Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World's Religions
Huston Smith
3.99
210 ratings17 reviews
This classic companion to The World's Religions articulates
the remarkable unity that underlies the world's religious traditions
192 pages, Paperback
Published
October 9, 1992 by HarperOne
Huston Smith
136 books276 followers
Follow
Smith was born in Suzhou, China to Methodist missionaries and spent his first 17 years there. He taught at the Universities of Colorado and Denver from 1944–1947, moving to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri for the next ten years, and then Professor of Philosophy at MIT from 1958–1973. While at MIT he participated in some of the experiments with entheogens that professor Timothy Leary conducted at Harvard University. He then moved to Syracuse University where he was Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Philosophy until his retirement in 1983 and current emeritus status. He now lives in the Berkeley, CA area where he is Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
During his career, Smith not only studied, but practiced Vedanta Hinduism, Zen Buddhism (studying under Goto Zuigan), and Sufism for over ten years each. He is a notable autodidact.
As a young man, Smith, of his own volition, after suddenly turning to mysticism, set out to meet with then-famous author Gerald Heard. Heard responded to Smith's letter, invited him to his Trabuco College (later donated as the Ramakrishna Monastery) in Southern California, and then sent him off to meet the legendary Aldous Huxley. So began Smith's experimentation with meditation, and association with the Vedanta Society in Saint Louis under the auspices of Swami Satprakashananda of the Ramakrishna order.
Via the connection with Heard and Huxley, Smith eventually experimented with Timothy Leary and others at the Center for Personality Research, of which Leary was Research Professor. The experience and history of the era are captured somewhat in Smith's book Cleansing the Doors of Perception. In this period, Smith joined in on the Harvard Project as well, an attempt to raise spiritual awareness through entheogenic plants.
He has been a friend of the XIVth Dalai Lama for more than forty years, and met and talked to some of the great figures of the century, from Eleanor Roosevelt to Thomas Merton.
He developed an interest in the Traditionalist School formulated by Rene Guenon and Ananda Coomaraswamy. This interest has become a continuing thread in all his writings.
In 1996, Bill Moyers devoted a 5-part PBS special to Smith's life and work, "The Wisdom of Faith with Huston Smith." Smith has produced three series for public television: "The Religions of Man," "The Search for America," and (with Arthur Compton) "Science and Human Responsibility." His films on Hinduism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Sufism have all won awards at international film festivals.
His latest DVD release is The Roots of Fundamentalism - A Conversation with Huston Smith and Phil Cousineau.
====
Community Reviews
3.99
Magnus Italy
48 reviews
6 followers
Follow
July 23, 2016
Even this book is not beach reading. You should have an interest in religions beyond your own denomination, if any, or in understanding how thinkers of the past used to see the world.
You will be hard pressed to find a clearer and more readable explanation of the common framework for the great religions of the world. Other traditionalists tend to write a dense prose, expecting the student to be desperate to learn the Truth and well versed in mystical theory and practice.
Huston Smith draws on his experience as an educator to try to make the topic more accessible. It will probably still not make sense to a large number of people, simply because the topic is unfamiliar and they may want (or be told) to disbelieve it. Smith uses a friendly, rational tone to make the reader consider and understand the topic regardless of whether one will ultimately let it influence one's own religious faith and practice (or lack thereof).
It seems strange that religions that are usually thought to be in conflict, actually have a lot of common ground in their underlying worldview. It is as if the same rough sketch of the invisible world has emerged again and again in different ages and on different continents. Perhaps it was once the commonly accepted view of the world, as Smith seems to believe. Or perhaps it was actually only ever perceived by a small minority, but this minority included the great lights that lit up those religions that have lasted (with some changes) into our age.
6 likes
1 comment
===.
Maratus S. Wert
12 reviews
1 follower
Follow
March 12, 2023
It is a pity that the entire dissertation on the importance of not forgetting the multiple dimensions of being in our exploration of reality is overshadowed by a chapter that tries to insult Darwinism. Natural Selection "is" and, far from its evidence being thin and faltering under critical analysis as Smith suggests, it continues to strengthen over time.
The reproach to the teleonomic argument of neo-Darwinism can be understood, but from there to proposing alternative essentialist mechanisms and getting out of it unscathed there is a stretch. Criticism of scientism is fundamental, but certain evidence cannot be turned away.
Show more
3 likes
Like
Comment
Wylie
2 reviews
1 follower
Follow
December 21, 2007
The foundation of Wilbur's "integral" ideas was written by Huston Smith in this humble masterpiece.
2 likes
1 comment
Like
Comment
Profile Image for Nathan.
Nathan
15 reviews
20 followers
Follow
August 30, 2007
"Itself occupying no more than a single ontological plane, science challenged by implication the notion that other planes exist. As its challenge was not effectively met, it swept the field and gave the modern world its soul. For this is the final definition of modernity: an outlook in which this world, this ontological plane, is the only one that is genuinely countenanced and affirmed."
Smith challenges this "modern" outlook with brilliance, wisdom, and style. Read it.
comparative-religion
philosophy
1 like
===
kelly
271 reviews
1 follower
Follow
Want to read
April 20, 2007
includes a "treatment of the contrast between the modern worldview and the worldview of virtually every other culture in history" (Marcus Borg)
philosophy-religion
1 like
===
Lee
31 reviews
2 followers
Follow
March 3, 2013
Excellent overview of the world's religions by a true, openminded scholar. Signed copy.
1 like
===
Jen
1 review
23 followers
Follow
April 10, 2023
The theological equivalent to “I don’t see race.”
The author sees fit to combine all attributes of the nonWestern religions (Hinduism, Daoism, indigenous religion, etc.) as part of a single ethos. In chapter two, for example, he fails to distinguish when he moves from the Way of the Dao, to Hinduism, to Zen Buddhism, and back again to Daoism over the course of a single paragraph, lumping it all together as though the individual practices and cultures from which they sprung are just incidental and not by design.
In chapter three, he does it again, but with “Native American” religion, as though there isn’t a rich diversity of indigenous cultures just in North America.
Again. And again. And again.
To say nothing of his emphasis that religion is “fact,” and science has forced mankind to lose its way (especially those poor Westerners). That science has become a religion in itself; but this is a bad thing, whereas when other religions (especially the Abrahamic ones) do it, it’s kosher.
Though I somewhat agreed with his premise coming in—that the religions of the world and science are all grasping at the same Universal Truth—I could not find a single argument convincing. Which made me question the validity of that line of study in Religious Studies.
What a bunch of self-aggrandizing rubbish. It’s this kind of bloated lack of self inspection that makes me glad I left academia.
Save yourself an afternoon. Don’t bother with this book.
===
Valentin Serrano Garcia
376 reviews
17 followers
Follow
July 30, 2023
A dispensable product.
There are interesting quotes, especially those of an apophatic and neoplatonic character, and a critique of scientism (first chapter) that is easy to read. But whoever has read Huxley's "Perennial Wisdom" will not hesitate to feel uncomfortable with the absence of suggestive mystical poetry in Smith despite the fact that there is a similar epochal air in both authors.
The problem has to do with the concoction and aspirations of the Smith. The worst tradition of universalism falls like a lead on the reader, who will yearn for Eliade or Campbell. In addition, Smith has somewhat cryptic traditionalists as traveling companions (Schuon, Guenon...), which translates into an excessively symbolic and abstract text. For that, better read directly to them (and Henri Corbin), and savor their religious conservatism firsthand.
On the other hand, criticism of Darwinism is abtruse. In short, a kind of psychotic essentialism wanders through the book.
For those interested in universalist and mystical theories of the sacred, it is better to read Uzdavinis or Kingsley (more literary and stimulating, even fanciful) or Eliade and Campbell (more well-founded and widely cultured). Of course, even better if it is accompanied by critical and expository authors (Carlos Domínguez, Hanegraaf, William Franke, Hoos...), far from New Age passions.
===
Kahfi
139 reviews
6 followers
Follow
December 2, 2017
This classic book can be regarded as a comparison material for modernity which exalts the progress of modern science. Basically, the author in this book tries to convey a perspective on the universe that needs to be seen from many points of view. Not fixated on numbers, in some ways the world cannot be explained quantitatively.
Basically, this book is very theological and psychological based on all the discussion presented by the author. Overall very good but this book is not very suitable for someone who touts rationality very much.
===
Hugo Rozo Pineda
22 reviews
Follow
April 4, 2019
Do you want to find a book that allows you to make a beautiful and clear synthesis of the world's religions, where it explains the levels of reality, levels of being and opens up a panorama where positivist reductionism cannot explain? This is the right book to start or restart a more serious reading in comparative theology. In my opinion, everything, the whole book is a jewel but both the first and the last chapter were a great pleasure.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 17 reviews
===
From other countries
John A. Van Devender
4.0 out of 5 stars What You See Is Not ALL There is
Reviewed in the United States on 10 January 2013
Verified Purchase
Smith's book is a refreshing non-Christian assessment of the irrational consensus stretching across the various segments of American culture, at least as far as I can see it. Over the past 50 years, with greater or lesser intensity, Americans have grown cynical and suspicious of any claims to truth other than that which their senses can validate and their perceptions confirm.
This is not an entirely new phenomenon in absolute essence. From the arrival of the Puritans right up throgh the classical enlightenment of Colonial times and extending even, though significantly lessened, through the Romantic 19th century, and certainly in the early Modernist 20th century, Americans have always prided themselves on being "practical." Our approach to religion, politics, art and literature has been influenced, if not conditioned, by the screening grid of "what works?"
But within that prevailing practicality Americans had certain values, misplaced perhaps but real, that limited that practicality. Though not a philosophical community, Americans were yet disposed toward the idea of "the beautiful", the pursuit of "quality", the social imperative of the American "Dream", the unquestioned assumption that we had "hit" upon that blend of freedom/responsibility/encouragement which was the key to human development and future prosperity. We were unabashedly evangelistic. Promoting our ways and our ideas, with some success and with too much arrogance, and exporting our institutions throughout the world.
In other words, we had a "world view" that formed a central unifying idea. Immigrants were "assimilated" into this view. Cultural distinctives were precious but subordinate. To be "Southern" was to embrace secondary ideas about life in these United States that were never-the-less absolutely subordinate to the higher claim of being an "American." I submit that even the shameful issue of race relations was characterized by this approach and I would submit the evidence of the proud performance of non-white Americans in ALL the wars of the period.
But that changed. The common embrace of intangibles dissolved under the influence of vicious political power plays, the dedicated strategy of radical elitist academics and intellectuals, and the rise of "selfish me-ism" sensuality that characterized the masses of the post-1960's populace.
Something had to fill the void created by the dismissal of abstract "values." That which was confidently advanced was "scientism" - the belief that the only true "truth" is that which can be established by the principles of formulaic validation and predictive behavior. It showed up across the board. Education theory became the subject of endless, repetitive, and often contradictory "studies." "Studies prove..." became the unquestioned warrant for whatever hare-brained agenda some demagogue wanted to advance. "Prove it" was the underlying demand that opened the door for the idea that everyone's opinion is of equal value no matter what their qualifications on the subject being discussed.
Consensus dissolved, intellectual and moral anarchy has prevailed and now, simply, there is no dream. All we have left is the sterile imbecility of moral license and the reductionist straight-jacket of impressionist thinking. In a social structue where in "quality" is not recognized, where "advancement" in personal virtue is not celebrated, and where transcendent goals are not pursued, there is and must be a corresponding despair - the sense that "something is missing" - and the resultant flattening of human existence.
Smith is on to something. He is too much a product of those same trends to be able to critique his own observations. He cannot find a measure (scientism) to be able to distinguish, among the commonly held values of the world's various religions, any which are to be elevated as the repository of "truth." He still treats the facts of human religions as the data from which conclusions are to be drawn.
But he says and sees many good things. All that is lacking is the insight, that what you "see" is not ALL there is. Among the world religions, only Christianity can claim the priority of "truth." That statement is not proved by the data of the Christian religion itself... it is furnished by the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit... a Person who is not contained in human equations nor constrained by human conceptions. He is the validation of all that is transcendent for in Him is beauty, peace, joy, life and truth.
5 people found this helpful
===
4591Michael
1.0 out of 5 stars Fluff
Reviewed in the United States on 11 December 2019
Verified Purchase
The book stuffed with fluff and spacers to make a bigger book. Perhaps there is a required 20 years of study in order to know who all the people he mentioned were, and his use of obscure terms was not appealing. Not written for the average person, person it was for scholars who already agreed? I had to put it down. Either way I don't feel it is ground breaking for today knowledgeable people, perhaps only for the believers.
The Baha'i Faith has a better explanation for the Unity of faiths. That all faith come from the same Creator, which spoke at different times and places through time. Progressive Revelation, and as humanity matured and were able to accept more detailed guidance explains how as we went from multiple gods, goddess, all sorts of deities, whittled down to at least half the world seeing one Creator of all. Now all we have to do is lay down the old, accept the new, that the Creators goal all alone has been to unite all people world wide, eliminate racism and sexism and form as one so that justice can become effective which will lead to global peace. Once we accept we are all one human family, not French, not American, Not Jewish, Not Hindu, Not Muslim etc but one people under one Creator.
4 people found this helpful
===
D.W. Walker
5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent introduction to the underlying metaphysical and mythological assumptions of the "primordial religions"
Reviewed in the United States on 21 November 2013
Verified Purchase
This very small book is simply the best book introduction to the sacred worldview of world religions that exists.
- If one wants to understand the esoteric wisdom behind the great religions, read this book.
- If one wants to understand the basis of the perennial philosophy as defined in the twentieth century, read this book.
- If you wish to grasp the underlying metaphysical and mythological assumptions of Western Civilization until around the 15th century, and
- the continuing metaphysical-mythological assumptions underlying Eastern Asian philosophy, read this book.
13 people found this helpful
===
Roy J Squires
5.0 out of 5 stars the absence of evidence about the existence of God is ...
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 12 April 2017
Verified Purchase
the absence of evidence about the existence of God is not evidence of absence of God when pursued by reductive, naturalistic and positivistic methodologies, metrics and philosophies of scient(ism).
===
Mark Canter
5.0 out of 5 stars Wise and Eloquent
Reviewed in the United States on 6 May 2015
Verified Purchase
Forgotten Truth is among the 10 best books I have ever read on spiritual wisdom. The contemporary philosopher Ken Wilber alerted me to the book, recommending it highly. I’m now reading it for the second time (after a decade's gap) and again delighting in its insights and in the eloquence of Smith’s prose.
12 people found this helpful
===
上位レビュー、対象国： 日本
ポム オール
5つ星のうち5.0 より広い世界に向かって
2007年10月11日に日本でレビュー済み
Amazonで購入
われわれはひとつの命を生きる人類の一人とするならば、東洋、西洋の区別など無く、同じ命の理のなかで生きているはずです。
そこには異なったように見えるものでのひとつのものによって貫かれた世界があるといわれています。
しかし近代の科学で強調される即物的な面の強調によりそういったことはみえなくなってしまいました。
本書ではよく神秘学などで言われる階層にまつわる緒論について考察しています。
「私」というリアリティ、人生のリアリティを追求することで世界観が広がるということはいえるのではないでしょうか。
心理学の新しい研究までも本書のなかでは言及されています。より包括的に世界を考えたい人に参考になる本です。
11人のお客様がこれが役に立ったと考えています
役に立った
レポート
cage against the machine
5つ星のうち5.0 足腰が鍛えられます！
2006年6月5日に日本でレビュー済み
Amazonで購入
忘れられた真理の著者であるヒューストン・スミスはアメリカの哲学者・宗教学者でカルフォルニア大学バークレー校で客員教授を勤めている。
スミスはこの本の中で真理が忘れられてしまったことの原因である科学主義教（科学ではない）を批判し、世界に存在する宗教の共通項である忘れられた真理を再提示している。
近代科学は唯一つの存在論的レベルしか必要としない。つまり物質レベルである(P23)。存在という館は、一階部分だけを残して破壊されてしまった(P216)。もし私たちの世界が変わったというのなら、これは、私たちが世界についてもっている考えが変わったことが反映している。神は退いたのではない。神から遠ざかったのは私たちである。（P145)
上記の引用は私がこの本から感じることが出来た通奏低音の言語的表現です。「真理から遠ざかったのが私たちであれば、真理へ歩みを進めるのも私たちである」ことを認識させてくれる名著です。
23人のお客様がこれが役に立ったと考えています
役に立った
レポート
========
FORGOTTEN TRUT~
ThE CoMMON VisioN of ThE
WoRld's REliqioNs
HUSTON SMITH
=
HarperSanFrancisco
A Division of HarperCollinsPublishcrs
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
Excerpts on pages 94-95 from Tales of the Deroishes by ldries Shah.
Copyright© 1967 by ldries Shah. Reprinted by permission of
ldries Shah and the publishers, Jonathan Cape Ltd., London,
England, and E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
Excerpts on pages 33 and 145 from "Burnt Norton" and "East Coker"
from Four QJLartets by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, Inc
Excerpt on pages 43-46 from The Monastery ofjade Mountain by Peter
Goullart. Reprinted by permission of John Murray Ltd., London,
England.
FORGOITEN TRUTH: The Common Vision of the Worlds Religions. Copyright© 1976 by Huston Smith. Preface copyright© 1992 by Huston
Smith. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address
HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022.
FIRST HARPERCOLLINS PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED IN 1992
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Huston
Forgotten truth.
Includes Index
1. Religion-Philosophy
BL5l.S572 1985
200'.1
ISBN 0-06-250787-7
I. Title
05 RRD H 20 1918 17 16
92-53925
CoNTENTs
Preface
v
I. The Way Things Are
2. Symbolism of Space: The Three-Dimensional
Cross
3. The Levels of Reality
4. The Levels of Selfhood
60
5. The Place of Science
96
6. Hope, Yes; Progress, No
118
7. Epilogue
Appendix: The Psychedelic Evidence
Index
For Eleanor Kendra
ELEANoR:
Variant of Helene (Greek), goddess of
light; from helene, "the bright one."
KENDRA:
Ken. Scottish, to know; to have
perception or understanding.
Kendra.
Sanskrit
~
cognate to the Greek KEVTPOV Center.
Modern society is intensely secular; even ·those who
regret this admit it. The irony is that, after excluding
the mystical tradition from our cultural mainstream
and claiming to find it irrelevant to our concerns, so
many of us feel empty without it.
DAVID MAYBURY·LEWIS, Millennium
PREfACE TO ThE 1992 EdiTiON
People have a profound need to believe that the truth they
perceive is rooted in the unchanging depths of the universe; for
were it not, could the truth be really important? Yet how can we
so believe when others see truth differently? Archaic peoples,
wrapped like cocoons in their tribal beliefs, did not face this
dilemma. Even civilizations on the whole have been spared
it, for until recently they were largely self-contained. It is wewe moderns, we worldly wise-who experience the problem
acutely.
This book addresses that problem. Twenty years before it was
published in 1976, I wrote The Worlds Religions (originally titled
The Religions of Man), which presented the major traditions in
their individuality and variety. It took me two decades to see
how they converge. The outlooks of individual men and women
(the militant atheist, the pious believer, the cagey skepticY"are
too varied to classify, but when they gather in collectivities-the
outlooks of tribes, societies, civilizations, and at deepest level
the world's enduring religions-a pattern emerges. One finds a
remarkable unity underlying the surface differences. When we
look at human bodies we normally notice their external features, which differ markedly. Meanwhile the spines that support
this variety are structurally much alike. It is the same with collective outlooks. Outwardly they too differ, but inwardly it is as
if an "invisible geometry" has everywhere been working to
shape them to a single truth.
v
vi I PREFACE
The only notable exception is ourselves; our modern Western
outlook has differed in its very soul from what might otherwise
be called "the human unanimity." But there is an explanation
for this, namely, modern science and its misreading. If the cause
were science itself, our deviation might be taken as a breakthrough: a new departure for humankind, the dawning of a new
day after a long night of ignorance and superstition. But since
the cause has been a misreading of science, our case is an aberration. If we correct it we can rejoin the human race.
The time is ripe for that correction-seeing this is what
prompts the new Preface to this book. Our mistake was expecting science to provide us with a world view, when we now see
that it shows us only half the world-its physical, calculable,
testable, significantly controllable, half. And even that half is
now unpicturable; it can't be visualized (see pages 103-109 in
the text). So science no longer presents us with a model for even
half of the world. For two thousand years, Europeans followed
Aristotle in picturing the earth as surrounded by sentient, crystalline spheres, a model which modern science displaced with
its clockwork universe. Postmodern science gives us not another
model of the universe, but no model at all. "Don't ask how nature can be the way it is," Richard Feynman told his students towards the close of his life, "for that question leads down a sinkhole from which no scientist has emerged alive. Nobody has any
idea how nature can be the way it is."
So scientific triumphalism, which came close to being modernity's zeitgeist, is over, for two reasons. One, we realize that
powerful as science is in certain domains, there are other domains its empirical method can't track (s-ee pages 14-16 below).
Two, the things science can work with no longer converge in a
model that makes sense even of nature.
This absence of a model for the world is the deepest definition of postmodernism and the confusion of our times. The two
come close to being the Sa)De thing. A recent review of eight
books, all carrying the word "postmodern" in their titles, throws
in the towel, concl'!ding that no one knows what that word
PREFACE
I Vll
means anymore. That's true if we stay with the pundits, but underlying their definitions is a common denominator that is
quite serviceable. Ask yourself if you know what's going on. If
your answer is no, you're postmodern. '1\nyone who isn't con·
fused today," Simone Weil reports, "simply isn't thinking straight."
If people didn't need models of reality and the life-serving
orientation and confidence they provide, there would be no
problem; but history suggests that we do need them. There have
been times when societies were triumphant and became true
cultures, when people, through their values and beliefs, knew
who they were and were at one with themselves. The Iliad, the
Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Henry V, and War and Peace celebrate..,
such times. Even in bad times there has usually been a consensus of sorts; symbols had accepted meaning and significance,
providing bastions where people could rally, console and entertain themselves, and attack agreed-upon evils. But in our postmodern Western world, as Walker Percy points out, "something
has gone wrong, and gone wrong in a sense far more radical
than, say, the evils of industrial England which engaged Dickens.
It did not take a dia~nostician to locate the evils of the sweatshops of the nineteenth-century Midlands. But now it seems
that whatever has gone wrong strikes to the heart and core of
meaning itself, the very ways [in which] people see and understand themselves." What is called into question now is the very
enterprise of human life. Instead of deploring social evils from
a posture of consensus, it is now the consensus itself th<U is
called into question. Rebecca West made the point differently
while retaining the point itself. Asked to name the mood of this
latter twentieth century, she said, "a desperate search for a
pattern."
That "the human unanimity"-how things pretty much looked
to peoples everywhere until modern science threw the West
temporarily off-balance-has helpful things to suggest toward the
creation of a viable pattern for our time, is this book's basic thesis.
It does not argue foolishly that traditional peoples were, or
are, universally wise. Their science has been superseded, and
viii I PREFAcE
modernity blew the whistle on slavery, even as postmodernity is
blowing it on racial and gender injustices. But if somewhere hidden in the depths of thing~ there are invariants-things that
resemble the floor of the ocean over which currents sweep, and
waves atop those currents-it doesn't much matter when they are
pondered, unless (to switch metaphors) one has been in a tunnel so long one has forgotten that sun and stars and rain exist.
The premodern realization that they do exist-that things more
wonderful than the tunnel vision of modernity allowed are not
only real but more real than the ones that pushed them out of
sight-is the thesis this essay explores with absolute seriousness.
Four additional points deserve note.
The first concerns the need for twentieth-century science to
posit invisible realities, a need that has gathered momentum
since this book first appeared. At the opening of the century,
WilliamJames epitomized religion as "belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto." In those terms modernity couldn't be
wholeheartedly religious, for it looked to science to tell it what
existed, and science's silence regarding the unseen rendered
distinctive religious objects-God, soul, and the like-suspect.
That silence has now lifted; science speaks increasingly of the
invisible, and does so respectfully. Ninety percent of the scientist's universe (some say ninety-nine percent) is at present invisible; no instruments pick it up, but calculations require that it
be posited to account for the gravitational pull on the rims of
galaxies. Instruments may yet be invented that will bring this
"dark matter" to light, but even if they are, we will still be left
with the wave packets from which particles derive. No scientist
expects that those packets will ever be observed.
So science is conceding that invisibles exist, and more. It also
concedes that these invisibles precede the visible and create or
in some way give rise to it. The aforementioned wave packets
attest to this, but if we take the particle, rather than the wave,
approach to matter, we get the same result. For protons derive
from photons, and photons are only "virtually" material: they
have no rest mass, lose no energy to the mediums they traverse,
PREFACE
I ix
and are not o~jectively (intersubjectively) detectable because
they are annihilated by being perceived. To summarize the way
in which science perceives the seen as deriving from the unseen, I will anticipate a short paragraph that appears in larger
context on pages 115-16.
All matter is created out of some imperceptible substratum. This
substratum is not accurately described as material, since it uniformly fills all space and is undetectable by any observation. In a
sense it appears as nothingness-immaterial, undetectable, and
omnipresent. But it is a peculiar form of nothingness, out of which
all matter is created.
The second point that deserves mention concerns hierarchies. The multileveled world that this book unfolds may seem
to be in tension with critiques of hierarchies that are now
healthily afoot, but it is not. For the critique is of social hierarchies, whereas this book deals with metaphysical ones. Metaphysically, all human beings are equal for populating a single
level of reality, the human level which Chapters Three and Four
place in larger context. Moreover, though social hierarchies can
be oppressive and often are, not all are of this nature. The hierarchical relationships between loving parents and their small
children are benign and empowering; the same may be said of
well-ordered classrooms. The basic claim of religion is that
God's relation to the world presents us with the paradigmatic
instance of a benign, empowering hierarchy. In Christian formulation, "God became man that man might become God"
(Athanasius).
Third, it is gratifying to find that my critique of Darwinism
(as distinct from evolution) in Chapter Six has gained support
since it was written. Those who wish to update themselves on
the subject are directed to Phillip E. Johnson's Darwin on Trial
(Washington, D. C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991); and the booklet,
"Evolution as Dogma," published by Haughton Publishing Co.,
P. 0. Box 180218, Dallas, TX 75218-0218.
Finally, overpopulation, the ecological crisis, and other traumas
that threaten our very survival. This book does not address
X
I PREFACE
them. Not, though, from indifference, but out of the conviction
that on their own plane social problems are unsolvable. The
causes of social disease, like organic disease, lie deep. Ultimately
as deep as the view of our human place in the total scheme of
things which this book addresses.
Huston Smith
Berkeley, California
june, 1992
That which is lacking in the present world is a
profound knowledge of the nature of things.
FRITHJOF SCHUON
l. THE WAy THiNGS ARE
In envisioning the way things are, there is no better place
to begin than with modern science. Equally, there is no worse
place to end, but that is for later; for now it is the beginning
that concerns us. Science is the fitting starting point, partly
because of its achievements, which according to Herbert Butterfield outshine everything since the rise of Christianityothers have claimed since the invention of language. Even
more pertinent, however, is the fact that science dominates the
modern mind. Through and through, from premises to conclusions, the contemporary mind is science-ridden. Its sway is
the stronger because we are unaware of its extent.
There may be no better way to summarize the scientific view
of things than to say that reality is a stupendous spatial hierarchy, a hierarchy of size. In its middle register, the meso-world
in which our daily lives are lived, we encounter objects carrying the proportions of inches, feet, and miles. In the microworld that undergirds this meso-world, cells measure on the
order of thousandths of an inch, atoms hundreds of millionths
of an inch, and their nuclei thousandths of billionths of an
inch. As we continue downward, or rather inward, from
nuclei to nucleons and their ingredient particles, the orders of
inverse magnitude continue to unfold exponentially.
Reversing our direction we enter the macro-world. Our sun
revolves around our galaxy at a speed of I 60 miles per second,
about 23 times the speed a rocket must attain to escape from
the earth's surface. At this speed it takes the sun approximately
2 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
240 million years to complete a single rotation. If the orbit
seems large, it is in fact parochial, for it is confined to our own
galaxy, which is but one among estimated billions. Andromeda,
our closest sizable neighbor, is 2,200,000 light-years away, and
beyond it space falls away abysmally, nebula after nebula,
island universe after island universe, until we reach the limits
of our known universe, some 26 billion light-years "across,"
whatever that means in a four-dimensional pseudosphere.
Now it happens that the view of reality that preceded that
of modern science was likewise hierarchical. Centering in the
human plane, it too opened onto higher realms above and
nether ones below, the heavens and hells of the traditional
cosmologies.
SCIENCE
TRADITION
M aero-worlds
Heavens
Earth
Micro·worlds
Hells
The two views are at one in sharing a hierarchical layout, but
the units of measure are different. The scientific gauge is
quantity; space, size, and strength of forces can all be reckoned
numerically. The comparable "yardstick" in the traditional
hierarchy was quality. 1 It had, over the millennia, two distinct
l. Language impounds this traditional measure. Dictionaries show that
the word "hierarchy" originally designated echelons of angels, the root hier
meaning "holy."
An alternative word for the traditional yardstick might be "virtue,"
THE wAy THINGS ARE
I 3
readings that overlapped~ To the popular mind it meant essentially euphoria: better meant happier, worse less happy.
Reflective minds, on the other hand, considered happiness to
be only an aspect of quality, not its defining feature. 2 The
word "significance" points us in the direction of the feature
they considered fundamental, but significance too was derivative. It was taken for granted that the higher worlds abounded
in meaning, significance, and importance, but this was because
they were saturated with being and were therefore more real.
Sat, Chit, Ananda: Being, Awareness, and Bliss. All three pertained, but Being, being basic, came first. In the last analysis,
the scale in the traditional hierarchy was ontological.
What it means for one thing to be more real than another
will, we trust, become clear as this book proceeds. For the present we note that the view of reality as consisting of graded
levels of being do~inated man's outlook until the rise of
modern science. As we intend to make something of this point,
it will be well to fix it into place by documenting it.
With the possible exception of Claude Levi-Strauss, no one
today is more qualified to pronounce on the mentality of precivilized man than is Mircea Eliade. Reducing the ontological
hierarchy to its minimum to cover all cases of such men, Eliade
finds this minimum to consist in a dichotomy between the
sacred and the profane. "The man of the archaic societies tends
to live as much as possible in the sacred ... ," he writes, "because for primitives ... the sacred is equivalent to a power,
and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated "'with
being."a
That which prevailed for tribes carried over into civilizawith its twin connotations of goodness and power. In Dante's Divine
Comedy, the planetary heavens and the heaven of fixed stars that surrounds
it are pictured as concentric spheres, "all the more vast inasmuch as they
possess more virtue."
2. "Better Socrates unhappy than a pig happy." Mill's famous aphorism
points up the inability of euphoria to stand as value's final arbiter.
3. Willard Trask, trans., The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper
& Row, 1961), p. 12.
4 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
Twc) VJt:WSC)~·Rt:AI.ITY*
MODERN
Unit of measure:
tpU111lity
PRIMORDIAL
Unit of measure:
quality
Popular notion of
:quality: euplwria
~~
r;
0
=.....,
- ...
Macro-worlds
r'
,!·=0'~ Meao-world
J5~ ~UJ M1cro-worlds
........
""""""
.......
"""""'
Reflective notion of
quality: importance,
significance, power,
beatitude, etc., as
deriving from being
~ r'
Higher
Planes
Earth
cbO
.......
'ij L o w e r
=
""""""
P I an e s
•The alternatives can also be read, roughly, as "scientific vs. humanistic,"
and "secular vs. sacred."
tions: they refined the hierarchical perspective but kept its
basic structure. "It has, in one form or another, been the-dominant official philosophy of the larger part of civilized mankind
through most of its history," writes Arthur Lovejoy in The
Great Chain of Being (which along with Rene Guenon's Les
Etats Multiples de l' Etre is one of the two studies devoted exclusively to this concept); taught "in their several fashions and
with differing degrees of rigor and thoroughness [by] the
greater number of subtler speculative minds and of the great
religious teachers.'' 4
Having noted the universality of the hierarchical perspective
in both tribes and civilizations generally, we narrow in on the
civilization that is our own. Here, for philosophy, Plato forged
the paradigm. Atop being's hierarchy is the Form of the Good,
4. Cambridge: Harvar~ University Press, 1936, p. 26.
THE WAy THINGS ARE
I 5
the most real of the various grades of reality, the "Good Itself."
Radically different from our everyday world, it can be described
only through poetic images. Nevertheless, being "pure perfection," it is the universal object of desire. It is also, of all
subordinate things, their cause. Such ancillary and partially
privative entities are logically required, Plato's successors (such
as Proclus) argued, by virtue of what Lovejoy called "the
principle of plenitude"; they are possible, and if any possibility were unactualized it would constitute, as it were, a hole in
Being's fullness and negate its infinity. Aristotle elaborated on
the graded character of the finite portion of the spectrum; 5 for
the scala naturae he provided biological specifics and a definition of continuity which came to be applied to the scale as
a whole. In the words of Lovejoy's summary:
The result was the conception of the plan and structure of the
world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late
eighteenth century ... most educated men were to accept without
question-the conception of the universe as a "Great Chain of
Being," composed of an immense, or ... infinite, number of links
ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents
... through "every possible" grade up to the ens perfectissimum.6
"Down to the late eighteenth century," Lovejoy tells us.
Why did the hierarchical outlook then collapse? As it had
blanketed human history up to that point, constituting man's
primordial tradition and what might almost be called the human unanimity, the force that leveled it must have been.,.powerful, and modern science is the obvious candidate. The timing
is right: Bacon, Hobbes, and Newton saw the writing on the
wall in the seventeenth century, but it took another century
for the scientific outlook to sweep the field. And the logic is
inexorable: the structure of the two views is such that it was
inevitable that they collide. Modern science requires only one
5. "All individual things may be graded according to the degree to which
they are infected with potentiality." W. D. Ross, Aristotle (London:
Methuen, 1949), p. 178.
6. Great Chain of Being, p. 59.
6 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
ontological level, the physical. Within this level it begins with
matter that is perceptible, and to perceptible matter it in the
end returns, for however far its hypotheses extend, eventually
they must be brought back to pointer readings and the like for
verification. Between their beginnings and their ends the hypotheses may cross foreign waters, for in its micro- and macroreaches matter behaves in unfamiliar ways. This does not, however, alter the fact that the matter (or rather matter;energy)
with which the hypotheses deal remains such throughout, subject to matrices of space and time however redefined: curved
space is odd, but it is still space. To whatsoever corner of the
universe nature is tracked, it continues in some way to honor
science's basic indices: space, time, and the matter;energy
that are convertible. It is by virtue of the fact that science fits
exhaustively into these matrices that its contents are, in last
analysis, of a kind. A spatio-temporal state of affairs is a spatiatemporal state of affairs. Or, at a higher level of abstraction,
a number is a number, and number is the language of science.
Objects can be larger or smaller, forces can be stronger or
weaker, durations can be longer or shorter, these all being
numerically reckonable. But to speak of anything in science
as having a different ontological status-as being better, say,
or more real-is to speak nonsense.
Itself occupying no more than a single ontological plane, science challenged by implication the notion that other planes
exist. As its challenge was not effectively met, it swept the field
and gave the modern world its soul. For this is the final definition of modernity: an outlook in which this world, this ontological plane, is the only one that is genuinely countenanced
and affirmed. 7 In religion modernity demythologizes tradition
to accommodate it to its one-story universe; if "God" in principle requires more exalted quarters, the nonexistence of such
7. An instance of what we mean: Once while discussing psychic phenomena with Freud, his biographer, Ernest Jones, remarked: "If one could
believe in mental processes floating in the air, one could go on to believe
in angels." Whereupon Freud closed the discussion with the comment:
"Quite so, and even der liebe Gott" -even the dear God.
THE WAY THINGS ARE /
7
quarters entails his nonexistence as well; hence Death-of-God
theologians. Existentialism does its best to give man purchase
in a world built for the examination of things, but subjective
truth is no match for objective, so in the main philosophy, too,
accepts the working premises of science. "The best way to characterize Quine's world view is to say that ... there is fundamentally only one kind of entity in the world, and that is the
kind studied by natural scientists-physical objects; and second,
that there is only one kind of knowledge in the world, and it
is the kind that natural scientists have." 8 Willard Quine is
the most influential American philosopher of the last twenty
years.
That the scientific outlook should, in Carl Becker's word,
have "ravished" the modern mind is completely understandable. Through technology, science effects miracles: skyscrapers
that stand; men standing on the moon. Moreover, in its early
stages these miracles were in the direction of the heart's desire:
multiplication of goods and the reduction of drudgery and disease. There was the sheer noetic majesty of the house pure
science erected, and above all there was method. By enabling
men to agree on the truth because it could be demonstrated,
this method produced a knowledge that was cumulative and
could advance. No wonder man converted. The conversion
was not forced. It did not occur because scientists were imperialists but because their achievements were so impressive, their
marching orders so exhilarating, that thinkers jostled to join
their ranks.
We ourselves were once in their number and would be so
today were it not for a fact that has become increasingly unblinkable. Strictly speaking, a scientific world view is impossible; it is a contradiction in terms. The reason is that science
does not treat of the world; it treats of a part of it only.
One world at a time, one hears. Fair enough, but not half a
world, which is all that science can offer.
At this poin·t matters grow awkward, for we are conscious of
8. Richard Schuldenfrei, "Quine in Perspective," The journal of Philosophy, LXIX, 1 Qan. 13, 1972), 5.
8 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
entering upon a hackneyed theme. We beg, however, for the
reader's closest attention; we wish he could read the balance
of this chapter as if he were encountering its argument for
the first time. For its conclusion is one of those things that
one knows yet never learns. The conclusion is this: Though
man's conversion to the scientific outlook is understandable
psychologically, logically it involves a clean mistake. Insofar
as we allow our minds to be guided by reason, we can see that
to try to live within the scientific view of reality would be like
living in a house's scaffolding, and to love it like embracing
one's spouse·s skeleton.
Every advance in our understanding of the scientific method
renders this conclusion more inescapable. Indeed, if there is
anything new in the version of the argument about to be presented, it lies in the near-consensus of scientists and philosophers of science that can now be invoked in its support.
As a probe toward the way things are, science is a powerful
but strictly limited instrument. One wonders if it was during
the Battle of Britain that Karl Popper of t~e University of
London, ranking philosopher of science in our generation, hit
upon an image that has become standard in making this point.
His image likens science to a searchlight scanning a night sky
for planes. For a plane to register, two things are required: it
must exist, and it must be whete the beam is. The plane must
be, and it must be there (where the beam is).
The point of this image is, of course, to make plain the restricted nature of the scientific quest. Far from lighting up the
entire sky, it illumines but an arc within it. Norbert Wiener
used to make the point by saying: "Messa_ges from the universe
arrive addressed no more specifically than 'To Whom It May
Concern.' Scientists open those that concern them." No mosaic
constructed from messages thus narrowly selected can be the
full picture.
These images make their point in a general way, but they
provide no particulars. Precisely how is science limited? In
what ways does it restrict its interests?
THE WAY THINGS ARE /
9
If the plane had
been here, the beam
would have missed it
Science is not one thing. It resembles a village more than
it does a single individual. But villages often have greens, and
they are usually located near their centers. Following this
analogy, we can move in on science by way of a series of concentric circles.
10 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
The outer, enveloping circle is labeled objectivity. No knowledge can claim to be scientific in any sense until it enters this
domain, which is to say, until it elicits intersubjective agreement. It must commend itself to human knowers generally,
provided only that they are competent in the subject in question. We move closer to the heart of science, however, when we
enter the second circle, prediction. Taxonomy is a science in
some sense, but it does not command the respect we accord to
the predictive sciences. When an astronomer tells us that so
many years hence, at such and such an hour on such and such a
night, the moon will enter eclipse, and this happens, we
are impressed. Not content to describe what occurs in nature,
the astronomer has pressed on to uncover its operators. A
scientist who goes further and takes command of these operators, throwing switches in the tracks on which nature runs,
so to speak, steps even closer to science's center, into the circle
marked control. It might seem that from the standpoint of pure
as against applied science the distinction between prediction
and control is small, but in fact it is important. In pure science controlled experiments set the stage for predictions that
could not be made without them-science grows exact by being
exacting-while in applied science (technology) control is
where the money lies. It is to the science that can build missile
systems and stamp out polio that the coffers of government
swing wide. To overlook the extent to which this affects the
shape of science as a sociohistorical enterprise would be naive.'
The fourth guideline of science takes the form, not of another
circle that hugs its center even more tightly, but of an arrow
which, beginning at the outer rim, drives straight to the center
itself. The name of this final guideline is number.1o Number,
9. Science is the controlled observation of nature, technology its conuolled exploitation. Heidegger calls both "provocative" and sees "self"
and "control" as the dominant, though concealed, motifs not only of
modem science but of the basic notion of truth that develops in the West.
Nietzsche anticipated him in seeing modern science as the product of the
will to power that animates all Western thought and history.
10. Or more precisely, mathematics, which embraces the study of relationships that are numerical and ones that are not, such as "greater fsmaller,"
THE WAY THINGS ARE I
11
as has already been rem·arked, is the language of science; the
more knowledge can be expressed quantitatively, in probability
equations and the like, the more scientific it is considered to
be. 11 The question of whether the social sciences will achieve
the status of true sciences turns on this point, with economics
being, at present, the test case.
It will be objected that this fourfold characterization presents science in its narrowest light. There is much talk today
of expanding the scientific method to make it applicable to
broader, more humane considerations. By directing this method
to new problems, the scientific enterprise can indeed, within
limits, be expanded, but not the scientific method itself. For
it is precisely from the narrowness of that method that its
power derives, so that to urge its expansion is like recommending that a dentist's drill be broadened so it can churn a bit
of butter on the side. 12 We are at liberty, of course, to use
"coincides withjdoes not coincide with," "falls within this setjdoes not so
fall," these latter being the preserve of mathematical logic. It is in this
inclusive sense of mathematics that Whitehead writes, "All science as it
grows toward perfection becomes mathematical in its ideal."
11. This point was first brought home to me through a chance conversation while I was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lunching at its Faculty Club, I found myself seated next to a scientist, and
as so often happened in such circumstances the conversation turned to
the difference between science and the humanities. We were getting nowhere when suddenly he broke in on something I was saying with the
authority of a man who had discovered Truth. "I have it!" he exclaimed.
"The difference between us is that I count and you don't."
The key differences between the primordial and contemporary p~rspec
tives in a double entendre.
12. In Where the Wasteland Ends, Theodore Roszak calls for "changing
the fundamental sensibility of scientific thought-and doing so even if we
must drastically revise the professional character of science and its place
in our culture." He proposes a science that is dominated by a "rhapsodic
intellect" which "would subordinate much research to those contemplative
encounters with nature that deepen, but do not increase knowledge"
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1972), pp. 374-75.
To which a practicing scientist rightly replies: "My answer is that science
cannot change in this way without destroying itself, because however
much human values are involved in the scientific process or are affected
by the results of scientific research, there is an essential element in science
that is cold, objective, and nonhuman." Steveh Weinberg, "Reflections of
a Working Scientist," Daedalus, CIII, 3 (Summer 1974), 42.
