our world as well. Alchemy, for example, was built on this because traditional alchemy is the practice of transforming one’s consciousness and the subtle prototypes of things.
And now, in the New Age, people are moving from “subtle” magical manipulation of the world to crude scientific and technical manipulation. But the goals are the same. It is possible to make the following comparison: the magical manipulation with the forces of the universe is similar to the psychological methods of suggestion when they try to get a person to do something by means of the subtle processing. They persuade him, ask him, make promises… And the scientific and technical (modern) approach is similar to torture when a man is simply coerced roughly. That is, they simply beat him on the head with something hard, thereby forcing him to do something.
Pre-modern, pagan humanity mainly relied on the first method. That is, it acted “subtly.” But New Age man, having devalued and deadened nature, moves on to very crude methods, to the “torture” of matter. People of the past did not use such methods, not because they were “underdeveloped” or could not think of such things, but because they considered them a kind of blasphemy, “hubris” in the ancient sense. The ancient Greeks had the word “hubris,” which can be translated as “arrogance” or “pride.” That is a kind of challenge to the forces of being, which, according to ancient ideas, will inevitably be followed by punishment. This line is found in the myth of Prometheus, a figure, by the way, highly revered by the European New Age.
So, the methods of the New Age would have been seen by traditional people as a kind of “hubris.” The whole world was considered to be animate (as it is, in fact). It would seem to them a kind of sacrilegious enterprise to start torturing the world, learning some secrets from it. For then, one might also get a retaliatory strike. Because nature is alive, it reacts to human actions. In the end, the traditional man was much smarter and more circumspect than the modern one.
So, magical cognition and magical manipulation of the world were arranged quite differently from modern “scientific” ones. They acted on a “subtle” level. And this level, by the way, not always works directly. Magic is not a thing where you read a spell, and everything works. It’s not like you put the plug in the socket, and the electricity went on. You can’t even learn it like you learn physics in college from some textbook. It’s all about the magician’s personality, heredity, and a lot of random things. There’s not the direct correlation between the action and the result. For example, if you look at the alchemical treatises, you’ll see that they don’t really teach you anything or offer any instructions. They are written in a very dark symbolic language, where each word passes into some other word, like the glare on the water. And that’s why modern science, that is, violent black magic, has defeated traditional holistic magic. Because here, the result is direct; this science deals with a very simple world that reacts unambiguously. If you conduct a current, there will be such and such an effect. Everything is clear and straightforward. Whereas if you do alchemical experiments according to this or that recipe, it is not clear what the result will be. Magic dealt with another level of reality, more subtle and far more complex.
So, all these terms of modern science like “forces,” “fields,” “dark matter,” “virtual particles,” “superstrings,” “big bangs,” which the layman thinks all this actually exists, are in reality mythologems that do not describe any real things. They are not fundamentally different from the notion of the turtle on which the earth stands. If we ask an Indian what the earth rests on, he will answer that it rests on a turtle. And if we ask a modern physicist, he will say that it rests on the “force of attraction.” He won’t answer what this “force” is and where it comes from. He will say, “Well, there is such a thing as a force.” And it is indicative that the word “force” itself was borrowed by Newton exactly from the occult context because he himself was an experienced occultist and alchemist who had spent most of his life on magical experiments.
So, modern science embodies the ancient occult dream of power over the universe, but it does so within the framework of dualistic ideas about the world as an inanimate, dead entity, corrupted by “original sin.” The “Great Mother” has been put to death, turned into a giant decomposing corpse, which physicists, chemists, biologists – these analogs of medieval magicians – have begun to dissect. This is the main difference from traditional science.
So why did magic move from the level of the World Soul to the level of the earthly material world? Because the Black Myth of Christianity cut off the connection of this world with the higher worlds. Its entrances and exits have been walled up. The world is radically bad, evil, black. The world is the consequence of Sin, the place of God’s suffering, crucifixion, and death. Man, too, is bad, but despite this, God took his form when He was pleased to come down to earth. And if “God became man,” why shouldn’t man try to become God?
Thus is born the Gestalt of New Age man, who is a subject powerfully asserting his divinity in a godless nature. He is a deity standing above the black world. And so Western man comes forward, takes out the sword of modern technology and says: this black world, this abyss below me – I will put this sword in it in order to rule over it. I am above, the black abyss of the world below… So here arises the challenge of the end times, which we will talk about later in connection with the theme of the Imam Mahdi coming.
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