Leonard George, Phd, is a psychologist and writer. His published works include Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics and Alternative Realities: The Paranormal, the Mystic and the Transcendent in Human Experience.

My serious interest in Neo-platonism began shortly after starting work as a clinical psychologist in a hospital burn unit. In this setting I was exposed to horrible mutilations of the human form, and to pain that is difficult to conceive. My deep response to this onslaught of mortal reminders was paradoxical — I became more and more sensitized to the beauty of things around me. And the Beauty twinkled. It drew my attention beneath the beautiful surfaces, into beautiful depths that led to a place of utter simplicity and stillness and silence. Feeling my own rootedness in that stillness — what I believe Plotinus and Iamblichus called the One — is what sustains me in my challenging work with survivors of severe physical and emotional traumas.

Incident at Gadara

The town of Gadara was a welcome stop for ancient travelers. Located a few miles southeast of the Sea of Galilee, it was renowned throughout the Roman Empire for its soothing hot springs. Sometime in the first years of the fourth century AD, the philosopher Iamblichus paid a visit to Gadara, along with a group of his students. One day, according to Iamblichus’ biographer Eunapius, an amazing scene unfolded. The sage’s devotees had been urging him for some time to show his divine power by performing a miraculous feat.

Iamblichus had always declined. But for some reason, on this day and in this place, he chose to acquiesce. Sitting down by a hot pool known as the spring of Eros, he plunged his hand beneath the roiling surface — and pulled a young boy out of the water. The child was radiant, with blond hair and fair complexion. Iamblichus then walked over to the next pool, called the Spring of Anteros. Again he reached into the depths, and retrieved another boy. This one was dark of hair and skin, but no less radiant. The children of the springs clung to him “as though he were genuinely their father.” Shortly, Iamblichus led them back to their respective pools where they swam out of sight beneath the bubbles. The philosopher continued his stroll with a retinue of astonished followers.

What are we to make of this? Eunapius obtained his account third-hand from a student of one of Iamblichus’ devotees. The biography hints that some of Iamblichus’ disciples were rather literal-minded, so we might suspect that the Gadara episode originated as a story of symbols, a teaching tale rather than a news report. And indeed, the figure of Iamblichus in the story portrays the sacred ideal taught by the sage himself.

Dreaming of a Pagan Reformation

But before we explore this ideal, and the means he offered to progress toward it, some background on this myth-shrouded character is in order. Who was Iamblichus? Details of his life are sketchy. We know he was born into a wealthy family in Chalcis in the roman province of Syria around 240. His direct ancestors were the priest-kings of the city of Emesa. He keenly felt his roots — contrary to the day’s fashion, he refused to adopt a Greek or Latin name (“Iamblichus” derives from the Syriac ya-mliku, “the god rules”). He spent most of his life in the vicinity of the Orontes valley. With its headwaters in the Lebanese highlands, meandering through a verdant swathe of western Syria and emptying into the Mediterranean Sea near Antioch, the Orontes River had been a conduit of influences between Greece and the East for many centuries. Iamblichus’ background readied him for his main life-task — crafting a synthesis of the pagan world’s deepest spiritual insights.

He lived a luxurious but simple life, tended by slaves and enjoying his suburban properties. Unfettered by material want, he could devote his life to searching for the highest truths using the best means available. Iamblichus studied under the famed Neoplatonist Porphyry, likely in Rome, but came to believe that his own discernment surpassed that of his teacher. The Syrian sage founded a school in Apamea, a columned town by the Orontes. This site was already esteemed in cultured circles as the hometown of Numenius, a great philosopher of the second century AD.

Iamblichus died around 325. His lifetime has been called an “age of anxiety.” It had become obvious that the shared sentiments binding the Empire together were fraying. Like the papacy a millennium later, the institution of imperial rule fractured into camps that often fought each other, softening the empire’s defenses against the attacks of restless neighbors. In his youth, Iamblichus saw Persian troops storm through Chalcis and pillage northern Syria. Other trends pointed to a deeper malaise. The leading thinkers viewed the sacrifices, prayers, and myths of traditional religion as naive and stale. Commoners for their part found the intricate philosophizing of the intellectuals remote and irrelevant. And even in popular devotion there were disturbing signs. The ancient network of oracles was falling silent one by one, like wells that dry up when their aquifer is exhausted. In his old age, Iamblichus witnessed the unthinkable. Emperor Constantine turned away from the pagan path to embrace the god of a fringe cult called Christianity. Iamblichus was troubled by the pallor of the pagan spirit. But he thought it could be nursed back to health. Iamblichus dreamed of a pagan Reformation.

His remedy for the pagan malaise was a return to the roots of antique wisdom: the most venerable spiritual practices, especially those of the eldest societies (Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria); the fountainheads of classical thought (Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle); and the major mystical movements and texts of later antiquity (the Mystery cults, the Hermetic writings, and a visionary book known as the Chaldean Oracles). Could these strands be woven into an integrated world view profound enough to hearten the philosophers, majestic enough to awe and comfort simpler folk? This was the challenge Iamblichus set for himself.

When considering the teachings of Iamblichus, we must always keep his goal in mind. He wasn’t interested in speculation or argument for their own sake. He believed that many of his philosophical forebears had lost their way in deserts of arid theorizing rather than pursuing contact with ultimate realities. Iamblichus’ ideas about the nature of world, self and spirit aren’t factual descriptions or logical points, but tools to alter awareness. We can’t judge their worth by rational or empirical means, but only by “trying them on” and assessing their impact on our consciousness and our lives.

The Erotic Cosmos

First, let’s review the stage on which our spiritual life is played out, according to the Apamean. We live, Iamblichus taught, in an immense and mostly invisible universe. The kaleidoscope of perceptions, thoughts, feelings, images and impulses that crowd the mind only skims reality’s surface. From unfathomable depths, the things we experience emerge in a perpetual upwelling of creation. Just as constantly, these forms melt back into the unseen domain. This appearance and dissolution is a flow, a circulation or current, encompassing the visible and the hidden.

The ultimate source of the current is a being of sheer simplicity. Iamblichus followed Neoplatonic convention in calling it ‘the One.’ But even this term misleads, as ‘the One’ is beyond anything countable. This mystical entity is not apart from all that flows from it and to it, but contains and unites the whole turbulent cosmos within its perfect stillness.

There are no lines between the colors in a rainbow. But we need to parse the rainbow to describe it: “Red / orange / yellow / green.” So also with the circuit of existence, seamless and endless. Iamblichus divided creation’s cascade from the One to the sense-world into levels. At each step away from the One there is more diversity and less unity. In our own realm diversity rules, and the unity of all is evident only in subtle ways.

Iamblichus described reality’s first forms as they bloom from the One in Pythagorean terms — as Numbers. From the One, there comes Two. The Two generates the Many. These Numbers aren’t the familiar counters used in practical transactions and measurements, but divine presences. Their patterns resonate across succeeding levels, giving rise to the regularities of the sense-realm.

For instance, the imprint of the Two can be detected throughout our world. Inspired by Plato, Iamblichus affirmed that everything is composed of dualities — light and dark, cold and hot, left and right, odd and even — knit together into the myriad objects we see around us. But everything in the cosmos yearns for its origin, the place where the opposites fuse. All longings in life, unmasked, are this. Iamblichus called this universal passion Eros. The One loves the Many, and the Many the One, impelling the cosmic flow. Every duality is Eros split in two, and the struggle of opposites that makes up our lives is the hide-and-seek of the halves of desire, the Lover and the Beloved — or as Plato put it, Eros and Anteros.

Iamblichus not only parsed reality’s rainbow. He personified each color. A spectrum of spiritual beings ranges between the One and the Manyworld of the sense — deities, archangels and angels, archons, daimones, heroes, and ourselves. The daimones are the spirits closely intertwined with our daily lives, lurking just beneath the veneer of the mind and the physical world. Daimones personify the natural energies that comprise our environment, and the character features that sway our fate. Before engaging the higher beings we have to establish mature relations with our daimones.

The most fulfilling relationships — with people, daimones, or divinities — are based on the ability to love (the mark of the One) while keeping our own distinctness (the signature of the Two). This is Eros’ flow, the play of the One and the Two. And we relate most intensely with other persons. Iamblichean personifying isn’t a simple-minded projection of human traits onto non-human things, but a psychological device helping us to relate fully — that is, Erotically — with the forces of creation.

The Double Identity

This vast unity — the entire cosmic cascade — is our home. And, more mysteriously, it is our identity. Who am I? Iamblichus taught that there are two valid answers. From the angle of ordinary awareness, I am a being with a body and an inner life or soul, sharing a world of other bodies and souls. I am an individual, limited in knowledge and power. And I am mortal. This finite identity is who I am. But it isn’t all that I am. From the standpoint of cosmic Eros, this individual life blends into the life of daimones, gods, archetypal Numbers, and the One. My immersion in the universe is so thorough that my “self” is in some sense the totality.

We live a double life, and a paradoxical one. The paradox in Iamblichus’ picture of the self is that both identities — finite and endless, dying and deathless — are utterly real. Neither is just a mirage or derivative of the other. I am both part and Whole. And to be completely present, we must be mindful of both identities, without either one eclipsing the other.

This is no easy task. Plato wrote that merely existing as a physical being scrambles the soul. We’re seduced by the vivid minutiae of our material life. Irresistibly we become confused and overidentified with them, mesmerized by the affairs of the small self. The sweet, faint note of the One is drowned by the clatter of everyday sensation and thought.

As a first step toward relaxing these attachments, Iamblichus’ students pondered lessons about the miseries of embodiment, such as Plato’s statement that “the body is a tomb.” But Iamblichus carefully balanced this seeming distaste for matter with teachings that praised the sanctity of the body. The coarsest thing is included in the highest good, the One. We are embodied beings. There is no use pining for escape to nonmaterial worlds. From Aristotle our Syrian sage learned that the soul is not other than the body. But from Plato he understood that the soul is more than the body.

Iamblichus compared the growth of divine self-awareness to the blossoming of a lotus. And like a flower it benefits from proper cultivation. Reading and thinking about higher truths — the usual pastime of philosophers — is helpful, like fertile mud. But on its own this activity is spiritually ineffective, because it remains on the plane of ordinary consciousness. Iamblichus insisted that spiritual flowering can only be powered from beyond the boundaries of personal identity. We must open ourselves to influences from outside, as a lotus to light. And again a paradox: these “external” influences remind us that from the Erotic vantage they aren’t “outside” us at all.

Rites of Self-Remembrance

We are to befriend the daimones and link with gods and rouse our unitive identity. But we won’t succeed by relying on our normal kinds of thought and effort. The sage emphasized that we can only approach Truth on its terms, not ours. How then do we proceed? Iamblichus taught that the hallowed repertoire of pagan spiritual practices held potent means of stirring awareness. These methods work because they aren’t inventions of the limited mind, but come from the side of divinity. He took a word from the Chaldean Oracles to denote these means of divine self-remembrance: theurgy. This term means ‘divine activity.’ Iamblichus contrasted theurgy with theology, or ‘divine words’ — talking about the Erotic cosmos isn’t the same as living it.

The Greek philosopher Thales said, “all things are full of gods.” The universe is stocked with objects that point to the mystery of the One. Our souls too harbor such reminders, in the form of images. Iamblichus’ favorite word for these numinous cues was synthemata, a Greek term that literally means “tokens” or “signals.” Synthemata are witnesses of the gods’ presence. They act as mirrors in which the soul’s sacred element can view its own divinity. Iamblichus prescribed the rites and meditations of pagan religion as means of guiding the soul’s attention to the synthemata around and within it.

The details of Iamblichus’ theurgical ceremonies are lost. But we know that he offered an array of disciplines to match the states of the soul. Many souls are so fixed on material things that they can only work with synthemata made of matter, and aspire to contact only the most material kind of gods. They performed rituals with certain stones, animals, plants, and other natural objects that revered lore associated with deities. For such people, life feels like a punishment, and the material theurgies eased their pain by calming their daimones.

More mature souls who had achieved some mindfulness of the One could include more refined synthemata in their theurgies. Because sounds are invisible and mental images are inaudible, the sage taught that they are tokens of divinities a step removed from the sensory realm. Theurgical chants and visualized symbols could arouse synthemata in the soul connected with them. Souls of this quality regard life’s travails as chances for purification.

Rarely is a soul so advanced that it can work with the subtlest synthemata of all, Iamblichus admitted. His surviving writings say little about the highest type of theurgy. Gregory Shaw, the preeminent Iamblichus scholar, believes that this summit of pagan practice was the contemplation of sacred geometric shapes and ratios. These mathematical synthemata joined the soul with the realm of archetypal Numbers, near the One itself.

To the most developed souls, the world seems neither punishment nor purgation, but a single exalted synthema. Every object within this grand vision appears clearly as a ripple on the ocean of Eros, a wave of yearning for the deep Source it will shortly return to. The self-concept of the advanced theurgist is also transfigured. Thoughts, emotions, and personality persist, but now are suffused with the feeling that these phenomena, no less than outer things, are shapings of the One. Every action is theurgy, and an expression of love, because Eros is Love. It is also a creative act. The gods whose ‘divine activities’ theurgists emulated are the channels of the One’s world-making. Through theurgy, we come to know that we are co-creators of the universe.

Philosophical Shamanism

What would it have been like to perform the theurgies of Iamblichus’ school? visions were common during the rites. Iamblichus described the types of transcendent beings that might appear to the theurgist, and a mysterious light — a glimmering of the current of creation itself. A sound like the wind was also reported, coming from every direction at once. These signs were taken to mean that the ceremony had contacted the sacred realms. they also point to a shift in the performer’s consciousness. And this is not surprising. Many components of theurgy had been known to trigger altered states of awareness since the Old Stone Age. Concentrating on a holy object, rhythmic singing, visualization — all of these techniques can loosen the hold of the ordinary world and the everyday self, and permit the mind to slip beneath the surface.

The stereotypic ancient philosopher is a toga-clad gentleman, calmly pondering the meaning of life. This image seems as far removed as can be from the howling, prancing shaman of primeval hunting cultures. The theurgist was both — a philosophical shaman who wielded every instrument, logical, mystical, or material, to prove the secrets of existence.

Iamblichus, like the shamans of old, taught that the soul is housed not just by the physical body, but also by an invisible and immortal frame. This ’spirit-body’ is made of the same stuff as the stars. The spirit-body can only be sensed through the imagination — indeed, it is the imagination. But it is obscured by the froth of discursive thinking. Breath meditations swept and cleansed the mind, bringing the imaginal body into clarity. The visions and celestial sounds invoked in theurgies were perceived with the spirit-body’s organs. And it is in this vehicle of imagination that the soul meets the gods.

Iamblichus saw himself as the preserver of paganism’s highest values and fullest insights. But he wasn’t uncritical of many common beliefs of his time. Then as now, people tried to divine the future by dreams, astrology, and numerology. Iamblichus thought that the only thing worth divining is the true nature of self and cosmos as manifestations of the One. Chasing after worldly secrets for their own sake was for infant souls. He was just as harsh in his judgment of egotistical magicians. Grasping at personal power through magic is a sad caricature of the theurgic quest, which is also a pursuit of power — the potency of universal creation itself. But the theurgist’s aim isn’t to gain this might for self-aggrandizement. When the personal soul is harmonized with cosmic Eros, the soul’s endowments serve the whole. Our sage also cast a cold eye on seekers of erotic experiences such as trances and ecstasies. Iamblichus pointed out that not every altered state is spiritually opportune. The ecstasies that occurred in theurgy weren’t treasured in themselves, but only as means to alert the soul to the One’s presence.

Personal knowledge, power, thrills — these weren’t what Iamblichus’ pagan Reformation was supposed to be about. He urged his disciples to model their lives on that of Pythagoras. The Apamean believed that Pythagoras had reached the peak of wisdom and compassion, not by rejecting his human existence but by doubling his sense of self to include the One and its infinite creativity. Pythagoras had matched his double identity with a double awareness. He became a living synthema of the One.

And in Eunapius’ tale, Iamblichus himself represents this attainment. Asked for a sign, he reaches beneath reality’s swirling surface (the springs), touches the dual currents (bright Eros and dark Anteros) of cosmic passion, and unites them in his own embodied life as their “genuine father.” He is a symbol of the Many, the Two, and the One. This, not some literal magic trick, was the miracle shown at Gadara.

Loss and Legacy

We all know today that Iamblichus’ pagan Reformation failed, washed away in the rising tide of Christianity and the shipwreck of Empire. But for a time a different outcome beckoned. His renewal of ancient wisdom freshened hope in the sagging pagan spirit. He was recognized as a genius within his lifetime, hailed as the “benefactor of the “entire world” and dubbed Theios Iamblichos — divine Iamblichus. Julian, the last non-Christian emperor, campaigned to revive the pagan faith along theurgical lines. According to historian Stephan Gersh, Iamblichus’ vision was “the dominant philosophy of antiquity in its most elaborate and developed form.” Every notable pagan thinker from Iamblichus’ age until the last light was snuffed at the Athenian Academy in 529 saw the world in his terms.

