Drive Within

     We're dealing with a very dramatic and very fundamental paradigm shift here. You may try to lubricate your social interactions with personality techniques and skills, but in the process, you may truncate the vital character base. You can't have the fruits without the roots. It's the principle of sequencing: Private Victory precedes Public Victory. Self-mastery and self-discipline are the foundation of good relationships with others.
     Some people say that you have to like yourself before you can like others. I think that idea has merit, but if you don't know yourself, if you don't control yourself, if you don't have mastery over yourself, it's very hard to like yourself, except in some short-term, psych-up, superficial way.
     Real self-respect comes from dominion  over self, from true independence. And that's the focus of Habits 1, 2, and 3. Independence is an achievement. Independence is choice only independent people can make. Unless we are willing to achieve real independence, it's foolish to try to develop human relations skills. We might try. We might even have some degree of success when the sun is shining. But when the difficult times come — and they will — we won't have the foundation to keep things together.
     The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won't be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.
—  Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, pp. 186-187.

     How is it possible for people to go through life without seriously thinking of such [life's big] questions? The answer is again disturbing. Because my thought is tied down to familiar things. As absurd as it sounds, the human mind does not seem to be really made for thinking. You realize this if you try to think about some fairly simple abstract problem, such as why a mirror reverses your left and right sides, but not your head and feet. The mind tries to grasp the problem, then skids, like a car on ice. It is as if some gravitational force pulled your mind back to the here-and-now as the ground pulls us back when we jump. You try to focus on big, universal problems, and a moment later find yourself wondering if you posted a letter. Philosophers who are aware of these problems are inclined to take the view that human life is brutal and meaningless. It is hard for a logical mind to disagree.
     This explains why most intelligent people are suspicious of the idea of reincarnation, or life after death. They see such ideas as another symptom of the human inability to face up to reality. We are hopelessly drugged by the biological sense of security — as sheep and cows are until they get to the slaughterhouse and smell the blood. We like to sooth ourselves with the tacit assumption that things will always go on as they are now. And so most religions promise their followers an afterlife that bears all the signs of wishful thinking — from the Elysian Fields of the Greeks to the Happy Hunting Ground of the American Indians. Philosophers can see through the daydream, but they have no convincing alternative to suggest.
     If we can drag our mind away from everyday trivialities and think honestly about these problems, we have to admit that the pessimists inspire no more confidence than the 'true believers'. Most of them use their pessimism as an excuse for not thinking. At first sight, this seems a reasonable attitude, since they believe that thinking only leads back to the conviction that life is meaningless. But then, some deep insight tells us that when a man ceases thinking, he has thrown away his greatest advantage. There is an odd feeling of arrested development about most of the total pessimists, as if they ceased to evolve as human beings.
     Besides which, none of these pessimists — Schopenhauer, Andreyev, Artsybashev, Beckett, Sartre — has really come to grips with the central question about human existence. All right, I have no idea where I come from or where I am going to, and most of the meanings that I see around me are mere conventions. I am little more than a blinkered horse, plodding along patiently, doing more or less what I did yesterday  and the day before, and I see all human beings around me behaving in the same way. Yet there does seem to be a certain logic about human existence, particularly when I am gripped by a sense of purpose. When I experience a feeling of intensity, I catch a glimpse of meanings that seem far greater than the 'me' I know. But then, I get the feeling that the 'me' I know is some kind of temporary half-measure. On top of all this, I begin to believe that the pessimists are making a fundamental mistake about the rules of the game. 'Meaning' is revealed by a kind of inner-searchlight. (This is just another way of stating Husserl's insight: Perception is intentional.) The greater the intensity of the beam, the more meaning it reveals. So a man who stares at the world with a gloomy conviction of defeat is going to see as little meaning as he expects to see.
     There is something absurd about human existence. You find yourself surrounded by apparently 'solid' meanings — which are all comfortingly trivial. But when you try to raise your eyes beyond them, all certainties dissolve. It is as disconcerting as walking through the front door of a magnificent building and finding that it is just a façade, with nothing behind it. The odd thing is that the façade seems solid enough. This world around us certainly looks consistent and logical. It is hard to believe it is part of a bad joke or a nightmare.

     Which brings us back to this most fundamental of all questions. Is it possible that the ladder-of-selves theory is the key not only to 'psychic powers', but also to the basic question of human existence, the riddle that has always tormented philosophers and theologians and 'existentialists thinkers? Mystics have declared that in flashes of revelation the answer to the mystery of the universe suddenly becomes obvious. And again and again, they have expressed the essence of this revelation in words like 'All is well' or 'Everything is good'. This is hard — in fact, impossible — to conceive. But that is not necessarily an ultimate objection. We cannot conceive infinity, yet Georg Cantor created a mathematics of infinity which has proved to be a valuable tool. We cannot conceive the notion that future events have somehow already taken place; yet cases of precognition seem to demonstrate that, in some baffling sense, this is true.
     The ladder-of-selves theory certainly throws light on some other basic problems of human existence: for example, the problem of absurdity or meaninglessness. The world around us seethes with endless activity, and this normally strikes us as quite reasonable. But there are certain moments of fatigue or depression when this meaning seems to crack under us, like thin ice. Camus compares it to watching a man gesticulating in a telephone booth, but being unable to hear a word he is saying. We suddenly wonder if our whole relationship with the world is based on a misunderstanding. Man likes to think he has a symbolic relation with the universe, but perhaps the universe has never heard of him? Sartre calls this same feeling 'nausea'; it comes if you stare at something until your sense of 'knowing' it dissolves, and it seems to become alien and strangely hostile. According to Sartre, this is because man has suddenly recognised the truth about his own nothingness. Simone de Beauvoir expressed it in a passage of Pyrrhus et Cinéas: 'I look at myself in the mirror, tell myself my own story, I can never grasp myself as an entire object, I experience in myself the emptiness that is myself, I feel that I am not.'
     According to the ladder-of-selves theory, this is precisely what one would expect in a state of low inner-pressure. But it is not an inescapable part of the human condition, still less a fundamental truth about the universe. In moments of intensity, of excitement, of creativity, I move up the 'ladder', and instantly become aware that the meaninglessness was an illusion. For I can 'tell myself my own story' and grasp it as a reality; I can look in a mirror and experience myself as an entire object. This is what is meant by Faculty X.
— Colin Wilson, Mysteries, pp. 41-44.

Inner Depth

     Seen from this standpoint, the individual really is of diminishing importance and anyone who wished to dispute this would soon find himself at a loss for arguments. The fact that the individual feels himself or the members of his family or the esteemed friends in his circle to be important merely underlines the slightly comic subjectivity of his feeling. For what are the few compared with ten thousand or a hundred thousand, let alone a million? This recalls the argument of a thoughtful friend with whom I once got caught up in a huge crowd of people. Suddenly he exclaimed, "Here you have the most convincing reason for not believing in immortality: all those people want to be immortal!"
— Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self, pp. 16-17.

     All these obstacles make it more difficult to arrive at a correct appreciation of the human psyche, but they count for very little beside one other remarkable fact that deserves mentioning. This is the common psychiatric experience that the devaluation of the psyche and other resistances to psychological enlightenment are based in large measure on fear — on panic fear of the discoveries that might be made in the realm of the unconscious. These fears are found not only among persons who are frightened by the picture Freud painted of the unconscious; they also troubled the originator of psychoanalysis himself, who confessed to me that it was necessary to make a dogma of his sexual theory because this was the sole bulwark of reason against a possible "outburst of the black flood of occultism." In these words Freud was expressing his conviction that the unconscious still harbored many things that might lend themselves to "occult" interpretations, as is in fact the case. These "archaic vestiges," or archetypal forms grounded on the instincts and giving expression to them, have a numinous quality that sometimes arouses fear.  They are ineradicable, for they represent the ultimate foundations of the psyche itself. They cannot be grasped intellectually, and when one has destroyed one manifestation of them, they reappear in altered form. It is this fear of the unconscious psyche which not only impedes self-knowledge but is the gravest obstacle to a wider understanding and knowledge of psychology. Often the fear is so great that one dares not admit it even to oneself. Here it is a question that every religious person should consider very seriously; he might get an illuminating answer.
— Carl Jung, Ibid., pp. 48-49.

