TAT Journal Issue 9

Number 9
1980
Forum for Awareness

TAT Foundation

TAT is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization founded in 1973 for the purpose of providing a forum and meeting place for inquirers into the mystery of ourselves; Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? TAT welcomes all inquirers, adventurers of the mind, laymen in search of truth, seekers of knowledge, the self and the unknown to meet others of like interest. Philosophers, psychologists and scientists, both professional and laymen, are on equal ground at TAT.

TAT is non-sectarian and non-denominational; there are no secret oaths, dogmas or rituals in TAT. Its membership, open to all of serious intent, from all walks of life, is united in the friendship of dialogue and fellowship of human spirit.

TAT believes that you can expedite and intensify your investigation of life's mysteries by working with others who are exploring, perhaps down a different road, so that you may share your discoveries, exchange ideas and "compare notes" in order to come to a better understanding of yourself and others. It is for this reason that TAT provides a unique mountain retreat where its members can meet informally, a Journal as a forum for readers and writers of esoteric subjects, symposia, as well as small, open-forum study groups in several cities. Your TAT Membership helps support these functions and gives you access to friends you might not otherwise have contact with.

Membership in TAT is $15 for the first year and $10 a year thereafter. Members are invited to attend four quarterly gatherings on the TAT Farm Mountain Retreat in West Virginia. Requests for memberships or further information should be sent to: The TAT Foundation, c/o TAT Journal, P.O. Box 236, Bellaire, Ohio 43906. For your convenience, a postcard has been provided in the back of this issue.

CONTENTS

Gurdjieff was a master psychologist who used drama and shocks to "awaken" sleeping humanity.

The author's lifetime of investigation into spiritual movements has revealed a Babel of confusion among seekers. Can the Truth be so complicated?

The East has a science, virtually unknown in the West, of transforming physical energy into explosive mental power.

Spontaneous lunacy by a modern Sufi.

Selections from Magic: White and Black. A classic work about the inner spiritual alchemy.

A penetrating look at the premises of "pop psychology."

Animal protein has its problems.

The paradox of predestination.

Unexplained mental phenomena are evidence that mind is not limited to the brain.

The Law of Suggestion, Magic: White and Black, Sword of Wisdom, Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg.

[Cover photograph of Gurdjieff courtesy of The Gurdiieff Foundation, New York.]

TAT Journal is published by the TAT Foundation, a non-profit, tax-exempt corporation, that was established to provide a forum for philosophical and spiritual inquiry, based upon the principle that cooperation with fellow inquirers expedites one's own search. The TAT Foundation supports workshops, seminars, study groups and related services. The views and opinions expressed in the TAT Journal are not necessarily those of the editors or of the TAT Foundation. Address all correspondence, including manuscripts, to: TAT Journal, P.O. BOX 236, Bellaire, Ohio 43906. Manuscripts will be returned only upon request and when accompanied by a stamped envelope.

Editor: Louis Khourey;
Contributing Editor: Mark Jaqua;
Production: Robert Cergol, Paul Cramer, Doron Fried;
Advertising and Circulation: William Weimer and Craig Smucker.

©1980 TAT Foundation. All rights reserved. 

Gurdjieff - Ouspensky - Orage

BLACK SHEEP PHILOSOPHERS
by Gorham Munson

On October 29, 1949, at the American Hospital in Paris died a Caucasian Greek named Georgy Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. A few nights later at Cooper Union, New York, a medal was presented to the revolutionary architect Frank Lloyd Wright. After his part in the ceremony was over, Wright asked the chairman's permission to make an announcement. "The greatest man in the world," he said, "has recently died. His name was Gurdjieff." Few, if any, in Wright's audience had ever heard the name before, which is quite understandable: Gurdjieff avoided reporters and managed most of the time to keep out of the media publicity.

