There are many spiritual teachers who say things I admire in the first instance, but who then trend toward a position I find difficult to maintain: privileging the group over the individual within the quest for gnosis. That is: a mysticism whose ethics entails an understanding that we are all of the same originary soul, now fractured and bifurcated into many – but, through a group politics, humanity may regain a oneness whose essence is Divine likeness.
In contrast, I’ve trended toward imprecision regarding humanity’s origin and course and metaphorized the politics of reunification: maintaining that the self is already a multiplicity of voices, a city unto itself, consisting of selves past and future – whose correction is necessarily one of individuation, unification/balancing within, not without. Perhaps, I muttered, a humanity-wide wholistic return follows from that process.
Nevertheless, its dependence on the process of individuation is a Tailorite ploy to subordinate the group to the individual.
Deconstructing the Tailorite ploy, two ideas silently become apparent.
1. The group is key, even to Tailorite isolationism. An isolationist economy of spirit exists as such only by virtue of a wider market economy (whose capital is the group reunification ideal). An isolationist economy (North Korea, the Soviet Union) crystalizes an iron curtain out of covetousness, a desire for the Cola of the religious group body and, hypocritically, will utilize capitalist wheat supplies (its scriptural tropes) when its own collective farms (of one) fail to self-deliver the necessary manna for analysis. Ultimately a breakdown of that state is inevitable, grounded as it is upon the fetish/caricature of the market.
2. The spiritual guide, who speaks of group reunification, is himself an anti-Tailor, which is not the same thing as a capitalist – rather it is a Marxist extrovert, with the Tailor an introvert. The Professor X to my Magnito – both still mutant perverts.
If we acknowledge now that the Real is composed of bodies in the plural, then any talk of unification is an individuated, fully extrovert, Marxist fantasy, whose “group” is a ploy to rationalize and order the fundamental chaos of bodies, teaming in naked uncountable expanse. Workers of the world, unite, speaks the prophet, oh so uniquely individual!
The capital of the body mass is still denied/fetishized/coveted but, while the Tailorite metaphorizes this mass as individuation, the anti-Tailor, fully individuated, appears to affirm the mass, renders it culturally weighted, assigns it a weight according to the spiritual metric of unification.
When no such unification is possible across the bodies, limbs, heads, appendages: only organic connection, mating, death, reaching out, disconnection, expiry, survival.
This is the meaning of the following verse:
That you may warn a people whose forefathers were not warned, so they are unaware. Already the word has come into effect upon most of them, so they do not believe. (36:6-7)
It speaks to the prophet, perfectly individual. And he infiltrates a stratum of flesh never before warned. Not warned: not of Adam, not of the individual prophetic body, but alien flesh. Only effect, the word, fetish: it contaminates these bodies, so as to capture then. But the verse itself demarcates itself as purely local ummah/city (“those who forefathers …”) in contrast to the implicit uncountable flesh (“will not believe (you)”) in evolution.
