¡VIVA LA REVELACIÓN!

A new revelation?

Paul Cudenec’s thought is a guiding light to many of us. His formulation of organic radicalism provides a framework grounded in the past—in fact, in the deepest realms of existence—that speaks to our struggles today and our hopes for a brighter tomorrow.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing 3 specially selected essays. You can think of these as a sort of ‘Cudenec primer’—they span his thinking over the past 11 years.

As we can see from the present essay, taken from his first published book, The Anarchist Revelation, his call for a “political-spiritual revolt” has been a constant theme. This is one of the things that sets his ideas apart: the realization that any real revolution, any genuine turning of this world around, involves political transformation coupled with spiritual transformation.

-WD James (ed.)

A remarkable transformation is required if we are to shake off the mental disease that is condemning humanity, and the planet, to a slow and ignoble death by ignorance and greed. An awakening is required on a scale never seen before, an awakening that will spread like a tsunami around the globe, sweeping away the machineries and mindset of hateful oppression and denial. It is not so much a revolution that is needed, but a revelation – a lifting of all the veils of falsity and a joyful rediscovery of the authentic core of our existence.

“Religion starts like a great shout,” says Oswald Spengler. “Gloomy apprehension is suddenly dispelled by a fervid wakening that blossoms plantwise from mother earth and at one glance takes in the depth of the light-world. In this moment – never earlier, and never (at least with the same deep intensity) later – it traverses the chosen spirits of the time like a grand light, which dissolves all fear in blissful love and lets the invisible appear, all suddenly, in a metaphysical radiance”.1 This revelation is not going to come from one of the existing exoteric forms of religion which have exhausted their essential vitality, withered inside and become nothing more than vehicles of worldly power and control. Neither is it going to come from some newly fabricated imitation of religion, a shallow concoction of superficial characteristics of spirituality considered entertaining and harmless by the dominant system.

This new revelation must start from within the individual, from within the existential grasping of the need to be that is born of self-searching alienation and the burning away of the dross of the ego. But the alchemy of spiritual renewal will have to be a universal one, in which not just the microcosm of the individual but the macrocosm of the whole is purified and turned to gold. Furthermore, if this revelation is to be a true revelation, it will have to emerge from concealment – it will have to possess the primal power of discovery, even though what it reveals will be as old as time itself. Thus it is that Karl Jaspers urges “we do everything in our power to restore the eternal truth; we must plumb its very depths and, unconcerned over what is transcient and historical, utter this truth in a new language”.2

And where is this new language of religion to come from? When Saul Newman suggests that “perhaps anarchism could become a new ‘heroic’ philosophy, which is no longer reactive but, rather, creates values”,3 he is pointing us towards the answer. The values of anarchism are “new” enough to force the massive changes for which the human soul is thirsting, but sink their roots into the deepest, richest soil of our collective psyche. This is the revelation we need – the Anarchist Revelation!

The religion behind this revelation – a glorious fusion of the earthly insurgent dynamic and the transcendent esoteric insight with which it is so eminently compatible – will not look like any religion that has been seen before. Gone will be all the outdated relics of what are today called religions, after we have asked ourselves, as Jaspers proposes, “which dogmas can be dropped because they have actually become alien to modern man and lost their credibility?”4 When we understand that the essence of authentic spirituality is both universal and timeless, that it can assume all manner of forms and yet remain exactly what it always was, then we will be free to express our longing for truth in the way which is most appropriate to the age we live in and which will ensure the message is understood and embraced. Frithjof Schuon is quite clear on this point, when he declares: “If a new Revelation may thus justifiably depreciate traditional values of an earlier origin, it is because it is independent of these values and has no need of them, since it possesses equivalent values of its own and is therefore entirely self-sufficient”.5

Anarchism has values of its own aplenty and its revelation is a contemporary rebirth of the primordial religion that was the origin of all other religions, before they atrophied. Martin Lings explains that Islam understands this universal primal beginning and “one of the characteristics of the Qur’an as the last Revelation is that at times it becomes as it were transparent in order that the first Revelation may shine through its verses; and this first Revelation, namely the Book of Nature, belongs to everyone”.6 This, too, is the quality of the Anarchist Revelation – it belongs to everyone and seeks to bring about a general transparency so that authentic truth can be revealed.