     The religious person enjoys a great advantage when it comes to answering the crucial question that hangs over our time like a threat: he has a clear idea of the way his subjective existence is grounded in his relation to "God." I put "God" in quotes in order to indicate that we are dealing with an anthropomorphic idea whose dynamism and symbolism are filtered through the medium of the unconscious psyche. Anyone who wants to can at least draw near to the source of such experiences, no matter whether he believes in God or not. Without this approach it is only in rare cases that we witness those miraculous conversions of which Paul's Damascus experience is the prototype. That religious experiences exist no longer needs proof. But it will always remain doubtful whether what metaphysics and theology call God and the gods is the real ground of these experiences. The question is idle, actually, and answers itself by reason of the subjectively overwhelming numinosity of the experience. Anyone who has had it is seized by it and therefore not in a position to indulge in fruitless metaphysical or epistemological speculations. Absolute certainty brings its own evidence and has no need of anthropomorphic proofs.
— Carl Jung, Ibid., pp. 90-91.

Looking With In

     For another billion years or so, these minute cells floated in the warm seas, birthless and deathless. No change took place. It was not until a mere half billion years ago that true evolution began. Life somehow managed to overcome its most basic problem — forgetfulness. Evolution cannot proceed without the accumulation of knowledge, and a single amoeba cannot accumulate much knowledge. It was not until the life-force invented the trick of coding knowledge into the reproductory processes that new advances became possible. The Pre-Cambrian creatures shed old cells and grew new ones in the same way that my body replaces all its old cells every eight years. With the invention of death and reproduction, they shed old bodies and grew new ones. Variety replaced monotony as the basic law of existence.
     Life invented death. There is no escaping this extraordinary fact, although a more conservative view might be that life simply learned to make use of death for its own purposes. The implications are the same. Life is not at the mercy of death. It is in control of death. Half a billion years ago, it learned the secret of reincarnation.
     The aim of all this manoeuvering was to establish a firmer bridgehead in the universe of matter. Individual creatures tend to stagnate when they have discovered a comfortable ritual of habit. A young creature fights and struggles and learns; an old creature vegetates. Death was invented to replace the vegetables with fighters and learners, to get the old soldiers out of the front line and replace them with shock troops.
     The next major step in this war — or process of colonisation — was the invention of consciousness: that is to say, of a group of faculties set apart from the instinctive drives. And their purpose? To observe and record and keep files. Consciousness might be described as the life force's secret police organisation. And, like the secret police in any totalitarian state, it is servant to the government — a powerful and formidable servant, but a servant nevertheless. Consciousness was a late evolutionary development because it was a long time before life could afford the energy for such an experiment. The instincts pay attention only to what deeply concerns them. The job of consciousness is to pay attention to everything, to keep watch on the surface movements of the world of matter. Most of the information it accumulates in this way is repetitive and useless, but occasionally its non-stop vigilance pays off, and a few random observations coalesce to form a new piece of knowledge.
     Consciousness has one immense disadvantage: it divides life against itself. When life was confined to the instinctive levels, its drives were simple: its aim was to increase its foothold in the realm of matter. Consciousness is concerned with superficial problems. The secret police know nothing about the ultimate aims of the government, about its economic and foreign policies. This does not matter so long as the government retains a firm control. But the success of consciousness has been so spectacular that it has become a kind of government department in itself. And this is dangerous. The danger has been immeasurably increased in the past few centuries. The invention of writing gave immense impetus to human evolution, and changed man's vision of himself. There is no evidence that Isaac Newton was more intelligent than Moses or Confucius, but he had subtler methods of storing and utilising his knowledge. As a result of three centuries of Newtonian science, man has become king of his earthly castle. He no longer takes life and death for granted, as his ancestors did. He looks out on the universe with the eye of a master. But consciousness is not the master; it is the servant. It lacks the power and drive of the instinctive life forces. Left to itself, it tends to become passive and bewildered, alienated from the world of instinct and the world of matter. It is a master who has lost all feeling of mastery.
     Human evolution has advanced too fast; its processes have become too complicated for its own good. But they can be simplified. Consciousness can be turned inward, to the understanding of the vital processes and the evolutionary drives.
     The chief enemy of life is not death, but forgetfulness, stupidity. We lose direction too easily. This is the great penalty that life paid for descending into matter: a kind of partial amnesia.
     But it is the next step in the argument that is the crucial one. The universe is full of all kinds of energies. Matter is energy — the most resistant and uncompromising kind of energy. And if life has succeeded in achieving some degree of conquest of matter, is it absurd to suppose that it has not succeeded with more malleable forms of energy?
     We are back to David Foster's notion of an intelligent universe, but now it is unnecessary to ask, Who does the coding? We know the answer. The force of life itself, which has been conducting its campaign for colonisation for more than a billion years....
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "Man's Latent Powers: Glimpses," pp. 577-579.

     The 'how' is unanswerable; we can only assume that the force of life began its conquest of matter by somehow splitting itself into units, each of which felt 'separate' from the rest of the universe. Chesterton answers the 'why': 'So that each thing that obeys the law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter.' Which means simply that without individuality, life would not build up the same desperate force. The man of the crowd is a weakling; people who need people are the stupidest people in the world. And so the basic paradox of human nature seems to be inherent in the force of life itself: without challenge or crisis, it takes things easy, and collapses into mediocrity. So far, all life on earth has had to be driven forward, as slaves once had to be whipped into battle. It has never possessed positive purpose — only the negative one of staying alive and avoiding pain. 'Evil is physical pain,' said Leonardo, going to the heart of the matter. The old theological question 'Why evil?' is answered by the recognition that without evil, there would be universal mediocrity, terminating in death. It is only at this point in the earth's history that this has ceased to be wholly true. With the development of art, science, philosophy, man has acquired the possibility of a positive purpose towards which he can drive forward, instead of being driven from behind. (It is true that religion has always been an expression of this purpose; but religion was content with paradox: the assertion that 'the world' must somehow be denied by 'the spirit,' without trying to understand why this should be necessary.) If positive purpose could be established as the human driving force, it would be a turning point in evolution, for it is many times stronger than the negative purpose of avoiding pain. A man can do things out of love or enthusiasm that would be impossible out of fear. His chief problem at the moment is to escape the narrowness of everyday triviality and grasp the nature of his goal; this, in turn, will require the development of what Blake called 'imagination,' but which it would be more accurate to call Faculty X.
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., p. 580.

Mystic Certainty

     But in order to understand the underlying spirit of the magic that flourished so unexpectedly in the sixteenth century (and the years 1500 to 1600 undoubtedly were the century of magic), it is necessary to understand something of the mysticism that inspired it. For it cannot be stated too often that the essence of magic and the essence  of mysticism are one and the same; the crucial difference is that magic lies at the lower end of the spectrum, mysticism at the higher. Both magic and mysticism are an attempt to get into tune with an 'inner force.' Plotinus (A.D. 205-270) was not a Christian, but his influence on Christian mystics was enormous; he compared human beings to the choir standing around a choir master but with their attention distracted by things going on about them, so they fail to sing the tune in time. He held that creation was a series of steps leading away from the One (or God); he called those steps emanations. (The Kabbalists later borrowed his ideas, as William Blake was to borrow from the Kabbalah.) This is  definitely a non-Christian view, for Plotinus's evil is a negative thing, depending upon how many steps you have taken away from the One; it is like someone walking away from a lighted house at night, moving further into the darkness of the garden. But why should people walk away, unless tempted by the Devil? Because, says Plotinus, we are empty-headed, and easily distracted. The philosopher is the man who determinedly ignores distractions and multiplicity, and tries to see back towards the One. 'Such' he concludes, 'is the life of gods and of godlike men; a liberation from earthly bonds, a life that takes no pleasure in earthly things, a flight of the alone to the alone.'
     This is the intoxicating idea at the heart of mysticism; and in spite of the apparent difference of aim, it is not far from the divine intoxication of the Dionysians. It is the feeling that the banal world in which we appear to be stuck can be escaped. We are all in the position of some dazed person wandering around after an accident, not knowing where he is going to — only half-conscious. A mystic is a man who has partly 'come to.' He has caught a glimpse of what life and death are really about.
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "A History of Magic: The World of the Kabbalah," pp. 230-231.