However, there was one kind of publicity that he always got in Europe and America, and that was the kind made by the wagging human tongue: gossip. In 1921 he showed up in Constantinople. "His coming to Constantinople," says the British scientist, J.G. Bennett, "was heralded by the usual gossip of the bazaars. Gurdjieff was said to be a great traveler and a linguist who knew all the Oriental languages, reputed by the Moslems to be a convert to Islam, and by the Christians to be a member of some obscure Nestorian sect." In those days Bennett, who is now an expert on coal utilization, was in charge of a British Intelligence section working in Constantinople. He met Gurdjieff and found him neither Moslem nor Christian. Bennett reported that "his linguistic attainments stopped short near the Caspian Sea, so that we could converse only with difficulty in a mixture of Azerbaidjan Tartar and Osmanli Turkish. Nevertheless, he unmistakably possessed knowledge very different from that of the itinerant Sheikhs of Persia and Trans-Caspia, whose arrival in Constantinople had been preceded by similar rumors. It was, above all, astonishing to meet a man, almost unacquainted with any Western European language, possessing a working knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology and modern astronomy, and able to make searching comments on the then new and fashionable theory of relativity, and also on the psychology of Sigmund Freud."

To Bennett, Gurdjieff didn't look at all like an Eastern sage. He was powerfully built - his neck rippled with muscles - and although of only medium height, he was physically dominating. He had a shaven dome, an unlined swarthy face, piercing black eyes, and a tigerish mustache that curled out to big points. In his later years he had a large paunch. But in one respect Gurdjieff's reputation followed the pattern of all the swamis, gurus and masters who have roamed the Western world: his past in the East was veiled in mystery. Only the scantiest facts are known about him before he appeared in Moscow about 1914.

Gurdjieff was born in Alexandropol, an Armenian city, in 1866. His father was a kind of local bard. It is said the boy was educated for the priesthood but as a young man he joined a society called Seekers of the Truth, and went with this group on an expedition into Asia. He was in Asia for many years and then came to Moscow where there was talk that he planned to produce a ballet called "The Struggle of the Magicians."

The rest is hearsay. It has been said that the Seekers of the Truth went into the Gobi desert. It has been said that they were checking on Madame Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine, and at places where she said there were "masters" they found none; whereas at places unspecified by her, they did find "masters." It has been said that Gurdjieff found one teacher under whom he studied for fifteen years and from whom he acquired his most important knowledge. It has been said that several times he became a rich man in the East. This is all hearsay.

A better grade of hearsay centers around Gurdjieff in Tibet. Was he or was he not the chief political officer of the Dalai Lama in 1904 when the British invaded Tibet? According to Achmed Abdullah, the fiction writer, Gurdjieff was the "Dordjieff" to whom the history books make passing reference, supposedly a Russian who influenced the Dalai Lama at the time of the Younghusband Expedition. Abdullah was a member of the British Intelligence assigned to spy on this "Dordjieff," and when Abdullah saw Gurdjieff in New York in 1924, he exclaimed, "That man is Dordjieff!" At any rate, when there were plans in 1922 for Gurdjieff to live in England, it was found that the Foreign Office was opposed, and it was conjectured that their file dated from the time of the trouble between the British government and Tibet. According to rumor, Gurdjieff counseled the Dalai Lama to evacuate Lhasa and let the British sit in an empty city until the heavy snow could close the passes of the Himalayas and cut off the Younghusband expedition. This was done, and the British hurried to make a treaty while their return route was still open.

