1,

Heraclitus= “War is the Father of all. Reconciliation, concord, is the Mother of all.” The Father Strife is symbolized by the bow, and the Mother Harmony is symbolized by the lyre.

Yet, there is a paradox. ‘Bios’ is the Greek for both the ‘bow’ and for ‘life’= that which kills and that which brings to life.

The exploding stars come before the Web of Life.

2,

Static Quality ‘saves’ those who fall out of the Great Wheel, or Circle Dance, through thinking themselves as separate from it, by bringing them back into it, making them a part of it. This Hindu statement is emblematic: “Everything is but a manifestation of the Impersonal, the basis of all being, and misery consists in thinking ourselves as different from the Infinite, Impersonal Being, and liberation consists in knowing our unity with this wonderful Impersonality.” Hence, Static Quality is also a balance of opposites, and by balancing, they create not discord and division, but a fuller and more pregnant harmony. Thus light and dark, gain and loss, good and bad, go together in the whole, because even dissonance is resolved by consonance. Thus equally emblematic is another Hindu statement: “The world in its essence is the reconciliation of opposite forces. These forces act in perfect harmony and yet [go] in opposite directions.” Similarly expressive of Static Quality is this Hindu question: “How can you regard yourself as subject and other beings as objects, when you know that all are One?” The universe, as one Hindu writer puts it, is “the Infinite written into the language of the finite.”

The Great Wheel of Cosmic Pattern gets more personal and loving as it goes westward; the Impersonal becomes a Lover, and the finite creation becomes the Beloved. This happens markedly in Eastern Christianity and in Sufi-ism, though it is already so in certain streams of Hinduism, such as ‘devotional yoga.’ Unofficially, India throbs with Eros—Soul marriage, however abstract its metaphysics. The metaphysics go to one extreme of abstract oneness [monism] to balance the way the people really are at the other extreme of erotic relationship between souls. Indian classical dancing, for example, is certainly not just the soul meditating on a wonderful Impersonality by expanding consciousness, but is the soul in an ecstatic yearning of love. Lover and Beloved, in their Joining, replaces the merging, melding, of part back into whole, to become unified with it. Unity becomes a union made by ecstatic love.

Because nothing other than belonging, or not belonging, is at stake in Static Quality, you can also have all the metaphysics that speak of God having a brother, the devil, who as a pair created the world. Some Shamanic peoples, albeit usually the more mother-oriented settled southern crop-growers rather than the more father-oriented nomadic northern hunter-gatherers, have these sorts of philosophical belief. Everything must join in, there cannot be any fundamental discord. Nothing can be ultimately rejected, everything has its place and plays its part. The Round Dance must go on and on. This is why R. Tagore rightly says: “To find God, you must welcome everything.” No picking and choosing, no preferring of this over that, no one thing better and the other thing worse..

Albert Einstein, who rejected the Daemonic God in asserting ‘God does not play dice with the universe’, gives a modern yet very ancient and traditional rendering of Static Quality:

“The most beautiful feeling we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science. He to whom this feeling is a stranger.. is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom, and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling, is at the centre of true religiousness.”

Dynamic Quality ‘redeems’ what can be lost to peril, through going into the peril, and by letting it exact a cost the heart does not believe it can pay, comes through.

Oriental Metaphysics come into direct and irreconcilable clash with the Daemonic God over two basic qualitative matters.

—Oriental Metaphysics confuse ego with personhood, the unique ‘hypostasis’, which in fact is both the ‘Original Face’ of Zen Buddhism, as well as Buddhism’s traditional ‘No-Self.’ In Jewish terms, this is the ‘Image of God’, the unalterable personal God-akinness given to each human being. When you look at a human face, something of God looks out at you; when you hear a human voice, something of God speaks to you. In Jewish terms, this is the Name which God gives each of us, written on a white stone that cannot be found, but can be lived, and acted upon, through the love, truth, faith. Though Buddhism is less obviously monistic in metaphysics than Hinduism, in grasping that the Hypostasis is not absorbed back into God nor is separated from God, it is still true that even Zen does not step into the heart. In Shamanism and Judaism, the Daemonic renders you personal in order to use your heart. Thus getting rid of the ego will not, in any sense, necessarily evoke the heart. In my time as a Buddhist, I only once met a Buddhist monk I would recognise as a man of heart. The tremendous revisions and subtleties of Buddhism easily reside, and remain within, the soul and mind, not touching the heart.