     The real importance of Swedenborg lies in the doctrines he taught, which are the reverse of the gloom and hell-fire of other breakaway sects. He rejects the notion that Jesus died on the cross to atone for the sin of Adam, declaring that God is neither vindictive nor petty-minded, and that since he is God, he doesn't need atonement. It is remarkable that this common-sense view had never struck earlier theologians. God is Divine Goodness, and Jesus is Divine Wisdom, and Goodness has to be approached through Wisdom. Whatever one thinks about the extraordinary claims of its founder, it must be acknowledged that there is something very beautiful and healthy about the Swedenborgian religion. This feeling of breezy health is the basic reason for its enduring popularity. Its founder may not have been a great occultist, but he was a great man.
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., "Adepts and Impostors," p. 281.

     Lindsay has created an image of the basic problem of the artist and the mystic. In the moments of 'higher consciousness' there is always a feeling of 'But of course!' Life is infinitely meaningful; its possibilities are suddenly endless, and 'normal consciousness' is seen as being no better than sleep. For, like sheep, it separates man from reality.
     When man gets this feeling of 'reality,' he knows that nothing in the world could be so important as keeping it. He tries every possible method of reminding himself not to forget, not to stop fighting to achieve it. What is more, in this state of intensity, it becomes clear that it can be achieved. He sees now as something that is self-evident that he possesses a true will, the ability to focus clearly on an objective and then to achieve it in the most economical way. But then he descends back to his lower storey, and can only remember dimly that he had a vision. The sleep comes back.
     The main trouble is a kind of listlessness, a tendency to waste time and consciousness, like a person staring out of the window at the rain and yawning, wondering what to do next....
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., "Two Russian Mages," pp. 391-392.

     Dostoevsky once said that God had denied man certainty because it would remove his freedom; there would be no virtue making the right choice if you knew for certain that it was the right one. Anyone who reads a history of spiritualism may well feel that the spirits have adopted the same principle: that too much evidence of 'another world' would condition mankind to a lazy mode of thought and behaviour. The philosopher C.D. Broad remarked to me in an interview on this subject: If these facts of psychical research are true, then clearly they are of immense inportance — they literally alter everything. And the alteration would not necessarily be for the better. In fact, it would certainly be for the worse, if we take into account the basic pecularity of human nature: the need for uncertainty and crisis to keep us on our toes. One day it may be that we shall learn to keep the will alert as automatically as we now breathe, and if that happens, we shall be supermen living on a continual level of 'peak experience.' But until we achieve this new degree of self-determination, life had better remain as bewildering and paradoxical as possible.
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "Man's Latent Powers: The Realm of Spirits," p. 462.

Now Concentrate

     Man's trouble is not his inability to achieve the kind of concentration necessary for maximum use of his powers, but his unawareness of what can be achieved by such concentration. And this recognition leads to a formulation of central importance: 'occultism' is not an attempt to draw aside the veil of the unknown, but simply the veil of banality that we call the present.... All art does its work in this way — by rescuing us from our self-chosen triviality, to which we are so prone. It is like a deep organ note that makes my hair stir and a shiver run through me. I 'pull back' from life, like a camera taking a long-shot with a wide-angle lens. I quite simply become aware of more reality than before.
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "A History of Magic: The Evolution of Man," pp. 134-135.

     This explains the attraction of drugs — particularly psychedilics — for intelligent people. They have an intuition that if a 'peak experience' could be summoned up at will, or maintained for half an hour, it would quickly become possible to learn to re-create it without drugs. There is a fallacy here. Most drugs work by reducing the efficiency of the nervous system, inducing unusual states of consciousness at the expense of the mind's power to concentrate and learn. You only have to try to memorize a short list of foreign words when you are slightly drunk to realise this. The mind is usually absorbent, like blotting paper; when you are under the influence of alcohol, it turns into a sheet of glossy paper with no power to absorb. Drugs work by temporarily paralysing certain levels of the mind, like a local anesthetic, thereby reducing its energy consumption. Worse still, they inhibit 'feedback effects.' When Lady Chatterley feels the park surging beneath her feet like the sea, this is a feedback effect of her intense concentration on her sexual activities: an ecstatic 100 per cent concentration that pumps up enormous energies from her depths. It is these energies that continue to surge and spread as she returns home. The Kabbalah describes the creation of the world as being a total concentration of energy into a single luminous point. (Captain Shotover's 'seventh degree of concentration' in Shaw's Heartbreak House is related to it.) All drugs, without exception, produce the reverse of concentration, a relaxation of the mind. In the case of the psychedelics, the nervous system is 'short-circuited,' so that the nervous impulses cease to follow their own track, and spread sideways, creating a series of 'feelings'; it is like opening the lid of a grand piano and running your fingers over its strings, producing an effect like a harp. But these 'feelings' have nothing to do with clear focussing upon reality....
     Drugs, then, are the worst possible way of attempting to achieve 'contemplative objectivity.' They increase the mind's tendency to accept its own passivity instead of fighting against it.
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "A History of Magic: The Evolution of Man," pp. 134-135.

     I must begin by repeating my basic general proposition. It is man's biological destiny to evolve Faculty X. All living creatures on the surface of this planet have been trying to do this throughout their history. Man is more than halfway there. A true adept would be a man in whom Faculty X is more developed than in the average.
     By this definition, there have not been many true adepts. This does not mean that the great names in magic were chalatans or self-deceivers (although some were). Most of them possessed a high degree of 'intuitive' powers, akin to Corbett's 'jungle sensitivity.' These powers lie at the lower end of man's concsiousness — the red end of the spectrum. Faculty X lies at the violet end....
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "A History of Magic: Adepts and Initiates," p. 177.

     The curtain is 'everydayness.' It is a state of mind rather than an objective reality. The human mind must be thought of as being akin to the radar of bats; we somehow reach out and 'feel' the reality around us. But in my ordinary, everyday existence, I do not need to 'reach out' very far. And I get in the habit of not doing so.
     Whenever I am deeply moved bt poetry or music or scenery, I realise I am living in a meaning universe that deserves better of me than the small-minded sloth in which I habitually live. And I suddenly realise the real deadlines of this lukewarm contentment that looks as harmless as ivy on a tree. It is systematically robbing me of life, embezzling my purpose and vitality. I must clearly focus on this immense meaning that surrounds me, and refuse to forget it; contemptuously reject all smaller meanings that try to persuade me to focus on them instead.
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., p. 178.

Inner Control

....in some international centre, nor lodged in any single mind, but permeating the community: an all-powerful, prescient, implacable group-mind, whose decisions can only be accepted unquestioningly by the individual. Necessarily so, since by the time individuals will have relegated to it, centuries before, the functions of thought and will. Such a super-intelligence will be permanently unchallengable, for it will rule from the inside as well as outside each individual. It will be everywhere — and nowhere. There is after all nothing new in this. The collective intelligence which controls the hive or the terminary has this mysterious invisibility and unquestionable power.
     Theses things have not happened yet. There is still time to decide — is this what we want? But they may not be far off. One contemporary writer has seen humanity caught already in the grip of an unseen yet pervasive power with thich it is impossible to contend; and it drove him to despair and death. Kafka's tremendous, suffocating books communicate perfectly the panic horror of the moment when man begins to guess that the very essence of himself, the power to will, to decide, to feel, even to realise the loss of these faculties, is slipping out of his grasp and sliding smoothly into invisible waiting hands whose purposes, perhaps hostile, at best indifferent, must be for ever unknown to him.