But the rebirth of paganism was not to be. Even among thoughtful pagans, Iamblichus’ ideas were almost immediately misunderstood. His cherished theurgical rites with their lofty goal of enlightenment fell into the very sort of magic and mystery-mongering that he condemned. Although he explicitly dismissed the use of statues for divination, theurgists became known as experts in the practice. Theurgist ceremonies were enacted as late as the eleventh century in Byzantium, but by then the ideals of the Apamean sage were long dead.

Iamblichus could have been a pagan Luther. But his timing was terrible. In the year of his death, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea, which gave birth to Christian orthodoxy. Christianity’s strength grew through political maneuvering, escalating violence against its religious competitors, and luck. By century’s end, paganism was withering in the Church’s looming shadow.

But Iamblichus left a hidden legacy. in the sixth century, a Syrian Christian wrote several philosophical works. He pretended that his books had actually been authored by a minor New Testament figure named Dionysius the Areopagite. This “Pseudo-Dionysius” combined Christianity with the system of Iamblichus. The writer recast the invisible hierarchy personifying the circulation of Eros as nine angelic choirs. He applied Iamblichus’ arguments for the frailty of human thought and the value of theurgic rites to the need for Christian faith and the eucharist. And instead of viewing the entire universe as a synthema of divinity, he shrunk this notion to embrace only the Church. Pseudo-Dionysius’ writings were crucial in moulding the Christian world view in both East and West, were they were translated into Latin by the Irish theologian Erigena. Ironically, the pagan sage who tried to revive the religion of his past ended up creating much of the religion of his future via his anonymous Christian interpreter.

Iamblichus eventually did play a role in a revival of pagan though. Eleven centuries after his death, a copy of his major surviving work came into the hands of Marsilio Ficino, the Neoplatonist philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. Ficino translated it into Latin, giving it the title it is known by today — De Mysteriis, or On the Mysteries. The Renaissance fascination with ancient spirituality was fueled in part by Ficino’s enthusiasm for Iamblichus.

Does this nearly-forgotten sage have anything to teach us today? In some ways, Iamblichus’ time was like ours. Old values and certainties were under fire, and civilization’s survival seemed doubtful. In this ominous setting, Iamblichus outlined the soul’s condition in terms that many of us can recognize: scrambled, unable to feel clearly its connectedness with the Whole, often bearing life as an anxious trial. Our spiritual search yields many examples of the egocentric sidetracks the seer warned against. Modern seekers talk about Soul and Imagination, two of Iamblichus’ main concerns. This is due largely to the writings of James Hillman and Thomas Moore, who acknowledge their debt to the antique and Renaissance Neoplatonists. It may be time to reconsider the views of the ancient soul-master himself.

Perhaps it’s good that we no longer know the details of his theurgic ceremonies. Otherwise, we might be tempted to mimic behaviors taken out of a context that has passed forever. But from the fragments of Iamblichus’ works that have come down to us, we can recreate the theurgic attitude. And we can “try it on.”

The theurgist knows that the sensory world isn’t an illusion. But neither is it everything. Its rippling surface veils a vast, animate energy flooding from inconceivable depths. The mathematical patterning of this flood, discovered by Pythagoras, is the basis of modern science. The inner world isn’t what it seems either. Below the flotsam of thought and fantasy the immortal Imagination dwells, seeing and hearing and swimming in creation’s stream. We don’t need to flee to another world, or another time, or another identity. There’s no exit anyway. We can find our own ways to glimpse the One in the mirrors of Nature, songs, images, and symmetries. By nurturing our soul’s double awareness, we too can feel at home in this wondrous realm between Eros and Anteros. Walt Whitman saw the same vision as Iamblichus, a vision that can also be ours, of an all-embracing Being nearer than our breath:

I am the poet of reality
I say the earth is not an echo
Nor man an apparition;
But that all the things seen are real,
The witness and albic dawning of things equally real…

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This article originally appeared in Lapis Issue 13.

Robert McDermott, PhD, was president and is currently professor of philosophy and religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He was formerly professor and chair of the department of philosophy at Baruch College, CUNY. His publications include Radhakrishnan, The Essential Aurobindo, and The Essential Steiner.

This essay is a revised version of a section of an essay entitled “My Transpersonal Worldview,” written for a forthcoming volume called The Collected Works of Ken Wilber.

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I am often accused by my East Coast friends of having “gone Californian,” and by my San Francisco Bay Area friends of being still “very East Coast.” Neither characterization is intended as a compliment. Reference points for New York academic life tend to be the canonical tradition from Socrates to Godimer whereas comparable reference points for the Bay Area transpersonal community tend to be Asian spiritual teachers; meditation techniques; goddess, shamanic and Jungian symbols; astrological archetypes and Enneagram points. When I appear to my East Coast friends as too Californian, it is because of my delight in the varieties of spirit manifest in transpersonal psychologists and artists, in the eighty dharma centers in the Bay Area, sacred medicine researchers, teachers of biography, eco-feminists, multi-traditional mystics, organizational experts, and astrologers. Anthroposophy is not ordinarily listed in such a catalogue, and there are excellent reasons why it should not be, as well as reasons why it should be — hence this essay.

For my transpersonal colleagues I am too much an Anthroposophist and for my Anthroposophical colleagues I appear too involved in Hinduism, Buddhism, and The New Paradigm. My Anthroposophy is very “East Coast,” and perhaps necessarily so. My version of Anthroposophy includes Krishna and Buddha, but also tends to include references to the European Christian tradition. Anthroposophy has Japanese and Israeli adherents, but non-western and non-Christian voices are not yet as audible as Anthroposophical teachers who look and sound Christian. Furthermore, anyone who accepts Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual-scientific research accepts a Christo-centric view of history and evolution of consciousness. Such a view can, and perhaps will, offer an alternative perspective to Christianity, but it is difficult to imagine a Christo-centric view of the history of the earth and humanity which does not closely resemble and overlap with the view of Christ offered, however imperfectly, by Christianity.

This essay is an attempt to explain why I admit to holding both sides of the polarities introduced above. In this essay I recommend the complementarity of East Coast and West Coast thinking as well as Anthroposophical and transpersonal world views. I am grateful for my fifty years in heady New York and for the past ten years in the transpersonal community of the San Francisco Bay Area. This essay issues from my primary commitment to the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner and from my secondary commitment to the varieties of transpersonal dharma and practice. The sociological difference of East and West Coast is interesting to observe for its subtle influence but the deeper topic is the spiritual paradigm represented by Anthroposophical and transpersonal teachings and practices.

While it would be misleading to say that Anthroposophy embodies East Coast and transpersonal embodies Bay Area sensibilities, the turn of the twentieth century European origin of Anthroposophy and the Asian and pagan origin of the transpersonal worldview continue to affect all who touch one or the other. For ten years I have been trying to integrate the best features of the transpersonal experience, worldview, and practices with Anthroposophy and to introduce Anthroposophical thinking and practice into the transpersonal community. My spiritual home, however, for the past twenty-five years, and no doubt longer in both directions, has been and will be Anthroposophy.

As my Anthroposophical and transpersonal worldviews overlap substantially but not entirely, this essay aims to express a transpersonal Anthroposophy and almost equally an Anthroposophical transpersonalism. As with all comparisons, it is the differences that get disproportionate attention. I will also indicate the strength of the Jewish and Christian elements in East Coast thinking, and the corresponding emphasis in the transpersonal community on a light-paradigm Buddhism — or, negatively, away from Jewish and Christian monotheism, creationism, and messianism. Entirely consistent with my Anthroposophical worldview, my thinking has been and no doubt will remain Mahayanist and incarnational. I attend to the Krishna of the Bhagavadgita, not only of the Mahabharata; to Buddha of the Mahayana tradition, not only Gotama of the Theravada tradition; and to Christ of the John-Logos tradition, not only Jesus of the western humanist tradition.

As it has been the aim of my dharma for approximately thirty years to transform my personal life in the light of the Mahayana and the transpersonal, I sought the guidance, first, of Sri Aurobindo, whom I have long considered the foremost spiritual teacher of modern India. Without revising that assessment, I turned for guidance to Rudolf Steiner, whom I consider the foremost spiritual guide of the West — and perhaps of this historical period. It seems to me that Steiner has given a more comprehensive spiritual teaching than anyone else of the last several centuries. I have been working both at deepening my Anthroposophical work as such, and also at creating relationships between my Anthroposophical discipline and the spiritual work of diverse individuals and groups, many of whom are transpersonalists.

The transpersonal movement is based on a panoply of non-ordinary experiences, including those derived from psychotropics and psychedelics, meditation, shamanic practices, intuition, rituals, spiritual journeys, artistic activities, and organizational transformation — a truly radical empiricism and one deepened by traditions of practice. The entire transpersonal movement has issued primarily from psychology, the most transpersonally advanced western discipline from the 1960’s to the present. The transpersonal movement in turn continues to influence psychology and allied disciplines on behalf of a conception of psyche as profound and proactive. Not properly an ‘ism’ or a community, ‘transpersonal’ is an adjective prefixed to a loose confederacy of ideas, ideals, critiques and practices, as well as cultural (and more typically counter-cultural) mores.

I would propose as a working definition that the term transpersonal refers to a group of worldviews and practices which aim to foster soul transformative experience as well as to deepen and expand awareness of psychic and spiritual realities. It should be added to this definition that the realities which we in the third millennium West consider extraordinary would be perceived as perfectly ordinary in earlier cultures and in cultures at the present time not yet overwhelmed by the modern western paradigm. In recent decades, experiences that were kept out of mainstream cultural and intellectual life have been increasingly recognized as worthy of attention. As positivism and materialism tighten their grip on the intellectual life of the West, so do an increasing number of individuals and communities affirm the interior life. As darkness spreads, individual lights do shine, and need to shine, ever brighter.

In principle, there is no part of Anthroposophy that should be considered incompatible with the ideas and experiences that characterize the transpersonal movement. The degree to which Steiner’s account of the evolution of consciousness is consonant with Ken Wilber’s theory and application of the pre/trans fallacy is one of many areas of agreement between Anthroposophy and the foundational ideas espoused by the most prominent members of the transpersonal community. There are also, however, five important respects in which my commitment to Anthroposophy leads me to make assertions which are not generally included in the worldview most typically associated with transpersonal thinkers:

1. The supersensible reality of Anthroposophy and Anthroposophia;

2. The ontological reality of higher beings;

3. The evolution of the earth and humanity as a framework for epistemology, culture and spiritual discipline;

4. The centrality of Christ — in cooperation with Buddha and other spiritual beings in service of humanity and the earth;

5. A positive regard for historical religions.

First, as “transpersonal” modifies a group of thinkers with a shared worldview and set of experiences, “Anthroposophical” modifies the teachings, practices, and contributions of Rudolf Steiner and everyone who works out of his dharma. But “Anthroposophical” is also a modifier of a spiritual being whom Steiner refers to as Anthroposophia — human wisdom, in divine feminine form. In addition to designating a body of ideas and the method of intuitive thinking which ideally access such ideas, Anthroposophy refers to a spiritual influence of particular beings and events in the spiritual world, particularly Christ, Buddha, the Archangel Michael, Christian Rosenkreutz, and Anthroposophia. Throughout the last week of December, 1923, Steiner created a mystery school, with esoteric and exoteric components, continuous with the western Rosicrucian esoteric tradition, in service of these beings.

Anthroposophy is also linked properly and comprehensively to the karmic biography of Rudolf Steiner, an initiate whose teachings and spiritual mission are right for this time. Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) was a European initiate who brought a modem scientific method to the study of spiritual realities. Science commanded his attention and respect, but he also taught methods by which to break through its perceived boundaries to a direct knowledge of spirit. Steiner exemplified and taught a way of thinking which is capable of accessing spiritual reality and serves as an antidote to the restrictions on thinking placed so effectively by modern Western epistemology. Steiner’s method fully integrates feeling and willing, activity and receptivity. The esoteric research that Steiner conducted in later life led to many practical initiatives such as biodynamic farming and Waldorf education. His epistemology, as theory and practice, provides the necessary foundation to all of his work on behalf of spiritual and cultural renewal. The Anthroposophical Society that Steiner founded is a modern mystery school continuous with the mystery centers of Egypt and Greece, but using western scientific sensibility and open to all who seek knowledge of higher worlds.

Secondly, my Anthroposophical worldview affirms a full hierarchy and pantheon of real, distinctive, and collaborative spiritual beings, including Krishna, Buddha and Christ, angels and archangels, the tempters Lucifer and Ahriman, and the great spiritual leaders of humanity. Steiner’s accounts of these beings and their influence provide us an opportunity to approach, to contemplate, and to make relationships with higher beings. Such specificity, however, can lead to inflated claims of familiarity. Religious fundamentalists have a tendency to regard their images of such beings as the beings themselves, thereby falling into idolatry, a sin warned against in the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and the Qu’ran. A similar opportunity and temptation attends our relationships to spiritual leaders of humanity — e.g., Abraham and Moses; John the Evangelist and Mary the Mother; Sankara, Ramanuja, and Sri Ramakrishna; Shantidev and Dogen; Augustine and Aquinas; Dante and St. Francis, as well as Rudolf Steiner. While the personalities and achievements of these figures offer unlimited opportunity for intellectual speculation, it is their essential karmic mission and significance that is efficacious for our spiritual striving.

The task of knowing the essential spiritual work of contemporary spiritual teachers is even more challenging because it is so difficult to penetrate to the spiritual realities of human beings who are familiar in ordinary ways. Among the spiritual leaders of global import in the twentieth century, I would include Sri Aurobindo, M.K. Gandhi, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Rudolf Steiner. Close behind these I would mention Black Elk, Swami Yogananda, Sri Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti, Simone Weil, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, C.G. Jung, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Bede Griffiths, Thich Nhat Hahn, and Ram Dass. I mention these names in the hope that such exemplars of the divine-human dialogue will give credibility and encouragement to our seeking and striving. The divine continues to reveal and manifest in myriad ways, and none so helpfully as in the lives of our contemporaries. The study of these figures and their esoteric-spiritual tasks is part of the discernment of karma.

For each of these, and others, I want to know the innermost core of their spiritual life, of their connection to the spiritual world, immanently and transcendentally considered. To meet such figures in their spiritual import is to engage in real, as opposed to nominal, knowing. It is to know the objective reality rather than the mere name, the surface, the conventional signification. Steiner’s esoteric epistemology is both a monism and a realism: a monism in that he defines reality as spirit, and matter as an expression of spirit; a realism in that spirit manifests a vast plurality of real beings and spiritual realities. These beings are all knowable, but only by effort. Steiner observes the medieval theological concept of adequatio: the level of knowing must meet the level of the object to be known. As Goethe observed, light created the eye just as spiritual light created the spiritual eye. To know the spiritual reality of beings past or present, physical and discarnate, requires spiritual — or realist, not nominalist — knowing.

Although it would be difficult, and rather to the side of the purpose of this essay, to generalize on the degree to which leading transpersonalist works can be said to be nominalist, I do believe that transpersonal thinkers partake of this nominalism more than I would want to do. Contemporary thought generally, and perhaps particularly psychological thought, regards as constructs of psyche precisely the spiritual ideals, events and individuals that I regard as spiritual facts, as realities that are mediated by, but also transcend, psyche. Among the many kinds of beings to which I ascribe ontological reality — not infrequently to the dismay of readers and colleagues — are angels and bodhisattvas; ideals such as Love, Truth, and Freedom; the etheric bodies of planets, animals, and human beings; and the Christ surrounding the Earth.

Names such as Krishna, Buddha, and Christ — and others, such as Brahman and Divine Mother — designate single beings, and experiences of them result in quite different descriptions of their characteristics and activities. These higher spiritual beings are experienced by human beings in a wide variety of valid transpersonal ways. By their relative vastness and relative perfection, these beings are closer to the singular divine source than any personal life, human community, or earthly existent. Because accounts of higher beings, including those given by Rudolf Steiner, are mediated by the limitations of human capacities, they are inevitably partial and inadequate.

I see the trans-personal and the trans-sensory as accessible and knowable by human effort and grace. The essential task of our time is to establish a noetic relationship between the immanent and transcendent, the supersensible and sensory. If artists, instead of psychologists, had initiated and articulated the transpersonal movement, its impact would have been more focused on the development of positive capacities and less on therapy. Steiner worked extensively with the arts because he considered art to be the most effective way of establishing a relationship between the supersensory and the world of the senses.

An ideal approach to the supersensible seems to me to include, in addition to artistic activity (including speaking and writing), highly individual experiences such as those celebrated in James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, and community experiences such as those celebrated in the religious philosophy of Josiah Royce. Just as an individual person is necessarily part of many communities, and is unintelligible apart from them, higher spiritual beings whom I and others aspire to know have their being as part of supersensible communities.