Much more is known about Gurdjieff after 1914. A recently published book by P.D. Ouspensky which the author called Fragments of a Forgotten Teaching, but which the publisher has renamed In Search of the Miraculous, gives a running account of Ouspensky's relations with Gurdjieff over a ten-year period. Of his first interview with Gurdjieff, Ouspensky says: "Not only did my questions not embarrass him but it seemed to me that he put much more into each answer than I had asked for." By 1916 Ouspensky was holding telepathic conversations with Gurdjieff. He also records one example of Gurdjieff's transfiguring of his whole appearance on a railroad journey, so that a Moscow newspaperman took him to be an impressive "oil king from Baku" and wrote about his unknown fellow passenger. The greater part of In Search of the Miraculous consists of the copious notes Ouspensky made on Gurdjieff's lectures in St. Petersburg and Moscow, which give us the only complete and reliable outline of Gurdjieff's system of ideas thus far in print. It is plain from Ouspensky's exposition that Gurdjieff attempted to convey Eastern knowledge in the thoughtforms of the West; he was trying to bridge the gap between Eastern philosophy and Western science.

For us in America the story of Gurdjieff is the story of three men whom I call the "black sheep philosophers." Gurdjieff was the master, and the other two - Alfred Richard Orage who died in the fall of 1934, and Peter Demianovich Ouspensky who died in the fall of 1947 - were his leading disciples. I call them philosophers; others would call them psychologists; many have called them charlatans. Whatever one names them, they were black sheep: they were looked at askance by the professional philosophers and psychologists because of the different color of their teachings. Nor were they accepted by theosophists, mystics, or various occult professors. They stood apart and their appeal was to what I shall call, for want of a more inclusive word, the intelligentsia.

"... Gurdjieff attempted to convey Eastern knowledge in the thoughtforms of the West; he was trying to bridge the gap between Eastern philosophy and Western science."

It is impossible to assimilate Orage, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff into any recognized Western school of thought. The New York obituaries of Gurdjieff called him the "founder of a new religion." It was said that he taught his followers how to attain "peace of mind and calm." This was an attempt to assimilate him. But Gurdjieff claimed no originality for his system and did not organize his followers; furthermore, he did nothing to establish a new religion. As for "peace of mind and calm"... there is the incident of an American novelist who calls himself a "naturalistic mystic." In the middle of a dinner with Gurdjieff in Montmartre, this novelist jumped up, shouted, "I think you are the Devil!" and rushed from the restaurant. The truth is that Gurdjieff violated all our preconceptions of a "spiritual leader" and sometimes repelled "religious seekers."

In my view, the man was an enigma, and that means that my estimate must necessarily be a suspended estimate. The supposition that he was founding a religion will not hold up. And I do not believe he was a devil out of the pages of Dostoevski. There is an old saying that a teacher is to be judged by his pupils, and by that test Gurdjieff had knowledge that two of the strongest minds in our period wanted to acquire. These minds belonged to the English editor, A.R. Orage, and the Russian mathematical philosopher, P.D. Ouspensky. Both surrendered to Gurdjieff. Let us look at the disciples and then come back to their teacher.

Orage, a Yorkshireman, bought a small London weekly, The New Age, in 1906. From then until 1922, when he relinquished the paper and went to Fontainebleau where Gurdjieff had his headquarters, Orage made journalistic history. He was remarkable for finding and coaching new writers. Among these was Katherine Mansfield, who acknowledged her great indebtedness to him as a literary mentor. Another was Michael Arlen, who once dedicated a novel to Orage in terms like these: "To A.R. Orage - slow to form a friendship but never hesitant about making an enemy." Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc and Arnold Bennett debated with each other in The New Age, and Shaw called Orage a "desperado of genius."

The New Age was more than a literary review. It played a lively role in British political and economic movements. It began by being highly critical of Fabianism, then took a positive turn by advocating National Guilds, or Guild Socialism, as the Guilds movement was popularly called. With A.G. Penty and S.G. Hobson, Orage was one of the prime instigators of the National Guilds movement, but he always had a lingering doubt of the practicability of its platform and in 1919 he dropped it and joined with Major C.H. Douglas to found the Social Credit movement. With him went many of the more brilliant Guild Socialists, to the mortification of G.D.H. Cole who denounced the "Douglas-New Age heresy."