                                    *     *     *

     Three possibilities, then, are open to modern man. We can continue as we have started — bombing, poisoning and infecting each other till death do us part, leaving Life a free hand either to begin again with the remnants of the human race, or to experiment with some altogether different species. Many already believe this to be the destiny of our world — and try not to think about it. Or we can recognise the fatal imbalance between size and structure in our present communities, and choose consciously to disintegrate into smaller and more manageable groups. But this is manifestly a pipe-dream. As the world knows, the world's population can now be supported only by the interlocked resources of huge industrial groups — business monsters that are the unwieldy progeny of the city-monsters. Even if we would, we cannot go back.
     There remains apparently only the third possibility: a sacrifice of individual values, and a passive human cooperation in Life's current tentative moves towards a super-intelligent group-mind, of which the individual is merely the acquiescent instrument. This is the goal towards which the contemporary planner unconsciously strives; perhaps in the long run the most hideous solution of all.
     Three very disagreeable answers to the problem....
....
    Undreamed of by them, there is another way of looking at these things. When a solution appears to lead to nihilism it is a safe assumption that the lines of approach are inadequate. Some factor of primary importance has not been taken into account. It is as if a two-dimensional mind were facing a three-dimentional crisis. This is the predicament of contemporary man.
— Alan McGlashan, Gravity and Levity, "Nature's Monstrous Failures," pp. 84-85.

     One should note the presupposition of this first paragraph, which is present in all Powys's work: that there is a kind of 'psychic ether' that carries mental vibrations as the 'luminiferous ether' is supposed to carry light.
     This I would define as the fundamental proposition of magic or occultism, and perhaps the only essential one. It will be taken for granted throughout this book.
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "A Survey of the Subject: Magic-The Science of the future," pp. 52-53.

     All this is to say that 'magical systems' — the Hebrew Kabbalah, the Chinese Book of Changes, the Tarot pack, the Key of Solomon, the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead — should not be regarded as primitive and unsuccessful attempts at 'science,' but as attempts to express these depths of 'lunar' knowledge in their own terms. The Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead — their own language Pert Em Hru (Emerging by Day) and Bardo Thodol — are designed to be read aloud to the dying person in an attempt to give the 'subconscious self' a certain control over its strange experiences. To Western ears, this sounds absurd, until we recognise as rational the notion of controlling the 'sleeping self' and its impulses. Then we understand that what the ancient Egyptians and Tibetans were trying to do is not childish and illogical, but a step ahead of any knowledge we possess in the West....
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., "A Survey of the Subject: The Dark Side of the Moon," pp. 77-78.

Individual Progress

     It is usually in this way that, once having defined particular goals which we consider it important to attain, instead of reaching them we are surprised to find ourselves deviating so far from our route that we do the opposite of what we want.
     It is like this, says Gurdjieff, with everything that man undertakes. What democracy does not eventually turn into tyranny, what faith does not breed intolerance, what disinterested search for truth does not culminate in the rigity of a system?
     It is worth pointing out that the word 'turn' is used as a synonym for 'deteriorate'. What is there  in human relations that does not 'turn sour'? Even abundance may 'turn to excess'!
     We are like weathercocks, and I wonder whether the ellipse shown above does not at some point open out into a spiral, that same spiral which for ever ornaments the 'august and tubiform belly' of Père Ubu, whose triumph over this century is evident enough.
     Gurdjieff exclaims:
     'Think how many turns the line of development of forces must have taken to come from the Gospel preaching of love to the Inquisition; or to go from the ascetics of the early centuries studying esoteric Christianity to the scholastics who calculated how many angels could be placed on the point of a needle.' [P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, p. 129]
— Michel Waldberg, Gurdjieff: An Approach to His Ideas, pp. 104/105/106.

....The talk was then about the latest inventions of science and so of Man's apparent progress. Gurdjieff said: "Yes, machines are making progress, but not Man. "In answer to a question whether Man had not progressed far beyond what he used to be, even in historical time, Gurdjieff said: "It is strange how you so easily believe in this word progress. It is as if this word hypnotized you, so that you cannot see the truth. Man does not progress. There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. It is only the outward form that changes. The essence does not change.... "Civilized" and "cultured" people live with exactly the same interests as the most ignorant savages. Modern civilization is based on violence and slavery....
— Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky, Volume I, p. 241.

....primary reason for Man's creation on earth is not fulfilled. The primary reason is individual evolution. If the conditions for the individual evolution of an individual man are destroyed, then the experiment of Man on earth will prove a failure. And if Man tampers with himself, with his body, with his glands, and so on, as the ants appear to have done, then one of the conditions of evolution will be destroyed.... Man is created a self-developing organism and if the conditions for his self-development are destroyed, then Mankind, as an experiment, becomes useless.... Evolution is possible for a man: but it is not possible for Mankind....
— Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky, Volume I, p. 245.

     One difficulty in thinking in this way, in the above example, is due to the fact that people think that the masses do things. They do not realize that only individuals do anything. Cultures have been founded by individual men, never by the masses. Humanity, the masses, never do anything save that they destroy often enough what individual men have built. All progress in the sciences is the work of individual men, not of the masses. All art, architecture, music, is due to the work of individual men. The explanation is that a mass of people is on a lower level than a single individual and so, from this point of view, evolution is only possible for individuals and not for the masses.
— Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky, Volume I, pp. 245-246.

Thoughtful Humors

....Lovers' groans are so alike, and lovers' giggles. I had such horror then of these paltry perplexities that I always fell into the same error, that of seeking to clear them up. It took me a long time, my lifetime so to speak, to realize that the colour of an eye half seen, or the source of some distant sound, are closer to Giudecca in the hell of unknowing than the existence of God, or the origins of protoplasm, or the existence of self, and even less worthy than these to occupy the wise. It's a bit much, a lifetime, to achieve this consoling conclusion, it doesn't leave you much time to profit by it....
— Samuel Beckett, Four Novellas, First Love, p. 28.

    But no sooner had I begun to reel on than I was stopped by a second policeman, similar in all respects to the first, so that I wondered whether it was not the same one. He pointed out to me that the sidewalk was for everyone, as if it was quite obvious that I could not be assimilated to that category. Would you like me, I said, without thinking for a single moment of Heraclitus, to get down in the gutter? Get down wherever you want, he said, but leave some room for others. If you can't bloody well get about like everyone else, he said, you'd do better to stay at home. It was exactly my feeling. And that he should attribute to me a home was no small satisfaction. At that moment, a funeral passed, as sometimes happens. There was a great flurry of hats and at the same time a flutter of countless fingers. Personally if I were reduced to making the sign of the cross I would set my heart on doing it right, nose, navel, left nipple, right nipple. But the way they did it, slovenly and wild, he seemed crucified all of a heap, no dignity, his knees under his chin and his hands anyhow. The more fervent stopped dead and muttered. As for the policeman he stiffened to attention, closed his eyes and saluted. Through the windows of the cabs I caught a glimpse of the mourners conversing with animation, no doubt scenes from the life of their late dear brother in Christ, or sister. I seem to have heard that the hearse trappings are not the same in both cases, but I never could find out what the difference consists in. The horses were farting and shitting as if they were going to the fair. I saw no one kneeling.
— Samuel Beckett, Four Novellas, The Expelled, pp. 39-40.

     Yes, surprising though it may seem, I still had a little money at this time. The small sum my father had left me as a gift, with no restrictions, at his death, I still wonder if it wasn't stolen from me. Then I had none. And yet my life went on, and even in the way I wanted, up to a point. The great disadvantage of this condition, which might be defined as the absolute impossibility of purchase, is that it compels you to bestir yourself. It is rare, for example, when you are completely penniless, that you can have food brought to you from time to time in your retreat. You are therefore obliged to go out and bestir yourself, at least one day a week. You can hardly have a home address under these circumstances, it's inevitable....
— Samuel Beckett, Four Novellas, The Expelled, pp. 41-42.

