Spiritual Chi

     In any case, I have visited places where I have heard the Manichaean myth told with such inner feeling and understanding as I would only wish for every follower of the Way in each of its manifestations. The presense in these followers of Mani gave the meaning to their language.
     Of course, those who trust words without sensing the being behind them will not see the nature of this reaching. Furthermore, the Manichaeans throughout their history no doubt had as many impatient and unprepared followers promoting their ideas as did the Church.
     Being, and the laws of Being, do not care much, I think, about words. The only issue is what helps and what does not help.
     No serious person in the history of the world ever held the notion of dualism which is considered by theologians and scholars to be a central tenet of so-called "gnosticism." What is called dualism, the idea of a good and evil force in the universe, is connected with the task of discriminating different directions of energy, and of recognizing that the struggle for inner perfection involves cosmic principles that operate within and outside of human nature. If the term esotericism is going to be used, it should be reserved for the study of energy within oneself; it has nothing to do with words and formulations as such, or rituals as such, or social practices as such.
     And the study of development and degradation of energy within oneself requires the long and difficult development of the force of attention, which is the soul in its gradations within ourselves.
     Behind what the world calls virtue there lies the hidden squandering of the sacred energies in man. This truth can never be popular and those who have been touched by it must be cautious in speaking about it, both for their own sake and for the sake of others. The "gathering of the light" may seem to conventional minds to be outside the realm of morality. But it is the only basis for true morality.
     Above all, it must not be spoken about in ways that encourage improvised and invented imitations. How many of what are now called "gnostic sects" were actually such "improvisations"?
     To understand history requires the same intuition as to understand nature or my neighbor, or myself. There exist messages from others which tell us what they have discovered about the world; and there exist messages from others that help us to discover the truth for ourselves. Only he who has the second can make use of the first. Without my own power to discriminate, to inquire for myself, I will be fooled every time by history, facts, nature herself. It is not the fault of nature or of the facts. It has  to do with the arrangement of energies and sensations within the mind. Yes, this is what is not recognized. Correct or incorrect information, true or false theories, right or wrong pictures of reality or history or whatever — this is all just a screen over the movement of energies within man. I believe because of forces, I do not believe because of forces. Subtle forces, perhaps, invisible, undetected by me — but they are there nonetheless. I am moral or I am criminal because of forces. This is the "law of my parts" which is the real cause, as St. Paul said, that drives me.
     Therefore the greatest enemy is what the world calls "virtue." Not even God Himself can help a man who has no attention.
— Jacob Needleman, Lost Christianity: A Journey of Rediscovery, pp. 82-83.

     But the main point is not Merton's degree of competence as a comparative religionist. His aim was to become a better Christian, and this, surely, dictated what he sought from the East as clues to the missing essentials of the Christian tradition. And I am persuaded that, for Merton, the magnetism of Eastern religion lay not in the promise of a methodology of mystical experience, but in the idea of an intermediate state of consciousness, an intermediate condition of man, as it were between sin and salvation. This intermediate state Merton saw as the state of Adam in Paradise; only in such a state was a relationship with God possible. Such a relationship was the beginning of service to God, rather than the end. In any case, for men as they are — as we are — to imagine we are in connection with God is to imagine, fantastically, that we are in Paradise.
     Once again, readers familiar with Gurdjieff ideas will recall his extraordinary emphasis on what he called "the third state of consciousness," to which he gave the name "consciousness of self." According to Gurdjieff, this third state, which lies between "waking sleep" (our present, "fallen" condition) and "objective consciousness," is man's real birthright. It is only in that state that the great ideas and ideals of sacred tradition can be rightly received and acted upon. But if man in the state of sleep gets hold of sacred ideas or "techniques," he merely builds them into his egoistic subjectivity, his waking dreams. Therefore, for Gurdjieff, the aim of any serious man is first of all to awaken himself. From this point of view, the term "esoteric" must be reserved, at least initially, for ideas, practices and methods of living that support the process of awakening. It has nothing to do with the exotic, arcane or "occult," as such....
— Jacob Needleman, Ibid., pp. 117-118.

....The only real value, the basic meaning of all life, inner and outer, is never lost sight of. In the human realm, psychologically, all changes and developments possible within the structure of man — developments of power, perception, etc. — are secondary to the ultimate good, which is man's union with God. Similarly, in the metaphysics of Christianity the whole realm of nature is always seen in its subordination to the ultimate goodness of God. Therefore, both in man and in the cosmos, the middle realms have tended to become neglected through an unbalanced emphasis on the ultimate or final reality of life. So concerned was the Church that man not be diverted by that which, while higher than ordinary man, is still secondary to God, that it neglected the intermediary world, both outwardly and inwardly: Outwardly, the world of nature in its many levels; inwardly, the world of the "third state of consciousness." Outwardly, the realm symbolized by medieval angelology; inwardly, the realm of intrapsychic energies and forces. Outwardly, the precision and flexibility to adjust its symbolism and expressions to the changing subjectivity of the modern world while at the same time retaining the essential "sound" of the Christian teaching; inwardly, the use and constant rediscovery of spiritual technique for the purpose of ontological growth rather than emotional satisfaction. Throughout Western history, the Church has tended to emphasize the goal of man's life and to underplay or neglect the instrumentality by which the goal may be reached. Perhaps only thus, as René Guénon has observed [in Aperçus sur L'Ésotérisme Chrétien] was it able to rescue the Western world from complete submersion in the tides of barbarianism and materialism throughout the centuries; it offered pure and real ideals as well as patterns of living that oriented the whole of Western civilization. For two thousand years it has been a "hearth of hope." At the same time, however, enormous confusion is bred when purity of intention (love of God, love of good) is demanded of man without a compassionate and workable psychological knowledge of everything in the individual human being that resists or covers over such purity of heart.
— Jacob Needleman, Ibid., pp. 122-123.

....relationship between ideas and practice. Throughout the manuscript, he warns of the danger of blind faith, blind practice without a certain level of intellectual understanding. "The intellect cannot be abandoned," he writes, "until it knows why it must be abandoned and can theoretically agree to it." For this, a certain attitude must be developed in the mind through the pure reception, over a long period of time, of the necessary ideas. Then, and only then, another stage of practice can be attempted. But the ego must first become interested in its own "destruction." Without this interest and attitude, a man will never be able to bear the emotional upheaval that is necessary for a relationship to the ego and will instead retreat into repetition of old efforts, imagination, or even violence of various kinds. In any case, progress will come to a halt.
— Jacob Needleman, Ibid., p. 202.

....It is rare that any Christian writer ever explicitly states that man has a soul only in potential. But Father Sylvan does make it clear that the term "soul" is sometimes used to refer to "natural," "given" psychological functions with which all men are born and sometimes to the potentially fully developed soul. This ambiguity, he says, starts early in the history of Christian doctrine, becomes dominant and even uncontrolled in Augustine and eventually haunts the whole development of Western thought.
— Jacob Needleman, Ibid., p. 208.