John Wren-Lewis

John Wren-Lewis (1923–2006) was a British-born scientist who taught at universities in Great Britain and the United States of America. He became known for his publications ranging over the fields of science, psychology, education and religion. He played a leading part in the so-called “Death of God” movement in Britain. In later life, after a traumatic near-death experience in Thailand in 1983, he wrote and taught about the meaning of mysticism and a broad spectrum of spiritual teachings.

Wren-Lewis graduated in applied mathematics from the Imperial College of Science, University of London. In the 1950s and 1960s, while working as industrial research executive with Imperial Chemical Industries, he became known for his publications as scholar, author and lecturer on topics of science, psychology, education and religion. As of 1970 he was president of the British Association for Humanistic Psychology, which later became the European Association for Humanistic Psychology.

Participating in the Regents’ Lectureship Program in the UC Santa Barbara in 1971–1972, he moved to the United States in 1972 with his life partner, the dream psychologist Ann Faraday. In 1972 he joined New College of Florida in Sarasota as visiting professor of religious studies and member of the faculty until 1974. Faraday and Lewis worked with the Esalen Institute since 1976. He has taught at universities in Great Britain and the United States of America.

John and Ann left the US to undertake three years of extended travel to India and the Far East. They spent the year 1982 together in Malaysia. Earlier, in her publications relating to dream theory, Ann Faraday had cited writings of Kilton Stewart, who had seen great potential in what he had called “Senoi dream theory”, and similarly Patricia Garfield referred to techniques of the Senoi when describing her work on dreams. However, Faraday and Wren-Lewis did not find any evidence supporting the use of dream control education in local culture.

In 1983, traveling with Ann, he was nearly poisoned to death in Thailand in the course of an attempt of robbery and underwent a near-death experience which profoundly changed his world view, and which has since been cited as a well-known example of experience of transcendent consciousness. Having been a convinced sceptic up to that point, he changed perspective. He said of the movie Fearless by Peter Weir that it conveyed “the actual feeling of a dimension beyond the life of space and time”. He has described his changed view of perception in the words:

“What I perceive with my eyes and other senses is a whole world that seems to be coming fresh-minted into existence moment by moment.”

In 1984 the couple moved to Australia. He later said of himself that at that moment he was “still reeling” from his experience of a year before. He became honorary associate at the Faculty of Religious Studies at the University of Sydney.

He and Ann Faraday together wrote a so far unpublished book The 9:15 to Nirvana about his near-death experience. As recorded in the Ryerson Index, he died on 25 June 2006 at Shoalhaven, New South Wales, aged 82 years.

After his near-death experience, Wren-Lewis was no longer a sceptic of mysticism as such, yet remained critical of endeavours aimed at attaining personal growth and spiritual awakening by following existing paths of practice, in particular when undertaken with the aid of a guru. His change in viewpoint was reflected in his later work:

“I know from firsthand experience that the “joy beyond joy” is greater than the wildest imaginations of a consciousness bogged down in time. But I can also see that the very impulse to seek the joy of eternity is a Catch-22, because seeking itself implies a preoccupation with time, which is precisely what drives eternity out of awareness. […] So what to do? One thing I learned in my former profession of science was that the right kind of lateral thinking can often bring liberation from Catch-22 situations, provided the Catch-22 is faced in its full starkness, without evasions in the form of metaphysical speculations beyond experience. This is the exploration to which my life is now dedicated.”

The psychologist Imants Barušs has interpreted this as a notion of a pre-physical substrate with similarity to the implicate order, as it has been postulated by theoretical physicists David Bohm and Basil Hiley.

In his book review of Ken Wilber’s book Grace and Grit: Sprirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber, he wrote:

“My conviction, which I share with Jean Houston and many others, is that the human race is entering a new phase, a new dispensation if you will, wherein we can develop a more truly empirical mysticism than has ever existed in the dogma-dominated cultures of the past.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wren-Lewis

From his work “The Dazzling Dark, A Near-Death Experience Opens the Door to a Permanent Transformation”:

“Some, if we believe what they tell us, are born with God consciousness. Some struggle to achieve it by strenuous spiritual practice, though by all accounts the success rate isn’t (and never has been) encouraging. I had God consciousness thrust upon me in 1983, my sixtieth year, without working for it, desiring it, or even believing in it, and this has understandably given me a somewhat unusual perspective on the whole matter. In particular, I wonder if discipline isn’t altogether counterproductive in this context and the idea of spiritual growth totally mistaken.

Before I had my experience, I was a Freud-style skeptic about all things mystical. I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist or materialist; in fact I’d published extensively on the need for a religious world view appropriate to a humanity that has “come of age” in the scientific and technological area.(1) But I emphasized that such a faith would have to be essentially positivistic, focused on the human potential for creative change, which I believed could become as effective in the social realm as it has been in the physical realm. I even believed it possible that the creative human personality might eventually discover technologies for transcending mortality, but I saw mysticism as a neurotic escape into fantasy, due to failure of nerve in the creative struggle.(2)

What happened in 1983 could be classified technically as a near-death experience (NDE), though it lacked any of the dramatic visionary features that tend to dominate both journalistic and scholarly NDE accounts.(3) As I lay in a hospital bed in Thailand, after eating a poisoned candy given me by a would-be thief on a long-distance bus, there were some hours when the medical staff thought I’d gone beyond recall. But I had no out-of-body vision of what was going on, no review of my life, no passage down a dark tunnel to a heavenly light or landscape, and no encounter with celestial beings or deceased relatives telling me to go back because my work on earth was not yet done. And although I’d lost all fear of death when eventually resuscitated, this had (and has) nothing to do with believing I have an immortal soul that will survive death.

On the contrary, it has everything to do with a dimension of aliveness here and now which makes the notion of separate survival a very secondary matter, in this world or any other. In fact it makes each present instant so utterly satisfying that even the success or failure of creative activity becomes relatively unimportant. In other words, I’ve been liberated from what William Blake called obsession with “futurity,” which, until it happened, I used to consider a psychological impossibility. And to my continual astonishment, for ten years now this liberation has made the conduct of practical life more rather than less efficient, precisely because time consciousness isn’t overshadowed by “anxious thought for the morrow.”

I didn’t even notice the change straightaway. My mind was too busy catching up on why I was in a hospital at night, with a policeman sitting at the foot of the bed, when the last thing I could remember was feeling drowsy on the bus in the early morning and settling down for a comfortable snooze on what was scheduled to be a seven-hour journey across the jungle-covered mountains. I’d suspected nothing, because the donor of the candy—a charming and well-dressed young man who’d been very helpful with our luggage—had left the bus some miles back. With hindsight, I guess he decided that retreat was the order of the day when he saw that my partner, dream psychologist Dr. Ann Faraday,(4) wasn’t eating the candy he’d given her. (Ann’s heroic rescue, when I started turning blue and the bus driver insisted I was just drunk, is quite a story in its own right, but not the point here.)(5)

The fact that I’d undergone a radical consciousness shift began to become apparent only after everyone had settled down for the night and I was left awake, feeling as if I’d had enough sleep to last a lifetime. By stages I became aware that when I’d awakened a few hours earlier, it hadn’t been from a state of ordinary unconsciousness at all. It was as if I’d emerged freshly made (complete with all the memories that constitute my personal identity) from a vast blackness that was somehow radiant, a kind of infinitely concentrated aliveness or “pure consciousness” that had no separation within it, and therefore no space or time.

There was absolutely no sense of personal continuity. In fact the sense of a “stop in time” was so absolute that I’m now convinced I really did die, if only for a few seconds or fractions of a second, and was literally “resurrected” by the medical team, though there were no brain-wave monitors to provide objective confirmation. And if my conviction is correct, it actually counts against rather than for the claim so often made by near-death researchers that personal consciousness can exist apart from the brain. My impression is that my personal consciousness was actually “snuffed out” (the root meaning, according to some scholars, of the word “nirvana”) and then recreated by a kind of focusing-down from the infinite eternity of that radiant dark pure consciousness. An old nursery rhyme conveys it better than any high philosophy:

Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of Everywhere into here.

Moreover that wonderful “eternal life of everywhere” was still there, right behind my eyes—or more accurately, at the back of my head—continually recreating my whole personal body-mind consciousness afresh, instant by instant, now! and now! and now! That’s no mere metaphor for a vague sensation; it was so palpably real that I put my hand up to probe the back of my skull, half wondering if the doctors had sawn part of it away to open my head to infinity. Yet it wasn’t in the least a feeling of being damaged; it was more like having had a cataract taken off my brain, letting me experience the world and myself properly for the first time—for that lovely dark radiance seemed to reveal the essence of everything as holy.

I felt like exclaiming, “Of course! That’s absolutely right!” and applauding every single thing with tears of gratitude—not just the now sleeping Ann and the small jar of flowers the nurse had placed by the bedside, but also the ominous stains on the bed sheets, the ancient paint peeling off the walls, the far from hygienic smell of the toilet, the coughs and groans of other patients, and even the traumatized condition of my body. From the recesses of my memory emerged that statement at the beginning of the book of Genesis about God observing everything “he” had made and finding it very good. In the past I’d treated these words as mere romantic poetry, referring only to conventionally grand things like sunsets and conveniently ignoring what ordinary human consciousness calls illness or ugliness. Now all the judgments of goodness or badness which the human mind necessarily has to make in its activities along the line of time were contextualized in the perspective of that other dimension I can only call eternity, which loves all the productions of time regardless.

It was mind-blowing even then, when I was taking for granted that this had to be a jumbo-sized “mystical experience” visited on me, of all people, as a kind of cosmic joke, from which I must quite soon “return to normal.” I envisaged making public recantation of my antimystical views and joining the formerly despised ranks of spiritual seekers. Because my skeptical bias had been recreated along with the rest of my memories, I toyed with the possibility that I might simply be suffering some aftereffect of the poison, which the doctors had diagnosed as probably being a heavy dose of morphine laced with cocaine. I didn’t really believe this, however, because there was no trace of the “trippy” feeling that was always present when I took part in a long series of officially sponsored experiments with high-dosage psychedelics back in the late 1960s.

Later, when the eternity consciousness continued into the following days, weeks, months, and years, any ordinary kind of drug explanation was obviously ruled out. Moreover my bewilderment was intensified as I discovered how all kinds of “negative” human experiences became marvels of creation when experienced by the Dazzling Dark. To convey even a fraction of what life is like with eternity consciousness would take a whole book and I’m currently in the last stages of writing one. It must suffice here to illustrate two features that have most impressed me and others who know me, notably Ann.

First, if there were a section in the Guinness Book of Records for cowardice about physical pain, I would be sure of a place there. But with eternity consciousness, pain becomes simply a warning signal which, once heeded (irrespective of whether a physical remedy is available), becomes simply an interesting sensation, another of nature’s wonders. The Buddha’s distinction between pain and suffering, which I used to think was equivocation, is now a common experience for me. And second, my erstwhile spectacular dream life has been replaced, on most nights, by a state which I can only call “conscious sleep,” where I’m fully asleep yet distantly aware of lying in bed. It is as if the Dark has withdrawn its game of “John Wren-Lewising” to a nonactive level where the satisfaction of simply being is totally unrelated to doing.(6)

The main point I want to make here, however, is that perhaps the most extraordinary feature of eternity consciousness is that it doesn’t feel extraordinary at all. It feels quintessentially natural that personal consciousness should be aware of its own Ground, while my first fifty-nine years of so-called “normal” consciousness, in ignorance of that Ground, now seem like a kind of waking dream. It was as if I’d been entranced from birth into a collective nightmare of separate individuals struggling in an alien universe for survival, satisfaction and significance.

Even so, there have been plenty of problems in adjusting to awakened life, because the rest of the world is still taking the separation state for granted, and my own “resurrected” mind still contains programs based on the assumptions of that state. So in the early days I made every effort to assume the role of spiritual seeker in the hope of finding help. It came as a real disappointment to find that no one I consulted, either in person or through books, had a clue, because ancient traditions and modern movements alike take for granted that the kind of eternity consciousness I’m living in is the preserve of spiritual Olympians, the mystical equivalent of Nobel laureates.

Fortunately the mystical state seems to have a growth pattern of its own which is gradually enabling me to deal with the adjustment problems—and a fascinating process it is. In the meantime, however, I’m very concerned that all the seekers I come across accept as a law of the spiritual universe that they have to be content with years—perhaps many reincarnational lifetimes—of hopeful traveling, rewarded at best with what T.S. Eliot called “hints and guesses”(7) of the eternity-conscious state, whereas I see that state as the natural human birthright.

My intensive investigations in this area over the past decade have left me in no doubt that proponents of the so-called Perennial Philosophy are correct in identifying a common “deep structure” of experience underlying the widely different cultural expressions of mystics in all traditions. Nonetheless I find no evidence whatever for the often-made claim that these traditions contain disciplines for attaining God consciousness that have been empirically tested and verified.(8) On the contrary, the assumption that God consciousness is a high and special state seems like the perfect defense mechanism for not asking whether spiritual paths are really leading there at all. Yet this is a very pertinent question, since many mystics whose utterances most clearly resonate as coming from life in the eternity-state have asserted that their awakening was “an act of grace” (or words to that effect) rather than a reward for effort on their part.

Indeed the more I investigate, the more convinced I become that iconoclastic mystics like Blake and Jiddu Krishnamurti(9) were right in asserting that the very idea of a spiritual path is necessarily self-defeating, because it does the one thing that has to be undone if there is to be awakening to eternity: it concentrates attention firmly on “futurity.” Paths and disciplines make gnosis a goal, when in fact it is already the ground of all knowing, including “sinful” time-bound knowing. To me now, systems of spirituality seem like analogues of those dreams which prevent waking up (for example, to wet a thirsty throat or relieve the bladder) by creating a never- ending nocturnal drama of moving towards the desired goal, encountering and overcoming obstacle after obstacle along the way, but never actually arriving.

In other words, I’ve begun to realize that my former skepticism wasn’t all bad. I think now that I was like the ignorant peasant boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story who simply wouldn’t go along with the courtiers’ wishful thinking about the emperor’s glory in his new clothes. My mistake was to put down the impulse that causes spiritual seekers to want a greater glory than ordinary life affords and makes them hope it’s there in the great traditions, even when they have no experiential evidence of it. Or to switch to an even older fable, I decided that heavenly grapes must be delusory when I could see that none of the ladders people were climbing in pursuit of them ever reached the goal.

Now I not only understand the urge to find something altogether beyond the shallow satisfactions and the blood, sweat, toil, and tears of this petty pace, but I know from firsthand experience that the “joy beyond joy” is greater than the wildest imaginations of a consciousness bogged down in time. But I can also see that the very impulse to seek the joy of eternity is a Catch-22, because seeking itself implies a preoccupation with time, which is precisely what drives eternity out of awareness. Even disciplines designed to prize attention away from doing are simply another form of doing, which is why they at best yield only occasional glimpses of the eternal Ground of consciousness in Being.

So what to do? One thing I learned in my former profession of science was that the right kind of lateral thinking can often bring liberation from Catch-22 situations, provided the Catch-22 is faced in its full starkness, without evasions in the form of metaphysical speculations beyond experience. This is the exploration to which my life is now dedicated. It’s a research project in which anyone who’s interested can join, because the very fact of being interested means that somewhere at the back of your head you are already as aware of the Ground of consciousness as I am. So rather than take up my little remaining space with any of my own tentative conclusions, I’ll end with a couple of cautionary hints.

First, beware of philosophies that put spiritual concerns into a framework of growth or evolution, which I believe are the great modern idols. Both are important phenomena of eternity’s time theater, but as paradigms they’re old hat, hangovers from the age of empire-building and the work ethic. We should know better today, when astronomers have shown that the kind of planetary destruction that was once imagined as a possible divine judgment could in fact be brought about at any time by the perfectly natural wanderings of a stray asteroid.

The “I want it now” attitude, so often deplored by spiritual pundits as a twentieth-century sin, is in my view a very healthy sign that we are beginning to be disillusioned with time-entrapment. A truly mystical paradigm has to be post-evolutionary, a paradigm of lila, divine play for its own sake, where any purposes along the line of time, great or small, are subordinate to the divine satisfaction that is always present in each eternal instant. Mystical gnosis is knowing the instant-by-instant delight of Infinite Aliveness in all manifestation, irrespective of whether, from the purely human standpoint, the manifestation is creative or destructive, growing or withering, evolving towards some noetic Omega or fading out.

My second warning is to mind your language, for the words we use are often hooks that catch us into time entrapment. For example, when we use the term “self” with a small “s” to describe individual personhood, and “Self” with a capital “S” for the fullness of God consciousness, the notion of the one gradually expanding into the other becomes almost inescapable, again concentrating attention along the time line. Mystical liberation, by contrast, is the sudden discovery that even the meanest self is already a focus of the Infinite Aliveness that is beyond any kind of selfhood.

Again, when the word “home” is used to describe eternity, there is an almost irresistible temptation to think of life as a journey of return, whereas mystical awakening for me has been like Dorothy’s in The Wizard of Oz: the realization that I never really left home and never could. Here too T.S. Eliot has the word for it: “Home is where one starts from.”(10) Finite life is a continual instant-by-instant voyaging out from the “eternal Home” into the time process to discover new “productions of time” for eternity to love as they arise and pass away.

Against this background, the main positive advice I would give to spiritual seekers is to experiment with any practice or idea that seems interesting—which is what the Buddha urged a long time ago, though not too many of his followers have ever taken that part of his teaching seriously. Ancient traditions and modern movements alike may be very valuable as databases for new adventures, but to treat them as authorities to be obeyed is not only “unscientific”—it seems actually to go against the grain of the divine lila itself, since novelty is apparently the name of the time game.

I suspect gnosis comes as “grace” because there are as many different forms of it as there are people. Yet because we’re all in this together, sharing experience is integral to its fullness. Whatever experiments you make, share your “failures,” your hints and guesses, and your awakening too if it happens, with warts-and-all honesty, because “everything that lives is holy.””

NOTES

1. See for example my book What Shall We Tell the Children? (London: Constable, 1971) and the quotations from my earlier writings in J.A.T. Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM Press, 1963), the foundation work of the “Death of God” movement in the mid-1960s.

2. See especially my article “Love’s Coming-of-Age” in C. Rycroft, ed., Psychoanalysis Observed (Baltimore, Md.: Penguin, 1968).

3. The best overview of this subject is still C. Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys: The Near-Death Experience in Mediaeval and Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). There is now also a Journal of Near-Death Studies published quarterly by the Human Sciences Press in New York.

4. See Ann Faraday, Dream Power (New York: Berkeley, 1973) and The Dream Game (New York: Harper & Row, 1976/1990).

5. A fuller version of the story is told in my article “The Darkness of God: A Personal Report on Consciousness Transformation through Close Encounter with Death” in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 28, no. 2 (1988), pp. 105-121, and in my forthcoming book The 9:15 to Nirvana. At the time of this incident, we were on holiday from fieldwork in the Malaysian jungle which led to exposure of the “Senoi Dream Tribe” legend as a fraud. See Ann Faraday and John Wren-Lewis, “The Selling of the Senoi,” in Lucidity Letter, vol. 3, no. 1, (1984), pp. 1-2.

6. For further details, see my article “Dream Lucidity and Near-Death Experience: A Personal Report” in Lucidity Letter, vol. 4, no. 2, (1986), pp. 4-12.

7. See T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” 5, in Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1944/1959). As an example, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (London: Sheldon Press, 1974) relates Merton’s discussion with a very high Tibetan meditation master in which they both admitted to each other that breakthrough into “direct realization” still eluded them after thirty years of assiduous practice. A high Tibetan lama once told me he expected to spend many more reincarnations before reaching a state of continuing “eternity consciousness.”

8. See for example Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1944) and Ken Wilber, The Atman Project (Wheaton, Ill.: Quest Books, 1980).

9. For notes on Krishnamurti in this respect, with particular reference to recent reports of his alleged affair with a married woman disciple, see my article “Death Knell of the Guru System: Perfectionism vs. Enlightenment” in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, vol. 34, no. 2 (1994), pp. 46-61.

