Insight Wisely

     There’s another mode of offbeat spirituality that differs both from occultism and the New Age. I’m thinking of visionaries like Swedenborg, Rudolf Steiner, and, in a way, Jacob Boehme too. These people possessed a distinctive spiritual talent: they could actually see spiritual realities. They were spiritual savants, so to speak.
     I’ve agreed to write a foreword to a forthcoming book, A Thoughtful Soul, that is said to be the best exposition of Swedenborg’s position that has ever been written. I agreed to do that, not because I know Swedenborg well but because I don’t and welcome the chance to learn more about him. For some reason I don’t feel the same inclination to explore Rosicrucianism or Freemasonry, even though their underlying concepts are very close to those of the primordial tradition.
— Huston Smith, Way Things Are, pp. 154-155.

Cousineau: Finally, you are fond of the phrase “winnowing the wisdom of the world.” What is the wisest wisdom you have winnowed? I asked our old friend Joseph Campbell if he had a favorite line or quotation or nugget of wisdom that he had picked up from his readings in mythology and religion that had given him some heart’s consolation. And he said immediately that there was a line by the Buddha that had given him a great deal of solace over the years. The Buddha said that the most important task in life is to “participate with joy in the sorrows of the world.” Do you have an equivalent nugget of wisdom that has given you comfort over the years, given you joy?
Smith: That’s wonderful! Well, I can’t top Joe’s favorite, but what comes to mind is the answer my roshi gave me at the close of my farewell with him when I asked him what Zen came down to for him. He said, “Infinite gratitude to all things past. Infinite service to all things present. Infinite responsibility to all things future.” And with that he bowed with his palms together in gassho, a bow signifying deep respect.
— Huston Smith, Ibid., pp. 276-277.

NINETEEN SEVENTY-TWO

SO, AT LAST YOUR PERSONALITY

HAS BECOME A COPROLITE!

((Fossilized shit!))

How

PAINFUL IT WAS

To grow up in the fifties!

WE LEARNED:

MATERIALISM,

MACHO-COMPETITION,

GREED.

But still I can hardly believe

THAT YOU SIT THERE TELLING ME:

ABOUT THE GIRLS YOU FUCK,

HOW MUCH MONEY YOU MAKE,

AND OF YOUR FAME.

As if

The last twenty years

Never happened.

You

Seem pathetically

Foolish.

But there is viciousness

In

Our generation.

YOU

ARE

REALLY

SET

(like a robot)

ON OVERKILL.

And you believe

In social appearances.

_______________________

You want to be like

The Big Boys.

Whoever they are!

— Michael McClure, September Blackberries, pp. 119-120.

So It Were

The Roman Rule:
The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it.
— Arthur Bloch, Murphy’s Law, Book Three, p.18.

Thompson’s Theorem:
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
— Arthur Bloch, Ibid., p. 31.

Kierkegaard’s Observation:
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.
— Arthur Bloch, Ibid., p. 82.

     “There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.”
— Neils Bohr, in Principia Discordia: The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse, p. 9.

     An Age of Confusion, or an Ancient Age, is one in which History As We Know It begins to unfold, in which Whatever Is Coming emerges in Corporeal Form, more or less, and such times are Ages of Balanced Unbalance, or Unbalanced Balance.
     An Age of Bureaucracy is an Imperial Age in which Things Mature, in which Confusion becomes entrenched and during which Balanced Balance, or Stagnation, is attained.
     An Age of Disorder or an Aftermath is an Apocalypse Period of Transition back to Chaos through the Screen of Oblivion into which the Age passeth, finally. These are Ages of Unbalanced Unbalance.
— HBT; The Book of Uterus, Chap. 3, in Ibid., p. 18.

“This book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no apostle looks out.”
— Lichtenberg, in Ibid., p. 22.

     An excellent therapist I once knew made the point that in almost all cases of criminal psychotic acting-out there is an easier alternative that the disturbed person overlooked. Brenda Spenser, for instance, could have walked to the local supermarket and bought a carton of chocolate milk instead of shooting eleven people, most of them children. The psychotic person actually chooses the more difficult path; he forces his way uphill. It is not true that he takes the line of least resistance, but he thinks that he does. There, precisely, lies his error. The basis of psychosis, in a nutshell, is the chronic inability to see the easy way out. All the behavior, all that constitutes psychotic activity and the psychotic lifestyle, stems from this perceptual flaw.
     Sitting in isolation and silence in her antiseptic apartment, waiting for the inexorable knock on the door, the Lysol Lady had contrived to put herself in the most difficult circumstances possible. What was easy was made hard. What was hard was transmuted, finally, into the impossible, and there the psychotic lifestyle ends, when the impossible closes in and there are no options at all, even difficult ones. That is the rest of the definition of psychosis: At the end there lies a dead end. And, at that point, the psychotic person freezes. If you have ever seen it happen — well, it is an amazing sight. The person congeals like a motor that has seized. It occurs suddenly. One moment the person is in motion — the pistons are going up and down frantically — and then it’s an inert block. That is because the path has run out for that person, the path he probably got on to years before. It is kinetic death. “Place there is none,” St. Augustine wrote. “We go backward and forward, and there is no place.” And then the cessation comes and there is only place….
— Philip K. Dick, in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, Lawrence Sutin (ed.), p. 41.

     It was always my hope, in writing novels and stories that asked the question “What is reality?,” to someday get an answer. This was the hope of most of my readers, too. Years passed. I wrote over thirty novels and over a hundred stories, and still I could not figure out what was real. One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.
— Philip K. Dick, in Ibid., p. 261.

High Standing

CYRANO:
What would you have me do?
Seek for the patronage of some great man,
And like a creeping vine on a tall tree
Crawl upward, where I cannot stand alone?
No thank you! Dedicate, as others do,
Poems to pawnbrokers? Be a buffoon
In the vile hope of teasing out a smile
On some cold face? No thank you! Eat a toad
For breakfast every morning? Make my knees
Callous, and cultivate a supple spine, —
Wear out my belly groveling in the dust?
No thank you! Scratch the back of any swine
That roots up gold for me? Tickle the horns
Of Mammon with my left hand, while my right
Too proud to know his partner’s business,
Takes in the fee? No thank you! Use the fire
God gave me to burn incense all day long
Under the nose of wood and stone? No thank you!
Shall I go leaping into ladies’ laps
And licking fingers? — or — to change the form —
Navigating with madrigals for oars,
My sails full of the sighs of dowagers?
No thank you! Publish verses at my own
Expense? No thank you! Be the patron saint
Of a small group of literary souls
Who dine together every Tuesday? No,
I thank you! Shall I labor night and day
To build a reputation on one song,
And never write another? Shall I find
True genius only among Geniuses.
Palpitate over little paragraphs,
And struggle to insinuate my name
In columns of the Mercury?
No thank you! Calculate, scheme, be afraid,
Love more to make a visit than a poem,
Seek introductions, favors, influences? —
No thank you! No thank you! And again
No thank you! — But . . .
To sing, to laugh, to dream,
To sing in my own way and be alone,
Free, with an eye to see things as they are,
A voice that means manhood — to cock my hat
Where I choose — At a word, a Yes, a No,
To fight — to write. To travel any road
Under the sun, under the stars, nor doubt
If fame or fortune lie beyond the bourne —
Never to make a line I have not heard
In my own heart; yet, with all modesty
To say: “My soul, be satisfied with flowers,
With fruit, with weeds even; but gather them
In the one garden you may call your own.”
So, when I win some triumph, by some chance,
Render no share to Caesar — in a word,
I am too proud to be a parasite,
And if my nature wants the germ that grows
Towering to heaven like the mountain pine,
Or like the oak, sheltering multitudes —
I stand, not high it may be — but alone!....
— Edmund Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Act II, Scene 2. VIII.


ROXANE:
If that be true —
And when that moment comes to you and me —
What words will you? . . .
CYRANO: [speaking for Christian who is courting Roxane]
All those, all those, all those
That blossom in my heart, I’ll fling to you —
Armfuls of loose bloom! Love, I love beyond
Breath, beyond reason, beyond loves own power
Of loving! Your name is like a golden bell
Hung in my heart; and when I think of you,
I tremble, and the bell swings and rings —
“Roxane!” . . .
“Roxane!” . . . along my veins, “Roxane!” . . .
— Edmund Rostand, Ibid., Act III.


     Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: They try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so that they will be happier.
     The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.

The purpose of creative visualization is:
To connect us with our beingness
To help us focus and facilitate our doingness
To increase and expand our havingness
— Shakti Gawain, Creative Visualization, p. 36.