12 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
words as we please, and "science" is no exception. We can
even revert to its scholastic definition wherein theology is
science's queen-would the proponents of an expanded science
like this definition better? The hope is only that Confucius
will be honored in his call for "the rectification of names,"
his plea that when we use words we understand and make
plain what we are doing with them. Underlying much of the
call for an expanded science is a stifled cry: "Please, in this age
of science, believe me, too, the way scientists are believed," or
"Please consider my research proposal eligible for funding by
the National Science Foundation, whose budget is many times
that of the National Endowment on the Arts and the Humanities." But we need not resort to ad hominems. For all we know,
the larger part of the motive for trying to expand science is
not self-serving; it is merely mistaken. The idealistic element
in it is its desire to achieve in the understanding of man what
science has achieved in the understanding of matter. Its mistake is in not seeing that the tools for the one are of strictly
limited utility for the other, and that the practice of trying to
see man as an object which the tools of science will fit leads
first to underrating and then to losing sight of his attributes
those tools miss. (Pages of illustrations, but the mere titles of
B. F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity and Herbert
Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man will, in opposite ways, suffice.) If it be asked, "But what did the nonscientific approach
to man and the world give us?" the answer is: "Meaning, purpose, and a vision in which everything coheres." But we are
getting ahead of our story.
We were speaking of numbers, and the subject warrants a
second small excursus before we leave it. Why numbers work
as they do with nature--or to put the matter the other way
around, why nature is as mathematical as it has proven to be
-no one fully understands. Eugene Wigner speaks of "the
unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics"; it is a mystery
sufficient to awaken the Pythagorean in us all. One of the
reasons for mathematics' effectiveness, however, we do know.
Numbers and their 'logical operators are the only symbols, or
THE WAY THINGS ARE
I 13
rather signs, that are completely unambiguous: 4 is 4 and that
is the end of the matter. This alone could account for why scientists press in their direction, for whatever else science seeks,
it seeks precision.
One can sense a problem brewing here, for if number is the
vehicle of precision (major premise), and number is not the
unit of measure in tradition (minor premise), whose basic
measure is quality rather than quantity, does it not follow (conclusion) that the traditional outlook is forever and in principle
condemned to vagueness? As far as descriptions of that outlook
are concerned, and insofar as these descriptions are compared
with scientific descriptions, the answer must be yes; the syllogism is valid. But lest it be concluded that this difference closes
the books on the traditional perspective, we must register immediately that tradition's limitations in the direction of precision carry compensations. The alternative to numbers is
words. Whereas numbers are signs, words are symbols, and
therefore by their very nature equivocal; their ambiguity can
be reduced but never eliminated. This bars them from the
needle's eye of absolute precision, but the loose ends that prevent them from piercing that eye endow them with a texture
that numbers cannot match. Multivalent, irreducibly equivocal
in intimation and nuance where not actually ambiguous in dictionary definition, words reach out like a banyan root system, as
tangled and in as many directions. Folding and refolding in
adumbration and allusion, they weave, veer, and seek out subliminal soil. No wonder logicians flee their meanderings in
favor of fixed and adamantine glyphs. The despair of logicians
is the humanist's glory. From the adversity of verbal ambiguity,
opportunity opens. The multivalence of language enables it
to mesh with the multidimensionality of the human spirit, depicting its higher reaches as numbers never can. 13 Equations
13. Exceptions to this statement are numerologists and "gnostic mathe·
maticians" for whom numbers.function as symbols reflecting another realm.
Pythagoras was such, as were certain members of Plato's Academy who, by
Aristotle's report, claimed that "the Forms are numhers."
That type is exceptional, but another point relating to the numberjwords
distinction is of general interest. In the chapter on "Information" in his
14 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
can be elegant, but that is a separate matter. Poems cannot
be composed in numbers.
We are now in a position to see how science is limited. The
knowledge with which it is exclusively occupied is, to begin
with, objective. It must be intersubjectively confirmable, and
since sense data are what men most incontrovertibly agree on
after the tautologies of mathematics and logic, the knowledge
science seeks is that which at some level of amplification can
connect with man's senses. That which so connects is energyI
matter, so energy;matter in its manifold forms and permutations is science's object. Within its domain science looks especially for precise-which in the end means mathematically
expressible-knowledge that is predictive and augments control.
What lies outside this pale?
1. Values in their final and proper sense. Some time ago
Bertrand Russell acknowledged that "the sphere of values lies
outside science, except insofar as science consists in the pursuit
of knowledge,"14 and even his exception is not truly such, for
the value of pursuing knowledge, though assumed by science,
is not itself scientifically derived. Science can deal with instrumental values but not intrinsic ones. If health is valued over
immediate somatic gratification, smoking is bad, but the "if"
Lives of a Cell, Lewis Thomas cites ambiguity as the property that distinguishes language from other modes of biological communcation:
Ambiguity seems to be an essential, indispensible element for the transfer
of information from one place to another by words, where matters of real
importance are concerned. It is often necessary, for meaning to come
through, that there be an almost vague sense of strangeness and askewness. Speechless animals and cells cannot do -this. . . . Only the human
mind is designed to work in this way, programmed to drift away in the
presence of locked-on info"nnation, straying from each point in a hunt
for a better, dHierent point" (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1974), p. Ill.
Language is biological in that we are programmed to learn it, Dr. lhomas
concludes, but it is peculiar in being a "programming for ambiguity," to
put the matter in the paradox his point requires.
For the present book, which warns against over-reliance on a mode of
knowing that favors monovalent numbers over multivalent words, the
point is big with consequences.
14. "Science and Valqes," in Philip Wiener, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), p. 599.
THE WAy THINGS ARE
I 15
itself science cannot adjudicate. Again, science can deal with
values descriptively but not prescriptively. It can tell us what
men do prize, but not what they should prize. Market research
and opinion polls are sciences, but as the word is used today
there can be no science of the summum bonum. Normative
values elude its grasp.
2. Purposes. For science to get on with its job, Aristotle's
final causes had to be banished and the field cleared for explanation in terms of efficient causes alone. Whether the case
be that of Galileo and falling stones or Kepler and light, the
shift "from the mechanics of antiquity to modern mechanics
[comes through] the . . . separation of primary and secondary
qualities, ... the numerical and affective aspects of nature, ...
to remove the language of volition and teleology, and to fortify
the notion of 'impersonal,' causal laws of motion." 15 Vitalism
is unscientific. Behavioral science traces "purposive behavior"
to instincts and conditioning, a Ia B. F. Skinner; biology tracks
tropisms to the codings of genes or chromosomes, ala Monad's
Chance and Necessity. It is "feedback loops" that render organisms "teleonomic." "The cornerstone of scientific method is ...
the systematic denial that 'true' knowledge can be got at by
interpreting phenomena in terms of final causes-that is to
say, of 'purpose.' "16
3. Life meanings. Science itself is meaningful from beginning to end, but on certain kinds of meanings-ones that are
existential and global-it is silent. What is the meaning of our
days? Does life make sense? Does the cosmic drama have point
and purpose? As a human being, a scientist may become engaged with such questions, but his science will not help him
answer them. 17 It is as if as scientist he were situated inside a
balloon. He can shine his flashlight anywhere on its interior,
15. Gerald Holton, "The Roots of Complementarity," Daedalus, XCIX,
4 (Autumn 1970), 1023.
· 16. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Vintage Books,
1972), p. 21.
17. Even in the period in which scientific propositions enjoyed pride of
place in his philosophy, Wittgenstein acknowledged that they leave "the
problems of life . . . completely untouched" (Tractatus, 6.52).
16 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
but he cannot get outside it to see it as a whole or in perspective.
4. Quality. This is basic to the lot, for it is the qualitative
ingredient in values, meanings, and purposes that accounts
for their power. Certain qualities (such as colors) are connected
with quantifiable substrates (lightwaves of given lengths), but
quality itself is unmeasurable. 18 Either it is perceived for what
it is or it is not, and nothing can convey its nature to anyone
who cannot perceive it directly. The most that one can do is
to compare things that have a quality with things that do not,
and even then the comparison is meaningful only to persons
who know from experience what the quality in question is.
Inability to deal with the qualitatively unmeasurable leads science to work with what Lewis Mumford calls "a disqualified
universe."
Values, life meanings, purposes, and qualities slip through
science like sea slips through the nets of fishermen. Yet man
swims in this sea, so he cannot exclude it from his purview.
This is what was meant when we noted earlier that a scientific
world view is in principle impossible. Taken in its entirety,
the world is not as science says it is; it is as science, philosophy,
religion, the arts, and everyday speech say it is. Not science·
but the sum of man's symbol systems, of which science is but
one, is the measure of things.
With science itself there can be no quarrel. Scientism is
another matter. Whereas science is positive, contenting itself
with reporting what it discovers, scientism is negative. It goes
beyond the actual findings of science to deny that other approaches to knowledge are valid and other truths true. In
doing so it deserts science in favor of metaphysics-bad metaphysics, as it happens, for as the contention that there are no
truths save those of science is not itself a scientific truth, in
affirming it scientism contradicts itself. It also carries marks of
a religion-a secular religion, resulting from overextrapolation
18. Augustine noted the distinction with respect to time. "For so it is,
0 Lord, my God, I measure it, but what it is I measure I do not know."
THE WAY THINGS ARE
I 17
from science, that has seldom numbered great scientists among
its votaries. Science has enormous difficulty dealing with things
that cannot be measured (if it can deal with them at all),
yet David Bohm, who is a great scientist, says that "the
immeasurable is the primary and independent source of all
reality. . ·. . Measure is a secondary and dependent aspect of
this reality." 19
Where are we?
Searching for the way things are, we found that the modern
reduction of reality to a single ontological level was the result
of science. But its psychological, not its logical, result; this
was our further finding. Nothing in what science has discovered controverts the existence of realms other than the
one with which it deals. Meanwhile our growing understanding of the scientific method shows us that there are things
science by-passes. Whether these neglected items belong to a
distinct ontological scale, science, of course, does not say; it
says nothing whatever about them. The fact that scientific
instruments do not pick them up shows only that they differ
in some way from the data science does register.
As long as modernity was captive of an outlook presumed
to be scientific but in fact scientistic, reality was taken to be
as science mirrored it. Now that it is apparent that science
peers down a restricted viewfinder, we are released from that
misconception. The view that appears in a restricted viewfinder is a restricted view.
Since reality exceeds what science registers, we must look
for other antennae to catch the wavebands it misses. What
other antennae are there? None more reliable than the convergent sensibilities of, in Lovejoy's characterization, "the
greater number of the subtler speculative minds and of the
great religious teachers" that civilizations have produced; and,
we have added with Eliade, that archaic societies have produced
as well. Lovejoy's crediting of the hierarchical outlook to the
19. journal of the Blaisdell Institute, IX, 2 (1974), 70.
18 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
subtler of human minds gains force from the fact that, writing
as he did in the heyday of scientism, he thought the hierarchical outlook mistaken. When we combine (a) the fact that it has
been the subtler minds which, when not thrown off balance by
the first flush of the scientific breakthrough, have gravitated to
the hierarchical view, with (b) the further fact that, from the
multiple heavens of Judaism to the storied structure of the
Hindu temple and the angelologies of innumerable traditions,
the view was reached convergently and independently, as if by
innate tropism, by virtually all known societies; when, to
repeat, we combine these two facts and bring them into alignment, they entitle us to regard a tiered reality as man's central
surmise when the full range of his experience is legitimated and
pondered profoundly. Constituting until recently, through
both rumored and recorded history, what we have ventured to
call the human unanimity-the phrase overstates the case
slightly, but not much-it presents itself as the natural human
outlook: the view that is normal to man's station because
consonant with the complete complement of human sensibilities. It is the vision philosophers have dreamed, mystics
have seen, and prophets have transmitted.
Spatial metaphors are always dangerous,
though unavoidable, in Theology. In space if A
is touching B then B must be touching A. In the
spiritual world this is not so. God is near me
(or rather in me), and yet I may be far from
God because I may be far from my own true
self.
c. E. ROLT, Introduction to Dionysius
the Areopagite, The Divine Names
and The Mystical Theology
Tell the truth, but tell it slant.
EMILY DICKINSON
2. SyMbolisM of SpACE:
THE THREE-DiMENSiONAl CROSS
A misunderstanding dogs the view of reality as multileveled which, if not dispelled, will vitiate everything that
follows. Levels imply space, space entails distance, and distance
spells separation. But separation is what religion seeks to overcome. Does it not follow that a hierarchical ontology which
splits reality into a number of discrete levels builds cleavage
into the very structure of existence and thereby makes endemic
the disease religion seeks to cure? Reasonings of this sort
appear to be widespread. How else are we to account for the
attention an Anglican bishop received for his midlife discovery
that God is not "out there"? We refer to the reception accorded
John Robinson's Honest to God.
Actually, there is a sense in which God emphatically is "out
there." In his power and awe-filled majesty he is ganz anders,
radically other, infinitely removed from what we are and
thereby "high as the heaven is above the earth." Concomitantly, of course, he is "nearer than our jugular vein," "closer
19
20 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
to us than breathing, nearer than hands and feet," for "in
him we live and move and have our being." In Augustine's
plain words, "It is arrant nonsense that the soul is without
Him who is everywhere." Transcendence and immanence, in
absolute tension. If we lose our grip on either, the tone in our
spiritual life collapses.
The reception Bishop Robinson's book received was the lay
aftermath of the reception theologians had themselves for a
generation accorded Rudolf Bultmann's move to "demythologize" Christian cosmology of its three-storied universe. Both
evince a surprising innocence regarding religious symbols and
the way they function. One of the reasons a hierarchical view
of reality is indispensable is that Spirit, the human spirit
included, is nonspatial and thereby belongs perforce to an
order of existence distinct in kind from nature. It follows that
no spatial, geographical terms-out there, deep within, high
and lifted up, basic, fundamental, exalted, whatever-can
characterize Spirit literally. But as an epigraph at the head of
this chapter notes, neither can such terms be avoided. Insofar
as we think, spatial images are inevitable, for thought proceeds
through language, and language is forged in our encounter
with the· spatio-temporal world.
Envisioned externally, as residing outside of man and apart
from him, the Good dons metaphors of height: "I shall lift
up mine eyes unto the hills . . . "; "in the year that King
Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and lifted up." When man
reverses his gaze and looks inward, his value-imagery likewise
transposes; it turns over. Within man, the best lies deepest;
it is basic, fundamental, the ground ofhis being. All the levels
of reality are within man, for microcosm mirrors macrocosm;
man mirrors the Infinite. But mirrors invert; hence symbolism's "law of inverse analogy." 1 That which man seeks exterI. If the reader objects that mirrors reverse rightjleft but not upjdown,
he should read Ned Block,.. \nwoO\qU Jo~ JUd Jl~\JrlaiJI :tn:tv:tJI 11011iM
oU '(rlVI" The journal of Philosophy, LXXI, 9 (May 16, 1974), 259 ff.
The written page w!Iich a mirror reverses rightjleft has been turned
SYMBOLISM OF SPACE
I 21
nally in the highest heavens he seeks internally in the depths
of his soul. Spiritual space, like physical, is curved. We journey
far to reach our origin.
Externally, the good dons
images of height. Mountains are
sacred, and gods dwell in the
/ heavens from whence sunlight and
. procee d .
/ / ram
/
/
/
....
Internally, the good dons images
of depth. We sense it as centered,
like the heart and other vital
organs, within a protective sheath
of bone and sinew.
We trust that this brief note on the symbolism of space
removes what would otherwise be an insuperable obstacle to
the concept of an hierarchical reality. Its higher levels are
not literally elsewhere; they are removed only in the sense of
being inaccessible to ordinary consciousness-invisible,..,.for
one thing. In this respect the multiple states of being resemble
multiple dimensions more than they do multiple levels. If
space has indeed a fourth dimension-we are not referring to
time-that dimension is not elsewhere; it intersects the three
dimensions we see, albeit invisibly. The imagery of dimensions
rightjleft, not upside down, to face the mirror. This is only the beginning
of the complexities that reflected vision presents, but for present purposes
these are irrelevant. Quite apart from mirrors, the image that is filtered
to the retina through the eye's lens is already inverted, practice being
required for us to compensate for that fact and "see" the image as upright.
22 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
has the further advantage of underscoring the ontological
differences at issue. Distance can render things invisible and
this the imagery of levels allows, but something that is invisible
while being right under one's nose, not because it is covered or
microscopic but because we lack the kind of sense receptors
that could connect with it-a something of this sort is
intrinsically mysterious. Science fiction writers know this: good
science fiction is set on other planets, great science fiction in
other dimensions. For to repeat, the notion of dimensions
beyond our normal three is uncanny from the outset, before
anything is made to happen within them. In its preoccupation
with a "more" that exceeds man's ken, science fiction is kin to
religion, the emphatic difference, of course, being that what
is fiction for one is for the other fact.
In view of the double advantage of dimensions over levels
-the advantage that dimensions, when multiplied, announce
domains that are (a) inherently awe-filled while being (h)
directly at hand-we might be tempted to adopt them as our
controlling spatial metaphor. To do so, however, would be a
mistake, for the simple reason that dimensions lack a value
gradient. Length is not better than breadth, breadth than
height, or whatever. ,· Jther than being distributed acros~
spatial dimensions, V? h1e differences fall along a single one,
the vertical. Better anr worse are not left and right; they are
superior and inferior. And because the comparative worth of
existences is crucial to our concerns, the imagery of levels is on
balance more appropriate.
It is more appropriate for ordering domains with respect
to their worth, but to symbolize existence in its entirety all
three dimensions are needed. When St. Paul hoped that the
Christians of Ephesus would be filled with the fullness of God,
he prayed that they would be granted power to comprehend
"the breadth and length, and depth and height" of Christ's
love (Eph. 3: 18), for only so could they know its inclusiveness.
Our special concern is with the height aspect of his formulation, but to see _how worth figures in being as a whole we
need to use the symbolism of the other dimensions as well.
SYMBOLISM OF SPACE /
23
Rene Guenon's Symbolism of the Cross must be credited for
much that we are about to say.2
No model is more effective in disclosing the symbolism
that_ is latent in space than a three-dimensional cross, constituted of a vertical cross pierced at its intersection by a third,
longitudinal arm running at right angles to the other two. The
construct can also be seen as deriving from the imposition of
a horizontal cross on a vertical one, in which case the model
symbolizes not only reality-its meaning that concerns us here
-but also, in passing, the meeting of East and West, for the
Asian counterpart of the upright Christian cross is one that
is typically inscribed on the ground. Such a horizontal cross
is a mandala, a sacred enclosure, round or square, with
typically four approaches to a "hidden treasure" that lies at
its center. The diagram is, of course, universal: the Garden of
Eden with its four rivers converging on the Tree of Life at
its center is a mandala, as is the New Jerusalem in the Book
of Revelation with its twelve gates-small entrances flanking
each of the four principal ones are common in mandalic layouts. But though mandalas cover the globe, Asia has worked
with them more intensively than has the West. Often they are
paintings that are hung on walls, but their basic position in
Asia is, to repeat, horizontal, as in the ground plans of Angkor
Wat and the stupa at Boroboedoer, the room-size butter
mandalas the Tibetans build for feast days, or the patterns
Indian women inscribe on floors and courtyards with rice ~.our.
Pare such a horizontal mandala to its essential geometry of
two lines that intersect at right angles and mount this horizontal cross on a vertical, Christian cross to make one having six
arms like the "pickup jacks" that children play with; the
vertical cross should be of Eastern Orthodox design so the six
arms can be of equal length and the center truly central. The
result is a three-dimensional cross, the most adequate model of
reality that space can provide.
Let us begin with its vertical axis. As the axis mundi it
2. London: Luzac & Company, 1958.
24 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
intersects all the planes of existence and ranks them in ontological hierarchy, the hierarchy of being and worth. Of the
planes thus traversed, our model shows but one, the one
represented by its horizontal arms. This is as it should be, for
our own plane is the only one we can see. But if we possessed
metaphysical eyes we would see arms protruding from all the
points the vertical axis registers.
How many planes there are, we do not know. The levels of
nature that science discriminates give us no clue, for these all
pertain to size which, being an aspect of space, belongs to our
plane only. (We discount as irrelevant for present purposes
the peculiar modes of space ·we experience when dreaming.)
The entire size-continuum, from minutest particle to our 26billion-light-year universe, falls along the horizontal arms we
see. The planes that bracket -this central one-central from
our point of view-may be indefinite in number, but even
if they are, something can be said about their antipodes. As the
levels of reality array themselves along the vertical axis in
descending degrees of reality, reality being (as noted in the
SYMBOLISM OF SPACE /
25
preceding chapter) worth's final criterion, the bottom of the
arm represents the point-a fraction of a degree above absolute
zero as we might say-where being phases out completely; all
that could lie beyond this margin is a nothing that is as unthinkable as it is nonexistent. The top of the axis represents
the opposite of this, that is, everything. Opposites being well
acquainted, this everything shares in common with its antithesis the fact that it too cannot be imaged, but unlike
complete nothingness it can be conceived. Being we experience, whereas nothingness, by itself, we do not. The zenith of
being is Being Unlimited, Being relieved of all confines and
conditionings. The next chapter will discuss it; for now we
simply name it. It is AU-Possibility, the Absolute, the In-finite
in all the directions that word can possibly point.
Returning to the horizontal arms that denote the human
plane, the transverse or lateral arm represents space and by
extension the amplitude of possibilities it can contain. The
longitudinal arm, in turn-the one that extends toward the
viewer and away from him-represents time; from its center,
the present, its stretches backward toward an indefinite past
and forward toward an open and unlimited future. Inching
forward along this longitudinal arm with time's passage, the
lateral arm represents at each point all the possibilities that
could in principle transpire at that moment in time on our
particular plane of existence. If we could see the past and the
future, lateral arms would spring from every point on the
longitudinal line and convert the horizontal arms of the "'cross
into a plane. And if to such time-consciousness were added the
metaphysical omniscience posited earlier-the capacity to perceive all the levels of being that exist-we would see that the
horizontal, space-time plane is only a section of a cube. Or
rather, because a circle encloses more space for the length of its
perimeter than does a square and amplitude is our object, a
sphere does better than a cube as our final image for being's
totality.
From the infinite sphere toward which the arms of the cross
26 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
point, let us now contract our attention to the center from
which the arms protrude. In intersecting at this center the
arms symbolize resolution, a principle which for spiritual
existence is decisive.
Two kinds of resolution are represented. The first of these
is the union of complements. Things that are complementary
differ from each other, and the differences can produce tensions and even open warfare. But the differences can also
"come together," as the convergence of the horizontal and
vertical arms indicates. In intersecting, the arms of the vertical
cross form, as it were, a Western yin-yang. The vertical line
represents most obviously the male or active principle and the
horizontal line the female, receptive one, but any complementing aspects of existence can be substituted. Complements differ
illimitably; this fact the arms register by diverging at right
angles with their extremities moving increasingly apart. They
need not be at odds, however, for at base-in the mathematical
point where they intersect-they are .identical.
If the intersection of the horizontal and vertical axes of the
vertical cross represents the union of complements, the meeting of the right and left arms of its horizontal axis represents
the resolution of opposites. The horizontal and vertical axes·
form a right angle, but the angle formed by the outbranchings
of the two halves of the horizontal axis is 180 degrees. In
protruding in directions that are diametrically opposed, these
halves represent alternatives that are irreconcilable: forced
options, excluded middles, dilemmas with horns on them,
decisions that are eitherjor. Complem~nts can coexist, and the
problem is how to harmonize them; opposites are exclusive,
and the problem is which to choose. Monogamous or polygamous; one may be either but not both simultaneously.
Choices of this kind can be agonizing, as the tension in the
thrusts of the right and left arms illustrates; they can tear a
man apart. But at the point from which left and right diverge,
this tension too is stilled, the message being that insofar as
one leads a centered life, tensions disappear. Aristotelian con-
27
SYMBOLISM OF SPACE /
tradictories do indeed preclude a middle, but the converse of
this truth is that when the middle appears, contradictories
cease to be such. Their logical exclusiveness may remain, but
the existential tension goes out of them. "Oppositions . . .
cease to affect the being who has reduced his ego to nothing"
(Tao Te Ching).
90"
differenc
I
I
~
cu
>..
. >,------1
ym
I
I
I
I
I
-L
Union of Complements
r.=T~
I
>1<
.
I
e1ther. ·I·. or
I
I
I
I
-L
Resolution of Opposites
Existentially, then, the cross's center represents the point
where complements unite and opposites are resolved. Meanwhile ontologically it is the "here and now" from which time
and space protrude. Clearly this point merits attention.
All space condenses into the mathematical point. Collapsed
successively, a three-dimensional cube becomes a two-dimensional plane, a two-dimensional plane a one-dimensional line,
a one-dimensional line a mathematical point. By the s,ame
token, all space proceeds from the mathematical point. Its
movement in a single direction produces a line; movement of
this line at right angles to itself produces a plane; movement
of the plane at right angles to itself produces a cube. Geometry
derives from the mathematical point.
But this brings us to something interesting. Source of all
space, the mathematical point is itself spaceless. The smallest
unit of space is not the Euclidean point which, as a position
without dimensions, occupies no space whatever. The smallest
distance possible is the distance between two such points that
28 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
are immediately adjacent; smaller than this is no distance whatever. Extension is the expanse between two simultaneously
existing points, but the points themselves are not parts of the
spatial continuum, though the distance they "produce" requires that they be conceived as situated within space. The
true spatial element is not the point but distance.
Symbolically this is exact, for the human plane, woven of
space, derives from a transworldly source where space is not.
Asked if there is life after death, Martin Buber replied, "There
is no after, for time is but a crystallization in the mind of
God." Space as well. Space derives from nonspace, if this
expression does not seem too peculiar and unusual. "Out of
that which is not, He made that which is. He carved great
columns from the impalpable ether" (The Kabbalah). Equally
-this was Buber's point-time derives from nontime. The
six days of creation correspond to the six arms of our cross.
On the seventh day God returns to the point from which his
actions began. On the seventh day he rested.
This brings us back to the vertical axis of the cross, which
registers degrees of reality, for something that is aloof from
space and time, eluding both their confines and their separations, obviously exceeds the world our senses report. In th~
next chapter the higher planes of reality will occupy us in some
detail, but for the present we need note only the one at the
top. The supreme plane from which the vertical axis descends
is the Infinite: Being exempt from every mode of limitation
and restriction. From this pinnacle all lesser being derives.
We can picture the vertical axis as a line which, tapping into
the infinite reservoir of Being at -its summit, transmits a
portion of its store to the subordinate planes, which by dint
of this transfusion "materialize." Each successively lower plane
receives a smaller allotment, not because Being becomes progressively depleted-the reservoir, we recall, is infinite-but
because every grade of finitude must be actualized. Were any
omitted, they would gape as holes, so to speak, depriving
existence of the _completeness the Infinite requires by name
SYMBOLISM OF SPACE /
29
-and possesses in fact. In alternative imagery the conduit is the
Celestial Ray of the world's mythologies, connecting the sun
to each entity in the universe it illumines. Geometrically the
vertical axis is a mathematical line which, having no width,
intersects the human plane through the mathematical point
in the cross's center. Through this point which, being spaceless, is unimplicated in the world it empowers, there flows from
the Infinite the measure of being that is earth's allotment. In
the act of flooding the human plane, being dons the categories
we know: space, time, and matter. And this is the meaning
of our earth's existence: to actualize reality in its own distinctive fashion, according to its allotted categories. For this
middling mode of existence-partly real, partly not-is possible, and being possible must be, that the scheme of things be
truly entire.
If we may postulate a microsecond preceding the moment
with which the astronomers' story begins-the moment some
13 billion years ago when a superdense kernel of matter began
the explosion that they say is still creating our universethe natural order may literally ·have derived from a mathematical point at its core. 3 Be this as it may, the metaphysical
origin of the physical universe as recounted in the preceding
paragraphs is paralleled by the origination of the human soul.
As without, so within; the manjworld isomorphism which we
shall note repeatedly in this study swings again into view. For
the point at the center of the three-dimensional cross ~that
gives rise to the order of nature concomitantly creates the
souls that inhabit that order, not just in the moment of their
conception but continuously, instant by instant as they pursue
their trajectories. Or to speak more precisely (and in doing so
to anticipate two chapters hence), the mathematical point at
the center of the three-dimensional cross is likewise each soul's
8. "The universe did not necessarily begin with the big bang. . . . Our
universe, however, did begin with the primordial explosion, since we can
obtain no infonnation about events that occurred before it." David
Schramm, "The Age of the Elements," Scientific American, CCXXX, I
aan. 1974), 70.
30 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
center. 4 If it strikes the reader as presumptuous to equate his
personal center with the center of the cosmos, he must be
reminded that physics requires him to do just that; because
space is relative and curved, the center of the physical universe is for each observer the point from which his observations
proceed. If, still incredulous, still resisting the notion that the
center of his self is in some way identical with that of creation
at large-have we not learned the lesson of Copernicus?-the
reader continues to try to position himself marginally by
arguing that a single center cannot occupy 4 billion bodies
simultaneously, he forgets that the spatial distinctions he has
introduced have no bearing on the mathematical point which,
as we have seen, produces space without being implicated in
it. The Hermetic formulation is exact: "God is a sphere whose
center is everywhere and circumference nowhere." At the top
of the mountain Black Elk reported that he was at the center
of the universe. "But," he added, "that center is everywhere."
According to Buddhism, there is a Buddha in every grain of
sand.
As the all-empowering but impalpable essence that creates
each snowflake of existence and causes it to settle in its own
proper place, the mathematical point is in everything. Kabbalists call it the Inward or Holy Palace; in Islam it is the
Divine Station that combines contrasts and antinomies. In
4. "Know the embodied soul to be a part of the hundredth part of the
point of a hair divided a hundred times; and yet it is infinite." Svetasvatara
Upanishad, V.9.
This juxtaposition of the infinitesimal and the infinite underscores the
fact that symbols, being fragmentary, can never capture more than an
aspect of their referents. What escapes the -symbol of the mathematical
point is. the truth that it is infinitely greater than the selves and universe
that derive from it. "It therefore needs to be complemented at the back
of our minds by another circle whose center stands for this world and
whose circumference symbolizes the All-Surrounding Infinite." Martin
Lings, What Is Sufism? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p.
22-see figure on p. 61 below. Meister Eckhart invokes the symbolism of
this second circle when he writes: "The soul that enters into God owns
neither time nor space . . . . But it stands to reason, if you consider it,
that the space occupied by any soul is vastly greater than heaven and
earth and God's entire creation. I say more: God might make heavens and
earths galore yet these ... would be of less extent than a single needle-tip
compared with the standpoint of a soul atoned in God."
SYMBOLISM OF SPACE /
31
China it is the Chung Yting, the Invariable Middle, the Taoist
Void that unites the spokes and makes of them a wheel.
Though nothing could exist without it, in the realm of the
Ten Thousand Things only man can be aware of it and
identify with it intentionally. The awareness can be cultivated
directly through meditation or indirectly through the "meditation of everyday life," which aims at reducing the tension
between the contraries of human existence. Practicing detachment, the aspirant undercuts the vicissitudes of the stream of
forms and attains peace in emptiness. To connote the point
where the opposites of space and time are resolved, Blake wrote
of "infinity in the palm of your hand 1 And eternity in an
hour"; the phrase "holy indifference," for its part, tokens the
fact that in that selfsame point the opposition between good
and evil likewise collapses:
One to me is fame and shame,
One to me is loss and gain;
One to me is pleasure, pain.
Bhagavad-Gita
Passage through the "gateless gate" (Mu Mon Kan) that guards
the holy center can be disorienting. If it takes the form of a
powerful satori it can feel as if one has been sucked into a
"black hole" where physical laws are destroyed. When eyes
have accustomed themselves to the new, ethereal light, however, one sees that no movement has occurred. Length and
breadth had already withdrawn into the cross's horizontal
center; now the vertical axis too collapses. Renouncing the
space it had embodied to make an important but provisional
point, that axis now withdraws the ontic, value distinctions
that once it metered. Sub species aeternitatis phenomena are
themselves noumena; samsara, nirvana.
The perfect way knows no difficulties
Only it refuses to make distinctions.
A hair's breadth's difference
And heaven and hell are set apart.
Seng-ts'an
32 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
Centered in the mathematical point, a non-ego is immune
to space and can be where it wishes. "Let us but transport
ourselves in spirit outside this world of dimensions and localizations, and there will no longer be need to seek the abode
of the Tao," Chuang Tzu tells us (XXII). Transport accomplished, the sage, even while in the flux of things, is at the
crux of things. Established in its Unwobbling Pivot, his way of
being in the world is wu wei. Literally "nonaction," the word
does not require that actions cease. Superfluous and egoaggrandizing activity must be stilled, but the stilling of such
activity clears the way for pure effectiveness-action that is
powered by force that is concentrated and energy assembled.
Fa-r from rendering it ineffectual, the tendency of this second
kind of action to "fit in" and avoid calling attention to itself
augments its power. "By his simplicity, the absolutely simple
man sways all beings. . . . Nothing opposes him in the six
regions of space, nothing is hostile to ~im, and fire and water
do not harm him" (Tao Te Ching, II). Nothing that comes
out of the spaceless point can touch the person who is centered within it. 5 Opposing nothing, nothing can oppose him,
for opposition is a reciprocal relationship that requires two
terms, which is precisely what unity disallows. Hostility, which
is but a consequence or outward manifestation of opposition,
can neither proceed from nor be directed toward a being who
is beyond all opposition. "Fire and water" in the passage
cited stand for the contraries of the phenomenal world; they
cannot harm the Simple Man because for him, as contraries,
they no longer exist. Neutralizing each other through the
union of their seemingly opposed but ·actually complementing
attributes, they have reentered the undifferentiation of the
primordial ether. Thus the viewpoint of the Simple Man
is one at which this and that, yes and no, appear still in a state of
non-distinction. This point is the Pivot of the Law; it is the
motionless center of a circumference on the rim of which all con5. "When men shall roll up space as if it were a piece of hide, then
shall there be an end of human misery" (Svetasvatara Upanishad).
SYMBOLISM OF SPACE
I 33
tingencies, distinctions and individualities revolve. From it only
Infinity is to be seen, which is neither this nor that, nor yes
nor no. To see all in the yet undifferentiated primoridal unity,
or from such a distance that all melts into one, this is true intelligence.
Chuang Tzu
That which Chuang Tzu calls the Pivot, we, following
Guenon, have called the mathematical point. T. S. Eliot
celebrated it in lines that have become familiar:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
W·here past and future are gathered. Neither movement from
nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.6
But for the way the cross as a whole, not just its center, can
vibrate, our mind goes to Pascal. Mathematician, scientist,
philosopher, inventor, whose prose is one of the great glories
of France, he could find only incoherent words to describe the
disclosure that came to him one memorable night:
In the year of grace 1654, Monday 23 November, the day of St.
Clement, Pope and Martyr, and others in the Martyrology; the eve
of St. Chrysostomous, Martyr, and others; from about half-past ten
in the evening till about half an hour after midnight
FIRE
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob. Not of the philosophers and the learned. Certitude. Certitude. Emotion. Joy ... Joy!
Joy! Joy! Tears of Joy ... My God ... let me not be separated
from thee for ever.
Above this record of his experience, which he kept always on
his person, was a rough drawing of a blazing cross. Twodimensional, but for a Christian, planted unambiguously in
Western Europe, it sufficed.
6. "Four Quartets: Burnt Norton," The Complete Poems and Plays,
1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1952), p. 119.
Nor was it above my mind as oil above the
water it floats on, nor as the sky is above earth;
it was above because it made me, and I was below
because made by it.
AUGUSTINE, Confessions, VII, 10
~- THE LEvEls of REAliTy
In the opening chapter of this book we argued that the
triumphs of modern science went to man's head in something
of the way rum does, causing him to grow loose in his logic.
He came to think that what science discovers somehow casts
doubt on things it does not discover; that the success it
realizes in its own domain throws into question the reality of
domains its devices cannot touch. In short, he came to assume
that science implies scientism: the belief that no realities save
ones that conform to the matrices science works with-space,
time, matterjenergy, and in the end number-exist.
It was not always so, but today a sadness comes over us as
we think back over the way this reductio leveled the world
view that preceded it. Traditionally men had honored, even
venerated, their ancestors as being essentially wiser than themselves because closer to the source of things. Now forefathers
came to be regarded as "children of the race," laboring under
children's immaturity. Their ens perf~ctissimum was a mirage,
a wish~fulfilling security blanket spun of thin air to compensate for the hardships of real life. Or alternatively, their
convictions regarding the human soul were opiates invented by
the privileged to quiet, as if by lobotomy, those who without
them might press for a fair share of the world's perquisites.
Reviewing the way the new evicted the old-myopia parading as vision, eternity-blindness as enlightenment and the
dawn of a brighter day-we find our thoughts turning to the
34
THE LEVELS OF REALITY /
35
Native Americans. They ·too watched a landscape dismantled,
in their case a physical landscape of almost magical richness.
Untapped, unravaged, its grains of soil had been to them
beads in the garment of the Great Spirit; its trees were temple
pillars, its earth too sacred to be trodden save by soft skin
moccasins. Across this unparalleled expanse of virgin nature
there poured hordes possessing a capacity so strange that they
seemed to the natives they dispossessed to represent a different
breed: 1 the capacity to look on everything in creation as
material for exploitation, seeing trees only as timber, deer
only as meat, mountains as no more than potential quarries.
For the victims of this "civilizing mission," as the predators
chose to call their conquest, there could only be, in the words
of a former U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, a "sadness
deeper than imagination can hold-sadness of men completely
conscious, watching the universe being destroyed by a numberless and scorning foe." For the Indians "had what the world
has lost ... the ancient, lost reverence and passion for human
personality joined with the ancient, lost reverence and passion
for the earth and its web of life." 2
Collier's account emphasizes the quality of sadness rather
than anger in the Indians' response. Inasmuch as humanity is
in some way one, the response may have included an element
of pity for us all. In any case, it appears of a piece with our
wistfulness as we think of the destruction of the primordial
world view that occurred concurrently and relatedly through
scientism's reduction of its qualitative aspects to mod:t'lities
that are basically quantitative. This ontological strip mining
asked man to sacrifice a good part of that which made for him
I. Confronted with the novel spectacle of a gorilla in an itinerant circus,
a Minnesota medicine man, after subjecting himself to an all-night vigil
in a sweat lodge, delivered himself of his judgment. "That," he said, "is
a cross between a white man and a cat." Related to the author by a French
student of the Ojibways, Jean-Louis Michon.
2. John Collier, Indians of the Americas (New York: Mentor Books,
1947), pp. 104, 7; quoted in Gai Eaton, "Man as Viceroy," Studies in
Comparative Religion, Autumn 1973. We are indebted to the latter article
for a number of thoughts on the present subject.
36 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
the reality of the world-its beauty, its holiness and crucial
expanses of truth-in return for a mathematical scheme whose
prime advantage was to help man manipulate matter on its
own plane. The discontinuous character of number ordained
in advance that such a predominantly quantitative approach
would miss the immense tissue of being, its side that consists
of pure continuity and relations kept necessarily in balance.
In point of fact, however, continuity and equilibrium exist
before discontinuity and crisis; they are more real than these
latter and incomparably more precious. But this the modern
mind has forgotten. In the face of its lapse, logic can do no
more. Short of a historical breakdown which would render
routine ineffectual and force us to attend again to things that
matter most, we wait for art; for metaphysicians who, imbued
with that species of truth that is beauty in its mental mode,
are (like Plato) concomitantly poets. By irradiating the human
imagination that has atrophied in this kali yuga, this age of
iron, such men might restore to it the supple, winged condition it requires if it is to come within light-years of Truth.
They might return to our inner eye-almost, one might say,
to our sense of touch-ontological spaces we have forgotten
exist, landscapes crowded with presences the knowing of which
can turn men into saints. 3 If the "remembrance of things past"
they conjured were vivid enough for us to enter it as confidently as we step out of our front doors, we might, as we
have said, rejoin the human race. For to reverse an earlier
image, epistemologically their work would be archaeological:
a stripping back of deposits of scientistic pseudoinferences that
hide the contours, extravagant but defined, of the primordial
outlook whose regions appear largely as blanks in the cosmologies modernity has reduced to cosmography.
3. Though few in number, such metaphysicians already exist. For our
part, we have found them concentrated among the contributors to a
small but luminous journal, Studies in Comparative Religion (Pates Manor,
Bedford, Middlesex, England). Jacob Needleman has collected selected
essays from this journal into a book titled The Sword of Gnosis (Baltimore: Penguin Books,_ I 974).
THE LEVELS OF REALITY /
37
Archaeology is an appropriate metaphor for the inward
probe toward reality, and this we shall come to in the next
chapter. For the present, however, we shall table our natural
interest in how the levels appear in man and establish their
existence in their own right. This calls for reverting to outbound, stratospheric imagery, a mounting of the vertical arm
of the three-dimensional cross as it pierces through "cloudlands"-in the last resort they are all maya-to the apex that
alone is fully real, the Infinite.
Disregarding domains that are inferior to our own and
therefore lie below the horizontal arm of the cross, common
numbering of the worlds is threefold: terrestrial, intermediary,
and celestial. Beyond these three lies a fourth domain that is
discontinuous with the others. Not itself a world, it is the
Infinite which is their uncreated source.
1. The Terrestrial Plane
We begin with the terrestrial plane, which alternatively we
shall call the gross, the material, the sensible, the corporeal,
the phenomenal, or the human plane. Strictly speaking, the
last of these appellations is a misnomer, because, as we have
mentioned in passing already and will consider in detail in
the next chapter, man in the fullness of his being intersects
the planes in their entirety. Even so, the designation is convenient, for the plane in question is the one we are most
directly in touch with. Its distinctive categories are tpace,
time, energyjmatter, and number, the last being a mode to
which the first three lend themselves.
Four is a schematization, of course, for the actual number is
(as we have said) indefinite. And because the four are in
reality classes, we can expect subdivisions to appear in each.
These are most apparent on the terrestrial plane, where
animal, vegetable, and mineral demarcate themselves obviously; the other planes are difficult enough to see in overview without trying to read the fine print. On the terrestrial
38 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
plane an upper, border region announces itself in the data
that frontier physics encounters. Such data belong to the
terrestrial world inasmuch as they continue to participate in
some way in space, time, and matter;energy as quantifiable,
but the way in which they so participate is, to say the least,
peculiar. In this twilight border region, parallel lines converge, things relocate without traversing space, and particles
have only probable positions. Phenomena are beginning to
phase out of the grossly physical. The terrestrial announces its
dependence on the plane above it.
2. The Intermediate Plane
This next plane up is named, neutrally, the intermediate. 4
Alternatively we shall refer to it as the subtle, the animic, 5
or the psychic plane, inasmuch as it is often encountered in
phantasms that have no sensible counterparts.
These phantasms can be animate or inanimate: the plane
houses both. Those that are animate are the various species of
4. The term goes back to Plato's to metaxy, a view which Paul Fried·
Hinder says "must have been of the utmost significance to him. It is the
idea or view of 'the demonic' as a realm 'intermediate' between the human.
level and ·the divine, a realm that because of its intermediate position
'unites the cosmos with itself.' " Plato, Vol. I An Introduction (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 41; see Republic, X614c. Thomas
Aquinas's general formulation of the point is as follows: "Ordo rerum
talis esse invenitur, ut ab uno extrema ad alterum non perveniatur nisi
per media"; the order of reality is found to be such that it is impossible
to reach one end from the other without passing through the middle.
For a global depiction of this level of existence, see Edward Conze, "The
Intermediary World," The Eastern Buddhist, VI, 2 (Oct. 1974). Beginning
with the statement that "the spiritual tradition of mankind has everywhere and at all times taught that there is a triple world, the natural
world, the spiritual world, and a world intermediary between the two"
(p. 23), Conze proceeds to focus on this middle sphere as it appears in his
special field of scholarship, Buddhism. "A belief in the existence of an
intermediary world is attested in all Buddhist scriptures a thousand times.
