The Metaphysics of World Collapse

V. Susan Ferguson, Contributor
Waking Times

“…movement and change are actually prized for their own sake…outward action…fleeting…dispersion…a tendency toward instantaneity, have for its limit a state of pure disequilibrium, which…would coincide with the final dissolution of this world; and this too is one of the clearest signs that the final phase of the Kali Yuga is at hand.” – Rene Guenon, ‘The Crisis of the Modern World’

The French metaphysical scholar Rene Guenon (1886-1951) is considered to be one of the greatest of all in the western world. Guenon was no mere occultist. He was an authority on the Sanskrit teachings, Sufism, Taoism, and many others including western esoteric traditions. ‘The Reign of Quantity’ is his masterwork and was the turning point in my own understanding as he convinced me to accept the Cycles of Time as reality.

Guenon’s ‘The Crisis in the Modern World’ was written in 1942 (three years before my own birth) and describes our current times with prescient and increasing accuracy. In the chapter on ‘Knowledge and Action’ Guenon explains in his razor-like French precision that the modern world, its sciences and philosophies, its very foundations have become completely disconnected from any metaphysical truth. The reason for this is our ongoing Kali Yuga descent into matter and limited five-sense perception, which blocks our understanding of the Invisible Realms that are the support and substratum of this entire universe.

The people who have become prominent in all fields of modern life simply are no longer capable of understanding the real underlying metaphysical principles that are the substratum of the temporal illusory earth we stand upon. Thus the various and always changing theories that become the basis of our lives are profoundly flawed, unsound, and subject to collapse. Rene Guenon: “It is impossible in any way to separate knowledge from the process by which it is acquired.” The intelligence that is now held in high esteem is of the lowest order — regardless of how many corporate global policy institute think-tanks these modern era PhD priests are ensconced within.

True knowledge consists in ‘identification’…

Guenon: “…for all true knowledge essentially consists in identification with its object.” This is the traditional ancient way of immersing consciousness to reach wisdom knowledge and is precisely what the shamans still today practice. In the west and spreading around the globe, this process of intense identification is overlooked and “…they admit nothing higher than rational or discursive knowledge, which is necessarily indirect and imperfect, being…reflected knowledge.” One is reminded of Plato’s shadows in a cave being taken as real.

This ‘lower type of knowledge’ has become more and more valued ‘only insofar as it can be made to serve immediate practical ends.’ Our modern western culture has become absorbed and obsessed with action, scientific and mathematical theories that produce profitable results, and have denied everything that lies beyond the grasp of their own limited five-sense perception. These servants of the corporatist scions are blind to the fact that acts thus disconnected from metaphysical truth degenerate — “from the absence of any principle, into an agitation as vain as it is sterile.”

Sleepwalkers

We still know very little about the mysteries of our universe, beyond what produces short-term profit at the expense of Mother Earth. Reflect on the countless theories, scientific and others that have come and gone like ill winds. Arthur Koestler, the now forgotten genius whose works were highly honored not so long ago, wrote about this in his 1959 book, “Sleepwalkers” in which he chronicles the parade of scientific theories that have been discovered, lauded and discarded.

“The muddle of inspiration and delusion, of visionary insight and dogmatic blindness, of millennial obsessions and disciplined double-think…may serve as a cautionary tale against the hubris of science. … The dials on our laboratory panels are turning into another version of the shadows in the cave [Plato’s analogy]. Our hypnotic enslavement to the numerical aspects of reality has dulled our perception of non-quantitative moral values; the resultant end justifies the means ethic may be a major factor in our undoing.”

Surfing the Surface

Concurrent with our descent into matter has come the need for ‘ever-increasing speed’ and ‘ceaseless agitation, for unending change.’ We have become addicted to surface effects. Recent observations, one might say warnings, from Jaron Lanier and Nicholas Carr reveal that surfing the Internet is reconfiguring the human brain. The evidence is conclusive. We are lost in what Guenon back in 1942 called “dispersion in multiplicity, and in a multiplicity that is no longer unified by consciousness of any higher principle.” This external multiplicity is merely the temporal ‘appearance’ generated by the eternal Real, the One substratum beneath all appearances. And yet the best and seemingly the most intelligent are consumed in its quantitative analysis, a bottomless pit of frantic change for its own sake and profit.

Guenon:  “…in daily life, as in scientific ideas, it is analysis [of external multiplicity] driven to an extreme, endless subdivision, a veritable disintegration of human activity in all the orders.” Nothing is of value that cannot generate profit, while the wisdom that is born from silent contemplation is ridiculed. Thus we live in an intellectual environment suffused in “the inaptitude for synthesis and the incapacity for any sort of concentration.”