Actual Acceptance

     It is all of a piece — the look in the eye, the posture, the stance, the gait, and “the angle of vision,” as Balzac says. The angel in man is ready to emerge whenever that dread human will to have one’s own way can be kept in abeyance. Things not only look different, they are different, when perfect sight is restored. To see things whole is to be whole. The fellow who is out to burn things up is the counterpart of the fool who thinks he can save the world. The world needs neither to be burned up nor to be saved. The world is, we are. Transients, if we buck it; here to stay, if we accept it. Nothing is solid, fixed or unalterable. All is flux, because everything created is also creative. If you are unhappy — “and I know you are — take thought! You can spend the rest of your life fighting it out on every front, in every vector — and get nowhere. Give up, throw in the sponge, and possibly you will look at the world with new eyes. More than possibly you will see your friends and enemies in a new light — even your wife, or that rascally, inconsiderate, hardheaded, ill-tempered, gin-soaked devil of a husband.
     Is there a discrepancy between this realistic picture, which I painted when the “oranges” were in bloom? No doubt there is. Have I contradicted myself? No! Both pictures are true, even though colored by the temperament of the writer. We are always in two worlds at once, and neither of them is the world of reality. One is the world we think we are in, the other is the world we would like to be in. Now and then, as if through a chink in the door — or like the myopic who falls asleep in the train — we get a glimpse of the abiding world. When we do, we know better than any metaphysician can expostulate, the difference between true and false, the real and the illusory.
— Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, p. 144.

A coincidence? Possibly. I prefer to think otherwise.
     At some point in his life most everyone ponders over the meaning of the word “coincidence.” If we face the question courageously, for it is a disturbing one, we are forced to admit that mere happenstance is no answer. If we use the word “predestination” we feel defeated. And rightly so. It is only because man is born free that these mysterious conjunctions of time, place and event can take place. In the horoscopes of those men and women marked by destiny we observe that mere “incidents” become highly significant events. Perhaps because these individuals were able to realize more of their potential being than ordinary mortals, the correlation between inner and outer, micro and macro, is striking and diamond clear.
     In grappling with the mystery of “chance” we may be unable to render suitable explanation but we cannot deny that we are made aware of laws beyond the reach of human understanding. The more aware we become the more we perceive that there is a relation between right living and good fortune. If we probe deep enough we come to realize that fortune is neither good nor bad, that what matters is the way we take our (good or bad) fortune. The common saying runs: “To make the most of one’s lot.” Implicit in this adage is the idea that we are not equally favored or disfavored by the gods.
     The point I wish to stress is that in accepting our fate we are not to think that things were destined thus or that we were singled out for special attention, but that by responding to the best in ourselves we may put ourselves in rhythm with higher laws, the inscrutable laws of the universe, which have nothing to do with good or bad, you and me.
     This was the test which the great Jehovah put to Job.
     I could run on indefinitely with examples of these coincidences and “miracles,” as I freely call them, which crop up in my life. Numbers, however, mean nothing. If only one had occurred, it would have the same shocking validity. Indeed, what baffles me more than almost anything, in human affairs, is man’s ability to ignore or bypass events or happenings which do not fit into his pattern of thought, his unquestioned logic. In this respect civilized man is just as primitive in his reactions as the so-called savage. What he cannot account for he refuses to look squarely in the face. He dodges the issue by employing words like accident, anomaly, fortuitous, coincidence, and so on.
     But each time “it” happens he is shaken. Man is not at home in the universe, despite all the efforts of philosophers and metaphysicians to provide a soothing syrup. Thought is still a narcotic. The deepest question is Why. And it is a forbidden one. The very asking is in the nature of cosmic sabotage. And the penalty is — the afflictions of Job.
     Every day of our lives we are presented with evidences of the vast, most complicated interconnection between the events which govern our lives and the forces which rule the universe. Our fear in pursuing the flashes of insight which they provoke is that we may come to know what will “happen” to us. The one thing we are given to know from birth is that we will die. But even this we find hard to accept, certain though it be.
— Henry Miller, Ibid., pp. 226-227.

Real Living Forestalls Death

....Through the Kaddish we have defiance at death and its fiendish conspiracy against man. When the mourner recites: “Glorified and sanctified be the great name…” he declares: No matter how powerful death is, notwithstanding the ugly end of man, however terrifying the grave is, however nonsensical and absurd everything appears, no matter how black one’s despair is and how nauseating an affair life is, we declare and profess publicly and solemnly that we are not giving up, that we are not surrendering, that we will carry on the work of our ancestors as though nothing has happened, that we will not be satisfied with less than the full realization of the ultimate goal — the establishment of God’s kingdom, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal life for man. — Joseph B. Soloveitchik, “The Halakhah of the First Day,” in Jewish Reflections on Death, Jack Riemer (ed.), p. 82.

….Everything thus depends on the point of departure — whether life can be measured in purely hedonistic terms. One may conceive of life as an enterprise, as a going concern, compare the credit and debit columns, and in a certain condition of sickness and pain logically conclude that the business is bankrupt and should be liquidated. On that basis, one may preach suicide and mercy killing, and from this point of view, be absolutely right.
     But one may also conceive of life as a mission: I was sent here. I may not know why, wherefore, nor for how long. But my mission (or exile, as some Buddhists would say) has sense, the sense. This is a conception of living even against one’s will, and a bookkeeper’s approach is out of place in it.
     According to such a conception the span of one’s life, whether it comes as a gift or punishment, is predetermined. Every individual life thus assumes an absolute and imperative character which neither the bearer of that life nor his enemy or friend may disrupt until it reaches its appointed epilogue. An echo of that approach one hears in an old Talmudic aphorism: “He who closes the eyes of a person in the agony of death may be compared to a murderer.”
— Hayim Greenberg, “The Right to Kill?,” in Ibid., p. 115.

     In 1899 Oliver Wendell Holmes’s brother John lay dying in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his family gathered about his bedside. There was some question as to whether John still lived, which was resolved by a nurse who reached under the bedclothes and felt his feet. “Nobody ever died with their feet warm,” she whispered. John Holmes looked up suddenly and said, “John Rogers did.” These were his last words.
     John Rogers had been burned at the stake for the crime of heresy in 1855.
— Scott Slater and Alec Solomita (eds.), Exits: Stories of Dying Moments & Parting Words, p. 116.

     I did write a poem, so it was not a wholly wasted day, after all. And it occurs to me that there is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much. It may be that I set my sights too high and so repeatedly end a day in depression. Not easy to find the balance, for if one does not have wild dreams of achievement, there is no spur even to get the dishes washed. One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
     But there is another reason for a dark mood. I thought I was approaching the publication of the new poems, A Grain of Mustard Seed, in perfect calm, accepting that there will be no review of consequence, glad simply to be able to give it to my friends. I have waited three weeks for paperbacks to send out, so few friends have seen it, and even friends find it hard to respond to poetry.
     Jung says, “The serious problems in life are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrifaction.” And so, no doubt, with the problems of a solitary life.
     After I had looked a while at that daffodil before I got up, I asked myself the question, “What do you want of your life?” and I realized with a start of recognition and terror, “Exactly what I have — but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.”
     Yet it is not those fits of weeping that are destructive. They clear the air, as Herbert says so beautifully:

     Poets have wronged poor storms: such days are best;
     They purge the air without, within the breast.

What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
— May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude, pp.100-101.

                         The Poet

Each instant of his life, a task, he never rests,
And works most when he appears to be doing nothing.
The least of it is putting down the words
What usually remains unwritten and unspoken,
And would so often be much better left
Unsaid, for it is really the unspeakable
That he must try to give an ordinary tongue to.

And if, by art and accident,
He utters the unutterable, then
It must appear as natural as a breath,
Yet be an inspiration. And he must go,
The lonelier for his unwanted miracle,
His singular way, a gentle lunatic at large
In the societies of cross and reasonable men.
— James Kirkup, in Ibid., p. 160.

Missilelaneous

If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, a Rolls Royce would today cost one hundred dollars, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
— Robert Caingely, from Info World, in The Quotable Investor, p. 73.

We are told that the love of money itself is the root of all evil; but money itself is one of the most useful contrivances ever invented: it is not its fault that some people are foolish . . . or miserly enough to be fonder of it than of their own souls.
— George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), The Intelligent Woman’s Guide . . . Fascism, in Ibid., p. 84.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?
— Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People, in Ibid., p. 97.

That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
— Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), in Ibid., p. 169.

Behold the fool saith, “Put not all thine eggs in one basket” — which is but a manner of saying, “Scatter your money and your attention”; but the wise man saith, “Put all your eggs in one basket and — WATCH THAT BASKET.”
— Mark Twain, Pudd’in Head Wilson, in Ibid., p. 204.