No Buddhist community has ever been without it. It is also, incidentally,
reflected in the trikaya doctrine [of the] three ways of looking at a
Buddha" (p. 24).
5. We are forced to this neologism because the word "animistic" has
come to be identified with a doctrine.
THE LEVELS OF REALITY /
39
discarnates: ghosts; departed souls that are provisionally in
limbo, or traversing the intermediate bardos (planes), as the
Tibetans would say; the "controls" that spiritualists and
mediums claim to be in touch with insofar as their claims are
valid; and our own subtle bodies (suksma-sarira) insofar as
they are" disengaged, as in sleep, from their gross, exterior
envelopes. These subtle bodies are often called "etheric" or
"astral," and their adventures-central to shamanism-described as astral projections, but we must remember that
spatial imagery never fits precisely on planes above our own.
The highest planes contain no literal space whatever. The
intermediate plane is spatial in a way, but the way differs
markedly from that of terrestrial space: the peculiarities that
we just noted in post-Newtonian physics derive from the fact
that its novelties are first steps in the direction of space of
the intermediary order. All this must be kept in mind when
we hear talk of astral projection and the dream journeys of
shamans. As with everything on the higher planes, such notions
become absurd if we force them into terrestrial armor, a
costuming that in this case generates pictures of psychic pellets
slipping through dermal pores to rocket this way or that to
who knows what fantastic wonderlands. The truth at issue
will emerge if we balance such astronautical images with
opposing ones in which the subtle body remains securely
within its corporeal sheath while time and space wash through
it, and its indriyic net-indriyas: subtle correlates of our
physical sense organs (Sanskrit)-selects the information it
seeks. Or let the explanatory model be ESP, the psychic counterpart of gravitation's action at a distance. This eliminates
spatial imagery altogether.
Passing to the impersonal furniture of the psychic plane,
we encounter most importantly the archetypes.s Their actual
6. The word compounds notions of (a) antiquity, as in "archaeololgy,"
and by extension timelessness or primordiality; (b) superlative rank or
status, as in "archduke" and "archbishop"; and (c) norm or exemplar,
from the Greek arketupon, meaning "that which was created as a pattern,
mold, or model."
40 I
FORGOTTEN TRUTH
abode is on the next plane up, but lower planes derive from
the higher, so the archetypes appear on the subtle plane as
reflections of their originals--each world in creation is no
more than a tissue of shadows entirely dependent on the
archetypes in the world above, phenomena being (as we might
say) divine qualities eroded in an illusory manner by nothingness. Thus the archetypes turn up on the terrestrial plane as
well, in the "forms" that shape objects out of a matter that
would otherwise be inchoate.7 On the subtle plane which we
are currently considering, however, we encounter them more
directly, though not yet unalloyed.
When on the next plane we do find them in their unalloyed state, they turn out to be Plato's Forms or Ideas, but
here on the intermediate plane they stand closer to the archetypes 1ung explored. The images he found recurring in the
dreams of his patients coincided to such a degree with the
world's mythologies (of which his patients were largely innocent) that he concluded that the symbols themselves must
reside in man's collective unconscious. But not passivelynot as colors on a painter's palette, to be dipped into for the
artist's needs. They have an energy of their own, sufficient to
have caused 1ung to regard them as the psychic counterparts
of biological instincts. Physically man's life is vectored by his
biological drives; psychically it is molded by the surging
pressure of the archetypes. In the end 1ung risked a further
correlation. The archetypes seemed close enough to the patterns he saw emerging in the theories and experiments of
twentieth-century physics for him to conclude that archetypes
are psychoid. By this he meant that the:y shape matter (nature)
as well as mind (psyche). They transcend the split between
these two and are neutral toward it, favoring neithe~ one side
nor the other.s
7. If one must try for metaphors, archetypes may be likened to invisible
magnetic fields which iron filings visibly conform to. Archetypes prescribe
the kind of experience we shall have, but what we experience is individual.
8. If Jung had seen this early in his career and based his psychology
squarely upon it, his thought could have been in line with the primordial
THE LEVELS OF REALITY /
41
This account has a double virtue. First, it establishes the
fact that the intermediate plane governs the terrestrial plane
in its entirety, its corporeal as well as its psychic aspects; to
underscore the completeness of its suzerainty, Sufis call it the
Domain of Royalty (malakut). The Indian notion of siddhisyogic powers, certain of which can influence external bodies
directly, in psychokinesis as we would say-moves in the same
direction, as does the concept of magic as the action of subtle
force on corporeal matter.
The second respect in which Jung's notion of archetypes
is appropriate here is in the justice it does to their formative
powers; they "create" or project forth the terrestrial plane,
which is no more than their exterior covering. Several times
in this study we have inveighed against reductionism, but let
us be clear. Its error does not lie in its attempt to understand
one type of reality in terms of another. Virtually all explanation proceeds in this fashion, and explanation is needed, for
true reality is never the most obvious; one might almost say
that one of the ways truth betrays the fact that it is such is in
the care it takes to remain elusive, if one may put the matter
paradoxically. The mistake of reductionism-spirit reduced to
metamorphosed matter (Darwinism), truth reduced to ideology
(Marxism), psyche reduced to sex (Freud: there is no way "to
sweeten the sour apple")-lies in its attempt to explain the
greater in terms of the less, with the not surprising consequence that the greater is thereby lessened. It is this, at
root, that sets us against the modern outlook and tu;ns us
back toward tradition where the drift is always the reverse: to
tradition. As it was, his psychoid thesis was an addendum--one, moreover,
that his followers have resisted, preferring on the whole his standard
contention that archetypes derive from the collective unconscious that
has evolved in the course of human evolution. This, Jung's prevailing
contention, was part and parcel of his lifelong struggle to have his theories
accepted as scientific, a struggle that produced not only inconsistencies
in his "system," but his own version of psychological reductionism; see
Titus Burckhardt, "Cosmology and Modern Science," in Needleman,
The Sword of Gnosis, pp. 15~78. In quoting Jung approvingly, we must
be selective.
42 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
explain the lesser by means of the more, a mode of explanation
that tends to augment rather than deplete, for in both cases
explanation produces a kind of rub-off. The terrestrial plane
proceeds from and is explained by the intermediate, the intermediate by the celestial, and the celestial by the Infinite.
Thus everything derives, ultimately, from the Infinite. And
since "derives" cannot in this last case involve separationthe Infinite is like a celestial void: nothing escapes from iteverything abides in the Infinite's luster. 9
We tend to think of mind as an epiphenomenon, as a gloss
on matter with spirit a patina on that gloss. The truth is the
reverse. Matter is the rarity; it obtrudes from the psychic with
perhaps the frequency of a few stalactites from the roof of an
enormous cavern. Or it is like our earth and its planetstiny bits of matter floating in an ocean of space. Our lives are
plunged in the animic world like crystals floating in a liquid,
though appearances make us suppose that the animic is
within our bodies or behind the physical shell of things. This
supposition causes us to underrate the mental. Apart from the
fact that it closes the door on the domain to which magic
pertains, it again makes the higher depend on the lower and
keeps us from seeing the faculties that make man distinctively
human in their full extent.
This holds not only when these faculties are in working
order, but when they are not. 1 0 Insanity is now regarded as
"mental illness": we place its victims in hospitals and pity
them in the way we do those who have lost their bodily health.
(The victims themselves often dispute this assessment, of
course, but they are the ones who are mad, so their judgment is
9. "All primordial men . . . saw the 'more' in the 'less,' in the sense
that the landscape was for them a reflection of a superior reality which
'contained' the physical reality; they added, may one say, to the latter, a
'spiritual dimension' which escapes modern man." (Francois Petitpierre,
"The Symbolic Landscape of the Muiscas," Studies in Comparative Religion, Winter 1975, p. 48).
10. On this subject we are again indebted to Gai Eaton's "Man as
Viceroy."
THE LEVELS OF REALITY /
43
discounted.) In point of fact, however, insanity is seldom
simply a lack. We recognize this, despite the changes we have
effected in vocabulary, in the fear that insanity, unlike disease,
continues to inspire within us, the inkling of strange seas beating against the shores of our familiar island. A man may have
"lost his -reason" only to have had it replaced, for better or
worse, by something else. Rarely is he simply reduced like an
amputee, and when we treat him as such he feels deeply if
obscurely insulted even if we are insensitive to our impertinence.
Mindful of the psychic plane and the way the human is
lodged within it, traditional societies tend to regard the insane
with a species of awe and respect, seeing them as caught in
psychic vortices that work at cross-purposes to ours while
possessing something of the autonomy and coherence that ours
exhibit. Our madhouses, too, may contain souls that are
ravaged by principalities and powers on the psychic plane;
in a word, possessed. The phenomenal response to a recent
film, The Exorcist, shows that our unconscious minds remain
open to this notion, but current psychiatric theory is so
opposed to it that it will be useful to have an example to show
that there are cases that almost require it. 11 The following
eyewitness account by Peter Goullart is condensed from his
book The Monastery of jade Mountain:12
The energumen, a rather emaciated man of about twenty-five, lay
on an iron bedstead on a rush mat. He was very pale and,.there
was a wild, roving look in his fevered eyes. The Taoist priest, holding an elongated ivory tablet held ceremonially in both hands in
11. There is another reason for citing an actual instance: clear cases
appear to be less common today than in the past. This may be due in
part to the fact that persons tend to be receptive to what they believeFreudians have a disproportionate number of Freudian dreams-and
possession does not square with the modem scientific outlook, but there is
a supplementing possibility. With genocides and the use of nuclear
~eapons to mash entire countrysides, the demonic may now be so diffused
on the terrestrial plane that it has no need, one almost says no time, to
put in many "personal appearances" in single individuals.
12. London: John Murray, 1961, pp. 86--89.
44 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
front of his chest, approached the bed slowly. There was a visible
transformation on the energumen's face. His eyes were filled with
malice as he watched the priest's measured advance with a sly
cunning and hatred. Suddenly he gave a bestial whoop and jumped
up in his bed, the four attendants rushing to hold him.
''No! No! You cannot drive us out. We are two against one. Our
power is greater than yours." The sentences poured out of the
energumen's distorted mouth in a strange, shrill voice, which
sounded mechanical, inhuman-as if pronounced by a parrot. The
priest looked at the victim intensely, gathering all his inner
strength; beads of perspiration appeared on his thin face.
"Come out! Come out! I command you to come out!" He was
repeating in a strong metallic voice with great force. "I am using
the power of the One compared to whom you are nothing. In His
name I command you to come out." Inmobile. he continued to
focus his powers on the energumen's face. The man was struggling
in the bed with incredible strength against the four men who held
him. Animal growls and howls issued from time to time from his
mouth which became square, his teeth gleaming like the fangs of
a dog. I had the impression that a pack of wild animals was
fighting inside his body. Terrible threats poured out of the contorted mouth, now fringed in white foam, and interspersed with
such incredible obscenities that women had to plug their ears with
their fingers.
Again the abbott cried his command to the unseen adversaries to
leave the prostrate man. There was a burst of horrible laughter
from the victim's throat and suddenly with a mighty heave of his
supernaturally strengthened arms he threw off the men who held
him and jumped at the priest's throat like a mad bloodhound.
But he was over-powered again. This time they bound him with
ropes and fastened the ends to the bedposts. The abbott, still
immobile, continued his conjurations in a metallic voice, his eyes
never leaving the body. With unutterable horror, we saw that it
began to swell visibly. On and on the dreadful process continued
until he became a grotesque balloon of a man.
"Leave him! Leave him!" cried the monk concentrating still
harder. Convulsion shook the monstrous swollen body. It seemed
that all the apertures of the body were opened by the unseen
powers hiding in it and streams of malodorous excreta and effluvia
THE LEVELS OF REALITY /
45
flowed on to the ground in incredible profusion. For an hour
this continued and then the energumen, resuming his normal size,
seemed to come to rest, with his eyes watching the unmoved priest
who was still reading.
The priest stopped reading; with sweat pouring down his face,
he backed .down to the altar, laid down the tablet and took up the
ritual sword. Threateningly and commandingly he stood again over
the energumen.
"The struggle is useless!" he cried. "Leave him! Leave him in the
name of the Supreme Power who never meant you to steal this
man's body!" Another scene of horror evolved itself before our
dazed eyes. The man on the bed became rigid and his muscles
seemed to contract, turning him into a figure of stone. Slowly, very
slowly, the iron bedstead, as if impelled by an enormous weight,
caved in, its middle touching the ground. The attendants seized
the inert man by his feet and arms. The weight was such that none
of them could lift him up and they asked for assistance from the
onlookers. Seven men could hardly lift him for he was heavy as a
cast-iron statue. Suddenly he became light again and they put
him on a wooden bed which had been brought in. A long time
passed with the abbott reading and commanding interminably.
At last he sprinkled the inert man with holy water and advanced
to him again with a sword. His concentration was so deep that he
did not seem to see anybody. He was utterly exhausted and
swayed slightly. Two novices came up to support him.
"I have wonl" he cried triumphantly in a strange voice. "Get
outl Get outl" The energumen stirred and fell into dreadful convulsions. His eyes rolled up and only the whites were visible. His
breathing was stertorous and he clawed his body until he ...was
covered with blood. Foam was issuing from his mouth and a loud
gurgling sound.
"Damn you! Damn you!" came a wild scream from the foaming
lips. "We are going but you shall pay for it with your life." There
was a terriffic struggle on the bed, the poor man twisting and rolling like a mortally-wounded snake and his colour changing all the
time. Suddenly he fell flat on his back and was still. His eyes
opened. His gaze was normal and he saw his parents who now
came forward.
"My parents!" he cried weakly. "Where am I" He was very feeble
46 I
FORGOTTEN TRUTH
and they carried him out in a specially ordered sedan chair. The
abbott himself was in a terrible state of prostration and was halfcarried and half-dragged away by his novices.
The word "possession" usually, as here, connotes demonic
possession, and this underscores the fact that the psychic
plane houses evil as well as good. For the popular mind, which
(as we have seen) ranks the worlds on the scale of euphoria,
this fact necessitates splitting the psychic plane in two: lodging
its beatific components in heavens above the earth and its
hellish ones in realms below-the effect can be achieved by
rounding the intermediate plane into a circle that envelops
the terrestrial plane. But for the reflective mind whose ordering principle is power-and more basically, being-the moral
and affective differences that loom so large in popular
thought are secondary. Evil is worse than good, but its power
can rival it at points, which means thal at these points the two
are ontically on a par. And if the power in question exceeds
the terrestrial, this par lies above the terrestrial plane. 13 The
primordial, Zarathustrian war between the opposites proceeds
13. This variability-between being and euphoria as the unit of
measure--explains why certain medieval cosmologists place the hells
symbolically between heaven and earth, and why in Islam it is said that
the throne of the devil is to be found between earth and heaven.
THE LEVELS OF REALITY /
47
on the intermediate plane; we inherit its spill and backwash.
Sufis recognize the ambiguous character of the psychic plane
by calling it God's Footstool-the place where Rigor and
Mercy, his two feet, reside-whereas the celestial plane is his
Throne: that plane is beatific throughout, for on his throne
God sits complete. According to the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
the intermediate bardos (planes) that a soul must traverse
before it reenters a human body run the full gamut from terror
to bliss. The opposites they house are the same as those we
experience here, but there they are experienced more intensely.
We visit those bardos nightly, the Indians say, when, subtle
bodies disjoined from gross, we dream.
A final point about the intermediate plane brings up again
the place of space and time within it. We have already noted
that this plane does not elude these categories entirely; for this
reason it can be classed with the terrestrial plane, the two together constituting the manifest world or nature in the inclusive meaning of these terms. 14 It can even be the object of
empirical research as in parapsychology and depth psychology,
though the teeth on the rim of its wheel, so to speak, are
rather flexible and barely mesh with the cogs of consensual objectivity which even these sciences, if they are to be such, must
honor as the final indices of the real. 15 But though space and
14. The modem restriction of the word "nature" to the terrestrial plane
represents a contraction. The Latin natura is a translation of the Greek
physis, which "originally encompassed heaven as well as earth.~-. . .
Physis means the power that emerges and the enduring realm under its
sway." Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1961), p. 12.
15. Isolated instances of psi phenomena, however dramatic, will never
convince everyone, for the same reasons that there will never be a knockdown proof of a miracle. As for statistics-whether on average the mind,
or certain minds, can exceed the laws of chance in predicting falls of dice
or runs of cards-the situation will remain where it has stood since such
investigations began. The results exceed probability, but so marginally
(to say nothing of the fact that the probabilities are violated negatively
a~ well as positively) that, given legitimate differences of interpretation in
the logical foundations of statistics themselves, it remains reasonable to
believe or disbelieve in the powers in question. No more here than anywhere can the lower prove the existence of the higher on the former's
48 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
time pertain in some ways to the psychic realm, the ways themselves are significantly different from those that hold on the
gross, corporeal plane. To accommodate the psychic counterparts of the spatio-temporal peculiarities that manifest themselves in frontier physics, Jung coined the word "synchronicity."
We need not juggle the full theory behind that word; our interest is in a single point. If J ung was accurate in reporting that
meaningful "coincidences"-as in Arthur Koestler's The Roots
of Coincidence-increased for his patients as they became aware
of the archetypal symbols and situations that were working
in their lives, this fact supports our present thrust. In addition
to creating the terrestrial world, the archetypes order it in ways
that partially exceed its linear laws of causation.
J. The Celestial Plane
The intermediate plane is not a misrellany. It is not even
enough to say that it is an integrated and ordered whole. One
must add that it is a conscious whole, for as one mounts the
levels of being, awareness intensifies and integration increases.
The subtle state coalesces in its totality in the "universal or
total soul," as Plotinus called it, though in the terminology we
are using it is the universal or total mind. As with organs and
the organisms of which they are members, individual minds
can be distinguished from the world mind, but they are not
separate from it.
The world mind is the supreme expression of the divine in
the manifest world, but it is far from God's totality. The questerms, however much on other terms, by other sensibilities, it all but
bursts with transcendent cargo. The opinion of one of the most respected
current researchers in parapsychology, 1974-75 president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, is, on this point, worth quoting. After
noting that a recent poll of the largely professional readership of the
British journal The New Scientist found only 3 percent to believe that
paranormal phenomena are impossible, Stanley Krippner adds: Neverthe1ess,"psychic phenomena are so fragile and so unpredictable that I believe
that they are beyond complete control." Psycholog;y Today, Oct. 1973,
p. 110.
THE LEVELS OF REALITY /
49
tion of what more his nature contains carries us to the plane
above the intermediate, the celestial.
When a man effects a project-wages a campaign, let us say
-he is truly present within it. A part of his nature surfaces
in the campaign, clearer than if we had been left to infer how
he might ·have performed in the face of its demands. Even so,
the undertaking treats us to but a facet of his being. We assume
that underlying what the person does is the person who does
those things. In the case in question, he involves himself in the
campaign, but by no stretch of the imagination can he be
equated with this involvement.
Comparably with God. To the end that nothing that is possible be left undone-if it were, the Infinite would not be
such-God actualizes (creates) being in the mode of mutiplicity
and individuation. In addition he enters and abides in his creation-the terrestrial and intermediate planes combined-as
the mind that organizes and empowers it. All the while he
transcends his creation and exceeds his involvement with it.
According to Hindu cosmology, during the nights of Brahma
in which he sleeps, the terrestrial and intermediate planes vanish completely; the "big bang" reverses-matter vanishes into
spreading black holes?-leaving nothing for the (no longer
existing) astronomers to detect. The lower realms, now reabsorbed into the celestial, are shown to have been but episodes
in the divine expanse.1a
Mystics, endowed with the "eye of the heart," can intui; this
celestial expanse; others must rely on reports or inferences.
Regarding the last of these, we have noted m?re than once that
unaided logic can infer nothing regarding higher realms from
ones that have been severed from them completely-realms
viewed only in terms of what excludes them from ones that are
higher: the externality of their components, their fragmentari16. "Our world is but a furtive and almost accidental coagulation of an
immense 'beyond,' which one day will burst forth and in which the
terrestrial world will be reabsorbed when it has completed its cycle of
material coagulation." Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence (New
York: Harper &: Row, 1975), p. 94.
50 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
ness, their incorrigible limitations. But if a lower plane is
viewed through the eyes of what might be called "ontic sensibility,"17 it is noticed that the plane is illumined. Seeking
the source of its illumination, sight turns upward and logic
perceives the contours of the planes from which the illumination issues.
Such "ontological logic" points invariably toward greater
being and less division. Thus the celestial plane dwarfs the
ones below it in the plenitude of its existence and at the same
time is less fragmented. Multiplicity reduces in its case to the
basic kinds of existents, the archetypes; we encountered them
in a derivative mode on the intermediate plane, but come now
upon the originals which, combining and recombining, give
form and structure to the worlds below.
To us these "universals," as they are sometimes called, seem
abstract, for in the phenomenal world we never encounter
beauty, say, by itself but only as a property of concrete things
that are beautiful. However, to regard objects as concrete and
their properties abstract is like calling water spray concrete and
wetness abstract. Objects are ephemeral, qualities endure; the
qualities we encounter in tangible objects are fragile attenuations of the intense, undiluted, and stable condition the arche-.
types enjoy in their own right, on their own plane. In addition
to archetypes of single qualities, there are archetypes that are
combinations of these. A species is an instance. Roses come
from Roseness, which is incomparably more real than the flowers that line the garden walk.
The celestial plane can be viewed impersonally, in which
case the archetypes are, as we noted earlier by way of anticipa17. The intuitive discernment that (a) nothing can arise without a
cause, (b) causes are greater than their effects, (c) the greater is more
integrated, and (d) the sequence of greaters cannot stop short of the
Greatest, the Infinite. "The role of the sage is not-as in the radically mistaken view of Europeans-to explain things from zero and to construct a
system, but firstly to 'see' and secondly to 'cause to see,' that is, to provide a key." Frithjof Schuon, Islam and the Perennial Philosophy (London: World of Islam Festival Publishing Company Ltd, 1976), p. 149.
THE LEVELS OF REALITY /
51
tion, the Platonic forms; viewed collectively, as comprising and
implying one another, they constitute the Idea of the Good.
It is more natural, however, to use personal imagery, for of
things we directly know, persons are the best, and as we ascend
the ladder of reality, value keeps step with being. Even Plato
uses personal terms when in the Sophist he has the Eleatic
stranger attribute to the "friends of the forms" the view that
the forms are alive. Plotinus in typical fashion converts Plato's
allusion into settled fact: the forms are unequivocally alive,
which makes the Intelligence that comprehends them even
more so. In conventional terminology the celestial plane is the
abode of God Transcendent: God before he creates the world
and the fullness of God that exceeds his creation after he has
accomplished it. It goes without saying that God's nature is
integrated, but this does not keep it from being composed of
attributes. It is meaningful to speak of his love, his will, his
judgment, his mercy, and the like. 18
We are obviously here in the realm of theism in its classic
Western sense. The celestial sphere is the sphere of the personal
God. God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob rather than of the
philosophers, he creates the world by deliberate intent, presides
over history providentially, and knows and loves his creatures
-not a sparrow falls but he registers that fact (Matt. 10:29);
"not so much as the weight of an ant in heaven and earth
escapes from Him" (Koran, XXXIV:3).
About theism in this eminently personal mode three p.pints
must be made:
I. The view is natural. Satirists, eyes peeled for man's pretensions, use this as a count against it: "If cattle ... were able
18. Cosmologies frequently locate the archetypes and God on separate
ontological planes with God as the higher of the two. When this separation is effected the principal levels of reality number five instead of the
four we are employing. Though the archetypes can be regarded as God's
first creations, to keep the paradigm this book presents to simplest possible
proportions we are regarding them as his attributes, in the way Plotinus
identified Intelligence (Nous) with its objects (the Platonic forms) and
Augustine saw these forms as God's "divine ideas."
52 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
to draw . . . they would make the bodies of the gods such as
they had themselves," said Xenophanes; the gods of triangles,
said Montesquieu, would have three sides. But there is no
reason to disparage what is natural; as a rule it tokens what
is fit and appropriate. To be put off by the anthropomorphic
character of God in scripture amounts in last resort to being
disaffected with ourselves, for the reality we call God necessarily
assumes toward us a human demeanor to the end that we may
enter as fully as possible into what is ultimately impenetrable.
"Thought flows into man," said Shankara, "as molten metal
is poured into the founder's mold." The very intensity of the
God-idea wakes it occupy man wholly, more or less as water
fills a vessel to the brim. It assumes the shape of that which
contains and limits it, and becomes anthropomorphic.
But is God personal only in the way he appears to us, or is
he personal in himself, in his own right and nature? This introduces the second point.
2. Theism is true. It is not the final truth; God's personal
mode is not his final mode; it is not the final reality. Even so,
it is vastly more real than are the creatures who encounter him
in this mode, so the fact that the mode is not final presents no
problem. Only persons who sense themselves to be not final~y
real-anatta, no-self-will sense the same of the God of theism.
And for them it does not matter that in the last analysis God
is not the kind of God who loves them, for at this level there
is no "them" to be loved. Insofar as one takes oneself seriously,
as all of us do most of the time and most of us do all of the
time, the God of theism is to be taken seriously too. Not only
do we love; we are loved. Not only do we hope; we are hoped
for. Not only do we find or miss meaning; we are meant.
Nevertheless:
3. Theism is not the final truth. Its vision of God is modeled
after capacities that are distinctively human, and noble as
these capacities are-the capacity to make discriminating judgments, the capacity to exercise responsible decision and choice,
the ability to ca~ry out long-range purposes-they require for
THE LEVELS OF REALITY /
53
their exercise contexts that stand over and against their subject
and thereby limit him. But the final reality is unlimited, for
it is infinite; to put the point in an aphorism, nothing finite
can be final. 19 Being persons ourselves, we tend to see in God
the part or aspect of his nature that is kin to us. But part is
never whole: man has reflexes (knee jerks, eye blinks); he is
not himself a reflex, not in his wholeness. Or to move closer
to the dignity of the topic at hand, man possesses reason while
at the same time exceeding his possession: reason is his tool,
not his definition. Several paragraphs above we noted that God
is anthropomorphic. Now we add that there is a sense in which
he is not; to wit, the sense in which he transcends all descriptions, anthropomorphic ones included-mystics often use the
word "Godhead" for this transpersonal mode. Religious sensibility demands this correlate as much as does logic, for much as
we yearn for a God who resembles us, such a God could never
satisfy us completely: we know ourselves too well. 20 It is a
truism that a God we could comprehend would not command
our worship. If he could be squeezed into the miserably inadequate vessel of our minds we would not avert our eyes-no
shudder would run through us; there would be no horror
religiosus, no religious awe. It is not enough to say that God's
attributes exceed ours inexhaustibly; the attributes themselves
must be transcended, for in the last analysis they derive, all but
infinity, from limitation, which finally is what religion works
to transcend.2 1 The difference in degree must phase into a~dif
ference in kind.
19. "There is one logically inescapable conception, and it is that of
infinity, of that which has no limit of any kind. It is impossible to conceive of an absolute limit; for it would have to be as it were a one-sided
boundary, a door having an inside face but no outside face." Lord
Northbourne, Religion in the Modern World (London: Perennial Books,
1970), p. 30.
20. "If He is like us, we are lost," Ignatius of Antioch wrote to the
Magnesians on his way to Rome for his martyrdom. I am indebted to
Father Martin Boler of Mount Savior Monastery, Pine City, New York, for
this reference.
21. "Great art suggests ... ideal forms ... in terms of ... appearances;
but what is art to one that toils up the Unshown Way, seeking to
54 /
FORGOTTEN TRUTH
4. The Infinite
"The difference between most people and myself," wrote
Jung toward the close of his life, "is that for me the 'dividing
walls' are transparent." 22 Remove the walls entirely, including
any that might serve as boundaries or perimeters, and we have
God in his ultimate nature: the Infinite.
As with God in his personal mode, so too with his Infinite.
Several points must be registered, in this case four.
1. Only negative terms characterize it literally. 23 This begins
with the word "Infinite" itself, which asserts only that its object is not finite, and holds equally for other characterizations
such as unconditioned, ineffable, and immutable. In Hinduism
transcend all limitations of the human intellect, to reach a plane of
being unconditioned even by ideal form? For such an one, the most
refined and intellectual delights are but flowery meadows where men
may linger and delay, while the straight path to utter truth waits vainly
for the traveller's feet. The thought explains the belief that absolute
emancipation is hardly won by any but human beings yet incarnate; it
is harder for the Gods to attain such release, for their pure and exalted
bliss and knowledge are attachments even stronger than those of earth."
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "The Aims of Indian Art," Studies in Comparative Religion, Winter 1975, p. 9.
22. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage
Books, 1961), p. 355.
23. "Sacred Writers . . . call It Nameless [because it] is fixed beyond
every name that is named, not only in this world but also in that which
is to come." Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names and The
Mystical Theology, trans. by C. E. Rolt (London: S.P.C.K., 1971), p. 61.
Here Dionysius's accent is on the fact that the Godhead can not be
named, but elsewhere he adds that it should not be named. For two
thousand years Jews have been forbidden to pronounce the tetragrammaton YHVH, and its vocalization is no longer known. Islam lists ninetynine names of Allah; the hundredth is s1lent. All this is in keeping with
an Akka pygmy chief's declaration that "God is He whose Name must
not even be pronounced."
We make a point of including the pygmy's assertion to build into this
book a conviction which, because we have not ourselves worked directly
with tribal religions, is little documented in these pages and is left to
ride almost wholly on the allusion to Mircea Eliade's work on page 3;
namely, the conviction that the primordial tradition covel'8 not only the
great historical traditions but archaic ones as well. With respect to Native
American traditions, Joseph Epes Brown's accounts in particular seem to
support this conviction.
THE LEVELS OF REALITY /
55
the Infinite is nir-guna (without qualities); in Buddhism it is
nir-vana (nondrawing, as a fire whose fuel is exhausted has
ceased to draw) and sunyata (emptiness, a void); in Taoism it
is the Tao that cannot be spoken; in Judaism it is 'en-sof, the
not-finite. The Infinite cannot be defined positively because
definitions compare: either they liken what they define to something or they distinguish it from something. If they distinguish,
we are back with negation: the object defined is not what it is
contrasted with. And if they liken? But the Infinite is all-inclusive, so there is nothing other than it to which it can be
likened.
2. Positive terms apply to the Infinite only analogically.
When Vedantists say that Brahman is Sat, Chit, and Ananda
(Being, Awareness, and Bliss) they mean that the terms are
more accurate than their opposites. The Infinite is more like
a lion that exists than like a unicorn that does not, more like
creatures that experience than like objects that do not, more
like ourselves when we are fulfilled than when we are wanting.
But that is all the assertions claim. We cannot presume that
Being in its infinity bears more than a trace of resemblance to
the being we encounter in rocks or mountains or waterfalls.
And. because the connotation of "being" derives preponderantly
from the modes in which we encounter it directly, it would be
misleading to claim that the word characterizes the Infinite literally. Only if the claim is converted into its negation-the
assertion that the Infinite hasn't zero-being (doesn't not-e~ist)
-is it literally true; short of this the word functions analogically. The same holds for "awareness," "bliss," and all other
posited attributes.
3. The degree to which positive terms seem apposite will
vary. The reason is: it depends on the experience (or the imagi·
native capacity) of the person who is using them. When Spinoza said that God's knowledge resembles our knowledge to the
extent that the Dog Star resembles a dog, it was because in his
discernment the Infinite exceeded the finite in about that ratio.
Others whose "ceilings" are lower will not find the disparity as
56 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
great. The governing law reads: the more developed the sense
of the Infinite, the more distant from the finite it appears and
the less literal positive designations will seem.
4. The most effective way to underscore the negative side of
analogy-how much attributes when predicated of the Infinite
differ from the modes in which we usually encounter them-is
through paradox. The device can also be seen as one by which
the mystics who (to borrow one of their own profound words)
have "suffered" the weight of the Infinite try to raise the sensibility ceilings of the uninitiated with respect to the Infinite's
otherness. The opposing forces that paradox generates cause
it to function as a verbal lever. The mystic may begin, for example, by establishing as fulcrum the fact that God is light.
This holds both metaphorically (light everywhere symbolizes
knowledge) and literally inasmuch as God-incursion is often
accompanied by light that is physically sensed: Christ in his
transfiguration, Saul on the . Damascus road, saints in the
Eastern Orthodox tradition. But in saying "light" the mystic
will be misunderstood, for neither the literal nor the symbolic
light he intends is the light the world knows-on the literal
side, for example, it has the power of an arc lamp with no
sense of glare or strain. Immediately, therefore, he must press
against the word's usual connotations. So: "God is not light";
if "light" denotes its conventional referents, God is darkness.
The countervailing forces raise the far end of the lever toward
light of a different order. If the alchemy works, our minds are
expanded and our souls as well.24
24. The following paraphrase of a com!Jlentary by Martin Lings on the
aphorisms of the Shaikh Ahmad al-Alawi further amplifies the dynamics of
chis exceptional mode of discourse: Since wisdom is in fact a hidden treasure, it is not always uneloquent to present it as such. In the case of
paradox, however, an additional element is involved. The barbed shaft of
the unexpected is introduced to penetrate the hearer and goad him into a
state of spiritual vigilance, keying his understanding to a higher pitch.
Here too the expression corresponds to an aspect of what is expressed, for
the truth is in fact strange, and the mind should not be allowed the complacency of supposing that it is familiar with more than a fragment of
it, seen from a particular angle. A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century
(Berkeley: Unive~ity of California Press, 1971), p. 204.
THE LEVELS OF REALITY /
57
dazzling darkness
-..
,..-----1
1
1
.:!l 1
I
"g I
c.) I
I
I
------
---------
---- -..-..-..
light
-..-..
not light
These four points speak to language and the Infinite. What
within their stipulations need be added before this chapter
may close?
Of the (necessarily negative) predicates that apply to the
Infinite literally, the most important two are "unbounded"
and "undifferentiated"-we are back with the fact that walls,
internal or peripheral, dividing or enclosing, have no place
at being's summit. The Infinite is unbounded because as we
have had more than one occasion to remark, a boundary would
limit it and contradict its infinity. It is undifferentiated,25 because differentiation implies distinction and thereby in some
respect separation, separation in turn implies distance, and in
the realm of the spirit distance symbolizes ignorance epistemologically and privation affectively. A Something that excludes
nothing save distinctions we cannot begin to image26 any
25. "He goes from death to death who sees anything like manyness
here." Katha Upanishad, II.i.lO.
26. If in the face of this fact the mind persists in erecting images, one
type in particular must be warned against: namely, the kind that pictures
nondifferentiation as a blank: a cloudless sky, a sea !.lndoven by waves, a
field of unbroken light. Such images err because they conspicuously,
almost self-consciously, exclude. They obviously exclude clouds and waves
and shapes-and-hues of any form, but more seriously (and contrary to
their intent) they exclude timelessness. For all of the foregoing images
are static, and "static"-implying as it does a something that fails to
change with time-is a temporal concept. An instant is not static; therefore, to invoke images that are static betrays the fact that temporal
matrices have not yet been transcended. If we cannot resist trying to
58 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
more than we can image light that is simultaneously wave and
particle, electrons that jump orbit without traversing the intervening distance, or a particle that passes through alternative
slits simultaneously without dividing. But if physics does not
stop with the image-able, need metaphysics?
Physics can relinquish imagery because it still has mathematics' terra firma to walk on. Metaphysics lacks this support.
It reaches a point where, numbers long ago having been
abandoned, thought itself faces a drop-off. There are some who
mistake this point for the end of the world; whatever can be
neither imaged nor coherently conceived, they argue, does not
exist. But truth does not need us and is in no way dependent
upon our powers of conceptualization. There are regions of
being-the unimaginable perfection of totality is at the moment the case in point-that are quite unrelated to the contours of the human mind. The mind is comfortable with facts
and fictions. 27 It is not made for grasping ultimates.
Other persons concede that the fact that we cannot conceive
of something is no proof that it does not exist, but contend that
if it does exist it is for all practical purposes irrelevant. 28 But
imagine what the Infinite is like, we will do better to replace lifeless
images like the ones just cited with recollections of times when we were
so completely engrossed in what we were doing that ingredient components did not present themselves· as such and we lost track of time
entirely, whether as stoppd or as continuing. Mystics return repeatedly
to the climax of sexual love as the most natural human approximation.
It is to offset simplistic readings of "simple" as a metaphysical predicate
that Advaitic (a = non, dva = dual) Vedantists say, "Never say 'one';
say 'not-two.'" Another way to make the point is to say that "the One
. . . is the transcendence of separability rather than the negation of
plurality." Quoted in The Essential Plotinus, trans. by Elmer O'Brien
(New York: Mentor Books, 1964), p. 18. We have insisted throughout that
numbers belong with science rather than with metaphysics, and this is a
case in point. Metaphysically speaking, one is a quality, not a number.
27. A pink unicorn is easy to conceive,. however little we may expect to
encounter one.
28. Wittgenstein's famous aphorism, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof
must one remain silent," can be read as this contention as aimed at speech
and discursive thought. When Frank Ramsey added "and you can't whistle
it either," he underscored the cutoff. The assertions are exceptionally crisp
indices of one of the divides that separates contemporary from traditional
THE LEVELS OF REALITY
I 59
the fact that ultimates exceed the reach of our bread-and-butter
faculties and can never be captured by minds that insist upon
absolute rights of possession does not mean that these ultimates
have no contact with the world we inhabit or with the human
self in its totality. It is only because we invest all our interests
in the specifiable, which to be such must perforce be partial
and ephemeral, that no concern remains for that which is
total and eternal and therefore unspecifiable. Even so, because
it is total it cannot be escaped. The belief, normal to mankind,
that meaning inheres in everything that exists and everything
that happens derives at depth from the fact that the Ultimate,
or Infinite as we are calling it, is omnipresent.
Being everywhere, it is, of course, in man; in the natural
world it is in man preeminently. This takes us to our next
chapter.
philosophy, for whereas traditional philosophy tried to suggest the inexpressible and alert men to its importance, recent Western philosophy has
tried to eliminate it, though Late Heidegger east of the English Channel
and Late Wittgenstein west of it are signs that the opposition may be
softening. The just-quoted statement by Wittgenstein is from his early
work, the Tractatus. Subsequently the ineffable became increasingly real
for him, and though he did not retract his earlier contention that it cannot
be specified propositionally-no mystic would have wanted him to retract
this formulation of his point-he came to believe that the ineffable was
embedded in the pattern of speech forms ("grammar") and in the fabric of
human life in which these forms are woven. His later thought can be seen
as a sustained effort to catch glimpses of the ineffable by penetrating life's
ebb and flow through chinks in its linguistic texture.
He is the Self within and without; yea, within
and without.
MAITRAYANA UPANISHAD, V.2
In truth I say to you that within this fathomhigh body . . . lies the world and the rising of
the world and the ceasing of the world.
THE BUDDHA
For the kingdom of Heaven, nay rather, the King
of Heaven ... is within us.
GREGORY PALAMAS
4. THE LEvEls of SElfHood
As without, so within-the isomorphism of man and the
cosmos is a basic premise of the traditional outlook. The preceding chapter mapped its cosmology; this one will consider
the levels of reality as they appear within man himself. We
could think of the chapter as an excursion into psychology
were it not for the fact that that word as currently used denotes
at best.but half the ground to be covered: "pneumatology," the
science of the soul or spirit, would be a better designation. A
sentence by William James provides a bridge from psychology
to the pneumatology we now essay.
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the
world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds
of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that
although in the main their experiences and those of this world
keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and
higher energies filter in.l
I. The Varieties o.f Religious Experience (New York: Collier Books, 1961),
p. 401.
60
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
61
If man does indeed mirror the cosmos, a quick review of
the traditional cosmology will alert us to its regions that call
for human counterparts. Visualized, that cosmology shows the
earth, symbolic of the terrestrial sphere, enveloped by the
intermediate sphere, which in turn is enclosed by the celes~ial,
the three concentric spheres together being superimposed on a
background that is Infinite.
Considered in itself each sphere appears as a complete and
homogeneous whole, while from the perspective of the area
that encloses and permeates it, it is but a content. Thus the
terrestrial world knows not the intermediate world, nor the
latter the celestial, though each world is known and domiflated
by the one that exceeds and enfolds it.
Positioned, as we are, at the center of these realms, when we
look out we look up, when we look in we look down. In the
latter case empowering is sensed to erupt from below and proceed from within: vital organs are encased in skeletal armor,
seeds slumber in husks, kernels are guarded by shells less animate (see figure on page 21). Chapter 2 described this inversion
in a general way; now we are ready to delineate the echelons of
selfhood that derive from and reflect the ontological planes
the preceding chapter established. The overview can be diagrammed as follows:
"As ABOVE, so BELow."*
INFINITE
'0
a,
> t=::::::::::::::::::t::::::::::::::::::::J
a, 1::::::::::::::::::::1:::::::::::::::::::1
~
1::::::,:::::::::::::1::;,:::::;:;::::::::::1
t'"'
tD
<
tD
( I)
0
...,
VJ
tD
...,
::r
0
0
0..
SPIRIT
*The assertion is fro~ The Emerald Tablets of Hermes Trismegistus.
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
63
1. Body
We begin with man's surface aspect, his body. One hundred
fifty pounds, more or less, of protoplasm that we can see, touch,
and maneuver, it is the most evident part of our makeup, so
need not detain us long. Pages could be given to its wonders.
We could describe the cells that are its building blocks, each
equipped with hundreds or thousands of allosteric enzyme
molecules a million billion times finer than the most delicate
cybernetic relays man can devise. Or we could note the brain
that is the body's apex; with its 10 billion neurons any one
of which can be related to as many as 25,000 others for a number of possible associations that exceeds the number of atoms
in the universe, it is the most highly organized three pounds of
matter we know. There is no need to dwell on details. 2 We leap
over them to consider the sentience that infuses the human
frame.
2. Mind
Mechanists consider mind to be a part of the body, but this
is a mistake. The brain is a part of the body, but mind and
brain are not identical. 3 The brain breathes mind like the
lungs breathe air.
It is not possible to prove these assertions, for as we just
...
2. No disrespect is intended the sciences that brought such facts to light
or the scientists, inspired in investigation, ascetic in discipline, who discovered them. The point is only that size and complexity, however awesome
they may appear until our minds get habituated to them, are consonant
with reason and therefore are in principle unmysterious. This does not
hold for the quarry we are tracking.
3. "Some say that we merely speak in two different languages when referring to thoughts on the one hand and to neural proce~ses on the other.
But we speak in two languages because we are talking of two different
things. We speak of the thoughts Shakespeare had while writing his plays
and not of the thoughts of hydrochloric acid dissolving zinc, because
men think and acids don't." Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 389-90.
64 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
said, each plane when viewed from within presents itself as a
complete and self-sufficient whole. But though this rules out
the possibility of demonstrating the existence of ontological
"mores" of whatever sort, intimations of such mores are likely
to obtrude, for the lesser is in fact not self-contained. Whether
a given individual picks up on these intimations--"hath ears
to hear"-depends on his ontic sensitivity (see p. 50).
Intimations of the fact that the mind, though obviously implicated with the brain ("attached to the body" is Aristotle's
wording) is not reducible to it are of three sorts.