To literature and economics, Orage added a sustained interest in occultism, and it was this that finally led him to Gurdjieff's Chateau du Prieure at Fontainebleau-Avon. Nietzsche had extended the horizons of Orage's thought during his formative years, and Orage's weekly became a forum for Nietzscheans. He himself wrote two small books on that grossly misunderstood philosopher which remain the clearest expositions yet penned of the superman doctrine. On the spoor of the superman, Orage investigated theosophy, psychical research, and Indian literature, and he wrote one book, Consciousness: Animal, Human and Superman, which hinted at the mental exercises he practiced to enlarge and elevate consciousness. T.S. Eliot called Orage the finest critical intelligence of his generation, which is an assurance to the reader that Orage was no gull in his excursions into mysticism. In 1922, at the age of forty-nine, he cut all ties in England, went to Gurdjieff at Fontainebleau-Avon, and was set to digging trenches and washing casseroles.

At that time Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man was in full swing. With funds provided by Lady Rothermere, Gurdjieff had acquired the historic Chateau du Prieure, once the residence of Madame de Maintenon, the consort of Louis Quatorze, and in latter years the property of Labori, the attorney for the exonerated French officer, Dreyfus. The institute provided a thorough work-out for the three "centers" of human psychology. Its members engaged in hard physical tasks ranging from long hours of kitchen drudgery to the felling of trees in the chateau's forest. Unusual situations, friction between members, and music insured great activity for the emotional "center." For the mental "center" there were exercises that often had to be performed concurrently with physical tasks. An airplane hangar had been set up on the grounds. This was known as the "study house" and was the scene for instruction in complicated dance movements. There were mottoes on the walls of the "study house." One of them in translation read: "You cannot be too skeptical." This was the milieu the brilliant English editor entered to become a kitchen scullion.

In 1924 Gurdjieff came to America with forty pupils - English and Russian - and gave public demonstrations of dervish dances, temple dances, and sacred gymnastics. Orage came along but did not perform the movements, although he had practiced them for a Paris demonstration. Nothing like these dances had ever been seen in New York, and they aroused intense interest. They called for great precision in execution and required extraordinary coordination. One could well believe they were, as claimed, written in an exact language, even though one could not read that language but only received an effect of wakefulness quite different from the pleasant sense of harmony most art produces. When Gurdjieff and his pupils sailed for France, Orage was left in New York to organize groups for the study of Gurdjieff's system, and for the next seven years he was engaged in this task.

Let me call up from memory one of the evenings Orage talked to a group in New York. The place is a large room above a garage on East Fortieth Street. Orage comes in a little after nine. Deliberately, he is always a little late, and often he takes a snifter of bootleg gin in Mrs. Draper's kitchen before entering the big room. He is tall, with a strong Yorkshireman's frame, an alert face, an elephantine nose, sensitive mouth, hair still dark. He is a chain-smoker throughout the meeting. He calls for questions. Someone asks about "self-observation," someone wants to know "what this system teaches about death," someone else makes a long speech that terminates in a question about psychoanalysis. After he has five or six questions, Orage begins to talk - and he talks well in lucid sentences often glinting with wit. A graduate student in psychology at Columbia objects to one of his remarks. Orage handles the objection and goes on until a progressive schoolteacher interjects a question. It is like a Socratic dialogue, with Orage elucidating a single topic from all sides. Every question eventually gets back to "the method," and by eleven o'clock he has once again illuminated the method of self-observation with nonidentification that appears to be the starting procedure prescribed by Gurdjieff for self-study.

Briefly, what Orage has said is that man is a mechanical being. He cannot do anything. He has no will. His organism acts without his concurrent awareness and he identifies himself with various parts of this victim of circumstances, his organism. There is only one thing he can try to do. He can try to observe the physical behavior of his organism while at the same time not identifying his 'I' with it. Later he can attempt to observe his emotions and thoughts. The trouble is that he can only fleetingly observe with nonidentification, but he must continue to make the effort. It is claimed that this method differs from introspection. The nonidentifying feature differentiates it from an apperception. The man who finally succeeds in developing the power of self-observation is on the path to self-knowledge and the actualizing of a higher state of consciousness. This higher state, which Orage calls "Self-consciousness" or "Individuality," stands to our present waking state as the waking state stands to our state of sleep.

