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.

Mind, It's Insideout

     The “perennial philosophy” — a favorite with those inclined to vagueness — is actually a name for recurrent intuition of a field-type reality, supported by the use of introspective experiment. It is perennial because, like the optical mode which generates realisms (including, as a historical specimen, Thomas Reid’s commonsensism, which is realism in caricature), it represents an experienceable cerebral mode, which tends to surface in successive philosophical systems. Those who have experienced it, like those who experience middle-order, optical reality, comprehend one another because the perceptions involved are roughly the same for all. There is nothing supernatural about this; it is simply one way of perceiving structure — inclusively. It could very well be simply an exaggeration of ordinary Gestalt perception induced by turning off linguistic logic. The perennial philosophy has a discrete logic which contradicts that of ordinary, everyday experience, and is extraordinarily difficult to set out, either mathematically or in plain. But it can be perceived rather easily by empathy and in this it resembles the skill one acquires in reading primary-process thinking in psychiatry. This is comprehensible enough, but will not really do for science; one can read and understand Joyce’s Finnegan without working out every oblique allusion, but if one wants a world model or a brain process model, one has to buckle down and reduce patterned intuition to words or to mathematics, so that it can be checked. An unconventional vision, however compelling, is no better evidence than common optical perception. Sometimes this can be short-circuited when unformulated intuition leads directly to experiment; otherwise, hard work is required. One can form an intuitive world view by floating about on empathy, but the result is going to be solipsistic and — to maintain the metaphor — wet. So the acausal, inclusivist logic of oceanic modes has to be reduced to mathematical form, simply to see if it makes heuristic sense, and what kind of sense it does make.
     One need no more be a Hindu to treat objects as events or loci in an independent field than one needs to be Jewish to like rye bread. Interestingly enough, Indian physicists have been too close to their tradition to draw directly to it as a source of ideas in this area. The germs of field theory in Western thought may well have arrived by way of Buddhist influences on Stocism (Comfort 1979A), but Indian scientists are probably just as scared as most Westerners of the influence of religion on science. However, if a religion is a world view defining the relations of the experience of I-ness to a hypothetical That, then scientific objectivism qualifies as religion no less than Hinduism or Buddhism.
     We do not accordingly start from, or need, any soft generalizations about brain-as-microcosm; the brain-as-perceiving system model will do nicely and is more in line with critical analysis. Our brain need not be universe-shaped (though it may be) because our universe is bound to be brain-shaped. At the same time, once we start looking critically at the preconceptions generated by our experience of positional identity, we have to re-examine the instrument we are using. In the case of particles, we have to stop attributing transcendental identity to these hypothetical objects (Post 1963). There is no way around the closed loop implicit in the cogito, awkward as it is — slap-happy excursions into pure mentalism which take the line that “mind is the only reality” will always run into the fact that if we are using a nervous system to think, that too is part of middle-order reality; they also risk the conventional fate of objects which fly in ever decreasing circles. There is still going to be a system break at the point where we have to explain how matter sets about thinking itself if it is in fact virtual and a construct of our (material) sensorium.
     This is something on which people like Sankara and Nagarjuna (the first Hindu, the second Buddhist) are either deliberately obscure, or led to take refuge in a kind of cosmic engram which stands behind illusory I-ness and is the true “dwarf in the middle” (Hindu), or the reflection of Buddha-nature (Mahayana Buddhist). Labeling this as Brahman, for example, and then translating Brahman and maya as God and illusion rather than as field and phenomenal reality add further to the confusion, and fuel edifying rather than illuminating interpretations based on what we have traditionally attributed to God. Spinoza brought a similar problem down on himself by doing this, and had to do penance for it; I risk doing so by treating objective science as a religion, which anthropologically it is. Nor are naïve Hindus and Buddhists necessarily more consistent than we are if they talk traditionally about reincarnation (in linear time) and the unreality of time and self in the same doctrinal breath, though philosophers like Nagarjuna saw the point….
— Alex Comfort, Reality and Comfort, pp. 30-31.

Digging Physics

It is the duty of the author of a scientific paper to make the subject matter clear to at least two people, one of whom may be the author.
— Freeman Dyson, fronticepiece to Reality and Empathy by Alex Comfort.

