While there are some similarities between The Numinous Way, and what has come to be called Buddhism, there are also a number of fundamental differences, which differences make the two Ways quite different, and distinct, from each other.
In The Numinous Way there is only living numinously by, for example, valuing empathy, compassion, and honour, and cultivating, in a gentle manner, empathy and compassion, and having that inner balance, that harmony, that personal honour brings. Thus, there are no scriptures, no written or aural Canon, from some Buddha – from some human being who, having arrived, and been enlightened, has departed, leaving works to be reverentially recited and considered as the way to such enlightenment. In addition, there are no prescribed or recommended techniques – such as meditation – whereby it is said that personal understanding, development, or even such enlightenment can or could be obtained.
In The Numinous Way, while there is an appreciation and understanding of compassion, of the need to cease to cause and to alleviate suffering, there is also – unlike in Buddhism – and appreciation and understanding of the need for personal honour; for a Code of Honour, which sets numinous limits for our own personal behaviour and which also allows for and encourages self-defence, including, if necessary, the use of lethal force in such self-defence. Thus, in many ways, The Numinous Way is perhaps more human, more in harmony with our natural, human, character: that innate instinct for nobility, for fairness, that has evolved to become part of many (but, it seems, not all) human beings.
In addition, while honour limits our behaviour in certain ways, there is no asceticism, no rejection of the pleasures of life, of personal love; only an understanding of the need to not be excessive in such things; to not go beyond the bounds set by honour and evident in empathy, and thus not to cause suffering to others by, for example, excessive, uncontrolled, personal desire. For, in The Numinous Way, it is not human desire per se which is regarded as incorrect – as giving rise to samsara – but rather uncontrolled and dishonourable desire and personal behaviour, and a lack of empathy, which are incorrect, which are un-numinous, and thus which are de-evolutionary, and which contribute to or which cause or which can cause, suffering.
In The Numinous Way, while there is an appreciation and understanding of our own individuality, our self, as an illusion – a causal abstraction – this understanding and appreciation, unlike that of Buddhism, derives from a knowledge of our true nature as living beings, which is of us, as individuals (as a distinct living individual entity) being a nexion; a connexion, by and because of the acausal, to all other living beings not only on our planet, Earth, but also in the Cosmos. That is, our usual perception of ourselves as independent beings, possessed of what we term a self, is just a limited, causal, perception, and does not therefore describe our true nature, which is as part of the acausal and causal matrix of Life, of change, of evolution, which is the living Cosmos, and of a living Nature as part of that Cosmos: as the Cosmos presenced on this planet, Earth.
Expressed simply, the illusion of self, for The Numinous Way, is the practical manifestation of a lack of, or the loss of, empathy; the inability (or rather the loss of the ability) to translocate ourselves, our consciousness, into another living-being: an inability to become, if only for an instant, that other living-being. We lack this ability – or have lost this ability – because we have become trapped by or immersed in or allowed ourselves to be controlled by causal Time, by the separation of otherness.
The Numinous Way thus understands our real life as numinous; or rather, as possessing the nature, the character, of the numinous, of The Numen, with our causal, manufactured, abstractions – based on the linearity of causal Time, on a simple cause-and-effect – as obscuring, covering-up, severing, our connexion to the numinous and thus depriving us from being, or becoming, or presencing, the numinous in and through our own lives.
Living numinously is thus a re-discovery of our true nature, as living-beings existing in the Cosmos; a dis-covering; a removal of the causal abstractions, the illusions, that prevent us from knowing and appreciating our true nature, that prevent us or hinder us from knowing and appreciating, and ceasing to harm, all Life (often including ourselves, and other human beings); that prevent us or hinder us from knowing and appreciating, and ceasing to harm, Nature and the Cosmos itself. Living numinously is thus a re-discovery of how and why we are but part of Life itself; a removal of the causal illusion of us-and-them.
Living numinously is thus to discover, to achieve – to-be – the true purpose of our very existence, which is simply to participate, in a numinous manner, in our own change, our own evolution, and thus in the change, the evolution, of all Life, of Nature, and of the Cosmos itself. We thus become balanced, in harmony, with ourselves, with Life, with Nature and the Cosmos, and reconnect ourselves to the matrix, the acausal, The Unity, beyond and within us.
There is thus no Buddhist-type cycle of rebirth, in the realms of the causal, for those human beings who, in their causal lifetime, fail to understand causal abstractions for the Cosmic illusions that they are, and who thus fail to control their own desires, their own behaviour, in such a way that they no longer cause or contribute to the suffering of Life. There is only, for them, a failure to use their one mortal, causal, living to evolve to become part of the change, the evolution, of Life and of the Cosmos itself.
For, by living numinously, by becoming again and then expanding the nexion we are to all Life, to Nature, and to the Cosmos, what we are – our acausal essence presenced in and through our one causal existence – lives-on beyond our mortal, causal, death; not as some illusive, divisive, causal “individual”, but rather as the genesis of the evolution of Life; as the burgeoning, changing, awareness – the consciousness – of Life manifest in the numinous Cosmos itself. And a genesis, a burgeoning, a changing, an awareness, that – being acausal – cannot be adequately described by our limited causal words, our limited language, and our limited, causal, terminology. This living-on is not a pure cessation, not an extinguishing – not nirvana – but rather a simple, a numinous, change of “us”; an evolution to another state-of-noncausal-being, where a causal individuality has no meaning.
David Myatt
(2010)
David Myatt 