....Till afternoon I held my face raised towards the southern sky, then towards the western till night. The bowl gave me a lot of trouble. I couldn't use my hat because of my skull. As for holding out my hand, that was quite out of the question. So I got a tin and hung it from a button of my greatcoat, what's the matter with me, of my coat, at pubis level. It did not hang plumb, it leaned respectfully towards the passer-by, he had only to drop his mite. But that obliged him to come up close to me, he was in danger of touching me. In the end I got a bigger tin, a kind of big tin box, and I placed it on the sidewalk at my feet. But people who give alms don't much care to toss them, there's something contemptuous about this gesture which is repugnant to sensitive natures. To say nothing of their having to aim. They are prepared to give, but not for their gift to go rolling under the passing feet or under the passing wheels, to be picked up perhaps by some undeserving person. So they give. There are those, to be sure, who stoop, but generally speaking people who give alms don't much care to stoop. What they like above all is to sight the wretch from afar, get ready their penny, drop it in their stride and hear the God bless you dying away in the distance....
— Samuel Beckett, Four Novellas, The End, pp. 86-87.

Under-Written

     In the same year also Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons, by divine inspiration began, on one and the same day, to read and to interpret ... [On the sacred solemnity of St. Martin] we were both of us sitting in the king's chamber, talking on all kinds of subjects, as usual, and it happened that I read to him a quotation out of a certain book. He heard it attentively with both his ears, and addressing me with a thoughtful mind, showing me at the same moment a book which he carried in his bosom, wherein the daily courses and psalms, and prayers which he had read in his youth, were written, and he commanded me to write the same quotation in that book. Hearing this, and perceiving his ingenuous benevolence, and devout desire of studying the words of divine wisdom, I gave, though in secret, boundless thanks to the Almighty God, who had implanted such a love of wisdom in the king's heart. But I could not find any empty space in that book wherein to write the quotation, for it was already full of various matters; wherefore I made a little delay, principally that I might stir up the bright intellect of the king to a higher acquaintance with the divine testimonies. Upon his urging me to make haste and write it quickly, I said to him, 'Are you willing that I should write the quotation on some leaf apart? For it is not certain whether we shall find one or more other such extracts which will please you; and if that should so happen, we shall be glad that we have kept them apart.' 'Your plan is good', said he, and I gladly made haste to get ready a sheet, in the beginning of which I wrote what he bade me; and on the same day, I wrote therein, as I had anticipated, no less than three other quotations which pleased him; and from that time we daily talked together, and found out other quotations which pleased him, so that the sheet became full, and deservedly so; according as it is written, 'The just man builds upon a moderate foundation, and by degrees passes to greater things.' Thus, like a most productive bee, he flew here and there[*] asking questions as he went, until he had eagerly and unceasingly collected many various flowers of divine Scriptures, with which he thickly stored the cells of his mind.
     Now when the first quotation was copied, he was eager at once to read, and to interpret in Saxon, and then to teach others; ... and he continued to learn the flowers collected by certain masters, and to reduce them into the form of one book, as he was then able, although mixed one with another, until it became almost as large as a psalter. This book he called his ENCHIRIDION or MANUAL, because he carefully kept it at hand day and night and found, as he told me, no small consolation therein.
[*I prefer "hither and thither"]
— A.D. 887, Asser began to teach King Alfred to translate from Latin.

When I saw a stage version of 'Pilgrim's Progress' announced for production, I shook my head, knowing that Bunyan is far too great a dramatist for our theatre which has never been enough resolute even in its lewdness and venality to win the respect and interest which positive, powerful wickedness always engages, much less the services of men of heroic conviction. Its greatest catch, Shakespeare, wrote for the theatre because, with extraordinary artistic powers, he understood nothing and believed nothing. Thirty-six big plays in five blank acts, and (as Mr. Ruskin, I think, once pointed out) not a single hero! Only one man in them all who believes in life, enjoys life, thinks life worth living, and has a sincere, unrhetorical tear dropped over his deathbed, and that man — Falstaff!
     All that you miss in Shakespeare you find in Bunyan, to whom the true heroic came quite obviously and naturally. The world was to him a more terrible place than it was to Shakespeare; but he saw through it a path at the end of which a man might look not only forward to the Celestial City, but back to his life and say: 'Tho' with great difficulty I am got hither, yet I do not repent me of all the trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.' The heart vibrates like a bell to such utterances as this: to turn from it to 'Out, out, brief candle', and 'The rest is silence', and 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on', and 'our little life is rounded with a sleep' is to turn from life, strength, resolution, morning air and eternal youth to the terrors of a drunken nightmare.
     Let us descend now to the lower ground where  Shakespeare is not disabled by this inferiority in energy and elevation of spirit. Take one of his big fighting scenes, and compare its blank verse, in point of mere rhetorical strenuousness, with Bunyon's prose. Macbeth's famous cue for the fight with Macduff runs thus:
                     Yet will I try the last: before my body
                     I throw my warlike shield. Lay on Macduff,
                     And damned be he that first cries, 'Hold, enough!'
Turn from this jingle, dramatically right in feeling, but silly and resourceless in thought and expression, to Apolloyon's cue for the fight in the Valley of Humiliation: 'I am void of fear in this matter. Prepare thyself to die; for I swear by my infernal den thou shalt go no farther: here will I spill thy soul.' This is the same thing done masterly. Apart from its superior grandeur, force, and appropriateness, it is better clap-trap and infinitely better word-music.
— George Bernard Shaw, Dramatic Opinions and Essays.

....Mine I composed long since and am still pleased with it, totally pleased. My other writings are no sooner dry than they revolt me, but my epitaph still meets with my approval. There is little chance unfortunately of its ever being reared above the skull that conceived it, unless the State takes up the matter. But to be unearthed I must first be found, and I greatly fear those gentleman will have as much trouble finding me dead as alive. So I hasten to record it here and now, while there is yet time:

          Hereunder lies the above who up below
          So hourly died that he lived on till now.

— Samuel Beckett, Four Novellas, First Love, p. 10.

Written Advice

     Certainly the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things man has devised. Odin's Runes were the first form of the work of a Hero: Books, written words, are still miraculous Runes, the latest form! In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream. Mighty fleets and armies, harbors and arsenals, vast cities, high-domed, many-engined, — they are precious, great; but what do they become? Agamemnon, the many Agamemnons, Pericleses, and their Greece; all is gone now to some ruined fragments, dumb mournful wrecks and blocks: but the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives; can be called up again into life. No magic Rune is stranger than a Book. All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.
— Thomas Carlyle, from On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.

     I stopped my horse lately, where a great number of people were collected at a Vendue of Merchant's goods. The hour of sale not being come, they were conversing on the badness of the Times: and one of the company called to a clean old man, with white locks, 'Pray, Father ABRAHAM! what do you think of the Times? Won't these heavy taxes quite ruin the country? How shall we ever be able to pay them? What would you advise us to.'
     Father ABRAHAM stood up, and replied, 'If you would have my advice; I will give it you, in short; for a word to the wise is enough, and many words won't fill a bushel, as Poor RICHARD says.'
     They all joined, desiring him to speak his mind; and gathering round him, he proceeded as follows:
     'Friends' says he, 'and neighbours! The taxes are indeed heavy; and if those laid on by the government were the only ones we had to pay, we might the more easily discharge them: but we have many others, and much more grievous to some of us. We are taxed twice as much by our IDLENESS, three times as much by our PRIDE, and four times as much as much by our FOLLY: and from these taxes, the Commissioners cannot ease, or deliver us by allowing an abatement. However let us hearken to good advice, and something may be done for us. GOD helps them that help themselves, as Poor RICHARD says in his Almanac of 1733.
     It would be thought a hard Government that should tax its people One-tenth part of their TIME, to be employed in its service. But Idleness taxes many of us much more; if we reckon all that is spent in absolute sloth, or doing of nothing; with that which is spent in idle employments or amusements that amount to nothing. Sloth, by bringing on disease, absolutely shortens life. Sloth, like Rust, consumes faster than Labour wears; while the used key is always bright, as Poor RICHARD says. But dost thou love Life? Then do not squander time! for that's the stuff Life is made of, as Poor RICHARD says....
     If Time be of all things the most precious, Wasting of Time must be (as Poor RICHARD says) the greatest prodigality; since, as he elsewhere tells us, Lost time is never found again ... and He that riseth late, must trot all day; and shall scarce overtake his business at night. While Laziness travels so slowly, that Poverty soon overtakes him, as we read in Poor RICHARD; who adds, Drive thy business! Let not that drive thee! and
                          Early to bed, and early to rise,
                         Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
— From Poor Richard Improved, Richard Saunders.