“That was lovely, having breakfast here,” she told him, “it was wonderful of you to think of it.” “Charmed, I am sure,” said Freytog, in a rather stagey manner. Mrs. Treadwell moved away again, from the thread of human nearness, of feeling. If she stayed to listen, she knew she would weaken little by little, she would warm up in spite of herself, perhaps in the end identify herself with the other, take on his griefs and wrongs, and if it came to that, feel finally guilty as if she herself had caused them; yes, and he would believe it too, and blame her freely. It had happened too often, could she not learn at last? All of it was no good, neither for the confidant nor listener. There was no cure, no comfort, tears change nothing and words can never get at the truth. No, don’t tell me any more about yourself, I am not listening, you cannot force my attention. I don’t want to know you, and I will not know you. Let me alone.
— Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools, p. 142.

Problems and Solutions

     The remaining questions — all too common by now — probed my opinions of America. Many of their rosy-eyed perceptions of the land of plenty, milk and honey, were beyond my critical and sharp words. Many had already been fooled by the pop culture media machine which permeated their culture, even now. I tried to diffuse their perceptions of abundance with American homelessness; their perceptions of wealth with America’s war on drugs; and their illusory book-filled schools with the 135,000 handguns found there each year. I tried to explain that the United States was a nation setting ourselves up for a painful fall. We had a legal system, not a justice system; we were a republic not a democracy; over 61 million Americans couldn’t even write a complete, grammatically correct sentence….
— John D. Ivanko, The Least Imperfect Path, pp. 116-117.

     I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.
— Thomas Jefferson.

     Jones: You seem to see art as a kind of struggle. What do you feel are the responsibilities of the artist in this combat?
     Lipchitz: It’s quite a question — quite a question. It’s very difficult to explain. But when I am working I feel related to the entire cosmos. By the rhythm of my work I am related to time; by the volume of space I am related to space; by the subject matter I’m related to the human being with all his sufferings and all his joys and hopes; and by my creative abilities I am related to the Creator of everything — to our Lord Himself. So you can conclude what kind of responsibility an artist should have….
— Jacques Lipchitz, from an interview in Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day, James Nelson (ed.), pp. 271-272.

     I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of “work,” because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do. Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. People are working every minute. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
— Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again), p. 96.

     I really look awful, and I never bother to primp up or try to be appealing because I just don’t want anyone to get involved with me. And that’s the truth. I play down my good features and play up the bad ones. So I look awful and I wear the wrong pants and the wrong shoes and I come at the wrong time and with the wrong friends, and I say the wrong things and I talk to the wrong person, and then still sometimes somebody gets interested and I freak out and I wonder, “What did I do wrong?” So then I go home and try to figure it out. “Well I must be wearing something that somebody thinks is attractive. I’d better change it. Before things get too far. So I go over to my three-way mirror and I study myself and I see that I have fifteen new pimples on my face and ordinarily that should have stopped them. So I think, “How weird. I know I look bad. I made myself look especially bad — especially wrong — because I knew a lot of the right people would be there, and still someone somehow got interested . . . ” Then I start to panic because I think I don’t know what’s attractive that I should eliminate before it starts causing me any more trouble. You see, to get to know one more person is just too hard, because each new person takes up more time and space. The way to keep some of your time to yourself is to maintain yourself so unattractively that nobody else is interested in any of it.
— Andy Warhol, Ibid., pp. 113-114.

Do Drugs Do God

     Why, when I count several of my entheogen* experiences as being among the most important in my life, have I no desire to repeat them? On occasion I have gone so far as to rank them with family and world travel in what they have contributed to my understanding of things, yet — with the exception of peyote, which I took in the line of duty while working with Native Americans as described in chapter 8 — it has been decades since I have taken an entheogen, and if someone were to offer me today a substance that (with no risk of producing a bummer) was guaranteed to carry me into the Clear Light of the Void and within fifteen minutes return me to normal with no adverse effects, I would decline. Why?
     Half of my answer lies in the healthy respect I have for the awe entheogens engender; in Gordon Wasson's blunt assertion in the frontispiece to this book, "awe is not fun." I understand Meister Eckhart completely when he says that "in joy and terror the Son is born" (emphasis mine). I speak only for myself, of course — that durable formula of set and setting again — but if I am honest I have to say (and age may figure in this) that I am afraid of the entheogens. I will take them again if need be, as I did with peyote, but the reasons would have to be compelling.
     The second half of my answer is that I have other things to do. This may sound like a limp excuse for foregoing ecstasy, so I will invoke the Buddhist doctrine of the Six Realms of Existence to explain the force it has for me.
     Metaphysically, that doctrine posits six kinds of being and the realms they inhabit. (The doctrine can also be read psychologically as six states of mind that human beings keep recycling, but I will stick to its metaphysical reading.) The two populations that are relevant here are the demi-gods, who are always happy, and the human beings, whose lot is harder but who are actually the best off of the six kinds of beings because they alone possess free will with its power to change things. (The four I haven't mentioned are instinct-ridden animals, fiercely envious jealous gods, insatitiably greedy ghosts, and hell beings who are ravaged by rage.) Blissed out on Cloud Nine, the demi-gods are still subject to time, which means that sooner or later their holidays will end and they will find themselves back in the form of life from which they were granted temporary leaves. Only the human state opens into nirvana, which is why one of the three things that Buddhists give thanks for each day is that they have been born into a human body.
     I will not try to separate what is literal from what is figurative in this account; only its moral teaching interests me here for supporting my second reason for having no desire to revisit the entheogens. The Sufis speak of three ways to know fire: through hearsay, by seeing its flames, and by being burned by those flames. Had I not been burned by the totally Real, I would still be seeking it as knights sought the Grail and moths seek flame. As it is, it seems prudent to "work for the night is coming," as a familiar hymn advises. Alan Watts put the point more directly: "When you get the message, hang up the phone."
     The downside of swearing off is, of course, the danger that the Reality that trumps everything while it is in full view will fade into a memory and become like Northern Lights — beautiful, but cold and far away. The problem besets the psalmist's lament, "restore unto me the joy of my salvation," has already been quoted. During the three years of the Harvard experiments the entheogens were the most exciting thing in my intellectual life, but at this remove I have to work to get my head back into those years and revive the excitement. I suspect that there are thousands of people out there, possibly millions, who would have reached passionately for a book, such as this had they come upon it soon after their first ingestion when they thought the world would never be the same again, but who at this remove find its subject interesting but no more than that.
     The question comes down to which experiences we should try to keep in place as beacon lights to guide us and which we should let lapse. The intensity of the experience doesn't give us the answer....

*An entheogen ("God inside us," en εν- "in, within," theo θεος- "god, divine," -gen γενος "creates, generates"), in the strict sense, is a psychoactive substance used in a psychotherapeutic, religious, shamanic, or spiritual context. Historically, entheogens were mostly derived from plant sources and have been used in a variety of traditional religious contexts. Most entheogens do not produce drug dependency.

— Huston Smith, Cleansing the Doors of Perception, pp. 130-131.

[From a televised interview between Huston Smith and Jeffrey Mishlove:]
SMITH
     That's interesting and pertinent as well, but I won't go into how. The two cases are strikingly similar. But I think it's important to add another point. The evidence I cited shows only that grug and non-drug mystical experiences are alike while mysticism includes much more than mystical experiences. Its real concern is with mystical lives, including the compassion and other virtues such lives embody. I think it was Robert Ornstein who put this point graphically when he said that the object of mysticism is not altered states but altered traits. Experiences come and go, whereas it is life's sustained quality that counts. So we have to ask not only whether mystical experiences feel the same, but also whether their impact on the lives of their subjects is the same.

MISHLOVE
     Good point. And now that we have a twenty-year perspective on the original experiments you refer to, I think it's quite obvious that psychedelic cults don't have the staying power of authentic religious traditions.
     What about Leary's claim in Psychedelic Experience that the gods that people tend to project onto the world actually exist inside us, as parts of our own psyches? He seems to have been saying that the pantheons of the ancient pantheistic religions are forces that actually exist within us. I think he would hold that the same principle holds for monotheisms.

SMITH
     We live in a psychological rather than a metaphysical age, and I see no harm in putting things the way you attribute to Tim. Whether we go the psychological or the metaphysical route is a fielder's choice because the importance points can be stated either way. We have that option because geography doesn't apply to things of the spirit which elude spatial matrices....
— Huston Smith, Ibid., pp. 152-153.

That's the Spirit

He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreached, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure.
— John Milton, Areopagitica, in The Sword of the Spirit, Walter Oakeshott, p. 78.


