“The strongest and most evil spirits have hitherto advanced mankind the most: they always rekindled the sleeping-passions – all orderly arranged society lulls the passions to sleep; they always reawakened the sense of comparison, of contradiction, of delight in the new, the adventurous, the untried; they compelled men to set opinion against opinion, ideal plan against ideal plan. By means of arms, by upsetting boundary-stones, by violations of piety most of all: but also by new religions and morals! The same kind of “wickedness “is in every teacher and preacher of the new – which makes a conqueror infamous, although it expresses itself more refinedly, and does not immediately set the muscles in motion (and just on that account does not make so infamous !). The new, however, is under all circumstances the evil, as that which wants to conquer, which tries to upset the old boundary-stones and the old piety; only the old is the good! The good men of every age are those who go to the roots of the old thoughts and bear fruit with them, the agriculturists of the spirit. But every soil becomes finally exhausted, and the ploughshare of evil must always come once more.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
A lot of New Age literature tries to wed popular science metaphors with mystical imagery without the understanding of the two thousand years between them that would clear up the inevitable confusion that results from such generic archetypal thinking.
Much of the standard New Age mythology diverges from early Theosophy partly through people like Bailey and Leadbetter that had such an impact on 20th century spiritualism, but were more religious and prophecy driven than they were scientific or philosophical.
I especially have a hard time with the New Age obsession with the black hole. I think the intuitions are pure and heading in the right direction; they just need to be thought through and properly contextualized.
They still work, as most New Age metaphors do, and as the old mystery schools did, despite having vague and inconsistent semiotics, precisely because they are mostly just images of thought, not full concepts, and images don’t need to be consistent to invoke energy or represent spirit. But if one cares to develop the soul, (not the spirit spark in the individual, but the higher modalities that enact the higher spiritual powers), needing more developed concepts which philosophy and science have developed out of the mystery school wisdom is crucial.
Steiner had very similar feelings about the way Theosophy was headed, which was why he broke from them. But anthroposophists have fallen into their own vague prophetic religious ways, mostly because to really follow the path of individuation and not get lost in either pole of the reciprocal dichotomy takes risking the safe space of the New Age balance/Hegelian synthesis of opposites, the becoming “whole” or the emergence of the “one” which as I explored in my paper here is different than the true creative singularity, which only looks like a black hole to the undeveloped mind, as Aurobindo or Steiner might have put it. Deleuze especially makes a point of exploring the singularity as merely the differential relation, which Steiner’s scientific pupils and the alternative science community (the good ones following Larson and Eric Dollard/Tesla, not the sloppy thinking of black hole obsessed New Agers like Nassim Haramein), have been developing as “counterspace”.
Concerning Nietzsche’s popular quote about needing chaos to give birth to a dancing star, Deleuze points out how important it is in this process of creative birth to not fall into the black hole of repeating tradition or explode into the supernova of madness. The relations between the inward and outward movements must be continually renegotiated in a dance at the edge of chaos if we are not to merely dedifferentiate back into the void of pure spirit.
If you want a good image of the true meaning of a black hole, ignore those decontextualized images the mainstream is using to promote their empty research projects and look into the mandelbrot set. All the real activity in the universe is on the fractal edge of the “black hole”. As I explored in my essay “Gravity of the Situation”, the singularity is the transformation point between space and inverse space or “counter space”. It signifies the birth of the new, but while implosion is key to birth of any order, gravity alone merely sorts all forces into a node of the universal, an iteration of the general spirit, unless used by a being that can straddle both worlds, the creative individual wielding the supermental or at least higher soul forces to direct the engine of creation and connection.
We are always headed towards an attractor and it is indeed a powerful image for our time of immense convergence, but the cosmic game is all about structuring those attractors — using the force of gravity’s acceleration to launch into the portals at the center, but also using the fractal topology that contextualizes the singularity to determine the trajectory of the transformation. That fractal boundary at the edge of chaos and order is what determines whether that singularity on our collective horizon is humanity’s enslavement to AI, or a new plateau of possibilities.