It reveals the sorry state of contemporary humanity: cut-off from reality, from others and the whole by the alienation of technology, of conformity, of conditioning. It reveals the falsity of our so-called democracy and exposes the destruction, the exploitation, the deceit, that hides behind it. It reveals the sick parody of justice, the outrageous theft of land, the intolerable denial of freedom that imprisons each and every one of us. It reveals how the lie of progress and the empty restrictive language of one-dimensional thinking are promoted by capitalism to close down our understanding of the world and have us think that there is no other possible reality.

The Anarchist Revelation shows us that this is not how things are meant to be; this is not how we are all meant to live – and it inspires us to put things right. It inspires us to fly free over the barriers erected around us, riding the winds of human passion and yearning. It inspires us to see that the state is a destroyer of life, not a necessity for it, and thus to kick over the whole house of cards of authority and control. It inspires us to draw on the energy flowing through ourselves, to find our dharma and to be guided by the “original instructions” and natural laws of organic self-governing society. It inspires us to plug ourselves back into the collective unconscious, into the heart of nature and to know that if we don’t stop civilization from murdering the planet, nothing else matters. It inspires us to take our despair into ourselves and find the courage to exist, to understand that our glorious gift as individuals is to be the only means by which the collective spirit has an actual physical existence and to accept the noble burden of responsibility which this bestows upon us. It inspires us to let out a collective cry of courageous refusal and to know, above all, that the future is not yet written.

It is the Anarchist Revelation that will bring about the metanoia we need to fight off the cancer that is killing us. Have no doubt that the primal power of its light will prevail over the darkness. “As soon as the Ideal is put before mankind, all former ideals will fade away as the stars fade before the rising sun”,7 writes Leo Tolstoy. Neither, as Landauer observes, need we worry that the quantity of those answering the call will not be great enough, when the quality of its content is beyond question: “There is no need to fear a lack of revolutionaries: they actually arise by a sort of spontaneous generation – namely when the revolution comes… The voice of the spirit is the trumpet that will sound again and again and again, as long as men are together. Injustice will always seek to perpetuate itself; and always as long as men are truly alive, revolt against it will break out”.8

Anarchy is not a dry theory, analysis or programme, but a manifestation – in the realm of ideas – of the life-force itself, the Tao that has been blocked by the capitalist death-system. As such, it can never be crushed, recuperated or forgotten. It lives on in the blood of each new generation of humanity, reborn again and again, becoming stronger and stronger the more its destiny is denied. “The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the men in whom it lives and who proclaim it,” writes Carl Jung. “This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean little enough; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree”.9

Once the Anarchist Revelation has achieved its transformative purpose it will no longer have to maintain the same shape and will not need the hard anger of revolt; organic society will no longer have to throw up men and women destined to incarnate that rebellion; individuals of a particular kind will no longer find themselves to be outsiders and rebels impelled to dedicate their lives to lonely defiance and bitter resistance. We will have reached eudaimonia:10 we will be living the way we are meant to live in the earthy tangle of nature, the perfect imperfection of what is real and true and growing. And our primal religion will remind us that, as the Hermetica say: “All things are linked together, and connected one with another in a chain extending from the lowest to the highest; so that we see that they are not many, or rather, that all are one”.11

1. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) pp. 324-25.

2. Karl Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, trans. by Ralph Manheim, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950) p. 107.

3. Saul Newman, Anarchism and the Politics of Ressentiment in I Am Not A Man, I Am Dynamite: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition, ed. by John Moore with Spencer Sunshine, (Brooklyn, New York: Autonomedia, 2004) p. 122.

4. Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, p. 107.

5. Frithjof Schuon, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, trans. by Peter Townsend, (London: Faber & Faber, 1953) pp. 115-16.

6. Martin Lings, What is Sufism?, (London: George Allen Unwin Ltd, 1975) p. 23.

7. Leo Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom, (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998) p. 243.

8. Gustav Landauer, For Socialism, trans. by David J Parent, (St Louis: Telos Press, 1978) p. 82 & p. 130.

9. CG Jung, Modern Man In Search of A Soul, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) p. 282.

10. Derrick Jensen, Dreams, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011) p. 444.

11. Ascelpius III, in Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings Which Contain Religious or Philosophical Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, ed. and trans. by Walter Scott, (Shaftesbury: Solos Press, 1997) p. 128.

This essay is the final chapter of Paul Cudenec’s The Anarchist Revelation