Third, it makes a decisive difference for one’s worldview if one adopts a perennialist or evolutionary framework for the interpretation not only of the past, present, and future, and equally of one’s spiritual discipline. I accept in broad outline the evolutionism of Steiner, including particularly the significance of Christ in the evolution of the earth and humanity. This framework might be the most important divide between Anthroposophy and virtually all transpersonal perspectives. In Steiner’s view, truths, such as those of the great religious traditions, are not permanently true, and certainly not true in the same ways, as one historical epoch succeeds another. The truth, meaning, and effectiveness of ideas, as well as beings, including higher beings, are all decisively affected by their evolving contexts.

Steiner’s account of the evolution of consciousness is not a simple modern Western view of progress, such that later is better; it is a double process. As human consciousness has expanded and deepened with respect to knowledge, complexity, and inventiveness, and continues to do so, it will continue, proportionately and appropriately, to lose the intimacy and directness of its relationship to the divine. In Steiner’s double evolutionary process, earlier consciousness (shamanic, for example) means closer to spiritual realities and later consciousness (particularly modern Western) means more alienated, individualized, and materialistic. This problem of modern Western alienated consciousness, however, provides the opportunity for humanity to share freely and deliberately in the creation of spiritual-sensory relationships.

As humanity lost its spiritual home and innate capacities (which Owen Barfield refers to as original participation), it also gained capacities. In the course of several millennia of human development, humanity experienced greater independence from the divine and thereby realized correspondingly greater opportunities for deliberate relationships between the human and divine. Steiner considered the twentieth century to be a time of exceptional spiritual darkness — and thereby an exceptional opportunity for the development of human wisdom and human will. To meet this challenge, Steiner bequeathed a host of spiritual insights and practices under the heading of Anthroposophy or spiritual science.

Steiner’s account of the evolution of consciousness does not commit what Ken Wilber refers to as the pre/trans fallacy — i.e., it does not reduce or prefer the pre-personal to the trans-personal (by whatever terms). Steiner essentially holds that even though the present might be terrible and the past might appear to be ideal, earlier modes of consciousness should nevertheless not be confused with, nor preferred to, contemporary modes of consciousness. Similarly, higher modes of consciousness, though perhaps painful or terrifying, should nevertheless neither be reduced to nor sacrificed in favor of lower modes of consciousness.

Steiner developed and recommended as a spiritual exercise a discipline, which he called symptomatology, for the study of the characteristics of each age, event, and biography under review. Steiner’s advice concerning the karma of consciousness is analogous to Krishna’s advice to Arjuna — namely, that despite the pain of Arjuna’s duty as a warrior in the line of battle, it was nevertheless right for him to do his own caste duty, however poorly, than to do well the duty of another caste. So too, it is better to face the task of this age, which Steiner takes to be the cultivation of free and loving thinking, than to revert to the consciousness of a previous age.

Fourth, I see the Christ as the central event in the evolution of consciousness. I am convinced that Steiner’s rendering of the evolution of consciousness will need to be very significantly extended so as to include, for their respective contributions, shamanic and indigenous consciousness, east Asian thought, and the vast research generated by a half century of anthropology, but I am not inclined to reduce or revise Steiner’s account of the role of Christ in cosmic and human history which he refers to as the Mystery of Golgotha. The transpersonal movement, by contrast, seems as focused on the spiritual teachings of Asia as the Theosophists of the past century and a quarter. The transpersonal movement has exhibited a natural preference for Buddhism, and particularly for forms of Buddhism with a light paradigmatic commitment.

The life of Jesus seems to me to have been an instrument similar to that of Gotama. After approximately fifteen years with little or no conscious relationship to the reality of Christ, I began to absorb the voluminous and unique teachings on Christ to be found in the writings and lectures of Rudolf Steiner. As a result of these works, supplemented by the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, and Bede Griffiths, I now view with gratitude the union of Jesus and Christ for three years that made possible a redemptive sacrifice on behalf of the evolution of human, and particularly Western, consciousness. If I do not fully accept the fundamental premise of Buddhism (particularly the first of the four noble truths — that all existence is dukkha) it is at least partly because the “good news” of the Incarnation described in the New Testament, and particularly its double message of vulnerability and forgiveness, keeps breaking in.

I consider my personal life to be intensely important not, as I ordinarily think, because it is mine, but, as I know transpersonally, because it expresses, however dimly, the reality of Logos — Christ, Buddha, Krishna, and Tao. I am relatively more awake to the reality and transformative power of Logos-Christ in history and enveloping the earth, and of Buddha, the preeminent source of wisdom and compassion prior to Christ, and less awake to other spiritual beings, such as Tao and Brahman, and beings to be contacted in shamanic journeys. As a result of study and meditative reflection, I can say that Buddha and Christ are real to me, but far less vivid for me than I would want them to be. Such beings are more real for me than they presumably are for those who subscribe to a standard modem or postmodern paradigm, but less real for me than they are for those whom William James referred to as “the experts” — converts, mystics, saints, Gnostics, sages, and initiates.

Fifth, just as transpersonal thinkers and teachers are currently attempting to revision psychology, so might they attempt to revision religious traditions as we know them. To do so, transpersonal thinkers who often sound dismissive of religious traditions might heed Huston Smith (whose exposition of religious traditions seems to me unsurpassed in our time) in seeing in these traditions what he refers to as the “traction of history.” Now and in the future, religious traditions — including particularly Asian traditions about which transpersonalists tend to be reactively uncritical — must die not to their rich diversity, sources, or institutions, but to their penchant for atavism, misogyny, and intolerance. Let pragmatism and pluralism help religious traditions replace anachronistic and dogmatic prescriptions in favor of tolerance needed both by adherents of religious traditions and by those who might be adherents if religious communities more faithfully exhibited their espoused ideals.

The first of many positive consequences of this change would be the general acceptance of the yogas that Krishna taught in the Bhagavadgita: spiritual thinking, selfless action, worship, and meditation. A second consequence would be the general acceptance of the dharma of Buddha and his followers. The life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, made luminous by suffering, and his teachings made efficacious by compassion, might then serve as evidence that spirit manifests itself for all humankind. A third such consequence would be the general acknowledgment that the Christ (Logos), through Its incarnation in Jesus, as depicted in the New Testament and witnessed currently by a third of the human community, decisively brought and continues to bring redemptive grace into human consciousness and into the earth.

Religious traditions can trivialize and distort by dogma and idolatry, but they can also sustain the mysterious relationship between the spiritual and the human. In my view, the spiritual has broken through with particular force and depth in at least these instances — but in many others as well: the revelation of YHWH as “I AM” to Moses; the revelation of the yogas by Krishna to Arjuna recounted in the Bhagavadgita; the way of overcoming suffering by Buddha; the life and teachings of Christ from his baptism through His resurrection and the descent of the Spirit; the reality of the Avalokiteshvara (the bodhisattva of compassion) in the life of Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth incarnation of the Dalai Lama.

It is an essential component of my Anthroposophy (as well as a karmically significant part of biography) that I find deep exoteric and esoteric truths in life and reality of Christ, some of which have been saved and others distorted by Christianity. I hold that as human beings we are born of the Ground of Being (traditionally called the Father), die and resurrect through the Logos, and are drawn to the future by the Spirit. I am convinced that the “persons” of the Trinity should no longer be understood in gender terms and that the divine feminine is emerging in our time from a deeply spiritual, ontologically real source.

Because I need help in my effort to experience, understand and express the reality of Christ and other higher beings who work in harmony with Christ on behalf of humanity and the earth, I practice some of Steiner’s many recommendations — such as meditation, working with mantras, esoteric reading, and regular invocation of the dead — helpful for developing a noetic relationship with the spiritual in the universe. I supplement my Anthroposophical practice by participation in the Christian sacramental life made possible by Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Experience of the Christian sacraments, particularly when deepened by scholarship, can be profoundly revelatory of a positive relationship between the sensory and the supersensory realms.

This article is adapted from a talk at the New York Open Center.

Jacob Needleman is the author of many books including The Heart of Philosophy, Lost Christianity and The American Soul. He is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University and was formerly director of the Center for the Study of New Religions at the Graduate Theological Seminary at Berkeley. He is a long-time student of the work of G.I. Gurdjieff and was honored at the 2006 New York Open Center Gala for the impact of his own work.

Photo courtesy of Gurdjieff International Review

My training is as a philosopher and a student of the great religions and spiritual teachings of the world. Rather early on in my studies I came to the conclusion, which many others have also come to, that all the great spiritual traditions, no matter how different and disparate they sometimes seem, converge at a certain point and at their root represent one single unitary vision of reality and the human condition, a vision which is expressed in many different ways according to the subjectivity and needs of their specific cultural context.

The question that arose in my mind very early on is: What light can this great spiritual vision that is common to all the traditions — Judaism and its mystical side, for instance; the Christian tradition in its contemplative dimension; the Sufi core of the Islamic tradition; Hinduism of course; the great Buddhist manifestations; all of the ancient traditions — what light can this unitary vision throw on the contemporary problems of our culture, our world, our individual lives?

On the one hand, we have this exalted, common vision. On the other hand, we have the difficulties, dangers, temptations — the chaos, the joys, the demands, the pleasures and pains of our everyday life as individuals and as a society. What bridge can we find between mankind’s timeless vision of spiritual truth and the life we actually lead? Because in the end it’s not enough simply to speculate about ideas. It’s not enough to immerse oneself in them and never try to live them. Nor is it enough simply to engage in the demands and the needs of our everyday life: family, work, survival, creativity, children. It’s just not enough. What is the bridge between these two worlds? How can we find it?

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I propose to you that the Gurdjieff teaching can help us find this bridge. Not only is it in itself a root teaching, coming from the source of all the traditions and adapted to the world we live in and the mind that lives in us. But it is also a teaching that can help us begin to see the bridge between the unitary vision of truth and the unique problems of our modern life.

In order to begin to sketch out something about this teaching, I’d like to evoke the kind of questions that lie at the heart of the philosophical impulse. I invite you to listen to these questions — listen to them and listen to yourself, if I may put it that way. Listen for the action these questions have on you if you let them in. There could be one question, it could be ten questions, it could be twenty. These are all aspects of one great question. But let me say a few of them to you, and you, please, try to let them in.

The first question: Are we alone in the universe? This isn’t referring to extraterrestrial beings, but to what some people call God, other people call the absolute, the higher. It has many names. Is man, are we, alone?

The second question: Who am I? Philosophically speaking, this question could be more theoretical: What is man? But the question that comes from the heart is, Who am I?

The third question: Why do we live? Why are we living? Why are we alive? Why are we here? Do we just arrive out of nowhere and go nowhere, or are we here for a purpose?

The fourth question: Why do we suffer?

The fifth question: Is death the end? Just watch your own self, where these questions are heard.

The sixth question: Why is there evil?

The seventh question: What can we hope for?

The eighth question: What can we know?

The ninth question: What ought we to do?

And the tenth question: How should we live?

Now I suggest that if you let these questions in, a space inside oneself opens up that is already the beginning of a new relationship to one’s search, a new relationship to oneself. Such questions are not answerable in the usual sense of the term. These are the great unanswerable questions of mankind.

And the only really interesting questions are the unanswerable ones. That doesn’t mean they don’t have answers — that means we can’t answer them. But they’ve been asked for thousands of years and every one of us sooner or later will, with great urgency, be touched by one or two or three of them or all of them together.

Some people may believe that because we have no strict answers written down in books upon which everyone can agree, that we should not waste our time on them and just let them go. But that’s a grave mistake. They are questions that come from the heart, from the depths of human nature, that come from a force inside ourselves, which our modern culture doesn’t acknowledge, and which Gurdjieff was very careful to address and to respect. Plato in the ancient world gave it a name, he called it Eros. This word has become limited in a way that Plato never meant it to be. Gurdjieff spoke of it as a wish in man’s essence and its nature is to call us to understand and participate in the greater reality we are meant to serve. This wish, this yearning is what defines us as human beings.

Let us step into each one of these questions without trying to be overly academic. Because the interesting thing is the movement inside that the questions evoke, the movement toward oneself, the stepping back into oneself that such questions, when honestly asked, evoke. These are questions which stop you. When we’re stopped, when the answering function is stopped, something else appears. When the answering function is stopped, even profound religious ideas and thoughts and theological and philosophical formulations are no longer the ultimate authority. It’s something else. Something silent, something real appears perhaps without any words at all. This is a very important moment from the point of view of what Gurdjieff teaches about the inner search.

If now we try to use words to elaborate his ideas, it is only to elaborate the questions themselves as a witness and support for the inner movement that they evoke.

Take the first question: Are we alone in the universe? For Gurdjieff, the universe is a vast organic whole of many levels of reality — ‘vertically’ vast, not only ‘horizontally’ vast, although those two dimensions really are not as different as they seem. I mean vertical vastness in the sense of levels of understanding, levels of consciousness, levels of being. And the horizontal dimension in the quantitative sense of vast measures of space, time and energy.

Ancient man stood in awe and wonder, not just of the quantitative vastness of the universe but of its qualitative vastness too. When one looks up at the night sky, a sense of wonder is evoked, a way of knowing which is connected to a state of feeling. In this state of wonder before the universe and nature, for most of us quite a rare thing happens: We feel what we know. We feel there exists something higher than ourselves. But it is a genuine knowing as well. This is one hint of a kind of human functioning — where knowing and feeling merge together — that has not been adequately recognized and valued in the modern world. We need to understand that there is a great difference between what we might call feeling, real feeling, and emotional reactions, which do not necessarily have a significant knowledge component to them.

The universe in the Gurdjieff teaching is a vast, multileveled organic structure. The relation of these levels to each other is diagrammatically presented in P.D. Ouspensky’s work, In Search of the Miraculous, as what is termed ‘The Ray of Creation,’ a movement of descending and ascending energy coming from and returning to a central, higher source with distinct ’stops’ or stations occupied by corresponding worlds. The Sun is higher than the earth; higher than the Sun in the vertical level is our galaxy, The Milky Way. Higher than our galaxy are all the starry worlds together. And transcending all is that which is called the Absolute — supreme and, for us, unknowable.

One of the many important elements of this idea of the Ray of Creation is that mankind is meant to receive different levels of influence, many different levels of intelligence, many different levels that are meant to nourish the life of the human being, not just physically, but psychologically, spiritually, intellectually, mystically, and practically. Man is meant to be a tree with branches reaching all the way up and the leaves of this human tree are meant to receive all these energies and transform them in oneself, in which case, a human being is meant and designed and built to become what Gurdjieff calls a microcosmos. It’s an ancient word, it’s a huge idea. Man is meant to be a miniature universe.

Each being, each planet, is a life, an organic whole in which order and structure are governed by a certain level of mind. Every system of the universe, every sun is an immense source of life energy pouring itself out into the universe. The earth itself captures a tiny thimbleful of the energy of our sun. Out of that thimbleful of energy, life on earth exists. Man is meant to be a mirror of that entire universe. The question, ‘Is man alone in the universe?’ bypasses entirely the ordinary concept of God that has become so boxed in, so over-familiar.

Let’s hold on to this idea for a moment as we face the second question, Who am I? Gurdjieff tells us each of us contains an immense possibility of consciousness that slumbers within us, crying to be born, to develop the greatness of a true I. What is I? What does it mean to truly say ‘I’? ‘I am.’ This is not the same thing as ‘I want that,’ ‘I like that,’ ‘I don’t like that,’ ‘I’m happy,’ ‘I’m sad,’ ‘I’m hungry,’ ‘I’m coughing.’ I is the mystery of the great self within.

Who am I? Man is the being who can say I, who can enter the cosmic mystery of I. But Gurdjieff tells us that, as we are, we’re not yet that. We can become this I, but we must work for it. It’s waiting for us. But it’s not I now. Now I am simply, ‘I like,’ ‘I don’t like,’ ‘ I’m happy,’ ‘I’m sad,’ ‘ I want,’ ‘ I don’t want.’ All the ways we use this word, ‘I,’ all the ways we can feel ourselves as ‘I,’ are simply one, then another, then another of these fragmentary beings within us that call themselves ‘I’ and falsely presume to represent the whole of ourselves. At one iteration of his teaching, Gurdjieff spoke of this situation as man’s ‘ many ‘I’s,’ and the shocking thing is that they are so different from each other and they don’t know each other. We don’t know that we are many ‘I’s. Right now, I think I’m this one; in ten minutes, I’ll be another one; ten minutes later, I’ll be another one and yet another one.