High Frequency Trading

What could be more symptomatic of this dispersion into multiplicity, addiction to speed and what Guenon terms an obsession with ‘instantaneity’ than the recent revelations regarding HFT, high frequency trading in the markets. Michael Lewis’ 2014 best seller ‘Flash Boys’ explains that the process of buying and selling have been transformed into a high speed mechanism in which those with the biggest fastest computers and most sophisticated algorithms will always be winning, the ‘front runners’ over any others. The markets have been rigged by the impenetrable wizardry of the science of algorithms. Sophisticated slight-of-hand advantage smacks of criminality and contributes to the collapse of fragile democracies around the planet, allowing the worst to rape the earth.

Guenon in 1942: “It is therefore to be expected that discoveries, or rather mechanical and industrial inventions, will go on developing and multiplying more and more rapidly…and who knows if, given the dangers of destruction they bear in themselves, they will not be one of the chief agents in the ultimate catastrophe.”

Sovereign Debt Collapse does happen…

As odd as my interest in finance may seem to many, I am convinced that the collapse of our current economic system is indeed ‘one of the chief agents’ in the catastrophic events that occur at the close of any Kali Yuga. Complexity theory expresses the notion that complex systems must inevitably collapse as they become more complex and unstable. We are approaching the edges of instability in the realm of fiat money, sovereign debt default, trillions of dollars in derivatives, and an increasing loss of confidence in the world’s reserve currency. Indeed as many far more knowledgeable and brighter that me have publicly stated, confidence is all that remains between our safe secure world and a complete breakdown of civilisation. Once this ‘confidence’ is gone no one really knows what will follow.

Are we being indoctrinated by the globalists to accept a new reserve currency? The Special Drawing Rights, the SDRs created by the IMF are waiting in the theoretical wings to rescue us from financial chaos and oblivion. But who created this instability? In his most recent book ‘The Death of Money’ James Rickards says that the Federal Reserve does not understand that the recent unlimited printing of trillions of dollars, known as QE quantitative easing, can be a perilously irreversible process. The reckless creation of fiat money (along with now $600 trillion in derivatives) may produce a total loss in confidence not only in the dollar, but also in the financial institutions themselves. Once this loss of confidence occurs, a new system must be created to replace the abandoned one.

This entirely new system, often called the New World Order, will be a planetary financial system which has been in the plan stage for centuries, but now actually appears to be gaining success mostly due to the advances in technology, meaning the global access which computer technology allows. Is this all ‘bad’ as the conspiracy researchers have warned us? Surely there is an argument for a more fair system that does not solely serve only one country.

Perhaps.

What worries me is the heinous effects we have already seen that result when corporations are allowed to plunder – (can there be another better description?) – resources in far away lands with impunity. The multinational corporations are poisoning the planet and her oceans. I need not enumerate the plethora of irrefutable evidence, anyone can see the curious disturbing neglect in Fukushima, the consequences of desperate fracking to local water supplies, the obscene greed of GMOs, the insidious ongoing dispersion of endocrine disrupting chemicals EDCs, the insane buying of world water rights, and more. Here clearly we see the results of a loss of individual financial sovereignty and remote control global governance.

While I do recommend that you read James Rickards in online interviews, YouTube, or his books, I have come to believe that his job is to indoctrinate the more financially keen into the IMF’s plan to implement their SDRs and complete control of global finance. In ‘The Death of Money’ Rickards says that when the dollar ceases to be the world reserve currency there are three probabilities: the SDR will replace the USD as world money, the possibility of a gold standard, and the threat of social disorder. I think this threat of social disorder has been carefully inculcated into our consciousness by many bizarre events, which normal peaceful law-abiding citizens have wondered at. Are we being warned? Accept the global system or face the frightening consequences. Anything will be better than lawless mad-max chaos and disorder. But will it?

A done deal?

Rickards says that the substitution of SDRs for dollars as the global currency is now in motion. A ten-year IMF transition plan has been ‘informally endorsed’ by the United States. What? So, we are told this is a done deal. No one has asked the public, there has been no democratic vote, no consensus from we the people. In a rather causal unexpected sentence, Rickards calmly says that money riots would be (his words) ‘squashed quickly’. I see. Resistance is futile indeed. This suppression of money riots is already legal because of a little known legislation passed in 1977, the IEEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Many of the rather frightening rumours floating around the Internet begin to make sense in light of this impending transition. Follow the money, indeed!

Rickards tell us that the IMF is buying time, some say in desperation. Thus the quantitative easing may go on, but he cautions the reader that the plan for a peaceful transition to SDRs or even gold may not occur before the collapse — and because of the prevalence of high frequency trading, collapse of the financial markets will be likely come flash-crash fast.

