The Correct Relationship between God and the Soul

System of Transcendental Qabala - Decan XV: Axiology

I’m starting this post in the green room backstage at the first show of our North American tour which is being hosted by a beautiful church in Brattleboro, Vermont. I haven’t had it in me to post much in the past two months since the release of 93696. It was unbelievably intense to release that album into the world after putting so much work and emotion into it. To me it feels like for the first time I’ve been able to really render the way I feel, what it feels like to be me, to see the world through my eyes. There’s a lot more to say about that, but it isn’t the subject of this post.

I bring up the 93696 release because the experience of creating an artwork, collaborating with others to realize it, releasing it into the world, getting a sense of how others react to it, how it moves them, how they judge it, and the way this whole process alters one’s identity, alters the lore and canon of one’s life, reconfigures the past or one’s memory if it - this is the heartbeat of the soul as it walks under the grace of God. In heaven it will be the basic unit of the fabric of society as such, playing a role that approximates our world’s legal and economic system.

Axiology is the philosophy of value. We don’t yet really know what value is. There are traditional metaphysical values - truth, goodness, beauty, justice. There is economic value, measured in terms of supply and demand, or labor, or resources, or simply in terms of norms and goals. There are cultural values that serve and represent allegiance and filiation, or which uphold a way of running society that has worked in the past. These different definitions of value refer to distinct features of the world, but it makes sense for them to have the same name; the connection is there. They are all different aspects of intrinsic value as such, the end-in-itself, what Plato called “the coin that cannot be exchanged”. Intrinsic value is creative self-realization as transmitted by a soul to other souls so that it fosters the same in them, so that they can do the same. This recursive radiation of love, inspiration and meaning is what Jesus called “the true vine.” The aesthetic sphere is where ultimate value lives. The fact that the aesthetic sphere is currently cordoned off into a particular domain of “the arts” or “entertainment” is an historical contingency. As we pass through the fire of the current technological phase shift, this restriction is dissolving, whether we like it or not. In particular, the aesthetic sphere is beginning to fuse with news media and politics, but this is just the beginning.

The soul vibrates, it has a musical being. And it has three distinct vibrational levels available to it: Hyperborean, Transcendental and Haelegenic. These are the three major concepts of Axiology in its normative dimension.

At the level of the Hyperborean, the soul lives in sin. It is abused or it is an abuser, depending on the context. It only knows and expects abuse, and it draws energy from hate, or from a false idolatrous love, but in any case it draw it from something outside, and is thus enslaved to whatever that thing is. And the Hyperborean soul may have no idea this is happening to it. It might even think that the opposite is the case, that the evil energizing it is actually justice or virtue. On the other hand it may know all too well, but be self-deceptively fixated on sustaining the situation. The Hyperborean soul is at war with itself, not coherent with itself. It is caught in a particular knot of fear, hate and attachment which all amplify and sustain one another: a mind virus.

But every soul has an inner source of energy that it can be led to tap into, and the task of art and religion is to demonstrate this. The Transcendental soul is able to tear itself away from its fear hate and objects of attachment and to go its own way, animated by the unfolding of its own potential, by curiosity, by genuine interest in other people.

The Haelegenic soul is one’s whose primary animating principle is the realization of the kingdom of heaven on earth, and who is able to attempt to articulate this desire as a realistic conception which includes accurate knowledge of how the world works and of world history. While the Transcendental soul is tapped into God’s will to a degree, it may not know this or think of it this way. The Haelegenic soul serves God’s will in-and-for-itself, so to speak, which gives it the possibility of making an impact on the historical horizon.

Transcendental Qabala is basically a speculative tool for attempting to become a Haelegenic soul over time, as an alternative to the dominant belief systems of the current world. The three pitfalls to avoid are Secular Humanism, Reactionary Traditionalism and Futurist Antihumanism. Each of these worldviews has Hyperborean and Transcendental variations, but none of them can ever be Haelegenic. The only Haelegenic theologico-political orientation is Apocalyptic Humanism.