So the question, ‘Who am I?’ cuts very deep and very wide. Who is the ‘I’ now present? What does he or she want to say? And yet the deeper question, ‘Who am I?’ is a way of seeing what happens when we confront the fact that we have no real answer. Just to ask the question is a liberation, is an invitation to step back from the illusion that I am one whole consistent being, in control of myself. Friedrich Nietzsche, in one of his many prophetic statements, defined man as the being who can make a promise, keep a promise. Gurdjieff has a similar idea and in this sense, we, as we are, are not yet men, but only men in quotation marks. So, ‘Who am I?’ is a great question in the Gurdjieff teaching. This doctrine of many ‘I’s, and this doctrine of real I, echoes many other teachings in the world.

As we are, we are many ‘I’s and we do not yet have a real I. How to say it dramatically enough? I don’t exist; there is no I; the I is asleep; I’m asleep to the I. And without I, there is no human life. This begins to touch on what Gurdjieff calls the ‘terror of the situation.’ If we begin to feel a slight metaphysical chill about this part of the teaching, it means we are beginning to understand it. This is one of the great shocks that the Gurdjieff teaching brings to the world.

But let’s move on. We now come to the third question. Why do we live? Why are we here? Here the question is: Why is mankind on earth? Gurdjieff says that mankind is meant to be a transmitting station for these energies we have been speaking of as coming from a higher source, coming down into the earth, in order to act in our world. We’re here to serve something. He puts it in terms of energies and materiality sometimes, and then in other expressions and other texts he has written, he speaks another language about it. But basically, the practical study of all the teaching of Gurdjieff about awakening, sleep, self knowledge and self-awakening is absolutely necessary before anything like serving and service can be understood.

We’re not here for ourselves alone, we’re here to serve something greater than ourselves. We’re built for that. But in order to come to that, we have to develop something in ourselves. We have to work. Here’s where the vast scale of what he calls the work can be sensed. Mankind cannot be happy and fulfilled without meaning; and meaning comes through the growth of the I. Meaning comes through serving, which can only take place when it is sourced in the I.

Why do we live? is answerable by a discipline of practice, of search, of struggle — of work to become what we are meant to be. And that means full engagement in the life of man. Then it opens the question, how to live this life? Why do we live the way we live? How can we live in a way that leads us toward the capacity to love, which is ultimately what it means to serve. Gurdjieff’s teaching doesn’t always speak of love in some of its more familiar formulations. But now it may be time for people to speak a little more in those terms. In the long run, we will discover that this is a teaching about love.

We can now go on a little more briefly to these other questions: Why do we suffer? The word ‘identification’ in Gurdjieff’s teaching is related to the Buddhist and Hindu idea of attachment. There are basically two kinds of suffering. One is the suffering that comes from identification or attachment, usually involving some source of ego, fear, illusion, preservation of an image, a wish for safety and security in a realm where safety and security are not really possible. The other kind of suffering is the suffering that brings meaning, that brings understanding. That is what called in the Christian tradition, redemptive suffering. Gurdjieff asks us to look at these two kinds of suffering. There is a kind of suffering that is deeply within the human essence and there’s a kind of suffering that covers over the human essence, a suffering that appears when my favorite illusions about myself are threatened. The creative suffering appears when the real self is touched by a perception of the truth that causes perhaps great grief, sorrow, remorse, but in the long run, perhaps, the joy that comes with the awakening of the power to be and to love.

I saw an illustration of what may be called essence-suffering some time ago. A Buddhist teacher I knew in California, a good man, a real master, had an American pupil whom he loved very much. She died of cancer at a very early age, in her early thirties. I remember there was a memorial service for her. This was many years ago and I went to the service. The master was up on the platform and friends of the young woman came and spoke about her. I was wondering what a Buddhist teacher would say because Buddhism is about freedom from suffering.

Other people spoke as we would all speak, very understandably, very deeply. I was very touched by what then happened. The Buddhist teacher stood up, and he let out a roar, a groan, from deep down. From the bottom of the earth, a groan of sorrow that resonated through the whole hall, took everyone aback. It was very deep and very real. Then he sat down and was completely quiet. It was as though a storm was unleashed and then it was over. That was suffering. That was the expression of essence-suffering!

So why do we suffer? It’s not that pain isn’t real, but what is it serving, what is it protecting, what is it expressing? Gurdjieff invites us to consider, when have we ever really learned anything deeply without suffering? And what kind of suffering?

The next question: Is death the end? This is one of the most difficult aspects of the Gurdjieff teaching for many people. Although it is not as cut and dried as it is sometimes presented, Gurdjieff’s extraordinary idea, which is not unique to him and which you find in some ancient teachings, is that man has the possibility of developing an immortal soul but is not born with it. We are not born with an immortal soul but, through a practice of spiritual work or an extraordinary kind of life, which is sometimes given to people, man can develop an ‘immortal soul.’

I could give you the references to other teachings where you’d find this idea, but wherever you find it, it stands as a great shock. How does he express this? It is an awesome idea that, just as the human body develops energies that produce all kinds of substances like hard bones and soft tissue, so the human psyche also receives energy and through a process of inner work, other kinds of substances and energies can form which are psychologically and spiritually conditioned. This is an element of the Gurdjieff teaching about the receiving of the energy of experience, through which one develops something which, putting it very simply, can withstand the death of the body.

Next, What can we know? Just as the soul is undeveloped, just as the I cries out to be born, just as there are higher states of consciousness that can be lived, so our knowing is a function of our state. Our state has to do with the level of sensitivity and participation of all of the elements of our being, our body, our heart and our mind. And it has to do with a different state of consciousness, which is to our present state of consciousness as our present state of consciousness is to our sleeping in bed, and which can be called the third state of consciousness. In this state, a different kind of knowing is possible. And beyond this third state of conscious there are others, still higher and still more cognitively powerful.

This is a revolutionary idea for modern science to contemplate: that everything we know is relative to the state of consciousness we’re in. And that the questions that we started with — which we call unanswerable — are in fact answerable, but only through the development of our consciousness.

Again, this would require a great deal of discussion. What does it mean, other states of consciousness? What is this mysterious word, self-remembering, that has become so familiar in many circles of the Gurdjieff work? When the energy, the force, the life of the true I appears and touches my mind and feelings, it is a kind of remembering of who I really am. The return home to my true self is another state, and we can know things in that state that we can never know in our usual state.

What can we hope for? I think that’s already been answered in a way. We can hope to become what we are meant to be, what we are created to be.

What ought I to do? Here Gurdjieff introduces another shattering idea. The word ‘ought,’ having to do with ethics and morality, does not have any real meaning for human beings unless they have access to what he calls conscience. Conscience is not the super-ego as the psychiatrists define it, and not our usual sense of what is right and wrong because often that is simply conditioned by our culture and is easily shaken sometimes or rigidly held onto in a way that contradicts the very ethical qualities that it is telling us to obey. So conscience is a characteristic of another state although it sometimes breaks through in our lives. And when it does, it is unmistakable, unforgettable. Shattering. Yet it is the only true source of moral guidance.

This does not, however, mean that we cannot be held to the normal moral guidelines of our everyday lives. These guidelines have often been laid down by men and women of greater understanding and in that sense represent the tracks of the force of conscience that has appeared in spiritually developed individuals of the past. The role of cultural morality in our lives represents a sort of functioning in us that we cannot simply disregard without having something of at least equal quality to put in its place. But, all the same, it is necessary to recognize that the ultimate source of moral power will appear in us when we develop a deeper sensitivity to the call of conscience within our Selves.

In great super-satisfaction, in great anxiety, in great disappointment, in the face of death, in the face of loss, in the face of great happiness and ecstasy, there are sometimes moments when I Am appears. I can then see what a person is meant to be. In the state of deep wonder, for example, I become more like the person I would wish to be. In the Gurdjieff teaching, these states are like harbingers of the ‘new man.’ They’re like the seeds of the people we could become. This points to the aim, in a way, of the Gurdjieff teaching and the hope that it presents to the world and to us. The hope is in the creation of people.

The world needs people who are conscious, who have being, who are real. The world doesn’t need more technology. It doesn’t need more theories or more ideology, more mass movements or political movements or more democratic goals or ideas. All those are very good and very needed to get through the night, as it were, to get through the times. But what the world most urgently needs are people who are conduits of genuine conscience and intelligence. We glimpse that possibility when we are in another state. In that other state, we see it is possible that I am, I can love, I can care, just a little bit more. I don’t react to every disturbance. I’m not taken by every temptation. I’m not chewed up by every anxiety. I can listen, I can look, I can be.

The practice of the Gurdjieff work is the art and science of becoming more accessible to that which appears in these other states. I once asked an orthodox Archbishop a question that may illustrate what I’m speaking about. This was a man in London, Anthony Bloom, whom I met several times. Once I had been traveling through Greece and spent a little time at the great monastic community of Mount Athos. During that trip I visited many Eastern Orthodox sacred places and churches. In an Orthodox church you look up and see the great head of Christ, Ruler of the Universe, Creator of the Universe. One of those times, I must have been in a better state than I usually am. I was looking up, sitting in a certain church in Athens. Deep down in myself, I sensed that the Universe and my life were a gift that was given through a great sacrifice that was being represented by the head of Christ above me. It made a great impression on me.

I went to Anthony Bloom once and we were having a conversation. I said to him, ‘What is the nature of the response that we are obliged to make to such an immense gift of life and existence coming from such a level?’ He gave a beautiful answer. He said, ‘What is the proper response to a gift? Simply to accept it. All our work,’ he said, ‘is to allow us to accept the gift that is always being offered, to become permeable to it, to become receptive to the gift that is given. The human being is not yet able to accept this energy, this light. The whole meaning of inner work is to become able in your being, not just in your mind, to accept this light that is being offered, because there is much more being offered than we’re able to receive.’

What ought we to do? Gurdjieff’s answer is: obey conscience. But the real voice of conscience is not heard by us very often. Therefore, the search, the struggle to become open to conscience defines the real meaning of ‘ought’ for someone who is not yet a real person.

The final question is, How should we live? This reflects a question heard throughout the history of mankind. How do you organize society? How do we structure our life, our manners, our customs, our behaviors, our forms, our relations with each other? Whole religions have been founded in order to tell us that. The Koran, the Talmud, all the ways and laws of India. It’s such a vast question. The contribution that immediately returns from the Gurdjieff teaching is his great idea of a real spiritual community. ‘I wished,’ he writes, ‘to create around myself conditions in which a man would be continually reminded of the sense and aim of his existence by an unavoidable friction between his conscience and the automatic manifestations of his nature.’ Such was the basis of the community in the midst of modern life that he founded, companions helping each other, transmitting to each other. In the first pages of his great book, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff tells us that to transmit the truth about what we are and what we can work to become is what he wishes for his readers with all of his being. We must take that very seriously. He felt that one needs to have a certain community-within-the-world for that, not a community removed from modern life, but rather a so-to-say invisible community formed by special conditions — psychological, physical, social, philosophical, attitudinal — within the life we all live. He was a master at that.

So he created something called the Work.

* * *

http://www.JacobNeedleman.com

The author wishes to thank Ralph White and Mitch Horowitz for their work in facilitating the talk at the Open Center from which this article emerged.

Kathleen Jesse Raine was British a poet, scholar, critic, philosopher and tireless worker for the spirit, who died on July 7, 2003, at the ripe old age of 95. She was the author of more than twelve books of poetry, an autobiography in four volumes, and many works of scholarly and philosophical criticism whose central concern was always the reaffirmation of what she believed to be the perennial, true and spiritual ground of poetry and inspiration. In the service of this truth, she delivered her seminal Mellon Lectures on Blake and Tradition and, more recently, in the 1970's gave her "Summa Blakeana"-her lectures on Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job.

In such projects, as in all her work, Kathleen Raine constantly strove to elucidate the sacramental wisdom of the imagination, that wisdom inherent in reality, immanent in nature and in mind, which the poet, when he or she is most truly "original," only uncovers or remembers. This symbolic gnosis, "of form and beauty inviolate," in which "inner and outer reality are at one, the world in harmony with the imagination," is, Dr. Raine believes, humanity's original and natural state. It is the Earthly Paradise or Eden, which each must recover or else perish, but which once restored becomes its own joy, true science, and true poetry:

Sleep at the tree's root,
where the night is spun Into the stuff of worlds,
listen to the winds,
the tides, and the night's harmonies,
and know All that you knew before you began to forget…

–Message from Home

She was convinced of the primacy of the imagination-that "mental things alone are real." Her life and work were concerned with tracing, learning, and practicing the one journey of remembrance. This is the narrow track the soul must tread, from Eden to Eden, through all the hells until, end and beginning joined once more, hells transcended and illusion dropped away, the perfection of the original sphere—"the cell and seed of life"—is wrought again.

"Poetry," she stated repeatedly, "is the language of the soul," invoking by this distinction the traditional tripartite anthropology of body, soul and spirit (or intellect). For it is the soul, in Christianity and in Platonism, whose descent becomes a fall through self-love when, as an image enamoured of itself, it becomes entangled in the suffering that follows from thinking that it is substantial in itself, its own source. Thus for her it was the soul and its world, fallen and de-symbolized, which must be purified and educated. Once, raised up and reunited with its celestial double, its true original, the soul can then raise the world itself up, transforming its veil of illusion into the diaphanous and redemptive play of symbols:

Bright cloud,
Bringer of rain to far fields,
To me, who will not drink that water
–fall nor feel–

Wet mist on my face,
White gold and rose
Vision of light,
Meaning and beauty immeasurable.
That meaning is not rain, nor that
beauty mist.

—Bright Cloud

For her the drama of the soul, whose language is poetry, is that of life itself, of created things and of our earthly being, of the struggle to recall and, recalling, to unite with that higher principle which, following Plato and Yeats, she calls the Daimon. Kathleen Raine felt with Plato that if they do not recall and lead us back to Eden-if they do not partake of the "inner journey"-poetry and life are abused and have no true place in the ideal Republic. For her, as for all Platonists, life and art-social, ethical and aesthetic (as also biological physical) forms-have but one function, the perfection of being, which is the knowledge and remembrance of the Eternal Kingdom:

Their only task to recollect
Originals laid up in heaven…

—Ninfa Revisited

Her first guide in this was life itself, inscribed like a palimpsest with the century's great themes of loss and anguish, rootlessness and passion, reductionism and materialism. She bore witness to these, overcame and transformed then by a continuous striving to be in all things true to herself, her vision and sacred calling. Next, her guides were Blake and Yeats (and to a lesser degree Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Dante, Spenser and Milton). They led her to drink deeply at the "ancient springs" of Platonism, Hermeticism and Kabbalah, teaching her to attend closely to such perennial "singing masters of the soul" as Orpheus, Plato, Hermes, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Paracelsus, Boehme, Swedenborg and Thomas Taylor. Long labor in this school confirmed that Blake and Yeats were not at all "original" in the modern sense, but were fully so in the ancient one. They were not innovators, except in the precise etymological sense of those who "renewed," that is made new again for their time what was perennially and continuously new: the wisdom and process of creation itself.

Realizing this, Kathleen Raine worked to recover the possibility of such a "renewal" or gnosis-that remembering which Plato called a "not-forgetting"-both for herself and for her age. It was always this that spurred her on; and her study and her scholarship were always secondary to it -"always incidental to the needs of a poet for knowledge of a certain kind." Therefore she never fitted easily into an academic role and worked mostly on her own, independently and for the sake of the greater good. "Like Thomas Taylor," she writes, "I read the books of wisdom for the sake of that wisdom, seeing scholarship always as a means to an end, never as an end in itself":

Stone into man must grow,
the human word carved by our whispers in the passing air is
the authentic utterance of cloud,
the speech of flowing water, blowing wind,
of silver moon and stunted juniper.

—Night in Martindale

Kathleen Raine was perhaps most precious to us because she was so much what she taught-which means that one cannot agree with her philosophy and remain untouched by her life, or admire her scholarship but deplore her philosophy. Her poetry, her life, her metaphysics, her aesthetics, her cosmology were all of one piece, a single seamless cloth. It was this wholeness that has allowed her to be one of those to perform for our time the same function that Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Eriugena, Ficino and Thomas Taylor performed for their times: the living transmission of Orphic Teaching. By this count the eighth in the succession, she may be said to mark the beginning of a new octave; and this, though fanciful, is at least metaphorically apt. For she became the prophet of that "new age" of the spirit in which the only true authority is the wisdom of the heart, Blake's "True Man," the Imagination.

Led to this "New Age" view by her life as by her study, she was also brought to confront its logical complement, the simultaneous reality of an ending, of what she calls "the leaf-fall of a civilization"-the natural end of European Christendom. From this stance on the cusp, she faced the end of the twentieth century with both hope for a new civilization and the fear of a terrible barbarism. She saw hope in "the seeds, the living among the dead, those who do not participate in the collective disintegration, but guard their secret of immortality, the essence of what has been and may be again." But she feared the barbarism, the chaotic disintegration within which these seeds will germinate, lying among those who have no knowledge of "what has been and may be again," and so have no past or ground, either ontological or historical:

To be a barbarian is to have no past;
For the past is the present of the
future, the human kingdom;
Some known to us, others unknown,
you, I, that still continuing few
To whose hearts the remembered and
forgotten dead are presences,
Ripening in memory the seed of cities
To scatter for what meagre crop this
poisoned stricken earth may bear,
Or harvest into that native land
we desire and remember,
Keep France, keep Christendom,
keep Athens in mind.

