Behind the Within

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

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

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

— Emily Dickinson, from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson (ed.), in Parabola, “Liberation,” Fall 1990, p. 51.


This is the amazing phenomenon of a myth, which is so important to recognize today, when we can’t avoid falling into the habit of explaining every step we make. Suddenly we encounter a quite different form, a form which speaks very powerfully, with very precise, immediately recognizable meaning; and that meaning is there, we receive it, we seem to understand it, yet when we try to dissect it, it slips between our fingers. This shock that comes from encountering a great myth acts upon us, in a sense, by opening the mind. Now, to be really open in an unexpected way, we need to reach the state of great emptiness that is so often referred to in different traditions — that moment when there is nothing but a complete void; and music exists, poems and sounds exist, so as to lead us straight to that extraordinary state of pure openness, of real freedom.
— Peter Brook, “The Sleeping Dragon,” in Parabola, Fall 1990, pp. 52-53.

Chronology of an Idea

1714 — Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, discoverer of integral and differential calculus, said that a metaphysical reality underlies and generates the material universe. Space-time, mass and motion of physics and transfer of energies are intellectual constructs. . . . 1902 — William James proposed that the brain normally filters out a larger reality. . . . 1929 — Alfred Whitehead, mathematician and philosopher, described nature as a great expanding nexus of occurrences not terminating in sense perception. Dualisms such as mind/matter are false; reality is inclusive and interlocking. . . . and Karl Lashley published his great body of research demonstrating that specific memory is not to be found in any particular site in the brain but is distributed throughout. . . . 1947 — Dennis Gabor employed Liebniz’s calculus to describe a potential three-dimensional photography: holography. . . . 1965 — Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnicks announced their successful construction of holograms with the newly invented laser beam. . . . 1971 — Physicist David Bohm, who had worked with Lashley as a neurosurgeon, proposed that the hologram was a powerful model for brain processes. . . . 1977 — Pribram speculated on the unifying metaphysical implications of the synthesis.

— Brain-Mind Bulletin, 2(16): 4 July 1977, in Chrysalis, “Re-Visioning,” Volume II, Issue 3, Autumn 1987, p. iv (Preface).

Narrow, Deep Way

....He [ODB] left us two lessons.
     The first I never want anyone to forget: When you enter the path of wisdom, of knowledge, of life — don’t turn off the road.
    Jesus said, “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it.” The wide road — that’s all around you, it’s easy to take, and many people will drag you down it. But find that narrow road, stay on it. For ODB to say in his last moment “I don’t understand” — that makes me say I don’t ever want to feel that, I want to always understand. I always want to have faith. But faith can leave you if you don’t practice it, don’t exercise it — if you let it die inside you. Practice your faith.
     The second lesson ODB left us with is just as important. It’s about freedom and your cipher — your circle, your family, the people you love.
     Death has many causes — violence, scheming, abuse — but a major one we overlook is neglect. We say, “Oh, he’s a grown man. He can drink what he wants to drink, smoke what he wants, say what he wants to say.” But Martin Luther King said that freedom has its own laws; it’s not without its own principles.
— The RZA, The Tao of Wu, p. 168.

     It’s like they said in the Civil Rights movement, if one man is lynching a man in front of twenty men — all twenty men are guilty. They’re allowing it. They’re guilty of a negligence of righteousness. You have to care for others. There’s always someone among you who has to teach those that don’t — even if just by example.
     There’s a statement on a piece of paper that I’d give my girl or my students, a piece of paper I’ve had since I was fourteen years old. It’s titled “Maturity,” which it defines as “the ability to change what must be changed, to accept what can’t be changed, and to know the difference between the two.” That same idea comes up in different sources. It’s even in a Mother Goose rhyme: “For every ailment under the sun,/ There is a remedy, or there is none;/ If there be one, try to find it:/ If there be none, never mind it.”
     It’s also in something called the Serenity Prayer, ascribed to St. Francis of Assissi*: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom” — the wise-dome — “to know the difference.” Again, knowledge means knowing, but wisdom means acting — acting on what you know, seeing the person who’s drowning right the fuck in front of you, and stepping in.
— The RZA, The Tao of Wu, pp. 170-171.
* The Serenity Prayer was actually written by Reinhold Niebuhr in 1943 (JRH).