First there is the evidence that derives from neurophysiologists themselves. A quarter-century ago when this science was
getting on its legs, Sir Charles Sherrington wrote: "That our
being should consist of two fundamental elements offers, I
suppose, no greater improbability than that it should rest on
one." The years that have intervened have not increased the
improbability of the two-entities theory. On the contrary:
Wilder Penfield, dean of living neurophysiologists if anyone
deserves such a title, thinks that the advances the years have
brought make the theory probable. In The Mystery of the
Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain,
he points out that by applying electrodes to the memory anc:I
motor regions of the cerebral cortex of patients undergoing
brain surgery the surgeon can make them remember past
events and move their bodily members, but there is no brainspot which, if electrically stimulated, will induce patients to
believe or to decide. Stressing that years of studying the mechanisms of the human brain have forced him to retain rather
than abandon the distinction between mind and these mechanisms, Penfield concludes that:
Mind must be viewed as a basic element in itself.... The mind
seems to act independently of the brain in the same sense that a
programmer acts independently of his computer.... It will always
be quite impossible to explain the mind on the basis of neuronal
action within the brain .... Mind comes into action and goes out
of action with the highest brain-mechanism. But the mind has
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
65
energy [and] the form of that energy is different from that of
neuronal potentials that travel the axone pathways.4
Still in the area of neurophysiology is the recent discovery
that the two hemispheres of the human brain serve different
functions .. Its left hemisphere (which controls the right side
of the body and perceives through right-body sense organs)
works predominantly with the analytic, logical thinking of
language and mathematics. Meanwhile the right hemisphere
("wired" to the left side of the body) proceeds holistically. Instead of following trails of linear reason and "single causation"
as does the left hemisphere, it takes in fields in a gulp; it grasps
intuitively, in patterned gestalts. It thinks, but because it bypasses language, it thinks tacitly in the sense in which Michael
Polanyi uses this word in his Tacit Dimension. This mode of
mentation equips it for artistic endeavor, pattern recognition
-our ability to identify faces at a glance-and the orientation
of our bodies in space: walking, swimming, or riding a bicycle.
Since these right hemisphere functions involve space, whereas
talk takes time, we can say that the right hemisphere functions
predominantly spatially and the left temporally. If, as we are
about to propose, the right hemisphere is in closer touch with
the subtle plane than is the left, the following remark by a
noted recent painter is precise: "Time is an invention of man,
but space-space· belongs to the gods" (Max Beckmann).
Since only the human brain is thus divided, no other species
even prefiguring it, the division is obviously related to man's
attendant monopoly, language. But why must linguistic competence be compartmentalized? Why does it not pervade the
cerebral cortex as a whole? Because, it would seem, our entire
4. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, pp. 81, 79, 80, 48. See
also Sir John Eccles' Preface to Eric Polten, Critique of the Psycho-Physical Identity Theory (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), which is summarized in
his own words as follows: "The program of the ... materialists is ... to
r~duce conscious experiences to the science of brain states and hence to
physics. Thus everything would be reduced to properties of matter. Their
efforts to deny or to ignore conscious experiences have collapsed because
of its intrinsic absurdity" (p. ix).
66 /
FORGOTTEN TRUTH
being cannot be accommodated to it. This being the case, a
part of the brain must be kept language-free. Only so can capacities that are incommensurate with language yet indispensable
to life remain intact.
If it is impossible for man to manage the whole of his terrestrial life by means of language, it goes without saying that
transverbal faculties must enter even more if he is to traffic
with supraterrestrial planes, which differ in kind from the
plane that language is primarily designed to cope with and
mirror. Without empowerment by the psychic order, man cannot live: we see empirical evidence of this in the laboratory discovery that experimental subjects who are allowed to sleep but
not to dream go mad; metaphysically it follows from the double
fact that (a) the lesser is ordered and empowered by the greater,
and (b) the psychic plane is greater than the corporeal. The
psychic cannot, however, be fitted into corporeal categories
which are also, in the main, the categories of language. Speaking in the manner of a Platonic myth, we might say that the
mind, contemplating its descent into matter, foresaw that it
would have to school itself in its ways. It did so by pouring
its direct and luminous intellection into molds-concepts,
words, language-that splintered it, for "rational" and "ratiocination" presuppose what the words suggest: a process in
which we ration or divide up reality into separate things to
facilitate discussion. In "the widest possible signification of the
notion of sin, namely that of centrifugal movement" (F.
Schuon), the mind consented to "take on the sins of the world"
-the categories of matter and the language that in part reflects, in part creates, these categories. But if mind was to save
the world-redeem it from total opacity and lifelessness-part
of its nature had to remain outside those categories, for reason,
being founded in distinctions, can at best only grope toward
wholeness; indirectly through inference, and sequentially
through time. The parallel with the two natures of Christ is
exact: The mind assumes the conditions of the fall with its
left (distinctively ~uman) hemisphere while keeping its right
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
67
hemisphere transcendent. That both hemispheres are requisite for man's full functioning is but one more evidence of his
amphibious nature. He lives in the world while not being of
it.
At the beginning of this section we said that there are three
lines of argument that point toward the conclusion that mind
exceeds the terrestrial plane. Neurophysiology we have noted;
of the other two, one is theoretical and the other empirical.
The theoretical argument asks if matter can ever account for
sentience, or mind in the widest sense of the word. This is a
time-worn issue, of course, one of the thorniest in the entire
history of philosophy. What we can say briefly is that no convincing materialistic explanation of mind has been forthcoming. Matter is located in space; one can specify precisely where
a given tree, let us say, resides. But if one asks where his perception of the tree is located he can expect difficulties. The
difficulties increase if he asks how tall his perception of the
tree is; not how tall is the tree he sees, but how tall is his seeing of it. Conscious experience is, as Sir Charles Sherrington
observed, "refractory to measurement."
We cannot say that the experience of one light has twice the
brightness of another. The tenns in which we measure experience
of sound are not terms of experience. They are terms of the
stimulus, the physical sound, or of the nervous or other bodily
action concomitant with the experience. . . . Mind, if it were
energy, would be measurable quantitatively .... But ... the ~~arch
in [the energy-scheme] for a scale of equivalence between energy
and mental experience arrives at none.s
That in some way I see because I have eyes and move my arms
and legs because I want to seems as incontrovertible as anything can be; both our observation of life and the fact that
within limits we can take it in hand and squeeze it like an
orange presuppose body-mind interaction. But as to the char5. Man on His Nature (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953),
p. 251.
68 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
acter of the interaction-Penfield says it is no more explicable
today than it was in the time of Aristotle, but in reality it is
less explicable, for Aristotle's nature included its subtle half
whereas the current conception, which prunes nature to almost
its quantifiable components, is less accommodating. As a consequence we live with an impasse. Sherrington's conclusion
has lost nothing in the thirty-five years since he wrote it.
Progress of knowledge . . . has only made more clear that the
spatial concept's far-reaching notion "energy" is ... powerless to
deal with or to describe mind . . . . Mind . . . goes . . . in our
spatial world more ghostly than a ghost. Invisible, intangible, it
is a thing not even in outline; it is not a "thing". It remains without it forever.6
The matter comes to this: From the side of insentient matter
the gulf that separates it from sentience is infinite; no bridge
can reach the other bank. A ton of feathers presents no problem, but of items that weigh nothing whatever, no number
will produce even an ounce. The doctrine of "emergent evolution" contributes nothing here. Proceeding from the fact that
gases that cannot be poured may condense into liquids that
can be poured, it argues that new qualities do arise. In ridin~
such analogies it overlooks the fact that a clear continuity joins
liquid to gas-the two are alternative arrangements of molecules in motion-whereas no common substratum linking sentience to insentience has been proposed. We shall return to
the subject of emergence in Chapter 6. For now we note only
that, as it happens, a substratum linking insentience to sentience does exist; depending on the level of reality on which
the question is raised, it is form, existence, being, or the Infinite. But nothing answering to physical categories links the
terrestrial plane to those above.
Such are the theoretical considerations that suggest that
mind exceeds matter. A final line of argument is empirical.
Instead of arguing that mind is a distinctive kind of entity,
6. Ibid., p. 260.
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
69
it argues that it functions in distinctive ways. It plays by different rules, conforms to laws that differ in kind from those
that matter exemplifies.
We are picking up here with the psi phenomena that were
introduced in the preceding chapter: mental performances
that are ~ailed parapsychological because by canons of the
mind's usual operations they are scandalous. As was intimated
in that chapter, we shall not try to prove that telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and the like occur; volumes could be
devoted to the project and still uncertainty would remain-in
border areas ontological convictions count for more than do
data, the latter being necessarily spotty when sighted from
what might be called their underside on the ontological ladder.
It is enough to note: (a) that some of the most recognized of
modern intellects-men of the stature of Kant, Bergson, and
William James-found the evidence in favor of parapsychology
convincing; and (b) that the climate of opinion in general
seems at present to be moving in the direction of credence: we
recall the survey we earlier cited in which only 3 percent of
the readers of The New Scientist reported that they consider
psi phenomena to be impossible. Anyone who wishes his opinion to adhere as closely as possible to the evidence can look at
Arthur Koestler's quick summary in his already-mentioned
The Roots of Coincidence; if he has more time he might work
through the two volumes of F. W. H. Myers's monumental
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death.
So much for the existence of mind as a stratum of seU·· that
is neither reducible to the brain nor finally dependent on it.
Turning to our experience of this stratum, we note that it
takes two forms: waking and dreaming.
The "feel" of mind as we encounter it awake is so familiar
that we overlook the mystery it parades in broad daylight. For
on the one hand it truly reaches the physical world and no
philosophical artifice can convince us of the contrary; meanwhile it consists of nothing but a tissue of images conditioned
by what our senses can pick up, our interests induce them to
70 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
pick up, and our past experience feeds in by ways of interpretations that elicit expectations. Everything that constitutes
for us the world-its brute stubbornness, its continuity, its
logical coherence-is a flow of phantasms, a gossamer of Berkeleian impressions. It is futile to try to know the world outside
this magic lantern show, since it comes to us only thrmtgh its
"slides." All the while the world insists-and we cannot but
agree-that we are not looking at a screen at all. The screen
is a window through which we see the world itself, an autonomous order~·
No theory of perception removes this miracle, the fact that
an entity in one region of space flashes forth to assume-in
truth become-the form (though not the matter) of entities
removed: the sparkle in a mountain stream, the red on the
throat of a ring-necked pheasant. Or causes those qualities to
come to it-with mind we are on the intermediate plane where
"wheres" cannot be pinpointed on the terrestrial map. When
we move from perception to memory, imagination, and abstract
thought the mysteries compound. If physiologica] psychology
ever gives the impression of explaining these phenomena we
should not be misled: it removes their mysteries in the way
daylight banishes stars. Given sufficient pertinacity, reason'~
flailings can worry the mystery out of anything. In fact, of
course, it is our sensibilities that die: " 'Tis ye, 'tis your
estranged faces, That miss the many-splendoured thing." Alternatively, "It is not the eyes which grow blind. It is the hearts
within the breasts that grow blind" (Koran, XXII, 46).
Daily, when we sleep, mind changes its register. In deep or
dreamless sleep its content-assuming,. with India, that it then
continues:to have a content7-is out of sight; presumably it is
too undifferentiated to be recalled. Dreams, on the other hand,
can be remembered, but we must not overlook the evaporation
that occurs in the process. As we pass into wakefulness a sort
of decantation takes place, of which we can, however, take
7. See Franklin Merrell·Wolff, The Philosophy of Consciousness Without
an Object (New York: Julian Press, 1973).
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
71
note inasmuch as it is by degrees that a dream's force subsides
and its otherworldliness eases into linguistic molds.
In dream the subtle body retires from the gross. The communication lines to its physical senses are disconnected, and
it returns to its natural medium. For the duration of its "home
leave" its. pedestrian rendezvous with matter is suspended and
it swims untrammeled in the psychic sphere. Because that
sphere is its native habitat-the environment that is continuous with the stuff of which the mind is composed-the homecoming refreshes and restores. "He giveth his beloved-sleep."
Not that the dream world is more pleasant. Terrors lie in
wait each time we turn out the light, nightmares being on
average as common as dreams of peace. Nor do we see more
clearly while asleep; if anything maya is compounded. We
know less where we are and for this reason can take ourselves
less in hand, a point the religions make by rating earthly life
precious because of the opportunity it affords us to alter our
condition toward final ends. Not pleasurableness but vividness and power are the respects in which dreams outrank our
waking consciousness.
Dreams are invariably and by nature vivid because they
know no habituation: each. encounter with a rose or goblin
is as if we were meeting it for the first time. As to power, the
case is ambiguous. In one sense dreams have little power, for
as we just noted, being disjoined from will, they do not in
themselves affect our futures as much as our deliberate doings
can. We cannot say that they have no power, for merf'· have
been known to emerge from dreams with perspectives that
changed the course of their entire lives, as in Dostoevsky's
story "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man." On the whole, however, the force dreams possess is passive rather than active;
their emotional intensity is out of proportion to the difference
they make. Beyond their freedom from habituation that has
been remarked, their intensity derives from the fact that they
put us in touch with forces that are more deep-lying and causative than the ones we notice in daily life. The dream lecture
72 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
in the course of which I discover that I am prepared in neither
content nor attire may be fictional with respect to real liferead: the waking world. Certainly I breathe easier when I
awake and realize that it was, as I say to myself, only a dream.
The fact remains that the anxiety the dream confronts me with
is more real-calls more tunes, throws more switches in my
moods and behavior-than the satisfaction I may feel later
in the day in the course of an actual lecture for which I have
prepared and donned trousers; in this sense we are indeed
"such stuff as dreams are made on." Dream research has come
up with exceptionally concrete evidence to document the fact
that in dreams we are close to the center of life's vitalities.
Eighty percent of the time men dream they have erections.
Between wakefulness and dreaming lies the twilight zone of
daydream. Phenomenologists could dub in a whole landscape
here, filled with phantasms that belie by their insubstantiality
the power they exert over us. We will forgo the tour of this
interface and touch instead on a final way we might catch a
glimpse of the mind at work. If discarnates can indeed report
through mediums their experiences after death, these reports
would testify to the mind in an exceptionally pristine condition, a state totally unimplicated in the corporeal world. Such
reports should be approached with great suspicion, for the
"controls" in question are not integrated souls or even integrated minds; they consist at most of "psychic residues" that
minds leave in their wake as they traverse the psychic plane.s
When our bodies break up under the heavy years and our
souls proceed toward eternity, superfluous fragments of our
personalities may float on for awhile Jike small lost rafts on
the psychic sea. Reports that derive from these fragments, assuming that some actually do so, could resemble the reports
8. This needs particularly to be said in this day of what our colleague
Agehananda Bharati has called "rampant Rampaism," wherein the writings
of an English plumber with the pen name Lobsang Rampa have produced
a craze, as have those of Jane Roberts, who purports to be the amanuensis
of a departed soul named Seth.
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
73
of schizophrenics: truth shot through with ellipses and masses
of misrepresentation. From the reports of patients in our asylums a visitor from another planet might glean some sense
of the earthly condition, but we would advise him against
taking their reports at face value. The entire subject of spiritualism is ~o treacherous-Rene Guenon's L' Erreur Spirite sets
it in perspective better than any other work we know-that
we are tempted to skirt it entirely; but in order not to rule
out the possibility that an occasional sliver of truth may reach
us from these lands of shades via shamans or other mediums,
we shall enter a single report, the latest as it happens to have
come our way. Though we knew and respected the medium
involved, Eileen Garrett, we quote her report, which purportedly came from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, not for this reason
but for one that is "logical"; that is, the extent to which it conforms to standard accounts of the intermediate plane.
I think that, as a matter of fact, when I say I am living in a
world considerably like the one I have left, people will be surprised. I find myself doing many of the things which I did there.
I find I am living in a world as dark as that which I have left,
more's the pity. It is a country where pain is forever ended; where
emotion is born a thousand times stronger; where inspirations
reach me easier. I find myself in a bodily state. It is a world where
the sinister life is to be dealt with. This is neither heaven nor hell.
It is a combination of both. Believe me, it is only the beginnng.
I understand that it tends to confirm the theory [that] soul goes
through many phases. It is really the soul of me in bodily.,-form.
The scientists will disagree with me, but I am still "material," and
so long as I am material, I feel myself the man I was on earth.9
We note in particular that the absence of physical pain and intensification of emotion conform to dream experience, and
that the continuation of body in some form agrees with accounts that range from India's "subtle body" to the glorified
and incorruptible "resurrected body" St. Paul alludes to.
9. Allan Angoff, Eileen Garrett and the World Beyond the Senses (New
York: William Morrow &: Co., 1974), pp. 40-41.
74 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
J. Soul
The conditions that govern this earthly cockpit in which
we are stationed are local and relative. To daydream is to
gaze out its windows at cloud kingdoms or stars so bright they
seem at fingertip; at such times we forget for a spell our
cabined condition and risk air's rhapsody of the deep. Sleep
springs us from our carrier and brings the weightlessness of
dream; death severs the lifeline to our transport, and for a
time we stride the clouds like titans. "For a time," because
there is a dimension of our selves that exceeds even the stratosphere, an essence no universe, subtle or gross, can contain.
The ancients called it soul (psyche, anima, sarira atman, nephesh, or nafs) and though on the cosmological map it lies
beyond the reach of the strongest telescope, we can join it in
a twinkling once we learn its register. For it is closer to our
essence by far than is the mind with which we usually identify.
The soul is the final locus of our individuality. Situated
as it were behind the senses, it sees through the eyes without
being seen, hears with the ears without itself being heard.
Similarly it lies deeper than mind. If we equate mind with
the stream of consciousness, the soul is the source of this.
stream; it is also its witness while never itself appearing within
the stream as a datum to be observed. It underlies, in fact, not
only the flux of mind but all the changes through which an individual passes; it thereby provides the sense in which these
changes can be considered to be his. No collection of the traits
I possess-my age, my appearance, what have you-constitutes
the essential "me," for the traits change while I remain in
some sense myself. To switch to the vocabulary of George
Herbert Mead, the fragments of self that present themselves
for identification constitute the "me" while the "I" that supports them as a clotheshorse supports the garments we drape
over it remains concealed. To try to get the "I" into the field
of vision is like trying to see my eyes by stepping back a pace;
with every backward move I make, it retreats correlatively. But
though the "me" is the only part of myself I can objectify, I
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
75
sense it to be the object of a subject that is its source and
superior.
This superior is the soul. We sense it indelibly in the incommunicable sense of what it feels like to be oneself instead of
anyone else who has ever lived, but beyond this we know it
only indirectly, by its effects. The way it supplies us with life
is completely invisible, as is the way it directs the trajectory
of our ontogenetic development: from the moment of conception it decrees that the raw materials the body assimilates in
food and drink and air will be transformed according to incredible foreordinations to produce from among illimitable
possibilities precisely-a human being. These workings of the
soul are not only hidden from the subject they create; for the
most part they elude even the laboratory scrutinies of sciencemicrobiology gives only a barest glimpse of the drama involved.
Where we do sense our souls is first, to repeat, in our discernment of our individuality-the fact that from conception to
death we are the same person, which person is distinct from
all others-and second, in our wants. For if we ask what we
sense ourselves to be, there is no better initial answer than
that we are creatures that want.
How far this definition holds for things other than human
-animal, vegetable, possibly in some panpsychic sense even
mineral-need not concern us. Nor need we lay out a classification that would set our wants in array: physical, psychological, spiritual, whatever. We cut through elaborations to c!:nter
on a single point: the soul's essential dynamism.1o In the faint
glimpses of itself that the soul affords us, it appears less as a
thing than as a movement; to paraphrase Nietzsche, it resembles
a bridge more than a destination. Restlessness is built into it
as a metaphysical principle. And though its reachings often
seem random, they have a direction.
What is this direction?
Ever since man appeared on this planet he seems to have
10. "Self·motion is the very idea and essence of the soul." Plato,
Phaedrus, 245d. "Anything that has a soul . . . move[s] itself." Aristotle,
Physics, 265b, 34.
76 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
been searching for an object that he could love, serve, and
adore wholeheartedly; an object which, being of the highest
and most permanent beauty and perfection, would never permit his love for it to dwindle, deteriorate, or suffer frustration.
The search has led to difficulties. It has brought him face to
face with calamity and taken from him a toll of heavy sacrifice
including the sacrifice of life itself. Yet he persists. The relentless urge of his nature compels him to continue at all costs.
The entire history of the race-political, moral, legal, sociocultural, intellectual, economic, and religious, from earliest
times to the present day-is the record of man's search for
some beckoning object.
And again we ask, what is this object?
Freud thought it was connected in some way with sexual
release, Adler with the drive for power. McDougall saw it as
the urge to express the animal instincts that in man have
entered into mysterious combination, Marx as economic wellbeing, often rationally disguised. The metaphysical answer is
more basic. The soul is programmed, as we might say today,
first to perpetuate its existence and then to augment it. Its
tropism is toward being and its increase.
This is obvious in the case of drives like hunger and sex4
but it holds for other outreaches as well, indeed for every outreach. We seek wealth and power because they strengthen our
support system, fame and power because they increase our
social stature. Friendship at once shores up our lives by the
positive regard it elicits from others and enlarges our lives by
stretching them, so to speak, to include the lives of others
within them: we rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with
those who mourn. Knowledge extends our understanding"The world spreads out on either side 1 No wider than the
mind is wide"-and beauty foretells the inner harmony of
things. In the latter case, it is a quickening of spirit that signals augmented being rather than an enlargement in size,
which is being's usual metaphorical quantifier.
Not that we see that being is invariably what we want. What
the lover senses h-imself as wanting is his beloved. In this he
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
77
is not mistaken, of course; the point concerns only why he
loves her. That question the lover himself does not ask: immersed completely in the universe of love, its object is selfevidently its final cause. But if our object is to understand, the
question "why" obtrudes. The beloved attracts because she
configurates the precise aperture through which being can
pour through to her lover in largest portions. Or change the
image. Among innumerable pieces of quartz that lie strewn
about the floor of a quarry it may chance that one alone bends
the sun's rays at the exact angle that sends them toward my
eyes. Doing so makes the quartz gleam. Yet it is the sun's light
I see; were cloud to intervene, the quartz would turn to slag.
So it goes: every emptiness we feel is "being" eclipsed, all
restlessness a flailing for the being that we need, all joy the
evidence of being found.
Kings lick the earth whereof the fair are made,
For God hath mingled in the dusty earth
A draught of Beauty from His choicest cup.
'Tis that, fond lover-not these lips of clayThou art kissing with a hundred ecstasies,
Think, then, what must it be when undefiled!ll
Even the addict who prowls the streets for his angry "fix"
and the assassin who stalks his fated prey are reaching out for
being. The alleys that they walk are blind ones; judged in
terms of the larger being they preclude or the damage they
work on the being of others they stand condemned. Buf if it
were possible to consider the cocaine's "rush" by itself, apart
from its consequences, it would be judged good; the same
holds for the satisfaction that sweeps over the assassin as he
effects his revenge. Esse qua esse bonum est. Being as being
is good;12 more being is better.
11. Jalal al-Din Rumi, Mathnawi, V, 372-75. English trans. by R. A.
Nicholson, Rumi, Poet and Mystic (London: George Allen 8c Unwin, 1950),
p. 45.
12. This is the metaphysical meaning in St. Paul's assertion to the
Romans: "I know with certainty on the authority of the Lord Jesus that
nothing is unclean in itself" (14:14).
78 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
It was Aristotle who saw every movement in the universe as
ultimately caused by the irresistible attraction of being's superlative instance, the Unmoved Mover. That is the magnet; that,
the far-off divine event toward which creation moves. St.
Thomas detailed his insight: the dynamic pulse and throb of
creation is the love of all things for the Infinite; in Dante's
echo, it is ''l'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle," the Love
that moves the sun and the other stars. From the lowest level
of reality, where even matter reaches out for form, to the highest heavens where angels gravitate around the Throne, a single
breath and motion sweeps through existence, the search of each
existent for the Good.
Our interest here is the way man, specifically his soul, instances this tendency. So sweetly are things disposed that it
appears to the soul not so much that it is led as that it goes
as it were of itself. Desiring self-fulfillment, it actively, of its
own free will, goes where this fulfillment is to be found. And
because the soul is finite, it appears to the soul as if its fulfillment were to be found in finite things: wealth, fame, power,
a loved one, whatever. And again we say: in its way this is not
inaccurate. But a telltale clue betrays the fact that such immediate. objects of desire are but proximate ends that front
for one that stands behind them and with respect to which they
are but installments. This clue is the fact that we invest these
manifestly finite objects with infinite worth. As infinite attractiveness is obviously not an objective property of our desired objects, a paradox ensues: we want infinitely, to the point
of sacrificing our lives at times, things that are finite. Our
usual way of explaining this paradox is to say that our evaluations are bestowed. The lover projects his estimate on the
beloved-lays it on her, she may sometimes feel. The phenomenon admits of another interpretation. It is not so much that
he projects infinity-infinite worth-upon her as that he
glimpses infinity-the Infinite-through her. She has, for the
duration that his passion lasts, become for him a symbol as
(for Dante) was B~atrice: she in whom Heaven's glory walked
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
79
the earth bodily. Symbols can be more or less effective and
more or less durable, but within these limits they are the
apertures we mentioned. However foolish the swain's love,
while it lasts something, at least, of the Shekinah (Presence)
hovers. God is near. The lover is in heaven.
For the most part the soul flits from symbol to symbol. Being flashes for a moment, now here, now there, only to withdraw. The object that admitted its light almost blindingly
closes over, and we wonder, as we say, what we saw in her.
In the long run the closures are providential, for they keep
us from getting caught on ontological rungs that are incapable
of satisfying us as much as ones that are higher. 13 At the time,
however, the closures are painful. When no replacement appears, our inward indigence turns everything to wasteland; at
this juncture macrocosm mirrors microcosm. Searching for a
love that is unerodable, Plato depicted in the Symposium the
possibility of passing from the love of beautiful objects to the
love of that within these that makes them beautiful: from the
love of a particular woman to the love of the femininity they
have in common, to suggest an example that was not his.
From this one might proceed, he argued, until one arrived
at the love of the Good itself, whereupon, it being the
Form that composes all lesser forms, one could in some
respect love everything and so never be without an object
for his affections.
For most temperaments this route is too abstract. Its alternative is to love not the Good but God. The object of this preference, as we pointed out in the preceding chapter, is not a
fiction. On pain of anthropomorphism we must be on guard
not to ascribe to God properties that make us distinctively human: our kind of knowledge, our mode of love. And we must
not overlook that exceptional type of spiritual personality
who, having sloughed off his own image and achieved within
13. "The desire for perfection ... is that desire which always makes every
pleasure appear incomplete, for there is no joy or pleasure so great in this
life that it can quench the thirst in our Soul." Dante, ll Convivio, III. vi. 3.
80 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
himself a kind of total nudity, can know God otherwise than
through a human prototype; this type we shall treat in the
next section. But between anthropomorphism on the one riverbank and transpersonalism on the other flow the waters of the
living God. It is not just, as we have noted;- that the lion knows
a leonine deity; that much was said in the preceding chapter.
We must go further and say that what we see through the
tinted glass of our finite human discernments is nonetheless
there, and if an in-ways-humanized image serves as bridge to
a region beyond the limitations under which all images must
labor, then al-hamdu lillah-praise be to Allah, as the Muslims
would say.
It is not easy to gauge the spiritual temperature of an age
nor to discern the mode its spirituality assumes, but tJ:le prevalence of phrases like "the death of God" or better, "the eclipse
of God," suggests that men seem to be "saying thou to the
universe," to use William James's phrase, less than they did
in the past, and hearing less in the way of personalized responses from it. Even entertainers capitalize on the point: "I
needed God so I called him," a quipster remarks. "He put
me on hold." It may be that the mechanization of our industrial environment-steel sheets and girders, concrete piers
and asphalt roads, belching blast furnaces, heavy coal smoke,
and dead neon signs-it may be that this enveloping insentience has led us unconsciously to assume that all environments are inanimate, whereas in fact, of course, above the
smog the stars still shine and the angels sing. If deep is answering to deep less today it is not because the depths have changed,
certainly not on their objective side. -If our world has changed,
this only reflects the change in the idea we now have of it.
God has not retreated; it is we who have turned away.
So far have we strayed that we need a firsthand account to
remind us what it was like to live in the conviction, periodically
fortified by direct realization, that from beginning to end
existence thrills to the life of the living God. To emphasize
the fact that personalized experiences of God were not re-
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
81
stricted to saints and seers, we deliberately present as illustration here an account by an anonymous layman, one drawn
from the manuscript collection which the psychologist E. D.
Starbuck assembled around the turn of the century.
I remember the night, and almost the very spot on the hilltop,
where my soul opened out, as it were, into the Infinite, and there
was a rushing together of the two worlds, the inner and the outer.
It was deep calling unto deep--the deep that my own struggle had
opened up within being answered by the unfathomable deep without, reaching beyond the stars. I stood alone with Him who had
made me, and all the beauty of the world, and love, and sorrow,
and even temptation. I did not seek Him, but felt the perfect
unison of my spirit with His. The ordinary sense of things around
me faded. For the moment nothing but an ineffable joy and
exultation remained. It is impossible fully to describe the experience. It was like the effect of_ some great orchestra when all the
separate notes have melted into one swelling harmony that leaves
the listener conscious of nothing save that his soul is being wafted
upwards, and almo~_t bursting with its own emotion. The perfect
stillness of the night was thrilled by a more solemn silence. The
darkness held a presence that was all the more felt because it was
not seen. I could not any more have doubted that He was there
than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less
real of the two.14
Happiness, it is said, has no history. History recounts wars
and plagues and famines. All the while on the underside of its
mantle of disaster a different kind of drama has never c-eased
from being woven. A private, interior drama consisting of
scenes like the one just described, it reaches the pages of history only when it makes an exceptional impact, as did St. Paul's
experience on the Damascus road or Luther's sudden comprehension of the full import of "I believe in the forgiveness of
sins." Yet precisely because it is an interior drama it touches
the wellsprings of joy and resiliency. Those who are tapped for
its cast can lie down on nettles, lie down with vipers, and
14. Quoted in James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 69.
82 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
scarcely notice where they are. The world is not relinquished,
but it assumes its proper place. It
is not all;
Is harsh with envy, greed, assault,-or blooms
With friendship, courage, truth, is beautiful;
Yet is at best but an inn on a thoroughfare:
Provincial, one might call the mind contented there. 15
The phenomenology of the soul's romance with its Creator
admits of three distinguishable modes. In the first the accent
falls on the love the soul feels for God. The troubadours come
to mind here, as do the seekers of the grail and the seventh- to
ninth-century Alvars of South India, alvar meaning literally
"diver" (into the ocean of divine consciousness). These ecstatic
devotees of Vishnu pressed into devotional service the entire
complement of human emotions, from the tenderness of a
doting mother to the terror of an abandoned child, but it was
in the half-crazed, near-hysterical longing of a lover for his
absent love that their fervor reached its peak:
When will the time come when I shall see Him without intermission and place my crowned head at His feet? When will the
time come when my tears of ecstasy shall flow on seeing the
wonderful Lord? When will the time come when my mind gazing
at His moon-like face will melt into Him?
Kulasekhara Alvar
A favorite allegory in Sufi tales concerns the shaikh who
abdicates his eminence in the world and to ~he incomprehension and disgust of those who had envied and respected him
now lives only to gain the company of some simple wench who
has won his heart. His beard mats up and his clothes become
rags, for his thoughts are so completely on her that none
remain for his own person. Even death is no deterrent, for
whereas her continued absence is intolerable, in her presence
he could die in peace.
15. Edna St. Vincent Milia)', Conversation at Midnight (Harper and
Brothers, 1937), p. 30.
THE .LEVELS OF SELFHOOD
I 83
In the second mode, the accent falls on God's love for man.
Posit a lover whose existence has centered for months in an
anguished and unrequited yearning like that of the shaikh just
depicted. Thoug~1 his passion is spurned he nevertheless longs
for nothing so much as to be in his beloved's presence: in her
absence he consoles himself with recollections of the times he
was with h~r and anticipations of ones when he will see her
again. If after months of such seemingly hopeless longing the
swain were to find that the princess was beginning to take an
interest in him, could we imagine his state? Not only does he
want, he is wanted; not only does he love, he is loved. And
should it transpire that from a modest beginning the princess's
regard for him were to rise to an intensity that rivaled his own
-the intensity of his desperation when it seemed that his love
was hopeless and of his rapture when it began to look as if it
were not-would we then be able to follow his emotions to
their Himalayan heights? It is on record that such are the
emotions that visit the soul when it discovers that it is literally
loved by the God who made and rules the universe. The
following is the account of Mrs. Jonathan Edwards:
Last night was the sweetest night I ever had in my life. I never
before, for so long a time together, enjoyed so much of the light
and rest and sweetness of heaven in my soul. ... Part of the night
I lay awake, sometimes asleep, and sometimes between sleeping
and waking. But all night I continued in a constant, clear, and
. lively sense of the heavenly sweetness of Christ's excellent love, of
his nearness to me, and of my dearness to him; with an inexpressibly sweet calmness of soul in an entire rest in him. I seemed to
myself to perceive a glow of divine love come down from the heart
of Christ in heaven into my heart in a constant stream, like a
stream or pencil of sweet light.l6
In our analogy we spoke of the princess's love as rivaling the
swain's, but in the present case God's love exceeds the soul's,
for the soul is finite, with the consequence that what is total
16. Quoted in James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 223.
84 /
FORGOTTEN TRUTH
for it is no match for the love that flows from a source that is
illimitable. It must have been this sense-the sense that the
Lord of all Being loved them with a strength that exceeded
their own, loved to the point of sacrificing his very Son for
them-that empowered the early Christians to launch what
numerically was to become the foremost religion in the world.
The third and final element in the phenomenology of the
soul's encounter with God emerges as we continue with Mrs.
Edwards's account, which was interrupted. After describing
her sense of God's love streaming toward her like a pencil of
light, she writes:
At the same time my heart and soul all flowed out in love to
Christ, so that there seemed to be a constant flowing and reflowing
of heavenly love, and I appeared to myself to float or swim, in
these bright, sweet beams, like the motes swimming in the beams
of the sun, or the streams of his light which come in at the window.
I think that what I felt each minute was worth more than all the
outward comfort and pleasure which I had enjoyed in my whole
life put together. It was pleasure, without the least sting, or any
interruption. It was a sweetness, which my soul was lost in; it
seemed to be all that my feeble frame could sustain ....
As I awoke early the next morning, it seemed to me that I had
entirely done with myself. I felt that the opinions of the world
concerning me were nothing, and that I had no more to do with
any outward interest of my own than with that of a person whom
I never saw. The glory of God seemed to swallow up every wish
and desire of my heart.17
For our present purpose the principal point of this passage is
contained in its opening sentence, wl}ich registers the sense of
"a constant flowing and reflowing of heavenly love." Whereas
in the first mode the accent was on man's love for God and in
the second on God's love for man, the two are now equalized
in full reciprocity. Yet more than reciprocity; in identity. In
what, at risk of indignity, we are tempted to call a love loopDionysius calls it the "unerring revolution"-the soul per17. Ibid.
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
85
ceives that the love it directs toward God is none other than
that which originated in God's love for it. It is the selfsame
love, turned back on its point of origin-in the moment when
Dante sees Beatrice in the way that transfigures his life forever, he sees her as God sees her, her and everything that is.
Plotinus saw this point: "The fullest life is the fullest love,
and the love comes from the celestial light which streams forth
from the Absolute One" (Enneads, VI.7.23). Ibn 'Arabi makes
the point as well:
The soul ... "sees" God not through itself, but through him; it
loves only through Him, not by itself.... The soul is His organ of
perception. [The soul's] sympathy with being is . . . the passion
[God's] Presence arouses in the soul. Accordingly it is not by itself
or even in conjunction with Him that the soul contemplates and
loves, but through Him alone . . . . The soul is His organ. . . . It
is He who seeks and is sought for, He is the Lover and He is the
Beloved.l8
St. John of the Cross says the same. Of the advanced state in
which the soul is seized by the love of God he writes:
The principal agent . . . is God. For God secretly and quietly
infuses into the soul loving knowledge and wisdom without any
intervention of specific acts [on the soul's part]. The soul has then
to walk ... conducting itself passively, and having no diligence of
its own but possessing this simple, pure and loving awareness.l9
According to Ruysbroeck, "The love of God is an outpouPing
and an indrawing tide."
Our account of the soul, the theme Plato esteemed to be
"of large and more than mortal discourse" (Phaedrus, 246a),
is complete. Having identified its essential tendency as "that
veritable love, that sharp desire" (Plotinus) and its final object
as Being, if one thinks "abstractly," or God in his personal
18. Henry Corbin, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn 'Arabi
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 151-52.
19. The Complete Works of St. john of the Cross, trans. by Allison Peers
(London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, Ltd., 1934), Vol. Ill, pp. 76-77.
86 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
mode if one does not, the way is clear to move to the final rung
on the scale of reality and the deepest element in man. But
lest it be inferred from this projected move that we do not
take the soul's God seriously, that we regard him as no more
than an edifying fiction or symbol, 20 we close this section with
words that count the more because written by the man who
more than any other has secured for us the personal God without loading him with finality-the two things must be said
together. Speaking of the levels within the self and the ascending importance of those which, lying deeper, are more substantial, Frithjof Schuon writes:
According to some people, it is enough to convince oneself, as
it were by auto-suggestion, that one is neither the body nor the
mind. This truth is not realizable, however, until body and mind
have conformed on their plane to what may be called the "Divine
Will"; one cannot attain Atma without God or in opposition to
God. The "personal Divinity" only allows those who adore Him
to understand that He is not the absolute Reality.21
We can see why this is so. To identify (merge) with what is
pitted against us (feared and resented) is out of the question;
only love can draw us, first toward, and then into, another.
Only when the demandingness of separative existence (the
tanha-craving of body and mind) has fallen away, leaving us
identified with the region of self that loves its matrix and
knows its love to be reciprocated-only selves that are living
at this barely separate level can think of taking the final step
20. He is not a symbol. Or to speak precisely, only with respect to the
plane above him does he serve as symbol. Viewed in relation to God's
infinite mode his personal mode does poiilt beyond itself. On its own
plane, the celestial, it exists without qualification, and we must remember
that the reality of that plane vastly exceeds our own. On our own plane the
representations we attempt of God have inevitably a symbolic element inasmuch as they can never rise to be their object's equal, bnt this does not
keep them from being literally true in certain respects, as when they assert
that God exists and that the degree of his existence exceeds our own. Symbolism is the science of the relationship between different levels of reality
(Ghazali) and cannot be precisely understood without reference thereto.
21. Frithjof Schuon, The Language of the Self (Madras: Genesh & Co.,
1959), pp. 54-55.
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
87
of relinquishing their individuality entirely, if "thinking" has
any application in a state that is on the verge of simply dissolving into the Godhead. As long as the sense of separateness
continues, which is to say in some degree until death, the self
must love and worship the Other its life confronts, for to repeat, this is the only attitude (affective stance) that can counter
the alienation of separateness and cause it to diminish. To the
degree that a soul worships, it does not demand to be "I," and
so is not opposed in principle to the thought, should it arise,
that "I am not my finite self; I am the Atman." It is in this
way that an adoring soul is the only possible bridge to Spirit.
4. Spirit
If soul is the element in man that relates to God, Spirit is
the element that is identical with Him-not with his personal
mode, for on the celestial plane God and soul remain distinct,
but with God's mode that is infinite. Spirit is the Atman that
is Brahman, the aspect of man that is the Buddha-nature, the
element in man which, exceeding the soul's full panoply, is
that "something in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable"
(Eckhart). It is the true man in Lin Chi the Ch'an master's
assertion that "beyond the mass of reddish flesh is the true
man who has no title"; and the basis for the most famous of
Sufi claims: Mansur al-Hallaj's assertion, "ana'l-Haqq, I am
the Absolute Truth, or the True Reality."
~·
We speak of identity, and this is right, for on this final
stratum the subject-object dichotomy is transcended. Still,
man's finitude remains, which means that the identity must
not be read simplistically. Spirit is Infinite, but man is finite
because he is not Spirit only. His specifically human overlaybody, mind, and soul-veils the Spirit within him. As the Jains
say, a lamp's flame may be bright, but let its chimney be
coated with dust or soot and the lamplight will be dim. Spirit's
presence in man does not render him omnipotent or omniscient, nor relieve him of limitations that dog even the greatest
88 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
saints: "Why callest me good? there is none good but one,
that is, God" (Matt. 19: 17). But though it does not render
man omnipotent, Spirit do(!s, as we might put the matter,
remove his impotence.22 It does so by providing him with a
vantage point from which he can see that his station requires
the limitations his humanity imposes. By itself that realization
would produce only resignation, but the something in man
that enables him to see that he must be limited also does the
limiting, if we may use this perhaps curious way of registering
the fact that the Infinite cannot tolerate a second of its kind:
some things are obvious. Spirit decrees that body, being
corporeal, must naturally be limited. Man accepts that decree
for his physical component; for his mind and soul as well, in
their respective ways. Meanwhile his Spirit remains free, it
being the sovereign that imposes the decree rather than the
prisoner who submits to it.
The shifting of the ballast of man's self-recognition from
servant to Sovereign proceeds by stages. Following a Sufi
formulation, we may distinguish between the Lore of Certainty, the Eye of Certainty, and the Truth of Certainty, the
first being likened to hearing about fire, the second to seeing
fire, and the third to being burned by fire. Spirit is the bedrock of our lifestream, but the waters that course over it are
for the most part too roiled to allow the bed to be seen. Where
the banks widen and the current slows, however, sediment settles and we glimpse our support. Always in this life some water
intervenes to veil, but at the moment the point is the opposite
one. Not only is the bed there throughout; it is truly the bed
that we see even when we see it obscurely. Man is Spirit while
not Spirit unalloyed.
Back now to Lin Chi's "true man who has no title" residing
22. "When my life opens up very clearly, I can't help, from the depths of
my heart, wanting to bow. When the mind that wants to bow to enemies
and friends and demons and gods and evils and Buddhas and good friends
and bad people-when this feeling comes tumbling out of my deep life,
then I am already master of the whole world, I control the entire world, I
become friends with all human and other beings." Hara Akegarasu, "0
New Year!" Zen Notes, XXII, I Uan. 1975), 3 (italics added).
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
89
beyond the mass of reddish flesh. He has no title-is not man
or woman, young or old, rich or poor-because as we spelled
out at some length in the preceding chapter, the Infinite
which Spirit overlaps defies positive characterization. Since
"Spirit" and "Infinite" are, like "Atman" and "Brahman,"
but two words for a single reality, we summarize what was said
about it under the caption "The Infinite." Though it is
possible to intuit it directly, we can think of it only by invoking a double negative. Peripherally Spirit is without boundaries; internally it is without barriers. It knows neither walls
that encompass nor walls that divide.