This bare summary will not, of course, explain why so many New Yorkers came to hear Orage between 1924 and 1931. Some came only once or twice out of a weak curiosity, like Heywood Broun who listened through one meeting, then asked, "When do we get to sex?" and shuffled off, never to return. Others were fascinated by the charm and keenness of Orage's literary personality and found such epigrams as "H.G. Wells is an ordinary man with a carbuncle of genius" full compensation for the dissertations on psychology they sat through. But the solid core of his group were probably the people who prefer Plato to Aristotle; that is, people who feel that there is some kind of film over reality and respond to the idea that this film can be penetrated.

In 1931 Orage faced a personal crisis. He had married an American girl and had an infant son. Gurdjieff, a hard taskmaster, wanted him to bring his family to the Chateau du Prieure and continue work on the translation into English of the huge book then called Tales of Beelzebub to His Grandson, which Gurdjieff had written partly in Russian and partly in Armenian. Orage neither wanted to leave his family nor to put them in the never-stable environment of Fontainebleau-Avon. He decided to go to London and there founded the New English Weekly. On Guy Fawkes Day in 1934, he who had never addressed more than a few thousand readers addressed hundreds of thousands of B.B.C. listeners with a speech on Social Credit, went home, and died before morning.

The link between Orage and Gurdjieff was originally P.D. Ouspensky, who came to London in 1921 and started groups for the study of the Gurdjieff system. Orage attended these, as did Katherine Mansfield, and both went to the source at Fontainebleau. As explained by Ouspensky, there were three main ways to a higher development of man: the way of the fakir who struggles with the physical body, the way of the monk who subjects all other emotions to the emotion of faith, and the way of the yogi who develops his mind. But these ways produce lopsided men; they produce the "stupid fakir," the "silly saint," the "weak yogi." There is a fourth way, that of Gurdjieff, in which the student continues in his usual life-circumstances but strives for a harmonious development of this physical, emotional and intellectual life - the non-monastic "way of the sly man." The accent was on harmonious, all-round development.

"... Orage has said... that man is a mechanical being. He cannot do anything. He has no will."

Ouspensky was a highly mental type. At his lectures in New York he seemed like a European professor. He was not nervous in manner and he had a peculiar kind of emotional serenity; one felt that it did not matter to him what his listeners thought of him. In his youth he had been fascinated by the problem of the fourth dimension, the nature of time, and the doctrine of recurrence. When only thirty-one, he wrote a book, The Fourth Dimension, which was recognized as a contribution to abstract mathematical theory. He also practiced journalism for a St. Petersburg newspaper. At thirty-four, he completed the book on which his popular fame rests, Tertium Organum. This book had a great influence on the American poet, Hart Crane, an influence Brom Weber has carefully traced in his biography of Crane. But Tertium Organum is a pre-Gurdjieffian work, and much of it has to be reset in a later pattern of Ouspensky's thought, as he implied in a cryptic note inserted after the early editions. Ouspensky also wrote a short book on the Tarot cards, which are surmised to contain occult meaning.

The young Russian thinker attempted to be practical about his speculative thinking. He made trips to Egypt, India and Ceylon in search of keys to knowledge. He experimented with drugs, fasting and breathing exercises to induce higher states of consciousness. When he met Gurdjieff in Moscow in 1914, he was ripe for a teacher.

As the years went on, Ouspensky began to make a distinction between Gurdjieff the man and the ideas conveyed by Gurdjieff. Remaining true to the ideas, he finally decided about 1924 to teach independently of the man Gurdjieff. The last chapter of In Search of the Miraculous deals with this "break," but it is too reticent to make the "break" understood.