     You don’t have to die to go to Heaven. Heaven is on earth. If you’re fucked up, shit is floating by you, if poverty and self-hatred are breaking you down — you’re in Hell. Set yourself in Heaven at once. When Jesus said the Temple of God is in you, he wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He said, “Thy Kingdom come on Earth as it is in Heaven.” Many people misinterpret that. The true meaning of that prayer is the same as the Buddhists’ idea of Zen, of finding Nirvana and enlightenment right now. The key is true consciousness, in the present, in this moment, right now, where you’re at. Don’t wait for it. Set yourself in Heaven at once.
     Strive for the super-consciousness that comes at the end of life — strive through meditation, through love, through building, through creation. Ignore the forces of darkness, separation, and death. Tune out the voices that don’t want you to grow, to change, to resurrect yourself. Ignore forces pulling you back into the past.
— The RZA, The Tao of Wu, p. 198.

Thought Takes Flight

“Shapeless thoughts from Swedenborg”

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

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

To Swedenborg, the movement and beauty of birds represents human intellect as it seeks to be led and taught by the Divine.
— Ray Silverman, “Welcome, O Life!”, in Chrysalis, Volume VIII, Issue 2, “Work,” Summer 1993.


     I know that Ghostface, Dirty, and GZA all understood the deeper implication these movies had for our lives, and I know everyone in the Clan does now. From Thirty-sixth Chamber you get discipline and struggle. From Shaolin and Wu-Tang you get the warrior technique — plus the idea bad guys are sometimes the illest. Then, from Eight-Diagram Pole Fighter, you get the brotherhood, the soul. You get the idea that, This guy right here? He’s stronger than me. Maybe he can take it a little further than I can. Let me throw my power behind him so we all rise up.
     In a way, the group we’d end up forming had to be called the Wu-Tang Clan. The name says that we’re Wu-Tang warriors, we’re from Shaolin, and we’re a Clan, which means family. That last part’s just as crucial because it’s about a connection to something bigger than yourself, which is where the greatest strength always comes from.
     That last bit of wisdom started to take hold of me later, when I began studying with Sifu Yan Ming, a thirty-fourth generation Shaolin monk who defected from China in ’92 and came to open a Shaolin temple in New York. He was the abbot of his school, I was the abbot of mine — he felt like a peer. But I also wanted to learn from him. “Sifu” can translate as “master,” and that’s a tough word in the black community, but I realized that sometimes you have to submit to someone to learn. So I did.
     With Sifu I learned many Shaolin techniques, but my favorite is probably the Five Elements, maybe because I saw The Five Deadly Venoms at a young age. This technique breaks nature down into five basic forces: earth, water, metal, wood, and fire — which are also represented by the kung-fu styles snake, crane, dragon, leopard, and tiger. Most martial arts teach you to be fluid as water, but earth absorbs water — so you counter water techniques with earth techniques, which absorb blows. Then if someone comes at you with earth techniques, you counter with wood styles, which drive forward. Then you counter wood with metal styles, which chop like an axe, and metal with fire styles, which are more explosive, and finally, you fight fire with water.
     These principles are both external and internal. Internally, it applies to your five major organs. Earth is the spleen, metal is the lungs, water is the kidneys, wood is the liver, fire is the heart.
— The RZA, The Tao of Wu, pp. 58-59.

Believe Deep

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

     It holds me still. What mind — child’s or adult’s — what consciousness can bear to be known, beyond telling, the eyes had plumbed the child’s heart, the adult’s mind, as no human face or glance would or could.
     Proposing that the religious essence lies in the encounter with “the holy,” Rudolph Otto sees the contact as essentially dual, instilling two attitudes at once within the participant. One he calls the feeling of awe, of dread, the mysterium tremendum, the energy that makes the self quiver and shake; the other he terms an attitude of attention, of fascination and interest, the mysterium fascinans, the energy that pulls the self on, and in, despite the terror, the dread, ever closer to the source.
      Who can bear to be seen, totally and completely known? Who does not seek just such knowledge, such encounter and union? The little self withdraws in the face of such a knowing, shrinking and cowering, as the deep self, the larger self, draws near, recognizing in the presence of the threat of dissolution, and shattering, the source and origin of its deep life and creativity.
     I write in a house that sits alone in a stand of holly, live oak, bay, and southern pine that wheeze and rush and sway with the storms that pound the coast from the North Atlantic. Tonight the wind is still, it is midsummer, and the moon hangs in its waning, two days past full. Yet even now, as this pencil tip scratches its stub point across the draft of this essay, there is in the silence of my breath, and these words, a force and mystery whose music and depth are one with that great, underground spring, a source beyond knowing or telling, beyond any accounting.
     The Blue Hole feeds from and toward as source that is as nameless as it is endless. So, for the child, the story began. The child did not know the way then, no more than the adult does now. May it continue.
— Steven Lautermilch, “The Blue Hole of Castalia,” in Chrysalis, Volume IX, Issue 1, p. 48.