….Here, before bringing this book to a close, I want only to consider for several paragraphs a single step in the sequence from Spirit to matter in order to suggest how it escapes the problems that attend Descarte’s self-world divide by positing a single source for them both. (Descarte himself was traditional enough to posit God as the source of res extensa and res cogitans, but as has been said, philosophers have ditched that source.) I have not bothered the reader with proof-texting my assertion that traditional philosophy did not work from the premise of a subject-object split, but given the importance of the point it might be well to provide at least one example. Hilary Armstrong tells us that Plotinus, the Intellect (a technical term) “is the level of intuitive thought that is identical with its object and does not see it as in some sense external.”
     We should not conclude from the identity they worked from that traditional philosophers were blind to distinctions. Obviously, our inner lives and the world in which they are set are different in certain ways, but they derive from a common sense. Think of an inverted V. Its apex is Spirit, and the two arms that reach down from it are consciousness (or more inclusively, sentience) and matter. This section tracks their relationship.
     If consciousness is not simply an emergent property of life, as science assumes, but is instead the initial glimpse we have of Spirit, we ought to stop wasting our time trying to explain how it derives from matter and turn our attention to consciousness itself. The image on a television screen provides an analogy for what we then find. The television lights up its screen, and the film in the video we are watching modifies that light so as to produce any one of an infinite number of images. These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts, and feelings that we consciously experience — we might think of them as the contents of consciousness. We know that the images on the screen are composed of this light, but we are not usually aware of the light itself. Our attention is caught up in the images that appear and the stories they tell. In much the same way, we know we are conscious, but normally we are aware only of the many different experiences, thoughts, and feelings that consciousness presents us with. Consciousness proper — pure consciousness, consciousness with no images imposed upon it — is the common property of all. When (in retrospection or meditation) we detect pure consciousness, we have every reason to think that what I experience is identical with what you experience in that state. And identical with what God too experiences, not in degree but in kind. For at that level, we are down to what consciousness is, namely infinite potential — receptive to any content that might be imposed on it. The infinitude of our consciousness is actual — God experiences every possibility timelessly — but the point here is that our consciousnesses themselves are in fact identical.
     That is the left, subjective, arm of the inverted V. The right descending arm represents Spirit branching out to create the physical universe. Its instrumentality for doing this is light, or as scientists say, photons. (If I try to move to what might be beyond or behind or beneath photons — a strict impossibility in my case — a no-man’s-land opens up where nobody really knows what goes on.) Photons are transitional from Spirit to matter, because (as we saw in the chapter on “light”) they are only quasi-material while producing things that are fully material. Scientists would give their eye-teeth to know what the non-material component of photons is. For religionists, it is Spirit.
      Notice the parallel with consciousness here. All that we typically see, optically, is light that is overlaid with images of one sort or another. The photons that strike the optic nerve of the eye are known only through the energy they release, which energy produces in us the sensation of light. That light, though, is a quality of mind, for to repeat, we never see photons, which is to say light in the form in which it pervades the objective world. But the light that we see and the photons in the objective world derive from the same source and carry that the trace of that source — Spirit — within them.
     In some such way as this, traditionalists see physics affirming with Genesis that in the beginning there was light. And (as again we saw in the chapter on Light) there continues to be light, for light underlies every process of nature, wherever and whenever. Every exchange of energy between atoms involves the exchange of photons. Every interaction in the material world is mediated by light; light penetrates and interconnects the entire cosmos. “An oft-quoted phrase comes to mind,” physicist-turned-metaphysician Peter Russell remarks: “God is Light. God is said to be absolute — and in physics, so is light. God lies beyond the manifest world of matter, shape, and form, beyond both space and time — so does light. God cannot be known directly — nor [as photons] can light.” When on the religious side we think of St. John’s reference to “the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” and the Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation’s reference to “the self-originated Clear Light of the Void, eternally unborn, shining forth within one’s own mind,” the correlation is remarkable. Reinforce it with this word from Islamic tradition. Abu’l-Hosain al-Nuri experienced light “gleaming in the unseen. I gazed at it continually, until the time came when I had wholly become that light.”
— Huston Smith, Why Religion Matters, pp. 264-266.

Write What Can't Be Said

Whoever cannot seek
the unforeseen sees nothing,
for the known way
is an impasse
— Heraclitus, in Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, #7, p. 7, Brooks Haxton (tr.).

Of all the words yet spoken,
none comes quite as far as wisdom,
which is the action of the mind
beyond all things that may be said.
— Heraclitus, in Ibid., #18, p. 13.

The way up is the way back.
— Heraclitus, in Ibid., #69, p. 45.

Applicants for wisdom
do what I have done:
inquire within.
— Heraclitus, in Ibid., #80, p. 51.

Just as the river where I step
is not the same river, and is,
so I am as I am not.
— Heraclitus, in Ibid., #81, p. 51.

Oh well, all this might be very disquieting were it not that “sacred” has lately been discovered to apply to a point of arrest where stabilization has gone on past the time. There is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other. There is nothing in literature but change and change is mockery. I’ll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it’ll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.
— William Carlos Williams, from Kora in Hell: Improvisations, in Imaginations: William Carlos Williams, Webster Schott (ed.), p. 13.

      So I come again to my present day gyrations.
      So it is with the other classics: their meaning and worth can only be studied and understood in the imagination —that which begot them only can give them life again, rekindle their perfection —
     Unless to study by rote or scientific research — Useful for certain understanding to corroborate the imagination —
     Yes, Anatole was a fool when he said: It [art] is a lie. — That is it. If the actor simulates life it is a lie. But — but why continue without an audience?
     The reason people marvel at works of art and say: How in Christ’s name did he do it? — is that they know nothing of the physiology of the nervous system and have never in their experience witnessed the larger processes of the imagination.
     It is a step over from the profitless engagements of the arithmetical.
— William Carlos Williams, from Spring and All, in Ibid., Webster Schott (ed.), p. 123.

So all things enter into the singleness of the moment and the moment partakes of the diversity of all things….
— William Carlos Williams, from A Novelette and Other Prose, in Ibid., Webster Schott (ed.), p. 282.

Notable Notes

Love, like money, is offered most freely to those in least need of it.
— Mignon McLaughlin, The Complete Neurotic’s Notebook, p. 9.

We lavish on animals the love we are afraid to show to people. They might not return it; or worse, they might.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 15.

We’re irritated by rascals, intolerant of fools, and prepared to love the rest. But where are they?
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 17.

No matter how young he may be at the time, nor how old he may live to become; on the day an unhappy child leaves home, his life is half over.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 24.

No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 29.

Others follow patterns; we alone are unpredictable.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 31.

The proud man can learn humility, but he will be proud of it.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 33.

“Pull yourself together” is seldom said to anyone who can.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 41.

Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 49.

An old racetrack joke reminds you that your program contains all the winners’ names. I stare at my typewriter keys with the same thought.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 57.

What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 62.

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 72.

An artist usually has no friends except other artists, and usually they do not like his work.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 72.

Don’t be yourself — be someone a little nicer.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 131.

Tough and funny and a little bit kind: that is as near to perfection as a human being can be.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 138.

Youth is not enough. And love is not enough. And success is not enough. And, if we could achieve it, enough would not be enough.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 143.

A rich suicide consoles us a little, and frightens us a lot.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 172.

Those without money often say they would do anything for it, when all they mean is that they would do anything pleasant and convenient. That’s why only the rich are rich.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 177.

Artists refuse to accept the idea that they should starve; they want all the money, as well as all the fun.
— Mignon McLaughlin, Ibid., p. 177.

Escape Your Tribe

IMPORTANT!

READ THIS CAREFULLY!

     What I have been saying — the important lesson of this book — can be put into two simple imperatives:
1. Never believe totally in anybody else’s BS.
2. Never believe totally in your own BS.

     These formulations are my own, but the basic idea here, of course, derives from Gotama Buddha.
     If you do not retain some zeteticism* about all ideas, however appealing they may be, you have entered hypnosis, as I entered hypnosis when placed in the Catholic school to be “educated” by the nuns — a bunch of ignorant women who had been so deeply hypnotized themselves that they remained mentally crippled for life.
     In the famous story, the Buddha was asked, “Are you God?”
     “No,” he replied.
     “Are you a saint?”
     “No.”
     "Then what are you?”
     “I am awake.”
     He meant that he was able to see who he was, where he was, and what was going on around him, because he was no longer blinded by Belief Systems.
*A term from ancient Greek philosophy revived by Dr. Marcello Truzzi, because the similar term “skepticism” has been pre-empted by certain entrenched dogmatists. The modern so-called skeptic accepts the dogmas of the reigning Establishment and is cynical only about ideas that are new, original or Heretical. The zetetic is skeptical of all dogmas.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, p. 72.


