Climbing Mount Analogue

“A good stew is worth more than false philosophy.” (Rene Daumal)

Theology is what happens when didactic philosophy replaces animistic ontology.

This is a byproduct of a civilization’s increasing urban complexity, specialization, and logocentric separation from the primacy of direct participatory experience with the cosmos.

As this happens, direct contact with the forces of nature is replaced by urban priests and pundits stuck in their heads in cities.

They theorize what they’ve lost the ability to understand through embodied experience in animistic relationships to the world around them and beyond them.

As a result those who talk the most theology often know the very least gnostically through direct experience.

The urban theologian is the last person that can help give you an experience of the ineffable.

Lao Tzu, a bridge between the Shamanism of early China and its emergent agricultural and logocentric civilization hinted at this in the first chapter of the Tao Te Ching …

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.”

Accessing the nameless requires direct participation with nature, the will to climb higher and descend deeper through an ordeal, initiatory gnostic experiences, and the use of analogy.

Climbing Mount Analogue is harder than Theology, but much more rewarding in the long run.