Say What?

     Our reality evolves because every once in a while we find that we need to edit part of the program that describes reality. We may find that this piece of the program, based on a certain model, is refuted (the underlying model is found to be inaccurate), and hence the program needs to be updated. Refuting a model and changing a part of the program is, as we saw, crucial to changing reality itself because refutations carry much more information than simply confirming a model.
     These refutations are manifested as ‘no-go’ principles. Physics is littered with them. The Second Law of thermodynamics, which we saw was one of the most general laws of physics, is phrased to prohibit any transfer of heat from a cold to a hot body without any other effect. So, the Second Law would say that while we do not stipulate what physical processes can do, we certainly do know what they cannot do. Whilst we know the ‘known knowns’ and ‘known unknowns’ we do not know the ‘unknown unknowns’. And this is very powerful, because it is extremely general. The same is true for the theory of relativity, as relativity tells us that you cannot travel faster than the speed of light.
     When it comes to quantum mechanics, this ‘no-go’ way of speaking stretches our imagination to its limits. When we said that quantum mechanically an object can exist in two different places at once, this state is very difficult to understand using our everyday intuition. In fact, if we use the negative way, we are forced to acknowledge that (in some sense) it is not true that the object is in two places at once’. So the statements that ‘an object is in two places at once’ as well as its opposite ‘an object is not in two places at once’ are both untrue. How can that be? It seems logically impossible that a statement and its negation are both incorrect. While to some this may be a contradiction, to Bohr this pointed to a deeper wisdom. He is reported to have said: ‘A shallow truth is a statement whose opposite is false; a deep truth is a statement whose opposite is also a deep truth’.
— Vlatko Vedral, Decoding Reality, pp. 192-193.

….What we can say, following the logic presented in this book, is that outside of our reality there is no additional description of the Universe that we can understand, there is just emptiness. This means that there is no scope for the ultimate law or supernatural being — given that both of these would exist outside of our reality and in darkness. Within our reality everything exists through an interconnected web of relationships and the building blocks of this web are bits of information. We process, synthesize, and observe this information in order to construct the reality around us. As information spontaneously emerges from the emptiness we take this into account to update our view of reality. The laws of Nature are information about information and outside of it there is just darkness. This is the gateway to understanding reality.
     And I finish with a quote from the Tao Te Ching, which some 2500 years earlier, seems to have beaten me to the punch-line:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.
The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one sees the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ in name; this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gate to all mystery.

— Vlatko Vedral, Ibid., p. 218.

Moving Still

The nature of sacred places is comparable to the nature of the divine in that nothing is unrelated to them. Henry Miller wrote that “our destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.” In this regard, acknowledging the bountiful role of story, ritual, and myth in the sanctification of place, consider, additionally, the following approaches to hallowed ground for a wider interpretation and understanding of the holistic signification of sacred landscape.

• Sacred places as perceptions of reality
• Sacred places as not merely locations but events where all time is eternal time
• Sacred places as sites for re-memberment
• Sacred places as renewed crucibles of consciousness
• Sacred places as encyclopedias of self-knowledge
• Sacred places as time capsules from ourselves to ourselves
• Sacred places as portals to ascent
• Sacred places as geography of the imagination
• Sacred places as centers of reconciliation
• Sacred places as realms of recollection
— T. C. McLuhan, Cathedrals of the Spirit, “Introduction,” p. 8.