Between thought (which proceeds indirectly through concepts) and intuition (which directly identifies) lies a middle
ground. We scarcely know what to call it. Symbolism? Art in
its sacred sector? It uses the stones of earth to raise on its flatlands spires that point toward heaven. This middle mode of
concourse plays while logic works. It is unquestionably alert,
while being in some respects passive to the point of dissociation, for to shift gears an engine must disengage and pass
through neutral. Playing with the second of the above stipulations about spirit-its indifference to internal divisions--we
note first that it is possible for nondifferentiation to climb to
the point where the world's divisions vanish completely. Ramakrishna reports his experience of this condition as follows:
Suddenly the blessed Mother revealed Herself. The buildings
with their different parts, the temple, and everything else vanished
from my sight, leaving no trace whatsoever, and in their stead I
saw a limitless, infinite effulgent Ocean of Consciousness. As far
as the eye could see, the shining billows were madly rushing at me
from all sides with a terriffic noise, to swallow me up! What was
happening in the outside world I did not know; but within me
there was a steady flow of undiluted bliss.23
But though corporeal distinctions can be thus erased, the
instances in which they are erased constitute an exceptional
23. Nikhilananda, Ramakrishna: Prophet of New India (New York:
Harper and Brothen, 1948), pp. 9-10.
90 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
class. Normally distinctions remain but are softened. Or they
remain precise while changing from barriers to bridges.
"I," table, flower, fragrance, the chirping of birds, are all undeniably present, but being in reality nonexistent they do not
present themselves as solid, self-subsistent entities. They are transparent and permeable. Reflecting each other, interpenetrating each
other, and dissolving themselves into each other, they form an
integral whole which is nothing other than the direct appearance
of the primary level of Reality. In this sense, sensible perception,
wherein distinctions loom so large, is reduced almost to nullity. It
loses its functional basis, it does not work properly, in the presence
of the trans-subjective and trans-objective awareness of the interfusion of all things where "gnat," instead of presenting itself as an
independent external entity, means rather its identification with
Being and all other things so that they end up by being fused
into one.24
In and through the body and ahamkara (ego sense) of every
human being Lin Chi's man with no title is untiringly alive.
He is not the personal God; he is the all-embracing Infinite.
He is the actor who has internalized the play so completely
that he identifies more with it than with his role in it: he will
make the audience despise him if the play requires that he d~
so. We can generalize this image. Every figure presupposes a
ground against which it is seen or thought. But since in the
final analysis the individual could not exist without its ground
or be conceived without presupposing it, the two are-in last
analysis, we repeat-inseparable. In a way that is absolutely
crucial, a thing's ground is an aspect of the thing itself. Seen
with the "eye of the heart," the organ of spiritual vision, this
body of flesh and blood which in corporeal respects is frail
as foam, fleeting as dew, is at the same time, in this very
moment and on this very spot, the infinite and eternal Life
instancing itself in this particular respect. Normally, as we
have noted, the perception does not involve the total dissolution of finitude in the ocean of Godhead. Rather it is the
24. Adapted from, the writings of Toshihiko Izutsu.
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD /
91
experience of finitude as infinity, or temporality as eternity, the
opposites blended in ineffable yet palpable whole. It is as if
an iceberg were suddenly to realize that it is H 2 0. 2 5
The fact that the notion of the Infinite appeals to us is itself
evidence of Spirit's reality, for metaphysical arguments would
never convince were there not within us a trace of that which
they set out to communicate-if the certainty they seek to
awaken were not already sleeping in the substance of our
souls. At the same time we resist the notion, for it requires
that we shift our identification from the parts of our being
that press palpably upon us. The writing of this chapter
happened to span a Christmas in which there was a two-yearold in the house, and it became evident again how strong the
ahamkara or ego sense is ingrained within us. One had remembered from one's own children the insatiability of the ego's
wants: the Christmases when what counted was not what the
presents were but their quantity, with the inevitable tears
when the number proved finite. It took a grandchild, however,
to revive the memory of an earlier stage when the life task was
to firm up the sense of selfhood itself. At this state not even
numbers mattered as much as who the numbers were for.
Before each present was opened, it was imperative that it
be paraded and acknowledgment secured from each person
assembled that "This is my present. This present is mine!"
The sands of the Sahara, and a grain pops up to announce:
I exist!
Once personal identity is established the issue shifts to what
~-
25. The image of ice and water "is all the truer in that the frozen
crystalisation appears to be far more substantial than unfrozen water; and
yet when a large piece of ice melts the result is a surprisingly small quantity
of water. Analogously the lower worlds [the terrestrial and intermediate
planes], for all their seeming reality, depend for their existence upon a
relatively unample Presence compared with that which confers on the
Paradises [the celestial plane] their everlasting bliss; yet here again, everlastingness is not Eternity, nor are the joys of these Paradises more than
shadows of the Absolute Beatitude of the Supreme Paradise fthe Infinite]."
Martin Lings, What Is Sufism? (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1975), pp. 70-71.
92 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
that identity is to be attached to. An eighth birthday and the
boy was happy until he went to bed and the light was out.
Then, in the aloneness of the dark, time paid him its first visit,
whispering that he would never be seven again. And the
prospect was intolerable. Since seven was what the boy sensed
himself to be, the day that had just ended being insufficient to
offset his identification with the plans and projects of the days
and weeks that had preceded it, time's notice fell as death
warrant. The death of himself-as-seven was the death of him,
the only "him" that at the time was in view. He jumped from
his bed and ran to his parents sobbing, "Take the presents
back; I don't want them. I just want to be seven."
We smile at the boy's naivete, but we know what he meant.
For with the exception of those supernatural moments when
reality breaks through the carapace of time like lightning and
reveals the landscape in which we are infinite, every human
has his age seven, his less than total self~ with which he
myopically identifies. The referent is elastic. An addict while
his tissues scream knows himself as little more than a demanding body. At the other end of the spectrum are the times
when one's cup runs over to the point where it would be easy
to lay down one's life if the need arose. But almost invariabh
there is some point where selfhood is sensed to end and the
not-self begin. This not-self, too, can be variously viewed: it
can appear as a predominantly hostile world of alien objects
and circumstances that kick and buffet, or as everlasting arms
from whose embrace it is impossible to fall. One must come
to the point where they are seen as the latter before one can
take the final step in self-abandonment and identify with one's
surround, which is why the preceding section asserted that the
door that leads from soul to spirit is the door of love: love of
Being-as-a-whole or of the God who is its Lord. For Spirit to
permeate the self's entirety, the components of the self must
be aligned: body in temperance, mind in understanding
(Gautama's Right Views), and soul in love. But the immediate
point is that even when the environment is seen to be benign,
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD
I 93
as long as it presents itself as distinct and other there will be
imponderables which must be written off to God's inscrutable
ways. The only alternative is to remove the dichotomy itself.
The removal is effected by perceiving the "other" as one's
destiny. As we despair of equaling a formulation of this point
that has come our way, we quote it at some length.
There is no radical distinction to be made between what a man
is given in the way of mind, emotional make-up and body on the
one hand and, on the other, what he is given in the way of outward circumstances and environment. Together they form a
significant whole and all are aspects of a particular individual life.
The being between birth and death scrawls-in matter and in
events-a pattern which, taken as a whole, expresses his unique
identity. This man, So-and-So, is not a sealed personality moving
through an alien environment. He is the sum total of all that he
does and all that happens to him and all that comes within his
range, spread out (from our point of view) in time and space, but
a single, timeless fact in the mind of God. What we are and where
we are cannot ultimately be divided. And to accept our destiny is
to accept ourselves, recognizing that what happens to us is as much
a part of our nature-in the widest sense-as the most intimate
contours of our own selfhood. It is sometimes said that the fatal
bullet has its victim's name upon it and fits no other Hesh.
In the last resort, a man looks at the love or anger or fear within
himself and says, So this is me. Looks at his withered hand or
wounded foot and says, So this is me. Looks at the woman he~_has
married or the garden he has planted and says, So this is me. Looks
finally upon his enemy and upon his death and says, So this is me.
But in saying this he bears witness to the fact that he is also incomparably more than an itemised list of the elements that make
up his individuality and its inseparable field of action.
And in acknowledging so much that is a part of ourselves (since
our boundaries extend to the furthest horizons we can see from our
particular vantage point) we make an act of recognition which
actualises what was inherent in us from the start-almost as though
we existed only to discover what was always there-recognising
our name-tag on everything that comes our way. But the part of
94 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
us that is our destiny, streaming in upon us in the form of "outside" events through the course of time, can be recognised as
belonging to our owh partic1tlar pattern only when it has happened. The religious man can say, "Thy will be done!" as a statement of his intention to accept this will when it has been done and
is apparent to him, but it is not our nature to be able to foresee
the future except under the most unusual circumstances. In general, acceptance of destiny is acceptance of what has happened, not
of what might happen (but might be prevented):2a
Assuming that the acceptance in question is in the mode of
affirmation and not solely resignation, acceptance of one's
destiny as part of one's selfhood is an aspect of that love of
being or God that opens us to the Infinite. But enough: the
point has been made or it will not be made here. We close
the chapter with a Sufi tale, "The Tale of the Sands," that
epitomizes what this section has tried to say.
A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through
every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the sands
of the desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream
tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it ran into the
sand, its waters disappeared.
It was convinced, however, that its destiny was to cross this
desert, and yet there was no way. Now a hidden voice, coming from
the desert itself, whispered: 'The Wind crosses the desert, and so
can the stream.'
The stream objected that it was dashing itself against the sand,
and only getting absorbed: that the wind could fly, and this was
why it could cross a desert.
'By hurtling in your own accustome<! way you cannot get across.
You will either disappear or become a marsh. You must allow the
wind to carry you over, to your destination.'
But how could this happen? 'By allowing yourself to be absorbed
in the wind.'
This idea was not acceptable to the stream. After all, it had
never been absorbed before. It did not want to lose its individuality.
26. Gai Eaton, "Man as Viceroy," Studies in Comparative Religion,
Autumn 1973, pp. 2'9-40.
THE LEVELS OF SELFHOOD
I 95
And, once having lost it, how was one to know that it could ever be
regained?
'The wind,' said the sand, 'performs this function. It takes up
water, carries it over the desert, and then lets it fall again. Falling
as rain, the water again becomes a river.'
'How can I know that this is true?'
'It is so, and if you do not believe it, you cannot become more
than a quagmire, and even that could take many, many years; and
it certainly is not the same as a stream.'
'But can I not remain the same stream that I am today?'
'You cannot in either case remain so,' the whisper said. 'Your
essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are
called what you are even today because you do not know which
part of you is the essential one.'
When he heard this, certain echoes began to arise in the thoughts
of the stream. Dimly, he remembered a state in which he-or some
part of him, was it?-had been held in the arms of a wind. He also
remembered-or did he?-that this was the real thing, not necessarily the obvious thing, to do.
And the stream raised his vapour into the welcoming arms of
the wind, which gently and easily bore it upwards and along, letting it fall softly' as soon as they reached the roof of a mountain,
many, many miles away. And because he had had his doubts, the
stream was able to remember and record more strongly in his mind
the details of the experience. He reflected, 'Yes, now I have learned
my true identity.'
The stream was learning. But the sands whispered: 'We know,
because we see it happen day after day: and because we, the sands,
extend from the riverside all the way to the mountain.'
And that is why it is said that the way in which the Stream of
Life is to continue on its journey is written in the Sands.27
27. Idres Shah, Tales of the Deroishes (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970),
pp. 23--24.
All sacred things must have their place.
ABORIGINE SAYIN··
5. THE PlAcE of SciENCE
The modern West is the first society to view the physical
world as a closed system. It is customary for those who protest
this view to do so by parading the dire consequences that it
has occasioned, but this will not be our tack-not, we hasten
to say, because we think that it is mistaken but because we
do not know if it is or not. In principle every charge that can
be made against modernity-and by now who does not know
them by heart?-can be matched by an equal indictment of
antiquity: Hitler by Attila, Auschwitz by Egypt's burial of
live slaves with their pharaohs, and Rome's use of Christians
for human torches. Who can not see the Nazi in all history?
To cut through the balance of charge and countercharge
requires instinct, an intuitive sense of how it has felt to live
in alternative societies, and this sense we confess we lack.
True, a logical point announces itself now and again, asking
if the prospect of an infinite and eternal beatitude which the
traditional perspective held out to man would not have exercised on balance a leavening influence, but this is the note of
a distant horn, too faint to be heard in argument. Our
objection to regarding the physical world as a closed system is
not that the view is unfortunate but that it is untrue. To ask
whether to believe what is untrue can in the long run be
fortunate is again to turn thought toward pragmatic waters,
and we refuse to be diverted.
This book opened by saying that it was modern science that
reduced the West's view of reality to its material stratumnot science itself, but an unwarranted conclusion that its
96
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE /
97
spectacular success engendered: the conclusion that no strata
other than the one science connects with exist. It is now time
to turn the tables and ask if, once it is relieved of this unwarranted appendage, science does not stand in supporting
relation to the traditional outlook. The most interesting version of the question is: Can science itself remain housed in
being's basement? but since this version must be answered
by scientists themselves, we content ourselves with a weaker
variant. Not, Does science require transphysical domains? but
rather, Does it hint of their existence? will be the question
for us here.
The point is this: Science, like most things, has two sides.
If one takes what turns up on its viewfinder as exhaustive of
reality, the consequence (as we have seen) is scientism and the
materialism it argues. If, on the ·Other hand, one begins by
realizing what Chapter 1 argued is now almost a closed case,
namely that the viewfinder is in principle limited, one then
looks at science for clues as to the nature of what lies outside
it. Clues are not proofs, of course, bu~ they are something, and
to follow their lead is the present chapter's object. If "a symbol
is something in a lower 'known and wonted' domain which
the traveller considers not only for its own sake but also and
above all in order to have an intuitive glimpse of the 'universal and strange' reality which corresponds to it in each of the
hidden higher domains," 1 anything, as we have noted more
than once, can qualify. Even science. If Allah "has not disdained to use even the gnat as symbol" (Koran), ther.e is
nothing unlikely in the notion that man's brightest intellectual
exploit may likewise house meanings beyond those it wears
on its sleeve.
What are these meanings as they bear on the human spirit?
They show themselves in a series of parallels between science
and religion. Both claim that: (1) Things are not as they seem;
(2) the other-than-the-seeming is a "more"; indeed, a stupen1. Abu Bakr Siraj Ed-Din, The Book of Certainty (New York: Samuel
Weiser Inc., 1970), pp. 50-51.
98 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
dous more; (3) this more cannot be known in ordinary ways;
(4) it can, however, be known in ways appropriate to it; (5)
these appropriate ways require cultivation; (6) and they
require instruments. We proceed, now, to detail these parallels.
1. Things Are Not As They Seem
One of the upshots of modern science has taken the form
of an expose: it has unmasked the claims of man's sense
receptors to disclose the world as it actually is. My senses tell
me that the desk I am leaning on is solid. Not so, says science;
if I could shrink to the size of an electron I would see that it
is mostly empty: the ratio of matter to space in it is on the
order of a baseball in a ballpark. Or my senses tell me that the
desk is static. Wrong again, says physics; it is a hive of activity
with electrons circling their nuclei a million billion times a
second, or (in undulatory terms) with electrons vibrating
more times each second than the number of seconds that have
elapsed since the earth's crust was formed. The desk is compacted power-closer to pure energy than to the lifeless block
my hands and eyes report. These are, of course, but samples.
Wherever we turn, our senses bounce back fictions. It is not
just that they do not inform us of nature's mien; they are
expressly devised not to inform us. Had they presented us with
the way things are we could not have survived. If we perceived
atoms or quanta instead of cars we would be run over. Had our
ancestors seen electrons instead of bears they would have been
eaten.
We now swing into this chapter's central exercise: to place
beside each of the points about science that we list its counterpart in the traditional (as opposed to modern), religious (as
opposed to secular), or humanistic (as opposed to scientistic)
outlook; in this book the three adjectives are largely synonymous. Anticipating physics' discovery that our senses deceive
is the traditional claim that our sensibilities mislead. No more
than man's unaided senses disclose the nature of the physical
universe do his' standard sensibilities discern the world's
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE /
99
import: the meaning of life, history, or existence in general.
"Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard ... the things which God
hath prepared" (I Cor. 2:9). To which C. S. Lewis adds:
Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about
something behind the world we can touch and hear and see. You
may think the claim false; but if it were true, what it tells us would
be bound to be difficult-at least as difficult as modem physics, and
for the same reason.2
Sufi tales almost invariably turn on a double reading of
events; at a decisive turn in the story the ordinary perception
of what has transpired is countered by an alternative that spins
the situation around and shows it in a light that is diametrically opposite to the one that had prevailed. It is the "fool"
who turns out to have been wise; the trinket, bought for a
song and soon discarded, is in fact made of pure gold; the
man who is ignored because he is dressed in rags is the king
in disguise. You never know! The Indian doctrine of maya
generalizes the point. The life that we see is a tissue of misreadings. He "saw life steadily and saw it whole," wrote
Matthew Arnold of Sophocles. To a degree, perhaps, but who
really attains this height? In exactly the way that our eyes are
blind to all but the limited band of lightwaves they are tuned
to, our hearts disregard events that lie outside their own selfinterest. Moreover, the fashioned worlds that we do see and
feel are governed by laws of perspective: objects close at hand
seem bigger than those that are distant, and events of- the
moment more important than those of tomorrow. "So teach
us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto
wisdom" (Ps. 90: 12). What a curious prayer-that we be
taught that we must die! Who doesn't know that? we say,
until on reflection we realize that no one knows it, not in a
way that enables him to live each day as if it were his last. 8
2. Condensed from The Problem of Pain (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1943).
3. "Of all the world's wonders, which is the most wonderful?"
"That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that
he himself will die" (Mahabharata).
100 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
Monks keep skulls on their tables to help them remember.
Maya derives from the root ma, "to measure, build, or
form"; it is cognate to "magic," the production, whether by
supernatural means or by mere camouflage, of an appearance
that is in some way deceptive. When the Indians say the world
is maya and we translate the word as illusion we should not
take this to mean that the world does not exist at all, in any
way or form. There is indeed a moon-larger-than-the-polestar,
namely the one we see; we err only if we credit our perception
with more objectivity than it deserves. Maya signals not that
the world is unreal but that the way it presents itself to us is
tricky. The carpet it unrolls before our feet and invites us
onto is a magic carpet: it is enchanted-its fabric is in important part a fabrication. Maya is caveat, a warning, a call
to alertness lest we be duped by the spell the world casts over
us, whence the Buddha's insistence on "right mindfulness" and
Islam's on dhikr or remembrance. "Life is the passage of an
individual dream, a consciousness, an ego through a cosmic
and collective dream. Death withdraws the particular dream
from the general dream and tears out the roots which the
former has sent down into the latter. The universe is a dream
woven of dreams: the Self alone is awake." 4
2. The Other-Than-the-Seeming Is a "More''; Indeed,
a Stupendous MO'I'e
Science and tradition agree, we see, in insisting that the
way things really are is radically different from the way they
seem. They also agree in claiming- that this "other" than
the way things appear lies in the direction of more rather
than ·less. It outstrips anything everyday experience might
suspect.
As science is essentially the domain of the quantifiable, the
more that it has brought to light is registered primarily in
4. Frithjof Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts (London:
Perennial Books, 1969), p. 169.
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE /
101
numbers. 5 We noted in the opening chapter of this book that
it takes light from the closest sizable galaxy more than 2
million light-years to reach us, and the galaxies in the universe number in the billions. If we look in the opposite direction the figures are equally incomprehensible. Avogadro's
number tells us that the molecules in 4! drams of water
(roughly half an ounce) number 6.023 X 1()23-roughly 600,000 billion billion.
To this more in the world's size that science reports tradition
juxtaposes a qualitative more-than-we-normally-suppose. "I
consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth
comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us," Paul
wrote to the Romans (8: 18), while Gregory of Nyssa put the
matter as follows:
You are made in the likeness of that nature which surpasses all
understanding. . . . Nothing in all creation can equal your
grandeur.... If you realize this you will no longer marvel even at
the heavens .... For the heavens pass away, but you will abide for
all eternity with him who is forever.
The heading of this section suggested that the "more" to
which science and tradition point, each in its own way, is not
only more but stupendously more. The items that have been
cited may already have made this case, but for the sake of the
record it should be noted that they are only a beginning.
Already by midcentury Fred Hoyle could say for science that
"no literary imagination could have invented a story .,.onehundredth part as fantastic as the sober facts that have be~n
unearthed," 6 yet the quarter-century that has intervened has
5. Primarily but not exclusively. Along with its quantitative revelations
science has discovered nature's elegance, too, to be beyond what had been
supposed. "If there is one important result that comes out of our inquiry
into the nature of the Universe it is this: when by patient inquiry we learn
the answer to any problem, we always find, both as a whole and in detail,
that the answer thus revealed is finer in concept and design than anything
we could ever have arrived at by a random guess." Fred Hoyle, The Nature
of the Universe (New York: New American Library, 1950), p. 128.
6. Ibid., p. 120.
102 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
dwarfed even his purview. While microphysics probes for
quarks that make the subatomic powers we have thus far
named look immense, things I 00 billion billion times smaller
than the electron,7 John Wheeler tells us that the entire
universe we know-13 billion years old, 26 billion light-years
across, filled with galaxies that too are now estimated to be in
the billions-is but one of who knows how many likely trajectories of universes across a gigantic platform of superspace
whose dimensions are not three or four but infinite. As for
levels, though to enter even a single level of smallness beyond
the one that is now being explored would require that we
build an accelerator roughly the size of our planet, David
Bohm thinks that the total number of levels in nature probably equals Wheeler's dimensions. They too are infinite. 8
Quality cannot be precisely quantified, but it is interesting
to note that when tradition uses numbers to suggest qualitative
degrees it gives the astronomers a run for their money.
Shankara gives us a notion of the extravagance of his vision
of the summum bonum when he says that it "cannot be obtained except through the merits of 100 billion well-lived
incarnations." 9 The Taittiriya Upanishad goes into the matter
in greater detail.
Let there be a noble young man who is well read [in the Vedas],
very swift, firm, and strong, and let the whole world be full of
wealth for him-that is one measure of human bliss.
One hundred times that human bliss is one measure of the bliss
of human gandharvas [demigods, the musicians of heaven], and
7. We now know that it was naive to think that a "vacuum" is empty; it
is populated, but by things that are utterly-small. By the well-founded
law that the shorter the wavelength the larger the energy that is compressed
into it, we arrive at the conclusion that "in a thimbleful of vacuum there
is more ... energy than would be released by all the atomic bomb fuel in
the universe." Quoted in Harold Schilling, The New Consciousness in
Science and Religion (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1973), p. 110.
8. The infinities of science are such, of course, only with respect to the
categories in question, none of which comes close to being unlimited in all
respects. Strictly speaking, there is only one Infinite, but that point is not
at issue here.
9. Crest-jewel of Discrimination (New York: New American Library,
1970), p. 35.
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE /
103
likewise of a great sage learned in the Vedas and free from desires.
One hundred times that bliss of the divine gandharvas is one
measure of the bliss of the Fathers, enjoying their celestial life....
One hundred times that bliss of the Fathers is one measure of
the bliss of the devas [demigods] who· are endowed with heavenly
bodies through the merit of their lawful duties ....
One hundred times that bliss of the devas is one measure of the
bliss of the devas who are endowed with heavenly bodies through
the merit ef the Vedic sacrifices....
One hundred times that bliss of the sacrificial gods is one
measure of the bliss of the thirty-three devas who live on the
sacrificial offerings. . . .
One hundred times that bliss of the thirty-three devas is one
measure of the bliss of Indra. . . .
One hundred times that bliss of Indra is one measure of the bliss
of Brihaspati. ...
One hundred times that bliss of Brihaspati is one measure of
the bliss of Prajapati. ...
One hundred times that bliss of Prajapati is one measure of the
Bliss of Brahman [II. viii. 1-4],
for a total of one-followed-by-twenty-zeros times the bliss of
the happiest worlding: 10 19 •1 0 As Atman, this supernal bliss
resides obscured in each one of us. Typically, however, India
does not bother with such number games, but moves right to
the point. Like Wheeler's dimensions and Bohm's levels, Brahman's ananda (bliss) is infinite.
J. In Their Further Reaches the World's "MOTet'
Cannot Be Known in Ordinary Ways
What science shows, a physicist has recently observed, is that
our view of things has no chance of being true unless it is
10. Cf. Chapter 11 of The Diamond Sutra: If galaxies equal in number
to the square of the number of grains of sand in the Ganges River were to
be filled with gold, silver, lapis-lazuli, crystal, agate, red pearls, and comelian, the treasure thus amassed would be less by far than that derivable
from four lines of The Diamond Sutra. Condensed from Buddhist Wisdom
Books, trans. by Edward Conze (London: George Allen&: Unwin Ltd., 1958),
p. 49.
104 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
astonishing. But astonishment admits of degrees. With the
exception of a footnote, the astonishing aspects of science we
have thus far noted pertain to size and number. These already
border on the incomprehensible-who can concretely imagine
billions of billions?-but in the sequence of science's surrealistic uncoverings they are only the start. There comes a
point where the nature science tracks turns a corner our minds
cannot maneuver, leaving us, at that point, not astonished but
astounded.
We have been treating science as basically the domain of
the quantifiable and shall continue to do so-mathematics, we
repeat, is its natural language-but this need not blind us to
qualitative differences that do appear within it. The examples
of these that are usually cited-the so-called secondary qualities of color, temperature, solidity jliquefaction, and the like
that characterize the meso- but not the micro-world-are
not the interesting ones here, for the way science deals with
these continues to be spatia-temporal-quantitative. More interesting is the qualitative change that at a given point comes
over science's epistemology, its knowing process.
The shift occurs when the physicist comes upon the very
large and fast in nature, or conversely the very small; the
former has spawned relativity theory, while the latter has
required the invention of a new kind of mechanics especially
designed for it, namely, quantum mechanics. Though these
disciplines are occupied with opposite ends of the size continuum, they are partners in having worked man into a new
epistemological situation.
It is customary to describe this sit_uation by saying that
nature in these reaches is "counterintuitive," meaning that it
disregards and violates-transcends-the categories of space
and time as we intuit them.
As human beings we live, as we have seen, in a middle
kingdom; a meso-kingdom flanked by a micro-kingdom within
and a macro-kingdom without. That our senses detect the mesokingdom only-this too has been noted. The point now to be
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE /
105
added is that the registers of nature that flank the one we
directly encounter differ from ours not only in degree but in
kind. On these outer registers nature behaves in ways that
are passing strange. They are foreign to the point of being
not merely unorthodox but downright scandalous. Put together two facts-(1) the fact that nature at its edges performs
in ways that differ in kind from the way it meets our senses,
and (2) the fact that our imaginations have nothing to ·build
with save the building blocks our senses provide-and we
arrive at the point the phrase "counterintuitive" was coined to
make. In its further reaches the physical universe dons forms
and functions we cannot visualize, in imagination any more
than with the eyes in our heads. There is no way in which we
can image them.
Light is the standard example, though actually the point
concerns all matter. Is light wave or particle? Certain experiments show it to behave like one, others like the other. But
waves and particles are different kinds of things. A particle is
an entity like a stone; waves are like the ripples that spread
from the stone's being dropped into a lake. To describe waves
requires introducing the notion of movement (changes over
periods of time)--otherwise we have only static ridgeswhereas a stone can be described nontemporally. As we cannot
visualize something that is simultaneously both rock and
ripple, we would like to know which light really is. Hubris,
the physicist snorts; must one know everything? If there is a
something underlying wave and particle which light Teally
is, it is a something for which our senses provide no analogue
and which we can therefore never hope to image concretely.
So with virtually everything in nature's recesses. In those
never-never, through-the-looking-glass abodes, parallel lines
meet, curves get you from star to star more quickly than do
Euclid's straight lines, a particle will pass through alternative
apertures simultaneously· without dividing, time shrinks and
expands, electrons (taking their cue from St. Thomas's angels
who simply will themselves into different locations and find
106 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
themselves there) jump orbit without traversing the intervening distance, and particles fired in opposite directions, each at
a speed approximating that of light, separate from each other
no faster than the speed of light.
The normal reaction to a first exposure to relativity is: "I think
I understand it; I just don't believe it." Normally it takes a physicist about five years of contact with the ideas before he feels comfortable with them-not because they are complex or obscure, but
just terribly strange.
The rule of the game is to accept the consequences of the postulate no matter how weird. We must never ask how they can be so;
we accept that they must be so, and see if any of the strange things
they imply actually contradict our experience. The reader is implored to have faith, in the hope that all will turn out self-consistent in the end.ll
One might put the matter this way: If modern science
showed that our senses are false witnesses, postmodern science
is showing that the human imagination is comparably defective.12 It simply was not devised to reflect nature's total gamut.
For to repeat, imagination has no alternative but to build its
scenarios out of the photographic frames our senses provide,
which frames draw from only a tiny band in matter's varied
continuum. It was this that provoked Haldane's famous "mutterance" that "the universe is not only queerer than we
suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." David Finkelstein's sequel is that respecting nature "we haven't the capacity
to imagine anything crazy enough to stand a chance of being
right."
The limitations to which imagination is subject hold equally
11. Robert March, Physics for Poets (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970),
p. 128.
12. "Contemporary physics [spells] the end of all hopes of interpreting
the ... elements ... of physical reality in sensory (visual-tactual) tenns.
Human imagination is clearly incompetent to provide the material from
which a satisfactory model of matter ·can be built. . . . The possibility
of . . . pictorial . . . models of the transphenomenal level [is] forever
excluded." Mili~ Capek, Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics
(Princeton: D. van Nostrand Co., 1961), pp. 398-99.
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE /
107
for language, for one step removed, it too derives from our
sensed and workaday world. The distortions that result from
trying to force nature into pictures of it~£ a kind with those
that occur when we try to chart our three-dimensional world
on a two-dimensional Mercator map: Greenland always balloons absurdly-are mimed by the "howlers" that arise when
we try to describe its distant regions in everyday speech. The
polite word for the predicaments language leads to in these
areas is "paradox," but the unvarnished fact is contradiction.
"If we ask whether the electron's position changes with time,"
writes Robert Oppenheimer, "we must say 'No'; if we ask
whether the position of the electron remains the same, we
must say 'No'; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we
must say 'No'; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must say
'No.'"
On hearing a statement of this sort Fran~ois Mauriac shook
his head, remarking, "What this professor says is far more
incredible than what we poor Christians believe.'' Actually,
however, this is not so. We saw in the preceding section that
the value claims of the traditions fully equal science's numerical claims; they climax in ens perfectissimum, perfect being,
and perfection is the value equivalent of infinity. The parallelism continues as we now note that this value apex exceeds
imagery 13 and ordinary discourse fully as much as do
the data of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. The
philosophical equivalent of "counterintuitive" is "ineffable"
or "apophatic.'' At first, Dionysius the Areopagite tells u;; the
divine presence
is shown walking upon those heights of His holy places which are
perceived by the mind; [but] then It breaks forth, even from those
things that are beheld ... and plunges the true initiate into the
Darkness of Unknowing wherein he renounces all the apprehen13. "I do not admit at all that one who examines the realities by reasoning makes use of images," Plato observes in Phaedo (IOOA), having made
clear that by "realities" he means things that reside at the upper end
of the ontological continuum.
108 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
sions of his understanding and is wrapped in that which is wholly
intangible and invisible.14
Ruysbroeck concurs:
Enlightened men are . . . lifted above reason into a bare and
imageless vision wherein lies the eternal indrawing summons of the
Divine Unity; and with an imageless and bare understanding they
... reach the summit of their spirits. There, their bare understanding is drenched through by the Eternal Brightness.15
The more we try to comprehend Perfection or even the
heavens pictorially, the more credibility drains out of them,
leaving us with cardboard cutouts of pearly gates and streets
of gold, sloe-eyed houris or thousand-armed divinities. If,
perceiving this, we retreat from visualization to abstract depictions, we find that propositions serve us no better than they
did Oppenheimer. They land us in contradictions: "the wall
of the Paradise in which Thou, Lord, dwellest is built of contradictories."16 Notwithstanding the infinite difference between God and man, Christ is fully both. The persons of the
Trinity are completely distinct and completely fused; they are
fused but not confused, as the Creeds have it. Or the mystical
experience. "We shall find," writes W. T. Stace,
that paradoxicality is one of the common characteristics of all mysticism .... The assertion of this new kind of consciousness is completely paradoxical. One way of bringing out the paradox is to
point out that what we are left with here, when the contents of
consciousness are gone, is a kind of consciousness which has no
objects. It is not a consciousness of anything, yet it is still consciousness. . . . Another aspect of the paradox is that this pure
consciousness is simultaneously both positive and negative, something and nothing, a fullness and emptiness. It is pure peace,
beatitude, joy ... but ... it is quite correct to say also that when
14. The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, trans. by C. E. Rolt
(London: S.P.C.K., 1971), p. 194.
15. Quoted in W. T. Stace, The Teachings of the Mystics (New York: New
American Library, 1960), p. 62.
16. Nicholas of Cusa, De Visione Dei, Ch. IX, fin.
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE /
109
we empty out all objects and contents of the mind there is nothing
whatever left . ... The commonest metaphor for the positive side
is light and for the negative side darkness . . . . We must not say
that what we have here is a light in the darkness. For that would
be no paradox. The paradox is that the light is the darkness, and
the darkness is the light.17
If we should like to tighten to identity the similarity between
such statements and Oppenheimer's, we can do so easily. "The
depths of the Holy Spirit," the Philokalia tells us, "are not as
the depths of the sea; they are the living waters of eternal
life. The mind enters therein after relinquishing everything
visible and mental [discursive] and moves and turns motionlessly among those incomprehensible things." 18 "He h both at
rest and in motion, and yet is in neither state." 19
4. The "More~' That Cannot Be Known in Ordinary Ways
Do, However, Admit of Being Known in Ways That Are
Exceptional
From the point of view of ordinary language, the further
reaches of both nature and spirit lie in the domain of the inexpressible. Or to put it the other way, they can be voiced
only on pain of contradiction. It is as though, unable to say
green, we were forced to say that a l~af is both yellow and blue
while being neither.
But though the domains in question cannot be known by
way of imagery and consistent description, they can be kii"own
in ways that are tailored to their exceptional referents. The
epistemological device for discerning matter's farther reaches
is mathematics: nature can no longer be consistently imaged
or described in ordinary language, but it can be consistently
17. Teachings of the Mystics, pp. 16, 22-23.
18. E. Kad1oubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer, Writings from the Philokalia
on the Prayer of the Heart (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), p. 132 (italics
added).
19. Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names and The Mystical
TheolofJY, p. 143.
110 /
FORGOTTEN TRUTH
conceived through equations. 20 The comparably specialized
way of knowing reality's highest transcorporeal reaches is the
mystic vision.
The word "mystic" derives from the Greek root mu, meaning silent or mute-muo = "I shut my mouth"-and by
derivation unutterable, which is the respect in which the word
lends itself here. Called satori or kensho in the Ch'an (Zen)
tradition, the vision broke over Hui-neng while he listened to
a chanting of the Diamond Sutra, over Te-shan as he watched
his master blow out a candle flame, over Ling-yun as he saw a
blossom fall, over Hakuin on hearing a beat of his temple's
gong, and over Po-chang when his master twisted his nose.
Obviously the insight is not limited to Asia. The Lord appearing high and lifted up to Isaiah; the heavens opening to
Christ at his baptism; the universe turning into a bouquet of
flowers for Buddha beneath the bo tree; John reporting, "I
was in the isle that is caJled Patmos ... and ... I was in the
Spirit"; Saul struck blind on the Damascus road .... For St.
Augustine it was the voice of a child saying, "Take, read";
for St. Francis a voice that seemed to come from the crucifix.
It was while St. Ignatius sat by a stream and watched the
running water, and Jakob BOhme was gazing at a pewter dish,
that there came to each that news of another world which it
is always religion's business to convey.
The message is always the same. Upon analysis we find that
it consists of four components:
I. The first we have just been noting: the insight is ineffable. Emphatically it knows, but like higher mathematics,
what it knows is so little contiguous with ordinary knowing
that scarcely a hint of it cah be conveyed to the uninitiated.
On balance, therefore, we must say that it is incommunicable.
20. "Resolution ... of the particle-wave paradox ... was achieved ...
by the adoption of purely mathematical symbols (those of quantum
mechanics) and, in general, by eschewing pictorially suggestive concepts
wherever possible." Schilling, The New Consciousness in Science and Religion, pp. 78-79.
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE
I Ill
There are tribes along the Amazon that have no sugar. When
anthropologists tried to describe to them the meaning of the
word "sweet" the natives asked, "Is it like alligator meat?,.
Negotiation finally settled on human milk as the closest equivalent. We have already watched Dionysius call his quintessential kltowing "Unknowing." Because the "mysteries of
heavenly Truth lie hidden in the obscurity of the secret
Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their
darkness," he titles the opening chapter of his Mystical Theology, numinously, "The Divine Gloom."
2. The vision shows existence to be characterized by an
entirely unexpected unity. Here we come upon another strik~
ing parallel with science, for its advance scouts too report
things to be integrated beyond anticipation. Matter and energy
are one. Time and space are one, time being space's fourth
dimension. Space and gravity are one: the latter is simply
space's curvature. And in the end matter and its space-time
field are one: matter is "a local deformation of the spatiotemporal medium. More accurately, what was called a material
body is nothing but a center of this deformation." 21 On the
parallel track of the world's worth the mystic keeps step. He
sees earth joined to heaven and man fused with God. "Hear,
0 Israel; the Lord our God, the Lord is one"; one in a sense
that is all-embracing and all-reconciling. In the mystic vision
at-one-ment is not a state to be achieved but a condition to be
recognized, for God has united his divine essence with- our
inmost being. Tat tvan asi; That thou art. Atman is Brahman;
samsara, Nirvana.
3. The discovery naturally awakens joy.
4. But it must be immediately added that the joy is not
fortuitous. It is the logical consequence of the cause that
preceded it: the discovery of being's unity. The point is crucial,
for without it the mystic vision is demoted to mystical experience. The vision is, of course, an experience in the vacuous
21. Milit Capek, Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics, p. 266.
112 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
sense that everything that comes man's way can be included
in this loosest of all words. But by the same token, to call it
an experience is to say nothing unless the point of the word is
to stress its feeling tone. And this is precisely what must not
be done on pain of debasing the currency. Feeling is a sentiment. To approach the mystic primarily on his feeling side
is sentimental in the strict, pejorative sense toward which
stress on the feeling aspect of things inevitably slopes. The
mystic vision is not a feeling: it is a seeing, a knowing. We
could add that it is a knowing that involves being-the man
of God, says Eckhart, "is never rejoiced; he is joy itself"but it is enough if we stop here with the fact that it is a knowing. It is noetic. In the words of William James, its disclosures
afford "insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of
significance and importance." Miss this point and there is no
explanation for the fact that "they carry with them a curious
sense of authority for aftertime."22
5. The Distinctive Ways of Knowing Which the Exceptional
Regions of Reality Require Must Be Cultivated
Some regions of nature we experience directly, others we
do not. But even these hidden regions can get messages to us
in roundabout ways or we would not know that they exist.
Had there been no lodestones on our planet we might still
not know about magnetism, but lodestones do exist, and given
that fact someone eventually picked up their signal.
Scanning for such signals and tracking their import is a
demanding endeavor. It takes time to become a physicist today.
The facts that relativity accounts for can be memorized in a
few minutes, but years of study may not suffice to master the
theory that places these facts in context. The dedication in
science rivals that of saints and lovers; awakened it makes
asceticism easy and natural. Was it Rutherford who, asked how
22. The Varieties -of Religious Experience (New York: Collier Books,
1961), p. 300.
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE /
113
he discovered the composition of the radiation emitted by
radioactive substances, replied, "I don't think I thought about
another thing for seven years"?
At first glance it might seem that mystic knowing does not
presuppose this kind of discipline and training, for its theophanies can arrive unsought and unprepared for. A Zen master
has ventured that almost everyone at some time in his life
experiences at least a light kensho (illumination), and the
pages of Alcoholics Anonymous are replete with accounts of
dissolutes to whom Heaven opened when their hope was
gone. The difference between science and religion on this
count is real, but we must distinguish on the religious side
between individuals who experience flashes of insight and
others who stabilize these flashes and turn them into abiding
light. This stabilization need not require that the terrain
the light discloses remain in direct view; William James lists
transitoriness as a defining feature of the mystic state.23 It is
enough if the terrain is remembered, but the memory must be
operative rather than idle-between the two lies literally a
world of difference. Operatively remembered, the mystic's insight stabilizes to become his defining sense of reality. And
thereupon it takes command-this is the "curious sense of
authority for aftertime" that James found mystic insight to
exercise. But for the mystic's vision to become definitive, things
must be done-as many as the scientist must do in his arena.
There is no point in raising here the issue of works ':~rsus
grace, for though the emphasis can fall on one side or the
other, there is no quest that does not include them both. Even
in Zen it is grace that gives the student the determination to
sit; 24 even in Shin the supplicant must himself pronounce the
nambutsu.2 5 Everything is a gift, but nothing is free. "The wind
23. Ibid., p. 372. "Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except
in rare instances, half an hour, or at most an hour or two, seems to be the
limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day."
24. See Marco Pallis, "Is There Room for 'Grace' in Buddhism?" in Jacob
Needleman, ed., The Sword of Gnosis (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1974).
25. See Daisetz Suzuki, Collected Writings on Shin Buddhism (Kyoto:
Shinshu Otaniha, 1973).
114 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
of God's grace is always blowing," Vivekananda used to say,
"but you must raise your sail." "The knowledge of God cannot
be attained by seeking, but only those who seek it find it"
(Bayazid).
If the need for vigilance and endeavor (spiritual exercises)
cuts across the free-willjgrace divide, it likewise transcends the
question of whether the training proceeds within the world
or apart from it, in monasteries and deserts or through "the
yoga of everyday life." Asked whether the spiritual quest requires asceticism, a Buddhist replied, "With the demands the
world makes on us for patience, who needs contrived askesis?"
6. Profound Knowing Requires Instruments
Finally, in both science and religion frontier knowledge is
disclosed only through the use of instruments. With the unaided eye a small, faint smudge can be detected in the constellation of Orion, and doubtless an imposing cosmological theory
could be founded on this smudge. But no amount of theorizing, however ingenious, could ever tell us as much about the
galactic and extragalactic nebulae as can direct acquaintance
by means of a good telescope, camera, and spectroscope.
What are the mystic counterparts of such instruments? Basically they are two, one of which is corporate, the other private.
For collectivities-tribes, societies, civilizations, traditionsthe revealing instruments are the Revealed Texts, or, in nonliterate societies, the ordering myths that are impounded in
stories. If one is put off by literalistic depictions of an anthropomorphic God who dictates these texts, he might provisionally
think of the truths as welling up from the deepest unconscious
of spiritual paragons, for, as we have seen, in the last resort
Spirit (the divine in man) and the Infinite (the divine in its
transpersonal finality) are identical-man's deepest unconscious is the mountain at the bottom of the lake. In either case,
"in the beginning," that illo tempore of man's once-upon-atime, there came ~o the Moseses and Muhammads of humanity
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE /
115
the shruti (Truth that is heard) in comparison with which all
subsequent truth is smriti (truth that is remembered).
These revealed canons are the "Palomar telescopes" that disclose the heavens that declare God's glory, but in this, religion's
case, other more individual instruments are required as well.
There comes a point when the mystic's instrument cannot stop
with being external and must become-himself. All knowing
involves an adequation of something in the knower to its
object, but in the kind of knowing that is at issue here, this
epistemological something cannot be limited to the knower's
mind and senses. When Blake tells us that "if the doors of
perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as
it is, infinite," the doors in question involve the total self. "It
is a fact, confirmed and re-confirmed by two or three thousand
years of religious history," Aldous Huxley wrote, "that Ultimate Reality is not dearly and immediately apprehended except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart,
and poor in spirit." These are the tools for facilitating the
mystic's key perceptions that solve all riddles at a stroke and
define reality from that point on.