....Oddly enough, the best description of how it might be apprehended comes from not a physicist but from the amateur yogi and occult philosopher P. D. Ouspensky, describing a vision he experienced during an altered state of mind.
 "In trying to describe this strange world in which I saw myself, I must say that it resembled more than anything a world of very complicated mathematical relations . . . in which everything is connected, in which nothing exists separately, and in which at the same time the relations between things have a real existence apart from the things themselves; or possibly 'things' do not exist, and only 'relations' exist." (1930)
     Ouspensky was a very odd fish, and certainly, from the remainder of his book, no great scientific thinker, but here for once his language is strikingly clearer than that of the physicists. He is coy about the means used to obtain this vision (they appear to have included smoking pot). Whether he contrived to see this natural implicate or was simply guessing, is a matter of some interest, as we shall see later, but his image, like that of Liebnitz, accurately describes the model which one trend in mathematical physics is attempting to convey.
— Alex Comfort, Reality and Empathy, pp. 19-20.

     Bigotry and credulity are misshapen sisters, and common intellectual prudence counsels against contracting wedlock with either. That paranormal phenomena do not exist is an opinion; that they certainly exist is an overstatement; and that we know a priori that they cannot possibly exist is manifest nonsense. As in the case of other apparent phenomena, the most reasonable position would be that they represent real effects, to be examined until shown to be otherwise. They do not follow from any model of quantum physics, though some of them might prove eventually to have roots in the double take between Boolean logic and wave-function on perception in the brain; and the contortions of the theoretical explainers [Rao 1966] that spring from clinging to a Newtonian universe as "real." The specific point on which paranormal phenomena might comment is not the nature of matter or energy, but the epiphenomenal character of mind. The nearest they can come to commenting on physical theory is as very different examples of a "second layer" show-through, analagous to certain postulated examples in physics. Nor, as we shall see, would they necessarily provide a way out of existential anxiety that would be any more flattering to our wish for permanent I-ness than the epiphenomenal model. It might be worth srtressing this in order to let some of the grosser pressures out of the subject.
— Alex Comfort, Ibid., p. 219.

Further In

Philosophia Perennis . . . the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; . . . is immemorial and universal. Rudiments . . . may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.
— Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, p. iv.

Given all this, what are the possibilities for esotericism? I would suggest that the only chance of philosophers taking seriously anything within the esoteric tradition would be if the people in the esoteric tradition, that is to say the people making those claims, had experiences which were noetic and productive.
     If we fail at knowledge, we fall back on belief. If an exponent of esoteric teachings, such as those of Swedenborg, asks the philosophical community, "Do you want to see beliefs?" — and Swedenborgians can point to thirty volumes of them — such a question will be greeted by disinterest. Philosophy is expected to eschew beliefs. Faith and beliefs are thought to be left over from the Middle Ages.
     Belief is what you do when you fall off or haven't climbed the "high road." The high road is for thinking; if you're not on the high road of thinking and knowledge, you will not be effective in philosophical discussion.
     Philosophy, in fact, is also full of unacknowledged beliefs, but we must know a lot about the philosopher's presumed knowing to show that it is believing.
     So it's really uphill. You have to know Swedenborg, and then you have to know philosophy. In order to show that Swedenborg has a better philosophy than what's out there you have to have knowing experiences which could be the envy of philosophy. That is very hard to do. I'd like to do that, too, along the lines laid down by Rudolf Steiner's Knowing Higher Worlds. We are all in this game together.
— Robert McDermott, "Whatever Happened to Esoteric?: A Challenge to Swedenborgians and Others from the Esoteric Tradition, in Chrysalis, Volume IX, Issue 1, Spring 1994, pp. 42-43.