     Dear Sir: — I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of 'Leaves of Grass'. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork, or too much lymph in temperament, were making our western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire.

     I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty.

     It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.

     I did not know until I last night saw the book advertised in a newspaper that I could trust the name as real and available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks and visiting New York to pay you my respects.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord, Massachusettes, 1855, letter to Walt Whitman "greeting" him.

Spirit Centered

The great question, you see, is whether or not this world is really real. If it is, then those who would search for some higher reality are mistaken. If this world is illusory — but a screen for some higher order of being — then there is more to reality than meets the eye. And we have settled for some illusory treasure and given up searching for the king.

Religion is a more or less organized way of remembering that every mystery points to a higher reality. A reality overarching and infusing this world with splendor. One pulsing through its veins. Unnoticed and unnamed. Of the Nameless One. A holiness so holy that it fills even our every day illusions with spiritual meaning.
— Lawrence Kushner, Honey From the Rock: Visions of Jewish Mystical Renewal, p. 34.

There are two directions of astonishment. Here is how it happens. Above there arches the immensity of the heavens. That if the thickness of this page of paper were to equal the 93 million miles between the earth and the sun then the distance to the edge of the known universe would be a stack of papers 31 million miles high.

And within there breaths the intricacy of the human body. That in each of the 100 trillion cells there are roughly 100,000 genes coiled on a molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid which if uncoiled and unwound would string back and forth between the earth and the sun over 400 times.

Man stands at the center of these two infinite directions. Above him space and time are literally astronomic. Within him space and time are infinitesimal. And now we understand that the universe is expanding. Growing ever larger. And that with each new microscope the inner biology grows ever smaller. In a word: we will never see the farthest thing above nor the smallest thing within. The greatness of the distance and the minuteness of the size will always increase simultaneously. It is almost as if we were driven to maintain this balance that always leaves us in the center.
— Lawrence Kushner, Ibid, p. 117.

     The Church had departed from the simple, direct, and inspiring story of how our Lord came upon earth clothed in visibility and dwelt as a man among men. For the marvelous reality, the clergy substituted fantasies that entangled them in metaphysical webs from which they could not extricate themselves. The beautiful truth of the Divine Humanity became distorted, dissociated, dissected beyond recognition, and our Lord Himself was lost in deadly dialectics. Swedenborg brought together the scattered and broken parts, gave them normal shape and meaning, and thus established a "new communion with God in Christ." Swedenborg was not a destroyer, but a divinely inspired interpreter. He was a prophet sent by God. His own message proclaims it more convincingly than any saying of his followers could. There is no escaping his virile personality. As we read his message, we are filled with recognition and delight. He did not make a new Bible, but he made the Bible all new! One who receives him gains a great spiritual possession.
     The first and last thought of Swedenborg throughout his writings is to show that in the Bible, rightly read and interpreted, is to be found the truest and noblest conception of God possible. Most human minds are so constituted that there is in them a secret chamber where theological subjects are stored, and its centre is the idea of God....
— Helen Keller, My Religion, pp. 71-72.

     I cannot imagine myself without religion. I could as easily fancy a living body without a heart. To one who is deaf and blind, the spiritual world offers no difficulty. Nearly everything in the natural world is as vague, as remote from my senses as spiritual things seem to the minds of most people. I plunge my hands deep into my Braille volumes containing Swedenborg's teachings, and withdraw them full of the secrets of the spiritual world. The inner, or "Mystic," sense, if you like, gives me vision of the unseen. My mystic world is lovely with trees and clouds and stars and eddying streams I have never "seen." I am often conscious of beautiful flowers and birds and laughing children where to my seeing associates there is nothing. They skeptically declare that I see "light that never was on sea or land." But I know that their mystic sense is dormant, and that is why there are so many barren places in their lives. They prefer "facts" to vision. They want a scientific demonstration and they can have it. Science with untiring patience traces man back to the ape, and rests content. It is out of this ape that God creates the seer, and science meets spirit as life meets death, and life and death are one.
— Helen Keller, Ibid., p. 157.

Spiritual Chi

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

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

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

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

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

Structured Thinking

     In his new book New Think, Edward de Bono talks about vertical and lateral thinking. Vertical thinking begins with a single concept and then proceeds with that concept until a solution is reached. Lateral thinking refers to thinking that generates alternative ways of seeing a problem before seeking a solution. At one point in his book, De Bono explains vertical and lateral thinking by refering to the digging of holes. He states:
     Logic is the tool that is used to dig holes deeper and bigger, to make them altogether better holes. But if the hole is in the wrong place, then no amount of improvement is going to put it in the right place. No matter how obvious this may seem to every digger, it is still easier to go on digging in the same place than to start all over again in a new place. Vertical thinking is digging the same hole deeper; lateral thinking is trying again elsewhere.
— James L. Adams, Conceptual Blockbusters: A Guide to Better Ideas, p. 34.

....In an essay, "The Three Domains of Creativity," Arthur Koestler, one of the more important writers who treat conceptualization, identifies these "domains" as artistic originality (which he calls the "ah!" reaction), scientific discovery (the "aha!" reaction), and comic inspiration (the "haha!" reaction). He defines creative acts as the combination of previously unrelated structures in such a way that you get more out of the emergent whole than you have put in. He explains comic inspiration, for example, as stemming from "the interaction of two mutually exclusive associative contexts." As in creative artistic and scientific acts, two ideas have to be brought together that are not ordinarily combined. This is one of the essentials of creative thinking.
— James L. Adams, Ibid., p. 57.

....I accept what seem to me architecture's inherent limitations, and attempt to concentrate on the difficult particulars within it rather than the easier abstractions about it "... because the arts belong (as the ancients said) to the practical and not the speculative intelligence, there is no surrogate for being on the job."9
9David Jones, Epoch and Artist, 1959, p. 12.
— Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,  p. 21.

     The city street façade can provide a type of juxtaposed contradiction that is essentially two-dimensional. Frank Furness' Clearing House, now demolished like many of his best works in Philadelphia, contained an array of violent pressures within a rigid frame. The half-segmental arch, blocked by the submerged tower which, in turn, bisects the façade into a near duality, and the violent adjacencies of rectangles, squares, lunettes, and diagonals of contrasting sizes, compose a building seemingly held up by the buildings next door: it is an almost insane short story of a castle on a city street. All these relationships of structure and pattern contradict the severer limitations associated with a façade, a street line, and contiguous row houses.
— Robert Venturi, Ibid., p. 61.

Proper Search

Jñana-yoga
The indispensibility of knowledge for a full spirituality — if not for each individual, at least for the tradition as a whole — is negatively demonstrated by those teachings and movements which generate unintelligible and ineffectual behavior. As Radhakrishnan, a highly intellectual exponent of Hinduism, has aptly remarked: "If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities." [Eastern Religions and Western Thought (1959), p. 80] As knowledge stripped of its experiential moorings deteriorates to scholasticism, spiritual experience devoid of an intellectual base can exhibit the coherence and lack of self-criticism characteristic of many current religious trends. Jñana-yoga, the discipline of knowledge leading to spiritual growth, calls for a philosophical analysis of experience, concepts, and assumptions. More significantly, however, jñana-yoga is the process by which knowledge itself is harnessed for the seeker's own spiritual realization. According to the ideal of jñana-yoga — as for example, in the Upanisads and the Gita, and generally throughout the Hindu tradition — knowledge is an instrument of spirituality. Specifically, the way of knowledge includes the following demands on the aspirant:
(a) ability to discern reality and truth from appearances
(b) receptivity to deeper sources of insight
(c) longing for freedom or liberation (moksa)
(d) freedom from ignoble motives (reputation; wealth)
(e) nonattachment to the fruits of one's search
(f) discipline for the achievement of physical and mental control
(g) meditation
— From "Indian Spirituality in the West: A Bibliographical Mapping," Robert A. McDermott, in Philosophy East and West (Journal), April 1974, p. 222.