—Letter to Pierre Emmanuel

Here she deeds us another gift: her understanding of culture as that net of truths that a society must hold permanent so that others may be changed, as the society itself changes, endures change, and yet remains the same. These are the qualities that ensure continuity and order. They are the invisible bonds of shared value, humanly honed and perfected and passed on in innumerable ways, whose embodiment is both a practice and a gnosis. They are a living access to the knowledge sub specie aeternitatis that myth, ritual, history and literature transmit and evoke. Without such a cultural tradition, as the Russian poet Mandelstam realized when he underwent what Dr. Raine calls "the Marxist variant of our Western materialism," history (and evolution) becomes "mere progress"—"the mechanical movement of a clock-hand, not the sacred succession of interlinked events."

Most precious of all, there is her poetry in which for more half a century she has kept true to herself in language true to itself. She wrote poetry not dictated by the fashions of the moment but inwardly determined by what she experienced as the unifying links that bind the human soul to the larger cosmos whose she is and must strive to reveal. Her's, in a sense, is sacred poetry, the paradox and promise of which is prophetically revealed in her first collected poem-which, as it should, resumes and stands as an introduction to the rest:

A bird sings on a matin tree
'Once such a bird was 1.'

The sky's gaze says
'Remember your mother.'

Seas, trees and voices cry
'Nature is your nature.'

I reply
'I am what is not what I was.
Seas, trees, and bird, alas!
Sea, tree, and bird was I.'

—Lyric

Adapted from the Introduction to Lindisfarne Letter 9, Poetry and Prophecy, originally published by the Lindisfarne Press in 1979.

Douglas Miller is Associate Professor of German and Art at the University of Michigan, Flint. He is the editor and translator of Goethe’s Scientific Studies (published by Princeton University Press), and most recently co-authored Synthetic Vision, an international exhibition on Goethe sponsored by the Goethe Institute.

A recent issue of a well-known publication for university faculty and administrators featured on its front cover a startling collage of literary portraits — sixteen authors with four of them x’d out in red.(1) In the top row, right, was the face of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 — 1832), the strokes of the red x intersecting over his eye.

Why deface this great German writer, author of Faust and some of the greatest poetry in the western tradition? The editors of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, a popular college text and an important voice in defining the canon of world literature, had eliminated him from their newest edition, purportedly in order to save space and reduce the bulk of the anthology. While it might be argued that Goethe is principally a great writer, and not a theorist, it would be hard to overlook the fact that he has produced a number of important essays on literature — in fact, the most recent translation of his work in this area contains over twenty essays on the subject.(2) No, there was certainly more to the elimination of Goethe than some shortage of suitable material. While the article did not indicate exactly why he was axed, there is already a strong hint in the title of the anthology itself, with its emphasis on theory. Further along, a telling statement underscored this point: “It made sense to treat theory not just as a development in intellectual history, but as something that was now embedded in the everyday practice of the profession.”(3)

It is easy to see how the anthology had an increasingly difficult time accepting the importance of a poet who could write (in advice to a young college student):

All theories, dear friend, are gray;
the golden tree of life is green.
– Faust, ll. 2038-2039 (4)

However, the rejection of what Goethe has to say about literature and life itself touches on a far deeper and more disturbing topic, namely the place of the esoteric in modern thought and the modern academy. Goethe was motivated throughout his literary and scientific career by a need to penetrate into life, not to turn his gaze away from it; he looked always for the hidden meaning in the events and processes around him, from the subtlest interplay of colors in nature to the spiritual and karmic background of human existence. For him, the greatest danger in thinking was to be trapped in the inner, abstract, illusory world of thought without reference to what occurs in the world. Today, the word esoteric has taken on the meaning of arcane and difficult, but the core meaning of the word (“that which is hidden”) became for Goethe a key to understanding — it is what gives real significance to his work. As he viewed the world, superficial events are only a veil of metaphor behind which the real forces shape life. Goethe worked hard to peer into this hidden world, to pierce through the veil of illusion, and to understand what he so succinctly indicated almost at the end of his life:

All that is transitory/ is only a symbol,
– Faust, ll. 12,104-12,105.(5)

Goethe felt the most important thing a human being could do was to develop the ability to see through the veil and discern clearly what lay behind; he put his mastery of language into the service of this quest. Thus, in his novel, Wilhelm Meister, he allows the main character (and the reader) to ride along on the glittering surface of life until suddenly we plunge through to discover that the seemingly chaotic events of that life are guided by a group of figures that seemed peripheral at first. The life of Faust in Goethe’s great drama unrolls against the background of spiritual events on a level to which we, the audience, are privy but Faust is not; we are witness to efforts to understand them and act out of them. In his well-developed body of scientific work, Goethe also approached this problem of esoteric understanding by showing how to awaken organs of perception through which we can participate inwardly and precisely in the intellectus archetypus at work in nature. He writes:

From the softest breath to the most savage noise, from the simplest tone to the most sublime harmony, from the fiercest cry of passion to the gentlest word of reason, it is nature alone that speaks, revealing its existence, energy, life, and circumstances, so that a blind man to whom the vast world of the visible is denied may seize hold of an infinite living realm through what he can hear.

Thus nature also speaks to other senses which lie even deeper, to known, misunderstood, and unknown senses. Thus it converses with itself and with us through a thousand phenomena.(6)

To understand Goethe and why he does not fit very well into a worldview that takes theory as its foundation and chief content, it is essential to understand that his path leads into life, through life, beyond life; purely abstract ideas and theories only serve to sidetrack and mislead on this journey. He notes the human tendency to “fall in love” with our own ideas, so that the ideas become more important than the phenomena around us, and supplant them (for example, making theory central in literary criticism rather than the literary creations themselves). We are cut off from the hidden forces, the esoteric forces, really at work in the world and they, in turn, are cut off from us. And as this abyss widens, the possibility of understanding becomes ever more remote.

When Goethe brings his gift for language to bear whether in literature or in science, the resulting pictures lead us into a spiritual experience distinguished by clarity, precision, and beauty. These strong pictures or metaphors reflect the fact that Goethe had learned to meditate in an objective way about the world.(7) His thinking about things (the theory) becomes one with the phenomena he confronts. This meditative gift is both objective and imaginative, and it yields extraordinary insights into the nature of the world and the human being. It is commonly held today that such meditation can only be subjective, and that an objective grasp of reality requires instruments and calculations that are held apart from the human being. Goethe strongly disagreed with that view, for he realized that such mechanical assistance could never lead to an understanding of life itself. Such approaches “transform living things into dead ones; they kill the inner life in order to apply an inadequate substitute from without.” (8) The meditative approach he took asked the meditant to keep the outer world in all its objective reality, and also move into it and through it with the whole power of thought. Goethe called this approach Anschauung, a term he based loosely on Kant. Anschauung is a difficult term to translate into English; I have rendered it as intuitive perception.

Clearly, what Goethe asks of himself (and of us) is not easy. Yet this was not all he asked. He also asked us to grow as human beings so that we could become worthy of receiving the perceptions that arise. For these perceptions always lead us into a realm which is both divine and magical. To approach this realm we need to rise above our inner needs and ideas; we need to become a “godlike being” (9) able to see the world for what it is, not what we want it to be. This is the crux of the issue in Faust, and what makes the play both fascinating and difficult. Goethe places the life of Faust in a divine context right from the beginning, yet we find it hard to understand how the many mistakes — even crimes — Faust commits can ever leave him worthy of entering the divine world. Still, he is taken up into that world (albeit, after death) because these mistakes are the very mistakes that arise as human beings strive to become divine. They are not intellectual mistakes, theoretical mistakes, but errors that result from the living of a human life that is also seeking the divine. The effect of living life is not theoretical; it possesses a magical power to bridge the abyss between us and the underlying spiritual realities, so that our life might continue. Indeed, there are strong hints that Faust’s path has not yet ended when he dies, and that his “immortal part” has other lifetimes ahead of it in which to grow. Goethe also calls this “immortal part” of the human being the entelechy, or the monad, or the idea, and he said of it:

It carries a higher intention within itself, a higher task that makes its development just as regular as the development of a rose from leaf to stem to crown, and according to the same law. I don’t care whether we call this an idea or a monad — this intention is invisible and it exists prior to its visible development in the world of nature. The intermediate masks this idea wears as it develops should not confuse us. It is always the same metamorphosis or ability to transform in nature that makes a flower, a rose, out of the leaf, makes a caterpillar out of the egg and changes the caterpillar into a butterfly. (10)

Clearly Goethe saw that the role of the human being was not to make theories about the world, but rather to find this “higher intention” present within it. In fact, he makes the case that we should find our own “higher intention” in the context of what the world wants from us. In this sense he follows the Rosicrucian path with its three precepts: Ex Deo nascimur; In Jesu morimur; Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus. (11) Goethe directly describes an initiation into the Rosicrucian order in his long fragment, The Mysteries, and the final defeat of Mephistopheles by the host of angels in Faust is filled with Rosicrucian imagery. He frequently touches on the Rosicrucian theme of spiritual and physical healing in his writings. If our human situation is one in which we are separated from the spiritual reality that forms and guides our existence, then there is an important task to be fulfilled in helping human beings find a bridge into the spiritual world. Whether presenting us with literary symbols or scientific archetypes, Goethe is always concerned that we begin to see how to cross that bridge. He is the magician, the alchemist, who can bring about the transformations necessary to create the bridge (even if only for a moment). Here we can recall the sacrifice of the green snake in his alchemical story, The Fairy Tale. In this respect, Goethe also became aware of a sacrifice he made, for by the end of his long life he felt that he had been set apart from others. He spoke of himself more than once as a Merlin, never quite a part of the society around him, yet always appearing to make his mark at the right time. Not long before he died, he wrote to his friend, Zelter: “In the meantime I stand alone; like Merlin from his shining grave I sometimes let my echo be heard quietly and close by, and sometimes in the distance, too.” (12)

Thus Goethe stands as a writer who put his talents in the service of the world and an understanding of its esoteric content. Throughout the range of his work and the many years of his life, he never really strayed from the path of research into spiritual realities. It would be hard to find an author able to convey so well the widths and depths of the world in which life reigns and the abstract kills:

It is not good to remain in the abstract realm for all too long a time. The esoteric only does damage when it seeks to become exoteric. Life learns best from what is living. (13)

Perhaps it is only to be expected that such an author would have no place in a worldview predicated on the centrality of theory in the practice of literature, or of life. Nonetheless, Goethe’s powerful voice will continue to be heard because it must, where the importance of the esoteric is truly understood.

+++

1) The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 May 2001, p. A1.
2) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey, trans. Ellen von Nardoff and Ernest H. von Nardoff (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers New York, Inc., 1986).
3) Chronicle, p. A17.
4) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I & II, ed. and trans. Stuart Atkins, (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers New York, Inc., 1984), p. 52.
5) Faust, p. 305.
6) Preface to Theory of Color; in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller, (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers New York, Inc., 1988), p. 158.
7) He describes his ability to meditate in his review of Purkinje’s Sight from a Subjective Standpoint; see Scientific Studies, p. xxi.
8) Theory of Color, ß752; in Scientific Studies, p. 277.
9) ‘The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject,’ in Scientific Studies, p. 11.
10) Conversation with J. D. Falk, January 25, 1813; cited in Curt Englert-Faye, Vom unbekannten Goethe (Basel: Zbinden Verlag, 1984), p. 317.
11) Fama Fraternitatis (1614); cited in Ralph White, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited (Hudson, N.Y.: Lindisfarne Books, 1999), p. 12.
12) Letter to Zelter, December 14, 1830; in Goethe, Briefe, ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1967), vol. 4, p. 412.
13) Maximen und Reflexionen, No. 487; in Goethe, Werke, ed. Hans Joachim Schrimpf (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1960), vol. 12, p. 432.

Richard Geldard is the author of six books, including studies of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Greek philosophy and culture. He is also a frequent lecturer. A forthcoming book, A Life Examined: A Personal Journey in Quest of the Ground of Being, will be published in the fall of 2003.

This article is adapted from a talk given at Faneuil Hall in Boston in September at a forum celebrating Emerson's bicentenary with Jacob Needleman and Robert Thurman.

We are met in Emerson's Bicentennial year, here in Faneuil Hall, a famously public and wholly American building, where just three months ago we met to reflect on Emerson and the Examined Life. In this forum, we broaden our concerns to the precincts of the republic, outward to its place in the world and inward to its very soul. And because we are met in anniversary, I shall, in my introductory remarks, locate our concerns in relation to Emerson's milestones.

Emerson was born just one month after President Thomas Jefferson negotiated the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, effectively doubling the size of the country. As Ralph Waldo took his first steps, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out to explore the wilderness and report its wonders to a curious nation. As a new country, America was in its genesis, and its founding vision said more about its wilderness and vast spaces than any ideas or philosophy borrowed from John Locke. The American soul sank its roots deep in that vast wilderness and still possesses the memory of that first awakening. No one who has not experienced our wilderness, our vast horizons, our turbulent waters and skies, can possibly understand who we really are as a nation.
When Emerson published Nature in 1836, he announced the American soul, its distinctive character, which he understood to embody the need for physical, intellectual and spiritual freedom, a restless power, and a yearning for transcendence. Emerson announced the primacy of nature and catalogued its deepest laws, firmly renouncing the fear of the wilderness so pervasively a part of his own Puritan ancestry. He rejected the witchcraft of the dark woods surrounding Salem, of a people huddled frightened on the verge of Dark regions of Hell. Emerson felt these forces coursing through his own veins because he could count among his relatives the banished Ann Hutchinson as well as the judge who condemned her. Calvin's guilt-ridden determinism had no place in his American landscape, just as it would not for those visionaries who followed him, explorers of land and spirit like Walt Whitman and John Muir, each indebted to Emerson's vision of transcendent nature.
Just listen for a moment to the words that influenced them, as well as thousands of others in subsequent years: this from his essay "Nature".

"At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of custom falls off his back with the first step he makes into these precincts. Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes…..Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures, and by thoughts fast succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the present, and we were led in triumph by nature."

Through the years of Emerson's prime as a writer and lecturer, he faced the dominant issues of America's moral failures: treatment of the native population, slavery, and imperial ambitions. He argued for the salvation of the Cherokee nation in its efforts to remain in its home in Georgia. He joined the Abolitionists in their efforts to rid the nation of slavery, and he chastised the national leadership for its expansionist policies into Mexican territory. He became, in effect, the conscience of the nation.

By May 25, 1903, for the Centennial of Emerson's birth, when William James gave the keynote address in Concord, America had all but completed its westward expansion. The railroad had seen to it that most of our space was, if not settled, at least traversed. The fast disappearing wilderness led to a growing interest in conservation, resulting in the establishment of nearly fifty national parks over the next ten years. Millions carried their copies of Emerson's essays into these sanctuaries to find a momentary solitude, far from the madding crowds. In my own experience, the spires of Zion National Park became my cathedral and the high country of the Sierra Nevada my parish. It is within these solitudes that the conscience awakens and reflective skills develop to become an integral part of conscious life.

But conservation also meant that our wilderness became partitioned into small museums, sanctuaries to be visited by a few for only brief periods, not open spaces lived and truly experienced. The nation instead closed in and fell in love with industrialization and mass production. The nation's business, as Cal Coolidge said, was business, and Henry Ford's assembly line became the standard, even in education.

Listen to what one Elwood Cubberley, Dean of Stanford's School of Education during the 20s said in a guidebook for administrators: "Our schools are factories in which the raw products, the students, are to be shaped and fashioned according to the specifications laid down." He was serious! It was this kind of thinking that closed the independent one-room school house to build instead the massive unified school districts, or factories, we suffer our children to endure today. That thinking was in opposition to voices like Emerson's who pleaded with those charged with the education of our children to trust the student to discover his or her potential and develop from within.

Years before, in an 1850s speech to teachers in Providence, Emerson pleaded his case, as well as his vision of the inner life, to teachers: "I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and forordained that he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude."