It holds me still. What mind — child's or adult's — what consciousness can bear to be known, utterly perceived, and taken in and comprehended? Alien beyond knowing, beyond telling, the eye had plumbed the child's heart, the adult's mind, as no human face or glance would or could.
     Proposing that the religious essence lies in the encounter with "the holy," Rudolph Otto sees the contact as essentially dual, instilling two attitudes at once within the participant. One he calls the feeling of awe, of dread, the mysterium tremendum, the energy that makes the self quiver and shake; the other he terms an attitude of attention, of fascination and interest, the mysterium fascinans, the energy that pulls the self on, and in, despite the terror, the dread, ever closer to the source.
     Who can bear to be totally and completely known? Who does not seek just such knowledge, such encounter and union? The little self withdraws in the face of such a knowing, shrinking and cowering, as the deep self, the larger self, draws near, recognizing in the presence of the threat of dissolution, and shattering, the source and origin of its own deep life and creativity.
     I write in a house that sits alone in a stand of holly, live oak, bay, and southern pine that wheeze and rush and sway with the storms that pound the coast from the North Atlantic. Tonight the wind is still, it is midsummer, and the moon hangs in its waning, two days past full. Yet even now, as this pencil tip scratches its stub point across the draft of this essay, there is in the silence of my breath, and these words, a force and mystery whose music and depth are one with that great underground spring, a source beyond knowing or telling, beyond any accounting.
     The Blue Hole [a bottomless deep water spring that he first saw as a child] feeds from and toward a source that is as nameless as it is endless. So, for the child, the story began. The child did not know the way then, no more than the adult does now. May it continue.
— Steven Lautermilch, "The Blue Hole of Castalia," in Ibid., p. 48.

A Passage from My Passage

Stephen's soul has been briefly awakened, and he catches a fleeting glimpse of his higher calling. But such transcendent experiences, like manna in the wilderness, seem to evaporate like the morning dew, drifting out of immediate consciousness into some quiet chamber of the soul. Stephen sinks back into lower realms of consciousness: the realm of the intellect, of reason and rationality.
     And so we see Stephen a few years later, as a university student trying to figure out the scholastic systems of the great philosophers. His mind is totally occupied with metaphysical questions. He has become an academician — hardly the young artist  whose soul had cried out with simplicity and purest passion, "Heavenly God!"
     Nevertheless, there is still something in his soul deeper than reason, larger than life, something that yearns to be satisfied and cries out to him, something leading him onward, ever onward. Stephen stops to watch birds overhead.

"What birds were they? . . . He watched their flight; bird after bird . . . he listened to their cries.... The inhuman clamor soothed his ears.... Why was he gazing upwards from the steps of the porch, hearing their shrill twofold cry, watching their flight? For an augury of good or evil? A phrase of Cornelius Agrippa flew through his mind and then there flew hither and thither shapeless thoughts from Swedenborg on the correspondence of birds to things of the intellect and of how the creatures of the air have their knowledge and know their times and seasons because they, unlike man, are in the order of life and have not perverted that order by reason." [James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pp. 224-225 passim.]

To Swedenborg, the movement and beauty of birds represents human intellect as it seeks to be led and taught by the Divine.

"The man who receives wisdom from God is like a bird  flying high which surveys everything in the gardens, woods, and farms beneath, and flies towards those things that are of use to it." [Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christian Religion, #69, Swedenborg Foundation, New York.]

— Ray Silverman, "Welcome, O Life!", in Chrysalis, Preface, p. viii, Volume VIII, Issue 2, "Work," Summer 1993.

On a personal note: I like passages like this one that are a good explication of a well stated thought — a great response to a wonderful passage from an outstanding book by a renowned author. I have been composing a novel for many years which incorporates a hundred passages from all sources that contain the phrase "hither and thither" and I am a long-time reader and admirer of Swedenborg's wisdom from the Lord. To find that both are in close proximity in a passage from a book I read forty years ago, before I began either of the above journeys, is a marvelously serendipitous God-instance.
— JRH

How Open?

After great pain, a formal feeling comes —
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs —
The stiff heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round —
Of ground, or Air, or Ought —
A wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone —

This is the Hour of Lead —
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow —
First — chill — then Stupor — then the letting go —

— Emily Dickinson, in Parabola: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, Fall 1990, p. 51.

     This is the amazing phenomenon of a myth, which is so important to recognize today, when we can't avoid falling into the habit of explaining every step that we make. Suddenly we encounter a quite different form, a form which speaks very powerfully, with very precise, immediate recognizable meaning: and that meaning is there, we receive it, we seem to understand it, yet when we try to dissect it, it slips between our fingers. This shock that comes from encountering a great myth acts upon us, in a sense, by opening the mind. Now, to be really open in an unexpected way, we need to reach the state of great emptiness that is so often referred to in different traditions — that moment when there is nothing but a complete void: and music exists, poems and sounds exist, so as to lead us straight to that  extraordinary state of pure openness, of real freedom.
— Peter Brook, "The Sleeping Dragon," in Ibid., p. 52.