The Way of Correspondence

     Conscious, interactive landscapes were daily events in the lives of our ancestors. Traditional cultures the world over recognize this reality. The megalith builders of Stonehenge, Avebury, the Great Pyramid, Chaco Canyon, Macho Picchu, Teotihuacan, and Palenque constructed their sanctuaries according to the sacred principles of ancient astronomy and geometry based on the system of correspondence, the core of which was Nature. “The most ancient people,” wrote the Swedish engineer, scientist, and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, “were celestial men [who] thought from correspondence itself, as the angels do.” Swedenborg defines correspondence as follows: “The whole natural world corresponds to the spiritual world, and not merely the natural world in general, but also every particular of it; and as a consequence every thing in the natural world that springs from the spiritual world is called a correspondence.” Swedenborg’s thinking is congruent with Aboriginal wisdom and Islamic philosophy relating to the world of correlation. For instance, the Gagudju of Arnhem Land in northern Australia know that the maturing of the fiber on the pandanus tree is irrefutable proof of sharks in nearby waters giving birth to their young. The eleventh-century visionary Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazzali has written that “the visible world was made to correspond to the world invisible and there is nothing in this world but is a symbol of something in that world.”
     The megalith builders understood that structures they were building were astrophysical sites, points of contact with the greater universes. They are time capsules containing “star mathematics.” The whole thing is very much . . . a beautiful and holy vision,” wrote Thomas Merton of his pilgrimage to Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka where the great stone Buddhas stand and recline. When the Trappist monk felt strangely inarticulate about his experience of this divine place, an Indian colleague advised Merton: “Those who carved those statues were not ordinary men.”
     The power inhering in these ancient monuments was real. The ancient builders were spiritual engineers who knew the way of the heavens and the principles of perennial truths. That sacred knowledge was a portal to a profound realization of the ineradicable connectedness of humankind with Earth, with its own divine essence and the cosmic beyond.
— T. C. McLuhan, Cathedrals of the Spirit, “Introduction,” pp. 14-15.

Heavenly Logic

3.1.1 A Summary of Gödel’s Argument
     Science shows that order pervades the world. This order provides some degree of evidence for the belief that the world has meaning. Granted that the world has meaning, there must be an afterlife. This follows because given that human beings in this world realize only a very small part of their potentialities, these potentialities would be a meaningless waste if there were no afterlife.
     Moreover, science supports the belief that this world of ours had a beginning and will have an end, thereby opening up the possibility of there being another world. On the other hand, we can, through learning attain better lives, and we learn principally through making mistakes. This is how we are. As we grow older, we get better at learning; yet before we can realize a significant portion of our possibilities, death comes. Therefore, since there ought not be such meaningless waste, we must envision the greater part of learning as occurring in the next world.
     Gödel rejects the idea put forth by his mother, that intellect is not the appropriate faculty for studying this issue. (By the way, this idea of his mother’s was widely shared and endorsed for instance, by Wittgenstein.) Gödel compares the status of his own view with that of atomic theory at the time of Democritus, when it was introduced “on purely philosophical grounds.” Gödel suggests that his belief in an afterlife may prevail in the future, just as the atomic theory prevails today. He admits that we are a long way from justifying this view scientifically, but it “is entirely consistent with all known facts.”
     To perceive this consistency, Gödel says, was what Liebnitz attempted to do 250 years ago, and what he also is trying to do in his letters. The underlying worldview is that the world and everything in it has meaning or reasons; this view is analogous to the “principle that everything has a cause, which is at the basis of the whole of science.”
— Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy, p. 105.

“[By the Platonistic view I mean the view that] mathematics describes a nonsensual reality, which exists independently both of the acts and the dispositions of the human mind and is only perceived and probably perceived very incompletely, by the human mind.”
— Gödel, 1995, Coll. Wks. 3.

Mathematical objects and facts (or at least something in them) exist objectively and independently of our mental acts and decisions.
— Gödel, original ms.

— Kurt Gödel, in A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy, Hao Wang, p. 211.