10. T.S. Eliot, “East Coker,” 5, in Four Quartets.

An interesting film in which John interviews U.G. Krishnamurti:

Thomas Berry

Thomas Berry (1914 – 2009) was born in Greensboro, North Carolina where he spent his early childhood and where he returned when he was 80. It was there that he died peacefully on June 1, 2009. Named William Nathan after his father he was the third child of thirteen of which four siblings remain. He entered the Passionist Order in high school and upon ordination he took the name Thomas after Thomas Aquinas whose Summa Theologica he admired.

Berry was third of 13 children. By age eight, he had concluded that commercial values were threatening life on the planet. Three years later he had a mystical epiphany in a meadow, which became a primary reference point for the rest of his life. He later elaborated this experience into a set of Twelve Principles for Understanding the Universe and the Role of the Human in the Universe Process. The first of these principles states:

“The universe, the solar system, and planet earth in themselves and in their evolutionary emergence constitute for the human community the primary revelation of that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being.”

He received his Ph.D. from the Catholic University of America in European intellectual history with a thesis on Giambattista Vico. Widely read in Western history and theology, he also spent many years studying and teaching the cultures and religions of Asia. He lived in China in 1948 where he met the Asian scholar and Confucian specialist, Ted de Bary. Their collaboration led to the founding of the Asian Thought and Religion Seminar at Columbia. Thomas authored two books on Asian religions, Buddhism and Religions of India, both of which are distributed by Columbia University Press.

For more than twenty years, Thomas directed the Riverdale Center of Religious Research along the Hudson River. During this period he taught at Fordham University where he chaired the history of religions program. He directed some twenty doctoral theses, including those of John Grim and Brian Brown, as well as many Master’s theses, including those of Mary Evelyn Tucker and Kathleen Deignan. From 1975-1987 he was President of the American Teilhard Association, and it was from Teilhard de Chardin that he was inspired to develop his idea of a universe story. With Brian Swimme he wrote The Universe Story (Harper San Francisco, 1992), which arose from a decade of collaborative research. Among advocates of deep ecology and “ecospirituality” he is famous for proposing that a deep understanding of the history and functioning of the evolving universe is a necessary inspiration and guide for our own effective functioning as individuals and as a species.

His major contributions to the discussions on the environment are in his books The Dream of the Earth (Sierra Club Books, 1988), The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future (Random House/Bell Towers, 1999), and Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (Sierra Club/University of California Press, 2006). His final two books focusing on world religions and on Christianity were published in September 2009: The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-first Century by Columbia University Press and The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth by Orbis Books.

Author Michael Colebrook describes two key elements in Thomas Berry’s thinking: “Firstly, the primary status of the universe. The universe is, ‘the only self-referential reality in the phenomenal world. It is the only text without context. Everything else has to be seen in the context of the universe’. The second element is the significance of story, and in particular the universe as story. ‘The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.’”

Sources:
http://www.thomasberry.org/Biography/short_bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Berry

Excerpts from his writings:

“The universe, the solar system, and planet earth in themselves and in their evolutionary emergence constitute for the human community the primary revelation of that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being.”

“What do you see? What do you see when you look up at the sky at night, at the blazing stars against the midnight heavens? What do you see when the dawn breaks over the eastern horizon? What are your thoughts in the fading days of summer as the birds depart on their southward journey, or in the autumn when the leaves turn brown and are blown away? What are your thoughts as you look out over the ocean in the evening? What do you see?

Many earlier peoples saw in these natural phenomena a world beyond ephemeral appearance, an abiding world, a world imaged forth in the wonders of the sun and clouds by day and the stars and planets by night, a world that enfolded the human in some profound manner. The other world was guardian, teacher, healer―the source from which humans were born, nourished, protected, guided, and the destiny to which we returned.

Above all, this world provided the psychic power we humans needed in our moments of crisis. Together with the visible world and the cosmic world, the human world formed a meaningful threefold community of existence. This was most clearly expressed in Confucian thought, where the human was seen as part of a triad with Heaven and Earth. This cosmic world consisted of powers that were dealt with as persons in relationship with the human world…

We need to awaken… to the wilderness itself as a source of new vitality for its own existence. For it is the wild that is creative. As we are told by Henry David Thoreau, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” The communion that comes through these experiences of the wild, where we sense something present and daunting, stunning in its beauty, is beyond comprehension in its reality, but it points to the holy, the sacred.

The universe is the supreme manifestation of the sacred. This notion is fundamental to establishing a cosmos, an intelligible manner of understanding the universe or even any part of the universe. That is why the story of the origin of things was experienced as a supremely nourishing principle, as a primordial maternal principle, or as the Great Mother, in the earliest phases of human consciousness…

We must remember that it is not only the human world that is held securely in this sacred enfoldment but the entire planet. We need this security, this presence throughout our lives. The sacred is that which evokes the depths of wonder. We may know some things, but really we know only the shadows of things.

We go to the sea at night and stand along the shore. We listen to the urgent roll of the waves reaching ever higher until they reach their limits and can go no farther, then return to an inward peace until the moon calls again for their presence on these shores. So it is with a fulfilling vision that we may attain―for a brief moment. Then it is gone, only to return again in the deepening awareness of a presence that holds all things together.”

“For peoples, generally, their story of the Universe and the human role within the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. Only through this story of how the Universe came to be in the beginning and how it came to be as it is does a person come to appreciate the meaning of life or to derive the psychic energy needed to deal effectively with those crisis moments that occur in the life of the individual and in the life of the society. Such a story communicates the most sacred of mysteries …. and not only interprets the past, it also guides and inspires our shaping of the future.”

“The Universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs, and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the Universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the Universe. The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so important to know the story. If you do not know the story, in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know anything.”

“The world we live in is an honorable world. To refuse this deepest instinct of our being, to deny honor where honor is due, to withdraw reverence from divine manifestation, is to place ourselves on a head-on collision course with the ultimate forces of the Universe. This question of honor must be dealt with before any other question. We miss both the intrinsic nature and the order of magnitude of the issue if we place our response to the present crises of our planet on any other basis. It is not ultimately a political or economic or scientific or psychological issue. It is ultimately a question of honor. Only the sense of the violated honor of the Earth, and the need to restore this honor, will awaken in the human the energies needed to renew the planet in any effective manner.”

“Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the Universe as we now understand this story through empirical knowledge. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and the energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificence.”

“It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we are in between stories. The Old Story—the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it—sustained us for a long time. It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purpose, energized action, consecrated suffering, integrated knowledge, guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children. We could identify crime, punish transgressors. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. But now it is no longer functioning properly, and we have not yet learned the New Story.”

“Our present urgency is to recover a sense of the primacy of the Universe as our fundamental context, and the primacy of the Earth as the matrix from which life has emerged and on which life depends. Recovering this sense is essential to establishing the framework for mutually enhancing human–Earth relations for the flourishing of life on the planet.”

“We have a new story of the Universe. Our own presence to the Universe depends on our human identity with the entire cosmic process. In its human expression the Universe and the entire range of earthly and heavenly phenomena celebrate themselves and the ultimate mystery of their existence in a special exaltation. . . . Science has given us a new revelatory experience. It is now giving us a new intimacy with the Earth.”

“If the Rhine, the Yellow, the Mississippi rivers are changed to poison, so too are the rivers in the trees, in the birds, and in the humans changed to poison, almost simultaneously. There is only one river on the planet Earth and it has multiple tributaries, many of which flow through the veins of sentient creatures.”

“All human activities, professions, programs, and institutions must henceforth be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually enhancing human/Earth relationship.”

“The basic mood of the future might well be one of confidence in the continuing revelation that takes place in and through the Earth. If the dynamics of the Universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the Sun, and formed the Earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relation to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the Universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.”

Franklin Merrell-Wolff

Franklin Merrell-Wolff (1887–1985) was an American living in rural California who documented his spiritual awakening in a journal published under the title Pathways Through to Space. Franklin grew up in California, the son of a clergyman and graduated Stanford University Phi Beta Kappa in 1911 majoring in mathematics with minors in philosophy and psychology. He did graduate work at Stanford and Harvard. He also taught mathematics briefly at Stanford. At this point, he withdrew from the academic world and began his spiritual search. Franklin does not include much additional personal information in his diary. Thus, this biography is more about spiritual experience and contains less background information on his life.

In 1937, Franklin had been studying and meditating on the Indian philosopher Shankara’s thought reading his books in English translation. He felt a great affinity with the writings of this sage, and his view of Vedanta. Franklin had also been spending a great deal of time alone as a gold-prospector, and this solitude helped him contemplate and understand the subtle philosophical issues in some depth.

He describes his initial spiritual realization as follows:

“One day after the evening meal… I passed into a very delightful state of contemplation. … My breath changed, but not in the sense of stopping or becoming extremely slow or rapid. It was, perhaps, just a little slower than normal. The notable change was in a subtle quality associated with the air breathed. Over and above the physical gases of the air there seemed to be an impalpable substance of indescribable sweetness that, in turn, was associated with a general sense of well being, embracing even the physical man. It was like happiness or joy, but these words are inadequate. It was of a very gentle quality yet far transcended the value of the form of any of the more familiar forms of happiness. It was quite independent of the beauty or comfort of the environment. At that time the latter was, to say the least, austere and not in any sense attractive. … the air was far from invigorating due to the period being exceptionally warm. However, introspective analysis revealed the fact that the elixir-like quality was most marked during exhalation, thus indicating that it was not derived from normal air. Further, the exhaled breath was not simply air expelled into the outer atmosphere, but seemed to penetrate down through the whole organism like a gentle caress, leaving throughout a quiet sense of delight. It seemed to me like nectar. Since that time I have learned it is the true Ambrosia.”

Franklin describes in detail some of the formative experiences that led to his present realization.

Franklin had in the previous few days an insight that he believed “played a vital part in clearing the way for the illumination that occurred later”. The insight had to do with his concept of the relationship of empty space to matter. He had gradually come to perceive that so-called empty space was in fact full and substantial, while material objects were in fact a kind of “partial vacuum”. The effect was that his senses began to be capable of perceiving empty space as the substantial foreground while physical objects receded into the background. This, in turn, led to the perception that material objects were part of a “dependent or derivative reality”.

In the previous eighteen months, Franklin had also begun to have conversations with a person he recognized as a sage. These communications led him to follow certain suggestions from the sage when he felt unclear on certain points of discussion. As the teaching continued, he reports that both he and his wife began to see “Light where their had been obscurity”.

Two previous insights also contributed to the current experience. Franklin mentions that nearly fourteen years prior, he had a realization that “he was atman” (atman loosely translates to soul). In the second, which occurred less than a year prior, Franklin realized while reading a book of a living Indian Sage that Nirvana was not “a field, or space, or world which one entered” but that he was “identical with Nirvana and would always be so”.

Franklin described this event as a “recognition” rather than an experience in the conventional sense. It was an awakening to a kind of knowledge best described as “knowledge through Identity”.

To precipitate his spiritual recognition, he had been reading a chapter on “liberation”. He realized that a common mistake in meditation, which seeks enlightenment, was that the meditator seeks something that can be experienced. He realized the falseness of this approach and proceeded to “drop the expectation of having anything happen”. He was then able to abstract the atman or “I am” from the objective reality around him. He found nothing but “darkness and emptiness” from an objective viewpoint but realized “it as Absolute Light and Fullness” and that he was That. He writes:

“I found myself above the universe not in the sense of having left the physical body and being taken out of space but in the sense of being above space, time, and causality. My karma seemed to drop away from me as an individual responsibility. I felt intangibly, yet wonderfully free. I sustained the universe and was not bound by it… I seemed to comprehend a veritable library of knowledge, all less concrete that the most abstract mathematics. The personality rested in a gentle glow of happiness.”

The experience left him disinterested in everyday activities. The questions that occurred to Franklin were, “what is there of interest here?”, and “what is worth doing?”. His answer: “I found but one interest: the desire that other souls should also realize what I had realized.” He perceived the tragedies of the everyday man as “little tragedies”. He wrote: “I saw one great tragedy, the cause of all the rest, the failure of man to realize his own divinity”.

Since that first realization, Franklin wrote that “the Current” as he described it continued to be with him off and on. Focused activity or thought stopped this Current. Action could occur along with the Current, provided that an “inner concentration” was not broken. The Current had an effect on certain people (such as his wife) who could recognize it, while others were not affected. Some people had the effect of shutting down the Current in Franklin while others had no effect on it.

The rest of Franklin’s journal consists of short tracts where he examines his realization from a variety of different standpoints. He examines such concepts as beauty, morality, cosmic consciousness, occult powers, asceticism, duty, and “the high indifference” from his new awakened perspective.

He also continues his analysis of the new spiritual states he was exploring under the repeating chapter title “The Record Continued”.

Franklin was fascinated with the formless unmanifest form of mysticism while acknowledging the existence of an intermediate form of mystical experience he identified as “Cosmic Consciousness”. He clearly states his preference:

“I cannot conceive of anyone who has glimpsed the beauty of the Transcendent Formlessness ever preferring cosmic beauty.”

He seemed most affected by the Indian author Shankara but also acknowledged his debt to the Western philosopher Immanuel Kant for his investigation into the noumenal world which lies behind and beyond the phenomenal world of the senses. His experience seemed to give him a universalist perspective to the world’s religions where the different religious prophets and leaders of the past had different approaches to religion but each was valuable:

“It seems clear that no man can effectively illuminate the Way for all men. There is more than one main Road and a great number of subroads. On all these, men who can serve as beacons are needed.”

Franklin even goes so far as to use the terminology of different religions to describe the Current characterizing it as the “Soma”, “Nectar”, the “Ambrosia of the Gods”, the “Water of Life”, and the “Baptism of the Spirit”.

Franklin mentioned on different occasions that the “Current of bliss” had a purifying affect on the body. This brought on a certain degree of tiredness due to the stress on the body when he remained immersed in it for an extended period. He therefore needed sleep after a prolonged period of contact with higher states.

He also gives an example of how his realization enhances everyday experience when he describes his response to a small yellow kitten he glimpsed:

“It ran across the platform and I felt a thrill of delight. It was as though a tiny melody from the Cosmic Symphony had trilled joyously into the mind – a little stretch born forth from the Grand Harmony. And from this a wave of joy was distilled and pulsed through me.”

Franklin continually tries to analyze and describe his experience of the Current in various ways reflecting on how it affects him:

“There were no words, no ideas, not any other form, yet one might say It was the very essence of Sound and Meaning. It was utterly satisfactory and filling. It was the very Power that makes all things to become clear. Again there flowed the Current of gentle joy that penetrates through and through…. It appears as of the nature of a fluid, for there is this sense of ‘flowing through’. It penetrated all tensions with the effect of physical release. All over and through and through there is a quality that may well be described as physiological happiness. The organism feels no craving for sensuous distraction to find enjoyment.”

He concludes that the true sage, while appearing ascetic, is in fact anything but ascetic, because “he who has realized Spiritual Gold enjoys more not less”.

One of the unique elements of Franklin’s spiritual path was the degree to which he used spiritual discrimination to bring about his realization. He found over the years that any attempt to stop thought, which is common to oriental methods of meditation, was an impediment to meditation. Instead, he spontaneously evolved methods to analyze his own experience in the light of his spiritual reading.These methods involved distilling out certain subtle aspects of experience and focusing his attention on those while letting the rest of his perceptions fade into the background. He believed that this is a common practice in Western scientific methods of understanding natural phenomena. He was extending this analytic method into the realm of spirituality and psychological states, as have others in the past who have followed the path of discrimination.

Franklin’s unique contribution to the varieties of religious experience seems to be his success in penetrating the mystery of consciousness without undergoing the exercises in fierce concentration that are generally prescribed by Hindu and Buddhist teachers. These are usually considered prerequisites to any sort of realization, and a necessary component of the path to enlightenment. However, Merrell-Wolff’s insight came spontaneously.

It seems that Franklin’s spiritual realization has also stood the test of time. In the preface to the second edition of Pathways Through to Space, he writes:

“It is now more than thirty-six years since the precipitation of the inner events which led to the writing of this volume. It may be said now that the value of this unfoldment is as high as it ever was. It is true that I would place this treasure far above anything which may be obtained in the ordinary world field, in whatever domain, such as achievement in government, in business, in science, philosophy, mathematics or the arts. All these stand as values far inferior to these greater values which come from Fundamental Realization.”

Though Franklin was an American, he did achieve genuine guru status himself, and gained disciples. And he was most certainly someone who felt himself to be in the Indian tradition looking primarily to Indian spiritual books and teachers for insight into the spiritual mysteries. In the following passage, he speaks of both the importance of the Indian philosopher Shankara’s works and Vedanta philosophy (text in parenthesis is added by the author for clarity):

“Immanuel Kant is a great example, among western peoples, of a man who attained some Recognition through Manas (defined by Wolff as the “Intellectual principle”). As a result, his philosophy clears the way in the West in a sense analogous to the thought achieved by Shankara in the Orient but, unlike the latter, it is incomplete on the metaphysical side. Hegel partially completed the structure, but the whole of this falls short of the completeness of the Advaita Vedanta (India’s primary non-dual system of philosophy).”

Franklin also believed that Indian culture had developed language in a way that was helpful to the spiritual quest:

“There is a science of recognition, though in large part it remains esoteric. But some of the knowledge may be uncovered by the uninitiated student if he seeks in the right place. Among the various races, the East Indians form the chief repository of this science, and the language employed, the Sanskrit, involves terms corresponding to concepts for which there are no real equivalents in our current western languages.”

Franklin also followed certain aspects of the Indian tradition in his emphasis on celibacy. As with many Indian renunciants, he considered sexuality a hindrance on the spiritual path, and suggested that serious spiritual seekers abstain from sexual activity.

In terms of Franklin’s role as guru, it is unclear to what extent he acted as a classical Indian guru to his disciples. He mentions on many occasions meditation with others, and talks of suggesting different approaches to see how effective they are in inducing his state of “recognition” in others. It seems unlikely that he accepted disciples who would depend on him or surrender to him in the more classical role of guru as spiritual father and director of the disciple’s life. His role appears to be limited to spiritual advisor and helper. A more exhaustive study of his life would be required to determine how he lived out his role as guru.

Although Franklin had contacts with one or more persons he considered “sages” who helped him in deep discussions of spiritual matters, he did not appear to have a guru in the classical Indian sense of initiation and surrender. His focused and penetrating mind appeared to be sufficiently powerful to discover the underlying mystery of consciousness without the direct aid of a guru.

Source: http://www.om-guru.com/html/saints/wolff.html

A substantial collection of quotes from his writings can be found at:
http://www.angelfire.com/space2/light11/diction/wolff.html

A direct extended inquiry with Franklin:
http://www.selfdiscoveryportal.com/arInduction.htm

Douglas Harding

Douglas Harding (1909-2007) was a British philosopher, mystic, and spiritual teacher whose most famous books are the monumental The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth (1952) and On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious (1961). He taught a practical, on-the-ground method of spiritual awakening based on the immediate first-person experience of headlessness. From one’s own first-person vantage point, as a matter of immediate personal experience aside from any speculation or abstraction, one manifestly has no head (look for yourself right now and see). From this central truth Douglas developed a philosophy, and just as importantly, a practical method of transmitting its primary experiential realization, that synthesizes and integrates elements of all the world’s great spiritual traditions.

He was recognized early on as a genius of startling vision; when he sent the unpublished draft of The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth to C.S. Lewis, who by that time was already a world celebrity, Lewis wrote back in a letter dated Easter 1950 and raved, “Hang it all, you’ve made me drunk, roaring drunk as I haven’t been on a book (I mean a book of doctrine; imaginative works are another matter) since I first read Bergson during World War I. Who or what are you? How have I lived forty years without my having heard of you before and my sensation is that you have written a book of the highest genius.”

Lewis went on to write the preface for the first published edition of the book. In it he said, “This book is, I believe, the first attempt to reverse a movement of thought which has been going on since the beginning of philosophy. . . . If [this book] should turn out to have been even the remote ancestor of some system which will give us again a credible universe inhabited by credible agents and observers, this will still have been a very important book indeed.”