According to the Sufis, the verses of the Koran contain a
minimum of seven and a maximum of seventy hidden, symbolic
significances. By this reckoning we are one short, having listed
only six ways in which science serves as symbol, illuminating
through parallels man's spiritual thrust. Were we to add a
seventh, it would be this: Beginning with the corporeal plane
as its object, science comes at length on strata where the spaciotemporal-material matrices of that plane grow at first spongy
and then fade out entirely. A summary of the position of Paul
Dirac, the father of antimatter, on this point reads as follows:
All matter is created out of some imperceptible substratum and ...
the creation of matter leaves behind it a "hole" in this substratum
which appears as antimatter. Now, this substratum itself is not accurately described as material, since it uniformly fills all space and
is undetectable by any observation. In a sense, it appears as nothingness-immaterial, undetectable, and omnipresent. But it is a pe-
116 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
culiarly material form of nothingness, out of which all matter is
created.26
In parallel vein John Wheeler, father of superspace, the quintessence of relativity, writes:
A . . . drastic conclusion emerges out of quantum geometrodynamics and displays itself before our eyes in the machinery of
superspace: there is no such thing as spacetime in the real world of
quantum physics. ...
On this picture physics is a staircase. Each tread registers a law .
. . . Each riser marks the transcendence of that law.... The staircase climbs from step to step: density, and density found alterable;
valence law, and valence law melted away: conservation of net
baryon and net lepton number, and these conservation laws transcended; conservation of energy and angular momentum, and these
laws likewise overstepped; and then the top thread displaying all
the key constants and basic dynamic laws-but above a final riser
leading upward into nothingness. It bears a message: With the
collapse of the universe, the framework falls down for every law
of physics. There is no dynamic principle that does not require
space and time for its formulation; but space and time collapse;
and with their collapse every known dynamic principle collapses.27
Invoking the levels of reality that were outlined in Chapte~
3, we say that science here bumps the ceiling of the corporeal
plane. It can glimpse a land across the river, but its methods do
not enable it to enter that land. From the metaphysical point
of view its arms, lifted toward a zone of freedom that transcends coagulation, form the homing arc of the "love loop"
noted on page 84. They are science responding to Eternity's
love for the productions of time.
It is a far cry from antimatter and superspace to the mind of
an aborigine, yet it is conceivable that if the whole sweep of
science were to be spread before the latter he might see it in
26. Richard F. Plzak, Jr., "Paradox East and West," unpublished senior
dissertation, M.I.T., 1973, p. 54.
27. "From Relativity to Mutability," in Jagdish Mehra (ed.), The Physicist's Conception of Nature (Dordrecht-HollandjBoston-U .S.A.: D. Reidel
Publishing Compan't, 1973), pp. 227, 241.
THE PLACE OF SCIENCE
I 117
better perspective than we do. In the opening pages of The
Savage Mind, Levi-Strauss quotes a native thinker as making
a penetrating comment, the one we used as epigraph for this
chapter: "'All sacred things must have their place.' It could
even be said," Levi-Strauss continues,
that being in their place is what makes them sacred for if they
were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order
of the universe would be destroyed. Sacred objects therefore contribute to the maintenance of the order of the universe by occupying the places allocated to them.28
So it is with science. In place it is a grace. Cyril Smith reminds
us that metals and glass were invented for art and religion
rather than utility, but technology bestows utilitarian favors
as well, and science in addition to its intrinsic disclosures of
truth can inspire awe and serve as a symbol to confirm the
spirit's quest. 29 This last is the way we have tried to put it to
work in this chapter: if there are sermons in stones it is inconceivable that none exist in science; in Latin "laboratory"
(labor-oratory) means a place to work and pray. The converse
of the foregoing is that out of place, as angel that has fallen,
science turns demonic. It presumes to control too much and to
disclose more of reality than in fact it does. To approach existence as if it were purely or even primarily physical and mathematical is to falsify it. The approach could end in smashing
our planet, for if a hammer is the only tool one learns to use,
it is tempting to regard everything as if it were a nail. .,..
But we were not going to get involved in consequences.
28. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966, p. 10. Our language
retains the memory of this early insight. The sublime is what remains
within its limit-sub-limen.
29. Approaching physics from this angle, Fritjof Capra calls it "a path
with a heart." The Tao of Physics (Berkeley: Shambala, 1975), p. 25.
I no longer desired a better world, because I
was· thinking of creation as a whole: and in the
light of this more balanced discernment, I had
come to see that higher things are better than
the lower, but that the sum of all creation is
better than the higher things alone.
ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessions, VII, xiii, 19
I only pass on to others what [has been] passed
on to me. If there is any lack of learning in my
writing, any obscurity of expression or superficial
treatment, you may feel sure that it is in such
places that I am most original.
ST. BELLARMINE
6. HopE, YEs; PROGREss, No
Hope is indispensable to human health-to psychological
health most immediately, but because man is a psychosomatic
whole, to physical health as well. Situated as we are in the
Middle (hence middling) World, vicissitudes are a part of the
human -lot: external vicissitudes (hard times), and internal yicissitudes-the "gravitational collapse" of the psyche that sucks
us into depression as if it were a black hole. Against such vicissitudes hope is our prime recourse. Ascending a sheer-faced
cliff, a mountaineer can lodge his pick in an overhead crevice
and, chinning himself on it, advance. Hope is the psyche's
pick.
In the primordial outlook hope is -vertical, or at least transhistorical. "Vertical" here means that the fundamental change
that is hoped for is an ascent of the individual soul through a
medium-the world-which does not itself change substantially
but provides stable rungs on which the soul can climb. Or in
cases where the prospect is viewed collectively and in worldly
terms-as in the Kingdom of God that is to come "on earth,"
the coming age qf the Maitreya Buddha, or Islam's Day of ResliS
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO /
119
urrection-it is assumed that this Kingdom will differ in kind
from the history that preceded it and will be inaugurated by
God's direct if not apocalyptic intervention. In neither its individual nor its collective version is progress in the traditional
sense envisioned as sociopolitical, the gradual amelioration
of man's corporate lot through his collective efforts and ingenuity.
By contrast, the modern version of hope is emphatically historical. And its imagery is horizontal, for its eye is on an earthly
future instead of the heavens. In one sense all hope is futureoriented, but that of modernity is doubly so--for mankind as
a whole as well as for the individual. In fact, hope for individuals is for the most part tied to hope for history; it is on the
hope that human life as a whole can be improved that hope for
the individual primarily relies. If the traditional view rested
its case on the fact that in boiling water bubbles rise, the
modern view hopes to escalate the water itself.
What effected this Copernican revolution in the way hope
--or progress; the same thing-is conceived? Three agents.
The first was science. Around· the seventeenth century the
scientific method began garnering information at an exponential rate. True, its findings pertained to physical nature only,
but even so, the vista was breath-taking. Moreover, by virtue
of improvements that occurred in methods of experimentation,
the new understanding of nature could be proved to be true.
It seemed evident, therefore, that in this one respect at least,
corporate progress was being effected. Never again would ~an
kind be as naive as it has been regarding its habitat.
On the heels of this progress in pure understanding came
science's utilitarian spin-off, technology. It multiplied goods,
relieved drudgery, and counteracted disease. Since these are
not inconsiderable benefactions and, like the findings of pure
science, can be dispensed-bestowed on people, unlike character, say, which each individual must acquire for himself-it
again looked as if mankind as a whole was advancing. History
was getting somewhere.
120 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
These two causes for the rise of the vision of historical progress are well known. The third reason has been less noticed
because it is privative; it involved not the appearing but the
vanishing of something. Science and technology would not
have changed man's outlook a fraction as much as they .did
had they not been reinforced by scientism. Its epistemological
assumption that only the scientific method gives "news about
the universe" produced the ontological conclusion that corporeal reality is the only concrete and self-sufficient reality
there is; see Chapter I. In a single stroke the mansion of being
was reduced to its ground floor. The consequence for hope was
obvious: if being has no upper stories, hope has no vertical
prospect. If it is to go anywhere-and hope by definition implies a going of some sort-henceforth that "where" could only
be forward or horizontal. The extent to which the modern
doctrine of progress is the child, not of evidence as it would
like to believe, but of hope's elan-the fact that being indispensable it does spring eternal in the human breast and, in
the modern world view, has no direction to flow save forward
-is among the undernoted facts of intellectual history. If the
ratio between evidence and hope in the idea of historical progress were to be laid squarely before us, we would be humbled
in our estimate of ourselves as rational creatures.
As things stand, we do not see that picture clearly and historical progress remains the kingpin of the modern outlook. Seeping and soaking, permeating, probing, it diffuses like mist,
discovering every corner, saturating every cell. In biology we
have Darwinism and evolution, in cosmology an evolving universe. In history we have The Idea ofProgress Q. B. Bury) and
Marx's escalator that rises from slavery and serfdom through
capitalism to the coming classless society. In philosophy we
have Henri Bergson's early-century Creative Evolution and
Ernst Bloch's midcentury Das Prinzip Hoffnung, and in theology Jiirgen Moltmann's Protestant Theology of Hope and
the Catholic writings of Johannes Metz. Cutting across the lot,
as if to pull the _vision together, is the work of the scientist,
HOPE, YEs; PROGREss, NO
I 121
poet, and mystic Teilhard de Chardin, as focused in The Phenomenon of Man.
Somewhere in his ponderous All and Everything Gurdjieff
says in effect, "Now I am going to tell you something people
are not going to believe." The statement galvanized our attention, for it·seemed to us that the author had been trafficking in
notions of this genre for some pages. With an interest the book
had not up to then aroused, we raced to discover what this
truly incredible truth was to be. It appeared that it would have
to do with the reason for wars, and this looked promising; it
would be very good, we thought, to know why human beings
decimate their kind. We were not prepared for the answer. The
reason for wars, it turns out, is that the moon feeds on human
beings. Periodically its fare grows slim and a war is needed to
beef it up. We thought: the man is right-absolutely, completely, unequivocally right. This people won't believe.
We relate this incident because we sense that it may be about
to be reenacted with its roles reversed. Readers who feel that
the notions of the last several chapters have already pressed
credulity to the limit-notions like the survival of bodily death,
incorporeal realms that are more real than physical ones, or
infinite beatitude as the human possibility-may find the point
we are about to make, the last major one of this work, excessive; de trop, as the French would say: too much. In traditional
China a gentleman might be found protesting that a friend's
modesty "exceeds the permitted limits." Readers may feel !:hat
what we are about to say likewise exceeds limits; the limits of
credulity most obviously, but possibly of propriety as well.
For we are going to say that progress is an illusion; not only
future progress but past progress as well. The last part of that
statement will have to be qualified, but in essence it will stand.
Utopia is a dream, evolution a myth.
To refer to the illusion in its total sweep, we coin the word
"prevolution." Phonetically the word joins progress to evolution, showing the two to be faces, prospective and retrospective,
of a single, Janus-like deity. In addition the word suggests the
122 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
current prevalence of the cult of this god. The impounding of
these ideas in a single word gives us a running start into our
theme.
If Western man were to see that this god is a false one--or
to put it the other way, that prevolution is a fiction; it has not
happened and will not happen-the modern age would be
over, for the notion is so much its cornerstone that were it to
crumble, a new edifice would have to be built. By the same
token, the case against the notion is going to be difficult to
make, for it is not easy to dislodge a notion that undergirds
an entire epoch. We shall take it in segments. Working our way
backward, we shall look successively at the long-range future,
the short-range future, the short-range past, and the long-range
past.
The long-range prospects for our universe are not encouraging. Whether it ends by collapsing into a widening black hole 1
or winds down to an entropic deep freeze four degrees above
absolute zero does not much matter; be the finale a bang or a
whimper, its human import is the same: our universe will not
support life indefinitely.2 Given the rate at which the sun is
1. "The black hole of today is more than a black hole. It is a symbol,
'experimental model,' and provider of lessons for the collapse Einstein
predicted in far later days for the universe itself." John Wheeler, in Jagdish
Mehra (ed.), The Physicist's Conception of Nature (Dordrecht-Hollandj
Boston-U.S.A.: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1973), p. 215.
2. I insert a footnote which is at least interesting; whether it is more
than that the reader may decide for himself. When in 1964 I had my first
audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, I resolved in advance not to
take much of his valuable time and after about ten minutes arose to take
my leave. He stood up with me, and though we had been conversing
through an interpreter I heard him say to himself in English, "I must
decide what is important." There was a moment's pause, then a smile broke
over his face and with the words "Please be seated," he gestured to the
divan. When I next arose an hour and three-quarters had elapsed for the
most remarkable morning of my life.
What secured for me this gift was not, it turned out, good karma but
rather a ruse. In Asia calling cards are useful, and the one I had sent
ahead in requesting the audience carried in its lower left-hand corner the
words "Massachusetts Institute of Technology." It proved to be a magic
name, for along with his sanctity and erudition, His Holiness has a lively
scientific interest and a mechanical bent: he strips down Austin Healeys
and dismantles watches to reassemble them. My card had misled him into
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO /
123
spending its energy, our particular solar system will die long
before our universe does, of course. In 5 billion years it will
have thinned out to 250 times its present diameter and swallowed our planet.
Such prospects caused a former dean of Canterbury Cathedral
to cry, "Short views, for God's sake, short views." But with the
thinking that he had a flesh-and-blood scientist in his living room, and he
had decided not to pass up the opportunity this afforded.
Specifically, he wanted to check two scientific reports that had recently
come his way. One of these concerned DNA; he wanted to know if it bore
at all on the doctrine of reincarnation. The other concerned cosmogonies.
He had heard of Hoyle's steady-state theory in which a continuing influx
of hydrogen (from who knows where) compensates for the thinning out
of matter through the world's expansion, and also of the so-called big-bang
theory which posits that at its start our universe consisted of a superdense
kernel that exploded and has been expanding ever since. To these I was
able to add a third, which Harlow Shapley called the bang-bang-bang
theory: the theory that the present expanding phase of our universe will
be followed by one of collapse, with no reason why the cycle should not
repeat itself, accordion fashion, indefinitely. His Holiness nodded, saying
that of the three this last was the most nearly right. It has been inter~sting
to note that in the decade since he registered that opinion the steady-state
theory has been retired from the running. One waits with interest to see
which of the other two receives the astronomers' imprimatur.
To insert brackets within parentheses, I cannot refrain from adding
another point which strictly speaking has nothing to do with the topic
under discussion but which mention of the Dalai Lama invariably brings
to mind. No one I know who has been in his presence has failed to be
impressed, least of all myself. But the way he impressed me was almost the
reverse of my expectations, insofar as I recall having had any. For it was
not as if he wore a halo or exuded some sort of numinous glow. Almost the
opposite: from the moment he clasped my hand with a firmness that made
it feel in comparison to his like a flabby fish, it was his directness, his utter
unpretentiousness, his total objectivity, that astonished. I do not ~lieve
that before or since I have been in the presence of someone who was as
completely himself. Because I have traveled considerably in "the mystical
East" I am frequently asked if I have ever encountered the siddhis, the
supernatural powers that are believed to accrue in the course of yogic
training and advance. My answer is no, not directly. I have heard innumerable accounts from persons who claimed to have been firsthand witnesses,
but always the displays have stopped one step short of my door. Since
meeting the Dalai Lama, however, I sometimes add an appendage to that
answer. How anyone could have been raised as that man was, like a queen
bee, really, surrounded from the age of four by no one save persons who
assumed as a matter of course that he was God-incarnate for Tibet-how,
to repeat, a mortal could have survived this kind of upbringing and
escaped the slightest trace of a big head is, I am inclined to think, as close
to a miracle as I need come.
124 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
ecological crisis, energy depletion, the population explosion,
and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, to say nothing of the
interlocking, depersonalized bureaucratization of life, 3 the
short-range future, too, looks bleak. Systems analysts, synthesizing their computer data, tell us we are on a collision course
with disaster; Robert Heilbroner's The Human Prospect is
not pleasant reading. Poets and philosophers had anticipated
their warning. The century in which politicians have preyed
on hope unprecedentedly, promising "The Century of the
Common Man," "The War to End All Wars," "The War to
Make the World Safe for Democracy," "The Four Freedoms,"
"The Great Society"-this century of maniacally inflated expectations has seen utopian writing come to a dead stop. 4 "Hope,"
Kazantzakis concluded, "is a rotten-thighed whore." Even Bergson, who moved Darwin into philosophy, came at the end to
the view that man was "being crushed by the immense progress"
he has made. Sartre is not profound, but he is a shrewd phenomenologist, and on the existential level where he works he
advises that "we must learn to live without hope." The morning newspaper lists a film that is showing at a local cinema.
Titled I Have Seen the Future and It Doesn't Work, it is billed
for "mature" audiences.
But if the future will not work, surely the past has. Is not
progress up to the present-life beginning in slime and ending
in intelligence-a matter of record?
Let us see.
We begin with the short-range past, the career of Homo
sapiens himself. To the prevolutionist, its career replicates the
incline plane of the grand design: the species begins with ape
men and moves through primitive savages to culminate in the
intelligent creatures we have now become. The view is so
taken for granted that when we hear the director of a leading
3. Ninety percent of the gainfully employed in the United States now
work in organizations. Seventy years ago 90 percent were self-employed.
4. Walden Two is no exception to this statement. Its unconvincingness,
stemming from its lack of insight more than its lack of artistry, debars it
from serious consideration.
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO /
125
museum observe, "From Stone Age to the present-what a decline," we suspect him either of quipping or of fronting for a
museum's vested interest in the past. Perhaps the discovery
that the Neanderthal's brain was larger than ours will help
us to take the judgment more seriously.l'i Or the assessment of
Uvi-Strauss; in terms of man-nature equilibrium, which in the
long run must be the ruling consideration, he places the Golden
Age of humanity somewhere around the Neolithic.6 If we shift
from ecological to intellectual criteria, he again sees no clear
advance; in a way the burden of his entire work has been to
make clear that "the savage mind" is fully as complex and
rational as our own. And if we go with him a final step, looking
beyond rationality to the motives that determine its use, LeviStrauss sees decline. Is it that analytic thought (the kind man
has fallen into) has unseen violence built into it? he asks; or
that man is possessed by an obscure fury against the Eden he
dimly remembers and unconsciously realizes that he has lost?
5. See Phillip V. Tobias, The Brain in Hominid Evolution (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1971), pp. 96, 10G-103. I am indebted to Gary
Snyder, who is an anthropologist as well as a poet, for this point as well
as the one in the next footnote.
6. Marshall Sahlins places it even earlier, in the Paleolithic; the view
that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture constitutes
a Great Leap Forward, he discounts as nothing but a "neolithic prejudice."
Countering the entrenched theoretical position today, wherein the question
"How did the primitives manage to live?" is topped only by the question of
whether their existence deserves to be called living at all, he argues in his
Stone Age Economics (Chicago and New York: Aldine-Atherton, Inc., 1972)
that theirs was, as the title of his opening chapter puts it, "The Ofiginal
Affluent Society." Affluence being a ratio between means and ends, by keeping their ends modest-want not, lack not-their means were more adequate
to them than is the case with us. It is we who sentence ourselves to life at
hard labor; the primitive is in business for his health. Hunters keep banking hours: "reports on hunters and gatherers . . . suggest a mean of three
to five hours per adult worker per day in food production" (p. 34). The
rest of their time is reserved for gossiping, entertaining, dancing and other
arts, and daytime sleep. "Savage ... days are nothing but a pastime," a
seventeenth-century explorer reported (p. 29). Passing to the question of
what our industry has got us, Sahlins answers: "This is the era of hunger
unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of
hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture"
(p. 26).
126 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
Whatever the reason, whenever man now comes on landscapes
or communities that resemble his image of a lost innocence, he
lashes out and lays waste. Colonizers, rapacious white men and
their technology, are the conspicuous culprits, but Levi-Strauss
does not exempt himself and his own discipline. The Western
hunt for knowledge, analytic and objective to its core, has
violence built into it. For to know analytically is to reduce the
object of knowledge, however vital, however complex, to precisely this: an object. This being so, the Western hunt for
knowledge, anthropology not excepted, is in a tragic sense the
final exploitation and, as George Steiner has observed, Tristes
Tropiques the first classic of our current ecological anguish.
It looks forward with haughty melancholy to the image of the
globe-cooling, emptied of man, cleansed of his garbage-that appears in the coda of Mythologiques. "Anthropology," says LeviStrauss in concluding Tristes Tropiques, can now be seen as
"entropology": the study of man has become the study of disintegration and certain extinction. There is no darker pun in modern
literature.7
Extending our retrospective look past man to the story of
life as a whole, we come to evolution in its classic, Darwinian
sense. This is the key domain, for it is on biological evolution·
that prevolution finally builds; this is its bedrock and prime
foundation. As biologist Lewis Thomas puts it, "Evolution is
our most powerful story, equivalent in its way to a universal
myth."
In his Personal Knowledge-a book once commended to us
by Noam Chomsky as the best on the p!lilosophy of science that
has been written-Michael Polanyi opens his critique of NeoDarwinism with this arresting remark: "Only a prejudice
backed by genius can have obscured such elementary facts
[contradicting this school] as I propose to state."s There is not
space here to reproduce the details of his argument; we must
7. The New Yorker, June 4, 1974, pp. 107-108.
8. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 382. Page references in
the following paragraphs are to this work.
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO /
127
be content to summarize it. The history of nature shows "a
cumulative trend of changes tending towards higher levels of
organization, among which the deepening of sentience and the
rise of thought are the most conspicuous" (p. 384). "At each
successive stage of this epic process we see arising some novel
operations. not specifiable in terms of the preceding level" (p.
389); for example, "while quantum mechanics can explain in
principle all chemical reactions, it cannot replace, even in
principle, our knowledge of chemistry" (p. 384). The same
holds, of course, for the relation of biology to chemistry, psychology to biology, and so on. Moreover,
the consecutive steps of a long-range evolutionary progress-like
the rise of consciousness-cannot be determined merely by their
adaptive advantage, since these advantages can form part of such
progress only in so far as they prove adaptive in a peculiar way,
namely on the lines of continuous ascending evolutionary achievement. The action of the ordering principle underlying such a persistent creative trend is necessarily overlooked or denied by the
theory of natural selection . . . . Recognition [of this ordering
principle] would.... reduce mutation and selection to their proper
status of merely releasing and sustaining the action of evolutionary
principles by which all major evolutionary achievements are defined. [p. 385]
The rise of man can be accounted for only by other principles
than those known today to physics and chemistry. If this be
vitalism, then vitalism is mere common sense, which can be ignored
only by a truculently bigotted mechanistic outlook. And so lo~g as
we can form no idea of the way a material system may become a
conscious, responsible person, it is an empty pretense to suggest
that we have an explanation for the descent of man. Darwinism
has diverted attention for a century from the descent of man by
investigating the conditions of evolution and overlooking its action. Evolution can be understood only as a feat of emergence.
[p. 390]
This last word, "emergence," epitomizes Polanyi's alternative to Darwinism and links him to the precursors he acknowl-
128 I
FORGOTTEN TRUTH
edges, Lloyd Morgan and Samuel Alexander. The entire thrust
of Polanyi's philosophical work is against reductionism, the attempt to explain the higher in terms of the lower, the whole
in terms of its parts. In this, its negative polemic, it is on sure
ground; the question concerns his alternative. Emergence is
well and good, but where from? From whence do the "ordering
innovative principles" he insists on (p. 387, passim) derive? If
simpler, antecedent principles cannot account for them, is
"nothing"-thin air-a more plausible source? For respecting
sources, "nothing" and "thin air" are what emergence comes
to. "All we can say is that at one moment there is nothing and
at the next something," said Hoyle in answer to the question
of where the hydrogen in his steady-state theory derived from.
As etiology, emergence says no more than this.
Can anything come from nothing? Can a stream rise higher
than its source? We are back to the enduring imponderables.
On issues this fundamental, this dose to ontological sensibility
at its root and essence, no argument can deliver verdicts, so we
shall enter none. Instead, we shall describe; we shall state. If
emergence denies that a stream can rise higher than its source
in the sense of simpler ordering principles accounting for ones
that are more complex, the primordial outlook agrees with thi~
denial and adds that something cannot come from nothing. Ex
nihilo nihil fit.
What does this portend for evolution? It does not counter the
fact that in the temporal order simple precedes complex. First
viruslike specks of living matter; then bacilli with physiological
functions that serve survival; then protozoa that can move
about of their own accord and effect purposive activities; then
multicellular organisms with sexual reproduction, nervous systems of increasing complexity, and sense organs that extend
contact deeper into the surrounding space. We do not know
when consciousness entered the sequence, but thought proper
seems to come with the language that is confined to man.
There is no need to deny anything in the sequence that carbon
dating tells us tra_nspired. Genesis had already announced the
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO /
129
principle, as had other sacred texts and commentaries on them.
"Man," said Gregory Palamas,
this greater world contained in a lesser, [is] the concentration into
one whole of all that is, the recapitulation of all things created by
God. Therefore he was produced last of all, just as we also (in our
turn) round off what we have to say with a condusion.9
Far from denying life's progression, tradition provides a reason
for it (in its own order of explanation, of course). Microcosm
mirrors macrocosm, earth mirrors heaven. But mirrors, as we
have noted, invert. The consequence here is that that which
is first in the ontological order appears last in the temporal
order.
Not that the higher appears after the lower but that it is
produced by the lower-this is what tradition denies. In doing
so it counters the dominant mood of our time. Order from
revolution (Marx), ego from id (Freud), life from the primal
ooze (Darwin); everywhere the reflexive impulse is to derive
the more from the less. Tradition proceeds otherwise.
What difference does it make which way we proceedwhether we look up or down for our explanations? We feel enjoined to raise this question explicitly, for we fear the reader
may at this point be experiencing a letdown. Taking off from
Gurdjieff's "this they won't believe," we had more than intimated that on the question of life's origin we proposed to say
something startling. The exotic expectations this introit may
have conjured in the reader's mind can only be surntised.
That man arrived from another planet? That he was molded
directly from dust? And after this buildup the promised surprise turns out to be scarcely one at all. The evolutionary sequence is not denied: amoebas did come first; life does advance.
The only difference attaches to what would seem to be a
secondary issue: the means by which the advance is effected. In
9. The Ascetic and Theological Teaching of Gregory Palamas, trans. by
Father Basil Krivosheine; reprint from The Eastern Churches Quarterly,
No. 4, 1938, p. 3.
130 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
all other respects the prevailing view is ratified and what was
billed as a shock wave turns out to be a ripple. Life does
evolve.
No, it does not. The point at stake is not a detail or in any
way secondary. For evolution does not present itself as mere
chronicle, a timetable, so to speak, with curators lining up fossil remains in the sequences in which they appeared. Evolution proposes to be an explanatory theory. It is the claim that
everything about man, his complete complement of faculties
and potentials, can be accounted for by a process, natural selection, that works mechanically on chance variations. Let its
most distinguished recent spokesman phrase the wording. "Evolution ... the product of an enormous lottery presided over
by natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from
among numbers drawn at utter random .... This conception
alone is compatible with the facts. The miracle stands 'explained.' " 10
The quotation marks around that last word are interesting,
standing as they do as an acknowledgment that Monod himself recognizes that he is using the word "explained" atypically.
He does not tell us the deviant sense he has in mind, but by
our lights his departure from normal usage is major. For to
someone not already predisposed in evolution's favor, Monad's
"explanation" is not such at all. 11 One reads his book, takes a
sounding of the evolutionary corpus, and the miracle remains.
Let us take our bearings. Why in a chapter on hope are we
devoting so much space to evolution?
Because it bears decisively on the chapter's theme. We have
saved hope for this last substantive chapter of the book, not
only because of its importance to human well-being but because we see it as the topic on which current thought is most
confused and mistaken. The mistake lies in founding hope on
10. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity (New York: Vintage Books,
1972), p. 138.
11. See William Pollard's telling critique of it in Soundings, LVI, 4
(Winter 1973). Also John Lewis (ed.), Beyond Chance and Necessity
(Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1974).
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO /
131
a collective future, a future that will upgrade the quality of
life by the mere fact that lives are born into it. Of the two
factors that gave rise to this error, the first-a blend of science
and technology-we are on our way to seeing through. There
remains its other prop: evolution. We have called it the kingpin of the .modern mind because from the standpoint of that
mind so much has come to rest on it-nothing less than hope
itself-that modernity is more invested in this doctrine than
in any other. This in itself should put us on alert respecting
it, given what we know about the way desire vectors evidence
in favor of its wishes.
To speak plainly, as long as we can believe that there is a
principle operative in nature-natural selection-that works
to produce the higher from the lower, we can take courage.
God is reinstated; a different god to be sure, but akin to the
earlier one in that "he" too will see to it that things turn
out all right. He does not preclude false starts any more than
his predecessor did, but in the long run the victory is assured.
We are in good hands.
As a matter of fact that last sentence happens to be truethe title of this chapter implies as much. But the hands in
question are not those of natural selection. Fortunately, considering the latter's brittleness.
This is not the place to enter into a full-scale critique of the
theory of evolution. Those who wish to pursue the subject will
find the main points summarized in Section IV of Titus
Burckhardt's remarkable essay "Cosmology and Mottern
Science" 12 and spelled out in considerable detail in Douglas
Dewar's The Transformist Illusion 1 s and Evan Shute's Flaws
12. In Jacob Needleman, ed., The Sword of Gnosis (Baltimore: Penguin
Books, 1974).
13. Murfreesboro, Tenn.: De Hoff Publications, 1957. It shows, among
other things, that the so-called missing lir.ks are still missing. The most
commonly cited example in favor of the evolutionary hypothesis is the
supposed genealogy of the equine animals, which Charles Deperet criticizes
as follows: "Geological observation establishes in a formal manner that
no gradual passage existed between these genera; the last Palaeotherium
was extinct long since, without transforming itself, when the first Archi-
132 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
in the Theory of Evolution.u Regarding the empirical evidence we shall content ourselves with three things: our own
summary assessment, the assessment of a biologist, and a prediction.
Our personal assessment is that on no other scientific theory
does the modern mind rest so much confidence on so little
proportional evidence; on evidence, that is to say, which, in
ratio to the amount that would be needed to establish the
theory in the absence of the will to believe, is so meager. In its
standard form the evolutionary hypothesis lies too close to
accepted belief for today's Westerner to see how much it rides
the will to believe, but when the hypothesis is enlargedblown up, as it were, like a photographic print-the "will"
shows up in clear outline. Teilhard de Chardin provides the
therium appeared, and the latter had disappeared in its tum, without
modification, before being suddenly replaced by the invasion of Hipparion .
. . . The supposed pedigree of the Equidae is a deceitful delusion, which
simply gives us the general process by which the tridactyl hoof of an
Ungulate can transform itself, in various groups, into a monodactyl hoof,
in view of an adaptation for speed; but in no way enlightens us on the
palaeontological origin of the horse." Le Transformations du Monde
Animal, pp. 107, 105; cited by Burckhardt on p. 144 and Dewar on p. 92.
Because the names of these authors are not household words, we add a
summary statement by Loren Eiseley, whose name will be recognized: "How
the primeval human creature evolved into Homo sapiens, what forces precipitated the enormous expansion of the human brain-these problems
ironically still baffle the . creature who has learned to weigh stars and to
tamper with the very fabric of the universe." "Fossil Man," in Scientific
American, CLXXXIX (Dec. 1953), 65. A final verdict in this list that
could go on for pages comes from a former colleague at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Murray Eden: "Neo-Darwinian evolutionary
theory ... has been modified to the point that virtually every formulation
of the principles of evolution is a tautology." "Inadequacies of Neo-Darwinian Evolution as a Scientific Theory," in Paul Moorhead and Martin
Kaplan, eds., Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation
of Evolution (Philadelphia: The Wistar Institute Press, 1967), p. 109.
"Natural selection" has proved to be a key that can be twisted to fit almost
any lock.
14. Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1961. The contribution of this book lies in
the clear distinction it draws between "micro-evolution" (evolution on a
small scale and within narrow limits), which no one contests, and "megaevolution" (the theory that the class of birds, for example, evolved from
the class of reptiles), which is "really a philosophy dating from the days
of biological ignorance; it was a philosophical synthesis built up in a
biological kindergarten."
133
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO /
obvious instance. To him, The Phenomenon of Man was
science, a clean print-out-"pure and simple" are his wordsof the conclusions the facts of nature point to. P. B. Medawar
is as schooled in those facts as Teilhard was, but since he does
not approach them by way of Teilhard's pseudo-Christian assumptions4 he does not find them pointing to the Omega Point
at all. The greater part of Teilhard's argument, Medawar
writes,
is nonsense, tricked out by a variety of tedious metaphysical conceits, and its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the
grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to
deceive himself. The Phenomenon of Man cannot be read without
a feeling of suffocation, a gasping and flailing around for sense.
There is an argument in it, to be sure-a feeble argument, abominably expressed-but ... it is the style that creates the illusion of
content, and which is in some part the cause as well as merely
the symptom of Teilhard's alarming apocalyptic seizures.tl
Touche! And pari passu! Our point is that if biologists were
to approach the paleontological record as innocent of evolutionary biases as Medawar is unencumbered by Teilhardian
ones, their frustration in the face of the claimed scientific status
of the evolutionary theory would rival Medawar's frustration
on reading the assertion with which The Phenomenon of Man
opens and on which the book turns; the assertion that "this
book ... must be read not as a work on metaphysics, still less
as a sort of theological essay, but purely and simply as a scien.
tific treatise."
As our judgment here is open to the double charge that not
only is it that of a layman but of one who obviously has his
own will to believe, we follow it with the judgment of a biologist whose heart is in the opposite, evolutionary camp. "I firmly
believe," writes Jean Rostand,
~
that mammals have come from lizards, and lizards from fish, but
. . . when I think such a thing, I try not to avoid seeing its indigestible enormity and I prefer to leave vague the origin of these
15. Mind, LXX, 277 Uan. 1961), 99.
134 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
scandalous metamorphoses rather than add to their improbability
that of a ludicrous interpretation.!&
Though this judgment has the merit of being that of a professional, it too is vulnerable. Rostand is but one biologist among
many; for what proportion of his guild does he speak? So we
round off the matter with a prediction: In the next hundred
years, possibly less, 17 the fate of the evolutionary hypothesis will
constitute the most interesting exemplification of the thesis
Thomas Kuhn sets forth in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; the thesis that scientists' need to make sense of their data
causes them to continue to pour it into the prevailing mold (explanatory paradigm) until an alternative mold is fashioned that
can accommodate the data more comfortably. When the change
does occur, it does so quite suddenly. The picture "does a flip,"
as when one visual gestalt replaces another.
With this prediction we leave the empirical side of the evolutionary question; the data that would have to be sifted is, as
we say, too vast to go into here. On the formal side, however,
another point can be registered. If it is not entirely (or even
primarily) evidence that gives the evolutionary hypothesis its
seeming strength, from whence does that semblance derive? We
have already mentioned man's need for hope as one explanation. To this we must now add a second that relates to the
scientific enterprise itself.
A Cambridge University professor points to it. In reviewing a
book on natural selection around midcentury, Sir James Gray
wrote: "No amount of argument or clever epigram can disguise
16. Le Figaro Litteraire, April 20, 1957. Quoted in Burckhardt, "Cosmology and Modern Science," p. 143.
17. In the several weeks that have elapsed since those words were written,
there have been signs that the time span in question may be closer to a
decade than a century. Most interesting has been the appearance of Tom
Bethell's "Darwin's Mistake" in the February 1976 issue of Harper's
Magazine (pp. 72, 75). His conclusion is as follows: "Darwin's theory, I
believe, is on the verge of collapse .... He is in the process of being discarded, but perhaps in deference to the venerable old gentleman, resting
comfortably in Westminster Abbey next to Sir Isaac Newton, it is being
done as discreetly and gently as possible, with a minimum of publicity."
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO /
135
the inherent improbability of [the orthodox evolutionary
theory], but most biologists think that it is better to think in
terms of improbable events than not to think at all." 18 It being
axiomatic in science that one of the best ways "not to think"
is by begging the question-that is, by assuming within an explanation that which it purports to explain-the first test a
scientific explanation of the origin of life forms must pass is that
the operative forces it invokes must not themselves possess life
properties. This initial test Darwinism passes brilliantly:
neither "chance" nor "the survival of those best suited to
survive" presuppose the slightest intentionality or tropism.
And because natural selection is the only hypothesis about
life's origin that does pass this qualifying examination, it can
fail right and left on subsequent tests (How much positive
evidence supports it? Can it account for countervailing instances?) without losing its place as king of the mountain. For
biologists are not different from other people; as Sir James says,
they would rather shoulder improbabilities than not think (in
their terms, by their criteria) at all.
In a brilliant paper prepared for the founding meeting of
the Society for the Philosophy of Psychology (Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, October 26, 1974), D. C. Dennett lays
all this out clearly. Titled "Why the Law of Effect Will Not
Go Away," the paper focuses on cognitive psychology but is
relevant here by virtue of the explicit way it relates the Law of
Effect to Darwinism. In the general terms in which Thorndike introduced that law, it holds that actions followed by
reward are repeated. It is not a particularly good law; as
Dennett says, its history has been "the history of ever more
sophisticated failures to get [it] to do enough work." 19 Despite
this, its tenacity exceeds that of old generals; it refuses not only
to retire but to fade away. Periodically it is given a new titlethe Law of Primary Reinforcement (Hull), the Principle of
18. Nature, CLXXIII, 4397 (Feb. 6, 1954), 227.
19. journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, V, 2 (1976), 172. Subsequent page references in the text are to this article.
136 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
Operant Conditioning ( Skinner)-but rather than improving
its performance these honorifics merely kick it upstairs, so to
speak. Whence, then, its extraordinary lien on life? "It is not
just mulishness or proproprietary pride," says Dennett, "that
has kept behaviorists from . . . look[ing] for another fundamental principle of more power ... but rather something like
the conviction that the Law of Effect is not just a good idea,
but the only possible good idea for this job" of explaining
intelligence (p. 172). "There is something right in this conviction," Dennett continues, that something being that it is the
only idea that has been proposed that does not beg the question. But there is also something wrong with the idea. And
what is wrong in it has had an ironic result: allegiance to the Law
of Effect in its behavioristic or peripheralistic versions has forced
psychologists to beg small questions left and right in order to keep
from begging the big question. One "saves" the Law of Effect from
persistent counterinstances by the ad hoc postulation of reinforcers
and stimulus histories for which one has not the slightest grounds
except the demands of the theory. [p. I 73]
The reason for this cross-reference to psychology is, to repeat,
that "the Law of Effect is closely analogous to the principle of
natural selection," having been, indeed, consciously modeled
after it. From a "population" of stimulus-response pairs, born
of random responses to a given stimulus, the nervous system
reinforces pairs that are adaptive. This "selects" them by increasing the probability that they will recur "while their maladaptive or merely neutral brethren suffer 'extinction,' not by
being killed (all particular stimulus-response pairs come to
swift ends), but by failing to reproduce. The analogy [to Darwinism] is very strong, very satisfying, and very familiar.'' It
is equally strong in the so-called dry, as opposed to biological
or wet, approach to the study of learning and intelligence, the
science of Artificial Intelligence which works with "thinking
machines.'' Problem-solving computer programs are designed
to generate and test. At a given point or points, the program
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO /
137
sets up generating and testing units. The generating unit invents candidates for the problem's solution and transmits
them to the testing unit, which accepts or rejects them on the
basis of stored criteria. This again is like natural selection, as
Herbert Simon points out. 20 Artificial Intelligence and cognitive psychology work from opposite ends of the scale. Artificial
Intelligence begins with mechanisms that obviously lack intelligence-magnetic tapes whose segments do or do not conduct
electrical currents-and tries to construct intelligence from
these, whereas cognitive psychology begins with creatures that
obviously have intelligence and tries to work back to neuron
firings, nerve reflexes, and selector mechanisms that are as
mechanical as computer operations. But forward or backward,
the object is the same: to derive intelligence from things that
do not possess it in the least. For
psychology must not of course be question-begging. It must not
explain intelligence in terms of intelligence, for instance by assigning responsibility fot the existence of intelligence in creatures to
the munificence of an intelligent Creator, or by putting clever
homunculi at the control panels of the nervous system. If that
were the best psychology could do, then psychology could not do
the job assigned it. [p. 171]
The same holds for biology. The attraction of natural selection
is that it seeks to
provide clearly non-question-begging accounts. Darwin explains a
world of final causes and teleological laws with a principle that is
utterly independent of "meaning" or "purpose." It assumes a world
that is absurd in the existentialist's sense of the term: not ludicrous
but pointless, and this assumption is a necessary condition of any
non-question-begging account of purpose. [pp. 171-72]
In sentences that are remarkable for the light they throw on
the life sciences as enterprises-how they proceed, and how
their procedures affect their findings by stipulating the kind of
20. The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge: MJ.T. Press, 1969), pp.
95-98.
138 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
findings that will be accepted-Dennett sums up the matter as
follows:
Whether we can imagine a non-mechanistic but also non-question-begging principle for explaining design in the biological world
is doubtful; it is tempting to see the commitment to non-questionbegging accounts here as tantamount to a commitment to mechanistic materialism, but the priority of these commitments is clear.
It is not that one's prior prejudice in favor of materialism gives
one reason to accept Darwin's principle because it is materialistic,
but rather that one's prior acknowledgment of the constraint
against begging the question gives one reason to adopt materialism
once one sees that Darwin's non-question-begging account of design
or purpose in nature is materialistic. One argues: Darwin's materialistic theory may not be the only non-question-begging theory
of these matters, but it is one such theory, and the only one we
have found, which is quite a good reason for espousing materialism.
[p. 172]
To what degree this entire approach is likely to succeed-life
out of nonlife, intelligence out of its absence, explanation out
of that which in no way contains that which is to be explained
-cannot, of course, be simply adjudicated. The question is
fundamental; in a way the whole swing from tradition to
modernity turns on it, and the point of this book is to help tip
the lever back to its earlier, more natural, we contend, position.
Charges of begging the question can settle nothing here, for
the petitio is not a fallacy in the form of an argument; to invoke it, therefore, when the question concerns the truth-status
of an argument's material premises or unvoiced assumptions is
to commit the very fallacy that is being charged. Apart from
material considerations, it is doubtful that the fallacy can even
be clearly stated. An inquiry to a colleague in logic requesting
a definition of the fallacy of begging the question brings word
that the subject is in dispute and references to three current
journal articles. Hoping to avoid this detour which looks as
though it could lead into a bog, we ask what he would say if a
student were to ask him straightforwardly what that fallacy is.
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO /
139
He answers: "I would tell him no clear formulation of it
exists."
We were trying to account for the inflated status of the
evolutionary hypothesis and have found thus far, beyond the
way it buttresses hope, a methodological reason: the fact that
it is the only candidate that meets the formal requirements for
being scientific lets it get by with less supporting data than
would otherwise be required. A corresponding ontological
reason is that in the world with which science works, there is
nowhere else to look for life's origin. Paraphrasing Sir James of
a few pages back, we can say that if scientists prefer to think
improbably than not to think at all, they would likewise rather
pull rabbits out of hats than out of thin air, literally ex nihilo.