     At some stage I asked Gödel to give me a systematic exposition of his philosophy, and he replied that he had not developed it far enough to be able to expound it systematically, although he was sufficiently clear about it to apply it in commenting on the philosophical views of others. As I said before, this was undoubtedly why he chose to discuss philosophy by commenting on what I had written — and on the ideas of other relevant philosophers such as Kant, Husserl, and the (logical) positivists.
     In November of 1972 Gödel used the occasion of discussing Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” (in Lauer 1965) to give what appears to be a summary of the pillars of his own philosophical outlook: that is, (A) to recognize that we have only probable knowledge; but to decline skepticism; (B) monadology; (C) to appreciate the universality of observations; (D) to strive for a sudden illumination; and (E) to achieve explicitness by applying the axiomatic method.
     The fundamental ideas seem to be these: By observation we can discover the primitive concepts of metaphysics and the axioms governing these concepts. By the axiomatic method, we can arrive at an exact theory of metaphysics, which for Gödel is best seen as a kind of monadology. In order to pursue this ideal effectively, we must realize that we are capable of only probable knowledge. We should learn to select and concemtrate on what is fundamental and essential. Therefore, in order to secure a governing focus to guide our continuous attention, we should strive for a sudden illumination.
— Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy, p. 290.

It Could Be!

DEFINITION: Pronoia is the antidote for paranoia. It’s the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It’s a mode of training your senses and intellect so you’re able to perceive the fact that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.
— Rob Brezsny, Pronoia, from “The Experiment,” p. 7.

But I had remained forever coy, never playing with pronoia to make it more esthetically appealing to myself. I’d written nothing beyond the same one-sentence formulations that my predecessors had been content to with. Questions like, “What does pronoia have to say to someone who has just been widowed or been in a car crash?” or “It I believe in pronoia, will I get my dream job and find my perfect lover this week?” had never won my attention; let alone the subtler inquiries, like, “What would psychology based on pronoia look like?” or “Does pronoia require a belief in God?”
     There at Burning Man, the Goddess of the sun finally thunderstruck me, forcing me to escape my lazy rut. I realized with a burst of rebellious joy that there was no reason I had to be loyal to the meaning of pronoia as promulgated by its originators. Pronoia didn’t belong to them or anyone. I could use it any way I wanted. I could stretch it and bend it to fit my extravagant needs.
     My benefactor, the sun, slowly dipped beneath the horizon. The sky’s zenith had turned from purple to indigo. I sat down on the grey playa, facing the rising moon, and wrote for a long time on my baby wipes. The Beauty and Truth Laboratory had been born. The last line I wrote before trekking back to my camp to find my co-conspirators was a quote from the mathematician Ralph Abraham: “Heart physiologists find more chaos in the healthy heart than in the sick heart.”
— Rob Brezsny, Pronoia, p. 21.

We’re searching for answers so we can destroy them and dream up better questions.
— Rob Brezsny, Pronoia, p. 25.

Sacred Advertisement

Here’s a message from our spiritual patron Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in your reading have been like a blast of triumph out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.” (The Portable Emerson, Carl Bode, editor)
— Rob Brezsny, Pronoia, p. 52.

Know what you want and all the universe conspires to help you achieve it.”
— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist, quoted in Brezsny’s Pronoia, p. 87.

The soul should stand ajar
That if the heaven inquire,
He will not be obliged to wait,
Or shy of troubling her.
— Emily Dickinson, Poem 1055, Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, quoted in Brezsny’s Pronoia, p. 87.

Humankind was put on earth to keep the heavens aloft. When we fail, creation remains unfinished.
— Rabbi Menachem Mendel (Kotzker Rebbe), quoted in Brezsny’s Pronoia, p. 87.

The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
— Bertrand Russell, quoted in Brezsny’s Pronoia, p. 87.

Love the earth and the sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and the crazy, devote your income and labors to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency.
— Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, quoted in Brezsny’s Pronoia, p. 87.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
— Friedrich Nietzshe, quoted in Brezsny’s Pronoia, p. 87.

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.
— Lao Tzu, quoted in Brezsny’s Pronoia, p. 87.