Douglas’s influence grew in the 1960s and 70s when such prominent figures in the burgeoning countercultural spiritual movement as Alan Watts referred approvingly to his work. He grew up in a strict fundamentalist Christian sect, the Exclusive Plymouth Brethren. The ‘Brethren’ believed they were the ‘saved’ ones, that they had the one true path to God and that everyone else was bound for Hell. When Harding was 21 he left. He could not accept their view of the world. What guarantee was there that they were right? What about all the other spiritual groups who also claimed that they alone had the Truth? Everyone couldn’t be right.

In London in the early 1930s Harding was studying and then practising architecture. In his spare time, however, he devoted his energies to philosophy – to trying to understand the nature of the world, and the nature of himself. Into philosophy at this time were filtering the ideas of Relativity. Influenced by these ideas, Harding realized that his identity depended on the range of the observer – from several metres he was human, but at closer ranges he was cells, molecules, atoms, particles… and from further away he was absorbed into the rest of society, life, the planet, the star, the galaxy… Like an onion he had many layers. Clearly he needed every one of these layers to exist.

But what was at the centre of all these layers? Who was he really? In the mid-1930s Harding moved to India with his family to work there as an architect. When the Second World War broke out, Harding’s quest to uncover his identity at centre – his True Identity – took on a degree of urgency. Aware of the obvious dangers of war, he wanted to find out who he really was before he died.

One day Harding stumbled upon a drawing by the Austrian philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach. It was a self-portrait – but a self-portrait with a difference. Most self-portraits are what the artist looks like from several feet – she looks in a mirror and draws what she sees there. But Mach had drawn himself without using a mirror – he had drawn what he looked like from his own point of view, from zero distance.

When Harding saw this self-portrait the penny dropped. Until this moment he had been investigating his identity from various distances. He was trying to get to his centre by peeling away the layers. Here however was a self-portrait from the point of view of the centre itself. The obvious thing about this portrait is that you don’t see the artist’s head. For most people this fact is interesting or amusing, but nothing more. For Harding this was the key that opened the door to seeing his innermost identity, for he noticed he was in a similar condition – his own head was missing too. At the centre of his world was no head, no appearance – nothing at all. And this ‘nothing’ was a very special ‘nothing’ for it was both awake to itself and full of the whole world. Many years later Harding wrote about the first time he saw his headlessness:

“I don’t think there was a ‘first time’. Or, if there was, it was simply a becoming more aware of what one had all along been dimly aware of. How could there be a ‘first-time’ seeing into the Timeless, anyway? One occasion I do remember most distinctly – of very clear in-seeing. It had 3 parts. (1) I discovered in Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science, a copy of Ernst Mach’s drawing of himself as a headless figure lying on his bed. (2) I noted that he – and I – were looking out at that body and the world, from the Core of the onion of our appearances. (3) It was clear that the Hierarchy, which I was then in the early stages of, had to begin with headlessness, and that this had to be the thread on which the whole of it had to be hung.”

However, Harding did describe his discovery more dramatically in On Having No Head:

“The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head.

It was eighteen years ago, when I was thirty-three, that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent enquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I? The fact that I happened to be walking in the Himalayas at the time probably had little to do with it; though in that country unusual states of mind are said to come more easily. However that may be, a very still clear day, and a view from the ridge where I stood, over misty blue valleys to the highest mountain range in the world, with Kangchenjunga and Everest unprominent among its snow-peaks, made a setting worthy of the grandest vision.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of “me”, unstained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.

Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused life-history. It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too clever to see. It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face – my utter facelessness. In short, it was all perfectly simple and plain and straightforward, beyond argument, thought, and words. There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden.”

Following this discovery, Harding spent eight more years working on The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. Prefaced by CS Lewis who called it “a work of the highest genius”, The Hierarchy was published by Faber and Faber in 1952. In this book Harding explores, tests and makes sense of his discovery in the broadest and deepest terms. It is not a book for a popular audience, but it is a book that will surely, in time, be recognized as a truly great work of philosophy.

In 1961 the Buddhist Society published On Having No Head – written for a popular audience. In the late 1960s and 1970s Harding developed the experiments – awareness exercises designed to make it easy to see one’s headlessness and to explore its meaning and implications in everyday life.

Harding added a final section to On Having No Head more than 40 years after his revelation of headlessness, laying out the Path – the Headless Way – he followed “from the unreal to the Real, from darkness to Light, from death to Immortality” (in the words from the Upanishad he quoted). He said that it represents one of countless variations on the Way, and he divided it into eight more-or-less arbitrary stages:

The Headless Infant

The Child

The Headed Grown-up

The Headless Seer

Practicing Headlessness

Working It Out

The Barrier

The Breakthrough

His recommendation is to first become a Headless Seer, which only takes one glimpse and corresponds to stages one through four. He laments that very few of the many people who have glimpsed their true natures in his workshops have followed through with the next step, which is Practicing Headlessness.

“Now the ‘hard’ part begins, which is the repetition of this headless seeing-into-Nothingness till the seeing becomes quite natural and nothing special at all; till, whatever one is doing, it’s clear that nobody’s here doing it…. At first, the essential practice requires much effort of attention. Normally, one takes years or decades to arrive to arrive at anything like steady and spontaneous in-seeing. Nevertheless the method is quite simple and the same throughout. It consists of ceasing to overlook the looker – or rather, the absence of the looker.”

The third and final step is breaking through the barrier of ego:

“No matter how revolutionary the discoveries made along Stages (5) and (6) of the Way, or how valuable for living they are beginning to prove, in the end they leave the wayfarer profoundly unsatisfied. There remains an ache, an undefined longing. In spite of all this quite genuine spiritual “progress,” an all-important region remains untravelled, or at least insufficiently explored. It’s a dark and dangerous country inhabited by monsters, and it cannot be by-passed. It is the area of the will. Here, beyond and beneath all these luminous goings-on, the unregenerate ego is still at work, possibly beavering away more vigorously than ever.”

What is required, he tells us, is a “profound declaration of intent”:

“It is the realization at gut level (so to say) that one’s deepest desire is that all shall be as it is – seeing that it all flows from one’s true Nature, the Aware Space here.”

“How is this breakthrough actually made? What can one do to bring it nearer?” he asks us, rhetorically. The answer: “In a sense, nothing. It’s not a doing but an undoing, a giving up, an abandonment of the false belief that there’s anyone here to abandon.” But he goes on, in the Postscript, to give some practical advice, the chief of which is the importance of the company of fellow-adventurers.

Summarization:

Harding felt a conviction, from childhood on, that the power behind the world is one of Self-giving love.

He discovered early that the greatest awe is that of Self-origination, of something manifesting out of nothing.

He thought it would be a great waste to find ourselves in existence and then not look to see what was the actual nature of that existence – and that this “seeing” was easy and direct.

“Either you go baldheaded for Who you really are, or else you get to work on all that mental stuff which is alleged to block the vision of that Who. They just won’t mix, and there’s no sense in jumping back and forth from one to the other.”

Harding is a vigorous proponent of going for a direct seeing, and the exercises he developed for helping with this are documented throughout his writing.

To overcome the yearning that goes with separation, we then need to break through the final barrier, the ego or individuality sense.

When asked about the fear that hinders us from this, he responded (in Face to No-Face):

“The profound and well-based reason for this fear is surely that we have one basic fear, the fear of death and annihilation. Coming back Here, looking in at the Void, is an arrow, isn’t it? We say the experiments are vehicles, but they’re also arrows or bullets. They come and they kill you. It really is the end of you. The fear of death, the fear of annihilation – that’s the real terror. The resistance to it is well-based. The Diamond Sutra says as much. Seeing into your void nature is naturally quite terrifying.

Of course, we have this fear that when we look in we’ll find death and annihilation. But it is death and resurrection. We forget that this death of the little one, who is dying anyway, is accompanied by our resurrection as the whole scene. So instead of this in-seeing being death, it becomes the answer to the problem of death.”

Sources include:

http://www.headless.org/douglas-harding.htm
http://www.selfdiscoveryportal.com/gtAdviceH.htm

More excerpts from his writing:

“There is a Reality which is Indivisible, One, Alone, the Source and Being of all; not a thing, nor even a mind, but pure Spirit or clear Consciousness; and we are That and nothing but That, for That is our true Nature; and the only way to find It is to look steadily within, where are to be found utmost peace, unfading joy, and eternal life itself.”

“Over the past [sixty] years a truly contemporary and Western way of ‘seeing into one’s Nature’ or ‘Enlightenment’ has been developing. Though in essence the same as Zen, Sufism, and other spiritual disciplines, this way proceeds in an unusually down-to-earth fashion. It claims that modern man is more likely to see Who he really is in a minute of active experimentation than in years of reading, lecture-attending, thinking, ritual observances, and passive meditation of the traditional sort. Instead of these, it uses a variety of simple, non-verbal, fact-finding tests, all of them asking: how do I look to myself? They direct my attention to my blind spot – to the space I occupy, to what’s given right here at the Centre of my universe, to what it’s like being 1st-person singular, present tense.”

“You are divine at centre, human in appearance – at a certain range. Seeing Who you really are doesn’t mean you are no longer aware of your appearance, no longer self-conscious – that’s impossible as well as undesirable. So you still respond to your name, still recognize yourself in the mirror, still take responsibility for your actions. Of course. But you are now aware that your humanity is like a disguise, an incarnation you have taken on to be here in this world. Inwardly you are God, outwardly you are a person – a unique person with a special contribution to make. Instead of thinking you are just that person, that appearance, you are awake to the Power behind you, the Safety within you, the Source of inspiration and guidance at the heart of your human life. This enables you to be yourself even more so.”

“Here is just emptiness. There is no getting my ego out of the way, and all that stuff. There is just the seeing, shining in great brilliance and clarity.”

“The big thing for me, a development over the last few years, is the realization of the Incarnation. To put it very, very simply, if it is true what Tennyson says, what the Koran says, that God is nearer to me than my hands and my feet and my breathing, then God is Here and This is where he lives. This is the temple of the living God, and these hands are not coming out of an organism Here. I see that they’re coming out of the Space. Then these hands do a different job. These feet go on the errands of God, and this voice speaks his words. They are the instruments of Who we really, really are. This is a very different organism from the one we see in the mirror and see around us. This is the First Person, and the First Person is totally different from the third person.”

“Relying on the given facts rather than preconceptions is always sound policy. I neither am my body nor in it. On the contrary, it – along with the rest of my world – IS in me. What was wrong with alternatives (1) BEING the body and (2) BEING IN the body was the notion that, in and for oneself, one is a limited thing stuffed with a lot of even more limited things. Correct the false notion that you are an example of the taxidermist’s art, and you will find that all three alternatives come to the same thing. Which isn’t a thing at all, but immense and brilliantly conscious capacity for everything under and above the sun.”

“The lost Gospel according to Thomas, discovered “by accident” in an Egyptian cave in 1945, couldn’t have appeared at a more opportune moment in history, or with a message that speaks more directly to our condition and needs.

In this early apocryphal Christian text, the living voice of Jesus comes down to us directly, bypassing all that men have been saying about him and doing in his name. It comes across distinctly, high above the confused roar of two millenia of Christendom, so-called.

It’s as if he himself had planted this beneficient time bomb in the cave at Nag Hammadi, carefully setting the fuse to delay its explosion till the world would be ready for the impact.

It’s as if, so tragically far ahead of his time, he knew when significant numbers of quite ordinary men and women ( as distinct from highly specialised and disciplined saints and sages and seers ) would at last be capable of catching up with his vision of the Light, his experience of what he calls the Kingdom.”

“Whether looked at from outside or inside, bodies dissolve, matter vanishes, spirit remains – once we bother to go into the matter. “Spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body is the outer manifestation of the living spirit.” Extend this statement by Carl Jung to all bodies from electrons to galaxies, and you have the ultimate physics.”

“Now you talk about stopping thinking. Well, I’ve read all the books about Ramana – I’ve never met him – and I think he says a lot of things – some of which don’t mean much to me, it seems to be more part of that culture – but one of the things he does say in places is that you don’t have to do anything to see who you really are, you don’t have to stop thinking to see who you really, really are. It is obvious, there is nothing more obvious in the whole world. I say that too. It’s absolutely obvious, and you say, well does that stop your thinking, Douglas? Well, not really, because it’s perfectly compatible with seeing here the one who is supposedly the thinker. The thinker goes along perfectly well with the realisation of the identity of the one here who’s alleged to be thinking, but there is a sense – and a very, very important sense – in which seeing who I am does involve cessation of thought, because when we think about a thing we are making it an object. It is there, the thinker and the object thought about, and I am not that. The thinker and the thought are two, but this vision of who I really, really, really am is not thought, it is directly experienced. So here there’s no thinking. Seeing who I really, really am is not thinking, it’s not a conceptual experience, it’s more like a percept – but an absolutely direct experience of what’s here.”

“What if you were happy already — were happiness itself — and never noticed the fact? What if this frantic search for happiness elsewhere blinds you to the searcher’s True Nature which is bliss itself?

Sri Nisargadatta is sure of the answer, and certainly doesn’t mince matters. “Nothing can make you happier than you are. All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being.” This, together with the teaching of the long line of seers and sages who have indissolubly linked ananda (Bliss) with sat (Being) and chit (Awareness), and certainly the experience of this writer, all insist that the true recipe for happiness is seeing Who you really are, and enjoying your very Nature as unalloyed Bliss.

How, then, to see Who you really are? In fact, it’s easier to see than anything else! Just look at What you are looking out of at this moment, at what’s your side of these printed words, and see Nothing — no shape or form, no complexity, no color, no texture, no opacity, no limits, no movement — nothing but Awareness.

But does this seeing into your Self-nature (and it’s something you can’t do wrong) mean that you want things to happen as they do happen? Well, who is responsible for them? Who you really, really are creates the world, and presumably isn’t regretting any of it.

Those who have actually tried it find that this last recipe for happiness is the one that works. What’s more, it makes the other two work. Consistently seeing Who you really are, you want what you get and get what you want. Again, this isn’t for believing but for testing.

In his Ethics the great Greek philosopher Aristotle concluded that happiness is some form of theoria, which means a looking-at, a viewing, a beholding. That’s to say, not a subjective state for achieving one day but an objective reality for enjoying right now. A reality we can’t get rid of no matter how we try.”

See also: https://www.youtube.com/profile?user=headexchange

Philokalia

The Philokalia (Ancient Greek: “love of the beautiful, the good”, from philia “love” and kallos “beauty”) is a collection of texts written between the 4th and 15th centuries by spiritual masters of the Eastern Orthodox hesychast tradition. The collection was compiled in the eighteenth-century by St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth.

The book is a “principal spiritual text” for all the Eastern Orthodox Churches; the publishers of the current English translation state that “The Philokalia has exercised an influence far greater than that of any book other than the Bible in the recent history of the Orthodox Church.” The various texts were chosen because of their shared teachings on the way to self-perfection, illumination, and purification, with a strong emphasis on inward prayer. They were originally written for the guidance and instruction of monks in “the practise of the contemplative life”, though the Philokalia has been used widely by lay Christians. The works were individually known in Greek-reading Christian monastic culture before their inclusion in The Philokalia, but the collection resulted in a much wider readership due to its translation into several languages, including a seven-volume translation into Russian (Dobrotolyubie) by St. Theophan the Recluse in the nineteenth-century.

The collection’s title is The Philokalia of the Niptic Fathers, or more fully The Philokalia of the Neptic Saints gathered from our Holy Theophoric Father, through which, by means of the philosophy of ascetic practice and contemplation, the intellect is purified, illumined, and made perfect. Niptic is an adjective derived from the Greek Nipsis (or Nepsis) referring to contemplative prayer and meaning “watchfulness”. Watchfulness in this context includes close attention to one’s thoughts, intentions, and emotions, with the aim of resisting temptations and vain and egoistic thoughts, and trying to maintain a constant state of remembrance of God. There are similarities between this ancient practice and the concept of mindfulness as practiced in Buddhism and other spiritual traditions. The Philokalia teachings have also influenced the revival of interior prayer in modern times through the centering prayer practices taught by Thomas Keating and Thomas Merton.

Philokalia is defined as the “love of the beautiful, the exalted, the excellent, understood as the transcendent source of life and the revelation of Truth.” In contemplative prayer the mind becomes absorbed in the awareness of God as a living presence as the source of being of all creatures and sensible forms. According to the authors of the English translation, Kallistos Ware, G. E. H. Palmer, and Philip Sherrard, the writings of The Philokalia have been chosen above others because they:

” …show the way to awaken and develop attention and consciousness, to attain that state of watchfulness which is the hallmark of sanctity. They describe the conditions most effective for learning what their authors call the art of arts and the science of sciences, a learning which is not a matter of information or agility of mind but of a radical change of will and heart leading man towards the highest possibilities open to him, shaping and nourishing the unseen part of his being, and helping him to spiritual fulfilment and union with God.”

The Philokalia is the foundational text on hesychasm (“quietness”), an inner spiritual tradition with a long history dating back to the Desert Fathers. The practices include contemplative prayer, quiet sitting, and recitation of the Jesus Prayer. While traditionally taught and practiced in monasteries, hesychasm teachings have spread over the years to include laymen. Nikodemos, in his introduction, described the collected texts as “a mystical school of inward prayer” which could be used to cultivate the inner life and to “attain the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” While the monastic life makes this easier, Nikodemos himself stressed that “unceasing prayer” should be practiced by all.

The hesychasm teachings in the Philokalia are viewed by Orthodox Christians as inseparable from the sacraments and liturgy of the Orthodox Church, and are given by and for those who are already living within the framework of the Church. A common theme is the need for a spiritual father or guide.

In the anonymous nineteenth-century Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim, the pilgrim asks a staretz, or spiritual father, whether the Philokalia is “more exalted and holier than the Bible.” The staretz answers:

“No, it is not more exalted or holier than the Bible, but it contains enlightened explanations of what is mystically contained in the Bible, and it is so lofty that it is not easily comprehended by our shortsighted intellects. Let me give you an illustration. The sun is the greatest, the most resplendent and magnificent source of light, but you cannot contemplate or examine it with the simple naked eye. You would need to use a special viewing lens, which, though a million times smaller and dimmer than the sun, would enable you to study this magnificent source of all light and to endure and delight in its fiery rays. Thus the Holy Scriptures are like a brilliant sun, for which the Philokalia is the lens needed in order to view it.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philokalia

Excerpts:

“We pray with words until the words are cut off and we are left in a state of wonder.”

“When a man has been granted constant prayer, it will mean that he has reached the summit of all virtues and has become the abode of the Holy Spirit; for a man who has not wholly received this grace of the Comforter cannot keep this prayer in his heart with joy. Therefore it is said that when the Holy Spirit comes to live in a man, he never ceases to pray, for then the Holy Spirit constantly prays in him (Romans 8:26). Then prayer never stops in a man’s soul, whether he is asleep or awake. In eating or drinking, sleeping or doing something, even in deep sleep his heart sends forth without effort the incense and sighs of prayer. Then prayer never leaves him, but at every hour, even if externally quiet, it continues secretly to act within. This is why someone has called the silence of the pure bearers of Christ ~ prayer; for their thoughts are Divine movements, and the movements of mind and heart that are pure are meek voices by which they secretly sing praises to the One who is in secret.”

“God’s Infinity: Standing Outside the Realm of Created Beings

Love is a holy state of the soul, disposing it to value knowledge of God above all created things. We cannot attain lasting possession of such love while we are still attached to anything worldly.

The person who loves God values knowledge of God more man anything created by God, and pursues such knowledge ardently and ceaselessly.

If everything that exists was made by God and for God, and God is superior to the things made by Him, he who abandons what is superior and devotes himself to what is inferior shows that he values things made by God more than God Himself.

Since the soul is more noble than the body and God incomparably more noble than the world created by Him, he who values the body more than the soul and the world created by God more than the Creator Himself is simply a worshipper of idols.