     ROC: In all your research, have you ever come close to believing in the One Big Conspiracy that controls everything?
     WILSON: Never. There are three basic attitudes toward the universe: atheism, polytheism and monotheism. Metaphorically, you can apply these views to history also. Atheist history says it all happened by accident, polytheism says it happened as the clash of rival forces, and monotheism says it happened because of one dominant intelligence. I don’t believe everything happens by accident, so atheism is out for me. On the other hand, I agree with H. L. Mencken, who said he wasn’t a monotheist because the world looked to him like it was designed by a committee. The world would make some kind of sense if there was one group of “insiders” who really run everything. Since the world obviously doesn’t make sense, there is no such group. There are just rival coalitions trying to become the group that runs the world, which is probably just as hopeless as trying to become God and “run” the universe. These Apes of God all get defeated in the end by what I call the Snafu Principle.
     ROC: What’s that?
     WILSON: In the power game, the more successful you become, the more motive people have for lying to you. They lie to flatter you, to avoid contradicting your prejudices, to keep their jobs, to tell you what you want to hear, etc. Have you ever told the truth, the whole truth, to anybody from the government? It’s the same in any authoritarian organization, be it the army, a corporation or a patriarchal family. People say what those in power above them want to hear. In the big power struggles, the most successful conspiracy of the decade becomes the stupidest conspiracy of the next decade, because it never hears what might offend its self-image. Communication is only possible between equals. The power game creates total communication jam and everybody near the top drifts slowly but inexorably into a kind of schizoid fantasy. Then they get replaced by younger, hungrier predators who are not successful enough yet to frighten everybody into lying to them, and hence have at least a partial knowledge of what the hell is really going on.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, pp. 146-147.

Know Your Tribe

     This triggered a total mutation in human society. As Riane Eisler has pointed out, previous human groups (“tribes”) had been based on partnership models (or as mathematical game theory would say, non-zero-sum games). Post bronze society was based on Authority and Submission (zero-sum games). Concretely, Bronze Age civilization — called The First Wave by Alvin Toffler — created an Elite of warriors with bronze spears and their Leader, a high testosterone “alpha” male of the type that usually leads mammalian herds. These alpha males almost always called themselves sons of the Sun-God, and their huge agricultural civilizations are often termed sun-kingdoms.
     These agricultural sun-king civilizations spread “westward and mildly northward” (as Bucky says [R. Buckminster Fuller]). Almost always they had the primal Sun King structure: the “divine” alpha male at the top, the nobles below, and women and slaves at the bottom. The whole world had changed. You could not mistake a citizen of one of these Sun Kingdoms for a tribal human than you’d mistake a canary for a Gila Monster.
     It took thousands of years, but eventually the largest part of humanity had been conquered, domesticated, de-tribalized and incorporated into one Sun-Kingdom or another. As late as the 18th Century, Louis XIV was called “the Sun King.”
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, p. 49.

     Aside from these psychological benefits, the major “spiritual” effect of LSD may be considered either another benefit or a dire curse, depending on your viewpoint. I began to develop a strong suspicion that there was, somewhere in space-time, another Adept of Brain Change, or perhaps a School of Adepts, helping and guiding me. This is not at all unusual. In most human societies, historically, the shamans have used similar brain-change drugs and soon become convinced they have “allies” helping them. Even a man with such a long and orthodox scientific career as Dr. John Lilly confesses that he thought he had superhuman “Guides” on some of his LSD voyages.
     My teachers seemed to have a damned peculiar sense of humor at times.
     At one point I was almost totally convinced that my teachers were a school of extraterrestrial adepts resident in the double-star system of Sirius. Strange coincidences — or Jungian synchronicities — then accumulated around me, supporting this theory.
     Later, a “psychic reader” told me I was “channeling” the spirit of an ancient Chinese sage. Coincidences or “omens” supporting this model then obligingly appeared.
     Then, another “psychic” told me I was channeling a medieval Irish bard. More synchronicities followed.
     This sort of thing always happens to people who mess around with Cabala (even if they don’t use Acid.) The late Dr. Israel Regardie, a psychotherapist and Cabalist, often distinguished two ways of looking at this phenomenon, when it happens to you. The objective theory, as he called it, assumes an external reality to these “entities.” The subjective theory, on the other hand, assumes the “entities” exist only in our brains, as anti-selves or Jungian archetypes or something of that sort. Dr. Regardie believed you will get the best results when you are not committed to either theory but just open yourself to whatever happens.
     Somewhere along the way I got concerned with the direction all this was taking and decided to safeguard my sanity by choosing the subjective theory (It’s all in my head) and ruthlessly repressing any tendency to speculate further about possible objective theories (There are super-human forces at work here…). In terms of the neurological model then current, I explained everything as my over-developed left brain learning to receive signals from the usually “silent” right brain.
    (We now know that this left brain/right brain model does not quite explain everything, and Karl Pribram’s hologram model of consciousness seems more inclusive. But I refer here to my state of ignorance in the mid 1970s, before I advanced to the more complex state of ignorance I now possess.)
     Then one night I was looking at Harvey, the comedy about the pookah, on TV. One character in the story is a medical orderly named Wilson; since I was once a medical orderly and named Wilson, he attracted more of my interest than the major characters.
     Wilson-in-the-TV was more “skeptical” about the giant rabbit than anybody else, and began to seem to me like a parody of my attempts to reduce everything to the right brain/left brain model.
     The pookah refrains from playing any nasty tricks on the Unbeliever. Instead, he arranges that just by accident Wilson meets a young woman who falls in love with him — which is obviously just what he needs. Then, when Wilson learns that the giant white rabbit is called a pookah, he looks the word up in a dictionary and reads the definition aloud. It reads:
     “A Celtic elf or vegetation spirit, wise but mischievous, fond of rumpots, crackpots and how are you tonight, Mr. Wilson?”
     Wilson-on-the-TV (me) also had a startle reaction. Thinking it over, I decided Harvey offered the best approach to Cabala and its entities. From then on when High Weirdness occurred, I would just file-and-index it as a six foot tall white rabbit from County Kerry, playing games with me.
     I still prefer this model to all others, because there is no chance that I or any sane person will ever take it literally.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, pp. 56-57.

     In short, without language we’d have less suffering and no progress.
     Remember also that the imagined contains a great deal of both the desirable and the terrifying — what we want and what we fear. Thus, unlike our relatives the chimpanzees and baboons, however clever one of them may be, humans alone can long for things that never existed outside their language-games (i.e. their “thinking”) and can get very irritated at the world for being less pleasing than these fantasies. They can also scare the hell out of themselves, and one another, with other verbal constructs that have never appeared in sensory experience.
     Thus, the state of “living in fantasy” or “being on a head trip” is by no means uncommon and is not typical only of well-fed intellectuals in academic Chairs. Everybody does it to a quite alarming extent. Humans never deal with raw experience as other animals do; they deal with experience filtered through what Dr. Timothy Leary calls a reality-tunnel and sociologists call a gloss — a belief system. Every belief system (or BS) colors experience in a different way, rosy-red or gloomy black or some unique personal flavor.
     We can all see how other people’s BS makes them blind and “stupid” at times, but we find it very hard to notice how our own BS is doing the same to us. This is what anthropologists call acculturalization.
     Following Gurdjieff, I prefer to call it hypnosis. Every culture on the planet — from the Stone Age bushmen of Africa to the still-medieval peasants of County Kerry, from the Parisian art crowd to the Oxford agnostic crowd, from Ohio Republicans to the Iranian Moslem Fundamentalists, from science-fiction buffs to the neo-pagans and “witches,” from the Tibetan Buddhists to the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal — represents another case of group hypnosis by BS (belief systems).
     That is, when I was sent to a “school” to be “educated,” that meant I was to be hypnotized into the tunnel-reality of my tribe….
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, p. 70.

More Wisdom, Less Thought

Remember the rule laid down by Pythagoras. It has been quoted again and again, but losses none of its beauty and profundity by repetition. It runs as follows:
     “Let not the setting sun reach the western horizon, nor close thine eyes in sleep, before thou hast gone over all the events of the day just past, and hast asked thyself this question: What have I done today that has been done amiss? What have I done today that has been done aright? Have I injured anyone? Have I failed in my duty? Let not the setting sun reach the western rim of space, nor let thine eyelids close in sleep ere thou hast asked thyself these questions.”
     If only men and women would conscientiously follow that simple rule, ninety-nine per cent of the world’s trouble, heartache, sin, and anxiety, would be non-existent, would never happen. And the reason is simple. The world’s troubles arise from our weaknesses, not from our strength; and if we would increase our strength, and do away with our weaknesses, every human being thereafter, in proportion to his inner evolution, would become a power for good in the world. And you see what that would mean. It cuts at the tap-root of most of the thoughts and feelings and acts that bring misery amongst us.
— G. de Purucker, Wind of the Spirit, p. 10.

