The Blind Leading the Blind: On Spiritual Degeneration

When one loses their connection with the spiritual impulse, a particular kind of complacency sets in, the first phase of a gradual process of spiritual degeneration.

It is the kind of complacency which resolutely accepts matters, definitions, concepts, etcetera as they are presented coinciding with the time in which one begins to lose their connection to the spiritual impulse.

Taken to an extreme, I would describe this kind of complacency as a militant form of blind acceptance and a close cousin of materialist literalism.

Among the more common qualities on the spectrum of this kind of complacency:

an un/conscious strict adherence to the status-quo, very little to no engagement in creative thought and activity, a profound lack of interest or aversion to philosophical or spiritual subjects, atheist leanings or proclamation, an uncritical and therefore unfounded faith in science (read: scientism), a more or less entirely transactional relationship with respect to career or line of work, and a deep-seated phobia where real risk is required.

To illustrate my point and subsequent propositions to follow, I will liken this process of spiritual degeneration to the physical death process.

Approaching the time of death, the heartbeat slows before eventually coming to a stop. Once the body has become a corpse, a process of decomposition begins.

This complacency I’m speaking of begins like the slowing of the heartbeat and over time continues on to become the complete stop catalyzing the inevitable process of degeneration.

At this point, a new characterization arises and permeates the consciousness, filling the void where the spiritual impulse once was: that is boredom.

Boredom is and has always been regarded as symptomatic of the absence of spirit.

Once this point is reached, there is no longer the ability to create, only to destroy, to reproduce, to transpose, or to invert.

From here, these actions are performed primarily toward the self or one’s projection of the world.

In the case of the former, self-destructive tendencies dominate the personality and behavior and the detachment from the world intensifies.

In the case of the latter, a hyper-fixation on worldly affairs dominates the personality and behavior and the detachment from self intensifies.

In every case, it is some combination thereof while either gathers prominence.

This now widespread deadened disposition has not only become normalized, but broadly encouraged.

The latter is more insidious and more difficult to correct due to its nature being contingent upon moving further and further away from the self where the spiritual impulse resides.

Where the life-wave of the cosmos engenders the impulse of those connected to it to seek to expand and evolve all within it, in those who are mostly or entirely removed from it this impulse is thus replaced by the desire to destroy and rebuild in one’s own distorted and unindividuated image under false pretenses of progression and individualism.

The targets are always that which we hold most familiar and long-held in their establishment as truth.

However, the only way one can participate in the genuine expansion and evolution of anything at all is by sustaining and strengthening the spiritual impulse and thereby remaining in the life-wave of the cosmos in which everything is contained.

Everything outside of that is merely distortion and recapitulation for it cannot be in resonance with the evolutionary stream nor correct for the time.

It is devolutionary by nature.

In other words, as it has been said countless times throughout the ages, it is only the presence of spirit that allows one to see something familiar with new eyes.

Nothing else can do it.

And so it is precisely those who have lost their connection to the spiritual impulse who are seeking outward from their profound sense of complacency and boredom to abolish distinctions and definitions pertaining to the most fundamental aspects of what makes us human in the disastrously ironic interest of freedom, truth, and evolutionary progress whom are, in fact, unknowingly blind and unknowingly imprisoned by destructive forces of which they have no awareness and therefore from which they cannot free themselves.

“So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, — What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. ... Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.”―Ralph Waldo Emerson

Yours In All,

nyo