Bloomian "Mere" Gnosis

From H.B.'s "spiritual autobiography" (Omens of Millennium, 1996):

I am not a Jungian, and so give no credence to the archetypes of a collective unconscious. But I am both a literary and a religious critic, a devoted student of Gnosis both ancient and modern, and I have enormous respect for recurrent images of human spirituality, no matter how they may be transmitted. Images have their own potency and their own persistence; they testify to human need and desire, but also to a transcendent frontier that marks either a limit to the human, or a limitlessness that may be beyond the human. I return here to...Henry Corbin's "suprasensible world which is neither the empirical world of the sense nor the abstract world of the intellect." In that intermediate world, images reign, whether of the plays of Shakespeare, the scriptures of religion, our dreams, the presence of angels, or astral-body manifestations. The Millennium may be an event only in that middle world, but who can establish or prophecy the ultimate relations between sense impressions, images, and concepts?

I bought a copy of Omens the moment it appeared in my local bookstore. My first read-through disappointed me. When people asked me what I thought of it, I complained that Harold had said all these things before. And he had. I am currently reading the book through for at least the 3rd time (judging by the various underlinings and marginalia in my copy) and the book grows dearer to me with every reading. It no longer matters to me that he said nothing new in this book; what he said bore repeating.

We are now living the Millennium, a worrisome time indeed. Neo-fascists are at the helm of our ship of state. The "2-party system" every day exposes itself as the Republicrat-Democan mono-party (with a "liberal" and "conservative" wing)--the lap-dog of the plutocratic ruling class. Any possibility of democratic action has been repeatedly betrayed by the 4th estate. The "news" is nothing more than plutocratic political theater, designed to reinforce the illusion that our Congress is more than merely ceremonial, that there is no difference between a modern multi-party parliamentary democracy and our own. The opiates of the masses are the life-boat delusions of "salvation religion" and "salvation politics": just "get saved" by Jesus or by the right presidential candidate and all your troubles will be over.

Gnostics have always known better. The god of this world and the principalities and powers of this present darkness have matters well in hand. Our troubles are not at all superficial, but deep, pervasive, systemic. There will be no relief from our Millennial troubles until we recognize that fundamental change is needed: a moral or spiritual revolution that will awaken us to the true nature of our predicament. We are living in thrall to the military-industrial-complex.

This is not some conspiracy theory; the MIC does not operate in a shadow world but brazenly and in broad daylight. It openly takes our tax dollars. It advertises for the lives of our children on television and publicly recruits them on school campuses. And when ever any one of us innocently suggests that there is something deeply wrong with taking another person's life, and that organizing into military forces for that very purpose, making a career out of it, going to a foreign country and killing people in the name of "liberating them" and getting paid to do it, is downright pathological...

Oh My God!

"That's right," replies the Gnostic--"your God, though you call him (or her or it) Jesus or Yahweh or Allah, is nothing other than this murder-for-money-madness. Your religion is the MIC and your Pentagonal cathedral is supported in all of its operations by the government. So much for the separation of church and state."

This is the Millennium we are living. If we do not wake up, we will not rise up. If we do not rise up, we will continue to go down, down, down...