If you distract your intellect from its love for God and concentrate it, not on God, but on some sensible object, you thereby show that you value the body more than the soul and the things made by God more than God Himself.

Since the Light of spiritual knowledge is the intellect’s life, and since this Light is engendered by love for God, it is rightly said that nothing is greater than divine love (1 Cor. 13). When in the intensity of its love for God the intellect goes out of itself: then it has no sense of itself or of any created thing. For when it is illumined by the Infinite Light of God, it becomes insensible to everything made by Him, just as the eye becomes insensible to the stars when the sun rises.

All the virtues co-operate with the intellect to produce this intense longing for God, Pure Prayer above all. For by soaring towards God through this prayer the intellect rises above the realm of created beings.

When the intellect is ravished through love by divine knowledge stands outside the realm of created beings, it becomes aware of God’s infinity.”

“If, then, you wish to behold and commune with Him who is beyond sense-perception and beyond concept, you must free yourself from every impassioned thought.

Persevere with patience in your prayer, and repulse the cares and doubts that arise within you.

Try to make your intellect deaf and dumb during prayer, you will then be able to pray.”

“In diligent exercise of mystical contemplation, leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual, and all things in the world of being and non-being, that you may arise by unknowing towards the union, as far as is attainable, with Him who transcends all being and all knowledge. For by the unceasing and absolute renunciation of yourself and of all things you may be borne on high, through pure and entire self-abnegation, into the superessential Radiance of the Divine Darkness.”

“We awaken in Christ’s body as Christ awakens our bodies, and my poor hand is Christ, he enters my foot, and is infinitely me. I move my hand, and wonderfully my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of him (for God is indivisibly whole, seamless in his Godhood). I move my foot, and at once He appears like a flash of lightning. Do my words seem blasphemous? – Then open your heart to him. And let yourself receive the one who is opening to you so deeply. For if we genuinely love Him, we wake up inside Christ’s body where all our body, all over, every most hidden part of it, is realized in joy as him, and he makes us, utterly, real, and everything that is hurt, everything seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful, maimed, ugly, irreparably damaged, is in him transformed and recognized as whole, as lovely, and radiant in his light we awaken as the Beloved in every last part of our body.”

“The rays of primordial Light that illumine purified souls with spiritual knowledge not only fill them with benediction and luminosity; they also, by means of the contemplation of the inner essences of created things, lead them up to the Noetic Heavens. The effects of the divine energy, however, do not stop here; they continue until through wisdom and through knowledge of indescribable things they unite purified souls with the One, bringing them out of a state of multiplicity into a state of oneness in Him.”

“True wisdom is gazing at God. Gazing at God is silence of the thoughts. Stillness of mind is tranquility which comes from discernment.”

“For God is silence, and in silence is he sung by means of that psalmody which is worthy of Him. I am not speaking of the silence of the tongue, for if someone merely keeps his tongue silent, without knowing how to sing in mind and spirit, then he is simply unoccupied and becomes filled with evil thoughts: … There is a silence of the tongue, there is a silence of the whole body, there is a silence of the soul, there is the silence of the mind, and there is the silence of the spirit.”

“By receiving a new sense of taste and a new form of knowledge in “stillness” and in giving himself over to God totally. Be still and know. Be still: remain in a state of spiritual wakefulness, with your prospects and your senses open, to hear what God’s will is at each moment.”

“Those who have been cleansed through following the path of stillness (hesychis) are counted worthy to see things invisible, undergoing, as it were, the way of negation and not forming ideas about it.”

“When the intellect has been perfected, it unites wholly with God and is illumined by divine light, and the most hidden mysteries are revealed to it. Then it truly learns where wisdom and power lie… While it is still fighting against the passions it cannot as yet enjoy these things… But once the battle is over and it is found worthy of spiritual gifts, then it becomes wholly luminous, powerfully energized by grace and rooted in the contemplation of spiritual realities. A person in whom this happens is not attached to the things of this world but has passed from death to life.”

“The person who listens to Christ fills himself with light; and if he imitates Christ, he reclaims himself.”

“The Lord fills His teachers with grace according to the quality and longing of those who listen.”

“All men are made in God’s image; but to be in His likeness is granted only to those who through great love have brought their own freedom into subjection to God. For only when we do not belong to ourselves do we become like Him who through love has reconciled us to Himself. No one achieves this unless he persuades his soul not to be distracted by the false glitter of this life.”

“A brother named John came from the coast to Father Philimon and, clasping his feet, said to him: “What shall I do to be saved? For my intellect vacillates to and fro and strays after all the wrong things.” After a pause, the father replied: “This is one of the outer passions and it stays with you because you still have not acquired a perfect longing for God. The warmth of this longing and of the knowledge of God has not yet come to you.” The brother said to him: “What shall I do, father?” Abba Philimon replied: “Meditate inwardly for a while, deep in your heart; for this can cleanse your intellect of these things.” The brother, not understanding what was said, asked the Elder: “What is inward meditation, father?” The Elder replied: “Keep watch in your heart; and with watchfulness say in your mind with awe and trembling: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me. For this is the advice which the blessed Diadochos gave to beginners.”

“Fasts and vigils, the study of Scripture, renouncing possessions and everything worldly are not in themselves perfection, as we have said; they are its tools. For perfection is not to be found in them; it is acquired through them. It is useless, therefore, to boast of our fasting, vigils, poverty, and reading of Scripture when we have not achieved the love of God and our fellow men. Whoever has achieved love has God within himself and his intellect is always with God.”

“There is no gainsaying what the fathers have so well affirmed, that a man does not find rest except by acquiring inwardly the thought that God and he alone exist; and so he does not let his intellect wander at all towards anything whatsoever, but longs only for Him, cleaving to Him alone. Such a man will find true rest and freedom from the tyranny of the passions. My soul, as David says, is bound to Thee; Thy right hand has upheld me.”

“For the good is not good if it is not rightly done. It is really good only if it is not done with the purpose of receiving some reward: as, for instance, the search for popularity or glory may be rewarded by fame, or by excessive gain, or by something else that is wrong. God is not interested in what happens to turn out to be good or in what appears to be good. He is interested in the purpose for which a thing is done.”

“For desire is drawn towards three things: the pleasure of the flesh, vain self-glory, and the acquisition of material wealth. As a result of this senseless appetite it scorns God and His commandments, and forgets His generosity; it turns like a savage beast against its neighbour; it plunges the intelligence into darkness and prevents it from looking towards the truth. He who has acquired a spiritual understanding of this truth will share, even here on earth, in the kingdom of heaven and will live a blessed life in expectation of the blessedness that awaits those who love God.”

“Natural knowledge is that which the soul can acquire through the use of its natural faculties and powers when investigating creation and the cause of creation — in so far, of course, as this is possible for a soul bound to matter… Supranatural knowledge, on the other hand, is that which enters the intellect in a manner transcending its own means and power; that is to say, the intelligible objects that constitute such knowledge surpass the capacity of an intellect joined to a body, so that a knowledge of them pertains naturally only to an intellect which is free from the body. Such knowledge is infused by God alone when He finds an intellect purified of all material attachment and inspired by divine love.”

“If your intellect is freed from all hope in things visible, this is a sign that sin has died in you. If your intellect is freed, the breach between it and God is eliminated.”

“Shut all the gates of your soul, that is the senses, so as to not be lured astay. When the intellect sees that it is not dominated by anything, it prepares itself for immortality, gathering its senses together and forming them into one body.”

“One of perfect prayer is he who, withdrawing from all mankind, is united with all mankind. One of perfect prayer is he who regards himself as existing with all people and sees himself in every person.”

“The wise Solomon says in the Proverbs, “They that have no guidance fall like leaves; but in much counsel there is safety.” So you see what the Holy Scriptures teach us? They enjoin us not to rely on ourselves, not to regard ourselves as knowing all, not to believe that we can control ourselves, for we need help, and are in need of those who would counsel us according to God. No men are more unfortunate or nearer perdition than those who have no teachers on the way of God.

For what does it mean that where no guidance is, the people fall like leaves? A leaf is at first green, flourishing, beautiful., then it gradually withers, falls, and is finally trampled underfoot. So it is with a man who has no guide: at first he is always zealous in fasting, vigil, silence, obedience, and other virtues; then his zeal, little by little, cools down and, having no one to instruct, support, and fire him up with zeal, he insensibly withers, falls, and finally becomes a slave of the enemies, who do with him what they will.”

“A soul pure in God is God.”

“If we were willing to make even small efforts, we would not suffer either much distress or difficulty. For if a man urges himself to make efforts, then, as he continues them, he gradually makes progress and later practices virtues with tranquility; for God, seeing him urge himself, sends him help. So let us urge ourselves, for, although we have not reached perfection, if we make efforts, through efforts we shall receive help, and with this help shall acquire all kinds of virtues. Therefore one of the fathers said, “Give blood and receive spirit,” that is, strive earnestly and you will become perfect.”

“If we had to seek virtue outside of ourselves, that would assuredly be difficult; but as it is within us, it suffices to avoid bad thoughts and to keep our souls turned toward the Lord.”

Bede Griffiths

Father Bede Griffiths, who died in 1993, was one of the great spiritual leaders of the 20th century, a charismatic man who emanated unconditional love. Bede Griffiths was a monk, a man in whom there was no guile, and was last to see the guile that may have been in any other. This monk with a universal heart was an icon of integrity and guilelessness. As John Henry Cardinal Newman once described them, Bede was one of those:

“who live in a way least thought of by others, the way chosen by our Savior, to make headway against all the power and wisdom of the world. It is a difficult and rare virtue, to mean what we say, to love without deceit, to think no evil, to bear no grudge, to be free from selfishness, to be innocent and straightforward… simple-hearted. They take everything in good part which happens to them, and make the best of everyone.”

Such was Father Bede Griffiths, Swami Dayananda, who died May 13, 1993, barefooted and clothed in the color of the sun, in his thatched hut at Shantivanam in South India.

Life, 1906-1993

Alan Richard Griffiths was born at home at Walton-on-Thames in 1906 in a British middle class family, youngest of three. He had a sister and a brother. Soon after his birth Alan’s Dad lost his business, cheated by a partner to the last penny. Mr. Griffiths lost face and never regained his role or place in the family. Alan’s mother, who then became both parents to the children, had to move to less comfortable surroundings and had to go to work and manage her own housecleaning.

Education, 1918-1929

At the age of 12 Alan was enrolled in a public school for poor boys, known as Christ’s Hospital. The students were nicknamed the “blue coats.” This tall, lean, poor boy, ranked first in his exams, as you may have guessed if you knew Bede Griffiths at all in later life. Receiving a scholarship to Oxford, Alan want on to study English literature and philosophy from 1925-1929. Poetry, a lifelong love for Alan, was a step toward living out the full interiority of his spirit. It was during his third year at Oxford that C.S. Lewis became his tutor and the two became great friends, searching together for the Ultimate and some form of fitting religion. Alan graduated in journalism which prepared him well for the 12 books he would later author and the multitudinous articles and conferences.

Experiment in Common Life, 1930

Soon after graduation, Alan began what he and his two companions called an “experiment in Common Life.” With Hugh Waterman and Martin Skinner, he purchased a country cottage in Cotswalds, and took on a lifestyle immersed in nature, as a protest against contemporary life. Mrs. Griffiths made them three wool vests. For their part, the three young men milked cows and sold the milk. They read the Christian Bible together as literature, much impressed with the connections with nature as they lived out their experiment. One of the three found the life too austere and before the year ran out left the group and the experiment concluded. It had been brief but had a profound effect on Alan.

Conversion, 1931

Alan Griffiths then applied for ministry in the Church of England. However, he was advised to first go work in the slums of London. The confusion that ensued with him between his rational mind end his spirit almost broke him. He sought out a retreat during which he fasted, prayed all night until tears flooded him and he had a tremendous breakthrough. As he himself wrote, “I was no longer the center of my own life.” But the breakthrough was not complete. Alan went back to Cotswald, lived on turnips, grew weaker and confused again. Therefore he was moved to spend the day in prayer surrendering this time in a closet, visualizing himself at the foot of the Cross. Alan was swept into “real prayer” and later described this as his own “return to the Center.” He went to work and ate at the farm next door, joined the family and began to read Cardinal Newman’s Development of Christian Doctrine.

Roman Catholicism and Monastic Life, 1931-1937

Deeply touched by the reading both intellectually and spiritually, in spite of the fact that his mother had verbalized that her greatest grief would be if any in her family would embrace Roman Catholicism, Alan visited Prinknash Abbey and remained six weeks, much impressed. On Christmas eve, 1931, he was received into the Church and at midnight Mass received his first Communion. Alan then entered Prinknash Abbey just a few weeks later. Here, he said, he felt at home. Later with tongue in cheek he said, “Downside would have ruined me as it was too intellectual.” On December 20, 1932, Alan was clothed as a Benedictine Novice and received the name of Bede, which means prayer. Years later in India, he received the name of Dhayananda which means bliss of prayer, and still later Dayananda, which means bliss of compassion. Fr. Bede offered his Perpetual Vows in 1937, just one year before his beloved mother met with a car accident and passed away. He was ordained in 1940 at the age of 34. One of the monastic tasks he most enjoyed was guest master, since the Abbey attracted people from different cultures and walks of life. The exchange was energizing.

Prior, 1947-1951

Once when Fr. Bede’s Abbot was ill and unable to deliver a lecture in Glasgow, the young monk was sent to fill in. He made such an impression on all that the Abbot then chose Fr. Bede to be Prior of a group of 25 monks being sent to “bail out” two French monasteries. His was that of Farnborough. But endowments were dreadfully insufficient, and in four years’ time, Bede Griffiths was unable to generate more, so the Abbot then sent him on to the other French monastery, Pluscardin, in Scotland. Fr. Bede described this place as being very cold. It was then that he was encouraged to write his story which eventually was published as his autobiography, The Golden String (1954).

India, 1955-1993

During his years at Farnborough, Bede had met Fr. Benedict Alapott, an Indian priest born in Europe, greatly desirous of starting a foundation in India. Fr. Bede had been introduced to Eastern thought, Yoga and Indian Scripture by a Jungian analyst, Tony Sussman.

When Fr. Griffiths asked permission to go to India he was refused because the Abbot said “there is too much of Bede Griffiths’ will in this.” Later, however, the Abbot saw fit to “send” Fr. Bede, but the venture was not to be a foundation from Prinknash. Fr. Bede was to be henceforth subject to a Bishop in India, which meant that eventually his vowed status with Prinknash Abbey would expire. Of all this he wrote: “The surrender of the ego is the only way of life.” And again, “The surrender of the ego is the most difficult thing we have to do.” In leaving for India, his spirit was lighthearted as he wrote to a friend, “I am going to discover the other half of my soul.” In 1955, Fr. Bede and Fr. Benedict took a ship to Bombay, and after pilgrimages to Elaphantes and Mysore, they settled in Kengeri, Bangalore, the garden spot of India. But this was only to last until 1958 when Fr. Bede joined Fr. Francis Acharya in Kurisumala for ten years. Fr. Bede said of life at Kengeri, “It was too Western.”

Kurisumala, 1955-1968

The Mountain of the Cross (Kurisumala Ashram) was located on 100 acres of donated land in the ghats of Kerala. Fathers Francis and Bede used the Syriac rite and developed a fitting monastic liturgy in that language. Wanting to enter into the tradition of Indian Sannyasa (monk hood) and to establish a Christian ashram, they dressed in Kavi orange robes, and Fr.Bede took the Sanskrit name, Dhayananda. During his time there, Fr. Bede wrote Christ in India and studied the religions and culture of India which he had loved from the start.

Shantivanam, 1968-1993

Shantivanam, the ashram in Tamil Nadu dedicated to the most Holy Trinity, (hence the name in Sanskrit: Saccidananda), had been founded in 1950 by two French priests: Fr. Jules Monchanin, a diocesan missionary, and Fr. Henry leSaux (Abhishiktananda) from the Abbey of Kergonan. Fr. Monchanin arrived in India in 1939 and first lived with the Bishop, then in a rectory in Kulithalai. Only in 1948 did a donor offer a few acres in Trichy near the Kavery River where he and Abhishiktananda began worshipping in a tiny chapel that they had built with their own hands in Indian style. They used English, Sanskrit and Tamil in their liturgies, meeting three times daily for common prayer, using scriptures of the different religions, using the Roman rite themselves. They lived in thatched huts, the real poverty of the poor in India. On October 10, 1957, Fr.Monchanin died in France where he had gone for surgery. Abhishik stayed on at Shantivanam but travelled up to the caves in the Himalayas off and on until he asked in 1968 that someone from Kurismula come and he retired to the North. His heart gave out in Rishikesh and he died December 7, 1973.

In 1968, Father Bede Griffiths arrived at Shantivanam from Kurisumala with two other monks and again immersed himself in the study of Indian thought, attempting to relate it to Christian theology. He went on pilgrimage and studied Hinduism with Raimundo Panikkar. Under Fr. Bede’s guidance Shantivanam became a center of contemplative life, of inculturation, and of inter religious dialogue. He contributed greatly to the development of Indian Christian Theology. In 1973 he published Vedanta and the Christian Faith. The first copies of Return to the Center arrived in time to be the centerpiece in the temple kolam for Father’s 70th Birthday, December l7, 1976.

Illness and Mahasamadhi

On January 25, 1990 Bede Griffiths suffered a first stroke in his hut at Shantivanam. One month to the day in February, he was cured in a struggle with death and divine love. He later described this as an intense mystical experience. By May of that same year he was in the USA. Among many other lectures and conferences he gave the John Main Lectures at New Harmony, Indiana, now published as The New Creation in Christ. Soon afterward, Fr. Bede completed his final work, not yet published, Universal Wisdom. He visited the USA again in 1991 and 1992, giving roving lectures before going to England, Germany and Australia. While in Australia he met with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, and the exchange was enriching for both. Afterwards Fr. Bade said, “I do believe he liked me!” He took the long way home, giving more lectures in Germany and England. His heart was fluttering but he was always energized by all that went through him. He arrived back at his ashram in S. India in October. An Australian film team was awaiting him. “A Human Search” was successfully completed just three days before his final stroke on December 20th – three days after his 86th Birthday. On January 24, Bede Griffiths had a series of strokes which finally brought him to his Mahasamadhi on May 13, in his hut at Shantivanam in South India, surrounded with much tender loving care. Father Bede Griffiths was laid to rest nearby the temple, next to one of his first disciples, Fr. Amaldas, who, half Father’s age, died some years before him.

The Man

Bede Griffiths was a man with a universal heart. He had no guile and saw no guile in others. He honored the sacredness of every person because he believed so deeply that each person is a unique image of the divine. With Ruusbroec, Fr. Bede believed that “God’s work in the emptiness of the soul is eternal.” He all but saw that “spark of God” in everyone. He loved to describe the divine processions within: the Father in Self-reflection bringing forth His Word, His divine Image in pure consciousness in perfect bliss: self-knowing and self-giving. And the whole creation comes to its fullness in this intimacy, this relationship of love. Fr. Bede was fascinated by the Trinitarian Mystery, and even more so by the possibilities the Hindu doctrine of Saccidananda presented our Christian theology. (Cf. Toward a Christian Vedanta, by Wayne Teasdale).

Bede Griffiths had a listening heart that was finely attuned to others and therefore many others came to open their hearts to him. Someone has said so truly, of all the things he was, Bede Griffiths was the perfect gentleman to the End. And it was this listening heart that awaited everyone who came. He even sought out new arrivals to set up a time to share with them. If the deepest meaning of hospitality is “receiving the Divine,” Bede Griffiths surely did just that in each one who came into his ambit. Those who left his presence frequently remarked that he treated them as if they were his only business that day; he made them feel so revered.