Chaos, they contend, has become the century's third great revolution in the physical sciences. Like the first two revolutions, chaos cuts away at the tenets of Newton's physics. As one physicist put it: "Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability." Of the three, the revolution in chaos applies to the universe we see and touch, to objects at human scale.
— James Gleick, Chaos, p. 6.

Clouds are not spheres, Mandelbrot is fond of saying.Mountains are not cones. Lightning does not travel in a straight line. The new geometry mirrors a universe that is rough, not rounded, scabrous, not smooth. It is a geometry of the pitted, pocked, and broken up, the twisted, tangled, and intertwined. The understanding of nature's complexity awaited a suspicion that complexity was not just random, not just accident. It required a faith that the interesting feature of a lightning bolt's path, for example, was not its direction, but rather the distribution of zigs and zags. Mandelbrot's work made a claim about the world, and the claim was that such odd shapes carry meaning. the pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing.
— James Gleick, Ibid., p. 94.

     Somehow, after all, as the universe ebbs toward its final equilibrium in the featureless heat bath of maximum entropy it manages to create interesting structures. Thouughtful physicists concerned with the workings of thermodynamics realize how disturbing is the question of, as one put it, "how a purposeless flow of energy can wash life and consciousness into the world." Compounding the trouble is the slippery notion of entropy, reasonably well-defined for thermodynamic purposes in terms of heat and temperature, but devilishly hard to pin down as a measure of disorder. Physicists have trouble enough measuring the degree of order in water, forming crystalline structures in the transition to ice, energy bleeding away all the while. But thermodynamic entropy fails miserably as a measure of the changing degree of form and formlessness in the creation of amino acids, of microorganisms, of self-reproducing plants and animals, of complex information systems like the brain. Certainly these evolving islands of order must obey the Second Law. The important laws, the creative laws, lie elsewhere.
— James Gleick, Ibid., p. 308.

Self-Development

      I will now recapitulate my thesis. It has been argued that man differs radically in kind from other animals. As a transcendence in the evolutionary process there appeared an animal differing fundamentally from other animals because he had attained to propositional speech, abstract thought and self-consciousness, which are all signs that a being of transcendent novelty had appeared in the world — creatures existing not only in World 1 but realizing their existence in the world of self-awareness (World 2) and so having in the religious concept, souls. And simultaneously these human beings began utilizing their World 2 experiences to create very effectively another world, the third world of the objective spirit. This World 3 provides the means whereby man's creative efforts live on as a heritage for all future men, so building the magnificent cultures and civilizations recorded in human history. Do not the mystery and the wonder of this story of our origin and nature surpass the myths whereby man in the past has attempted to explain his origin and destiny?
— John C. Eccles, The Human Mystery, The Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburg, 1977-1978, p. 121.

     If you feel you must enlist the aid and advice of a recognized authority or specialist on a given subject, remember that an expert frequently avoids all the small errors as he sweeps on to the grand fallacy. A truly creative editor must become an expert on experts.
— M. Lincoln Shuster, quoted in Editors On Editing, XVIII, Gerald Gross (ed.), p. 36.

     Shame is the uncomfortable or painful feeling that we experience when we realize that a part of us is defective, bad, incomplete, rotten, phoney, inadequate or a failure. In contrast to guilt, where we feel bad doing something wrong, we feel shame from being something wrong or bad. Thus guilt seems to be correctable or forgiveable, whereas there seems to be no way out of shame.
     Our Child Within or True Self feels the shame and can express it, in a healthy way, to safe and supportive people. Our co-dependent or false self, on the other hand, pretends not to have the shame, and would never tell anyone about it.
     We all have shame. Shame is universal to being human. If we do not work through it and then let go of it, shame tends to accumulate and burden us more and more, until we even become its victim.
     In addition to feeling defective or inadequate, shame makes us believe that others can see through us, through our facade, into our defectiveness. Shame feels hopeless: that no matter what we do, we cannot correct it.... We feel isolated and lonely with our shame, as though we are the only one who has the feeling....
— Charles Whitfield, Healing the Child Within, pp. 44-45.

Some Possible Paths to Serenity

1. We are ignorant of our journey, we are limited (humility): we can study universal "laws," approximate them and surrender to our lack of ultimate knowledge. Given these limitations, sages over the centuries describe something like the following:
2. Higher Power is in each of us, and we are in Higher Power.
3. We can view our reality as a hierarchy of levels of awareness, consciousness of being.
4. We are going Home (we are Home, already and always). Home on this earth is being all levels of our awareness or consciousness in our own unique fashion.
5. There will be conflict going Home (melodrama, cosmic drama). This conflict or creative tension is useful to us in some way, probably as a way Home.
6. We have a choice. We can use our bodies, ego/minds, our relationships on this earth to reinforce our separation and our suffering. Or we can use them as vehicles for our Soul, Spirit or Higher Self to return Home and to celebrate that return.
7. Higher Power (Home) is Love (Love perhaps the most useful way we know Higher Power).
8. We can remove the blocks to realizing our Higher Power by experiencing (including living in the Now), remembering, forgiving and surrendering (these five realizations can be viewed as being ultimately the same). Regular spiritual practices help us with this realization.
9. Separation, suffering and evil are the absence of realizing Love, and are therefore ultimately illusions. They are also manifestations of our searching for Love, Wholeness, and Home.
10. We create our own story by our thoughts and actions. What we think and feel in our mind and heart, we will produce in our experience and our life. What we give, we get. As within, so without.
11. Life is a Process, Force or Flow that lives us. We do not live it. When we surrender to it, i.e., flow with its Process and take responsibility for our participation in it, we become co-creators. We can then become free of our suffering that comes with our attachment to resisting flowing with our Life.
12. Inner peace or serenity is knowing, practicing and being all the above. We ultimately discover that we are already and always Serenity and Home.

  Some sources: Perennial Philosophy (Huxley), Christ, Tao, Muktananda, A Course in Miracles, Fox, Wilber, Lazaris, Schaun, and many and always Serenity and Home.

— Charles Whitfield, Healing the Child Within, pp. 138-139.

Omnipresence

     A silence fell in the heavens. All the saints followed God's gaze and like him watched the shadow that hid half of Italy, and the hymns of the angels froze upon their lips, and the stars trembled, for they feared to have done some wrong, and waited humbly for God's angry word. But nothing of the kind happened. The heavens had opened in their whole breadth over Italy, so that Raphael was on his knees in Rome while the blessed Fra Angelica of Fiesole stood on a cloud and rejoiced over him. Many prayers were at that hour on their way from the earth. But God recognized only one thing: the strength of Michelangelo rose up to him like fragrance of vineyards. And he suffered it to fill his thoughts. He bent lower, found the striving man, looked beyond his shoulder at the hands that hovered listening about the stone, and started: Did the very stones have souls? Why was this man listening to the stones? And now the hands awoke and tore at the stone as at a grave, in which a faint, dying voice is flickering. 'Michelangelo,' cried God in dread, 'who is in that stone?' Michelangelo listened; his hands were trembling. Then he answered in a muffled voice: 'Thou, my God, who else? But I cannot reach Thee.' And then sensed that he was indeed in the stone, and he felt fearful and confined. The whole sky was but a stone, and he locked in its midst, hoping for the hands of Micheangelo to deliver him; and he heard them coming, though as yet afar.
     But the master was at work again. He thought continually: 'Thou art but a little block, and some one else might scarcely find one figure in thee. But I feel a shoulder here: it is that of Joseph of Arimathaea; and here Mary bends down: I sense the trembling of her hands that support Jesus, Our Lord, who has died on the cross. If in this little block of marble there is room for these three, why should I not sometime lift a whole sleeping race out of rock?....
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Stories of God, pp. 76-77.

     Sometimes I long for a convent cell, with the sublime wisdom of centuries set out on bookshelves all along the wall and a view across cornfields — there must be cornfields and they must wave in the breeze — and there I would immerse myself in the wisdom of the ages and in myself. Then I might perhaps find peace and clarity. But that would be no great feat. It is right here, in this very place, in the here and now that I must find them. But it is all so terrible difficult, and I feel so heavy-hearted.
— Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life - Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-43, p. 36.