As we saw, neither the nation nor its teachers listened. The efficient factory model won out, to be replaced in the 1970s and 80s with the corporate model, still huge and impersonal but now filled with long-term plans, product (student) testing and now, the latest buzz words: uniform standards of accountability. To study Emerson in this environment is like introducing meditation to workers as they work on the assembly line.
By 1982, the Centennial of Emerson's death, the republic had suffered through the debilitating moral failures of Vietnam and Watergate and was searching for some genuine redemption.. That memorial observance for Emerson momentarily reawakened the spirit of his vision. Academic departments of philosophy, literature and history reassessed Emerson's place in American culture, and publishers poured biographies, analyses and fresh editions of his work onto the nation's bookshelves. It is my belief that the remarkable rebirth of interest in Emerson during those years took place as a direct result of the perceived moral crisis in American life, the crisis Jimmy Carter was derided for by when he told us we were in the midst of a spiritual malaise. He was, of course, correct.
And now, here in 2003, in the light of 9/11 and the growing crisis in American credibility both here and abroad, Emerson steps forward again, this time to raise pointed questions and perhaps offer a renewed vision. Facing this task, I was drawn again to his famous question from "Experience" and to direct it to the nation as a whole. "Where do we find ourselves?" Only this time, the question turns away from its more psychological underpinnings to broader, more historical, moral and spiritual concerns.

Let's rephrase it for this occasion. Where does this nation find itself now? And, where in the wilderness of our experience, within reach of our own conscious faculties, do we discover the means of renewing the promise we made to ourselves in the founding of our republic? And by extension, how do we awaken the conscience of the republic?
The soul of this nation finds its tap root in the human instinct to be free from oppression. The Declaration and the Constitution are instruments of personal and collective liberation from the oppressions of body, mind and spirit experienced and resisted by our forebears. We began with that impulse and with varying devotion have cherished it ever since. What we need to recognize now is the global nature of the principle.

But what we call the soul, as distinct from spirit, is a more personal, discreet human faculty, and it can be withdrawn from the horizon of our lives. The symbol we employ to express that withdrawal is sleep, a falling from awareness, a force missing from the company of faculties we employ to address the world. The question, then, becomes, what can we do to awaken that force, to array it against the new oppressions of the body, mind and spirit which daily confront us? If we fail to awaken this force, we are fated to succumb and be buried in our comforts and entertainments while the republic we have inherited disintegrates before our eyes.

Freedom from oppression has given us, as Americans, our buoyancy of spirit and sense of optimism, that is, until recent events here and abroad. Since then we have experienced a collective despondency, Carter's malaise. On the psychological level, this condition manifests itself as fear. On the psychic level, oppression leads to feelings of emptiness and an absence of self-worth. Philosophically, oppression leads to an abdication of wholesale categories of meaning. Spiritually, it leads to a cynical withdrawal and separation from our ground of being.

Emerson's response to this dilemma was years in the making and appropriately complex. In his lecture on "Fate," he gives us a hint of the ambiguities and pitfalls involved. In response to the question of what measures can be taken to apply a philosophical ideal to the soul of the nation, he said "I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought. Many eager persons successively make an experiment in this way, and make themselves ridiculous…..I confess that I think we can as yet discern no social measures adapted to this end. We are instantly embarrassed when we attempt to apply a reform to societies of men. Societies are not convertible; to the highest ends societies cannot act."

What then are we to do? Emerson's eloquence seldom leaves us despairing of solution. Although he warned against programmatic or manipular solutions, declaring that there was little we could do to solve the times, he did offer sound advice to the would-be reformer. "I speak to the individual heart," he said. "I throw myself on the noble hope that struggles up through obstruction and perplexity in the private soul." We say in response, "Yes, sir, we know this and we try but is there no collective response, nothing to be applied to the community, to an assembly of seekers such as this one?"

It is a question which haunted Emerson as well, and here is his offering for our consideration, beginning with that one private soul.

I seek to show to one man his possible attainment and to bring to his ear the solicitations of a fairer earth and heaven than that he now inhabits — him to possess and use it. In the presence of the assembly, he has the desire, perhaps for the first time, to express himself largely, symmetrically, gigantically, not in fragments and miniatures…..[It is] a universal skill, a taking sovereign possession of the audience.

I see no other solution but Emerson's, that is, a reawakening of conscience in the individual act of remembrance, accomplished in solitude and then applied in community. You will recognize such a reawakening in yourself through a combination of clarity, coherence and moral conviction, which in turn will result in a consistency of thought, feeling and action in the world. That consistency will be the proof you require that the soul has indeed awakened and taken its proper place in the hierarchy.

This article is adapted from a talk given at Faneuil Hall in Boston in September at a forum celebrating Emerson's bicentenary with Jacob Needleman and Robert Thurman.

The whole program can be viewed on WGBH Webcast at
http://streams.wgbh.org/forum/forum.php?lecture_id=1269>http://streams.wgb
h.org/forum/forum.php?lecture_id=1269

Ptolemy Tompkins is author of This Tree Grows Out of Hell, a study of Mesoamerican myth and ritual, Paradise Fever: Growing up in the Shadow of the New Age, and The Book of Answers: Field Notes on Getting Wise in a Wisdom-Crazy World.

"Nothing in the world is really of value except what happens in the end." 1 So wrote the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin in Letters from a Traveler, one of roughly a dozen volumes published in the years following his death in New York City on Easter Sunday, 1955: volumes that saw the light only then because, though professedly Christian, they put forth a vision of the universe and the human place within it so radical that his Jesuit superiors had forbade him to publish them during his lifetime.

Teilhard's name is much less visible today than it was in the fifties and sixties — so much so that it's easy to underestimate just how broad and deep his influence ran when it was at its strongest. Is the universe a random and pointless event, or is it heading somewhere? What is the relationship, if any, between the truths uncovered by modern science and those of the world's religious traditions? Is a marriage of science and spirituality possible? For someone looking for answers to such questions in much of the fifties, all of the sixties, and a good part of the seventies as well — especially answers from a Christian voice capable of meeting the cosmically tinged teachings of the East with an equal scope and openness –Teilhard's work was the place to find it.

Long before Ken Wilber arrived to rescue the spiritual connotations of the word "evolution" for a large audience, Teilhard situated the human being in a cosmos that did not spit it out accidentally but brought it to birth as its highest and greatest creation. Biological evolution — Teilhard's chief interest as a scientist and the prime barrier to faith for educated people in the century he wrote in — was no enemy of this view, but its clearest evidence. The fossil record that he spent his life studying was, for him, but the immediately tangible manifestation of a great drift toward divinity that every atom of the universe has been secretly engaged in from the beginning. Everywhere Teilhard looked in the natural world — and he spent his entire life looking at it very closely — he saw evidence of the larger spiritual world which underlay and gave birth to the material, and into which it would eventually return, in a higher, transformed condition. The emergence of human consciousness on earth was, for him, the latest and most portentous step in a process of divinization that would ultimately encompass not only all of life, but all of matter itself. The universe and all it contained would, Teilhard believed, ultimately be lifted up into a state above the matrix of space and time altogether; a state that Teilhard, following the language of the New Testament, termed Omega. All that happened on the earth and to the earth was part of a larger story — the story of spirit. And because it was so, all that happened in the world was ultimately forgivable and good.

Far from seeing himself as some lone prophet with a quirky, subjective vision to foist upon the world, Teilhard believed he was just one among many spectators at this new wedding of science and spirit, and the grand drama of cosmic synthesis that was coming into view through it. Though he did not live to see the storm of enthusiasm — and controversy — that followed the publication of works like The Divine Milieu and The Phenomenon of Man, he knew very well that countless others were and had long been seeking a vision along the lines of the one he laid out. "The vision is not found in books of an earlier age," Teilhard scholar Thomas M. King writes in his book Teilhard's Mysticism of Knowing, because "it required the whole modern understanding of an evolving cosmos to make it possible. Teilhard has seen more only because he has stood in a privileged place, that is, he has been deeply involved in both the scientific and Christian milieu and has allowed the two influences to act on each other." 2 Whether by him or someone else, it was, to Teilhard, only a matter of time before the outlines of that vision were brought completely into view.

Teilhard's dogged determination to give physical matter a positive role in the cosmic drama he outlined produced most of what, from today's perspective, can seem his excesses. We live in a time when it is no longer unthinkable to question natural selection as the sole shaper of life on our planet. In Teilhard's day, it was far more outrageous than it is now for a scientist to suggest that the earth's organisms — including human beings — have the shape and character they do for any reason other than random genetic mutation. Teilhard embraced the mechanics of Darwinian evolution more than he might have needed to, and books like The Phenomenon of Man can today seem un-necessarily encumbered with farfetched spiritual explanations for Darwinian processes that have been, or are in the process of being, discarded. But Teilhard's vision survives such shortcomings — largely because his true value is not as a scientist but as a genuine mystic and visionary. Teilhard lived and breathed within a universe that was moving toward a state of spiritualization; one in which every last atom will be lifted up and rescued, and he was intent on creating a spirituality that would recognize that fact, condemning and discarding no aspect of material reality. Though his writings at first glance seem bewilderingly abstract, he in fact sought to become the least abstract, the most truly cosmic of Christian thinkers.

So it is that, mixed in with all his daunting terminology and dense metaphysical speculation (and the endless neologisms for which he had a particular weakness), Teilhard uses a rich supply of surprisingly immediate, physical imagery to describe the eons-long process of spiritual evolution that he sees both science and theology pointing to. River imagery is particularly appealing to him — perhaps because his very Western view of time saw it not as a circle or series of cycles, but a current moving inexorably and wonderfully forward.

There is, he writes, a "fundamental tide inherent in Matter." Human history is a "great river," the currents of which are "coming to run together." The world "falls forward in the direction of spirit." Of the vertiginous feeling that this new vision of cosmic evolution can bring on, he writes that, "once upon a time everything seemed fixed and solid. Now everything in the universe has begun to slide under our feet." 3 While that might sound like the worst, most unsettling news in the world, to Teilhard it is, in fact, the best.

For all the images of flowing currents and pulling, tidal forces that fill them, Teilhard's books don't propound some easy, New Age vision of cosmic transformation. On the contrary, much work is involved on the part of the individual who would take it seriously. To see the universe in its true dimensions, and to see those dimension as a proof of the Divine's goodness and greatness rather than of its non-existence, takes courage — a courage different from, but not unrelated to, that demanded of the Apostles following Christ's death. It was a courage not always being lived up to, Teilhard felt, by those of his day — both within his religious tradition and beyond it. Many of his fellow 20th century Christians had, he lamented, "allowed the fire to subside in our sleeping hearts. No doubt we still pray and work consciously that 'God's kingdom come'; but, actually, how many a heart really beats faster in the crazy hope of our whole world's transformation? To tell the truth, we must admit that we expect nothing of the kind. We must, at whatever cost, revive that flame — the desire and hope for the great coming event." 4 Teilhard believed that "the higher reality of the supernatural world is apparent only to those who have the courage to make up their mind that it is true." That courage entailed being open to the truths of science and of theology in equal measure.

In his fervent belief that the universe was shot through with a sense of purpose, and that the advent of the age of science had done nothing to diminish the truth of that purpose but instead was only a further chapter in its unfolding, Teilhard was in accord with another Christian thinker who was also enormously popular in the middle decades of the last century, and even more overlooked today than Teilhard: the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev. Like Teilhard, Berdyaev spoke from within the Christian tradition (though he was much given to railing about the shortcomings of the Russian Orthodox Church, he stayed within it throughout his adult life); but also like Teilhard, his words were often attractive to people outside that tradition or standing at its edges, wondering if, and how, its truths could be made to fit with the realities and challenges of the modern world. While Teilhard was trained as a paleontologist, Berdyaev's chief area of expertise was the historical past, in the details of which he found evidence for a quirky but profound re-visioning of the Christian understanding of humanity as freely, but perilously, working its way through the fallen world toward a recovery of its primordial innocence.

For Berdyaev, the world is "not yet completed," and the earth is "the arena of the struggle for eternity." Like Teilhard, he is unapologetically eschatological. Time, Berdyaev felt, was moving toward an ultimate consummation which "can give meaning to personal and historical existence, an end which takes the form of resurrection into which the creative attainments of all human beings enter." 5

Fascinatingly, Berdyaev also speaks again and again of human life as existing within a tide or current, and of the future not as a mere abstraction, but as a living reality — one with a "pull" we can feel, if we attune ourselves to it, in the deepest portion of our being.

Berdyaev is, overall, darker than Teilhard. The shadow of the Christian doctrine of the fall looms over all he wrote much more heavily than it does over Teilhard's cosmically inclusive optimism. But beyond their superficial differences, both men speak for a vision of the universe that is both in sync with, and nourishing to, a whole gamut of contemporary holistic philosophies. So much of today's more popular thinking and writing about a potential marriage between science and spirituality continues, as it has for decades, to draw it's major or sole spiritual inspiration from the traditions of the East. Both Teilhard and Berdyaev speak from a perspective that is both authentically Christian, but "cosmic" in the truest, deepest, and most contemporary sense as well.

Perhaps the greatest gift these men bring us is their focus on the human personality as a central and indestructible element in the cosmic process. For both, the human person was no illusion, no temporary knot in the endless play of Maya, but the center and summation of all creation. The two men were, in fact, proponents of an eschatological grammar that is at once traditional and revolutionary: one that insists in seeing the cosmos as a place where the individual human being not only appeared for a reason, but appeared as the reason. Both knew that all modern myths of progress are simply re-visions of Western eschatological scenarios in secular guise ("The idea of progress," wrote Berdyaev, "is of Christian origin and was born in the Christian messianic hope." 6), and they both felt that when science finally grew out of its materialist baby clothes, it would come around to realizing the centrality and indestructibility of the individual human personality.

Whatever the shortcomings of Teilhard's and Berdyaev's visions — and many are certainly there for the finding — their mid-century writings on a cosmos that produced human beings for a reason, and which is far from finished in its work on them, were the first in what is now a sizable chorus of voices, from a variety of traditions and perspectives, that give lie to the idea of a an unconscious universe built on chance and blind accident. "Although the universe appears to have been lifeless for the first eleven billion years of its existence," writes scientist-turned-theologian John Polkinghorne, "there is a real sense in which it was pregnant with the possibility of life from the very beginning. Only because the balance between the fundamental forces of gravity and electromagnetism is what it is and no different, have stars been able to burn for the billions of years that are necessary if they are to be able to fuel the development of life on one of their planets. Only because the laws of nuclear physics are what they are and no different, has the range of chemical elements necessary for carbon-based life been produced by the stars, from whose dead ashes we and all other living creatures here on Earth are made." 7

Centuries ago, when Western culture was still purely and simply Christian culture, all of life was like the rushing little world at the lip of a waterfall; the place where objects, drifting downstream, suddenly begin to move faster, turning and tumbling end-over-end as they are drawn toward the rumbling, misty line of the falls. With the birth and rise of science, that vision was in danger of becoming lost. Now — through discoveries in fields from subatomic physics to paleontology to astronomy — science is, just as Teilhard predicted, beginning to give that vision back.

"How many of us," Teilhard asked in The Divine Milieu, "are genuinely moved in the depths of our hearts by the wild hope that our earth will be recast?"

"The question of eschatological hope," writes Polkinghorne, echoing and in part answering him, "is also the question of the fundamental meaningfulness of human life within creation. Are those moments of our deep experience when we glimpse that reality is trustworthy and that all will be well, intimations of our ultimate destiny or merely fleeting and illusory consolations in a world of actual and absolute transience?" 8

Both Teilhard and Berdyaev were unambiguous in their answer to this question. Half a century after their most impassioned arguments were made, they deserve to be heard more than ever.

1 Teilhard de Chardin, Letters from a Traveler, Harper & Row, 1962
2 Thomas M. King, Teilhard's Mysticism of Knowing, Seabury, 1982
3 Teilhard de Chardin, The Vision of the Past, quoted in King
4 Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, Harper & Row, 1960
5 Nicholas Berdyaev, The Beginning and the End, Harper and Brothers, 1952
6 Berdyaev, ibid.
7 John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World, Yale University Press, 2002
8 John Polkinghorne, Science & Theology: An introduction, Fortress Press, 1999

Teilhard de Chardin (1882-1955) was as French Jesuit and paleontologist who spent the majority of his life attempting to integrate religion and science, more specifically to reconcile perceived differences between Christianity and theories of evolution.

The author of numerous books, his most influential one was The Phenomenon of Man, which he wrote in 1938-1940. However, it was not published until after his death because, like many of his views, the Catholic Church would have deemed it too controversial. Because of this, he entrusted much of what would become his most influential writings to non-clerical friends, who published them after his death.

But as we look back upon his life and work, we can see that much of his 'controversial' views were years ahead of their time. For example, he described what he termed a "Noosphere" that predicted a network of communication, trade, and exchange that many people today see as being the first accurate description of the Internet. And he did so in 1925, during a series of packed lecture courses in Paris, after which the Vatican pushed to silence him.

As another example, decades before some environmentalists stressed the spiritual connection between humankind and the earth in the form of Gaia theory, Teilhard discussed the evolution of human consciousness moving toward what he termed an "Omega" point, where humans and nature would converge harmoniously.

