Transcending Material Temptation
by Rose Sybil
My beautiful son was only seven weeks old. I spent nearly all of his waking hours holding him, and worked on finishing my Bachelor’s degree online during his naps. As usual, he fell asleep in the early evening. I smelled his head before kissing it, and gently placed him in his cradle. Then I hurried to the computer to finish some coursework.
As I worked on finance problems, a persistent urge to go check on him kept popping up in my mind. My logical brain quickly overrode it, thinking: This is my window to get schoolwork done so I can be fully present when he is awake. I pushed the thought aside, but it returned stronger each time. Then I felt a clear physical pull on my third eye.
In that moment, I realized I was logically reasoning away something beyond reason. This was third-eye intuition pulling on my conscious mind, not random worry. I jumped up and ran to my baby with foreboding in my heart. I knew something was terribly wrong when I picked him up. His sweet face was contorted in pain and his skin had turned a dark burgundy. He was suffocating on thick spit-up blocking his nose.
I sprang into action, calling 911 while running to grab the suction bulb. I cleared his nose, flung him over my shoulder, and hit his back until he cried. It was the most joyous sound I had ever heard. The EMT later told me I had caught it just in time before he turned blue, which is when brain damage would have begun. By being open to third-eye intuition and connected in the present moment, I saved my son’s life. I realized later on that my son would have died if I had continued to rationalize and had pushed my third-eye intuition out of awareness.
Intuition, Instinct, and the Body
Third-eye intuition lives in what I have described as the progenic realm — an incorporeal place beyond space and time that includes the past and potential future of peoples or a person. When people meditate into the third eye they tangibly feel themselves outside of the body within this realm that is both differentiated and simultaneously one. I have written about Progenic Hierarchy and what strengthens this realm, contrasted by material hierarchy and mimetics.
Progenic Hierarchy
Rose Sybil argues that modern language and social hierarchies create a “Linguistic Sink” and “Behavioral Sink,” which fragment reality into static, lifeless forms. To reconnect ancestors and descendants, she proposes “Progenic Hierarchy”.
The third eye holds the wisdom of the past while pointing toward future generations. It carries wisdom from our recently deceased and ancestral protectors. Opening and attuning to your third eye results in a constant feeling of energy pulsating in and in front of the center of the forehead. Intuition comes as thoughts that appear but the energy will increase to a pull with clear warnings of danger or possible future outcomes, like the night I saved my baby. Though often treated as the center of all intuition, I have found this is not entirely accurate.
For me, as a woman and as a mother, the heart chakra is where the deepest and most meaningful insights bloom. It is the primary place for processing lived experience into meaning, receiving insight from the group subconscious, and understanding the felt reality of those who came before. Synchronicities are strongly tied to the heart and increase when it is in tune, especially in nature. Sitting above the solar plexus, it serves as the bridge between the celestial and earthly realms.
The earthly realms carry their own vital intuition. Gut instincts arise from the solar plexus which is our center of being. They may not feel as precise or externally interconnected as third-eye or heart insights, but they should never be ignored. The solar plexus reveals what is within our perceptual field but not yet conscious on an individual immediate level. Many modern problems, especially in liberalism, stem from a rejection of gut instincts or rootedness.
Higher reasoning and intuition should not reject the lower realms but build upon them. Instinct is too often conflated with impulsivity, causing both to be demonized. The belief that being above base instincts is spiritually superior is the end state of the Gnostic rejection of the physical world. We are meant to live fully in this body as the microcosm, in this world that is the living body of the divine as macrocosm. No higher insight or reason will be properly grounded if we first dismiss our body and its intuition.
Instinct, Passion, and Addiction
People conflate instincts with impulsive escapism and then demonize both, when the latter is really addiction. Addictions are imbalances, just as extreme renunciation of the world is an imbalance. The Stoics rightly identified issues with addiction, but much of Stoicism veered into ascetic excess and detachment from bonds. They lost the balanced wisdom of the Greeks and blurred the crucial distinction between passions or instincts and addictions.
True instinct is bodily intuition that reaches beyond limited conscious perception. Passion is an expression of love that keeps the soul alive, active in the world and connected to intuitions. Passion differs from addiction by not being a form of consumptive entropy, though one can be consumed by passion. Passions manifest as the love of learning, philosophy, eros in its highest sense, love for deep family bonds, loving devotion to the divine, or philia in fraternal love. The beauty of Western civilization came from passion projects, not market-driven calculations… because beauty is born of passion, not economics.
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Addictions always carry an entropic and economic dimension, which I discuss more on the distinction between creation and consumptive existence. They arise when real bonds and passions are absent. Traditionally, meals were an act of ancestral and divine worship, a ritual to bond within an ancestral family or fraternity through nourishment and gratitude across time. An internal passion to pursue knowledge or philosophize is not a consumptive act. When an economic transaction or a materialist worldview replaces that deeper essence, the act becomes addictive and stripped of meaning.