You decline to write poetry, won’t listen to sutras,
Too lazy to visit the other peaks of Ch’an—
When at last your head is white and they question you,
What stories will you have to tell your students?
— Buddhist Poet Monks of China, The Clouds Should Know Me By Now, Red Pine/Mike O’Connor (eds.), p. 71.

Moonlight and the sound of pines are things we all know
Zen mind and delusion distinguish sage and fool
Go back to the place where not one thought appears
How shall I put this in words for you
— Ibid., p. 131.

Mountains and rivers: flowers of the Tao
But I, sadly, am a writer
No divine voice, talentless
Yet, lend me a brush; I’m off and running

Better an addiction to sunset clouds
To dispense with this sickness of words
Let wooded springs purify this old heart
Azure clouds burnish the sun red
— Ibid., p. 159.

     Synthetic thinking, generalized, led Fuller to the concept of ephemeralization — “doing more with less.” The tendency of technology, he showed us with graphs of various historical stages of machinery, always moved steadily toward greater and greater ephemeralization. Every step forward in information allowed us to do more and more with less and less energy. Economists, he said, were still thinking in terms of scarcity while science was inexorably moving the world toward abundance and super-abundance.
     Bucky [R. Buckminster Fuller] then spoke about the 92 natural elements, and I got a tingly feeling of strange intuition or “predestination” when he mentioned that the last of them was discovered the year I was born. These elements occurred at random around our planet, he said. Universe — a term he used the way theologians use “God” — would eventually force us to make a choice, as technology advanced, between two ways of getting maximum benefit out of these elements. We could follow traditional mammalian politics, in which one nation would try to dominate the others in order to access all 92 elements, which we now call a zero-sum game. Or we could choose a new synthetic path, a non-zero-sum game, in which all Terans cooperate to “advantage all without disadvantaging any.”
     Since war will continue to become more and more “omnilethal,” Bucky said, humanity would have to choose the latter cooperative path eventually, because “we always do the intelligent thing after we have tried every stupid alternative and none of them works.”
     Everybody at the seminar seemed as overwhelmed by Bucky as I was.
     “He puts you in a trance,” somebody said.
     “No,” somebody else said. “He wakes you out of your trance.”
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, p. 47.

Take Advice Further

Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.
— Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), U.S. Scientist, quoted in The Mind of God & Other Musings: The Wisdom of Science, Shirley Jones (ed.), p. 74.

I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.
— Jonas Salk (b. 1914), U.S. Microbiologist, quoted in Ibid., p. 74.

Whatever a man does he must do first in his mind.
— Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893-1986), Hungarian-American Biochemist, quoted in Ibid., p.77.

Our intellectual endeavors, our whole science will be of no avail if they do not lead man to a better comprehension of himself, of the meaning of his life, and of the resources buried in his inner self.
— Lecomte du Nouy (1849-1919), French Scientist,
quoted in Ibid., p. 78.

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
— Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912), French Scientist,
quoted in Ibid., p. 79.

Man is inside his most important biological specimen, himself, and . . . from this strategic position he is able to learn many things that no amount of observation of other specimens ever could reveal.
— Edmund W. Sinnott (1888-1968), U.S. Biologist,
quoted in Ibid., p. 80.

In a free world, if it is to remain free, we must maintain, with our lives if need be, but surely by our lives, the opportunity for a man to learn anything.
— J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), U.S. Physicist,
quoted in Ibid., p. 80.

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all other woes of mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and you have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another thing to open the box…. Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
— Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895), British Biologist,
quoted in Ibid., pp. 81-82.

Imagine the fifteen-billion-year lifetime of the universe compressed into the span of a single year…. Dinosaurs emerge on Christmas Eve; flowers arise on December 28th; and men and women originate at 10:30 P.M. on New Year’s Eve. All of recorded history occupies the last ten seconds of December 31….
— Carl Sagan (b. 1934), U.S. Astronomer,
quoted in Ibid., p. 93.

The time is coming when every person who lays claim to ability will keep the question of waste before him constantly.
— Thomas Alva Edison (18347-1931), U.S. Scientist,
quoted in Ibid., p. 95.

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this something, at whatever cost, must be attained.
— Marie Curie (1867-1934), Polish Chemist, quoted in Ibid., p. 114.

Life is short, art long, opportunity fugitive, experimenting dangerous, reasoning difficult…. To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy.
— Hippocrates (460-400 B.C.), Greek “Father of Medicine,” quoted in Ibid., p. 126.

Sages Advice

     In Lost Horizon, a group of westerners find themselves captured by Lamas in the mountains of Tibet. Here the drifter of the group, Conway, swaps thoughts with a Tibetan holy man.

     “Slackers?” queried Chang. His knowledge of English was extremely good, but sometimes a colloquialism proved unfamiliar.    
     "Slacker,” explained Conway, “is a slang word meaning a lazy fellow, a good-for-nothing. I wasn’t, of course, using it seriously.”
     Chang bowed his thanks for this information. He took a keen interest in languages, and liked to weigh a new word philosophically. “It is significant,” he said after a pause, “that the English regard slackness as a vice. We, on the other hand, should vastly prefer it to tension. Is there not too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be better if more people were slackers?”
     “I’m inclined to agree with you,” Conway answered with solemn amusement.
— James Hilton, from Lost Horizon (1933), quoted in The Idler’s Companion edited by Hodgkinson and De Abaitva, pp. 74-75.

     The fact that scientific method seems to reduce God to something like an ethical code may throw some light on the nature of scientific method; I doubt if it throws much light on the nature of God.
— Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), British theoretical Astronomer, The Mind of God & Other Musings: The Wisdom of Science, in Shirley Jones (ed.), p. 48.

     One equation involves Planck’s constant (h), the velocity of light (c), and the electronic charge (e). The combination hc/e happens to equal 137…. This number connects quantum theory (h), relativity (c), and electricity (e). Therefore, it holds a special significance for physicists. When I mentioned this number — 137 — to [Gershom] Scholem, his eyes popped out…. He told me that in Hebrew each letter of the alphabet has a numerical equivalent and that the Cabala assigned a deep symbolic significance to the sums of such numbers in a given word. The number corresponding to the word “cabala” happens to be 137. Could there be a connection between Jewish mysticism and theoretical physics?
— Victor Weiskopf (b. 1908), Austrian-American Physicist, quoted in Ibid., pp. 48-49.

     Quarks are located in a physical “somewhere” between matter and spirit…. The “inconceivable concept” of the electron as a “wave of matter” alone touches upon a metaphysical dimension…. These “waves of matter” are more than shape; they are metashape, shapes to which we can no longer attribute a substantial content — only a spiritual one.
— Gerhard Staguhn (b. 1952), U.S. Physicist, quoted in Ibid., p. 49.

     Science shows us that the visible world is neither matter nor spirit; the visible world is the invisible organization of energy.
— Heinz R. Pagels (b. 1939), U.S. Physicist, quoted in Ibid., p. 66.

     The world of psychical phenomena appears to me to be as much a part of “Nature” as the world of physical phenomena; and I am unable to perceive any justification for cutting the Universe into two halves, one natural and one supernatural.
— Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), British Biologist, quoted in Ibid., p. 67.

     To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
— Thomas Huxley (1825-1895), British Biologist, quoted in Ibid., p. 67.

Stay Open to Opportunity

Money doesn’t grow on trees, and if it did, someone else would own the orchard.
— Breck Speed & Mark Dutton, Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees, p. 19.

Most people do not realize that there’s just as much money to be made when a society is falling down as when it’s rising up.
— Breck Speed & Mark Dutton, Ibid., p. 21.

The road to success is always under construction.
— Breck Speed & Mark Dutton, Ibid., p. 28.

If you lined up all the economists in the world end-to-end, they still would not reach a conclusion.
— Breck Speed & Mark Dutton, Ibid., p. 100.

The economy depends as much on economists as the weather does on weather forecasters.
— Breck Speed & Mark Dutton, Ibid., p. 120.

Opportunity knocks but once, while temptation leans on the doorbell.
— Breck Speed & Mark Dutton, Ibid., p. 139.

Some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
— Oscar Wilde, in Ibid., p. 139.

There is hardly anything in the world that someone can’t make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and people who consider price alone are this man’s lawful prey.
— Breck Speed & Mark Dutton, Ibid., p. 144.

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open….”
— George Carlin, fronticepiece, Braindroppings.

“No artist is pleased…. [There is no] satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
— Martha Graham to Agnes de Mille, from Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham, in Ibid.

Consider the End at the Start

Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events not of words. Trust movement.
— Alfred Adler in Quantum Leap Thinking by James J. Mapes, p. 17.

     Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills ideas and splendid plans; that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.
     All sorts of things occur to help one that would never have occurred. A whole system of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.
     Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
— Wolfgang von Göethe in Ibid., p. 162.