     It is important to recognize that the process of waking or coming to oneself is by no means automatic; indeed, it may be uncommon.
Kierkegaard writes:
"And this is the pitiful thing to one who contemplates human life, that so many live on in a quiet state of perdition; they outlive themselves, not in the sense that the content of life is successively unfolding and is now possessed in this expanded state, but they live their lives, as it were, outside themselves, they vanish like shadows, their immortal soul is blown away, and they are not alarmed by the problem of its immortality, for they are already in a state of dissolution before they die." [Either/Or, Lowrie (tr.), V. 2, p. 172]
     Their loss is compounded: they have lost the ability to recognize that they are lost. Their entrapment is internal, not external. They are not trapped by circumstances, but by not being aware of being trapped. Put positively, an expanded vision would allow them to perceive new opportunities. This is why only radical change will save them — because they are unaware of their true location, doing more of the same does no good. If adversity arises, they may, like the sailors on Jonah's boat, row harder, but this kind of effort will not bring the right kind of change. It is like words spoken in the wrong language. Kierkegaard notes that such a person "learns to imitate the other men, noting how they manage to live, and so he too lives after a sort, . . . but a self he was not and a self he did not become." [The Sickness Unto Death, Lowrie (tr.), p. 186]
— James L. Bull, "Rethinking Jonah: The Dynamics of Surrender," in Ibid., pp. 81-82.

A Caution

     The "perennial philosophy" — a favorite with those inclined to vagueness — is actually a name for the recurrent intuition of a field-type reality, supported by the use of introspective experiment. It is perennial because, like the optical mode which generates realisms (including, as a historical specimen, Thomas Reid's commonsensism, which is realism in caricature), it represents an experienceable cerebral mode, which tends to surface in successive philosophical systems. Those who have experienced it, like those who experience middle-order, optical reality, comprehend one another because the perceptions involved are roughly the same for all. There is nothing supernatural about it; it is simply one way of perceiving structure — inclusively. It could very well be simply an exaggeration of ordinary Gestalt perception induced by turning off linguistic logic. The perennial philosophy has a discrete logic which contradicts that of ordinary, everyday experience, and is extraordinarily difficult to set out, either mathematically or in plain. But it can be perceived rather easily by empathy and in this it resembles the skill one acquires in reading primary-process thinking in psychiatry. This is comprehensible enough, but will not really do for science; one can read and understand Joyce's Finnegan without working out every oblique allusion, but if one wants a world model or a brain process model, one has to buckle down and reduce patterned intuition to words or to mathematics, so that it can be checked. An unconventional vision, however compelling, is no better evidence than common optical perception. Sometimes this can be short-circuited when unformulated intuition leads directly to experiment; otherwise, hard work is required. One can form an intuitive world view by floating about on empathy, but the result is going to be solipsistic and — to maintain the metaphor — wet. So the acausal, inclusivist logic of oceanic modes has to be reduced to mathematical form, simply to see if it makes heuristic sense, and what kind of sense it does make.
     One need no more be a Hindu to treat objects as events or loci in an interdependent field than one needs to be Jewish to like rye bread. Interestingly enough, Indian physicists have been too close to their tradition to draw directly on it as a source of ideas in this area. The germs of field theory in Western thought may well have arrived by way of Buddhist influences on Stoicism (Comfort 1979A), but Indian scientists are probably just as scared as most Westerners of the influence of religion on science. However, if a religion is a world view defining the relations of the experience of I-ness to a hypothetical That, then scientific objectivism qualifies as religion no less than Hinduism or Buddhism.
     We do not accordingly start from, or need, any soft generalizations about brain-as-microcosm; the brain-as-perceiving system model will do nicely and is more in line with critical analysis. Our brain need not be universe-shaped (though it may be) because our universe is bound to be brain-shaped. At the same time, once we start looking critically at the preconceptions generated by our experience of positional identity, we have to re-examine the instrument we are using. In the case of particles, we have had to stop attributing transcendental identity to these hypothetical objects (Post 1963). There is no way around the closed loop implicit in the cogito, awkward as it is — slap-happy excursions into pure mentalism which take the line that "mind is the only reality" will always run into the fact that if we are using a nervous system to think, that too is part of middle-order reality; they also risk the conventional fate of objects which fly in ever decreasing circles. There is still going to be a system break at the point where we have to explain how matter sets about thinking itself if it is in fact virtual and a construct of our (material) sensorium.
     This is something which people like Sankara and Nagarjuna (the first Hindu, the second Buddhist) are either deliberately obscure, or led to take refuge in a kind of cosmic engram which stands behind illusory I-ness and is the true "dwarf in the middle" (Hindu), or the reflection of Buddha-nature (Mahayana Buddhism). Labelling this as Brahman, for example, and then translating Brahman and maya as God and illusion rather than as field and phenomenal reality add further to the confusion, and fuel edifying rather than illuminating interpretations based on what we have traditionally attributed to God. Spinoza brought a similar problem down on himself by doing this, and had to do penance for it; I risk doing so by treating objective science as religion, which anthropologically it is. Nor are naive Hindus and Buddhists necessarily more comsistent than we are if they talk traditionally about reincarnation (in linear time) and the unreality of time and self in the same doctrinal breath....
— Alex Comfort, from "Physics, Brains, and World Models," in Reality and Empathy, pp. 30-31.