Indeed, Buddhism no less than Hinduism regards the ‘fundamental error’ as the human being asserting an identity separate from, and in spirit against, the Primal Isness. Buddhism misses the existential sense of a necessary standing ‘other’ to everything: the personhood must be free of God, and free of the world, in order to act from the heart in passion. This is not the benign and universalistic kindness of the enlightened for the ignorant, a kind of tolerance and inclusiveness that can also veer back to Oriental impersonality.

—Fear is the other crucial factor that is different in Static Quality and in Dynamic Quality. In the former, fear is preventing the coming of the Divine Light; in the latter, fear is the facilitator of the Divine Dark. This Hindu declaration sums up fear in the former sense: “Fear comes from the selfish idea of cutting oneself off from the universe.” This leads to a whole rejection not only of desire that arises from this selfishness, but the anger, conflict, and fighting spirit that are also regarded as only forms of selfishness. The desire of soul, the anger of heart, when selfish, ‘fabricate’ all our troubles, all the blockage that keeps us in the illusion of separate identity. This Hindu statement sums up ‘selfish desire’ and ‘selfish anger’, a monastic contrast common to Hindu, Buddhist, and Eastern Orthodox Christian asceticism: “A mind that is caught in fear lives in confusion, in conflict, and therefore must be violent, distorted, and hostile.. Free yourself from anger and desire, which are the causes of sin and conflict, and thereby make yourself whole. This is the essence of yoga.. This is the means by which you.. attain the highest spiritual consciousness. Learn to meditate. Then you will master the senses, the emotions, and the intellect.”

In fact, ‘body, emotions, mind’ constitute the ego, not the personhood. Even more vitally, the fear that drives the ego, and renders it selfish, and deluded, is not the Biblical ‘fear and trembling’ that announces the Daemonic to the heart. The angst of Existentialism is neither selfish nor deluded; its unease, apprehension and anguish, dread, dizziness and shakiness, is true to and revealing of the heart’s situation in the world, and the heart—world situation vis a vis the Daemonic God. The fear in the heart is the ‘fear of God’ we need, or we go astray in the Daemonic. It is fine to say that perfection in love will eventually cast out this fear, but more significant, this fear is ‘the beginning of wisdom’, the anchor in the depth that allows us to be respectful, bold and humble yet gravely realistic, without becoming crippled and paralysed by terror, on the one hand, nor becoming over confident, glib and arrogant like Lucifer, on the other hand. Fear anchors us in depths, and also becomes the spur to action, for only action addresses the profound questions in our fear, and can answer them. The energy of passion is roused by angst, like drawing a bowstring taught, and then action lets that energy go where it is aimed.

Searching the heart takes us deeper into the heart. Action takes us deepest.

Fear starts all this, and love ends it, by being what truthfully emerges from the ‘going.’ Thus, no fear: no love.

Getting rid of fear is getting rid of the heart, throwing away the love the heart can reach in its searching of and acting from deeps.

Fear tells you there is depth, and you must do something about it, or stand forever on the edge of a cliff, nailed to the spot, unable ever to look down or to leap. In that way the heart is defeated before it even gives its best shot.

3,

For now, let Eros and the Daemonic — Static Quality with its Stable Pattern of Duration, and Dynamic Quality with its Violence of Patternless Change — contrast. They are not the opposites of Static Quality; if they are partners, then some other way to describe their partnership has to be found. Perhaps this works as metaphor= the Celtic king both ‘married to the land’ and ‘a sacrifice for the people.’

One Hindu writer, who might have been R. Tagore, can have the last word, because to an extent, his way of articulating it can hold for both Eros and the Daemonic.

His ‘word’ was something like, ‘man ceases to be a slave to himself, man ceases to be a slave to the world, only when he is a lover.’

It is in the understanding of Eros and the Daemonic as the Right and Left sides of love that we can begin to grasp their partnership.

Eros= Good and Bad in polarity.
Daemonic= Love and Evil in contention.

Eros= Sublime and Sacred.
Daemonic= Terrible and Holy.

Eros= Light and Water, and the Heaven Above.

Daemonic= Fire and Earth, and the Abyss Below.

Eros mothers us. This is the constant backdrop.

The Daemonic fathers us. This is the moving edge.

The mother ‘contains’ us, always guaranteeing to provide a meaning for whatever we get ourselves into.

The father does not contain us, but leaves us ‘free’, sharing with us as mentor and then ally the unknown into which we venture.

Eros= Love is generous.
Daemonic= Love is sacrificial.

Eros= Love as bounteous [over-flowing].
Daemonic= Love as radical [unrelenting].