Rudolf Steiner believed that evil was comprised of two forces that were opposed to each other in many ways, though with a tendency to form an alliance. One force, associated with Lucifer, represents grandiosity, arrogance, and self-indulgence. The other, associated with Ahriman, is manipulative, acquisitive, and ultimately sterile. We owe art to Lucifer and technology to Ahriman. They have both played a necessary and constructive role at different stages of the evolution of consciousness, enabling human beings to find a path of development towards love, wisdom, and freedom. Thus, for Steiner, “the task of evil is to promote the ascent of man.” Because there are two forces of evil, not just one, good is not seen as being opposed to evil. The forces of good, associated with Christ, balance, redeem, and heal the two evil forces.
— Francis N. Watts, “The Spiritual Psychology of Rudolf Steiner,” an essay in Beyond Therapy: The Impact of Eastern Religion on Psychological Theory and Practice, G. Claxton, editor, quoted in Brezsny’s Pronoia, p. 126.

Ever since I learned to see three sides to every story, I’m finding much better stories.
— Rob Brezsny, Pronoia, p. 257.

Change to Real

…A man or a woman who has never doubted himself or herself but who is always convinced of being right from his or her acquired psychology — i.e. from what they have been taught — is not suitable for this Work. Sooner or later such people will come up against the possibility of realizing that they cannot take themselves for granted as they have done hitherto but must alter their whole way of taking things, their whole way of judging things. Now if they cannot stand this, if, in short, they are completely fixed in their own acquired psychology, remember that nothing can be done with such people except to avoid any frontal attack on them.
— Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff & Ouspensky, Volume III, p. 796.

On Putting Feeling of “I” into the Work

We spoke recently about the Driver mounting the box of the Carriage. It has often been said in the Work that unless a man believes in Greater Mind it is impossible to do the Work. The Work teaches that there is a Conscious Circle of Humanity. The Conscious Circle of Humanity always through the ages has tried to awaken the Mechanical Circle of Humanity. But it cannot do this by compulsion. You may remember the idea of Man, one of the great sign-posts in the Work. The Work says that Man is created a self-developing organism, but to develop he must believe in Greater Mind. As you have probably already noticed, Nature, the external world, does not tell you anything. It is neutral. You can come to one conclusion or another about Nature. You can say God exists or you can equally well say that God does not exist. Why is there not clear evidence of Greater Mind? It was once said that suppose God were floating overhead on a cloud it would destroy the whole idea of God, who is invisible, and a spirit that only Truth finds in us. People would have to believe in God. People would be compelled by the evidence of their outer senses to acknowledge the existence of the higher. But since Man is created a self-developing organism, this would destroy his meaning. In other words, we have to come to our own conclusions through our own individual thinking. A man can only develop in the esoteric sense through his own individual understanding by work on his knowledge and Being. Otherwise he could not be self-developing….
— Maurice Nicoll, Ibid., p. 837.

Now are you all fully aware that although you live in visible bodies seen clearly and signal to each other as best you can, and usually very clumsily, you really live in your thoughts, feelings, moods, desires, ambitions, and so on, which are invisible? So you are really invisible, enclosed in a visible body. Do you see this yet? You may be heartbroken, as the saying is, and yet appear visibly cheerful. Why is it that people cannot take in the idea that they themselves live in their invisible side, known only to them through their own consciousness? So look at this vision: here we are visible to one another as physical bodies but almost totally invisible to one another in any real sense. So, being really invisible, you are therefore all alone — not lonely — but alone. This is one thing we have to grasp from height to depth of all the meaning it contains. It is the only thing that saves us from continual self-pity. It is no-one’s fault that you are not understood — for you are invisible and no-one can know you. Only you can know yourself. So the Work says: “Begin with trying to understand yourself.” Yes — a very big task. But it shifts effort to the right place. However, imagination steps in here to keep you fast asleep. It says: “Of course I know myself — of course I understand myself.” The answer is: “You do not and as long as you are under this illusion nothing will change for you. Everything will remain the same. You will go through the same troubles, the same unhappiness, and the same tragedies. There is only one way to change all that and that is to change yourself, change your own being and life will change. Try to change life and everything will be the same, even if you go to the uttermost parts of the Earth.”
     Now here we have one of the positive ideas of the work — namely, “To change things, to change his life, a man must first change himself. And in order to change himself he must find a teaching that will tell him how to do so. He must be willing to be taught new knowledge, new truth, and to begin to think in a new way. If he continues to think from the knowledge he has acquired, he will continue to think in the old way and then nothing will change. Only thinking in a new way can change a man.”
— Maurice Nicoll, Ibid., pp. 1114-1115.