Science Awakes, Religion Mellows

     To summarize, we began the material on transformation with the thoroughly grounded physical processes studied by Prigogine, and found ourselves eventually talking of a necessary new step in evolution which is undertaken voluntarily, which brings a new level of aliveness, and to which what Buber called the Eternal Thou has a stake in becoming.
     How can we learn that higher feeling and deeper seeing are infinitely more satisfying than ego-gratification? When such an inner move occurs, individuals call it the grace of God," but there is a way of building to the point at which one can let it happen; building to the point of involution, transformation, opening, awakening.
     This can occur as we are gripped by symbols of potentiality. The remarkable thing is that these symbols are now arising within science as such, and this fact offers much hope. As I said earlier, the symbols provided by religious institutions, conditioned as they are by the cultures in which they arose, are not sufficiently universal for the step of forming a global consciousness. Only science, along with music and the visual arts, exhibits the necessary universality, the ability to cross the cultural borders of the world, and thus take the needed next step toward its unity.
— John L. Hitchcock, "The New Physics and Human Transformation," in Crysalis, Volume IV, Issue 1, "Science and Spirituality," p. 35.

....We're talking about a world in which there is the possibility of measurement for more precise seeing, and what that seeing does is to give us nuances of the new. Through more precise measurement, we discover things that are mind-blowing and open up whole new areas of thought, and that is the reason for precise measurement, for me. Not for everybody. A lot of physicists, I still think, and as Larry [Dossey, M.D.] was saying, the bulk of physicians, see medicine in a certain way, 'fix the machine,' and they say 'Get the world in place.' Hawking thinks that he might come up with a new 'theory of everything' in twenty years, if he can still communicate. I frankly disbelieve that God is going to run out of ideas with which to intrigue us about the nature of reality in this century or the next thousands of centuries.
     ". . . a law of physics or a law of science begins with the first observed regularity, and some are more universal than others, but any regularity that you can come back to constitutes a law of physics. Now, are we only projecting when we see purpose of events or events which carry meaning of purpose to us? If we see those [events] with any sense of reality, and I think that most people feel they do, then . . . purposiveness is an observed phenomenon and that is sufficient for me to begin talking theologically."
— Gustav Arrhenius, from "New Physics—Panel Discussion Highlights," in Ibid., p. 40.

TRANSFORMATION: [Emanuel] Swedenborg sees the whole purpose of human life as "regeneration," and sees clearly the need for dark passages. "Before anything is brought back into order, it is quite normal for it to be brought first into a kind of confusion, a virtual chaos. In this way, things that fit together badly are severed from each other; and when they have been severed, then the Lord arranges them in order."
— George Dole, from "Physics and Psychology: A Swedenborgian Response to Hitchcock's Paper," in Ibid., p. 41.

