" This book is a collection of essays related to The Numinous Way, which essays attempt to elucidate this new ethical philosophy, based upon empathy, compassion, and honour, which I have developed, and refined, over a period of many years, and which philosophy - which Way of Life - thus expresses my own conclusions about life. These conclusions are the result of a four-decade long pathei mathos: the result of my many and diverse and practical (and, to many others, weird and strange) involvements (political, and otherwise), and my many and diverse and practical quests among the philosophies, Ways of Life, and religions, of the world. The Numinous Way is, in particular, the result of the often difficult process of acknowledging my many personal mistakes - many of which caused or contributed to suffering - and (hopefully) learning from these mistakes.

The essays presented here represent the culmination of my own thinking, and thus supersede all other essays of mine about, or concerning, The Numinous Way, and what I, previously, called The Numinous Way of Folk Culture. For there has been, for me, a profound change of emphasis, a ufollowing of the cosmic ethic of empathy to its logical and honourable conclusion, and thus a rejection of all unethical abstractions, including those of the nation, of what is termed "race", and what I previously, in more unempathic days, referred to as "the folk". It is empathy, compassion and honour which are paramount - the living of an ethical way of life by individuals which is important - not some outward, causal, form, nor the classification and (unethical) judgment of individuals according to some abstraction, some stereotype, some dogma, some ideology, or some theory. "   The Numinous Way of Life: Empathy, Compassion, and Honour

This rumored return, by Myatt, to his own - if revised - rather mystical, and somewhat pagan, philosophy - or Weltanschauung - was privately confirmed in several letters, and e-mails, which he sent me in late January of this year, and which he later confirmed with the distribution of a new autobiographical essay, dated 2455227.753, where he, with a rather admirable honesty and candor, writes:

"There [was] a stubborn clinging to doing what I conceived to be my honourable duty, and it is only in the last month that I have finally and to my own satisfaction resolved, in an ethical way, the dilemma of such a duty, thus ending my association with a particular Way of Life, which Way many consider a religion.....

For almost four years - since Francine's suicide - I struggled with this dilemma of honour and duty, believing that it was my honourable duty to stubbornly adhere to the particular Way of Life I had embraced in the previous decade; and stubbornly adhere despite the conclusions of my own thinking regarding compassion and empathy, manifest as these conclusions were in the ethical, and non-racialist, Numinous Way that I had continued to develope. Thus did I during this period, and several times, publicly and in private re-affirm my commitment to that particular Way of Life, striving hard to forget my own answers, born from my thinking, my experiences, and especially from that personal tragedy, for surely these things were only a test, a trial, of my belief, my honour? Was it not therefore my duty to just humbly submit to الله, to thus acknowledge that my own thinking, my own conclusions based on experience, were flawed, the product of error and pride?

But, to paraphrase TS Eliot, here I am now, in the middle way I have devised for myself, having had many years, often wasted, the years between two wars within myself

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Thus, I have declared a still rather shaky new truce, a compromise: based on a treaty where I have (re)defined personal honour as a practical manifestation of empathy, of the desire to cease to cause suffering to living-beings, with such empathy and the compassion deriving from it a guide to living that awareness of ourselves as but one nexion to all Life and to the Cosmos, and which awareness, which Cosmic perspective, expresses both our true human nature and the potential we possess to change ourselves into higher, more evolved, beings.

I would like to believe that this new truce I have manufactured will hold, but I have believed that before, and been mistaken, and even now it occurs to me that my theory of ethics, my new definition of honour, is just that: mine, and that I may be wrong. Yet my experiences - my feeling for, my empathy with, the numinous (manifest for instance in sublime music or in a mutual personal love) - tell me I can only live what I feel, I know, I empathize with, and this now is presenced in my developed Numinous Way. " DW Myatt: A Change of Perspective

"The Numinous Way - as now developed, and as explicated by me in the past year or so - represents my true nature: the hard, difficult, re-discovery of what I had controlled, and lost; and, perhaps more importantly, an evolution of that personal nature as a result of my diverse experiences, my learning from my mistakes, and my empathic awareness of the suffering I have caused to others.

Hence, I have been, for many decades, wrong; misguided. Or, rather, I misguided myself, allowing idealism and a perceived duty to triumph over, to veil, my humanity. My good intentions were no excuse, even though, for nearly four decades, I made them an excuse, as idealists always do."

"...will continue to be judged, by others, according to some, or all, of my former beliefs, and involvements, which beliefs and involvements the majority of people, un-enlightened and un-empathic as they remain, still describe by some un-numinous abstraction or other and which they have to categorize as either political or religious, or both, forgetting or unaware as they are of the numinous and personal and undivided reality beyond which can only be felt, discovered or known through a personal knowing of, a personal empathy with, the person they are talking and/or writing about..." 

[Myatt is] a complex man, and one who it’s impossible to understand without considered and prolonged study. Reading wikipedia will only obfuscate, given that the way information is structured and determined appropriate there is mutually exclusive with any expression which provides understanding of his character. The Wikipedia article simply isn’t useful in forming any intelligent opinion of him.

He would say that you are being dishonourable by passing a superficial-causal judgement without taking the time to either meet and discuss matters with him or, at least, seriously attempt to understand things from his perspective before making an empathetic judgement, and not reactively judging in accordance with emotive-abstract labels.

At least read his poetry if you’re going to post about him (not any points he’s made or his Philosophy on their own merits). That’s where you can see the man as he is, and come to some limited appreciation of the kinds of things that motivate his actions; instead of seeing him as he plays at being for the sake of understanding. (Yes, understanding– how dedicated would a person have to be that they would be prepared to immerse themselves in violent subcultures such as radical Islam for the purpose of understanding that which is heretical from the inside? You’d have to want understanding more than anything else. You’d have to be a martyr to wisdom, doing that in the knowledge that you’d forever be instantly rejected upon the basis of some label you’d voluntarily taken on. Bear in mind that he’s alternated between the Numinous Way, radical Islamism and other positions for years now. That’s not the behavior of a self-identified ideologue or true believer. )

As someone else wrote, last year, and also on the Internet:

” [Myatt] appears to have been on a multi- decade intellectual/spiritual journey that has taken him far beyond his NS/supremacist origins, through all sorts of twists and turns (his writings on “numinosity”, NS ethics, Islam, Buddhism, etc.), and finally ending up somewhere near the opposite place from where he started. I would call that an admirable and even noble journey.

Very very few people are capable of real change. They seize upon some ideology or orientation or other, and NEVER LET GO. No matter what. So, when someone DOES change, I respect it — apart from the consideration of what, specifically, they changed from or to. To be able to change, from the strongly-held convictions of earlier years, shows character and deep commitment to truth — regardless, again, of specifically what one is changing from or to.

This guy Myatt is, I submit, a man of quite some (inner) accomplishment…..”

A Personal Learning