Mystical Reply to the Last Man

Hi all,

For this next event, an anonymous member of Negative Space has provided the topic concerning Mysticism and Nietzsche's idea of "the last man." Here is the anonymous member's write-up:

In the prologue to Zarathustra, Nietzsche has his beloved hero describe to the masses a sobering vision of their future if they do not heed his warning. He calls this frightening terminal point “the last man,” who, while thinking himself making “progress” in the knowing of various
things, has actually made the world small and himself tame. Having reduced the world to language and thereby lost touch with it, the last man asks, “What is love? What is creation?
What is longing? What is a star?” In the first of the ongoing seminar on the unconscious by this group, Nietschze’s conception of consciousness was presented as largely negative–an almost inevitable growth of a symbolic mode of knowing which increasingly snuffs out human vitality and creativity. I will present my understanding of the mystical view of the unconscious and the conscious, and in so doing, give a mystical reply to the last man.

To give a preview here, the mystics might agree with Freud’s idea that there is a fundamental trauma which causes a split between the conscious and the unconscious. But they may emphasize a faculty which they view as even more fundamental than either the conscious or unconscious, and it is this faculty to which they give the name “consciousness” or “non-dual awareness” or–even more simply–“God.” Due to its primary nature, the great mystic Ramana Maharshi sometimes called it “the substrate.”

In this discussion, I’d like to focus on this faculty and its relationship to language, drawing illustrations from the mystical traditions I’m most familiar with. To give a different angle on the subject, it will be largely exploratory, and we will examine the workings of this faculty through a combination of empirical and theoretical study–in other words, I’ll try to indicate those aspects of this faculty which can be verified to be true with the utmost immediacy and ease. And I really do mean utmost. After all, both the Hindu mystics and Christian theologians have said the (up to translation) same thing that “God is both immanent and transcendent,
” and this can’t be true unless God is both closer and more self-evident to us than even our own noses. And we’ll explore why this faculty has been described as God, or as the source of wisdom (prajna), compassion (karuna), humor (not sure I have a translation for this one lol), the absolute (sat), truth (chit), and bliss (ananda). And, lastly, we’ll talk about how this relates to the problem (or non-problem) of the last man and what Nietschze may have thought of this reply. So join me on St. Paddy’s Day so that together we and its chaos will form a perfect expression of the mystical response to the last man.

I’ve attached a couple short (and very related) foundational texts below that I may reference which are related to this subject. Reading them is not required but feel free to have a look at them if you are curious. They are the Heart Sutra from Buddhism and Shankaracharya’s Six Stanzas on Nirvana (a Hindu poem translation by Swami Nikhilananda from “The Gospel of Sri
Ramakrishna").

https://www.sfzc.org/files/daily_sutras_heart_of_great_perfect_wisdom

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EpEdGkPvBEkXj7UTVnKMSRRLACPvuyfzPA96Y_4RUoM/edit?tab=t.0