For Fr. Bede, being universal meant to be centered and grounded. He generated this universality of heart through his daily practice of meditation and contemplative prayer, and this opened him ever more to the myths, symbols and teachings of the other great religions of the world. He was intrigued by the concept of the archetypal or Universal Man. In several of his books one can find how he detailed the names and descriptions of such from all the major religions. (cf The Marriage of the East and West, p.140; 70). He loved to quote the Chandogya Upanishad to show that while our body takes up only a small space on this planet, our mind encompasses the whole universe:

“There is this city of Brahman (the human body) and in it there is a small shrine in the form of a lotus, and within can be found a small space. This little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars; fire and lightening and wind are there, and all that now is and is not yet – all that is contained within it.”

Bede Griffiths had loved and assimilated his earlier studies and reading so well that his universal heart could quote a Upanishad committed to memory as easily as a line or stanza from William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins or others. “Touch the wing of a butterfly and you move a star.” He delighted in describing the interconnection, interrelationship of everything (cf New Vision of Reality).

Already in 1940, at the time of Ordination, Bede Griffiths’ heart reached out to the universal Lord. As an octagenarian, with a twinkle in his eye and in his throat, he told me while walking on a country road in the mountains in Vermont, that on his Mass Card he put the words, “Priest forever according to the Order of Melchesidech,” the universal priesthood. Then too, his final book, published posthumously, is entitled, Universal Wisdom. He was indeed a man with a universal heart and a universal God.

After his first stroke his intuitive mind was vibrant with insights on the divine mysteries, while his heart often suffered from some new insight of discrepancy in the Bible, or with injustice. He was convinced that the Old Testament has to be re-read in the light of the life and teachings of Christ. Jesus’ prayer to his Father “that they may be one as we are one,” (Jn. 17:2l) consumed Father Bede’s great heart.

The Monk

For Alan Richard Griffiths to be a Christian was simultaneously to be a monk! In much less than one month after his reception into the Roman Catholic Church he became a postulant at Prinknash Abbey. His clothing with the monastic habit the following year was for him a “sign that you were putting on Christ,” and the new name, Bede, signified that he “had become a new man in Christ.” But already as a Postulant, life in the monastery was much less austere than the life Alan had lived since College. Therefore, his first monastic crisis arose. He asked to visit a Cistercian monastery and discovered that his imagination had played tricks on him. As austere as it was, the Cistercian life would not have fit him at all, so he returned to Prinknash humbled and happy. In reading the New Testament and Abbot Marmion’s Christ the Ideal of the Monk, Christ’s life of humble obedience to his Father’s will astounded this Postulant, especially that he had not noticed this before. He was beginning to see how he had controlled his life by his reason alone, and it was dawning upon him that “the greatest obstacle in life is the power of self-will.” (cf Golden String, p.135). He recalled from reading Marcis Arelius that there is a divine order in the universe…and to discern the divine will beneath all the events of daily life and to adhere to it with one’s own will was the source of all happiness. (Golden String, p.136)

This profound insight was to be tested by fire when the young Father Bede asked his Abbot permission to go to India. He was told “no” because there was too much of Bede Griffiths’ will in this. The Abbot was wise enough to recognize how much of the Divine Will was in it also, and later “sent” Fr. Bede to India. “The surrender of the ego is the most difficult thing we have to do,” Bede wrote, and insisted “The surrender of the ego is the ONLY way of life.”

In the light of this it is easy to see how Indian monkhood so easily attracted Fr. Bede. The monk in the Hindu tradition is called the Sannyasi – the renunciate. And of all that is renounced, the most essential is the self. Little wonder Fr. Bede was ever concerned for the “return to the center,” our true center. “The problem with human existence is that we all have a self-centered personality,” he once said in a talk on religious vows. And it was monastic vows that he saw as the help to free us from our selfishness. In the Indian Independence leader, Gandhi, Bede saw the same insight:

“What Gandhi saw so clearly is that this detachment was not a way of escape from the world but of a freedom from self-interest which enabled one to give oneself totally to God and to the world.” (Christ in India, p.24)

Father Bede lived as he wrote – a monastery must always be concerned with the “search for God,” the continual effort to “realize” God, to discover the reality of the hidden presence of God in the cave of one’s heart or depths of the soul. For Bede Griffiths, the monk was one who has found the true center, and therefore the real call of the monk is to renew and share this awareness of the center.

He was ever faithful to his monastic office and community prayer and always stopped at the first sound of the bell. He radiated when sharing on the Scriptures even when he found contradictions in many places. He was a contemplative through and through. Contemplation was the basic dynamism of his life, and he believed it was meant to be the aim of all human life. His letters, conferences, homilies and personal exchanges were all so enriching because all proceeded from this contemplative dimension deep within him. Bede Griffiths has been called the “equivalent to the Hesychast,” one who goes beyond silence to stillness of heart. He saw the contemplative process not only as one of transcendence but also a painful experience of self-discovery, “initiating an experience of self-knowledge and purification, shattering the illusions we have about our self, the nearer we draw to this Transcendent Mystery.” (Judy Walter’s Influence on My Life).

In the talks he gave at New Harmony, the year before he died, Fr. Bede strongly urged the laity to form small groups of contemplative prayer. He also laid the groundwork for a society for the renewal of contemplative life in the world. Father Bede’s keen interest and involvement in East-West Inter-monastic dialogue flowed naturally from this contemplative dimension. His contribution to the dialogue throughout the world is immeasurable, much of which is yet to be uncovered. But for those who were blessed to be present during any of the exchanges, his presence was immediately giftful, his words insightful, and his manner attentive and respectful. Needless to say, his celebration of Eucharist was profound, not only for himself but for all who participated.

The Mystic

Bede Griffiths was granted mystical experiences both before and after attending Oxford. As a high school lad, when walking through the playing fields he was totally transformed at sunset while birds were singing like never before. The Hawthorne trees were in bloom, but again, like never before. He felt an awe and knelt on the ground. Nature began to wear a kind of sacramental character from then on, and every sunset thereafter brought a sense of religious awe, in the presence of an unfathomable Mystery. After graduation from Oxford, his mystical experience was as the other side of a two-edged sword, “the initiating experience of self-knowledge and purification, shattering the illusions…” His work in the slums of London brought him to his knees in utter confusion. He fasted and prayed all night until tears brought a tremendous breakthrough and he realized he was no longer the “center of his own life.” He was relieved but still confused. This time he spent the entire day in prayer but thought it had only been two hours. Fr. Bede surrendered to the Crucified One and had an astounding breakthrough, being swept up into what he called “real prayer.” This he referred to as his own “return to the Center.” It was soon after this that he entered the Roman Catholic Church and then the monastery. These were mystical experiences, moments, hours which brought awe and transformation: a sense of oneness with intensely sharpened senses, deep spiritual delight and a yet unknown sense of belonging in the universe, belonging where he was.

But a mystic is one who reaches a more or less continuous state of transformation, with a constant sense of union, of divine communion. This was to come to Fr. Bede in his later years through the instrumentality of his first stroke. He looked back upon his stroke as having three levels of influence on him: body, soul and spirit. Spiritually, he described it as his “advaitic experience.” In the Hindu tradition, that is often referred to as a unity that is no longer two: “Not two, not two” they say. Fr. Bede spoke of it as being the awakening of his repressed feminine side which demanded attention and integration. A cure 30 days after the stroke he called an intense experience of the divine feminine, loved like never before. He wept and could not speak for days. A disciple close to his heart took notes of his words:

“This was not merely a psychological analysis, but a deeply contemplative look at the overwhelming inner experience he had gone through. Intimating it was a mystical experience which could not properly be put into words, Father used symbolic language to try and express the depth of the experience. The two symbols he used were the Black Madonna and the Crucified Christ. He said these two images summed up for him something of this mysterious experience of the Divine feminine and the mystery of suffering.”

When he first spoke about the Black Madonna, he said his experience of her was deeply connected to the Earth-Mother, to the forms of the ancient feminine found in rocks and caves and in the different forms in nature. He likened it to the experience of the feminine expressed in the Hindu concept of Shakti – the power of the Divine Feminine. Later Father wrote these reflections on the Black Madonna: “The Black Madonna symbolizes for me the Black Power in Nature and Life, the hidden power in the womb…I feel it was this Power which struck me. She is cruel and destructive, but also deeply loving and nourishing.”

A few months later Father again wrote:

“The figure of the Black Madonna stood for the feminine in all its forms. I felt the need to surrender to the Mother, and this gave me the experience of being overwhelmed by love. I realized that surrendering to death, and dying to oneself is surrendering to Total Love.”

Regarding the image of the Crucified Christ, Father made the statement that his understanding of the crucifixion had deepened profoundly. He wrote:

“On the Cross Jesus surrendered himself to this Dark Power. He lost everything: friends, disciples, his own people, their law and religion. And at last he had to surrender his God: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Even his heavenly Father, every image of a personal God, had to go. He had to enter the Dark Night, to be exposed to the abyss. Only then could he become everything and nothing, opened beyond everything that can be named or spoken; only then could he be one with the darkness, the Void, the Dark Mother who is Love itself…”

Then a final quote from a talk that he gave in Jaiharikal in May, 1991:

“I would like to share with you something of my advaitic experience…I was overwhelmed and deluged with love. The feminine in me opened up and a whole new vision opened. I saw love as the basic principle of the whole universe. I saw God in the earth, in trees, in mountains. It led me to the conviction that there is no absolute good or evil in this world. We have to let go of all concepts which divide the world into good and evil, right and wrong, and begin to see the complimentarity of opposites which Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa called the coincidentia oppositorum, the ‘coincidence of opposites.'”

From the time of his first stroke in l990 until his death, Father was contemplatively undergoing this struggle of the coincidence of opposites. The mystical language he uses in the image of the Black Madonna and the Crucified Christ speak of the profound depth of this integration, and also the fact that this coincidence comes in the form of the Cross.

His attitude was one of surrender and observation, allowing the process to unfold without analysis or interference. I believe this was a deeply contemplative response to the process of final integration that was taking shape in the depths of his being. Father’s openness and receptivity of this integration could only come from a lifetime experience of contemplative living. (Judy Walter, “Father Bede’s Influence on My Life,” Shantivanam 5/l3/94)

After the stroke and the cure, father Bede did a great amount of travel to foreign countries. He said he never lost this sense of the divine presence from that time on. In a brief explanation he offered his overview of life in contrast to what society teaches us, he said at the age of 85 he begged to differ with those who think that life is all over at 40, and that from then on we go downhill. He saw our lifetime as roughly divided into three interrelated phases: ages 1-20, during which time our bodies develop, our mind and character gradually grow to maturity; then ages 20-40, during which time our psychological faculties are developed, many people marry at this stage and rear a family, professional skills are acquired, sports and arts are perfected. But most people think or are taught that that’s all there is and it’s all down hill from there. Father Bede insisted that the time from age 40 on is what life is all about; all the rest was preparation for the flowering of the whole personality. For him, here the spiritual powers begin to develop and transcend the capacities of mind and body. These are not left behind but are integrated into what opens us to the Eternal, the discovery of the Absolute, the Transcendent, the deep Source of all Reality. This is the breakthrough to the mystical and this, Fr. Bede believed, is the great hope for everyone. He said the last 20 years of his life were the most wonderful of all. This man, monk, and mystic, left us a message not only in his words but most of all by his very life!

Source: http://www.bedegriffiths.com/bede-griffiths/

More excerpts from his writings:

“I suddenly saw that all the time it was not I who had been seeking God, but God who had been seeking me. I had made myself the centre of my own existence and had my back turned to God. All the beauty and truth which I had discovered had come to me as a reflection of his beauty, but I had kept my eyes fixed on the reflection and was always looking at myself. But God had brought me to the point at which I was compelled to turn away from the reflection, both of myself and of the world which could only mirror my own image. During that night the mirror had been broken, and I had felt abandoned because I could no longer gaze upon the image of my own reason and the finite world which it knew. God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn. I was no longer the centre of my life and therefore I could see God in everything.”

“God has graced every tradition with insight into the divine mystery, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated-each has a gift to bring to the world.”

“The inspiration came suddenly again to surrender to the Mother. It was quite unexpected: And so somehow I made a surrender to the Mother. Then I had an experience of overwhelming love. Waves of love sort of flowed into me.”

“I think the Mother is gradually revealing itself to me and taking over. But it is not the Mother alone. It is the Mother and the Father, the male and the female, sort of gradually having their marriage.”

“Obedience is detachment from the self. This is the most radical detachment of all. But what is the self? The self is the principle of reason and responsibility in us. It is the root of freedom, it is what makes us men.”

“You must be ready to give up everything, not only material attachments but also human attachments – father, mother, wife, children – everything that you have . But the one thing which you have to abandon unconditionally is your self.”

“I was being called to surrender the very citadel of my self. I was completely in the dark. I did not really know what repentance was or what I was required to repent of. It was indeed the turning point of my life.”

“I suddenly saw that all the time it was not I who had been seeking God, but God who had been seeking me. I had made myself the centre of my own existence and had my back turned to God.”

“It is no longer a question of a Christian going about to convert others to the faith, but of each one being ready to listen to the other and so to grow together in mutual understanding.”

“I am rediscovering the whole sexual dimension of life at the age of 86, really. And that also means discovering the feminine. So the whole of this dimension, which I had been seeking for a very long time, is now sort of opening itself up to me.”

“I had made a god of my own reason… Even if theoretically I now acknowledged the authority of God and the Church, in practice I was still the ruler and the judge. I was the centre of my own existence, and my isolation from the rest of the world was due to the fact that I had deliberately shut myself up within the barriers of my own will and reason.”

“Atheism and agnosticism signify the rejection of certain images and concepts of God or of truth, which are historically conditioned and therefore inadequate. Atheism is a challenge to religion to purifiy its images and concepts and come nearer to the truth of divine mystery.”

“I liked the solitude and the silence of the woods and the hills. I felt there the sense of a presence, something undefined and mysterious, which was reflected in the faces of the flowers and the movements of birds and animals, in the sunlight falling through the leaves and in the sound of running water, in the wind blowing on the hills and the wide expanse of earth and sky.”

“Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality.”

“I was suddenly made aware of another world of beauty and mystery such as I had never imagined to exist, except in poetry. It was as though I had begun to see and smell and hear for the first time. The world appeared to me as Wordsworth describes with “the glory and freshness of a dream.” The sight of a wild rose growing on a hedge, the scent of lime-tree blossoms caught suddenly as I rode down a hill on a bicycle, came to me like visitations from another world. But it was not only my senses that were awakened. I experienced an overwhelming emotion in the presence of nature, especially at evening. It began to have a kind of sacramental character for me. I approached it with a sense of almost religious awe and , in a hush that comes before sunset, I felt again the presence of an almost unfathomable mystery. The song of the birds, the shape of the trees, the colors of the sunset, were so many signs of the presence, which seemed to be drawing me to itself.”

“The resurrection does not consist merely of the appearances of Jesus to his disciples after his death. Many think that these appearances in Galilee and Jerusalem are the resurrection. But they are simply to confirm the faith of the disciples. The real resurrection is the passing beyond the world altogether. It is Jesus’ passage from this world to the Father. It was not an event in space and time, but the passage beyond space and time to the eternal, to reality. Jesus passed into reality. That is our starting point.

It is into that world that we are invited to enter by meditation. We do not have to wait for physical death, but we can enter now into that eternal world. We have to go beyond the outer appearances of the senses and beyond the concepts of the mind, and open ourselves to the reality of Christ within, the Christ of the resurrection.”

“When we approach the Upanishads for an understanding of the Cosmic Mystery, we are coming to the very heart of the Hindu experience of God. This is what we want to try to understand, not with our minds, but with our hearts: to enter into the heart and continually remind ourselves that the Upanishads are intended to lead us to the heart. The Greek fathers of the Church used to say, “Lead the thoughts from the head into the heart and keep them there.” This is to open to the Cosmic Mystery.”

“To enter deeply into meditation is to enter into the mystery of suffering love. It is to encounter the woundedness of our human nature. We are all deeply wounded from our infancy and bear these wounds in the unconscious. The repetition of the mantra is a way of opening these depths of the unconsciousness and exposing them to light. It is first of all to accept our woundedness and thus to realize that this is part of the wound of humanity. All the weaknesses we find in ourselves and all the things that upset us, we tend to try to push aside and get rid of. But we cannot do this. We have to accept that “this is me” and allow grace to come and heal it all. That is the great secret of suffering, not to push it back but to open the depths of the unconscious and to realize that we are not isolated individuals when we meditate, but are entering into the whole inheritance of the human family.”

“Nobody know when he is going to die. It is no good simply putting it off all the time, as we tend to do. If you face it, you realize you hold your life in your hands, and you’re ready to let go at any moment. I think that is real wisdom.”

“Love demands love.”

“We’re now being challenged to create a theology which would use the findings of modern science and eastern mysticism which, as you know, coincide so much, and to evolve from that a new theology which would be much more adequate.”

See also:

Dag Hammarskjöld

Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld ( 29 July 1905 – 18 September 1961) was a Swedish diplomat, economist, author, and mystic. The second Secretary-General of the United Nations, he served from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. At the age of 47 years, 255 days, Hammarskjöld is the youngest to have held the post. He is one of only three people to be awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize. Hammarskjöld is the only UN Secretary-General to die in office; his death occurred en route to cease-fire negotiations. US President John F. Kennedy called Hammarskjöld “the greatest statesman of our century.”

When Trygve Lie resigned from his post as UN Secretary-General in 1953, the United Nations Security Council recommended Hammarskjöld for the post. It came as a surprise to him. Seen as a competent technocrat without political views, he was selected on 31 March by a majority of 10 out of eleven Security Council members. The UN General Assembly elected him in the 7–10 April session by 57 votes out of 60. In 1957, he was re-elected.

Hammarskjöld began his term by establishing his own secretariat of 4,000 administrators and setting up regulations that defined their responsibilities. He was also actively engaged in smaller projects relating to the UN working environment. For example, he planned and supervised in every detail the creation of a “meditation room” in the UN headquarters. This is a place dedicated to silence where people can withdraw into themselves, regardless of their faith, creed, or religion.

During his term, Hammarskjöld tried to smooth relations between Israel and the Arab states. Other highlights include a 1955 visit to China to negotiate release of 11 captured US pilots who had served in the Korean War, the 1956 establishment of the United Nations Emergency Force, and his intervention in the 1956 Suez Crisis. He is given credit by some historians for allowing participation of the Holy See within the United Nations that year.

In 1960, the former Belgian Congo and then newly independent Congo asked for UN aid in defusing the Congo Crisis. Hammarskjöld made four trips to the Congo. His efforts towards the decolonisation of Africa were considered insufficient by the Soviet Union; in September 1960, the Soviet government denounced his decision to send a UN emergency force to keep the peace. They demanded his resignation and the replacement of the office of Secretary-General by a three-man directorate with a built-in veto, the “troika”. The objective was, citing the memoirs of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, to “equally represent interests of three groups of countries: capitalist, socialist and recently independent.”

In September 1961, Hammarskjöld learned about fighting between “non-combatant” UN forces and Katangese troops of Moise Tshombe. He was en route to negotiate a cease-fire on 18 September when his Douglas DC-6 airliner SE-BDY crashed near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Hammarskjöld and fifteen others perished in the crash. The circumstances of the incident are still not clear. There is some recent evidence that suggest the plane was shot down. Göran Björkdahl (a Swedish aid worker) wrote in 2011 that he believed Dag Hammarskjöld’s 1961 death was a murder committed in part to benefit mining companies like Union Minière, after Hammarsköld had made the UN intervene in the Katanga crisis. Björkdahl based his assertion on interviews with witnesses of the plane crash near the border of the DRC with Zambia, and on archival documents. Former U. S. President Harry Truman commented that Hammarskjöld “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him’.”

In 1953, soon after his appointment as United Nations secretary general, Hammarskjöld was interviewed on radio by Edward R. Murrow. In this talk he declared: “But the explanation of how man should live a life of active social service in full harmony with himself as a member of the community of spirit, I found in the writings of those great medieval mystics [Meister Eckhart and Jan van Ruysbroek] for whom ‘self-surrender’ had been the way to self-realization, and who in ‘singleness of mind’ and ‘inwardness’ had found strength to say yes to every demand which the needs of their neighbours made them face, and to say yes also to every fate life had in store for them when they followed the call of duty as they understood it.”

