Inclusive Leveling Up

     Nor does the Vedantist, in expressing his reverence for Allah and Christ, mean quite what orthodox Mohammedans and Christians would like him to mean. Vedanta, as I have said already, offers a philosophical basis to all sects. It can do this precisely because it is fundamentally monistic; because it teaches that there is one Reality and nothing else. "Thou art That." The person is the Atman; the Atman is Brahman. This person in his ignorance, may think that he worships the Creator. Very well: let him think that. It is a necessary stage in spiritual progress. The ultimate truth cannot be apprehanded at once. The Atman must be personified at first, if it is to be loved and realized; otherwise it will remain a mere intellectual abstraction. The true monist never disdains dualism. But it is very hard for the rigid dualist ever to accept monism. St. Ignatius Loyola was dismayed when the vision of his beloved Jesus faded into impersonal, all-embracing Reality.
— Christopher Isherwood, "What Is Vedanta?", in The Wishing Tree, p. 38.

     There is no conflict between true religion and true science, but there is a great deal of bickering between religious dogmatists and scientific pedants. The dogmatist states his case, or rather presents his dogmatic ultimatum. The scientifically trained pedant reminds him, none too patiently, that his assertions cannot be verified by the microscope, the slide rule, or the laboratory experiment. Therefore, he concludes, quite rightly, the dogma is merely another hypothesis. And, he will probably add that hypotheses which are incapable of scientific proof do not interest him, anyway. At this point, a deadlock is reached, and the two men part in mutual annoyance.
— Christopher Isherwood, Ibid., "Hypothesis and Belief," p. 58.

     He opens the drawer of his desk and is confronted with some of the books he is reading at the moment — The Occult World, Life After Death, Atlantis and Lemuria, and many others. They may seem perhaps impractical and even naive, yet they have a strange flavour of truth, the promise of vistas beyond the arid deserts of materialism.
     He decides to set aside his writing for a time, to abandon his ordinary activities and seek some of the ancient cultures. So he embarks on a series of travels through Asia Minor, Greece and Egypt, where perhaps he will discover some real values; which in fact he did, and returned to Russia two years later to resume his writing with renewed impetus.
— J.H. Reyner, Ouspensky: The Unsung Genius, p. 12.

As Gurdjieff's ideas began to take shape in his mind he realised how completely they complemented his own earlier thinking. In many respects they involved a complete reversal of the conventional approach. Most important was the concept that the Universe was a living and evolving structure created by a Supreme or Absolute Intelligence in a succession of increasingly detailed stages of which the physical world is nearly the lowest. Each of these levels has its own intelligence and consciousness, again of descending order, the whole structure being continuously enlivened by energy devolving from the Absolute.
     As a corollary of this concept it is clear that the higher states of consciousness about which people are wont to speculate vaguely are not mere extensions of ordinary awareness but are manifestations of the superior intelligences in the already existing structure and hence, as Ouspensky himself had found in his experiments, are of an entirely different order.
     This cosmological hierarchy, however, was initially discussed only as a background to the more immediately practical aspect of the teaching, which was that man's usual so-called consciousness is an illusion. His behaviour is that of a machine which reacts entirely automatically to the stimulus of life events in accordance with 'programmes', or patterns of associations, which have been built up by education and experience. This the group was told to observe and verify for themselves, for it was an axiom of the system that nothing was to be believed without question. Only when one has established the truth of any statement for oneself can any real understanding develop.
     Finally, there was the clear distinction between the spiritual and temporal parts of a man (or woman). Each has its own reality but they are of a different order. The spiritual part, which is unmanifest, i.e. not evident to the physical senses, originates from a very high level in the Universe, but in the course of its development it has to adapt itself to progressively lower levels of existence until, in the condition which Gurdjieff called Essence, it inhabits a physical body.
— J.H. Reyner, "Meeting With Gurdjieff," in Ouspensky: The Unsung Genius, pp. 40-41.