Today, a first glance at Teilhard's writings might lead one to view them as somehow 'dated' because the scientific ideas that he drew upon were from the first half of the twentieth century. But such a view would fail to appreciate the significant influence that Teilhard had upon a generation of spiritual seekers in the 1950s and 1960s.

Indeed, Teilhard helped to lay the foundation of the growing and expanding holistic view of the world. We are grateful for the opportunity to publish the previous article by another gifted writer, Ptolemy Tompkins, in an effort to pay tribute to Teilhard de Chardin and his legacy that continues to live on in places like Lapis and the Open Center.

David Spangler has been writing, lecturing, and teaching since the early seventies, when he was codirector of the spiritual community of Findhorn in Northern Scotland. He is the author of Revelation: The Birth of a New Age; Emergence: The Rebirth of the Sacred; Everyday Miracles; A Pilgrim in Aquarius; The Call; and most recently Parent as Mystic, Mystic as Parent.

Ralph White: How do you feel about the state of the soul of America, given our present overall political and economic predicament?

David Spangler: In a sound bite, the soul of America is doing all right, but the personality of the country is going through a crisis. At the moment, it’s a split personality! When I attune to a deep level, however, there is a sense of a unity that isn’t being broken, that in fact our tussling is serving a deeper purpose and generating creativity between us, and resolving old issues. In my everyday consciousness, there are things about the country and its direction that I find personally distressing. But if I shift into a state of consciousness in which I feel I’m in touch with the soul of America, much of that distress falls away. I get a different perspective.

Interestingly enough, I was very surprised after the election to find that my sense of the energy of the country wasn’t roiled in the way that I’d been experiencing it up to the election. It felt peaceful, as if the soul of America were saying, “OK, a choice has been made and now we can move ahead.”  This unblocking of energy so we can move ahead with the consequences was important.

To me the soul of America is a planetary being. The destiny of America is to be a planetary nation, a nation that serves humanity as a whole. In many ways historically, the United States has become a place where all the different races, religions, and ethnicities of the world come together and are working out the challenges of how to work with differences co-creatively. We’re working in miniature on issues we’re going to have to solve on a planetary level as well.

A few years ago, prior to Reagan’s first term, I’d had insights that America was on the cusp of a transformative event. Then, nothing happened. After a couple of years, I put out a query to my inner colleagues: “What happened?” The answer I got was interesting. It said, “America wasn’t ready.” The image I received was one of pouring very hot water into a glass, and the glass shattered because it wasn’t tough enough. It wasn’t the right tempered-glass, not Pyrex.

So there were things that had to happen within the American psyche. Old fracture lines dealing with ideologies, race, economics, world views, and so forth had to be brought up to the surface, looked at, recognized, and dealt with. That had to happen first.

Part of that strengthening was also a necessity to hold the soul and personality of America, the beingness of the United States, in love. This meant saying — and meaning — within oneself, “I love this country. I love being an American. I can appreciate and hold the identity and energy of being an American.”  It’s not the kind of partisan love we mean when we say, “America, love it or leave it.” It’s an ability to align oneself to the spirit of this country, why it was founded, what it is trying to do, and say, “I wouldn’t have been born here, I wouldn’t have been naturalized, I wouldn’t be attracted to this land except that my soul is woven into America’s task and I have love for that. I love the promise and spirit of this country and what it can be.” What spirit was saying was that that depth of love just wasn’t there. That was another reason the glass was weak.

I believe that the attacks of 9/11 stimulated a world outflow of love for America. Not just love for us as a nation, but as a dream, the essence of which was proclaimed in the Declaration: life, liberty, equality, and pursuit of happiness. There was a moment of strengthening of our energy as a country. There was an opening of wider possibilities.

I know it looks as if we haven’t taken advantage of that and as if in fact we have moved backwards, but to me that opening is still there. When I look at this administration, it’s a very mixed bag. Like our own souls with us, the soul of America has to work with what it’s got. And what it has in our government from the President on down are largely people trying to accomplish something good as defined by their own vision and world view, which others may not agree with. And you also have people whose vision and sensibilities are constrictively selfish and even destructive in a way that seems in tune with the spirit of America but in fact is corrosive and distorting to that spirit.

Is America in jeopardy? I would say yes, but not simply because of President Bush and his administration. I see them as a culmination, a surfacing or outworking of forces set into motion a long time ago within this country, and within the world, for that matter. If we are in jeopardy, then in some ways, we are the ones who have placed our country in that position. If we see greed and jingoism and unbridled power being expressed in the current administration, then it is an expression of those same qualities in ourselves. No wonder we can become so angry seeing our own shadow reflected back to us!

I know this seems strange to say, but my inner observations, as I said, put some of the blame of this jeopardy onto our failure to appreciate and love this country and ourselves as Americans. This creates a vacuum here. So we should not be surprised that it becomes filled with a kind of love and pride that is nationalistic, setting itself against other cultures and other countries. If we cannot be loved (or love ourselves properly), then at least we will be the strongest and in control.

This is a direction that goes against the grain of the soul of America which, as I say, is a planetary being and one that sees the country under its wing as giving service to all humanity.

Something I feel is very important is to be careful not to identify the soul path, the spiritual path, with the liberal Democratic path or with the Left. There’s a tendency in the spiritual path to do that. I don’t want to identify it with the far right and the conservative side either. It’s actually much larger than that. Both sides have their own attunement to this deeper process, and both sides are screwing it up. The liberal left tends to get into a place of blame and anger, like someone who is disillusioned: you have such high hopes, such a high vision, of what America can be and when it isn’t, you just want to smash the whole thing and start over. On the right, on the other hand, you’ve got people who are going to love America whatever it does, and the more powerful it is, the better. Neither extreme serves us. What would serve is an ability to agree on loving being an American and then from there work out the operational differences of how America can and will make her contribution in the world.

If I look out at the world, I would say that we live in a haunted world. It’s haunted by the ghosts of old civilizations, and patterns, and habits: potentialities that were not realized and fulfilled. I’ll give you a specific example, which I feel is pertinent to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It took me a while to see this because it’s part of a complex layering of energies and consequences. One of the layers is definitely a replaying of the Crusades, The West vs. Islam, and that’s a very heavy energy. Another layer points to the destruction of the Caliphate by the Mongols. When that happened, the Islamic civilization was at its height. It was the premier civilization in the West, and Europe had nothing to match it really. Along come the Mongols, who decimate it. They become Muslim and they spread Islam back into Asia, but in the process, they destroyed Arab culture. Then the Turks took over and the Arabs were subservient.

So we end up with what I call the Ghost of the Islamic civilization. It doesn’t know it’s dead. We think of a person who is earth-bound, and here’s a cultural impulse, a civilizational impulse, that is earth-bound as well because it had been violently cut off and never came to a natural ending. So it’s a force, an energy, a presence, which has the effect of binding a great many souls to its desire to continue its life as it was when it was killed.

When you look at the Arab countries and their governments, they’re energetically stagnant in many ways. They don’t have to develop the way the West did, but they’re not even developing the way they were when the Islamic empire was alive and well. So, there’s this impulse that says, “I want to restore what I had, I want to be reborn.” When I think of the terrorists, they are like the out-runners of the ghosts of the Islamic civilization. Not so much of Islam, per se, but of this old civilization. In some way, this civilizational ghost has to be shattered and its energy liberated. It doesn’t have to be shattered by war. It just needs to be shifted and opened up so energy is allowed to move through it in new ways.

This civilizational ghost (and there are more than one in the world) is a piece of planetary karma that needs to be healed and transformed. The loving, creative, human energies of the millions of people in the Arab world need to be freed and allowed to unfold in their own unique ways. Otherwise all humanity is lessened.

With this as a background, you’ve got a couple of things happening with America. On one level, from my point of view, you have people in America seeking to recreate an empire. As I said, if you can’t be loved, be strong and in control. This desire for empire has been a shadow part of our culture for a long time. Besides, it’s a natural part of humanity’s karmic challenge at the moment. In the past, when power and energy have accumulated and centralized, the result has been control and domination. It is a habit: where there is power, let me control it and extend it. America is the most powerful nation on earth, most likely the most powerful there has ever been, so it should not be surprising that the habit of imperialistic longing would raise its head. This doesn’t mean we should succumb to it. On the contrary, I believe it’s part of this country’s karma to transform the image and expression of empire into something else. But in order to do this, we need to engage with it and confront it. It seems to me this is part of what is happening now.

America would not create a military empire in the old sense, like the Roman Empire with its legions conquering everything in sight. For us, it would largely be an economic and cultural empire with military assistance. But whatever the form, you have America at this time becoming a vessel for an imperialist urge. Other countries are going to resist, at times violently if no other options present themselves. Some of that resistance is genuinely inspired from the soul level of other nations because an imperialistic energy really can’t be allowed to take over the world. We’ve been there, done that, and there are other possibilities for humanity that an empire of any form cannot imagine or express.

That’s one level. At another level, the soul of America has said, apparently, “I’m going to draw to myself some of the planetary karma that needs to be broken up and shaken up, so that energy and creativity are allowed to flow once more. The country I overlight is exercising an imperialistic energy and directing it towards the Middle East; since it is there, I will see if I can use it to produce good outcomes all the way around.”

This would be like me determining to follow a course of action that my soul knows is wrong, that’s going to bring me grief, but since I’m going to do it, my soul will try to take that energy and turn it in a way that I will at least learn good lessons from it and hopefully do some good.

At the moment, the United States is divided. We say we have Red states and Blue states, which back in the fifties would have meant that half the country was communist and the other half was depressed! I see the Red/Blue division in three ways. In some ways, it’s media inspired because it makes good copy. Secondly, some of the division is based on genuine differences, and in the best sense, those differences create an edge around which new vision could emerge if we can dialogue together. Thirdly, if we are not careful, the differences can inspire not creativity but collapse and conflict.

RW: You’ve spoken about how the Blue/Red division in many ways may be more a media manifestation than reality, and that perhaps our most effective strategy is to remember what it really is we love about this country — its can-do capabilities, its generosity of spirit, its multicultural embrace of the people around the world. There is a noble identity, a noble soul around which we can all unite. But there are some disturbing elements, disturbing to me and certainly to most New Yorkers, in contemporary society. How do you view the rise of the religious right and its political influence?

DS: I view it with trepidation. Whether anything will come of it, I don’t know — I certainly hope not. A theocratic America would most likely not be a country that could help the world to a better space! But in its intolerance, its desire for control, and its willingness to destroy whatever is different, it represents a way of being that is the reverse of all that America came into being to represent. That it is so embraced by our political leaders and by millions of Americans is scary, for it suggests to me there is a lot of anger, fear, and violence in our hearts still to be dealt with.

I know we identify this worldview and movement as the religious right. To me, it’s more of a political movement than a religious movement. It is imperialism masquerading in religious form. As such, it is part of the same karmic challenge I spoke of earlier. On the other hand, I think again we have to be careful in our preconceptions because I do feel the media doesn’t give us a clear perspective on this. It presents us with the extremes, who are the ones making the noise and pushing the agendas on both sides, rather than revealing the thoughts and feelings of the vast majority of Americans who are not — or who have not been up till now — part of those extremes. The effect of media, though, can be to cut out the middle because there is no drama there and end up persuading all of us that we belong to one extreme or another. That is a recipe for conflict.

Frankly, the religious right has been extremely successful at organizing itself and promoting its agenda. Any kind of religious tyranny concerns me. I don’t really feel that America would succumb to it. But I’d be a lot happier if we didn’t put it to the test because I think the test itself would be very difficult.

But one thing the New Age folks and those who pursue alternative spiritual visions need to be aware of is how easily we can become — and at times in my experience are — like the Religious Right. Our methods would hopefully be different, but we, too, can become overly convinced that our way is Right and True and become oppressive to others.

The issue as I see it is not between Christian Right and Pluralistic Left but between True Believers who feel that they will only be safe if their ideology is unchallenged and in control and the rest of us. It is between forces of constriction and forces of expansion and inclusion. And these forces of constriction can operate just as well in the universities of the Left as in the churches of the Right.

There’s nothing wrong with the Christian religious foundations of this country, but America seeks to become a planetary nation, an inclusive nation, where, as in the Bill of Rights, we have freedom of religion. If we insist on having Christian scriptural elements in public and government places, then why shouldn’t we have Koranic or Talmudic or Buddhist, or Taoist scriptures, or Holistic writings, in governmental places? Of course, the argument is that these other faiths weren’t there at the founding of the country, though one can make an argument that the New Age or Holistic perspective was also there in the presence of so many Freemasons among the Founding Fathers. But they were there in spirit, for inclusiveness of humanity with all its traditions IS the tradition of America.

RW: What is your sense of how the whole holistic world view is progressing in becoming the prevailing world view in society? There was a time in the late 60s, early 70s when we saw it coming perhaps a little faster than it has. It’s come up against various obstacles, like elements of conservatism, whether religious or political, or cultural. What’s your sense of its movement and the whole future of it?

DS: I also feel it ran up against obstacles inherent in itself. I think there was a, dare I say so, smug confidence in the 60s and 70s. I certainly remember feeling very confident, saying, “of course this new way is going to succeed. Who can argue against wholeness and sustainability?” Then we discovered quite a lot of people can argue against it and some of the arguments were good arguments.

But to answer your question, I feel that the holistic worldview is alive and well, in part because it’s the only one that can address the problems we have. You can struggle against it, but the world itself is forcing us to it. I think that folks who believe in it, who support the holistic worldview should not be arrogant, but I feel they should definitely stand proud. They need to say this is just the way the world works, in holistic, interconnected ways, and our politics and economics and spirituality need to take this into account.

At its heart, it’s a loving approach. If my intent is to try to create wholeness between us, love, most often in the form of respect for the other, is one of the ways we have to start. What I don’t feel is that it’s going to inevitably sweep the field just because we say it’s such a good vision. It’s going to take folks taking on a whole new level of awareness, engagement, and practice: just doing practical things that help demonstrate issues of connectivity and sustainability and wholeness to those looking for a new vision.

RW: You really bring a unique perspective on this when we look at the evolution of consciousness, when we look at the efforts of the holistic thinkers to bring their perspectives into practical reality. Can you just give me your overall thoughts on the whole question of how the higher spiritual world works with us to support our strivings?

DS: There are different ways. The rule of thumb I have is that they will work with us as partners, but they won’t do the work for us. We’re the ones who are at this level. It’s largely our challenges, because many of our challenges are created by human consciousness. So we can’t look to the higher world with any expectation that they’re going to do the work for us. We have to grapple with it.

But given that, in my experience the higher forces do everything they can to make our processes as unobstructed as possible, so they will in fact remove whatever they can remove of a negative and destructive nature. They will help, if we ask, to adjust probabilities in co-creation with us so that instead of going down track A, the future will go down track B. They will do that. They won’t push us down B if we don’t choose it and we don’t make some effort to go that way ourselves. They are not going to save us in that sense.

Any place there is a deliberate effort to serve the world, to serve others, to bring a new pattern into being, the higher worlds will come forward with as much assistance as they can. In some cases, that might be a lot, in some cases, not so much. That depends on the human actors involved, how much space they are creating for that kind of interaction, and also, how willing they are to undertake the work. I actually think it’s paradoxical in this way. The more willing I am to shoulder more of the burden, the freer the inner forces are to take more of that burden off me. But if I’m saying, “Take this off me, it’s too big for me,” then they’re very restricted, I find, in how much of that burden they can lift. Because my response then could be, “Great, I don’t have to deal with this, thanks a lot, you handle it.” I don’t actually experience any deeper growth on my part as a human being.

For me the higher world gives a sense of spaciousness. Just knowing that they’re there and can be cooperative, I’m already part of a larger cosmos than I was before I opened to that vision, and my mind and heart can expand into that larger spaciousness which helps energy flow more freely as well. A helpful attitude is to approach the inner world not as experts or those who take my burden or save me, but as partners who have profound willingness to cooperate and a lot of love. But I have to be a partner too. They can enhance my capacity to be a partner but, generally speaking, they will not do my work for me.

To find out more about the author’s work, click here: lorian.bigmindcatalyst.com

Ralph White is the editor of lapismagazine.org and co-founder of the New York Open Center. 

The story of the Findhorn Community in Northern Scotland has become one of the inspirational legends of the last forty years. It tells the tale of three individuals, a British couple and their Canadian friend, who found themselves unemployed and penniless in 1962. With nowhere else to turn, they towed their green caravan to a remote and windswept trailer park thirty miles east of Inverness and began to scratch a modest existence from the poor and sandy soil. But these were not ordinary people. Eileen Caddy, the mother of three young boys, had a disciplined contemplative practice that enabled her in moments of great quiet to hear "the still, small voice within." Dorothy Maclean found that she had the gift of attunement to what she called the devas, the angelic presences within and behind the world of nature. And Peter Caddy, a former RAF officer and hotel manager, was an energetic man of action and strong intuition who reposed a profound faith in the spiritual attunement of his two colleagues.

