The knowledge [we] seek is not meant for controlling the world, but, rather, for unlocking it and letting a mute world become one that speaks to us in a thousand places.
— Erwin Straus (please learn more here)
How to Ascend?
First we descend. We incarnate, we root in a body, we ground in a life. We are born defined in a very confrontational way: as a male or female (or neither or a bit of both, but still using those parameters). Every confrontation is a lesson; for which the ultimate knowledge (know-how) derived is always far less important than the learning experience. We live to learn not to be learnèd.
We learn very slowly and in diversely successful (lasting) manners. There is the example of "one aspirant . . . [who came to see ] how the maggid ties up his shoelaces." There are as many ways to receive learning. (cf. Z'ev Ben Shimon Halevi, "The Way of Kabbalah").
The teaching begins in the recognition of the problem. In Kabbalistic terms we would coin it the problem of bondage. Man lives largely in a vegetable state of eating, sleeping and propagating. What would happen when we start to elevate the eat, sit, and fuck of this life? Can knowledge boost our base-line human modes of doing that determine the bulk of our being? Or is it it again down that good ol' devil called love? The devil of it in the detail.
Throughout the Evolution of Man, every so often it boils down to the gloopy syrup of love, not so maple saccharine as you might think, despite the term Romance or (Sturm und Drang) Romantic or Courtly as from the 14th century; cranberry tart in fact, if you ask me and much misunderstood by modern scholars to be but a battle between eroticism and spiritual aspiration (rather than what I deem to be its amalgamation). We find this powerful reduction of life's dualism in Sufi poetry or the Song of Solomon, and in Parzival by Wolfram of Eschenbach, or Savitri by Sri Aurobindo, everywhere in the stories of Krishna, even in Goethe's West–Eastern Diwan (inspired by Hafiz) and don't get me started on the works of Rilke, O.V. de Milosz, or Hermann Hesse: which ooze most subtley the spiritual power derived from the essence of life that is sex (by its very nature dualistic, where two halves commune, cojoin, unite; and we all know the nuclearpower of fusion).
The world as the seed-bed of the soul is patient, but there are limits to the germination potential of planted seed. It is entirely posible that there can be seed left undeveloped at the end of Time - and there will be an end to our Time in this particualar telluric condition, as any astrophysisist will be able to calculate.
What can we do to further our growth and evolve our existence? Rilke appeals to the terrible angels in his unparallelled master pieces of the Duino Elegies. Joseph Campbell lectured on "transformations" as presented in myth through time.
Joseph Campbell; Transformations of Myth Through Time
Steps Forward on the Way
Must we aim for a greater catharsis of our soul?† And a greater uni-sexual equality to dissolve at least our sexual tensions, which seem to serve little ego struggles rather than love? Watching the disturbing documentary on Harvey Weinstein‡ , a man who never takes no for an answer, and probably finds self-justification in his brash risk-taking modus operandi - the success formula for getting what he wants, after all, in business, producing interesting, out of the box films: "Sex, Lies, and Videotape", Almodovar's "Atame" - "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!"; "Clerks" etc.), we may learn that this latter aim is probably fairly futile; while there are personalities who push to get what they want in a deluded belief in the importance of me, myself and little I, with a fervent and sincere ambition to have things their own way, there will be sexual assault, violation and rape. The woman (or the feminine aspect which receives such direct abusive force; also to be found in a male) will be muted and robbed to be left stuck with a considerable amount of collateral damage (as we see in the chilling story of Hope d'Amore, 40 years after her rape, still doubting herself as to why she stopped resisting after a few pointless if insistent attempts).
Cooking on gas. We need this world with all its bones and flesh to find our sanctity.
footnotes:
†Further reading: "A Pocket Essential Short History Of The Cathars" by Sean Martin
‡ Untouchable: The Rise and Fall of Harvey Weinstein, BBC2
¶ This might be a good time to (re)read Thomas Traherne's "A World Without Objects Is A Sensible Emptiness".