Ouspensky held groups in London throughout the 1920's and 1930's, and had a place outside London for his more devoted pupils, some of whom were quite wealthy. When the bombs began to rain on England, he and a number of his English pupils migrated to America and purchased Franklin Farms, a large estate at Mendham, New Jersey. In New York he lectured to shifting groups of sixty or so, while at Mendham his wife supervised the pupils who carried out farm and household tasks as part of their psychological training. Instruction in the Gurdjieff dance movements was also given at Mendham.

Ouspensky's later books have included A New Model of the Universe, begun in pre-Gurdjieff days but revised and completed under his influence, and a novel, Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, which has a flavor that reminds one of Gogol. Although Ouspensky has written extensively on relativity, the professional physicists appear to have given him a cold shoulder; at least, he is never mentioned in scientific literature. However, A New Model of the Universe produced a great impression on the novelist J.B. Priestley, who wrote one of his most enthusiastic essays about it.

Gurdjieff was by far the most dramatic of the trio; in fact, Gurdjieff as a pedagogue was mainly an improvising dramatist, a difficult aspect of his character to explain briefly. Most people believe that they can make decisions. They believe that when they say "Yes" or "No" in regard to a course of action, they mean "Yes" or "No." They think they are sincere and can carry out their promises and know their own minds. Gurdjieff did not lecture them on the illusion of free will. Instead, in conversation with a person, he would produce a situation, usually trivial and sometimes absurd, in which that person would hesitate, perhaps say "Yes," then change to "No," become paralyzed between choices like Zeno's famous donkey starving between two equidistant bales of hay, and end full of doubt about any "decision" reached. If the person afterwards looked at the little scene he had been put through, he saw that his usual "Yes" or "No" had no weight; that, in fact, he had drifted as the psychological breezes blew.

Often, in his early acquaintance with a person, Gurdjieff would hit upon one or both of two "nerves" which produced agitation. These were the "pocketbook nerve" and the "sex nerve." He would, as our slang goes, "put the bee on somebody for some dough," or he might, as he did with one priest from Greece, egg him on to tell a series of ribald jokes. The event often proved that he didn't need the money he had been begging for. As for the poor priest, when he had outdone himself with an anecdote, Gurdjieff deflated him with the disgusted remark, "Now you are dirty!" and turned away. "I wished to show him he was not true priest," Gurdjieff said afterwards. To go for the "pocketbook nerve" or the "sex nerve" was to take a short cut to a person's psychology; instead of working through the surfaces, Gurdjieff immediately got beneath them. "Nothing shows up people so much," he once said, "as their attitude toward money."

There are legends about how Gurdjieff came by the large sums of money he freely spent. It has been rumored that he earned money by hypnotic treatment of rich drug addicts. There used to be a tale that he owned a restaurant, or even a small chain of restaurants, in Paris. His fortunes varied extremely, and there were times when he had little money. He lost his chateau at Fontainebleau-Avon in the early 1930's. His expenses were large and included the support of a score or two of adherents. He tipped on a fabulous scale. Money never stuck to his fingers but he himself did not lead a luxurious life. He joked with his pupils about his financial needs and openly called his money-raising maneuvers "shearing sheep."

When the Bolshevik revolution struck Russia, Gurdjieff moved south. He halted at various places, notably at Tiflis, to launch groups, but eventually he and his followers crossed the Caucasian mountains on foot and made their way to Constantinople. Via Germany, he reached France where, as related, Lady Rothermere enabled him to found the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at the Chateau du Prieure. This Institute, Orage once told me, was to have made Bacon's project for an Academy for the Advancement of Learning look like a rustic school. But in 1924, Gurdjieff met with an automobile accident which nearly killed him, and thereafter he turned to the less strenuous activity of writing. The Institute plans were canceled, and he began the tales of Beelzebub as told to his grandson on a ship in interstellar space. This book is a huge parable with chapters on the engulfed civilization of Atlantis, the "law of three" and the "law of seven," objective art, and many riddles of man's history. It purports to be an impartial criticism of the life of man on the planet Earth. In this period Gurdjieff also composed many pieces of music, making original use of ancient scales and rhythms.