His only book, Vägmärken (Markings), was published in 1963. A collection of his diary reflections, the book starts in 1925, when he was 20 years old, and ends at his death in 1961. This diary was found in his New York house, after his death, along with an undated letter addressed to then Swedish Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Leif Belfrage. In this letter, Dag writes, “These entries provide the only true ‘profile’ that can be drawn … If you find them worth publishing, you have my permission to do so”.

The foreword is written by W.H. Auden, a friend of Dag’s. Markings was described by a theologian, the late Henry P. Van Dusen, as “the noblest self-disclosure of spiritual struggle and triumph, perhaps the greatest testament of personal faith written … in the heat of professional life and amidst the most exacting responsibilities for world peace and order.”

Hammarskjöld writes, for example, “We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours. He who wills adventure will experience it – according to the measure of his courage. He who wills sacrifice will be sacrificed – according to the measure of his purity of heart.”

Markings is characterised by Hammarskjöld’s intermingling of prose and haiku poetry in a manner exemplified by the 17th-century Japanese poet Basho in his Narrow Roads to the Deep North. In his foreword to Markings, the English poet W. H. Auden quotes Hammarskjöld as stating “In our age, the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dag_Hammarskj%C3%B6ld

Excerpts from his book “Markings”:

“In a dream I walked with God through the deep places of creation; past walls that receded and gates that opened through hall after hall of silence, darkness and refreshment–the dwelling place of souls acquainted with light and warmth–until, around me, was an infinity into which we all flowed together and lived anew, like the rings made by raindrops falling upon wide expanses of calm dark waters.”

“When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is able to receive, and be grateful. When Love has matured and, through a dissolution of the self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover.”

“You wake from dreams of doom and–for a moment–you know: beyond all the noise and the gestures, the only real thing, love’s calm unwavering flame in the half-light of an early dawn.”

“Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions.”

“Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.”

“Friendship needs no words – it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.”

“I would rather live my life as though there is a God and die to find out that there isn’t, than to live my life as though there is no God and die to find out there is.”

“To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.

In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.”

“For all that has been,
Thank you.

For all that is to come,
Yes!”

“Forgiveness breaks the chain of causality because he who ‘forgives’ you–out of love–takes upon himself the consequences of what you have done. Forgiveness, therefore, always entails a sacrifice.

The price you must pay for your own liberation through another’s sacrifice is that you in turn must be willing to liberate in the same way, irrespective of the consequences to yourself.”

“This accidental meeting of possibilities calls itself ‘I.’

I ask: what am I doing here?

And, at once, this ‘I’ becomes unreal.”

“The longest journey Is the journey inwards. Of him who has chosen his destiny, Who has started upon his quest For the source of his being.”

“To preserve the silence within–amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens–no matter how many tramp across the parade ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.”

“Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for.”

“He is one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion.”

“Life only demands from you the strength you possess.”

“Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It *is*–is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.

To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your earing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance.”

“Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.”

“If only I may grow: firmer, simpler, — quieter, warmer.”

“The light died in the low clouds. Falling snow drank in the dusk. Shrouded in silence, the branches wrapped me in their peace. When the boundaries were erased, once again the wonder: that *I* exist.”

“You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds.”

“It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity.”

“Is life so wretched? Isn’t it rather your hands which are too small, your vision which is muddled? You are the one who must grow up.”

“At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose *your* self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I’s. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one–which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your *I*.”

“Doffing the ego’s safe glory, he finds his naked reality.”

“Never measure the height of a mountain, until you have reached the top. Then you will see how low it was.”

“Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.”

“It is not we who seek the Way, but the Way which seeks us. That is why you are faithful to it, even while you stand waiting, so long as you are prepared, and act the moment you are confronted by its demands.”

“God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder the source of which is beyond all reason.”

“Never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only he who keeps his eye fixed on the far horizon will find the right road. ”

“Acts of violence– Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death–and the meaninglessness of killing.”

“The present moment is significant, not as the bridge between past and future, but by reason of its contents, contents which can fill our emptiness and become ours, if we are capable of receiving them.”

“The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.”

“It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals–though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt–but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I–in complacent adjustment to alien demands.”

“When the sense of the earth unites with the sense of one’s body, one becomes earth of the earth, a plant among plants, an animal born from the soil and fertilizing it. In this union, the body is confirmed in its pantheism.”

“We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny, but what we put into it is ours.”

“It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.”

“Like wind– In it, with it, of it. Of it just like a sail, so light and strong that, even when it is bent flat, it gathers all the power of the wind without hampering its course.

Like light– In light, lit through by light, transformed into light. Like the lens which disappears in the light it focuses.

Like wind. Like light.

Just this–on these expanses, on these heights.”

“Jesus’ ‘lack of moral principles.’ He sat at meat with publicans and sinners, he consorted with harlots. Did he do this to obtain their votes? Or did he think that, perhaps, he could convert them by such ‘appeasement’? Or was his humanity rich and deep enough to make contact, even in them, with that in human nature which is common to all men, indestructible, and upon which the future is built?”

“Beneath the hush a whisper from long ago, promising peace of mind and a burden shared. No peace which is not peace for all, no rest until all has been fulfilled.”

“The ‘mystical experience’. Always here and now – in that freedom which is one with distance in that stillness which is born of silence. But – this is a freedom in the midst of action, a stillness in the midst of other human beings. The mystery is a constant reality to him who, in this world, is free from self-concern, a reality that grows peaceful and mature before the receptive attention of assent. ”

“I am the vessel. The draft is God’s. And God is the thirsty one.”

“That our pains and longings are thousandfold and can be anesthetized in a thousand different ways is as commonplace a truth as that, in the end, they are all one, and can only be overcome in one way. What you most need is to feel…”

“A heart pulsating in harmony with the circulation of sap and the flow of rivers? A body with the rhythms of the earth in its movements? No. Instead: a mind, shut off from the oxygen of alert senses, that has wasted itself on ‘treasons, stratagems and spoils’–of importance only within four walls. A tame animal–in whom the strength of the species has outspent itself, to no purpose.”

“I don’t know Who — or what — put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone — or Something — and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.”

“Is my contact with others anything more than a contact with reflections? Who or what can give me the power to transform the mirror into a doorway?”

“Somebody placed the shuttle in your hand: somebody who had already arranged the threads.”

“Didst thou give me this inescapable loneliness so that it would be easier for me to give thee all?”

“You are your own god – and are surprised when you find that the wolf pack is hunting you across the desolate ice fields of winter.”

“Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward—your destiny—are here and now.”

“In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way.”

Simone Weil

Simone Weil (3 February 1909 – 24 August 1943) was a French philosopher, Christian mystic, and political activist.

Weil’s life was marked by an exceptional compassion for the suffering of others; at the age of six, for instance, she refused to eat sugar after she heard that soldiers fighting in World War I had to go without. She died from tuberculosis during World War II, possibly exacerbated by malnutrition after refusing to eat more than the minimal rations that she believed were available to soldiers at the time.

After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks due to poor health and to devote herself to political activism, work that would see her assisting in the trade union movement, taking the side of the Anarchists known as the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War, and spending more than a year working as a labourer, mostly in auto factories, so she could better understand the working class.

Taking a path that was unusual among twentieth-century left-leaning intellectuals, she became more religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed. Weil wrote throughout her life, though most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. In the 1950s and 1960s, her work became famous on continental Europe and throughout the English-speaking world. Her thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across a wide range of fields. A meta study from the University of Calgary found that between 1995 and 2012 over 2,500 new scholarly works had been published about her. Although sometimes described as odd, humourless, and irritating, she inspired great affection in many of those who knew her. Albert Camus described her as “the only great spirit of our times”.

According to her friend and biographer, Simone Pétrement, Weil decided early in life that she would need to adopt masculine qualities and sacrifice opportunities to have love affairs in order to fully pursue her vocation to improve social conditions for the disadvantaged. From her late teenage years, Weil would generally disguise her “fragile beauty” by adopting a masculine appearance, hardly ever using makeup and often wearing men’s clothes.

Weil was a precocious student, proficient in Ancient Greek by age 12. She later learned Sanskrit after reading the Bhagavad Gita. Like the Renaissance thinker Pico della Mirandola, her interests in other religions were universal and she attempted to understand each religious tradition as an expression of transcendent wisdom.

In 1919, at 10 years of age, she declared herself a Bolshevik. In her late teens, she became involved in the workers’ movement. She wrote political tracts, marched in demonstrations, and advocated workers’ rights. At this time, she was a Marxist, pacifist, and trade unionist. While teaching in Le Puy, she became involved in local political activity, supporting the unemployed and striking workers despite criticism by some. Weil had never formally joined the Communist party, and in her twenties she became increasingly critical of Marxism. According to Pétrement, she was one of the first to identify a new form of oppression not anticipated by Marx, where élite bureaucrats could make life just as miserable for ordinary people as did the most exploitative capitalists.

In 1932, Weil visited Germany to help communist activists there. At the time, the German Marxists were considered to be the strongest and best organised communists in Western Europe, but Weil considered them no match for the then up-and-coming fascists. When she returned to France, her political friends in France dismissed her fears, thinking Germany would continue to be controlled by the centrists or those to the left. They were wrong. After Hitler rose to power in 1933, Weil spent much of her time trying to help German communists fleeing his regime. In 1936, despite her professed pacifism, she fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side.

Weil was born into a secular household and raised in “complete agnosticism”. As a teenager, she considered the existence of God for herself and decided nothing could be known either way. In her Spiritual Autobiography however, Weil records that she always had a Christian outlook, taking to heart from her earliest childhood the idea of loving one’s neighbour. Weil became attracted to the Christian faith beginning in 1935, the first of three pivotal experiences for her being when she was moved by the beauty of villagers singing hymns during an outdoor service that she stumbled across during a holiday to Portugal.

While in Assisi in the spring of 1937, Weil experienced a religious ecstasy in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli—the same church in which Saint Francis of Assisi had prayed. She was led to pray for the first time in her life as Cunningham relates:

“Below the town is the beautiful church and convent of San Damiano where Saint Clare once lived. Near that spot is the place purported to be where Saint Francis composed the larger part of his “Canticle of Brother Sun”. Below the town in the valley is the ugliest church in the entire environs: the massive baroque basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels, finished in the seventeenth century and rebuilt in the nineteenth century, which houses a rare treasure: a tiny Romanesque chapel that stood in the days of Saint Francis—the “Little Portion” where he would gather his brethren. It was in that tiny chapel that the great mystic Simone Weil first felt compelled to kneel down and pray.”

She had another, more powerful, revelation a year later while reciting George Herbert’s poem Love III, after which “Christ himself came down and took possession of me”, and, from 1938 on, her writings became more mystical and spiritual, while retaining their focus on social and political issues. She was attracted to Roman Catholicism, but declined to be baptized; preferring to remain outside due to “the love of those things that are outside Christianity”. During World War II, she lived for a time in Marseille, receiving spiritual direction from a Dominican friar. Around this time, she met the French Catholic author Gustave Thibon, who later edited some of her work.

Weil did not limit her curiosity to Christianity. She was keenly interested in other religious traditions—especially the Greek and Egyptian mysteries; Hinduism (especially the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita); and Mahayana Buddhism. She believed that all these and other traditions contained elements of genuine revelation, writing that:

“Greece, Egypt, ancient India, the beauty of the world, the pure and authentic reflection of this beauty in art and science…these things have done as much as the visibly Christian ones to deliver me into Christ’s hands as his captive. I think I might even say more.”

She was, nevertheless, opposed to religious syncretism, claiming that it effaced the particularity of the individual traditions:

“Each religion is alone true, that is to say, that at the moment we are thinking of it we must bring as much attention to bear on it as if there were nothing else … A “synthesis” of religion implies a lower quality of attention.”

In 1942, Weil traveled to the United States of America with her family. She had been reluctant to leave France, but agreed to do so as she wanted to see her parents to safety and knew they would not leave without her. She was also encouraged by the fact that it would be relatively easy for her to reach Britain from the United States, where she could join the French Resistance. She had hopes of being sent back to France as a covert agent. Weil lived briefly in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, and is remembered to have attended daily Mass at Corpus Christi Church there, where the Columbia student and Trappist monk Thomas Merton had been received into the Catholic Church. She then went to London, where she finally joined the French Resistance.

In 1943, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and instructed to rest and eat well. However, she refused special treatment because of her long-standing political idealism and her detachment from material things. Instead, she limited her food intake to what she believed residents of German-occupied France ate. She most likely ate even less, as she refused food on most occasions. Her condition quickly deteriorated, and she was moved to a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, England. After a lifetime of battling illness and frailty, Weil died in August 1943 from cardiac failure at the age of 34.

During her lifetime, Weil was only known to relatively narrow circles; even in France her essays were mostly read only by those interested in radical politics. Yet during the first decade after her death, Weil rapidly became famous, attracting attention throughout the West. For the 3rd quarter of the twentieth century, she was widely regarded as the most influential person in the world on new work concerning religious and spiritual matters. Her philosophical, social and political thought also became popular, although not to the same degree as her religious work.

As well as influencing fields of study, Weil deeply affected the personal lives of numerous individuals, Pope Paul VI for example said that Weil was one of his three greatest influences. Weil’s popularity began to decline in the late sixties and seventies. However more of her work was gradually published, leading to many thousands of new secondary works by Weil scholars; some of whom focused on achieving a deeper understanding of her religious, philosophical and political work. Others broadened the scope of Weil scholarship to investigate her applicability to fields like classical studies, cultural studies, education and even technical fields like ergonomics.

Many commentators who have assessed Weil as a person were highly positive; many described her as a saint, some even as the greatest saint of the twentieth century, including T. S. Eliot, Dwight Macdonald, Leslie Fiedler, and Robert Coles. Weil biographer Gabriella Fiori writes that Weil was “a moral genius in the orbit of ethics, a genius of immense revolutionary range.” In 1951 Albert Camus wrote that she was “the only great spirit of our times.” Foolish though she may have appeared at times—dropping a suitcase full of French resistance papers all over the sidewalk and scrambling to gather them up—her deep engagement with both the theory and practice of caritas, in all its myriad forms, functions as the unifying force of her life and thought. Gustave Thibon, the French philosopher and close friend, recounts their last meeting, not long before her death: “I will only say that I had the impression of being in the presence of an absolutely transparent soul which was ready to be reabsorbed into original light”. Weil’s first English biographer, Richard Rees, offers several possible explanations for her death, citing her compassion for the suffering of her countrymen in Occupied France and her love for and close imitation of Christ. Rees sums up by saying: “As for her death, whatever explanation one may give of it will amount in the end to saying that she died of love.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil

Excerpts from her writings:

“The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment, is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.”

“The extreme affliction which overtakes human beings does not create human misery, it merely reveals it.”

“One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world. Most people hardly ever realize this, because it is rare that the very same man thinks and puts his thought into action.”

“All sins are attempts to fill voids.”

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

“Love is not consolation. It is light.”

“Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be obtained only by someone who is detached. ”

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

“Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling. ”

“All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.”

“Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand.”

“Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.”

“Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity.”

“If we go down into ourselves, we find that we possess exactly what we desire.”

“We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.”

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this apparatus and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.”

“Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection, there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sigh that you will recognize it.”

“Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.”

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”

“Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.”

“The sea is not less beautiful in our eyes because we know that sometimes ships are wrecked by it.”

“True definition of science: the study of the beauty of the world.”

“Humility is attentive patience. Compassion directed toward oneself is true humility.”

“He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.”

“We must not wish for the disappearance of our troubles but for the grace to transform them.”

“Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul.”

“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”

“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.”

“A mind enclosed in language is in prison.”

“It seemed to me certain, and I still think so today, that one can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms. ”

“Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, “What are you going through?”

“A science which does not bring us nearer to God is worthless. ”
“The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. … Every separation is a link.”

“Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.”

“We cannot take a step toward the heavens. God crosses the universe and comes to us.”

“The capacity to pay attention to an afflicted person is something very rare, very difficult; it is nearly a miracle. It is a miracle. Nearly all those who believe they have this capacity do not. Warmth, movements of the heart, and pity are not sufficient.”

“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.”

“Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.”

“To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”

“Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.”

“There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.”

“To die for God is not a proof of faith in God. To die for an unknown and repulsive convict who is a victim of injustice, that is a proof of faith in God.”

“An imaginary divinity has been given to man so that he may strip himself of it.”

“The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God. Afterward he will stay near the entrance so that he can gently push all those who come near into the opening.”

“God created through love and for love. God did not create anything except love itself, and the means to love. He created love in all its forms. He created beings capable of love from all possible distances. Because no other could do it, he himself went to the greatest possible distance, the infinite distance. This infinite distance between God and God, this supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others, this marvel of love, is the crucifixion.”

“The beauty of this world is Christ’s tender smile coming to us through matter.”

“And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.’ To remit debts is to renounce our own personality. It means renouncing everything that goes to make up our ego, without any exception. It means knowing that in the ego there is nothing whatever, no psychological element, that external circumstances could not do away with. It means accepting that truth. It means being happy that things should be so.”

“There are those people who try to elevate their souls like someone who continually jumps from a standing position in the hope that forcing oneself to jump all day— and higher every day— they would no longer fall back down, but rise to heaven. Thus occupied, they no longer look to heaven. We cannot even take one step toward heaven. The vertical direction is forbidden to us. But if we look to heaven long-term, God descends and lifts us up. God lifts us up easily. As Aeschylus says, ‘That which is divine is without effort.’ There is an ease in salvation more difficult for us than all efforts. In one of Grimm’s accounts, there is a competition of strength between a giant and a little tailor. The giant throws a stone so high that it takes a very long time before falling back down. The little tailor throws a bird that never comes back down. That which does not have wings always comes back down in the end.”

“The form that the love of religion takes in the soul differs a great deal according to the circumstances of out lives. Some circumstances prevent the very birth of this love; others kill it before it has been able to grow very strong. In affliction some men, in spite of themselves, develop a hatred and contempt for religions because the cruelty, pride, or corruption of certain of its ministers have made them suffer. There are others who have been reared from their earliest youth in surroundings impregnated with a spirit of this sort. We must conclude that in such cases, by God’s mercy, the love of our neighbor and the love of the beauty of the world, if they are sufficiently strong and pure, will be enough to raise the soul to any height.”

“I had never read any of the mystics, because I have never felt called to read them. In reading, as in other things, I always attempt practical obedience. There is nothing more favorable to intellectual progress, for as far as possible I do not read anything except for that which I am hungry in the moment, when I am hungry for it, and then I do not read … I eat. God mercifully prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it would be evident to me that I had not fabricated this absolutely unexpected contact.”

“In any case, when I imagine baptism as the next concrete act toward my entry into the Church, no thought troubles me more than separating myself from the immense and afflicted mass of unbelievers. I have the essential need — and I think I can say the vocation — to mingle with people and various human cultures by taking on the same ‘color’ as them, at least to the degree that my conscience does not oppose it. I would disappear among them until they show me who they really are, without disguising themselves from me, because I desire to know them to the point that I love them just as they are.”

“God rewards the soul that focuses on Him with attention and love, and God rewards that soul by exercising a rigorous compulsion on it, mathematically proportional to this attention and love. We must abandon ourselves to this pressure, and run to the precise point where it leads, and not a single step further, not even in the direction of what is good. At the same time, we must continue to focus on God, with ever more love and attention, and in this way obtain an even greater compulsion — to become an object of a compulsion that possesses for itself a perpetually growing portion of the soul. Once God’s compulsion possesses the whole soul, one has reached the state of perfection. But no matter what degree we reach, we must not accomplish anything beyond what we are irresistibly pressured (compelled) to do, not even in the way of good.”

“When I think of the Crucifixion, I commit the sin of envy.”

“Never, in any case, is any effort of true attention lost. It is always completely effective on the spiritual plane, and therefore also, in addition, on the inferior plane of the intelligence, for all spiritual light enlightens the intelligence.”