     We have always thought of the Bible as a book. We know that was only its first incarnation. It is also a computer program. Not merely a book that Rips typed into a computer, but something that its original author actually designed to be interactive and ever-changing.
     The Bible code may be a timed series of revelations, each designed for the technology of its age.
     It may be some form of information we cannot yet fully imagine, something that would be as strange to us now as a computer would have been to desert nomads 3000 years ago.
     “It is almost certainly many levels deep, but we do not yet have a powerful enough mathematical model to reach it,” says Rips. “It is probably less like a crossword puzzle, and more like a hologram. We are only looking at two-dimensional arrays, and we probably should be looking in at least three dimensions, but we don’t know how to.”
     And no one can explain how the code was created.
— Michael Drosnin, The Bible Code, pp. 45-46.

     Suddenly a voice called out to him from nowhere: “Moses, come up to the top of the mountain.”
     It was 1200 BC. According to the Bible, on top of Mount Sinai Moses heard the voice we call “God.” And that voice gave him the ten laws that defined Western civilization, the Ten Commandments, and it dictated to him the book that we call the Bible.
     But when God says, “Behold, I make a covenant: before all thy people I will work miracles,” the code says “computer.”
     The word “computer” appears six times in the plain text of the Bible, hidden within the Hebrew word for “thought.” Four of the six anachronistic appearances of “computer” are in the verses of Exodus that describe the building of the Ark of the Covenant, the famous “lost Ark” that carried the Ten Commandments.
     The code suggests that even the writing of the laws on the two stone tablets may have been computer-generated. “And the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets,” states Exodus 32:16. But encoded in that same verse is a hidden message: “it was made by computer.”
     The code must be describing a device far beyond any we have developed. The New York Times recently reported that mankind may be ready to take the next leap, to harness the world inside the atoms and create “an information-processing method so powerful that it would be to ordinary computing what nuclear energy is to fire.” [quantum computing]
— Michael Drosnin, Ibid., p. 95.

     The anxiety of early abuse creates a severe need in children to take control of life. They fashion dramas, sometimes severe and self-destructive ones, in order to give themselves a sense of meaning and hence reduce their anxiety. Breaking the pattern of these dramas can be extremely difficult, but therapists have found success by facilitating the perception of peak moments of success with athletics, group interactions, meditation, and other activities. These activities are designed to promote the experience of a higher self to replace the old identity and its attendant reaction pattern.
     To some extent, each of us is hit one way or another with the same kind of anxiety abused children experience. In most cases, thankfully, this anxiety is of a lesser degree, and our reaction patterns are not as extreme, but the process, the growth step involved, is exactly the same. This realization, as I watched it play out in my work, clarified in my mind what the whole culture seemed to be going through. We knew that life-as-usual seemed to be missing something that could be attained through an inner transformative experience, a real change in how we perceive ourselves and life that produces a higher, more spiritual personal identity. The effort to describe this psychological journey became the basis of The Celestine Prophecy.
— James Redfield, The Celestine Vision, pp. 7-8.

     This scenario can be played out, as well, by the white-collar criminal whose delusions finally catch up with him or anyone whose use of drugs, working, shopping, eating, watching sports, or pursuing sex gets out of control. Whatever the crutch or obsessive behavior, it never addresses the root cause and is doomed to break down; the angst creeps back in and we are driven onward in our never-ending flight from disconnection. This is the nature of hell on earth — and according to much of the information coming in from near-death and out-of-body researchers, it is the nature of hell in the Afterlife as well.
     Robert Monroe reported that during his travels in the Afterlife dimension he regularly saw hellishly delusional constructions devised by groups of souls who obsessively pursued sex as a defensive illusion against their lostness. In Ruth Montgomery’s automatic writing of Arthur Ford’s descriptions of the Afterlife, she noted that certain souls could not wake up in heaven after death, caught up, no doubt, in the same illusions they devised in life.
     Such accounts suggest there is also great effort on the part of other beings in the Afterlife dimension to intervene with these deluded souls. They probably do so using the same process of uplifting that we already know about: the process of focusing on the soul’s higher self and projecting energy until the soul wakes up, cuts through the obsessive activity, and begins to open up to the divine inside — which is the only real cure for any obsessive activity….
— James Redfield, Ibid., p. 195.

     As both science and mysticism demonstrate, humans are in essence a field of energy. Yet the East maintains that our normal energy levels are weak and flat until we open up to the absolute energies available in the universe. When this opening occurs, our ch’i — or perhaps we should call it our level of quantum energy — is raised to a height that resolves our existential insecurity. But until then we move around seeking additional energy from other people.
— James Redfield, Ibid., p. 71.

Get Ready to Get Ready

     A human being who strives for something great considers everyone he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and obstacle — or as a temporary resting place. His characteristic high-grade graciousness toward his fellow men becomes possible only once he has attained his height and rules. Impatience and his consciousness that until then he is always condemned to comedy — for even war is a comedy and conceals, just as every means conceals the end — spoil all of his relations to others: this type of man knows solitude and what is most poisonous in it.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #273, p. 222.

     The problem of those who are waiting. — It requires strokes of luck and much that is incalculable if a higher man in whom the solution of a problem lies dormant is to get around to action in time — to “eruption,” one might say. In the average case it does not happen, and in nooks all over the earth sit men who are waiting, scarcely knowing in what way they are waiting, much less that they are waiting in vain. Occasionally the call that awakens — that accident which gives “permission” to act — comes too late, when the best of youth and strength for action has already been used up by sitting still; and many have found to their horror when they “leaped up” that their limbs had gone to sleep and their spirit had become too heavy. “It is too late,” they say to themselves, having lost their faith in themselves and henceforth forever useless.
     Could it be that in the realm of the spirit “Raphael without hands,” taking this phrase in the widest sense, is perhaps not the exception but the rule?
     Genius is perhaps not so rare after all — but the five hundred hands it requires to tyrannize the kairos, “the right time,” seizing chance by its forelock.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ibid., #274, p. 222.

     Anyone who does not want to see what is lofty in man looks that much more keenly for what is low in him and mere foreground — thus betrays himself.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ibid., #275, p. 223.

     In all kinds of injury and loss the lower and coarser soul is better off than the nobler one: the dangers for the latter must be greater; the probability that it will come to grief and perish is actually, in view of the multiplicity of the conditions of its life, tremendous.
     In a lizard a lost finger is replaced again; not so in man.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ibid., #276, p. 223.

     Confucius said, “Study without thought is blind, thought without study is dangerous.”

     Without thought, study is not absorbed; without study, thought is uninformed.
— Thomas Cleary, The Human Element, p. 33.

     Lao-tzu said, “If you agree too easily, you will be little trusted.”

     Try to please everyone and you wind up pleasing no one. Try to be all things to all people and you wind up able to be nothing to anyone. Treasures are hidden because of their value.
— Thomas Cleary, Ibid., p. 67.

     Work on yourself first; take responsibility for your own progress.

     At the outset of an undertaking, when there is potential but no momentum, it may be that all you can do at first is to marshal your own resources and try to develop the capacities and qualities you will need along the way. Without a developed framework of support at this stage, you will need to manage yourself and do your own work, under your own steam. If you rely on others before you have consolidated your own strength and awakened your own faculties, you may tend to become dependent and weak.
— Thomas Cleary, Ibid., p. 79.

Inside-full Growth

     Late in the third day of his journey, he tells us, “at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase, ‘Reverence for Life.’ The iron door had yielded: the path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the idea in which world- and life-affirmation and ethics are contained side by side! Now I knew that the world-view of ethical world- and life-affirmation, together with its ideals of civilization, is founded in thought.” So was kindled the light which has since made clear every path his thought has traveled.
     The most immediate fact in human consciousness is the realization: “I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live.” I must, therefore, revere my own life and the life around me. “A man is ethical,” said Schweitzer, “only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellowmen, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help.” Ethics are absolutely boundless in their domain and in their demands. This is the ethical foundation of Schweitzer’s philosophy of civilization. The ultimate source of all the catastrophes and misery of our times is the lack of any consistent ethical theory of the universe….
— From Charles R. Joy’s Introduction to The Wit and Wisdom of Albert Schweitzer.

If the talents succumb to the errors of their time, what matter? But when the men of genius are ensnared in them, centuries have to suffer for it.
— Albert Schweitzer, Bach, I, p. 96.

Jesus comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He Is.
— Albert Schweitzer, Quest for the Historic Jesus, p. 401.

I do not say, “I am life”; for life continues to be a mystery too great to understand. I only know that I cling to it. I fear its cessation — death. I dread its diminution — pain. I seek its enlargement — joy.
— Albert Schweitzer, Reverence for Life, p. 228.