You will understand by now that as long as the Personality, formed in us by our contact with manifest life, is active, then the inborn, real part of us, called Essence, cannot grow. A man, a woman, living only by the acquired side in themselves, the Personality, the social or business or professional side, cannot possibly have peace of mind, internal happiness, or a real centre of gravity. Why? Because the acquired personality, which controls them because it is active, is not really themselves, but outside themselves, and depends on how others behave to them in life. For this reason they must seek endless outer changes, excitements, varieties, and praise, congratulations, and so on, to keep up the fiction of themselves that they can take as themselves and that depends on outer life. Fictional Personality, for instance, marries Fictional Personality, and nothing is real, but all is a kind of pretence concealing so much tiredness. Now if you are for a moment conscious in Essence, everything is, as Gurdjieff said, richer, more vivid, more real. But no one can get back to Essence artificially. People try to do so by drugs, excitement, and so on, but this is not real. One has to pay beforehand to reach Essence aright. Relatively speaking, everything belonging to Essence is real and everything belonging to Personality is unreal. I say, on purpose, relatively real and unreal. We understand that Personality must be formed in us before Essence can grow beyond the stage it reaches through its own power of growth. And Essence can then grow at the expense of Dr. Nicoll or in your case at the expense of this fine man, this superior woman….
— Maurice Nicoll, Ibid., p. 1197.

Come to Think of It

Mottoes of Ancient Greece:

Know Thyself

Seize Occasion

Industry is All

The Mean is Best

Look to the End of Life

The Most of Men are Evil

Haste, If Thou Would’st Fail

— Alfred Armand Montapert, The Supreme Philosophy of Man: The Laws of Life, taken from a graphic on p. 112.

The Law of Correct Use of Man

      The most important thing to learn in life, is how to live. There is NOTHING men are so anxious to keep as their life . . . and NOTHING they give so little attention to. Happiness and success in life do not depend on our circumstances, but upon ourselves. More men have ruined themselves than have ever been destroyed by others. Of all the ruins, the ruin of man is the saddest, and “a man’s worst enemy,” as Seneca said, “is the one in the breast.”

     Some men have a purpose in life, and some have none. Our first objective should be to make as much out of ourselves as can be made out of the stuff that is in us. “The aim of every man,” said Humboldt, “shall be to secure the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole.” We must not, however, attempt this merely with a selfish objective, or we are foredoomed to failure. For as Bacon said, “No man’s private fortune can be an end in any way worthy of his existence.” Some of the best and greatest minds — Plato, Aristotle, St. Paul, Buddha — would never have been content to perfect themselves merely for themselves. We are to make the best of ourselves FOR THE SAKE OF OTHERS.

— Alfred Armand Montapert, Ibid., from “Segment 19,” p. 113.

The Law of Adversity

      There is a law of man’s nature to the effect that the more opposition a person faces the better his chances are of getting ahead. He that wrestles with us strengthens our muscles, and sharpens our skill. The essence of LIFE is struggle. Strength comes from struggle, weakness from ease.

     The greatest men in history learned to go against the current by being thrown into the maelstrom, where they had to battle for their life or drown. Only the school of hard knocks graduates men cum laude for the business of living. So runs the story through the lives of most of the world’s successful men and women.

     O. W. Holmes wrote, “If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn’t pass it around. Wouldn’t be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don’t say embrace trouble. That’s as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you’ll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.”

— Alfred Armand Montapert, Ibid., from “Segment 22,” p. 130.

The Law of Aging

     Each year, we should be more joyful than ever before, because we have fewer years ahead in which to be joyful. AS WE GROW OLDER, IT IS IMPORTANT TO US THAT EVERY HOUR SHALL BE AS RICH WITH VALUE AND BEAUTY AS POSSIBLE. We cannot afford to allow one minute to go by that does not bring wisdom, love, and beauty to our lives. Some lives, like evening primroses, blossom most beautifully in the evening of life.

     When the great finals come, each one will be asked five questions. First: What did you accomplish in the world with the power God gave you? Second: How did you help your neighbor and what did you do for those in need? Third: What did you do to serve God? Fourth: What did you leave in the world that was worthwhile when you came from it? Fifth: What did you bring into this new world which will be of use here?

— Alfred Armand Montapert, Ibid., from “Segment 46,” p. 237.