Insight Wisely

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

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

NINETEEN SEVENTY-TWO

SO, AT LAST YOUR PERSONALITY

HAS BECOME A COPROLITE!

((Fossilized shit!))

How

PAINFUL IT WAS

To grow up in the fifties!

WE LEARNED:

MATERIALISM,

MACHO-COMPETITION,

GREED.

But still I can hardly believe

THAT YOU SIT THERE TELLING ME:

ABOUT THE GIRLS YOU FUCK,

HOW MUCH MONEY YOU MAKE,

AND OF YOUR FAME.

As if

The last twenty years

Never happened.

You

Seem pathetically

Foolish.

But there is viciousness

In

Our generation.

YOU

ARE

REALLY

SET

(like a robot)

ON OVERKILL.

And you believe

In social appearances.

_______________________

You want to be like

The Big Boys.

Whoever they are!

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

So It Were

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High Standing

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


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


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

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

Actual Acceptance

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

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

Real Living Forestalls Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

                         The Poet

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

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

Missilelaneous

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problems and Solutions

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

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

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

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

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

Do Drugs Do God

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's the Spirit

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


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