From this second, ontological angle, we can join Burckhardt in
ascribing part of evolutionism's force to "an incapacitypecular to modem science-to conceive 'dimensions' of reality
other than those of purely physical sequences; to understand
the 'vertical' genesis of species."21
What is this vertical genesis of species? If we were to answer
"God" this would not be incorrect, but the doctrine of "special
creation" has become so weighted down with anthropomorphic
imagery that we do better here to use its less personalized
variant. The nonanthropornorphic counterpart of special creation is emanation. In the €elestial realm the species are never
absent; their essential forms or archetypes reside there from an
endless beginning. As earth ripens to receive them, each in its
turn drops22 to the terrestrial plane and, donning the world's
fabric, gives rise to a new life form. The origin of species is
metaphysical.
First a viable habitat must be devised, hence the inorganic
universe is matured to the point where life can be sustained.
And when living beings do arrive, they do so in a vaguely as21. "Cosmology and Modern Science," p. 147.
22. After Chapter 2 on "The Symbolism of Space," we use words like
this comfortably, trusting that the reader will not impute false literalisms
to them.
140 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
cending order that passes from relatively undifferentiated
organisms-though not simple ones; the electron microscope
shows unicellular organisms to be astonishingly complicatedto ones that are more complex. But there is no need to force
the fossil record to show a univocal and continuous line. If
the movement proceeds in jumps with whole categories of
plants and animals bursting out at once without discernible
predecessors, this presents no problem. There is no need to
multiply hypotheses by positing a thread that unites the various classes of life, such as insect, fish, reptile, bird, and mammal. We need not strain to see in the fins by which certain
fishes flap their ways on shore rudiments of the articulation
that arms and paws require but which fins show no beginnings
of. Nor exaggerate the resemblance of birds to reptiles in an
effort to prove that one derived from the other, an exercise
that must proceed in the face of glaring differences in skeletal
structure and the fact that the hearing apparatuses in the two
orders are modeled on altogether different plans. If the tortoise
turns up all at once in fossil remains or the spider appears
simultaneously with its prey and with its faculty of weaving
fully developed, such facts can be welcomed with smiles instead
of puzzled brows.
As for the variant forms which Darwinists must use to construct their largely hypothetical bridges between species, from
the metaphysical perspective these appear as variations which
the species in question allow. It is as if nature, always more prolific and life-loving than we had supposed, first staked out
distinct species and then decided to ring changes on these
by having each reflect the forms of the others insofar as it could
do so without transgressing its own essential limits. Seen in
this light, variations are not generative links between speciesit has yet to be shown what the dolphin, say, is a link to or
from. They are, rather, mimics; they show species imitating the
ways and forms of species that in essence are foreign to them.
Not solely for utilitarian reasons of adaptation and survival,
we may add; in p~rt-larger part-for lila, the divine play:
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO /
141
sheer protean exuberance. Esse qua esse so bonum est (being as
being is so good) that God cannot resist any of its possibilities.
Wishing with part of herself to be a mother, a child dons apron
and suckles her doll. Dolphins and whales are the archetypal
mammal wondering what it would be like to be a fish; armadillos the result of its thinking, "Wouldn't it be interesting to
dress up in scales and play reptile?"2S Pressing the image a bit,
we might say that hummingbirds in their mode of feeding
and Hight and their iridescent coloring are birds fancying
themselves as butterflies. It is like Indra's Net, each jewel reflecting the others and being reflected in them.
Admitting that, to revert to an earlier image, we are performing here like the generating unit of a computer and not its
testing unit, we push on to venture that the skeletons that
evolutionists take to be protohuman may in fact be posthuman. They may be the deposits of degenerate epigones, tail
ends of earlier human cycles (yugas) that were drawing to their
close. After all, myths recount devolution more than evolution,
and we know for a fact that later human forms are not necessarily more advanced: Steinheim man preceded Neanderthal
but was more "evolved." If it be asked, "Where, then, are the
remains of these 'giants who walked the earth in those days'?"
it might be answered that in his beginnings, when he stood
close to provenient spirit, man was ethereal to the point of
leaving less in the way of ossified remains.
If this seems altogether too fantastic, we can at least take
satisfaction in the fact that at last we have delivered on the
promise with which we introduced this subject of human
origins, the promise that we would say something faintly
scandalous. If in doing so we h4ve gone too far-so far perhaps
as to cause the reader to close the book-it is not without
design that we have reserved these speculations for the book's
23. We are speaking in the mode of Platonic myth, one consequence of
which is that the reader will not be able to determine how literally we
intend such statements because we are not sure ourselves. All we feel
confident of is that they contain more truth than the alternatives they
intend to counter.
142 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
closing chapter. In defense we say but this. Though we have
not been unserious in anything we have postulated, the point
we are most convinced of is the following: Whatever the utility
of contemporary biological models for discovering useful specifics like antibiotics, for the understanding of life these models
are largely useless. Moreover, they mislead. 24 The first shall be
last and the last first, we are told. We have seen how in the
microcosmjmacrocosm mirror inversion, this decrees that man,
who is first in the order of worth on the terrestrial plane, will
be last in the order of his appearance. Now the converse: the
last shall be first. Among the sciences, physics is ontologically
the lowliest: it treats of matter in its most elementary arrangements. Concomitantly it is the first of the empirical sciences
to "see through" its subject to a glimmering beyond. It knows
the derivative character of space and time; the unimageable,
transcendent character of the real. Even assuming that in
specifics and details what we have ourselves postulated in these
pages may be quite mistaken, we feel certain of this: if modern
science continues, the current working premises in biology,
Darwinism included, will in time (possibly quite a short time)
show themselves to have been as inadequate as were Newton's.
The life sciences will crash through them as through a sound
barrier. On that glad day biologists will begin to talk like
physicists. Like Richard Feynman, say: "We have to find a new
view of the world." Or Freeman Dyson: "For any speculation
which does not at first look crazy, there is no hope."
At last we have completed our excursus on evolution. As it
has monopolized the better part of this chapter on hope, we
trust that its object has not been lost from view. With the
buckling of science and technology as props for the idea of
progress, evolution has become its principal support. (This
accour.. ts for the emotional investment in Teilhard de Chardin.
24. "Though modern scientific knowledge reveals much that was previously unknown, . . . it hides or supplants much more." Lord Northbourne, Looking Back on Progress (London: Perennial Books, 1970), p.
116. The present chapter is deeply indebted to this lucid little book.
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO /
143
We know of no other twentieth-century thinker who has an
entire journal devoted to the propagation of his theses.) Part
of us feels bad about disturbing this prop, for in an age that
has sealed over other outlets for hope, to undermine evolution,
the last remaining prop for progress, which in the modern
world has· become the last remaining refuge for hope, is to
undermine hope itself, and hope is indispensable to human
well-being; this was this chapter's opening premise. But truth
or consequences-when one must choose between them, jnana
yogins at least, those whose approach to God (Reality) is by
way of knowledge (gnosis), will understand that choice must
favor the former. If within this vast universe a thread of life
were to angle always upward, leaving a trail that looked from
a distance like the jet stream of an ascending plane, such a
never-circling life force would be a freak. For everywhere else
-name one exception-nature favors the curves that space itself conforms to; the yin-yang rhythms of turning gyres and
waves that crest and fall. 0 my people! can you not see how it
is hope, not fact, that powers this dream of onward and upward toward the dawning light? If human life is truly natural
-and this, surely, the evolutionists would want us to believeit is seasonal. Fall and winter are its lot as assuredly as summer
and spring. Half the art of living is a talent for dying.
Its other half, of course, is its talent for living, and this
requires above all else an inward eye. Body dies, but the soul
and spirit that animate it live on in ways that can be inferred
from the Levels of Selfhood as described in Chapter 4. At death
man is ushered into the unimaginable expanse of a reality no
longer fragmentary but total. Its all-revealing light shows up his
earthly career for what it truly was, and the revelation comes
at first as judgment. The pretenses, rationalizations, and delusions that structured and warped his days are now glaringly
evident. And because the self is now identified with its Mind or
vital center rather than its Body as these terms were employed
in Chapter 4, Mind's larger norms, to which the embodied
ego paid little more than lip service, now hold the balance. It
144 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
is thus that in hell man condemns himself; in the Koran it is
his own members that rise up to accuse him. Once the self is
extracted from the realm of lies, the falsities by which it
armored itself within that realm become like flames and the
life it there led like a shirt of Nessus. 25 When the flames have
consumed these falsities-or to use other language, when truth
has set the distortions of terrestrial existence in perspectivethe balance is restored and the distortions, too, are seen to have
had their place. This is forgiveness. With it, the Mind recedes
as the Body earlier did at death, and the self, which is to say
attention and identification, passes to the Soul's immortal
center, which is now freed for the beatific vision. Lost in continual adoration and wonder, it abides in the direct presence
of the Living God who is Being Itself. Beyond this, where the
film that separates knower from known is itself removed and
the self sinks into the Spirit that is the Infinite . . . . Ah, but
we can say no more. We have reached the Cloud of Unknowing, where the rest is Silence.
If this sounds "old-fashioned," we trust that those who
make this charge are not blind to the fact that it is the tacit
progress-premise underlying that word that has turned it into
a pejorative. We need not romanticize the past. If the most
primitive people now living on the earth are also its sweetest
and gentlest, 26 there are other primitives who are sadists. And
25. "The experience of death resembles that of a man who has lived all
his life in a dark room and suddenly finds himself transported to a
mountain top; there his gaze would embrace all the wide landscape; the
works of men would seem insignificant to him. It is thus that the soul
torn from the earth and from the body perceives the inexhaustible diversity
of things and the incommensurable abysses of the worlds which contain
them; for the first time it sees itself in its universal context, in an inexorable concatenation and in a network of multitudinous and unsuspected
relationships, and takes account of the fact that life had been but an
'instant', but a 'play'. Projected into the absolute 'nature of things' man
is inescapably aware of what he is in reality; he knows himself ontologically
and without deforming perspective in the light of the nonnative 'proportions' of the Universe." F. Schuon, Understanding Islam (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 85.
26. John Nance, The Gentle Tasaday (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).
HOPE, YES; PROGRESS, NO
I 145
as for history, it shows grotesque aberrations as well as magnificent achievements; we do not have to be reminded of tyrannies of altar and throne, the rigidities of imperial legalisms,
or the closedness of respectable mores and the sectarian spirit.
It is only in cosmic outlook that we see the past as superior to
ourselves ·and qualified to be our teacher; there may be other
ways, but we have not tried to sift the record. That there have
been in this world, and are today in lingering pockets, metaphysical doctrines that are complete along with means for their
realization-this is a notion that for moderns is barely conceivable, but it has emerged as the thesis of this book. In this
day of neophilia and reflective embrace of the new, when
"What's new?" has become standard salutation and quipsters
tell us they want even their antiques to be of the latest variety;
in this time when clergy themselves have grown "trendy" in
worship of their God who is "not yet" (Moltmann); this age
of flourishing futurists when almost the only way to get attention is to claim to be privy to some new discovery, it gives us
the most exceptional pleasure, the most piquant delight, to
announce what in today's climate of opinion may be the most
novel, original, and unexpected prediction imaginable. The
wave of the future will be a return to the past. "There is only
the fight to recover what has been lost j And found and lost
again and again." 27 "I sing the songs of olden times with
adoration. "28
27. T. S. Eliot, "Four Quartets: East Coker," The Complete PoemS' and
Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1952), p. 128.
28. Svetasvatara Upanishad, 11.5.
The master said, Who expects to be able to go
out of a house except by the door? How is it then
that no one follows this Way of ours?
CONFUCIUS, Analects, Vl.l5
Z EpiloquE
Truth, Elie Wiesel has reminded us, is betrayed by its
repetition. Insofar as things have been said, there is no need
to resay them. Is there anything respecting our thesis that has
not been said and needs to be said?
Perhaps some misunderstandings can be anticipated and
allayed.
Our equation of tradition with norm, of what is inherited
(traditio, to hand over) with what should be espoused, may
sound to some like a counsel to ''turn back the clocks"-as if
history could ever be reversed or an old man grow young again.
If we have left the impression that the primordial philosophy
counsels reversion, we should speak more plainly. The needed
return-a kind of homecoming-is in outlook only; it is in
world view and sense of reality, and even here phrases such as
"going back" are imprecise. For the issue does not really concern time at all; it concerns truth, truth of the kind that is
timeless. If we have appealed to past ~ges it is because we see
them as having been bathed in such truth to a degree that we
are not. In this respect we would indeed be pleased to see life
on earth recover a lost dimension, and are grateful for persons
who are working to reknit the rich coherence of a fully human
consciousness which the cramped and aggressive rationality of
modernity has bruised so badly. But our opportunity is not in
any literal sense to go back, a move that in a thousand ways is
impossible even if it were desirable. Bygone days really are
146
EPILOGUE I
147
gone, and many specifics of "the good old days" would not be
good in our context.
What we might do is get back on course. This distinction between reverting to the past and realigning ourselves with the
truth suggests a companion distinction respecting the word
"originaL" The preceding chapter closed by alluding to the cult
of originality which has become a hallmark of our time. We
may now extend this allusion by pointing out that the kind of
originality that has become fashionable-namely, that which
feeds on difference and tokens departure-is limited to a single
facet of the word; one, moreover, that is relatively late and
superficial. Foundationally the word pointed in the opposite
direction, to that which derives directly from its source or
origin and is close to it, like water that is pure and uncontaminated by side influences and admixtures.
The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim.!
"Originality is thus related to inspiration, and above all to revelation, for the origins are transcendent, being beyond this
world, in the domains of Spirit. Ultimately the origin is nothing less than the Absolute, the Infinite and Eternal,"2 and
originality a guarantor of both 'authenticity and effectuality. In
this fundamental sense of the word, a sense that carries the
prospect of a progressive awakening in the direction of man's
root and source, our book is a call for originality at all costs.
Developments will occur, of course; on the terrestrial plane
nothing escapes change, and this holds as much for religions as
for individuals and civilizations. Nor are changes in all respects
I. Joseph Addison, "Ode," in The Spectator, No. 465, Aug. 23, 1712.
John Ruskin distinguishes the two senses of original as follows: "That
virtue or originality that men so strain after is not newness (as they vainly
think), it is only genuineness; it all depends on this single glorious faculty
of getting to the spring of things and working out from that."
2. Martin Lings, What Is Sufism! (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1975), p. 15.
148 / FORGOTTEN TRUTH
deleterious. Respecting religions, change often involves a
double movement whose aspects to some extent balance one
another. On the one hand the collectivity degenerates in proportion to its distance from the Revelation that launched it,
while on the other hand, with respect to doctrine, the tradition
blooms, values that were implicit from the start being now
articulated. Thus a progressive and compensating unfolding
occurs within the very framework of a general decline.3 Five
hundred years after the initial Vedic revelation, Brahmanism
was in danger of ossifying in formalism and privilege: at
precisely that moment the Upanishads appeared. Implicit
wisdom was made explicit and rishis developed the techniques
of yoga. Five hundred years after the Buddha, his tradition
stood in like danger; it was on the verge of shriveling to a
monasticism without possibility of expanding radiation. It was
then that the Mahayana burgeoned, overlaying the "holy
selfishness" of the Pratyeka Buddhas with the ideal of the
compassionate Bodhisattva, and again the day was saved. In
Judaism the time of the Psalms and the Song ,of Solomon
could not possibly have been that of the Pentateuch, any more
than the Kabbalah could have unfolded before the Middle
Ages. The Christianity of the desert fathers flowers in the·
Middle Ages more gently under the sign of the Virgin Mother
and gives rise in turn to pure gnosis in the Rhineland mystics
and aspects of Scholasticism. In Islam the successive disintegration of empires and the sundering rift between Sunnis and
Shi'ites are redeemed by the progressive unfolding of Sufism
and the growth of its invigorating or~ers. It would be wrong
to conclude from these examples that religions never decline
3. A similar pattern can often be seen in the history of art. "Strange as
it may seem, it has always happened in the history of art, that by the time
perfection of technique has been attained, inspiration has declined. It was
so in Greece, and in Europe after the Renaissance. It almost seems as if
concentration upon technique hindered the free working of the imagination a little; if so, however much we desire both, do not let us make any
mistake as to which is first." A. K. Coomaraswamy, "The Aims of Indian
Art," Studies in Comparative Religion, Winter 1975, p. 7.
EPILOGUE I
149
and die. History shows that they do and logic that they must;
belonging as they do to the order of finitude, their days are
numbered from the start. The point of the illustrations is to
correct a misreading this book might otherwise provoke: the
mistake of assuming that the traditions teach that earlier is in
every way better and the present without redeeming prospects
of any sort.
A second misunderstanding could arise from the book's
pronounced inwardness. A book of many silences, its silence on
society is apt in these extroverted days to be particularly noticed and could raise the specter of social irresponsibility. On
the question of how society might be benefited, tradition harbors insights almost equal to the ontological insights our pages
have explored, beginning with its recognition that the issue
is so complex that, depending on the context in question, the
answer can range from jihad (holy warfare) 4 to wu wei ("the
way to do is to be"). Obviously we are not going to get into
this subject in an epilogue; 5 we note only that to charge the
primordial perspective with social indifference is calumny.
The fact that Confucius trudged for a decade trying to persuade rulers to convert his doctrines into practice, to say
nothing of Muhammad, who in a relatively short time drew
out of nothingness one of the greatest empires of history and
a religion that has imposed and maintained itself on a quarter
of the inhabited globe for nearly a millennium and a halfthese facts alone should suffice to show that the issue tradj_tion
poses is not that of contemplation versus action or even sociopolitical action. In this area the issue is simply that of balance
and proportion, the balance that derives from a sense of proportion, infinite matters being accorded infinite regard and
finite ones being regarded conditionally. Christ tells us to "seek
4. Though even here Muhammad's characterization of overt physical
combat as "the lesser jihad" must be remembered. "The greater jihad" is
that directed against the foe within.
5. Gai Eaton's manuscript, "Choice and Responsibility," on which we
have drawn a number of times in passing, will, if published, be a useful
introduction to the topic.
150 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
... first the Kingdom," and even a tradition as occupied with
society as is Confucianism observes that
If there be righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty
in the character.
If there be beauty in the character, there will be hannony
in the home.
If there be harmony in the home, there will be order in the
nation.
If there be order in the nation, there will be peace in the world
(The Great Learning).
It happened to have been Muhammad's destiny to penetrate
versatilely an exceptionally wide range of earthy experience:
not only was he shepherd, merchant, hermit, exile, soldier, lawgiver, and prophet-priest-king; he was also orphan (but with a
remarkably loving grandfather and uncle), for many years the
husband of one wife much older than himself, a many times
bereaved father, a widower, and finally the husband of many
wives, some much younger than himsel£. 6 What sanctified
this earthly plenitude was the degree to which it was dominated
by acute and unswerving sensitivity to the magnetism of the
Hereafter. "Do for this world," he said, "as if thou wert to
live a thousand years and for the next as if thou wert to die
tomorrow." On the one hand this Hadith "enjoins the perfection-the patient thoroughness we might say-incumbent
upon man as representative of God on earth: and on the
other hand it demands that he shall be ready to leave this
world at a moment's notice."7 Inasmuch as this terrestrial
plane is our current lot, it is not only-natural but appropriate
for us to feel concern for our daily problems and those of
our neighbors. We build our sand castles because we need
them, and in their small way they are beautiful, reflecting
in their fragile moats and turrets the patterns of another place,
a more enduring realm. But every man and woman is infinitely
6. Martin Lings, What Is Sufism1 p. M.
7. Ibid.
EPILOGUE I
151
more than the child that" plays thus in salt and sand, even as
a seed contains in virtuality a great tree: "0 high-born race of
foreigners on earth . . . you do not belong here, you belong
somewhere else." 8 Moreover, our entire visible cosmos rests
on an invisible volcano. We imagine that our earth, its mountain ranges and unplumbed seas, can be destroyed only by
forces of its own kind, by masses and energies that are in some
way physical, but in this we are mistaken. The world, in appearance so resilient, so substantial, can withdraw "from
within." Matter can flow back to the immaterial source from
which it came, causing the entire space-time field to collapse
like a balloon that is emptied of air. Our marvel consists in
the fact that, possessed as we are of souls and Spirit, we can
escape this collapse by retreating, or rather advancing, into
the mathematical point, our unchanging Center which is nonspatial. All discussion of social problems and the dangers· that
press upon us should proceed in the context of this realization.
They must be given their fair measure of concern but not
more.
We said that the visible cosmos rests on an invisible volcano,
but we must now add that at a deeper ontological level it floats
on an ocean of bliss. The addition is needed to offset a third
possible misunderstanding of the primordial outlook, the last
that we shall mention: namely, that the view is pessimistic. At
first glance it is difficult to take this supposition seriously: does
a reader suppose that we would have taken the pains to ~~ite
this book for the object of piping man into a gloomier mood
than the one he now enjoys? we impulsively wonder. 9 On
second thought, however, one sees how charges of pessimism
8. Augustine, £narrationes in Psalmos, 136.13.
9. "Freud's very pessimism and cynicism is still the most contemporary
thing about his thought," Ernest Becker wrote in The Denial of Death
(New York: Free Press, 1973), p. 94. As a barometric reading, the sentence
would be worth quoting had it ended there, but the way it continues makes
it interesting in another respect: " ... it is a pessimism grounded in reality,
in scientific truth," Becker concludes. We have ourselves said many things
about science in this book; none, we trust, as irresponsible as this.
152 I FORGOTTEN TRUTH
and failure of nerve arise. If optimism requires (on its negative side) refusal to accept imperfection as an inherent feature
of the terrestrial world, or (stated positively) faith in historical
progress, optimism is indeed unavailable to the traditions. But
only a logic that is blind to alternatives could conclude from
this that the traditions are pessimistic in their own right.
Characterizing the South Asian formulation of the primordial
outlook, Heinrich Zimmer writes:
Philosophical theory, religious belief, and intuitive experience
support each other ... in the basic insight that, fundamentally, all
is well. A supreme optimism prevails everywhere, in spite of the
unromantic recognition that the universe of man's affairs is in the
most imperfect state imaginable, one amounting practically to
chaos,lO
Toward the middle of this book we said that at heart what
sets us against modernity is its determination, scientistically
derived, to reverse tradition's premise and explain the more in
terms of the less. Even there we noted the inevitable though
subtle consequence of this reversal: the more becomes lessened
by the etiology. Now, at the book's cl-ose, we focus on this consequence itself and say that what sets us against modernity is
its demeaning of the human potential. The primordial tradi~
tion holds that man-not man in some hypothetically envisioned future, but man as he is constituted today an'd has always
been constituted-is heir to Sat, Chit, and Ananda: Infinite
Being, Infinite Awareness, Infinite Bliss. It is impossible in
prin'ciple for any alternative, ancient or modern, to match
that claim, for if it did, in essence it would be the primordial
philosophy, however different its details. In Dante's Inferno
souls have what they choose. The fate of those he classifies as
"virtuous pagans" derives from nothing more than their
failure to imagine better.
The traditions are realistic. Buddha saw the waters of the
seas as but a drop compared with the tears men have shed since
10. The Philosophi~s of India (New York: Pantheon Books, 1951), p. 549.
EPILOGUE
I 153
they reached the earth: "I teach ill," he said. But we know that
his assertion did not end there; "I teach ill and the ending of
ill," it continued. Our world is by definition a grimy, flawed,
and broken place; it is subject to decay and riddled with
death. If it were otherwise, it would be indistinguishable from
the timeless perfection of Paradise and would forfeit its separate existence. Yet with all its deformities it can be rendered
transparent, and perfection can be discerned behind its shapes
and patterns; it can also be loved in a way that turns its flaws
themselves into objects of redeeming compassion. This is the
spiritual counterpart of the fact that with all its smog and
pollution, our planet rides in an ocean of sunlight through the
innermost recesses of the solar system. Being is woven of
beatitude; there is a Buddha in every grain of sand.
"The world," said St. Augustine, "is a smiling place." As
for the Celestial City to which it is antechamber, "Brethren,
when I speak of that City ... I just can'not bring myself to
stop.... " 11 The only way to stop is to modulate discernment to
heights where words, having reached their timberline, can go
no further.
Guide us to that topmost height of mystic lore which exceedeth
light and more than exceedeth knowledge, where the simple,
absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of heavenly Truth lie hidden
in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness, and surcharging our
blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible~_fair
ness of glories which exceed all beauty! Such be my prayer.t2
11. Sermon, 158.7; Enarrationes in Psalmos, 136.13.
12. Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names and The Mystical
Theology (London: S.P.C.K., 1971), p. 191.
ADDENDUM
Daniel Ellsberg, reading this book in page proofs, has called
my attention to something worth stopping the presses for. On
pages 41 and 129, in pointing out tradition's inversion of the
modern propensity to derive the more from the less, the better
154 I
FORGOTTEN TRUTH
from sources that are inferior, I cited the Marxist contention
that order derives from chaos. This is, of course, the way Marxism
is read; it looks toward a classless society while asserting as the
opening claim of The Communist Afanifesto that "The history
of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
But that was written in 1847. Forty-one years later the findings
of the anthropologists had advanced to the point where they
could not be ignored, and Engels was forced to append a footnote. Thus, to the sentence just quoted the 1888 edition adds,
"That is, all written history."
In view of the ratio of unwritten to written history, it is just
possible that no other footnote, ever penned, retracts so much.
AppENdix:
THE PsycHEdElic EvidENCE
Know ten things, the Chinese say; tell nine-there is reason
to question whether it is wise even to mention the psychedelics in
connection with God and the Infinite. For though a connection
exists, it is-as in the comparable case of the role of sex in Tan.tra
-next to impossible to speak of it without being misunderstood. It
is for this reason, we suspect, that the Eleusinian mysteries were
among the best-kept in history, and Brahmins came eventually to
conceal, then deliberately forget, the identity of soma.l
If the only thing to say about the psychedelics was that they
seem on occasion to offer direct disclosures of the psychic and celestial
planes as well as (in rare instances) the Infinite itself, we would hold
our peace. For though such experiences may be veridical in ways,
the goal, it cannot be stressed too often, is not religious experiences;
it is the religious life. And with respect to the latter, psychedelic
"theophanies" can abort a quest as readily as, perhaps more readily
than, they can further it.
It is not, therefore, the isolated mystical experiences which the
psychedelics can occasion that lead us to add this appendix on the
subject, but rather evidence of a different order. Long-term, professionally garnered and carefully weighed, this latter evidence deserves
to be called, if anything in this area merits the term, scientific. We
enter it because of the ways in which, and extent to which, this
evidence seems to corroborate the primordial anthropology that Chap1. See the author's "Wasson's SOMA: A Review Article," journal of the
American Academy of Religion, XL, 4 (Dec. 1972).
155
156 I APPENDIX
ter 4 sketched in paradigm. In contradistinction to writings on the
psychedelics which are occupied with experiences the mind can
have, the concern here is with evidence they afford as to what the
mind is.2
The evidence in question is not widely known, for to date it has
been reported only in a few relatively obscure journals and a book
but recently off the press. At the same time, judged both by quantity
of data encompassed and by the explanatory power of the hypotheses
that make sense of this data, it is the most formidable evidence .the
psychedeiics have thus far produced. The evidence to which we refer is that which has emerged through the work of Stanislav Gro£.3
Grof's work began in Czechoslovakia, where for four years he
worked in an interdisciplinary complex of research institutes in
Prague and for another seven in the Psychiatric Research Institute
that developed out of this complex; on coming to the United States
in 1967 he continued his investigations at the Research Unit of
Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. Two covering
facts about his work are worth noting before we turn to its content.
First, in the use of psychedelics for therapeutic and personality assessment, his experience is by far the vastest that any single individual has amassed, covering as it does over 2,500 sessions in which he
spent a minimum of five hours with the subject. In addition his studies cover another S::>o cases his colleagues at Baltimore and Prague
conducted. Second, in spanning the Atlantic his work spans the two
2. "LSD. the most powerful psycho-active drug ever known to man, is
essentially an unspecific amplifier of mental processes. What we see in
LSD sessions is only an exteriorization and magnification of dynamics that
underlie human nature and human civilization. Properly used, the drug is
a tool for a deeper understanding of the human mind and human nature."
Abridged from the writings of Stanislav Grof, cited in footnote 3.
3. His book, the first in a projected five-volume series, is Realms of the
Human Unconscious: Obseroations from LSD Resem·ch (New York: Viking
Press, 1975). His journal articles are: "Beyond Psychoanalysis: I. Implications of LSD Research for Understanding Dimensions of Human Personality," Darshana International (India, 1970); "LSD Psychotherapy and
Human Culture," journal of the Study of Consciousness, Part I, 1970, Part
II, 1971; "The U,se of LSD in Psychotherapy," journal of Psychedelic
Drugs," 1970; "Varieties of Transpersonal Experiences: Observations from
LSD Psychotherapy," journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1972; "LSD
and the Cosmic Game: Outline of Psychedelic Cosmology and Ontology,"
journal of the Study of Consciousness, 1972; and one more which, because
it is his latest paper, will be quoted most often in this chapter. It is cited in
footnote 4.
THE PSYCHEDELIC EVIDENCE /
157
dominant approaches to psychedelic therapy that have been developed: psycholytic therapy (used at Prague and favored in Europe
generally), which involves numerous administrations of low to medium doses of LSD or variant over a long therapeutic program, and
psychedelic therapy (confined to America), which involves one or a
few high .doses in a short period of treatment.
The first thing Grof and his associates discovered was that there
is no specific pharmacological effect which LSD invariably produces:
"I have not been able to find a single phenomenon that could be
considered an invariant product of the chemical action of the drug
in any of the areas studied-perceptual, emotional, ideational, and
physical."4 Not even mydriasis (prolonged dilatation of the pupils),
one of the most common symptoms, occurs invariably. Psychological
effects vary even more than do physiological, but the range of the
latter-mydriasis, nausea, and vomiting, enhanced intestinal movements, diarrhea, constipation, frequent urination, acceleration as well
as retardation of pulse, cardiac distress and pain, palpitations, suffocation and dyspnea, excessive sweating and hypersalivation, dry
mouth, reddening of the skin, hot flushes and chills, instability and
vertigo, inner trembling, fine muscle tremors-exceeds that of any
other drug that affects the autonomic nervous system. These somatic
symptoms are practiCally independent of dosage and occur in all possible combinations. Variability between subjects is equaled by
variation in the symptoms a single subject will experience under different circumstances; particularly important from the clinical point
of view are the differences that appear at different stages in the
therapeutic process. All this led Grof to conclude that LSD is not
a specific causal agent, but rather a catalyzer. It is, as foot~ote 2
indicates, an unspecific amplifier of neural and mental processes.
By exteriorizing for the therapist and raising to consciousness for
the patient himself material otherwise buried, and by enlarging this
material to the point of caricature so that it appears as if under a
magnifying glass, the psychedelics are, Grof became convinced, an
4. "Theoretical and Empirical Basis of Transpersonal Psychology and
Psychotherapy: Observations from LSD Research," journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1973. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent references
in this appendix will be to this, Grof's latest paper. Also, though his work
covers a wide spectrum of psychedelic substances, most of it was with
LSD, so we shall limit our references to it.
158 / APPENDIX
unrivaled instrument: first, for identifying causes in psychopathology
(the problem that is causing the difficulty); second, for personality
diagnosis (determining the chancter type of the subject in question);
and third, for understanding the human mind generally. "It does
not seem inappropriate to compare their potential significance for
psychiatry and psychology to that of the microscope for medicine
or of the telescope in astronomy.... Freud called dreams the 'royal
way to the unconscious.' The statement is valid to a greater extent
for LSD experiences.''5
Of the drug's three potentials, it is the third-its resources for
enlarging our understanding of the human mind and self-that concerns us in this book. The nature of man has been so central to our
study that even flickers of light from Grof's work would make it
interesting. That the light proves to be remarkably clear and steady
makes it important.
We come at once to the point. The view of man that was outlined
in Chapter 4 presented him as a multilayered creature, and Grof's
work points to the same conclusion. As long as the matter is put
thus generally it signals nothing novel, for existing depth psychology
-psychiatry, psychoanalysis-says the same; the adjective "depth"
implies as much, and metaphors of archaeology and excavation dot
the writings of Freud, Jung, and their colleagues. The novelty of
Grof's work lies in the precision with which the levels of the mind it
brings to view correspond with the levels of selfhood the; primordial
tradition describes.
In chemo-excavation the levels come to view sequentially. In
this respect, too, images of archaeology apply: surface levels must be
uncovered to get at ones that lie deeper. In psychedelic (high-dose)
therapy the deeper levels appear later in the course of a single session; in psycholytic (low-dose) therapy they surface later in the
sequence of therapeutic sessions. The sequences are parallel, but
since the levels first came to Grof's attention during his psycholytic
work in Prague, and since that earlier work was the more extensive,
covering eleven of the seventeen years he has been working with the
5. "Theory and Practice of LSD Psychotherapy" (U68). Instead of being
published as a single volume as Grof originally intended, this long, initial
report of his study is being reworked for projected issue in five volumes,
the first of which, as- indicated in footnote 3, appeared in 1975. Page
references to the comprehensive original report will hereafter be prefixed
with aU, indicating unpublished. Page numbers not thus prefixed refer to
the paper named in footnote 4.
THE PSYCHEDELIC EVIDENCE /
159
drugs, we shall confine ourselves to it in reporting his experimental
design.
The basic study at Prague covered fifty-two psychiatric patients.
All major clinical categories were represented, from depressive disorders through psychoneuroses, psychosomatic diseases, and character
disorders ~o borderline and clear-cut psychoses in the schizophrenic
group. Patients with above-average intelligence were favored to obtain high-quality introspective reports; otherwise cases with dim
prognosis in each category were chosen. Grof himself worked with
twenty-two of the subjects, his two colleagues with the remainder.
The number of psycholytic sessions ranged from fifteen to one
hundred per patient with a total of over 2,500 sessions being conducted. Each patient's treatment began with several weeks of drugfree psychotherapy. Thereafter the therapy was punctuated with
doses of 100 to 250 micrograms of LSD administered at seven- to
fourteen-day intervals.
The basic finding was that "when material from consecutive LSD
sessions of the same person was compared it became evident that
there was a definite continuity between these sessions. Rather than
being unrelated and random, the material seemed to represent a successive unfolding of deeper and deeper levels of the unconscious with
a very definite trend" (U41).
The trend regularly led through three successive stages preceded
by another which, being less important psychologically, Grof calls
a preliminary phase. In this opening phase the chemical works
primarily on the subject's body. In this respect it resembles what
earlier researchers had called the vegetative phase, but the two
are not identical. Proponents of a vegetative phase assumed that
LSD directly caused the manifold somatic responses patients typically
experience in the early stages of psychedelic sessions. We have seen
that Grof's more extensive evidence countered this view. Vegetative
symptoms are real enough, but they vary so much between subjects
and for a single subject under varying circumstances that it seems
probable that they are occasioned more by anxieties and resistances
than by the chemical's direct action. There is also the fact that
they are far from confined to early phases of the LSD sequence.
These considerations led Grof to doubt that there is a vegetative
phase per se. The most he is prepared to admit is that the drug has
a tendency at the start to affect one specific part of the body: its
perceptual and particularly its optical apparatus. Colors become
160 I APPENDIX
exceptionally bright and beautiful, objects and persons are geometrized, things vibrate and undulate, one hears music as if one were
somehow inside it, and so on. This is as close as the drug comes to
producing a direct somatic effect, but it is sufficient to warrant speaking of an introductory phase which Grof calls aesthetic.
With this preliminary phase behind him the subject begins his
psycholytic journey proper. Its first stage is occupied with material
that is psychodynamic in the classical sense: Grof calls it the psychodynamic or Freudian stage. Experiences here are of a distinctly
personal character. They involve regression into childhood and the
reliving of traumatic infantile experiences in which Oedipal and
Electra conflicts and ones relating to various libidinal zones are
conspicuous; first and last, pretty much the full Freudian topography is traversed. The amount of unfinished business this layer of the
self contains varies enormously; as would be expected, in disturbed
subjects there is more than in normals. But the layer itself is present
in everyone and must be worked through before the next stratum
can be reached. "Worked through" again means essentially what
psychiatry stipulates: a reliving not only in memory but in emotion
of the traumatic episodes that have unconsciously crippled the
patient's responses. Freud and Breuer's hypothesis that insufficient
emotional and motor abreaction during early traumatic episodes produces a "jamming" of affect that provides energy thereafter for
neurotic symptoms is corroborated, for when patients in the course
of a number of sessions enter into a problem area to the point of
reliving it completely and integrating it into consciousness, the
symptoms related to that area "never reappear" and the patient is
freed to work on other symptoms.
This much was in keeping with Grof's psychiatric orientation; it
came as "laboratory proof of the basic premises of psychoanalysis"
(p. 21). But there that model gave out. For_ the experiences that followed, "no adequate explanation can be found within the framework
of classical Freudian psychoanalysis" (pp. 24-25).6
6. On the limited range of the Freudian model I insert a supporting
remark by Gordon Allport, in his latter years the dean of American personality theorists. In his closing years at Harvard he would invite me to
his seminars to register such light as Asian psychology might throw on
human nature. One year I organized my remarks around India's "four
psychologies," geared respectively to kama (pleasure), artha (wealth or
worldly success), dharma (duty), and moksha (liberation). Allport's response
THE PSYCHEDELIC EVIDENCE /
161
Negatively the new stage was characterized by an absence of the
individually and biographically determined material that had dominated the sessions theretofore. As a result, the experiential content
of this second stage was more uniform for the population than was
the content of the first. We have already cited Grof's contention that
LSD is not so much an agent that produces specific effects as it is
an amplifier of material that is already present, and in the first
stage the enlarging process worked to magnify individual differences:
"the sessions of patients belonging to various diagnoistic categories
were characterized by an unusual inter- and also intra-individual
variability" (U 118). In the second stage the process was reversed.
With the magnifying glass still in place, variations receded. "The
content seemed to be strikingly similar in all of the subjects" (ibid.).
This is already important, for the emergent similarity suggests
that the subjects were entering a region of the mind which they
shared in common, a region that underlay the differing scrawls their
separate biographies had incised upon it. As to content, "the central
focus and basic characteristics of the experience on this level are
the problems related to physical pain and agony, dying and death,
biological birth, aging, disease and decrepitude" (p. 25)-Buddha's
First Noble Truth, Grof somewhere observes, and three of the
Four Passing Sights that informed it. Inevitably, he continues,
the shattering encounter with these critical aspects of human existence and the deep realization of the fraility and impermanence
of man as a biological creature, is accompanied by an agonizing
existential crisis. The individual comes to realize through these
experiences that no matter what he does in his life, he cannot
escape the inevitable: he will have to leave this world bereft of
everything that he has accumulated, achieved and has been""- emotionally attached to. [ibid.]
Among the phenomena of this second stage the theme of death
and rebirth recurred so frequently that it sent Grof to a book_ he had
heard of in his psychiatric training but had not studied, it having
been written by a psychoanalytic renegade, Otto Rank. It bore the
was: "In the West we have a detailed psychology of pleasure a Ia Freud's
Pleasure Principle. McClelland's 'achievement motivation' has added to this
a psychology of success. Respecting duty we have a nickel's worth of
Freud's superego, and on the psychology of liberation-nothing."
162 I
APPENDIX
title The Trauma of Birth, and to use Grof's own word, he was
"flabbergasted" to find how closely the second-stage psycholytic
experiences conformed to it. He and his colleagues fell to calling
the second stage perinatal or Rankian.
During the weeks through which the stage extends, the patient's
clinical condition worsens. The stage climaxes in a session in which
the patient experiences the agony of dying and appears to himself
actually to die.
The subjects can spend hours in agomzmg pain, with facial contortions, gasping for breath and discharging enormous amounts of
muscular tension in various tremors, twitching, violent shaking
and complex twisting movements. The color of the face can be
dark purple or dead pale, and the pulse rate considerably accelerated. The body temperature usually oscillates in a wide range,
sweating can be profuse, and nausea with projectile vomiting is a
frequent occurrence. [ibid.]
This death experience tends to be followed immediately by rebi... th,
an explosive ecstasy in which joy, freedom, and the promise of life
of a new order are the dominant motifs.
Outside the LSD sequence the new life showed itself in the patients' marked clinical improvement. Within the sequence it introduced a third experiential landscape. When Grof's eyes became acclimated to it, it appeared at first to be Jungian, Jung being the
only major psychologist to have dealt seriously and relatively unreductionistically with the visions that appeared. Later it seemed
clearer to refer to the stage as transpersonal.
Two features defined this third and final stage. First, its "most
typical characteristics ... were profound religious and mystical experiences" (Ul25).
Everyone who experientially reached th~se levels developed convincing insights into the utmost relevance of spiritual and religious
dimensions in the universal scheme of things. Even the most hardcore materialists, positivistically-oriented scientists, skeptics and
cynics, uncompromising atheists and antireligious cruaders such as
the Marxist philosophers, became suddenly interested in spiritual
search after they confronted these levels in themselves. [p. 25]
Grof speaks of levels in the plural here, for the "agonizing existential
crisis" of the second ~tage is already religious in its way: death and
rebirth are ultimates or none exist. The distinguishing feature of
THE PSYCHEDELIC EVIDENCE /
163
the third stage is not, strictly speaking, that it is religious but that
it is (as Grof's words indicate) mystically religious: religious in a
mode in which (a) the whole predominates over the part, and (b)
within the whole evil is rescinded. This connects with the stage's
other feature, its transpersonal aspect, which was so pronounced as
to present itself in the end as the logical candidate for the name
by which the stage should be designated. A trend toward transpersonal experiences, that is, ones occupied with things other than
oneself, had already shown itself in stage two. Suffering, for example, which in the first stage presented itself in the form of recollected autobiographical traumas, had in the second stage taken the
form of identifying with the suffering of others, usually groups of
others: famine victims, prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, or
mankind as a whole with its suffering symbolized archetypally by
Christ on his cross, Tantalus exposed to eternal tortures in Hades,
Sisyphus rolling his boulder incessantly, Ixion fixed on his wheel,
or Prometheus chained to his rock. Likewise with death; already
by stage two "the subjects felt that they were operating in a framework which was 'beyond individual death'" (Ul25). The third stage
continues this outbound, transpersonal momentum. Now the phenomena with which the subject identifies are not restricted to mankind
or even to living forms. They are cosmic, having to do with the
elements and forces from which life proceeds. And the subject is less
conscious of himself as separate from what he perceives. To a large
extent the subject-object dichotomy is itself transcended.
So much for description of the three stages. Now to interpretation
and explanation.
Grof was and is a psychiatrist. Psychiatry is the study and practice
of ontogenetic explanation: it accounts for present syndromes in
terms of antecedent experiences in the life history of the individual.
Freud had mined these experiences as they occur in infancy and
childhood, but Grof's work had led to regions Freud's map did not
fit. Clearly, as psychiatrist, Grof had nowhere to turn for explanations
save further in the same direction-further back. His very methodology forced him to take seriously the possibility that experiences
attending birth and even gestation could affect ensuing life
trajectories.
Taking his cues from The Trauma of Birth while emending it in
important respects, Grof worked out a typology in which second- and
third-stage LSD experiences are correlated with four distinct stages
164 I
APPENDIX
in the birth process: (a) a comfortable, intrauterine stage before the
onset of labor; (b) an oppressive stage at labor's start when the
fetus suffers the womb's contractions and has "no exit" inasmuch
as the cervix has not opened; (c) the traumatic ensuing stage of
labor during which the fetus is violently ejected through the birth
canal; and (d) the freedom and release of birth itself. B and c
seemed to Grof to vector the second or Rankian stage in the LSD
sequence. In the reliving of b, the oppressiveness of the womb is
generalized and the entire world, existence itself, is experienced as
oppressive. C, when relived-the agony of labor and forced expulsion through the birth canal-produces the experience of dying:
traumatic ejection from the only life-giving context one has known.