“There are four evidences of divine mercy here below. The favors of God to beings capable of contemplation (these states exist and form part of their experience as creatures). The radiance of these beings, and their compassion, which is the divine compassion in them. The beauty of the world. The fourth evidence is the complete absence of mercy here below.”

“But we can be nearly sure that those whose love for God has caused their pure loves here below to disappear are false friends of God. Our neighbour, our friends, religious ceremonies and the beauty of the world do not fall in rank to unreal things after direct contact between God and the soul. On the contrary, only then do these things become real. Previously, they were half-dreams. Previously, they had no reality.”

“The entire virtue of religious practices can be conceived from the Buddhist tradition concerning the recitation of the name of the Lord. It is said that the Buddha made a vow to raise up to himself all those who recite his name with the desire to be saved by him, into the Land of Purity; and that because of this vow the recitation of the name of the Lord really has the virtue of transforming the soul. Religion is nothing else but this promise of God. Every religious practice, every rite, every liturgy is a form of the recitation of the name of the Lord, and must in principle really have virtue, the virtue of saving anyone devoted to it with desire. Every religion pronounces the name of the Lord in its own language. Most often, it is better for people to name God in their own native language rather than in a foreign language. Apart from exceptions, the soul is incapable of completely abandoning itself in the moment if it must impose on itself even a minor effort in searching for words in a strange language, even when they know it well.”

“The beautiful is the experimental proof that the incarnation is possible. Beauty captivates the flesh in order to obtain permission to pass right to the soul.”

“You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.”

“The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself.”

 

Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) is an important occult philosopher and mystic. An Austrian, he was greatly influenced by Goethe’s works, and worked for a time at the Goethe archives at Weimer. He later became involved in the Theosophical Society, and founded a new German branch. But although obviously influenced by the Theosophical World-view (the concept of seven planes, cosmic cycles and sub-cycles, etc) Steiner’s approach and teachings differed markedly from those of the rest of Theosophists. Whereas the Theosophists, under the inspiration of Blavatsky’s orientation, looked to the East – to India and Tibet, for inspiration – Steiner was preiminantly a European mystic. He was interested in European occultism, European mysticism, European Christianity. In 1907 he was initiated into the Rosicrucians. By 1910 he was lecturing heavily on the Gospels, which gave him a popular following among the Germans he associated with.

Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published philosophical works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he founded a spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy; other influences include Goethean science and Rosicrucianism.

In the first, more philosophically oriented phase of his spiritual journey, Steiner attempted to find a synthesis between science and spirituality; his philosophical work of these years, which he termed spiritual science, sought to apply the clarity of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy to spiritual questions, differentiating this approach from what he considered to be vaguer approaches to mysticism. In a second phase, beginning around 1907, he began working collaboratively in a variety of artistic media, including drama, the movement arts (developing a new artistic form, eurythmy) and architecture, culminating in the building of the Goetheanum, a cultural centre to house all the arts. In the third phase of his work, beginning after World War I, Steiner worked to establish various practical endeavors, including Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and anthroposophical medicine.

Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual approach. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s world view, in which “Thinking … is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.” A consistent thread that runs from his earliest philosophical phase through his later spiritual orientation is the goal of demonstrating that there are no essential limits to human knowledge.

Steiner wrote only a few books, but during his period as a teacher he gave thousands of lectures on all aspects of occultism and esotericism, as well as education, music, agriculture, and economics. In this enormous corpus of work he laid out his metaphysical system, a unique but limited structure, based on elements of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Plato, Goethe, and Christianity. Indian influence in his ideas was for all intents and purposes nil, unlike the Theosophists, and the Theosophical Sanskrit terminology which appears in his early lectures was soon replaced by Christian European terms, such as spirit, soul, etc.

Steiner claimed to have clairvoyant or occult vision; to be able to directly perceive occult realities, spiritual beings, and the Theosophists’ Akashic Record. It was on the basis of reading this akashic record that Steiner developed his cosmology, theory of human evolution, Christology, etc. He claimed to be able to actually see back in time to these ancient events imprinted on the cosmic aether.

Steiner’s current legacy lies in education and agriculture. His education philosophy made him a notable figure among progressive educators just after the First World War, and his “Waldorf schools” are still known and respected by many today (although quite understandably everyone tends to look down on his associated cosmology in a rather dismissive way). In the 1940’s and ’50’s in Australia at least the Steiner people developed the Camp Hill Communities (for example Warranala in Sydney), with curitative education of other retarded children. In many ways these were the forerunners of the modern communes, with aspects of closed monastic communities.

Steiner’s extraordinary system of agriculture, called bio-dynamics, rejects chemical fertilisers, and is based on the subtle formative forces of plant growth. With the help of his second wife, Marie von Sivers, he developed a system of flowing movement, “eurythmy”, which seems, especially in Curative Erythmy to be at least superficially camparable to Chinese disciplines such as Tai Chi, although totally independent of them (for Steiner the Greek influence was always primary).

Rudolph Steiner was certainly one of the most important thinkers of our age; a man who should surely go alongside Jung as a great visionary explorer of consciousness, even if public acknowledgment is not likely whilst the present sceptical-materialistic paradigm reigns.

Yet in spite of his great intellect and intuition of other worlds, Steiner was never really able to overcome certain limitations in his own thinking. He never changed his cosmology, which remained ridiculous; even in later lectures he would refer back to his very early book Cosmic Memory. He would have been a more successful thinker had he changed his concepts and allowed his ideas to develop and evolve, which is something Carl Jung did. Indeed, as we have seen, in the realm of psychological development, there are a number of parallels between Steiner, Jung, and Feud. All were working on much the same thing – the unknown psychic realities all around us, and the way these determine even our conscious thoughts and responses – in the same time and place.

Yet Steiner goes beyond psychology. Like other occult and gnostic teachers (e.g. the Gnostics and Kabbalists, Blavatsky, Edgar Cayce, and even Freudian and Jungian psychology) Steiner was tapping into something. That “something” goes beyond the merely human psychic. It would seem to be the intuition of the his-tory of the cosmos, not just the present physical cosmos known to science, but perhaps of other stages and cycles of evolution as well.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner
http://kheper.net/topics/Anthroposophy/Steiner.htm

Excerpts from his writings:

“Love starts when we push aside our ego and make room for someone else.”

“If we do not believe within ourselves this deeply rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find the strength to evolve into something higher.”

“Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.”

“Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings who are able of themselves to impart purpose and direction to their lives. The need for imagination, a sense of truth, and a feeling of responsibility—these three forces are the very nerve of education.”

“You will not be good teachers if you focus only on what you do and not upon who you are.”

“In order to approach a creation as sublime as the Bhagavad-Gita with full understanding it is necessary to attune our soul to it.”

“The time has come to realize that supersensible knowledge has now to arise from the materialistic grave.”

“The sun with loving light makes bright for me each day, the soul with spirit power gives strength unto my limbs. In sunlight shining clear I revere, Oh God, the strength of humankind, which thou has planted in my soul, that I may with all my might, may love to work and learn. From thee stream light and strength to thee rise love and thanks.”

“Where is the book in which the teacher can read about what teaching is? The children themselves are this book. We should not learn to teach out of any book other than the one lying open before us and consisting of the children themselves.”

“That which secures life from exhaustion lies in the unseen world, deep at the roots of things.”

“Today certain definite ideas are developing out of the Egyptian ideas. What is called Darwinism today did not arise because of external reasons. We are the same souls who, in Egypt, received the pictures of the animal forms of man’s forebears. The old views have awakened again, but man has descended more deeply into the material world.”

“In the universe we have not to do with repetitions, each time that a cycle is passed, something new is added to the world’s evolution and to at its human stage of development.”

“The idea of the freedom of the human will has found enthusiastic supporters and stubborn opponents in plenty. There are those who, in their moral fervor, label anyone a man of limited intelligence who can deny so patent a fact as freedom. Opposed to them are others who regard it as the acme of unscientific thinking for anyone to believe that the uniformity of natural law is broken in the sphere of human action and thinking. One and the same thing is thus proclaimed, now as the most precious possession of humanity, now as its most fatal illusion.”

“I beg you to see this in the right light, and to combine it with the feeling about what happened through the Mystery of Golgotha, in which his actual sacrifice consisted: namely in leaving the spiritual spheres in order to live with the earth and the human beings on the earth and to consolidate the impulse he gave for further human evolution on earth.”

“He who is unwilling to trust to the power of thinking cannot, in fact, enlighten himself regarding higher spiritual facts. There slumber in every human being faculties by means of which he can acquire for himself a knowledge of higher worlds. Mystics, Gnostics, Theosophists — all speak of a world of soul and spirit which for them is just as real as the world we see with our physical eyes and touch with our physical hands.”

“To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.”

“Live through deeds of love, and let others live with tolerance for their unique intentions.”

“Truth is a free creation of the human spirit, that never would exist at all if we did not generate it ourselves. The task of understanding is not to replicate in conceptual form something that already exists, but rather to create a wholly new realm, that together with the world given to our senses constitutes the fullness of reality.”

“Each individual is a species unto him/herself.”

“Because of their very nature, science and logical thinking can never decide what is possible or impossible. Their only function is to explain what has been ascertained by experience and observation.”

“As regards what is independent of our bodily makeup we are all individually made; each one of us is his or her own self, an individual. With the exception of the far less important differences that show up as racial or national differences … but which are (if you have a sense for this you cannot help noticing it) mere trifles by comparison with differences in individual gifts and skills: with the exception of these we are all equal as human beings … as regards our external, physical humanity. We are equal as human beings, here in the physical world, specifically in that we all have the same human form and all manifest a human countenance. The fact that we all bear a human countenance and encounter one another as external, physical human beings… this makes us equal on this footing. We differ from one another in our individual gifts which, however, belong to our inner nature.”

“Spiritual science is not something intended simply to satisfy our inquisitiveness. We are not sitting here simply because we are more inquisitive than other people about the spiritual world, but because we have some feeling for the fact that human beings in the future will not be able to live without spiritual science. All efforts which do not take this fact into account will become decadent. But life is arranged in such a way that those who resist spiritual knowledge at the present time will have the opportunity to approach it in later incarnations. But there must be outposts. Human beings who through their karma have a longing for spiritual knowledge already in the present can become outposts through this. You have this opportunity because there must be outposts, and you can be among them. Other human beings who cannot yet come to spiritual knowledge according to their karma, even though they do not reject it, will find later the longing for spiritual knowledge arising within them, more from the general karma of mankind.”

“When somebody has done something like that hurt another person, it has a certain effect on his whole life. Any action of man that hurts another being or creature or the world in general, hinders the doer in his development. This is what the pilgrimage of life means, that the primary force of the soul, as it goes from incarnation to incarnation, is set for further development. And this development progresses in such a fashion that man as it were is always putting obstacles in his own path. You must not think that man would be better off if he put no obstacles in his own way. It is only by setting himself these handicaps that he grows strong and acquires experience, for it is the very eradicating and overcoming of these hindrances that will make him the strong being he must become by the end of earth evolution. It is thoroughly in keeping with earth evolution that he puts stones in his own path. If he did not have to muster the strength to remove these obstacles he would not acquire this strength at all. Then the world would be the poorer. We must altogether disregard the good and evil connected with these hindrances and look solely at the wisdom of the world that intended, right from the beginning, that man should have the possibility of setting himself hindrances in earthly evolution so that in removing them he could acquire strength for later. We could even say that the wise guidance of the world allowed man to become evil and gave him the possibility of doing harm, so that in repairing the harm and overcoming the evil he can become stronger in the course of karmic development than he would have become had he reached his goal without effort. This is how we should understand the significance and justification of obstacles and hindrances.”

“Entrance into the spiritual world is imagined in a way too similar to an experience of the senses; therefore, what is experienced when reading about this world is considered to be much too much of the nature of thought. But if we have truly absorbed these thoughts we are already within this world and have only to become quite clear about the fact that we have already experienced, unnoticed, what we thought we had received merely as an intellectual communication.”

“When we speak on the physical plane and tell our thoughts to someone, we have the feeling that our thoughts come from our soul, that we have to remember them at this particular moment. Speaking as a true occultist and not someone who just tells his experiences from memory, we will feel that our thoughts arise as living beings. We must be glad if we are blessed at the right moment with the approach of a thought as a real being.”

“A true prayer has something to give to all of us, whatever stage of development we may have reached. The simplest person, who perhaps knows nothing more than the words of the prayer, may still be open to the influence of the prayer on his soul, and it is the prayer which can call forth the power to raise him higher. But, however high a stage we may have reached, we have never finished with a prayer; it can always raise us to a still higher level. And the Lord’s Prayer is not for speaking only. It can call forth the mystical frame of mind, and it can be the subject of higher forms of meditation and concentration. This could be said of many other prayers.

Since the Middle Ages, however, something has come to the fore, a kind of egotism, which can impair the purity of prayer and its accompanying state of mind. If we make use of prayer with the aim only of withdrawing into ourselves and making ourselves more perfect — as many Christians did during the Middle Ages and perhaps still do today — and if we fail to look out at the world around us with whatever illumination we may have received, then prayer will succeed only in separating us from the world, and making us feel like strangers in it. That often happened to those who used prayer in connection with false asceticism and seclusion. These people wished to be perfect not in the sense of the rose, which adorns itself in order to add beauty to the garden, but on their own account, so as to find blessedness within their own souls.

Anyone who seeks for God in his soul and refuses to take what he has gained out into the world will find that his refusal turns back on him in revenge.”

“The way in which the experiences here on earth are processed, is such that only a very small portion of these experiences are retained; every ability one acquires needs much more than what is retained in the end. For example, one does not remember how one has learned to write. Acquiring the ability to write was accompanied by a variety of experiences. These experiences contract, as it were, into a single power, the skill of writing. What at first is outer experience turns into a skill. In all experiences there lies such a possibility, such an opportunity: the experiences one gains in life can later on transform into abilities, talents. The conversion takes place after death. When the person is born again they will appear as talents, as capabilities. This is the basic feeling in devachan [Heaven]: that all experiences are transformed to capabilities, life-skills. That results in a feeling of bliss…. a stream of happiness permeates the people. All creative activity evokes a feeling of bliss. The relationships that have been spun in the world are much more intense in devachan than here on Earth. The limitations of space and time fall away. One can in fact penetrate other people.”

“One never learns to know people from a world view that is merely outwardly oriented. Once an viewpoint that is clouded by materialism orientates itself only on the outer appearance of a person, once the human being does not know what hides behind this physical corporality, and he thereby does not get the opportunity to look behind the scenes so to speak, he is not at all capable, really unable, to understand something about the forces that guide and direct life. That is precisely the task of spiritual knowledge. It has to be admitted that this task is not currently fulfilled in the right measure. [….] However, that is not what really matters, what is important is that which becomes possible through spiritual insight. It can be something that not only teaches us, but provides powerful schooling for our inner soul forces as well. That is what can best be brought about through spiritual knowledge, when we look at the spiritual worldview from out of the perspective of what can be developed through it.”

“The first ground rule for the study of man is that one does not have to think too much. That will seem strange at first, but you will soon understand what I mean. By thinking about something a man does obviously not learn particularly much about anything. If he only broods on what he saw, he will as a rule not make much sense of it.

Thus If one wants to learn about the world, one should not expect too much from thinking; It is not so important to think about something. When one needs to consider the facts, one must of course do that. But one must not consider this to be the main purpose. It does not bring any knowledge to brood on things afterwards. One has to look at other things, compare them and find the coherences. The more one looks for the coherences, the more one becomes aware of nature. Those who only think about nature find nothing more there than what they already knew.

If someone is a materialist, then he also talks about nature in a materialistic way, because that is how he stands in the world. He discovers nothing new. If someone talks about nature in an idealistic way, he does that because he already is an idealist. One can always find that by thinking, people find only what they already knew beforehand. Proper thinking arises only when one is led by the facts.”

“Everything that happens in the physical sense-world has its counterpart in the spiritual world. When a hand is moved, there is more before you than the moving hand seen by your eye, there is my thought and my volition: ‘My hand must move.’ A spiritual background is there. Whereas the ocular, sensible impression of the hand passes away, its spiritual counterpart remains engraved in the spiritual world and unfailingly leaves a trace there. So that, when our spiritual eyes are opened, we can follow the traces and find the spiritual counterpart of everything that has happened in the world. Nothing can happen in the world without leaving such traces. Let us suppose the spiritual investigator lets his gaze wander back to the days of Charlemagne, or to Roman times, or to ancient Greece. Everything that happened in those times is preserved in the trace left by its spiritual prototype, and can be observed in the spiritual world. This kind of vision is called ‘reading the Akashic records’.”

“People think they are free to make resolves, to think and to form ideas, but they are guided by spiritual beings behind the physical world. What men call their understanding, by which they believe they can control the course of time, is the expression of spiritual beings behind.”

“What characteristics must we specially cultivate if we wish to work in a beneficial way on our will life? Most beneficial of all in our will nature is the influence of a life directed in its entire character towards a comprehension of karma. We might also say a soul life which strives to develop, as its primary characteristic, serenity and acceptance of our destiny. And what better way can one find of developing this acceptance, this calmness of soul in the presence of one’s destiny, than by making karma an actual content in one’s life?

What do we mean by this? It means that — not merely theoretically but in a living way — when our own sorrow or the sorrow of another comes upon us, when we experience joy or the heaviest blow of fate, we shall really be fully aware that, in a certain higher sense, we ourselves have given the occasion for this painful blow of fate. […] our serenity, our acceptance of our karma in all occurrences, strengthens our will. We grow stronger in facing life with serenity, never weaker. Through anger and impatience we become weak. In the face of every occurrence we are strong when we are serene. On the contrary, we become continually weaker in will through moroseness and an unnatural rebellion against destiny.”

“Eventually all human evil springs from what we call selfishness. From the smallest human faults to the most immense crimes, when considering what we can designate as human imperfection and human wickedness, whether it seemingly originates from the soul or more from out of the bodily nature, the common basic characterization will be egotism. We find the actual meaning of evil in concurrence with human selfishness; and all striving to rise above imperfections and evil can be seen as commitment to fight against what we call selfishness. There has been much contemplation on this or that ethical principle, about these or other moral foundations; exactly this diving deeper into ethical principles and into moral foundations shows that selfishness is the common basis of all human evil. And so one can say: man works himself out of evil here in the physical world, inasmuch as he overcomes egotism.”

“The reality of the spiritual world was to me as certain as that of the physical. I felt the need, however, for a sort of justification for this assumption. I wished to be able to say to myself that the experience of the spiritual world is just as little an illusion as is that of the physical world. With regard to geometry I said to myself: “Here one is permitted to know something which the mind alone, through its own power, experiences.” In this feeling I found the justification for the spiritual world that I experienced, even as, so to speak, for the physical. And in this way I talked about this. I had two conceptions which were naturally undefined, but which played a great role in my mental life even before my eighth year. I distinguished things as those “which are seen” and those “which are not seen.”

I am relating these matters quite frankly, in spite of the fact that those persons who are seeking for evidence to prove that anthroposophy is fantastic will, perhaps, draw the conclusion from this that even as a child I was marked by a gift for the fantastic: no wonder, then, that a fantastic philosophy should also have evolved within me.

But it is just because I know how little I have followed my own inclinations in forming conceptions of a spiritual world – having on the contrary followed only the inner necessity of things – that I myself can look back quite objectively upon the childlike unaided manner in which I confirmed for myself by means of geometry the feeling that I must speak of a world “which is not seen.”

Only I must also say that I loved to live in that world. For I should have been forced to feel the physical world as a sort of spiritual darkness around me had it not received light from that side.”

Evelyn Underhill

Evelyn Underhill (6 December 1875 – 15 June 1941) was an English Anglo-Catholic mystic, writer, and pacifist known for her numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, in particular Christian mysticism. In the English-speaking world, she was one of the most widely read writers on such matters in the first half of the 20th century. No other book of its type—until the appearance in 1946 of Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy—met with success to match that of her best-known work, Mysticism, published in 1911.