     To a greater degree than [William] James or [Alfred North] Whitehead realized, however, philosophizing out of, or in concert with, spirit, requires a new — and in some respects, an old — philosophical method. Philosophizing out of, and on behalf of, spirit is possible only by a mode of cognition which avoids the materialistic presuppositions and limitations of the modern western paradigm. It requires spiritually-based thinking such as was practiced by Plato and by medieval Christian philosophical theologians, by most practitioners of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, as well as by some western thinkers such as [Emanuel] Swedenborg and [Rudolph] Steiner, and to a lesser extent, Goethe and Emerson, who are apparently in touch with spiritual reality.
     Unfortunately, contemporary philosophy, both in theory and practice, emphatically excludes any possible contribution which might issue from a meditative or contemplative effort. As it prefers analysis to speculation, and argument to assent, it also prefers combat to contemplation. But it is by contemplation that the impersonal and universal can triumph over the subjective, the self-interested and the self-indulgent....
— Robert McDermott, "Curing Philosophy; Philosophy as Cure," in Ibid., pp. 62-63.

Right Writing Rite

     The brain is a poor reed shaken by every wind, and its fruits are the sport of dust. Solomon has said that the making of many books is a great weariness and that there is nothing new under the sun. There are no new books, and had men the least wisdom, they would read what has been written and use the Nile papyrus for shoes and raiment and not for more arrogant writings. It is of much doubt that the trade of letters has done anything else but whet greed and jealousy and hatred. Thoth has died, and the cicadas scorn the present alphabet men because they say they write for themselves although they are gluttonous to be known as Tantalus in Erebus.
     The sick have written astounding books: The poet Schiller was consumptive, and the odor of rotten apples quickened his soul; Hölderlin was insane; and Christopher Smart spent most of his latter days in Bedlam. Donne and Shakespeare, heretical bawds in their heyday, were broken in their fifties. Donne sat in cerecloth for eight years. These men gave much to other people, and even to the universe, for unless man returns a tithe of what he has taken from nature, he is a skulking grout-head. But no one needs novel miseries, though some cultivate solitude, and most of our books look as though they were ill, lonely, and starved to death. Books should exhale affections, friendship, and good precepts and  be redolent of the mulberry, osiers burning in the hearth, or lentils in the pot. The most pernicious volume is a cold one which is not conceived on Mount Ida but comes from the lawless lust of malignant privacies. Crates, seeing a young man walking by himself, said, "Have a care of lewd company." Men unaccustomed to people are savages and are as odorless as the eunuch....
— Edward Dahlberg, The Sorrows of Priapus, from Part II, The Carnal Myth, pp. 178-179.

     Non-interfering, receptive, Taoistic perception is necessary for the perception of certain kinds of truth. Peak-experiences are states in which striving, interfering, and active controlling diminish, thereby permitting Taoistic perception, thereby diminishing the effect of the perceiver upon the percept. Therefore, truer knowledge (of some things) may be expected and has been reported.
     To summarize, the major changes in the status of the problem of the validity of B-knowledge, or illumination-knowledge, are: (A) shifting it away from the question of the reality of angels, etc., i.e., naturalizing the question; (B) affirming experimentally valid knowledge, the intrinsic  validity of the enlarging of consciousness, i.e., of a wider range of experience; (C) realizing that the knowledge revealed was there all the time, ready to be perceived, if only the perceiver were "up to it," ready for it. This is a change in perspicuity, in the efficiency of the perceiver, in his spectacles, so to speak, not a change in the nature of reality or the invention of a new piece of reality which wasn't there before. The word "psychedelic" (consciousness-expanding) may be used here. Finally, (D) this kind of knowledge can be achieved in other ways; we need not rely solely on peak-experiences or peak-producing drugs for its attainment. There are more sober and laborious — and perhaps, therefore, better in some ways in the long run — avenues to achieving transcendent knowledge (B-knowledge). That is, I think we shall handle the problem better if we stress ontology and epistemology rather than the triggers and the stimuli.
— Abraham H. Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, Appendix D, "What is the validity of knowledge gained in peak-experiences?", pp. 80-81.