     Yes, we carry everything within us, God and Heaven and Hell and Earth and Life and Death and all history. The externals are simply so many props; everything we need is within us. And we have to take everything that comes: the bad with the good, which does not mean we cannot devote our life to curing the bad. But we must know what motives inspire our struggle and we must begin with ourselves, every day anew.
— Etty Hillesum, Ibid, p. 162.

     Many would call me an unrealistic fool if they so much as suspected what I feel and think. And yet there exists in me all the  reality the day can bring. I must look up those sentences in Rathenaus' letter I copied out some time ago. That is what I shall miss later: here, I need only stretch out my hand to put my finger on so many words and passages. Out there, I shall simply have to carry everything inside me. One ought to be able to live without books, without anything. There will always be a small patch of sky above, and there will always be enough space to fold two hands in prayer.
— Etty Hillesum, Ibid, pp. 189-190.

....It has been amply demonstrated that attempting to use effort or will power to change beliefs or to cure bad habits has an adverse, rather than a beneficial effect. Emile Coué, the little French pharmacist who astonished the world around 1920 with the results he obtained with "the power of suggestion," insisted that effort was the one big reason most people failed to utilize their inner power. "Your suggestions (ideal goals) must be made without effort if they are to be effective," he said. Another famous Coué saying was his "Law of reversed Effort": "When the will and imagination are in conflict, the imagination invariably wins the day."
— Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics, pp. 54-55.

     Happiness is a mental habit, a mental attitude, and if it is not learned and practiced in the present it is never experienced. It cannot be made contingent upon solving some external problem. When one problem is solved another appears to take its place. Life is a series of problems. If you are to be happy at all, you must be happy — period! not happy "because of."
— Maxwell Maltz, Ibid., p. 90.

The Real Work

     This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making me happy.
     I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and, as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live.
     I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I've got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
— George Bernard Shaw, quoted in Susan Jeffers, Ph.D.,
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, p. 186.

....I have come to believe there are only two kinds of experiences in life: those that stem from our Higher Self and those that have something to teach us. We recognize the first as pure joy and the latter as struggle. But they are both perfect. Each time we confront some intense difficulty, we know there is something we haven't learned yet, and the Universe is now giving us the opportunity to learn. If we go through the experience with this in mind, all the "victim" is taken out of the situation, and we allow ourselves to say YES.

The challenge is to stay on the Path of the Higher Self .... don't be deceived into thinking that by changing the external, the internal will be changed. It works the other way around.
— Susan Jeffers, Ph.D., Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, p. 215.

On the road of desire, do not gladly dip your fingers
     into the pot just because it happens to be there.
Once you have stuck them in and tasted what is inside,
You will try to put them in ten thousands fathoms deep.
On the road of principle, do not step back even a
     little, hesitating over the difficulties.
Once you have stepprd back in retreat,
You will be separated from your goal by the
     ranges of a thousand mountains.
— Hung Ying-ming, The Roots of Wisdom - Saikontan,
Wm. Scott Wilson (tr.), Book I, #40.

Reading books but not seeing the wisdom and intelligence within
     This is being a slave to paper and print.
Being of high rank and not loving the people:
     This is a thief wearing ceremonial robes.
Lecturing on learned subjects but not giving proper
     respect to putting them in action:
     This is Zen of the mouth alone.
Performing great achievements but giving no thought
     to the seeds of virtue for the future:
     This is but flowers blooming and withering
     before the eyes.
— Hung Ying-ming, Ibid., #56.

The restive horse that has overturned the carriage
     Can, at last, be made to run properly.
The melting metal that leaps out of the mold
     Can, in the end, be returned to the cast.
But the man who lives only in peaceful amusement
     without rousing himself to action
Will, until the end of his life, make no progress at all.
Pai Sha* said, "There are many ailments involved
     in becoming a man, but none are sufficient
     to make him hide his face in shame."
     "I lament only the man who lives his
     life without any ailment at all."
This is truly a solid argument.
— Hung Ying-ming, Ibid, #77.
*Chen Pai Sha (1428-1499)

The peace that comes from peaceful surroundings is not true peace:
     Only in peace obtained in the midst of activity
Is found the true sphere of one's original nature.
The pleasure that comes from pleasureful surroundings
     is not true pleasure:
     Only with the pleasure obtained in the midst of suffering
Can one see the true movements of the mind.
Those things pleasant to the taste
     Are all poisons; they inflame the intestines and rot the bones.
If one will halve his portions of them, he should be
     without divine reproach.
— Hung Ying-ming, Ibid, #88.

Fortune beyond one's status,
Things entrusted to one for no reason:
If these are not snares set by the Creator of Things,
     They are traps laid by the world at large.
In such places, if one does not fix his eyes high,
     He will rarely fail to fall to their tricks.
— Hung Ying-ming, The Roots of Wisdom - Saikontan,
Wm. Scott Wilson (tr.), Book II, #127.

Hollow Cost?

     A guest: Jews are said to understand one another by a glance. What they say afterward is nothing but a passionate commentary on this glance.
— Edmund Jabés, The Book of Yukel/Return to the Book, Waldrop (tr.), p. 59.

     "We have little to say about many things. God had so much to say about so little. God fell silent in the Void. Man chatters on in the Fullness. But how will he make himself heard?"
— Edmund Jabés, Ibid., p. 157.

     "I only had eyes for the infinite. I tended to let the days pass by. They punished me."
— Edmund Jabés, Ibid., p. 165.

     "I walk behind the wind, and the stifled scream of words is only a bit of dust under my feet.
     Now the book is done. Three times the lesson of the book. Night is inside it forever.
     I started out wanting to forget, and the void mapped my route. Nothing more certain: you cannot turn green again, away from your roots.
     Dry branches of my felled trees. The forest counts on its excess of sap....
— Edmund Jabés, Ibid., p. 231.

    In every situation, for every person, there is a realm of freedom and a realm of constraint. One may live in either realm. One must recognize the irresistible forces, the iron fist, the stone wall — must know them for what they are in order not to fall into the sea like Icarus — but, knowing them, one may turn away and live in the realm of one's freedom. A farmer must know the fence which bounds his land but need not spend his life standing there, looking out, beating his fists on the rails; better he till his soil, think of what to grow, where to plant the fruit trees. However small the area of freedom, attention and devotion may expand it to occupy the whole of life.
— Allen Wheelis, How People Change, pp. 30-31.

     There are big balloons of blame in every corporation, drifting gently from person to person. The purpose of your memos is to keep these balloons aloft, to bat them gently on their way. This requires soft, meaningless phrases, such as "less than optimal." If you write a direct memo, a memo that uses sharp words such as "bad" to make an actual point, you could burst a balloon and wind up with blame all over your cubicle.
— Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top, p. 47.

....They decided to take a further, daring step. They would try sending a word from their dimension into ours.
     How carefully was that word chosen!
     The word that allows yes, the word that makes no possible.
     The word that puts the free in freedom and takes the obligation out of love.
     The word that throws a window open after the final door is closed.
     The word upon which all adventure, all exhilaration, all meaning, all honor depends.
     The word that fires evolution's motor of mud.
     The word that the cocoon whispers to the caterpillar.
     The word that molecules recite before bonding.
     The word that separates that which is dead from that which is living.
     The word no mirror can turn around.
     In the beginning was the word and the word was

                           CHOICE

— Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker, p. 190.

     In our society transformation has a bad name, having been associated with various neditation fads and instant success groups. But real transformation has nothing to do with gaining a better life in this world; deliverance does not involve trying to use Buddhist  chanting techniques to acquire a new Mercedes, nor is salvation a side effect of Fundamentalist healing services. Transformation for a Zen monk, a Moslem sufi, a Catholic, or a Jehova's Witness is the same: It is a matter of delivering one's self into the possession of God. Meister Eckhart puts it very well when he says, "We must become as clear glass through which God can shine." But this involves giving up the self," which feels just like dying.
— Whitley Strieber, Communion: A True Story, p. 225.