     One is no closer to happiness or the Grail by leaving flesh-and-blood woman alone. When we take this inner law and try to apply it outwardly, we end up being puritanical and guilt-ridden, which practically all of us are, and we still have no laws for our inner conduct. There is little information in the Grail myth about what to do with flesh-and-blood women, but there is a great deal about what to do with the inner woman. That is the information we need so badly.
     One can think of many spiritual things that are negated by taking them outwardly instead of inwardly. The virgin birth is one. This has a powerful meaning for anyone who is going through the individuation process, for it tells us that the miraculous event, the birth of Christ within us, comes about through the intercourse of divine powers with the eternal human soul. That Christ birth comes in us too, if our soul interacts with God, and when it does it is just as miraculous and unbelievable as a virgin birth. But if we get stuck in the ritual, historical question — did it happen literally that way with Jesus’ human birth — then we never get to this inner meaning and its profound truth.
     Much of Christianity is a set of laws for relating to, coping with, or making meaningful the inner parts of one’s being, not a set of laws for outer conduct. Few people are aware of this differentiation.
     If we confuse these laws — inner and outer — we really have a difficult thing going. If a man treats a flesh-and-blood woman according to the laws that would be appropriate for his own interior femininity, his anima, there is just chaos.
     Look at what happened in the Middle Ages, when man first really began to cope with the anima. The anima has always been there, but it is only recently that man has had the capacity to come to any kind of conscious relationship to his own femininity. Before that, everything was lived out instinctively with the flesh-and-blood women around him. It was when man began to come to sense the difficulty of the anima and her danger to him that all the witch hunts started. Instead of quelling the interior feminine, which was the dangerous one, he had to go out and burn some poor creature who was behaving a little strangely. We are just getting to the point now where we can burn the right woman, namely, the interior one (although burning her is not too good a practice in any case; she will turn around and burn you if you do). We haven’t really gone very far past the witch hunts yet. We are still projecting onto outer, flesh-and-blood women our relationship, or lack of it, to our inner femininity….
— Robert A. Johnson, He, pp. 30-31.

How Do You Think Why?

     “Existential” is a nonce word meaning “concerned with, or arising from, the individual’s perception of the human condition.” The basic feature of the human condition is a foreknowledge of our own mortality and the impermanence of human activities. We normally postpone Sancho Panza’s anxiety, the gut anxiety over death, or deal with it by denial or diversion — like Kingsley Amis’ young man who handled the thought of death by thinking quickly about sex. Denial mythologies are as old as human beings, who from the remote past buried the dead with tools, food and grave goods.
     Death has never been a part of the human inheritance which has been pleasant to contemplate, and all humans, at adolescent or in the middle of a sleepless night, have experienced existential anxiety. But chronic and unrelieved existential anxiety, to be handled simply by acceptance and stoicism, is a direct spin-off of the hard-hat, Newtonian-Cartesian, world view. For a large part of European history, Christianity provided doctrinal comfort, although its reassurance was complicated by some ugly reflections about hell. Pre-Einsteinian science neither proves the idea that mind is an activity of brain and equally perishable with it, nor does it prove the non-existence of a traditional God. But by the end of the nineteenth century (and simply on the basis of a coherent world view which accorded with knowledge), neither disembodied intelligences generally, nor the religio-scientific blend which both Newton and Descartes themselves held, looked in any way evidentially probable. The scientific creed includes one uncompromising moral item: that we follow what the evidence appears to show, regardless of any anxiety or discomfort which the results may present. If we really cannot play constantly with a hard ball, nobody will deny us illogical or undemonstrable convictions, but they are not the same game as science, should not leak into it, and, ideally — as a test of our mental integrity — should not contradict observable fact: they can be tolerated only in gray areas where there is room for doubt or no possibility of direct verification.
     Our personal anxieties should, of course, play no part in the dispassionate business of science. On the other hand, they quite obviously do. Like the old-time sex researchers, who put on the guise of disinterested eunuchs pursuing knowledge, we are kidding nobody.
     A biologist who is also a doctor exhibits (some would say, suffers from) a singularity of his or her own. He or she is occupationally obliged to treat scientists and philosophers as people — a role in which some of them are extremely uncomfortable, having embraced science, propositional logic, or philosophy as a way of dealing impersonally with uncertainty. Although scientific integrity is real, and is maintained by peer pressure, in the field of world models personal motivation shows through. It is part of the unfortunate legacy of religious dualism; world models tend to be designed to hold down the stone we have placed on our existential anxieties. It is not quite cricket to draw attention to this — such considerations only operate as a rule where there is some room for choice, and most of us eventually assent to overwhelming experimental evidence. Einstein disliked quantum logic, because God does not shoot dice. Darwin was apprehensive about the uproar which his theories would produce, and was only persuaded to face the music when Wallace was about to anticipate him.
     A psychopathologist of science would be immensely interested in the story, for example, of "paranormal" phenomena — not as to their reality or significance, but for the effect which the idea of their possible existence has had on intellectually respectable people; it seems unkind to let them go home like that, and the temptation to interpret is overwhelming. Writers on the subject can be divided, not between “sheep” and “goats” (Schmeidler 1958) but between Counterphobics, Deniers, Viscerals, and Arbitrators. They may be categorized by the way they relate to anxiety and by the degree of clarity, openness, and precise reasoning with which they relate to systems breaks.
     Counterphobics have come to terms with a world view which accepts existential anxiety and renounces wishful denial. This process has been psychologically costly, and for them it has an ethical dimension. They know from experience the power of denial mythologies, and combat them; they are also intensely disturbed by systems breaks which might give ground to such mythologies. The position which counterphobics defend today is that of positivist mechanism — they fear that the irrational may return. Until about 150 years ago, counterphobics were of a different order: they feared the rational and the causal, because it might displace the supernatural, in which their world model was then invested.
     Deniers face existential anxiety with less stamina. They look with hope for a systems break, which, since it can hardly now be supernatural, must lie somewhere in science. They are pursuers of spiritualists who converse with deceased relatives. Their writings on speculative matters or philosophy generally, observe the decencies of scientific argument, but there is a tangible soft center. What the counterphobic fears, they encounter with relief. Bad cases end up reading significance into the Great Pyramid, or looking for ancestors from outer space.
     Viscerals in my terminology are those analgesic in the face of death anxieties and life anxieties is the re-creation of a sense of awe. They cultivate the marvelous — unexplained phenomena leave open questions which might, if resolved, give unsettling answers. Unidentified flying objects attract them because they are unidentified. It is the inrush of viscerals, who do not want precise explanations (those might provide answers and suggest some definite world model) which so upset Wheeler (Gardner 1979) in regard to the misuse of quantum formalisms. In medicine we see them as “holistic” quacks. The response of the visceral to any new or old formulation is not that there might, but there must be something in it, and they form not philosophies but intellectual jackdaw’s nests by a process of eclectic accretion.
     Arbitrators are for my money the genuine practitioners of science. Very possibly they owe their capacity for combining judgment with originality to a defense mechanism of another kind — the use of intense interest in the nature and workings of the world to displace any unwelcome consequences which the discovered world may have. For them constant integrative curiosity is ego-syntonic. They do not fear a systems break, and if phenomena of any kind suggest one, then that is intensely interesting. Besides attempting to confirm the phenomena rigorously, they begin to think how and where they might fit the world model if confirmed. They are not preoccupied with possible points of entry for denial would be unreassuring unless it has some basis in an integrated reality; and they have no interest in the diffusely marvelous, only in evidence suggesting that their world model for the time being is possibly incomplete. Whereas deniers and viserals are unconsciously reinforced by reports of sea serpents (because they suggest that “science does not yet know everything” and folklore may prove right), arbitrators are interested in them because they might possibly represent the existence of an unknown genus, which is likely to have an instructively specialized physiology for deep diving. Counterphobics, unless a sea-serpent is actually and ungainsayably caught, are a little disturbed and indignant at the credulity of those who report them. Arbitors are inclined to listen to unconventional ideas or experiences attentively, even a little in advance of hard evidence, simply to see if they could possibly throw light on something. At the edges of any world model, they are the masters of that controlled lunacy which might generate a more comprehensive model.
     Both arbiters and viscerals read science fiction, the first for ideas they can make over, the second because science fiction is their mode. Arbitors wade through the works of quacks and psychotics, exotic philosophy, or oddballs like Paracelsus, looking for pieces of the jigsaw which the quacks and oddballs may not have seen. Jung, of whom I will speak later, was a visceral, but has some claim to be an arbiter: once he got, not a world model, but a glimpse of human intellectual patterning, he became an indefatigable collector from every conceivable source. Because he could not fully integrate what he found into a world model, he has become a favorite with viserals, which is at once a deserved and an undeserved fate….
— Alex Comfort, Reality and Empathy, pp. 160-162.