Together, to their great surprise, they were guided to found a 'center of light', a non-sectarian spiritual community that would demonstrate to the world attunement to the divinity within all creation, co-operation with the spirits of nature, and service to the planet. It sounds hopelessly optimistic if not delusional but, amazingly, that is exactly what they proceeded to do. By the early Seventies people of every age group were coming to Findhorn from all over the world and among the tiny collection of caravans and bungalows there began to emerge a community center and then a pentagonal Universal Hall for meditation, performance and conferences. Then, as Findhorn's fame grew, Cluny Hill College was added, a large Nineteenth Century hotel in the ancient town of Forres, which became the community's center for its educational programs. Before the decade was over there was also a retreat house on the sacred island of Iona on the West Coast of Scotland and a sister community on the nearby isle of Erraid.

The following years were not always easy as the community faced the familiar litany of financial and political issues that confront any idealistic impulse. The pattern of visitors changed with the decades from Americans to Europeans to, more recently, Latins and Asians. Yet today Findhorn remains a thriving and dynamic international center with around five hundred people living within, or locally connected, to the community, and members from every continent. The tinny and freezing old caravans that accommodated the first members have now mostly been replaced by eco-friendly homes complete with a large windmill and Europe's first living machine for water purification. True to the Scottish spirit, a handful of beautiful houses have been created from recycled whiskey barrels, and Findhorn aims to meet 100% of its energy needs from renewable sources within the next five years. It seems that everywhere straw bale homes, turf roofs, and solar panels are popping up to create one of Europe's leading eco-villages. And dozens of local businesses have emerged from the Findhorn Foundation in fields such as healing, the arts, ecology, publishing and management consultancy. The place is, in fact, popping with creativity despite the wind, rain and northern darkness, and the frequent, deafening roar of jet engines from a nearby RAF base.

By any standards, this is a remarkable achievement. Although Findhorn's profile is not as high in North America as it was twenty years ago, within Britain the community has become a widely recognized part of the cultural landscape. Its recent fortieth birthday was accompanied by full page articles in most national newspapers and a ten minute segment on the BBC's most prestigious news program. Surprisingly, the coverage was almost all positive given the mainstream media's well known skepticism about hippy follies, alternative spirituality and the existence of any kind of higher reality. Clearly the community has gradually earned the respect of a suspicious outside world. It has even become a United Nations NGO actively involved in events like the recent Johannesburg Summit on Sustainability and the attempt to propagate the idea of the 21st Century as an era when Restoring the Earth must become a leading international priority.

Even the founders can't quite believe what's happened. According to Dorothy Maclean, "All we knew was that we were trying to follow the wishes of the divine. That a community of hundreds of people, visited by thousands more would result is an incredible, awesome miracle. After forty years the loving magic we helped ground at Findhorn is still doing its work. One can only be thankful, grateful and amazed." Certainly there was a mood of immense gratitude, conviviality, and good humor when two hundred former members returned in mid-November to celebrate the community's fortieth birthday. For a week, a non-stop round of parties, performances, dances, and fireworks lit up the long northern darkness. Everywhere there were old friends now living in different parts of the planet renewing their connections after years or decades with little contact. One thing was abundantly clear: Findhorn has created an immense well of love that refreshes and bathes its former and current members and that seems to generate tremendous creativity.

In the corner of Cluny Hill lounge one morning, three former members sat comparing notes on their lives since leaving the community twenty years ago. They learned that between them they had written sixteen books on topics like leadership, sports psychology and organizational development, some of which were best sellers while others had been translated into eighteen languages. A sampling of other ex-members spoke of their current activities at a gathering in the Universal Hall one evening and revealed a remarkable array of talents and commitments. Now they develop organic farms in Brazil, work with aboriginal children in Australia, run holistic consulting firms in Holland, serve as officers of the Norwegian army in Bosnia and Kosovo, produce television shows on peace building in Northern Ireland, or conduct research at Edinburgh University on animal consciousness and the effects of factory farming.

The famous magic of Findhorn is clearly real. Despite the least promising of beginnings and in the face of a harsh climate in stark contrast to the balmy breezes of California's Esalen, Findhorn has become an improbable powerhouse of consciousness and love. It has quietly spread its seeds across the globe to produce countless transformational initiatives. Why has it worked so well? Perhaps the essential humility of its founders, the absence of any cult-like guru worship, the placement of attunement to nature at the center of community life, and the ongoing effort to listen to the inner voice have all contributed to its fundamental sanity and longevity. For Cultural Creatives today seeking to implement positive social change, the Findhorn story may ultimately be one of faith fulfilled. It reminds us that even in our prosaic material world filled with hindrances, when something is truly needed for the benefit of humanity, the patience, persistence and perseverance long advocated by Peter Caddy can actually make miracles happen. As Findhorn turns forty it does so with a spring in its step and a song in its heart, confident that the world is now more open than ever to the way of life it pioneered. Thankfully, we now have holistic centers in virtually every North American city, but for those who have a special love for the winter coats, the wooly hats, the chilly mornings and the soothing patter of Scottish rain on the sanctuary roof, there will only be one Findhorn.

One of the exemplars of Renaissance humanism, founder of the Florentine Academy, and first translator into Latin of the Hermetic texts (at the behest of the Medicis), Ficino breathes the spirit of an age when the human being was understood as a divine microcosm. Although his view of the body is hardly holistic, he speaks to us across the centuries with the noble wisdom of one of Shakespeare's philosopher-princes. (From Meditations on the Soul: Selected Letters of Marsilio Ficino, Inner Traditions, Vermont.)

Marsilio Ficino to Peregrino Agli 1 December 1457 – Figline

Greetings.

On November 29 my father, Ficino the doctor, brought to me at Figline two letters from you, one in verse and the other in prose. Having read these, I heartily congratulate our age for producing a young man whose name and fame may render it illustrious.

Indeed, my dearest Peregrino, when I consider your age and those things that come from you every day, I not only rejoice but much marvel at such great gifts in a friend. I do not know which of the ancients whose memory we respect, not to mention men of our own time, achieved so much at your age. This I ascribe not just to study and technique, but much more to divine frenzy. Without this, say Democritus and Plato, no man has ever been great. The powerful emotion and burning desire that your writings express prove, as I have said, that you are inspired and inwardly possessed by that frenzy; and this power, which is manifested in external movements, the ancient philosophers maintained was the most potent proof that the divine force dwelt in our souls. But since I have mentioned this frenzy, I shall relate the opinion of our Plato about it in a few words, with that brevity that a letter demands; so that you may easily understand what it is, how many kinds of it there are, and which god is responsible for each. I am sure that this description will not only please you, but also be of the very greatest use to you.

Plato considers, as Pythagoras, Empedocles, and Heraclitus maintained earlier, that our soul, before it descended into bodies, dwelt in the abodes of heaven where, as Socrates says in the Phaedrus, it was nourished and rejoiced in the contemplation of truth. Those philosophers I have just mentioned had learnt from Mercurius Trismegistus, the wisest of all the Egyptians, that God is the supreme source and light within whom shine the models of all things, which they call ideas. Thus, they believed, it followed that the soul, in steadfastly contemplating the eternal mind of God, also beholds with greater clarity the natures of all things. So, according to Plato, the soul saw justice itself, wisdom, harmony, and the marvelous beauty of the divine nature. And sometimes he calls all these natures "ideas", sometimes "divine essences", and sometimes "first natures that exist in the eternal mind of God".

The minds of men, while they are there, are well nourished with perfect knowledge. But souls are depressed into bodies through thinking about and desiring earthly things. Then those who were previously fed on ambrosia and nectar, that is the perfect knowledge and bliss of God, in their descent are said to drink continuously of the river Lethe, that is forgetfulness of the divine. They do not fly back to heaven, whence they fell by weight of their earthly thoughts, until they begin to contemplate once more those divine natures that they have forgotten. The divine philosopher considers we achieve this through two virtues, one relating to moral conduct and the other to contemplation; one he names with a common term "justice", and the other "wisdom". For this reason, he says, souls fly back to heaven on two wings, meaning, as I understand it, these virtues; and likewise Socrates teaches in Phaedo that we acquire these by the two parts of philosophy; namely, the active and the contemplative. Hence, he says again in Phaedrus that only the mind of a philosopher regains wings. On recovery of these wings, the soul is separated from the body by their power. Filled with God, it strives with all its might to reach the heavens, and thither it is drawn. Plato calls this drawing away and striving "divine frenzy", and he divides it into four parts. He thinks that men never remember the divine unless they are stirred by its shadows or images, as they may be described, which are perceived by the bodily senses.

Paul and Dionysius, the wisest of the Christian theologians, affirm that the invisible things of God are understood from what has been made and is to be seen here, but Plato says that the wisdom of men is the image of divine wisdom. He thinks that the harmony that we make with musical instruments and voices is the image of divine harmony, and that the symmetry and comeliness that arise from the perfect union of the parts and members of the body are an image of divine beauty.

Since wisdom is present in no man, or at any rate in very few, and cannot be perceived by bodily sense, it follows that images of divine wisdom are very rare among us, hidden from our senses and totally ignored. Because of this, Socrates says in Phaedrus that the image of wisdom may not be seen at all by the eyes, because if it were it would deeply arouse that marvelous love of the divine wisdom of which it is an image.

But we do indeed perceive the reflection of divine beauty with our eyes and mark the resonance of divine harmony with our ears-those bodily senses that Plato considers the most perceptive of all. Thus when the soul has received through the physical senses those images that are within material objects, we remember what we knew before when we existed outside the prison of the body. The soul is fired by this memory and, shaking its wings, by degrees purges itself from contact with the body and its filth and becomes wholly possessed by divine frenzy. From the two senses I have just mentioned two kinds of frenzy are aroused. Regaining the memory of the true and divine beauty by the appearance of beauty that the eyes perceive, we desire the former with a secret and unutterable ardor of the mind. This Plato calls "divine love", which he defines as the desire to return again to the contemplation of divine beauty; a desire arising from the sight of its physical likeness. Moreover, it is necessary for him who is so moved not only to desire that supernal beauty but also wholly to delight in its appearance which is revealed to his eyes. For Nature has so ordained that he who seeks anything should also delight in its image; but Plato holds it the mark of a dull mind and corrupt state if a man desires no more than the shadows of that beauty nor looks for anything beyond the form his eyes can see. For he believes that such a man is afflicted with the kind of love that is the companion of wantonness and lust. And he defines as irrational and heedless the love of that pleasure in physical form that is enjoyed by the senses.

Elsewhere he describes this love as the ardent desire of a soul that in a way is dead in its own body, while alive in another. He then says that the soul of a lover leads its life in another body. This the Epicureans follow when they say that love is a union of small particles, which they call atoms, made to penetrate the person from whom the images of beauty have been taken. Plato says that this kind of love is born of human sickness and is full of trouble and anxiety, and that it arises in those men whose mind is so covered over with darkness that it dwells on nothing exalted, nothing outstanding, nothing beyond the weak and transient image of this little body. It does not look up to the heavens, for in its black prison it is shuttered by night. But when those whose spirit is drawn away and freed from the clay of the body first see form and grace in any one, they rejoice, as at the reflection of divine beauty. But those people should at once recall to memory that divine beauty, which they should honor and desire above all; as it is by a burning desire for this beauty that they may be drawn to the heavens. This first attempt at flight Plato calls divine ecstasy and frenzy. I have already written enough about that frenzy which, I have said, arises through the eyes.

But the soul receives the sweetest harmonies and numbers through the ears, and by these echoes is reminded and aroused to the divine music that may be heard by the more subtle and penetrating sense of mind. According to the followers of Plato, divine music is twofold. One kind, they say, exists entirely in the eternal mind of God. The second is in the motions and order of the heavens, by which the heavenly spheres and their orbits make a marvelous harmony. In both of these our soul took part before it was imprisoned in our bodies. But it uses the ears as messengers, as though they were chinks in this darkness. By the ears, as I have already said, the soul receives the echoes of that incomparable music, by which it is led back to the deep and silent memory of the harmony that it previously enjoyed. The whole soul then kindles with desire to fly back to its rightful home, so that it may enjoy that true music again. It realizes that as long as it is enclosed in the dark abode of the body it can in no way reach that music. It therefore strives wholeheartedly to imitate it, because it cannot here enjoy its possession. Now with men this imitation is twofold. Some imitate the celestial music by harmony of voice and the sounds of various instruments, and these we call superficial and vulgar musicians.

But some, who imitate the divine and heavenly harmony with deeper and sounder judgment, render a sense of its inner reason and knowledge into verse, feet, and numbers. It is these who, inspired by the divine spirit, give forth with full voice the most solemn and glorious song. Plato calls this solemn music and poetry the most effective imitation of the celestial harmony. For the more superficial kind that I have just mentioned does no more than soothe with the sweetness of the voice, but poetry does what is also proper to divine harmony. It expresses with fire the most profound and, as a poet would say, prophetic meanings, in the numbers of voice and movement. Thus not only does it delight the ear, but brings to the mind the finest nourishment, most like the food of the gods; and so seems to come very close to God. In Plato's view, this poetic frenzy springs from the Muses; but he considers both the man and his poetry worthless who approaches the doors of poetry without the call of the Muses, in the hope that he will become a good poet by technique. He thinks that those poets who are possessed by divine inspiration and power often utter such supreme words when inspired by the Muses, that afterwards, when the rapture has left them, they themselves scarcely understand what they have uttered.

And, as I believe, the divine Plato considers that the Muses should be understood as divine songs; thus they say "melody" and "muse" take their name from "song". Hence divine men are inspired by divine beings and song to imitate them by employing the modes and meters of poetry. When Plato deals with the motion of the spheres in the Republic, he says that one siren is established within each orbit; meaning, as one Platonist says, that by the movement of the spheres song is offered to the gods. For "siren" rightly means in Greek "singing in honor of God". And the ancient theologians maintained that the nine Muses were the musical songs of the eight spheres, and in addition the one great harmony arising from all the others.

Therefore, poetry springs from divine frenzy, frenzy from the Muses, and the Muses from Jove. The followers of Plato repeatedly call the soul of the whole universe Jove, who inwardly nourishes heaven and earth, the moving seas, the moon's shining orb, the stars and sun. Permeating every limb, he moves the whole mass and mingles with its vast substance.

It is thus that the heavenly spheres are set in motion and governed by Jove, the spirit and mind of the whole universe, and that from him also arise the musical songs of these spheres. which are called the Muses. As that illustrious Platonist says, "Jove is the origin of the Muses; all things are full of Jove, and that spirit which is called Jove is everywhere; he enlivens and fulfills all things." And as Alexander Milesius, the Pythagorean, says, "touching the heavens as though they were a lyre, he creates this celestial harmony." The divine prophet Orpheus says, "Jove is first, Jove is last, Jove is the head, Jove is the center. The universe is born of Jove. Jove is the foundation of the earth and of the star-bearing heavens. Jove appears as man, yet he is the spotless bride. Jove is the breath and form of all things, Jove is the source of the ocean, Jove is the movement in the undying fire, Jove is the sun and moon. Jove, the king and prince of all. Hiding his light, he has shed it afresh from his blissful heart, manifesting his purpose." We may understand from this that all bodies are full of Jove; he contains and nourishes them, so that truly it is said that whatever you see and wherever you move is Jove.

After these follow the remaining kinds of divine frenzy, which Plato considers are twofold. One is centered in the mysteries, and the other, which he calls prophecy, concerns future events. The first, he says, is a powerful stirring of the soul, in perfecting what relates to the worship of the gods, religious observance, purification, and sacred ceremonies. But the tendency of mind that falsely imitates that frenzy he calls superstition. He considers the last kind of frenzy, in which he includes prophecy, to be nothing other than foreknowledge inspired by the divine spirit, which we properly call divination and prophecy. If the soul is fired in the act of divination he calls it frenzy; that is, when the mind, withdrawal from the body, is moved by divine rapture. But if someone foresees future events by human ingenuity rather than by divine inspiration, he thinks that this should be named foresight or inference. From all this it is now clear that there are four kinds of divine frenzy: love, poetry, the mysteries, and prophecy. That common and completely insane love is a false copy of divine love; superficial music, of poetry; superstition, of the mysteries; and prediction, of prophecy. According to Plato, Socrates attributes the first kind of frenzy to Venus, the second to the Muses, the third to Dionysus, and the last to Apollo.

I have chosen to describe at greater length the frenzy belonging to divine love and poetry for two reasons first, because I know you are strongly moved by both of these; and second, so that you will remember that what is written by you comes not from you but from Jove and the Muses, with whose spirit and divinity you are filled. For this reason, my Peregrino, you will act justly and rightly if you acknowledge, as I believe you do already, that the author and cause of what is best and greatest is not you, nor indeed any other man but immortal God.

Farewell, and be sure that nothing is dearer to me than you are.