Underhill was born in Wolverhampton. She was a poet and novelist, as well as a pacifist and mystic. An only child, she described her early mystical insights as “abrupt experiences of the peaceful, undifferentiated plane of reality—like the “still desert” of the mystic—in which there was no multiplicity nor need of explanation.” The meaning of these experiences became a lifelong quest and a source of private angst, provoking her to research and write.

Both her father and her husband were writers (on the law), London barristers and yachtsmen. She and her husband, Hubert Stuart Moore, grew up together and were married on 3 July 1907. The couple had no children. She travelled regularly within Europe, primarily Switzerland, France and Italy where she pursued her interests in art and Catholicism, visiting numerous churches and monasteries. Neither her husband (a Protestant) nor her parents shared her interest in spiritual matters.

She was a prolific author and published over 30 books either under her maiden name, Underhill, or under the pseudonym “John Cordelier”, as was the case for the 1912 book The Spiral Way. Initially an agnostic, she gradually began to acquire an interest in Neoplatonism and from there became increasingly drawn to Catholicism against the objections of her husband, becoming eventually a prominent Anglo-Catholic. Her spiritual mentor from 1921 to 1924 was Baron Friedrich von Hügel, who was appreciative of her writing yet concerned with her focus on mysticism and who encouraged her to adopt a much more Christocentric view as opposed to the theistic and intellectual one she had previously held. She described him as “the most wonderful personality, so saintly, truthful, sane and tolerant” and was influenced toward more charitable, down-to-earth activities. After his death in 1925, her writings became more focused on the Holy Spirit and she became prominent in the Anglican Church as a lay leader of spiritual retreats, a spiritual director for hundreds of individuals, guest speaker, radio lecturer and proponent of contemplative prayer.

Underhill came of age in the Edwardian era, at the turn of the 20th century and like most of her contemporaries had a decided romantic bent. The enormous excitement in those days was mysteriously compounded of the psychic, the psychological, the occult, the mystical, the medieval, the advance of science, the apotheosis of art, the re-discovery of the feminine and an unashamedly sensuous and the most ethereally “spiritual”. Anglicanism seemed to her out-of-key with this, her world. She sought the centre of life as she and many of her generation conceived it, not in the state religion, but in experience and the heart. This age of “the soul” was one of those periods when a sudden easing of social taboos brings on a great sense of personal emancipation and desire for an El Dorado despised by an older, more morose and insensitive generation.

As an only child she was devoted to her parents, and later to her husband. She was fully engaged in the life of a barrister’s daughter and wife, including the entertainment and charitable work that entailed, and pursued a daily regimen that included writing, research, worship, prayer and meditation. It was a fundamental axiom of hers that all of life was sacred, as that was what “incarnation” was about.

Underhill wrote three highly unconventional though profoundly spiritual novels. Like Charles Williams and later, Susan Howatch, Underhill uses her narratives to explore the sacramental intersection of the physical with the spiritual. She then uses that sacramental framework very effectively to illustrate the unfolding of a human drama. Her novels are entitled The Grey World (1904), The Lost Word (1907), and The Column of Dust (1909).

Underhill’s novels suggest that perhaps for the mystic, two worlds may be better than one. For her, mystical experience seems inseparable from some kind of enhancement of consciousness or expansion of perceptual and aesthetic horizons—to see things as they are, in their meanness and insignificance when viewed in opposition to the divine reality, but in their luminosity and grandeur when seen bathed in divine radiance. But at this stage the mystic’s mind is subject to fear and insecurity, its powers undeveloped. The first novel takes us only to this point. Further stages demand suffering, because mysticism is more than merely vision or cultivating a latent potentiality of the soul in cosy isolation. According to Underhill’s view, the subsequent pain and tension, and final loss of the private painful ego-centered life for the sake of regaining one’s true self, has little to do with the first beatific vision.

Her two later novels are built on the ideal of total self-surrender even to the apparent sacrifice of the vision itself, as necessary for the fullest possible integration of human life. This was for her the equivalent of working out within, the metaphorical intent of the life story of Jesus. One is reunited with the original vision—no longer as mere spectator but as part of it. This dimension of self-loss and resurrection is worked out in The Lost Word, but there is some doubt as to its general inevitability. In The Column of Dust, the heroine’s physical death reinforces dramatically the mystical death to which she has already surrendered to. Two lives are better than one but only on the condition that a process of painful re-integration intervenes to re-establish unity between Self and Reality.

All her characters derive their interest from the theological meaning and value which they represent and it is her ingenious handling of so much difficult symbolic material that makes her work psychologically interesting as a forerunner of such 20th-century writers as Susan Howatch, whose successful novels also embody the psychological value of religious metaphor and the traditions of Christian mysticism. Her first novel received critical acclaim, but her last was generally derided. However, her novels give remarkable insight into what we may assume was her decision to avoid what St. Augustine described as the temptation of fuga in solitudinem (“the flight into solitude”), but instead acquiescing to a loving, positive acceptance of this world. Not looking back, by this time she was already working on her magnum opus.

Underhill’s greatest book, Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, was published in 1911, and is distinguished by the very qualities which make it inappropriate as a straightforward textbook. The spirit of the book is romantic, engaged, and theoretical rather than historical or scientific. Underhill has little use for theoretical explanations and the traditional religious experience, formal classifications or analysis. She dismisses William James’ pioneering study, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), and his “four marks of the mystic state” (ineffability, noetic quality, transcience, and passivity). James had admitted that his own constitution shut him off almost entirely from the enjoyment of mystical states thus his treatment was purely objective. Underhill substituted (1) mysticism is practical, not theoretical, (2) mysticism is an entirely spiritual activity, (3) The business and method of mysticism is love. (4) mysticism entails a definite psychological experience. Her insistence on the psychological approach was that it was the glamorous science of the pre-war period, offering the potential key to the secrets of human advances in intelligence, creativity, and genius, and already psychological findings were being applied in theology (i.e., William Sanday’s Christologies Ancient and Modern).

She divided her subject into two parts; the first, an introduction, and the second, a detailed study of the nature and development of human consciousness. In the first section, in order to free the subject of mysticism from confusion and misapprehension, she approached it from the point of view of the psychologist, the symbolist and the theologian. To separate mysticism from its most dubious connection she included a chapter on mysticism and magic. At the time, and still today, mysticism is associated with the occult, magic, secret rites, and fanaticism, while she knew the mystics throughout history to be the world’s spiritual pioneers.

She divided her map of “the way” into five stages: the first was the “Awakening of Self.” She quotes Henry Suso (disciple of Meister Eckhart):

“That which the Servitor saw had no form neither any manner of being; yet he had of it a joy such as he might have known in the seeing of shapes and substances of all joyful things. His heart was hungry, yet satisfied, his soul was full of contentment and joy: his prayers and his hopes were fulfilled.”

Underhill tells how Suso’s description of how the abstract truth (related to each soul’s true nature and purpose), once remembered, contains the power of fulfilment became the starting point of her own path. The second stage she presents as psychological “Purgation of Self,” quoting the Theologia Germanica (14th century, anonymous) regarding the transcendence of ego (Underhill’s “little self”):

“We must cast all things from us and strip ourselves of them and refrain from claiming anything for our own.”

The third stage she titles “Illumination” and quotes William Law:

“Everything in nature, is descended out that which is eternal, and stands as a visible outbirth of it, so when we know how to separate out the grossness, death, and darkness from it, we find it in its eternal state.”

The fourth stage she describes as the “Dark Night of the Soul” (which her correspondence leads us to believe she struggled with throughout her life) where one is deprived of all that has been valuable to the lower self, and quoting Mechthild of Magdeburg:

“…since Thou hast taken from me all that I had of Thee, yet of Thy grace leave me the gift which every dog has by nature: that of being true to Thee in my distress, when I am deprived of all consolation. This I desire more fervently than Thy heavenly Kingdom.”

And last she devotes a chapter to the unitive life, the sum of the mystic way:

“When love has carried us above all things into the Divine Dark, there we are transformed by the Eternal Word Who is the image of the Father; and as the air is penetrated by the sun, thus we receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us, and penetrating us.” (Ruysbroech)

Where Underhill struck new ground was in her insistence that this state of union produced a glorious and fruitful creativeness, so that the mystic who attains this final perfectness is the most active doer – not the reclusive dreaming lover of God.

“We are all the kindred of the mystics. Strange and far away from us though they seem, they are not cut off from us by some impassable abyss. They belong to us; the giants, the heroes of our race. As the achievement of genius belongs not to itself only but also to the society that brought it forth; the supernal accomplishment of the mystics is ours also our guarantee of the end to which immanent love, the hidden steersman is moving us on the path toward the Real. They come back to us from an encounter with life’s most august secret, filled with amazing tidings which they can hardly tell. We, longing for some assurance, urge them to pass on their revelation, but they cannot, only fragments of the Symbolic Vision. According to their strength and passion, these lovers of the Absolute have not shrunk from the suffering. Beauty and agony have called, and have awakened a heroic response. For them the winter is over. Life new, unquenchable and lovely comes to meet them with the dawn.”

The book ends with an extremely valuable appendix, a kind of who’s who of mysticism, which shows its persistence and interconnection from century to century.

Among the mystics, Jan Van Ruysbroeck was to her the most influential and satisfying of all the medieval mystics, and she found herself very much at one with him in the years when he was working as an unknown priest in Brussels, for she herself had also a hidden side.

“His career which covers the greater part of the fourteenth century, that golden age of Christian Mysticism, seems to exhibit within the circle of a single personality, and carry up to a higher term than ever before, all the best attainments of the Middle Ages in the realm of Eternal life. The central doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood, and of the soul’s power to become the Son of God, it is this raised to the nth degree of intensity…and demonstrated with the exactitude of the mathematician, and the passion of a poet, which Ruysbroeck gives us…the ninth and tenth chapters of The Sparkling Stone the high water mark of mystical literature. Nowhere else do we find such a combination of soaring vision with the most delicate and intimate psychological analysis. The old Mystic sitting under his tree, seems here to be gazing at and reporting to us the final secrets of that Eternal World.”

One of her most significant influences and important collaborations was with the Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian mystic, author, and world traveler. They published a major translation of the work of Kabir (100 Poems of Kabir, Calling Songs of Kabir) together in 1915, to which she wrote the introduction. He introduced her to the spiritual genius of India which she expressed enthusiastically in a letter:

“This is the first time I have had the privilege of being with one who is a Master in the things I care so much about but know so little of as yet: & I understand now something of what your writers mean when they insist on the necessity and value of the personal teacher and the fact that he gives something which the learner cannot get in any other way. It has been like hearing the language of which I barely know the alphabet, spoken perfectly.”

They did not keep up their correspondence in later years. Both suffered debilitating illnesses in the last year of life and died in the summer of 1941, greatly distressed by the outbreak of World War II.

Evelyn in 1921 was to all outward appearances, in an assured and enviable position. She had been asked by the University of Oxford to give the first of a new series of lectures on religion, and she was the first woman to have such an honour. She was an authority on her own subject of mysticism and respected for her research and scholarship. Her writing was in demand, and she had an interesting and notable set of friends, devoted readers, a happy marriage and affectionate and loyal parents. At the same time she felt that her foundations were insecure and that her zeal for Reality was resting on a basis that was too fragile.

By 1939, she was a member of the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, writing a number of important tracts expressing her anti-war sentiment. After returning to the Anglican Church, and perhaps overwhelmed by her knowledge of the achievements of the mystics and their perilous heights, her ten-year friendship with Catholic philosopher and writer Baron Friedrich von Hugel turned into one of spiritual direction. Charles Williams wrote in his introduction to her Letters: “The equal swaying level of devotion and scepticism (related to the church) which is, for some souls, as much the Way as continuous simple faith is to others, was a distress to her. She wanted to be ‘sure.'”

Writing to Von Hugel of the darkness she struggled with:

“What ought I to do?…being naturally self-indulgent and at present unfortunately professionally very prosperous and petted, nothing will get done unless I make a Rule. Neither intellectual work nor religion give me any real discipline because I have a strong attachment to both. It is useless advising anything people could notice or that would look pious. That is beyond me. In my lucid moments I see only too clearly that the only possible end of this road is complete, unconditional self-consecration, and for this I have not the nerve, the character or the depth. There has been some sort of mistake. My soul is too small for it and yet it is at bottom the only thing that I really want. It feels sometimes as if, whilst still a jumble of conflicting impulses and violent faults I were being pushed from behind towards an edge I dare not jump over.”

In a later letter of 12 July the Baron’s practical concerns for signs of strain in Evelyn’s spiritual state are expressed. His comments give insight into her struggles:

“I do not at all like this craving for absolute certainty that this or that experience of yours, is what it seems to yourself. And I am assuredly not going to declare that I am absolutely certain of the final and evidential worth of any of those experiences. They are not articles of faith. You are at times tempted to scepticism and so you long to have some, if only one direct personal experience which shall be beyond the reach of all reasonable doubt. But such an escape would possibly be a most dangerous one, and would only weaken you, or shrivel you, or puff you up. By all means believe them, if and when they humble and yet brace you, to be probably from God. But do not build your faith upon them; do not make them an end when they exist only to be a means. I am not sure that God does want a marked preponderance of this or that work or virtue in our life – that would feed still further your natural temperament, already too vehement.”

Although Underhill continued to struggle to the end, craving certainty that her beatific visions were purposeful, suffering as only a pacifist can from the devastating onslaught of World War II and the Church’s powerlessness to affect events, she may well have played a powerful part in the survival of her country through the influence of her words and the impact of her teachings on thousands regarding the power of prayer. Surviving the London Blitz of 1940, her health disintegrated further and she died in the following year. She is buried with her husband in the churchyard extension at St John-at-Hampstead in London.

More than any other person, she was responsible for introducing the forgotten authors of medieval and Catholic spirituality to a largely Protestant audience and the lives of eastern mystics to the English-speaking world. As a frequent guest on radio, her 1936 work The Spiritual Life was especially influential as transcribed from a series of broadcasts given as a sequel to those by Dom Bernard Clements on the subject of prayer. Fellow theologian Charles Williams wrote the introduction to her published Letters in 1943, which reveal much about this prodigious woman. Upon her death, The Times reported that on the subject of theology, she was “unmatched by any of the professional teachers of her day.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Underhill

Excerpts from her writings:

“The business and method of mysticism is love.”

“Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.”

“On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.”

“If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.”

“In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes on the assured aspect of a personal passion. Where the philosopher guesses and argues, the mystic lives and looks; and speaks, consequently, the disconcerting language of first-hand experience, not the neat dialectic of the schools. Hence whilst the Absolute of the metaphysicians remains a diagram —impersonal and unattainable—the Absolute of the mystics is lovable, attainable, alive.”

“Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.”

“Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond; too arrogant to still our thought, and let divine sensation have its way. It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition; for the process involves a veritable spring-cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of the gramaphone within. Those who do this, discover that they have lived in a stuffy world, whilst their inheritance was a world of morning-glory: where every tit-mouse is a celestial messenger, and every thrusting bud is charged with the full significance of life.”

“The spiritual life of individuals has to be extended both vertically to God and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore more truly personal it will become.”

“For a lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day.”

“Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth.”

“All men, at one time or another, have fallen in love with the veiled Isis whom they call Truth. With most, this has been a passing passion: they have early seen its hopelessness and turned to more practical things. But others remain all their lives the devout lovers of reality: though the manner of their love, the vision which they make to themselves of the beloved object varies enormously. Some see Truth as Dante saw Beatrice: an adorable yet intangible figure, found in this world yet revealing the next. To others she seems rather an evil but an irresistible enchantress: enticing, demanding payment and betraying her lover at the last. Some have seen her in a test tube, and some in a poet’s dream: some before the altar, others in the slime. The extreme pragmatists have even sought her in the kitchen; declaring that she may best be recognized by her utility. Last stage of all, the philosophic sceptic has comforted an unsuccessful courtship by assuring himself that his mistress is not really there.”

“Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the practical man is here invited: to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation from the fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to new levels of the world. Thus he may become aware of the universe which the spiritual artist is always trying to disclose to the race. This amount of mystical perception—this “ordinary contemplation,” as the specialists call it—is possible to all men: without it, they are not wholly conscious, nor wholly alive. It is a natural human activity, no more involving the great powers and sublime experiences of the mystical saints and philosophers than the ordinary enjoyment of music involves the special creative powers of the great musician.”

“As the beautiful does not exist for the artist and poet alone—though these can find in it more poignant depths of meaning than other men—so the world of Reality exists for all; and all may participate in it, unite with it, according to their measure and to the strength and purity of their desire.”

“He goes because he must, as Galahad went towards the Grail: knowing that for those who can live it, this alone is life.”

“Here the further question of the relation of spiritual life to public life and politics comes in. It must mean, for all who take it seriously, judging public issues from the angle of eternity, never from that of national self-interest or expediency; backing our conviction, as against party of prejudice, rejecting compromise, and voting only for those who adopt this disinterested point of view. Did we act thus, slowly but surely a body of opinion—a spiritual party, if you like—might be formed; and in the long run make its influence felt in the State. But such a programme demands much faith, hope, and charity; and courage too.”

“The art of the alchemist, whether spiritual or physical, consists in completing the work of perfection, bringing forth and making dominant, as it were, the “latent goldness” which “lies obscure” in metal or man. The ideal adept of alchemy was therefore an “auxiliary of the Eternal Goodness.” By his search for the “Noble Tincture” which should restore an imperfect world, he became a partner in the business of creation, assisting the Cosmic Plan. Thus the proper art of the Spiritual Alchemist, with whom alone we are here concerned, was the production of the spiritual and only valid tincture or Philosopher’s Stone; the mystic seed of transcendental life which should invade, tinge, and wholly transmute the imperfect self into spiritual gold. That this was no fancy of seventeenth-century allegorists, but an idea familiar to many of the oldest writers upon alchemy—whose quest was truly a spiritual search into the deepest secrets of the soul—is proved by the words which bring to an end the first part of the antique “Golden Treatise upon the Making of the Stone,” sometimes attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. “This, O Son,” says that remarkable tract, “is the Concealed Stone of Many Colours, which is born and brought forth in one colour; know this and conceal it . . . it leads from darkness into light, from this desert wilderness to a secure habitation, and from poverty and straits to a free and ample fortune.”

“When we are in good health, we all feel very real, solid, and permanent; and this is of all our illusions the most ridiculous, and also the most obviously useful from the point of view of the efficiency and preservation of the race.”

“As the genuine religious impulse becomes dominant, adoration more and more takes charge. ‘I come to seek God because I need Him’, may be an adequate formula for prayer. ‘I come to adore His splendour, and fling myself and all that I have at His feet’, is the only possible formula for worship.”

“The Incarnation, which is for traditional Christianity synonymous with the historical birth and earthly life of Christ, is for mystics of a certain type, not only this but also a perpetual Cosmic and personal process. It is an everlasting bringing forth, in the universe and also in the individual ascending soul, of the divine and perfect Life, the pure character of God, of which the one historical life dramatized the essential constituents. Hence the soul, like the physical embryo, resumes in its upward progress the spiritual life-history of the race. “The one secret, the greatest of all,” says Patmore, is “the doctrine of the Incarnation, regarded not as an historical event which occurred two thousand years ago, but as an event which is renewed in the body of every one who is in the way to the fulfilment of his original destiny.”

“Art is the link between appearance and reality. All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplatives.”

“The individual is reminded that in him, no less than in the Archetypal Universe, real life must be born if real life is to be lived.”

“It is significant that many of these experiences are reported to us from periods of war and distress: that the stronger the forces of destruction appeared, the more intense grew the spiritual vision which opposed them. We learn from these records that the mystical consciousness has the power of lifting those who possess it to a plane of reality which no struggle, no cruelty, can disturb: of conferring a certitude which no catastrophe can wreck. Yet it does not wrap its initiates in a selfish and otherworldly calm, isolate them from the pain and effort of the common life. Rather, it gives them renewed vitality; administering to the human spirit not–as some suppose–a soothing draught, but the most powerful of stimulants.”

Source of quotes: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/112836.Evelyn_Underhill