For example, porn is not an expression of procreation, primal vitality, or spiritual union; it is an economic exchange detached from lived experience. Alcoholics chase a dragon of escapism, far divergent from drinking during a sacred rite or cultural bonding festivities. Drug addiction stems from a loss of meaningful purpose when the will to express one’s soul is silenced because there is no sense of a rightful place in the world. Work is meaningless if it does not suit your nature and passions, which is why work you love does not feel like work.
Passions drive great works of art, masterful craftsmanship, poetry as communion with the divine, profound human relationships, and legacy. The philia between Patroclus and Achilles in its formation and in loss affected the outcome of their entire Age. Genuine passions transmit deep meaning as expressions of essence, the spirit reaching outward to touch the group soul... When people lose meaning and connection, they regress toward lower, addictive states of being.
“Let us insist for a moment on what the choices of Achilles, Hector, Helen, Penelope, and Odysseus suggest. In Homer, life, this small, ephemeral, so common thing, has no value in itself. It is only worth its intensity, its beauty, the breath of greatness that each man — and first in his own eyes — can give it.
This is a very different conception from that conveyed by so many bazaar wisdoms, the platitudes that have invaded the spirit of the Western masses and incited the desire to live a life as long as possible, even if mediocre and larval. Mortal like all beings of nature, plant or animal, men are, however, sometimes splendid like the immortal gods. Homer shows them often even greater, because they are mortal.”
— Dominique Venner, Samurai of the West
First Principles and the Temptation of Material Stasis
The Divine in a purely non-physical state cannot form meaning. All-powerful full-potentiality therefore sacrificed part of itself to create the physical world as a foil for meaning. This act required genuine risk because meaning cannot emerge under absolute predetermination or omnipotence. Spirit formed physical mater through self-sacrifice of its own omnipotent power as an act of first conception, then united with mater as an act of first procreation to layer life towards the formation of meaning. All life must be a sacrifice in that image, or it destroys itself in the consumption of mater for material.
Life is built on layers meant to house divine consciousness and beauty through creative complexity. Contrasting this with behavioral sink reveals the difference between living physical reality and mere material existence. Material is that which relates to matter but is not itself matter. Matter becomes purely material in its most entropic state, when it exists outside of the life-death cycle. A deliberate sacrifice of energy from full potentiality allows for life and death to flow into each other. When that potential is squandered for meaningless consumption and hyper production, it forsakes the sacred sacrifice.
The great risk in creation is the temptation to hold the physical world in a material stasis, ending the unfolding of meaning and complexity. This temptation is the Stasis of Forms (I discuss this in further detail in the Lost Heroic Age Series), or the desire to eliminate uncertainty by holding living processes in rigid materiality. It prevents the divine from acting within the world because we no longer recognize that we exist within the divine to participate in enacting meaning. As the heart chakra closes under layers of entropy, synchronicity fades or is misinterpreted as something purely external.
The mindset of the Stasis of Forms views revelation as a completed past pointing toward a final utopian, predetermined salvation, instead of potential fates in flux. This prevents Divine Providence by forsaking the present. It is no accident that the hope of bodily resurrection so closely resembles transhumanist dreams of engineered immortality. The latter is the same impulse without the divine; the former displaces the divine from the world and from its action through people, across ancestral lines, and lived experience. Both represent the desire for stasis to escape from life’s purpose.
By truly participating in the living divine foil of physical reality, we usher Providence into the world. This is what, I believe, allowed me to save my son. We must reject utopian ideals and rationalizations that remove us from the living present, lest we yield dystopian outcomes… as my future would have been if I was detached from or continued to ignore my third-eye intuition. Many would rationalize such a loss by saying it was meant to be or beyond our understanding, but such responses reinforce the rejection of life itself. Even with loss, to say it is predetermined beyond our understanding passively negates a vital response from the soul of the person (which causes a disruption of Being and Becoming that I discuss further in “Simulacra and the Dialectical Defeat of the Right”) that is responsible for meaning to begin with.
We are meant to live in this world, in this body, and to be present in this moment. Only when connected to divine living reality do we access intuition across all centers, as all life is a layering. We must embrace passion and creative risk to transcend into new forms of beautiful complexity, rather than a stasis. We are meant to be vessels of living fire between earth and heaven… passionate, intuitive, reasoning, and present as part of the divine mystery of life.
“The underlying life force or God is an ultimate, unchanging entity, but the gods themselves are living, evolving entities that transform alongside natural and celestial living absolutes. Symbolic or mythological shifts, over long spans of time, reflect the spirit of the people who hold them, as they become new states of being. The gods are reincarnated through these people, and significant events can even fracture and change how the god is expressed and its spiritual standing.”
— Rose Sybil, “Living Symbolism and Myth”
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The Biocentric Worldview brings together selected works by the German philosopher and psychologist Ludwig Klages, showcasing his radical critique of modernity and his life-affirming vision for healing man’s estrangement from the living world, inspired by pagan antiquity and thinkers such as Nietzsche. This uniquely curated volume also features Klages’ penetrating critiques of psychoanalysis as well as his poems, which give lyrical expression to the experience of nature and the living cosmos at the heart of human thought.
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