Money as Water

Money can be understood as the ‘water’ necessary to business and trade; and financial institutions, banks & bonds, are the conduits through which money flows. Rickards says that the large banks, such as Goldman Sachs will be instrumental in the future distributions of the new planetary reserve currency, the SDRs. Thanks to Mike Taibbi’s courageous journalism, we have fully understood how deserving the Vampire Squid is of our complete trust. James Rickards’ publishing company Portfolio Penguin also happens to have published three books that were finalists for the prestigious Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Edward N. Luttwak explains in ‘The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy‘ that the “highest echelon” of the U.S. Treasury, for example Timothy Franz Geithner, “is staffed almost entirely by former or future employees of the leading financial firms” that are sensitive to Chinese enterprises as future clients. According to Luttwak, these financial power elites have no responsibility for or indeed any intellectual interest in the condition of the U.S. manufacturing sector and the subsequent loss of jobs, which they regarded as “uncompetitive and not worth having” — and their willingness to bend to Chinese demands for the sake of making cheap capital available to private finance, has also allowed a tsunami of technology, including aerospace technology, innovated by American enterprise to be given to the Chinese.

I wish I could believe that all this is a rather benevolent and necessary transition. Certainly the obviously very bright and astute Benn Steil of the Council of Foreign Relations makes rational intelligent calming practical arguments somewhat in favour. Steil is extraordinarily knowledgeable and a wonderful writer. He says many in the USA will not be willing to undermine the US monetary sovereignty. However a lack of confidence in a dollar, which is used globally, will undermine the ability of the Federal Reserve to control interest rates, inflation, and contain any domestic financial crises; and therefore inevitably the power of the FED will decline to the point that the sovereignty of the USA becomes, in his words ‘meaningless’.

Unanswered Questions

Can it be that globalization is something that recurs on all planets in their various stages of social and financial evolution, as they move from tribal & clan, to nation states, to global interests? Yet the question remains: Why allow the destruction of the planet herself, the contamination of her oceans, our fields & land, and the air we breathe? Who turns away from planet Earth’s future for mere profit?

This incessant frantic descent into ever increasing multiplicity and complexity is, as Rene Guenon says, the result of “a pretended intuition modelled on the ceaseless flux of things of the senses, far from being able to serve as an instrument for obtaining true knowledge, represents in reality the dissolution of all possible knowledge.”

An intelligence that has been disconnected from the immutable imperishable substratum that lies beneath ‘the curtain of each atom’ [Mahmud Shabistari’s Sufi poem] is necessarily precariously unstable and inclined to collapse. Without metaphysical wisdom, each temporal ‘fix’ our elitist servant PhD’s come up with will only lead us closer to the final moments of this Kali Yuga.

Our sole refuge is a higher consciousness and to individually reconnect with the God essence that dwells within All. Nothing ever dies and as the Bhagavad Gita tells us, ‘The Wise do not grieve.’ Rene Guenon would not have been surprised to witness our current predicament. Guenon offers us one last profound comfort in the final sentence of his brilliant ‘The Reign of Quantity’: “…it can be said in all truth that the ‘end of a world’ never is and never can be anything but the end of an illusion.”

“[We are] made of the same stuff of which events are made…The mind that is parallel with the laws of Nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, from the essay ‘Power’ in “The conduct of Life”

About the Author

V. Susan Ferguson is the author of Inanna Returns, Inanna Hyper-Luminal; her own commentary on the Bhagavad Gita and the Shiva Sutras; and Colony Earth & the Rig Veda. Her website is Metaphysical Musing.

Resources:

– The Crisis of the Modern World, by Rene Guenon, 1942; Sophia Perennis, NY, 2004.
– The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times, by Rene Guenon, 1945; Sophia Perennis, NY, 2004.
– The Death of Money, The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System, by James Rickards; Portfolio Penguin, NY, 2014.
– Currency Wars, The Making of the Next Global Crisis, by James Rickards; Portfolio Penguin, NY, 2011, 2012.
– The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, by Edward N. Luttwak; Harvard University Press, 2012.
– Money, Markets & Sovereignty by Benn Steil & Manuel Hinds; A Council of Foreign Relations Book, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2009.
– The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order, by Benn Steil; Council of Foreign Relations Books, Princeton University Press, 2013.
– The Sleepwalkers, A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe, by Arthur Koestler; Penguin Arkana, London, 1959.
– This Time is Different, Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, by Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff; Princeton University Press, NJ, 2009.
– Cosmic Evolution, The Rise of Complexity in Nature, by Eric J. Chaisson; Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 2001.
– The SHALLOWS, What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr; W.W. Norton & Company, NYC, 2011.
– ‘You are not a gadget’, by Jaron Lanier; Vintage Books, NY, 2011.

This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.

~~ Help Waking Times to raise the vibration by sharing this article with the buttons below…