In the last year or two of his long life, Gurdjieff finished with his writings and intensified his direct contacts with his followers. Movement classes were started in Paris, and several hundred Frenchmen now come more or less regularly to these and other meetings. In England the exposition of Gurdjieff's ideas is carried on by the mathematical physicist, J.G. Bennett. Bennett is the author of The Crisis In Human Affairs, an introduction to the Gurdjieff system. It is said that Bennett attracts about three hundred to his lectures and that the class in movements numbers nearly two hundred.

"... Ouspensky began to make a distinction between Gurdjieff, the man, and the ideas conveyed by Gurdjieff."

Gurdjieff spent the winter of 1948-49 in New York, as usual unnoticed by the press. The remnant of the old Orage groups came to him, as did the Ouspenskyites from Mendham and many new people. With Oriental hospitality, he provided supper night after night for seventy and upwards in his big suite at the Hotel Wellington, the supper being punctuated by toasts in armagnac to various kinds of idiots: "health ordinary idiots," "health candidates for idiots," "health squirming idiots," "health compassionate idiots." When Gurdjieff drank water, he always proposed, "health wise man." Prepositions were left out of the toasts; Gurdjieff spoke a simplified English that often required an effort to follow. After the supper, Gurdjieff's writings were read until the small hours of the morning. While he was here, he signed a contract with a New York publisher to bring out in 1950 the English version of the 1000-page tales of Beelzebub, under the title All and Everything. It is also expected that after the book appears, his American pupils will give a public demonstration of the dance movements.

Gurdjieff had passage booked for America last October but fell gravely ill. An American doctor flew to Paris, had him removed to the American Hospital, and made him comfortable. "Bravo, America!" he said to the doctor. "Now we can have a cup of coffee." Those were his last words.

How shall I sum up this strange man? A twentieth century Cagliostro? But the evidence about Cagliostro is conflicting, and the stories you will hear about Gurdjieff are highly conflicting. I can personally vouch for his astonishing capacity for work. Two to four hours' sleep seemed sufficient for him; yet he always appeared to have abundant energy for a day spent in writing, playing an accordion-harmonium, motoring, cafe conversation, cooking. Those who had to keep up with him were sometimes ready to drop from fatigue, but he seemed inexhaustible after twenty hours and fresh the next morning from a short sleep. He was eighty-three this last winter at the Hotel Wellington. He would retire at three or four in the morning. Around seven the elevator boys would take him down and he would go over to his "office," a Child's restaurant on upper Fifth Avenue. Here, as at a European cafe, he would receive callers all morning.

I have sometimes asked myself what our civilization of specialists would make of certain men of the Renaissance - men like Roger Bacon, a forerunner, and Francis Bacon and Paracelsus who came at the height - if they reappeared among us. I think we would find them baffling, and it would be their many-sidedness that would puzzle us. The biographers and historians have never quite known how to take their scandalous unorthodoxy. To me Gurdjieff was an enigma whom I associate with the stranger figures of the Renaissance rather than with religious leaders. He never claimed originality for his ideas but asserted they came from ancient science transmitted in esoteric schools. His humor was Rabelaisian, his roles were dramatic, his impact on people was upsetting. Sentimentalists came, expecting to find in him a resemblance to the pale Christ-figure literature has concocted, and went away swearing that Gurdjieff was a dealer in black magic. Scoffers came, and some remained to wonder if Gurdjieff knew more about relativity than Einstein.