The rebirth experience in which the Rankian stage climaxes derives
from reliving the experience of physical birth (d) and paves the way
for the ensuing transpersonal stage. The sense of unshadowed bliss
that dominates this final stage taps the earliest memories of all:
before the womb grew crowded, when the fetus blended with its
mother in mystic embrace (a).
Even in bare outline Grof's hypothesis is plausible, and when
fleshed out with the case histories and experiential accounts that
gave rise to it (material that is fascinating but which space precludes
our entering here) it is doubly so. When subjects in their Rankian
stage report first suffocation and then a violent, projective explosion
in which not only blood but urine and feces are everywhere, one is.
persuaded that revived memories of the birth process play at least a
part in triggering, shaping, and energizing later-stage LSD experiences. The question is: Are these the only causes at work? As we have
noted, in the psychiatric model of man, once the Freudian domain
has been exhausted there is nowhere to look for causes save where
Rank did and Grof does: the ego, driven back to earlier and yet
earlier libido positions, finally reenters tht: uterus. In the model of
man that was sketched in Chapter 4, however, things are different.
There the social and biological history of the organism is not the
sole resource for explanation. "The soul that rises with us ...
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness ...
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.
THE PSYCHEDELIC EVIDENCE /
165
From whence? "From God," Wordsworth tells us, and we agree.
When he adds in the line that follows: "Heaven lies about us in our
infancy!" we again concur; as the celestial plane it envelops our
souls not only in their infancy but always. More proximately, however, it is the intermediate or psychic plane from which we stem.
Whereas in the psychiatric perspective body is basic and explanations
for mental 'occurrences are sought in body's endowments or history,
in the primordial psychology body represents a kind of shaking
out of what has condensed on the plane of mental phenomena that
exist prior to body and are more real than body. We are back at
the point Chapter 4 made in the context of dreams: it is not so
much that we dream as that we are dreamed, if we may use this
way of saying that the forces that come to the fore in our dreams
pull the strings that govern our puppet existences. They do not
govern them entirely-man is man, not manikin-but to say that
they govern them is closer to the truth than is the epiphenomenal
view in which body pays the piper and calls the tunes that dreams
play out.
Thus to Grof's finding that later stages in the LSD sequence
conform to the stages of the birth process to a degree that warrants
our saying that they are influenced by those stages, we add: influenced only, not caused. To a greater degree the experiences of
these stages put the subject in direct touch with the psychic and
archetypal forces of which his life is distillation and product. Birth
and death are not physical only. Everyone knows this, but it is less
recognized that physical birth and death are relatively minor manifestations of forces that are cosmic in blanketing the manifest world,
the terrestrial and intermediate planes combined. Buddhism's pratitya-samutpada (Formulation of Dependent Origination) says,.. profound things on this point, but all we shall say is that when a psychic
quantum, germ of an ego, decides-out of ignorance, the Buddhists
insert immediately-that it would be interesting to go it alone and
have an independent career, in thereby distinguishing itself from
the whole, and setting itself in ways against the whole, the ego
shoulders certain consequences. Because it is finite, things will not
always go its way: hence suffering in its manifold varieties. And the
temporal side of the self's finitude ordains that it will die-piecemeal from the start as cells and minor dreams collapse, but eventually
in its entirety. Energy is indestructible, however, so in some form
166 I APPENDIX
there is rebirth. Confrontation of these principal truths in their
transpersonal and trans-species scopes and intensity is the basic
stuff of later-stage LSD experience. Biological memory enters, but
conceivably with little more than a "me too": I too know the
sequence from the time I was forged and delivered.
Spelled out in greater detail, the primordial explanation of the
sequence would run as follows. Accepting LSD as a "tool for the
study of the structure of human personality; of its various facets
and levels," we see it uncovering the successively deeper layers of
the self which Grof's study brings to light. Grof's psychiatric explanation for why it does so is that "defense systems are considerably
loosened, resistances decrease, and memory recall is facilitated to a
great degree. Deep unconscious material emerges into consciousness
and is experienced in a complex symbolic way" (U277). Our explanation shifts the accent. Only in the first stage are the defense systems
that are loosened ones that the individual ego builds to screen out painful memories. For the rest, what is loosened are structures that condition the human mode of existence and separate it from modes that are
higher: its corporeality and compliance with the spatio-temporal
structures of the terrestrial plane. The same holds for the memory
recall that LSD facilitates. In the first stage it is indeed memory that
is activated as the subject relives, directly or in symbolic guise, the
experiences that had befallen it, but in later stages what the psychiatrist continues to see as memory-an even earlier, intrauterine
memory-the ontologist (short of invoking reincarnation) sees as
discovery: the discovery of layers of selfhood that are present from
conception but are normally obscured from view. Likewise with the
"peculiar double orientation and double role of the subject" that
Grof describes. "On the one hand," he writes, the subject "experiences full and complex age regression into the traumatic situations
of childhood; on the other hand, he can as~ume alternately or even
simultaneously the position corresponding to his real age" (U279).
This oscillation characterizes the entire sequence, but only in the
first stage is its not-immediate referent the past. In the later sessions,
that which is not immediate is removed not in time but in spacepsychological space, of course. It lies below the surface of the exterior
self that is normally in view.
The paradigm of the self that was sketched in Chapter 4 showed
it to be composed of four parts: body, mind, soul, and Spirit. Work-
THE PSYCHEDELIC EVIDENCE /
167
ing with spatial imagery, we can visualize LSD as a seeing-eye probe
that penetrates progressively toward the core of the subject's being.
In the early sessions of the LSD sequence it moves through the
subject's body in two steps. The first of these triggers peripheral
somatic responses, most regularly ones relating to perception, to
produce the aesthetic phase. The second moves into memory regions
of the bra.in where, Wilder Penfield has posited, a complete cinematographic record of everything the subject has experienced lies stored.
That the events that were most important in the subject's formation
are the ones that rush forward for attention stands to reason. We are
into the first of the three main stages of the psycholytic sequence,
the psychodynamic or Freudian stage.
Passage from the Freudian to the Rankian stage occurs when the
chemicals enter the region of the mind that outdistances the brain
and swims in the medium of the psychic or intermediate plane. The
phenomenological consequences could almost have been predicted:
1. Biographical data-events that imprinted themselves on the
subject's body, in this case the memory region of his brain-recede.
2. Their place is taken by the "existentials"--conditioning structures--of human existence in general. The grim affect of this stage
could be due in part to memories of the ordeals of gestation and
birth, but the torment, the sense of the wistfulness and pathos of a
suffering humanity and indeed life in all its forms, derives mainly
from the fact that the larger purview of the intermediate plane
renders the limitations (dukkha) of the terrestrial plane more visible
than when the subject is immersed in them.
3. In the death and rebirth experience that climaxes this phase,
Rankian factors could again cooperate without precluding causes
that are more basic. The self had entered the intermediate.. plane
through the soul's assumption of--compression into--mind; as the
Hindus say, the jiva assumed a subtle body. Now, in the reversal of
this sequence, mind must be dissolved (die) for soul to be released
(reborn).
The sense of release from the imprisoning structures of mind
signals the fact that the probe has reached the level of soul. The
phenomenological consequences are the ones Grof's subjects reported
in the transpersonal stage, the main ones being the following:
1. Whereas in the Rankian stage "there ... was ... a very distinct
polarity between very positive and very negative experience" (Ul25),
168 I APPENDIX
experience is now predominantly beatific, with "melted ecstacy" per·
haps its most-reported theme. Subjects "speak about mystic union,
the fusion of the subjective with the objective world, identification
with the universe, cosmic consciousness, the intuitive insight into the
essence of being, the Buddhist nirvanam, the Vedic samadhi, the
harmony of worlds and spheres, the approximation to God, etc."
(U29).
2. Experience is more abstract. At its peak it "is usually contentless and accompanied by visions of blinding light or beautiful colors
(heavenly blue, gold, the rainbow spectrum, peacock feathers, etc.)"
(ibid.) or is associated with space or sound. When its accouterments
are more concrete they tend to be archetypal, with the archetypes
seeming to be limitless in number. The celestial plane which the soul
inhabits is, we recall, the plane of God and the archetypes. The
distinction between the two, which if fleshed out would result in
an ontology of five tiers instead of four (see footnote, page 51), is
for purposes of simplification and symmetry being played down in
the present book.
3. The God who is almost invariably encountered is single and
so far removed from anthropomorphism as to elicit, often, the pronoun "it." This is in contrast to the gods of the Rankian stage which
tend to be multiple, Olympian, and essentially enlarged titans.
Beyond the soul lies only Spirit, an essence so ineffable that when
the seeing eye strikes it, virtually all that can be reported is that
it is "beyond" and "more than" all that had been encountered
theretofore.
The correlations between the primordial anthropology and the
psychedelic sequence can be diagramed as shown opposite:
Up to this point we have noted Grors empirical findings, and
compared the way they fit into his Rank-extended psychiatric theories
on the one hand and into the primordial understanding of man on
the other. It remains to point out how the findings of seventeen
years affected his own thinking.
Engaged as he was in "the first mapping of completely unknown
territories" (U267), he could not have foreseen where his inquiry
would lead. What he found was that in "the most fascinating
intellectual and spiritual adventure of my life [it] opened up new
fantastic areas and forced me to break with the old systems and
frameworks" (U250). The first change in his thinking has already
THE PSYCHEDELIC EVIDENCE /
169
Preliminary
phase
Psycho lytic
stages
Anthropological
levels
been noted: the psycholytic sequences showed the birth trauma to
have more dynamic consequences than Grof and his strictly Freudian
associates had supposed. This change psychoanalysis could accommodate, but not the one that followed. "I started my LSD research in
1956 as a convinced and dedicated psychoanalyst;'' he writes. "In the
light of everyday clinical observations in LSD sessions, I found this
conception untenable" (p. 17). Basically, what proved to be untenable was "the present ... gloomy ... image of man, which is to a
great extent influenced by psychoanalysis" (U382).7
This picture of man,
that of a social animal basically governed by blind and irrational
instinctual forces . . . contradicts the experiences from the LSD
sessions or at least appears superficial and limited. Most of the
instinctual tendencies described by psychoanalysis (incestuous and
murderous wishes, cannibalistic impulses, sadomasochistic inclinations, coprophilia, etc.) are very striking in the early LSD sessions;
these observations are so common that they could almost be con7. The flyleaf of Rank's book which served as almost the bible for Grof's
work in one of its stages carries a quotation from Nietzsche: "The very
best ... is, not to be born . . . . The next best . . . is ... to die soon."
170 I APPENDIX
sidered experimental evidence for some of the basic assumptions
of psychoanalysis. Most of them, however, appear in the sessions
for only a limited period of time. This whole area can be transcended [whereupon] we are confronted with an image of man
which is diametrically opposed to the previous one. Man in his
innermost nature appears then as a being that is fundamentally in
harmony with his environment and is governed by intrinsic high
and universal values. [U382-83, deletions not indicated.]
This change in anthropology has been the solid effect of psychedelic evidence on Grof's thinking. In psychoanalytic terms, if Freud
discovered the importance of infantile experience on ontogenetic
development and Rank the importance of the experience of birth
itself, Grof's discoveries carry this search for ever earlier etiologiesin psychoanalytic theory earlier
stronger-to its absolute limit: his
optimistic view of man derives from discovering the influence and
latent power of early-gestation memories; memories of the way things
were when the womb was still uncongested and all was well. Beyond
this revised anthropology, however, Grof has toyed with a changed
ontology as well. Endowments that supplement his psychiatric competences have helped him here: he has an "ear" for metaphysics and
an abiding ontological interest. These caused him to listen attentively
from the start to his subjects' reports on the nature of reality, and in
one of his recent papers, "LSD and the Cosmic Game: Outline of
Psychedelic Cosmology and Ontology" (see footnote 3, page 156), he
gives these reports full rein. Laying aside for the interval his role as
research psychiatrist, which required seeing patients' experiences as
shaped by if not projected from early formative experiences, in this
paper Grof turns phenomenologist and allows their reports to stand
in their own right. The view of reality that results is so uncannily
like the one that has been outlined in this book that, interlacing
paraphrases of passages in Grof's article with direct quotations from
it, we present it here in summary.
=
The ultimate source of existence is the Void, the supracosmic
Silence, the uncreated and absolutely ineffable Supreme.
The first possible formulation of this source is Universal Mind.
Here, too, words fail, for Mind transcends the dichotomies,
polarities, and paradoxes that harry the relative world. Insofar as
description is attempted, the Vedantic ternary-Infinite Existence,
Infinite Intelligence, Inpnite Bliss--is as adequate as any.
THE PSYCHEDELIC EVIDENCE /
171
God is not limited to his ·foregoing, "abstract" modes. He can
be encountered concretely, as the God of the Old and New Testaments, Buddha, Shiva, or in other modes. These modes do not,
however, wear the mantle of ultimacy or provide answers that are
final.
The phenomenal worlds owe their existence to Universal Mind,
which Mind- does not itself become implicated in their categories.
Man, together with the three-dimensional world he experiences, is
but one of innumerable modes through which Mind experiences
itself. The "heavy physicality" and seemingly objective finality of
man's material world, its space-time grid and laws of nature that
offer themselves as if they were sine qua nons o£ existence itself
-all these are in fact highly provisional and relative. Under
exceptional circumstances man can rise to a level of consciousness
where he sees that taken together they constitute but one of
inumerable sets of limiting constructs Universal Mind assumes. To
saddle that Mind itself with these categories would be as ridiculous
as trying to understand the human mind through the rules of
chess.
Created entities tend progressively to lose contact with their
original source and the awareness of their pristine identity with it.
In the initial stage of this falling away, created entities maintain
contact with their source and the separation is playful, relative,
and obviously tentative. An image that would illustrate this stage
is that of waves on the ocean. From a certain point of view they
are individual entities; we cap. speak of a large, fast, green, and
foamy wave, for example. At the same time it is transparently
evident that in spite of its relative individuation the wave is part
of the ocean.
At the next stage created entities assume a partial independence
and we can observe the beginnings of "cosmic screenwork." He.,r.e
unity with the source can be temporarily forgotten in the way
an actor on stage can virtually forget his own identity while he
identifies with the character he portrays.
Continuation of the process of partitioning results in a situation
in which individuation is permanently and for all practical purposes complete, and only occasionally do intimations of the
original wholeness resurface. This can be illustrated by the relationship between cells of a body, organs, and the body as a
whole. Cells are separate entities but function as parts of organs.
The latter have even more independence, but they too play out
their roles in the complete organism. Individuation and participation are dialectically combined. Complex biochemical interactions
172 / APPENDIX
bridge provisional boundaries to ensure the functioning of the
organism as a whole.
In the final stage the separation is practically complete. Liaison
with the source is lost and the original identity completely forgotten. The "screen" is now all but impermeable; radical qualitative change is required for the original unity to be restored. Symbol
of this might be a snowflake, crystallized from water that has
evaporated from the ocean. It bears little outward similarity to
its source and must undergo a change in structure if reunion is to
occur.
Human beings who manage to effect the change just referred
to find thereafter that life's polarities paradoxically both do
and do not exist. This holds for such contraries as spiritjmatter,
goodjevil, stability/motion, heaven/hell, beauty ;ugliness, agony1
ecstasy, etc. In the last analysis there is no difference between
subject and object, observer and observed, experiencer and experienced, creator and creation.
In the early years of psychoanalysis when hostility was shown to
its reports and theories on account of their astonishing novelty, and
they were dismissed as products of their authors' perverted imaginations, Freud used to hold up against this objection the argument
that no human brain could have invented such facts and connections
had they not been persistently forced on it by a series of converging
and interlocking observations. Grof might have argued equally: to
wit, that the "psychedelic cosmology and ontology" that his patients
came up with is as uninventable as Freud's own system. In fact,
however, he does not do so. In the manner of a good phenomenologist he lets the picture speak for itself, neither belittling it by
referring it back to causes that in purporting to explain it would
explain it away, nor arguing that it is true. As phenomenologists
themselves would say, he "brackets" his own judgment regarding
the truth question and contents himself witlr reporting what his
patients said about it.
The idea that the "three-dimensional world" is only one of
many experiential worlds created by the Universal Mind . . .
appeared to them much more logical than the opposite alternative
that is so frequently taken for granted, namely, that the material
world has objective reality of its own and that the human consciousness and the concept of God are merely products of highly
organized matter, the human brain. When closely analyzed the
THE PSYCHEDELIC EVIDENCE /
173
latter concept presents at least as many incongruences, paradoxes
and absurdities as the described concept of the Universal Mind.
The problems of finity versus infinity of time and space; the
enigma of the origin of matter, energy and space; and the mystery
of the prime impulse appear to be so overwhelming and defeating
that one seriously questions why this approach should be given
priority in our thinking. [p. 11]
aborigine, 96, 116
Absolute, 25. 85, 147
Abu Bakr Siraj Ed-Din, 97n
Addison, Joseph, 147n
Adler, Alfred, 76
aflluent society: stone age as the
original, 125n
ahamkara, 90
Ahman al-Alawi, 56n
Akka pygmy, 54n
Alexander, Samuel, 128
al-Hallaj, Mansur, 87 ·
All and Everything, 121
Allah, 80, 97: names of, 54
Allport, Gordon, 160
All-Possibility: the Infinite as, 25
Alvars, 82
ambiguity as a virtue in symbolism
and language, 15-14
anatta, 52
angels, angeology, 2n, 18, 105
Angkor Wat, 23
Angoff, Allan, 73n
anthropologists, Ill
anthropology: Levi-Strauss on, 126;
primordial, ch. 4, 155, 168
anthropomorphism: appropriate-.
ness of, 5lff. 80; dangers in, 53, 79
antimatter, 115, 116
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 38, 78, 105
archaic (tribal, pre-civilized) outlook, 3, 17: as included in the
primordial tradition, 54
archetypes, 3~1. 48, 50, 5ln, 139,
168; as God's "ideas", attributes,
or first creations, 5In: as psychoid,
40; archetypal forces, 16~
174
arketupon, 39
Aristotle, 5, Un, 15, 26, 64, 68, 75n,
78
Arnold, Matthew, 99
artificial intelligence, 136£
Asia, 23, 110, 122: South, 152
askesis, 114
astral bodies, astral projection, 39
astronomy, If, 29
Atman, 86, 87, 89, 103: identical
with Brahman, Ill
Attila, 96
Augustine, St., 16n, 20, 34, 110, ll8,
15ln, 153
Auschwitz, 96
Avogadro's number, 101
axis mundi, 23
Bacon, Francis, 5
bardos, 39, 47
Bayazid, 114
beatific vision, 144
Beatrice, 78, 85
Becker, Carl, 7
Becker, Ernest, 15ln
Beckmann, Max, 65
being, 24, 25, 28, 57, 58, 153: as
intrinsically good, 77; as object of
the soul's desire, 76£; as the
ontological measure, 3
Being, 28, 55, 84, 85, 90, 92, 144, 152
Bellarmine, St., 118
Bergson, Henri, 120, 124: and
parapsychology, 69
Bethell, Tom, 134
Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 12
INDEX /
Bhagavad-Gita, 31
Bharati, Agehananda, 72n
biology, biologists, 15, 120, 127, 137,
142
Black Elk, 30
black holes, 49, 122n
Blaisdell Institute, Journal of,
17n
Blake, William, 31, ll5
Bloch, Ernst, 120
Block, Ned, 20n
body, 63, 143£, 165, 169: resurrected,
73; subtle (etheric, astral) , 39,
47, 73, 167
Bohm, David, 17, 102, 103
Bohme, Jakob, llO
Boler, Father Martin, 53n
Brahma, 49
Brahman, 87, 89, 103, 111
brain: distinguished from mind,
63f; hemispheres function
differently, 65f
Breuer, 6., 160
Brown, Joseph Epes, 54n
Buber, Martin, 28
Buddha, 30, 38n, 60, 92, 100, llO,
148,. 152, 161, 171: Maitreya, liS;
Pratyeka, 148
Buddha-nature, 87
Buddhism, 30, 38n, 55, 88n, 161, 165,
168: Ch'an (Zen), 87, 110, ll3;
Mahayana, 148; Shin, ll3
Bultman, Rudolf, 20
Burckhardt, Titus, 4ln, 131, 132n,
139
Bury, J .B~, 120
Butterfield, Herbert,
Capek, Mili~. 106n, 111n
Capra, Fritjof, ll7n
causes, final: vs. efficient, 15; as
excluded from science, 15, 137
celestial. See planes
celestial ray, 29
Chance and Necessity, 15, 130n
China, 31, 121, 155
Chomsky, Noam, 126
Christ, 56, 77n, 83f, 108, 110, 149:
two natures of, paralleled in
brain's two hemispheres, 66
Christian, Christianity, 1, 22, 33, 83,
96, 99, 107, 133, 148
175
Chuang Tzu, 32, 33
Collier, John, 35
Communist Manifesto, 153
complements: union of, 26
Confucius, Confucianism, 12, 146,
149, 150
control: as a goal of science, 10
Conze, Edward, 38n, 103n
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 54n,
148n
Corbin, Henry, 85n
counter-intuitive: nature as, 104£,
107
Creative Evolution. 120
Crest-Jewel of Discrimination,
102
cross: symbolism of, ch. 2; threedimensional, ch. 2
Czechoslovakia, 156
Dalai Lama, 122f
Dante, 3, 78, 79, 85, 152
Darwin, 124, 129, 137f
darwinism, ch. 6, _passim
Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 120
death: experienced under LSD,
161--62; survival of bodily, 69,
143--44
demonic, 43n, 43--46
demythologizing, 20
Dennett, D. C., 135ff
dependent origination: doctrine of,
in Buddhism, 165
Deperet, Charles, 13ln
desert fathers, 148
destiny, 93
devolution, 141
Dewar, Douglas, 131, 132n
dhikr, 100
Diamond Sutra, 103n, 110
Dickinson, Emily, 19
dimensions vs. levels as spatial metaphors, 21£
Dionysius the Areopagite, 19, 54n,
84, 107, 109n, 111, 153
Dirac, Paul, 115
discarnates, 72
Divine Comedy, 3
Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, 19, 54n, 108n, 109n, 153
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 71
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 73
176 / INDEX
dream, dreams, dreaming 70f, 165:
correlated with erections, 71;
correlated with intermediate
plane, 73; day-, 72; life as, 100
dukkha, 167
Dyson, Freeman, 142
Eastern Orthodoxy, 23, 56
Eaton, Gai, 35n, 42n, 94n, 149n
Eccles, Sir John, 65n
Eckhart, Meister, 30n, 87, 112
Eden, Murray, 132n
Edwards, Mrs. jonathan, 83
Einstein, Albert, 122n
Eisley, Loren, 132n
Eleusinian mysteries, 155
Eliade, Mircea, 3, 17, 54n
Eliatic stranger, in Sophist, 51
Eliot, T. S., 33, 145
:Ellsberg, Daniel, 153
emanation: as explanation for
origin of species, 139ff
Emerald Tablets of Hermes
Trismegistus, 62
emergence, 127f
Engels, Friedrich, 153
Enneads, 85
'en-sof, 55
ens perfectissimum, 34, 107
"entropology": anthropology as,
126
epiphenominalism, 165
ESP, 39
etiology, psychoanalytic, 163, 170
Euclid, 105
European: art, 148n; mistake
regarding explanation, 50n
evolution, ch. 6: as a support for
hope, 131; critique of, 126-142;
emergent, 127f; micro- vs. mega-,
132n
existentialism, 7
Exorcist, 43; exorcism, 42-46
"experience" as a vacuous term, 111£
Feynman, Richard, 142
Finkelstein, David, 106
Flaws in the Theory of Evolution,
131
forgiveness, 144
forms, Platonic, 13n, 40, 51
Francis, St., 110
'
Freud, Sigmund, 6n, 41, 76, 129, 158,
160, 16ln, 163, 172; pessimism of,
15ln; freudian stage in LSD
sequences, 160, 167; freudianism,
43n, 164, 169
Friedlander, Paul, 38
futurists, futurism, 145
Galileo, Galilei, 15
Garrett, Eileen, 73
Gentle Tasaday, 144n
Ghazali, 86n
God, 6, 19, 30n, 33, 48, 49, 53, 79,
lllf, 119, 131, 139, 140, 144, 155,
168; anthropomorphic, 52, 79, 80,
114, 139; as object of the soul's
love, 79; death of, 7, 80; kingdom
of, 118; personal, 49ff, 79ff, 171;
not merely a symbol, 68, 79;
transpersonal, 54ff, 80, 87ff, 168
Godhead, 53, 86, 90
Goullart, Peter, 43
grace: works vs., 113, 114
Gray, Sir James, 134f, U9
Great Chain of Being, 4, 5
Gregory of Nyssa, 101
Grof, Stanislav, Appendix, passim
Guenon, Rene, 4, 23, 33, 73
Gurdjieff, G., 121, 129
hadith, 150
Hakuin, 110
Haldane, J. S., 106
Hara Akegaras, 88n
heaven, heavens, 73, 165
Heidegger, Martin, IOn, 47n, 59n
Heilbroner, Robert, 124
hell, 46n, 73, 144
hereafter. See death, survival of
Hermes Trismegistus, 62
hermetic, 30
bier, as root of "hierarchy," 2
hierarchical cosmology: scientific vs.
traditional, 1-5
Hindu, Hinduism, Hindus, 18, 49,
54, 167
Hitler, 86
Hobbes, Thomas, 5
Holton, Gerald, 15n
Honest to God, 19
hope, ch. 6: as indispensable, 118;
as kingpin of the modem mind,
INDEX
hope: as kingpin (cont'd.)
120; evolution as prop for, 131,
139; horizontal (collective,
historical), 119; Kazantzakis on,
124; Sartre on, 124; vertical
(individual) , 118£
horror religiosus, 53
Hoyle, Fred, ·lOin, 123n, 128
Hui-neng, 110
Hull, W. F., 135
Human Personality and Its Survival
of Bodily Death, 69
Human Prospect, 124
humanistic, 4, 98: psychology, 48n
Huxley, Aldous, 115
I Have Seen the Future and It
Doesn't Work, 124
Ibn 'Arabi, 85
Idea of Progress, 120
Idea of the Good, Plato's, 51, 79
Ignatius of Antioch, 53n
Ignatius, Loyola, 110
India, 70, 103; Alvars of, 82
Indian, Indians, 23, 41, 100.
American: see Native Americans
Indra, 103
lndra's net, 141
indriyas, 39
ineffable: mystic vision as, llOf
Inferno, 152
infinite: dimensions of space, I 02f;
levels of nature, 102f; scientific
"infinite" not truly such, 102n
Infinite, In-finite, 20, 25, 28, 30n, 37,
42, 49, 61, 78, 114, 144, 147, 155; as
God's ultimate nature, 54ff, 87ff;
as the inescapable notion, 53n; as
single, 102n; dangers in imaging,
57n; not literally describable,
54ff
insanity, 42
instruments: in science, 114; in
religion, 114£
intermediate. See planes
Isaiah, 110
Islam, 46n, 54n, 80, ll8f, 148
isomorphism of microcosmjmacrocosm, man and the cosmos, 20£,
29, 60, 62. 129, 142
Izutsu, Toshihiko, 90n
I 177
Jains, 87
James, William, 60, 69, 80, 81n, 112,
113; and parapsychology, 69
jihad, 149
jiva, 167
jnana yogin, 143
John, St. 110
John of the Cross, 85
Jones, Ernest, 6n
joy: as aspect of mystic vision, 111
Judaism, 18, 54n, 148; the Infinite
in, 55
Jung, Carl, 40, 41, 48, 54, 158, 162;
critique of, 40nf
Kabbalah, 28, 30, 148
kali yuga, 36
Kant, Immanuel: and parapsychology, 69
Kazantzakis, Nikos, 124
kensho, llO, 113
Kepler, Thomas, 15
Koestler, Arthur, 47, 69
Koran, 70, 97, 115, 144
Krippner, Stanley, 48n
Kuhn, Thomas, 134
Kulasekhara Alvar, 82
labor-oratory: "laboratory" as
deriving from, 117
Lachtennan, David, x
language, 107, 109; related to brain's
left hemisphere, 65£
law of effect, 135£
L'Erreur Spirite, 73
Les Etats Multiples de rE.tre, 4
levels of reaiity, 61, 62, Ch. 3: as..five
rather than four, 5ln, 168. See
planes
levels of selfhood, 62, ch. 4: LSD as
revealing, 158ff, 166-69
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 3, 117, 125f
Lewis, C. S., 99
light: as wave and particle, 105;
God as, 56£
lila, 140
Lin Chi, 87, 88, 90
Lings, Martin, 30n, 56n, 9ln, 147n,
150n
Ling-yun, 110
Lives of a Cell, 14n
logic: ontological, 50
178 / INDEX
Looking Back on Progress, 142n
love: 76ff; as bridge to the Infinite,
86f, 92; God's, of man, 83; man's,
of God, 82; identity of human and
divine, 84f; of the world, 153;
love-loop, 84, 116
Lovejoy, Arthur, 4, 5, 17
LSD, Appendix, passim
Luther, Martin, 81
magic, 42; maya as cognate to, 100
man, ch. 4: as infinite and not, 87;
isomorphism with the cosmos, 20f,
29, 60, 62, 129. See levels of
self hood
mandala, 23
March, Robert, 106n
Marcuse, Herbert, 12
Marx, Karl, 76, 120, 129; Marxism,
41, 153
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, lln, 116n, 122n, 132r:t
materialism, 65n, 67; science's
avoidance of question-begging as
leading to, 138
mathematical point, 27, 29, 32, 151
mathematics, 58, 104, 109, 110
matter, 42, 151: matterjenergy, 6,
14, 37
materialism, 137
Mauriac, Frant;ois, 107
maya, 37: cognate to magic, 100
McClelland, David, 16ln
McDougall, William, 76
Mead, George Herbert, 74
meaning: theoretical vs. existential,
partial vs. wholistic, 15
measurement: as essential in science
but inapplicable to quality, 16-17
mechanism: on mindjbody identity,
63
Medawar, P. B., 133
Merrell-Wolff, Franklin, 70n
metaphysics, 25, 139, ch. 3; LSD
and, 170-73; scientism as faulty,
16
Metz, Johannes, 120
Meyers, F. W. H., 69
Michon, Jean-Louis, 35n
microcosmjmacrocosm iSomorphism.
See isomorphism
middle ages, 5, 148
Mill, John Stuart, 3
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 82n
mind, 63ff, 143f, 167, 169; distinct
from brain, 63; dream experience
of, 70f; working experience of, 69f;
world, 48
mind: universal, 170ff
miracles, 47n
modern world (mind, outlook), 17,
34f; definition of, 6; hope as kingpin of, 120; as founded on "prevolution," 122; as demeaning the
human potential, 152
moksha, 160n
Mo1tmann, Jiirgen, 120, 145
Monastery of jade Mountain, 43
Monod, Jacques, 15, 130
Montesquieu, 52
Morgan, Lloyd, 128
Mount Savior Monastery, 53n
Mu Mon Kan, 31
Muhammad, 114, 149, 150
Mumford, Lewis, 16
Myers, F.W.H., 69
Mystery of the Mind, 64
mystic, 110, 120, 148
mystic vision, 110f: as noetic rather
than affective, 111-12; as
transitory, 113
mystical experience: and LSD, 162.
168
mystics, mysticism, 49, 58n;
Rhineland, 148
myths, 114, 126, 141n
nambutsu, 113
Nance, John, 144n
Native Americans, 35, 54n
natural selection, 132n, 137; as
substitute for God, 131
nature: Greeks' broader view of, 47,
68
Nazi, 96
Neanderthal, 125, 141
Needleman, Jacob, 36n, 113n, 13ln
neolithic, 125
neurophysiology: on mindjbrain
distinction, 64ff
New Scientist, 48n, 69
neophilia, 145
Newton, Isaac, 5, 142
Nicholas of Cusa, 108n
INDEX /
Nietzsche, Frederich, IOn, 75
N ikhilananda, Swami, 89
Nirguna Brahman, 55
nirvana, 3I, 55, Ill
noetic: mystic vision as, 112
Northbourne, Lord, 53n, 142n
nous, 5ln
number: as· the language of science,
6, 10, 58, I04; as precise, 12f
objective knowledge, objectivity, 10,
14
O'Brien, Elmer, 58n
Ojibways, 35n
one: metaphysical meaning of, 58n
One-Dimensional Man, 12
ontic sensibility, 50
ontological levels. See levels
Oppenheimer, Robert, 107, 108, 109
opposites, resolution of, 26
optimism, 152; deriving from LSD
research, 169£
optimistic, traditions as,· 152
original, double meaning of, 146
Original, the great, 146
Palamas, St. Gregory, 60, 129
paleolithic, 125n
Pallis, Marco, 113n
paradise, 108, 153
paradox, 56n, 172; in mysticism,
108f; in science, 107
parapsychology, 47, 69
Pascal, Blaise, 33
Patmos, 110
Paul, St., 22. 73, 77n, 81, 101. See
Saul
Penfield, Wilder, 64, 68, 167
perennial philosophy, x
Perry, Whitall, x
Personal Knowledge, 63n, 126f
pessimism: in psychoanalytic theory,
15ln, 169; traditions charged with,
151; traditions cleared of, 151£
petitio, 138
Petitpierre, Francois, 42n
Phaedrus, 75n, 85
Phenomenon of Man, 121, 133
Philokalia, 109
philosophy, 4, 18, 67, 132n; modem
vs. traditional, 58nf; Western
mistake in, 50n
179
physics, 117n, 142
pivot, unwobbling, 32
planes of existence or reality:
celestial, 42, 48fl, 61, 86, 87, 165,
168; intermediate (animic,
psychic), 38fl, 42, 48, 49, 50, 61,
72, 73, 164, 167; terrestrial
(human), 37f, 42, 47, 48, 49, 61,
116, 139, 142, 150, 165. See levels
Plato, 4, 5, 13n, 36, 38, 40, 51, 75n,
79, 80, 107n
Plotinus, 48, 51, 58n, 85
Plzak, Richard F., 116n
pneumatology, 60
Po-Chang, 110
point. See mathematical
Polanyi, Michael, 63n, 65, 126£
Pollard, William, 130n
Polten, Eric, 65n
Popper, Karl, 8
possession, demonic, 42-46
Prague, 156, 158£
Prajapati, 103
pratitya-samutpada, 165
precision as virtue and limitation,
13£
prediction: as sought in science, 10
"prevolution," 121£
Proclus, 5
progress, ch. 6, passim
Protestant, 120
psychedelic "theophanies":
ambiguity of, 155
psychedelics, Appendix, passim: as
mind-amplifiers, 156n, 157, 161;
psychedelic vs. psycholytic, 157
psychiatry as ontogenetic
explanation, 163, 170
psychoanalytic theory: pessimism of,
169; pessimism contradicted by
LSD, 169f
psychoid: archetypes as, 40
psychokinesis, 41
psychology: as limited, 60;
Association for Humanistic, 48n;
cognitive, 135; depth, 47; not
question-begging, 137; para-, 47;
primordial, 165; Western, 161n
psycholytic, 157; vs. psychedelic, 157
purposes (final causes) : as eluding
science, 15; non-question-begging
accounts of, 137
180 / INDEX
pygmy, 54n
Pythagoras, Pythagorean, 12
qualities: primary vs. secondary, 15
quality: as eluding measurement, 16,
102; as eluding science, 16f; as the
ontological measure, 2f, 101
quantity: as determiner of the levels
in science, 2; science's
preoccupation with, 10f, 104
quantum mechanics, 104, 107, 110;
quantum physics, 116
question-begging, 135, 137ff
Quine, Willard, 7
Ramakrishna, 89
Rampa, Lobsang, 72n
Ramsey, Frank, 58n
Rank, Otto, 161, 168
Rankian stage in LSD therapy, 162,
164, 167, 168, 170
reality (being) : as the ontological
measure, 3; levels of, ch. 3
Realms of the Human Unconscious:
Observations from LSD Research,
156n
reductionism, 41, 128
relativity theory, 104
religion, 4, 6; developments in, 148;
scientism as, 16f
Religion in the Modern World, 53n
Religions of Man, ix
revealed texts, 114
revelation, 148
Rhineland mystics, 148
Roberts, Jane, 72n
Robinson, John, 19, 20
Rolt, C. E., 19, 54n
Rome, 96
Roots of Coincidence, 47, 69
Ross, W. D., 5n
Rostand, Jean, 133f
Roszak, Theodore, II n
Rumi, Jalal ad-Din, 77n
Ruskin, .John, 147n
Russell, Bertrand, 14
Rutherford, Ernest, 112
Ruysbroeck, 85, 108
sacred, 3, 4n, 35
Sacred and the Profane, 3
Sahlins, Marshall, 125n
samsara, 31, Ill
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 124
sat, chit, ananda as God's attributes
(Hinduism) , 3, 55, 152
satori, 31, 110
Saul, 56, 110
Savage Mind, 117
scala naturae, 5
Schilling, Harold, 102n, liOn
scholasticism, 148
Schramm, David, 29n
Schuldenfrei, Richard, 7n
Schuon, Frithjof, 49n, 50n, 66, 86,
lOOn, 144n
science, chs. 1, 5, 6, passim; as
occasioning historical hope, 119;
as symbol, ch. 5; as the
quantifiable, lOf, 17, 100, 104;
elegance of, lOin; nature of, 9-12;
postmodern, 106. Scientism as
misreading of,: see scientism.
science fiction: as kin to religion, 22
scientific enterprise: as distinct from
scientific method, 11
scientific method: impossibility of
expanding, 11; limitations
inherent in, 1~17; nature of,
9-12
scientific world view, ch. 1, passim;
limitations of, 7f, 1~16;
psychedelic evidence as
challenging, 170-73
scientism, 16, 96-97; as a religion,
16f; as occasioning historical
hope, 120
scientists: dedication of, 63n, 112
secondary qualities, 104
secular, 98
Seng-ts'an, 31
sense: data, 14; deception, 98, 106
senses, limi-tations of, 98, 104, lOb
sentimentality as consequence of
exclusive attention to sentiments
or feelings, 112
Seth, 72n
Shah, Indries, 95n
shaman, shamanism, 39
Shankara, 52, 102
Shapley, Harlow, 123n
shekinah, 79
Sherrington, Sir Charles: 64, 67, 68
Shi'ites, 148
INDEX /
shruti, 115
Shute, Evan, 131
siddhis, 41, l23n
Simon, Herbert, 137
simple: as a metaphysical predicate,
58n
sin: broadest meaning of, 66
Skinner, B: F., 12, 15, 136
Smith, Cyril, 117
Smith, Eleanor Kendra, dedication
smriti, 115
Snyder, Gary, l25n
society: present book's silence on,
149; traditions on, l49f
Society for the Philosophy of
Psychology, 135
socio-political action, 149
Socrates, 3
soma, 155
Song of Solomon, 148
Sophist, 51
Sophocles, 99
soul, 73, 74ff, 144, 151, 164f, 167,
169; as locus of individuality, 74;
as tropic toward being, 76, 78;
pneumatology as the science of, 60
space, 6, ch. 2, passim, 37, 38, 173;
curved, 6, 30, 105f, Ill; in the
intermediate plane, 39, prior to
time, 65; relativity of, 30, 116;
symbolism of, ch. 2
Spinoza, 55
Spirit, 20, 87ff, 114, 147, 151, 168,
169; as the Infinite, 87, 144
spiritualism, 73
Spring Grove State Hospital, 156
Stace, W. T., 108
Starbuck, E. D., 81
steady-state theory, 123n, 128
Steiner, George, 126
Steinheim man, 141
Stone Age Economics, 125n
Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
134
Studies in Comparative Religion,
35n, 36n, 42n, 54n
sublime, as deriving from
"sub-limen," ll7n
Sufi, 88, 115: tales, 82, 94, 99
Sufism, 47
Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century
56n
181
suksma-sarira, 39
summum bonum, 15, 102
Sunnis, 148
superspace, 101, 116
sunyata, 55
Suzuki, Daisetz, 113n
Sword of Gnosis, 36n, 4ln, 113n,
13ln
symbol, 79, 171; personal God is
and is not, 52f, 86n; science as,
ch. 5
symbolism, 79, 89; as the science of
relationships between levels of
reality, 86, 97; in the Koran, 115;
of space, ch. 2
Symbolism of the Cross, 23
symbols vs. signs, l2f
Symposium, 79
Tacit Dimension, 65
"Tale of the Sands," 94f
Tantra, 155
Tao, 32: as the Infinite, 55
Tao Te Ching, 27, 32
Taoism, 31, 43, 55
Tasaday, Gentle, l44n
tat tvam asi, Ill
technology, 7: as occasioning
historical hope, 119; botn of art
and religion, 117
Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 121,
132, 142f
teleology: rejected by science, 15
ten thousand things, 31
terrestrial. See planes
Te-shan, 110
theism: as limited, 52; as natuz-al,
51; as true, 52
theology, 7, 20
Theology of Hope, 120
Thomas, Lewis, 14n, 126
Thorndike, E. L., 135
Tibet, Tibetans, 23, 123n
Tibetan Book of the Dead, 47
time, 6, 25, 37, 57n, 104; as
subsequent to space, 65; in the
intermediate plane, -47f
timelessness, 57n, 146
to metaxy (intermediate plane,
Greek), 38
Tobias, Phillip, 125
Tractatus, 15n, 59n
182 / INDEX
traditio, 146
Transformist Illusion, Ul
transpenonal: journal of,
Psychology, 156n; stage in LSD
sequence, 162f
Trauma of Birth, 162, 165
trikaya, 58n
Tristes Tropiques, 126
truth: as not needing us, 58; as
single, ix, 18; elusiveness of, 41;
objective, 7, 10; Modern West
might realign with, x, 147;
subjective, 7
unanimity, the human, 18
unity: as disclosed in science and
the mystic vision, Ill
universals, 50
unknowing, 107, 111; Cloud of, 144.
See: ineffable
Unmoved Mover, 78
Upanishads, 148; Katha, 57n;
Maitrayana, 60; Svetasvatara, 50,
52n, 145n; Taittiriya, 102
utopia, 121; utopian writing
discontinued in the 20th century,
124
Vishnu, 82
vitalism, 127; as unscientific, 15
Vivekananda, 114
void (sunyata), 170
Walden Two, 124n
Wasson, R. Gordon, 155n
Wei-;tberg, Steven, lin
western: civilization, x, 4, IOn; man,
122; psychology, 161n; search for
objective knowledge, 126;
~estemer, 152. See European
What Is Sufism? 50n
Wheeler, John, 102, 105, 122
Whitehead, Alfred North, lln
Wiener, Norbert, 8
Wiesel, Elie, 146
Wigner, Eugene, 12
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 15n, 58n, 59n
Wordsworth, William, 165
world: necessarily imperfect, 152f;
as transparent to perfection, 155;
-view, 146
worlds: macro-, meso-, micro-, 2, 4,
104
wu wei, 52, 149
Xenophanes, 52
vacuum: not empty, 102
values: as eluding science, 14;
descriptive vs. normative, 14f;
instrumental vs. intrinsic, 14f
Vedanta, 55, 170: advaita, 58n
Vedas, 105; Vedic, 147, 168
Virgin Mother, 148
virtue: as synonym for quality or
being, 2nf
YHVH, 54n
yin-yang, 26
yugas, 141
Zarathustra, 46
Zen. See Buddhism
Zen Notes, 88n
Zimmer, Heinrich, 152