"A Pythagorean Greek," Orage called him, thus connecting the prominence given to numbers in the Gurdjieffian system with Gurdjieff's descent from Ionian Greeks who had migrated to Turkey. Perhaps this appellation, "Pythagorean Greek," is as short a way as any to indicate the strangeness of Gurdjieff to our civilization, which has never been compared to Greece in its great period from the sixth to the fourth centuries before Christ.

"... Gurdjieff was an enigma whom I associate with the stranger figures of the Renaissance rather than with religious leaders... His humor was Rabelaisian, his roles were dramatic, his impact on people was upsetting."

How shall we account for the interest persons of metropolitan culture in the Western world have shown in the Eastern ideas of Gurdjieff and his transmitters, Orage and Ouspensky? One explanation is easy, and it holds for people who seek respite for their personal unhappiness in psychoanalysis, pseudo-religious cults, and the worship of the group (nostrism as manifested in Communism and Fascism). This is the therapeutic interest, and many who have come to the Gurdjieffian meetings have had it. Let us disregard this common interest and ask why Eastern ideas have attracted in these years the interest of sophisticated thinkers like Aldous Huxley who has been remarkable for his typicality. The answer here is that Western culture is in crisis. Ours is a period of two world wars and one world depression. In this period it has been impossible for a thoughtful person not to have been deeply disappointed in his hopes for man. He has seen one effort after another produce an unintended result. World War I made the world unsafe for democracy. The prosperity of the 1920's led to economic drought. World War 2 turned into cold war. The socialist dream flickered into a totalitarian nightmare. Science becomes an agency of destruction. The doctrine of progress gives place to the feeling that Western man is at a standstill. In a crisis one hopes or one despairs. Gurdjieff, Orage and Ouspensky confirmed the despair but simultaneously raised the hope of Westerners whose mood was disappointment over the resources of their culture. It is said that Aldous Huxley, that modern of moderns, went to a few Ouspensky meetings in London. Eventually Huxley settled for Gerald Heard who draws heavily on Eastern philosophy. In Huxley we may find a symptom of a desperate tendency to turn in our crisis to ideas and teachings that stand outside the stream of Western culture. Orage, Ouspensky and Gurdjieff painted a crisis-picture - in one part as black as any school of Western pessimism, in another part so bright as early Christianity. In this balance-by-contrast of the dark and the light is a principal reason for their appeal to moderns.

This article originally appeared in the February, 1950 issue of Tommorow magazine. Reprinted by permission of Garrett Publications.

Defining the Truth

Most serious-minded people talk about the "Truth." But they take it for granted. They never get down to setting up measurements by which to gauge the Truth so that they will realize it when they hear it. They presume to be able to recognize it, and some go as far as to presume to be the fortunate possessors of it.

The Truth is a path more than a realization of measurability. The scientist feels that he is a pursuer of Truth, but the products of the scientific laboratory are more likely to be cannons and culture rather than inklings of the first cause or man's picture of ultimate destiny. And the same scientist who may be trying to crack the atom or split a chromosome, may privately have massive rationalizations about religion, personal definition, or personal destiny. So that he is a mechanical seeker, but not an entire and dynamic seeker, - even though he functions mechanically in his scientific quest much more valuably than most of humanity.

Truth is a path because it is never fully realized, and because many aspects of the search for Truth remain relative. Man is a being whose consciousness depends upon fickle senses and a mind largely capable of witnessing in a relative manner, and largely incapable of direct knowledge.

Truth may well be absolute in nature, but to bicameral man with the necessary bi-polar survey of all things, - a definition of absolute or abstract things or states may be readily seized and accepted in relative form, that is, with relative and possibly equivocal words.

Every last one of us thinks we are right. Which means that we think we have the Truth or that if we do not have it, no one else will do any better. But everyone has a different definition of it. And with this different definition upon the minds of men, we have a subtle, unseen Tower of Babel which stands between the minds of men so that they cannot strive together. There is much talk of the brotherhood of seekers for Truth, but this brotherhood is split up into myriad groups with no common language or understanding. And all of this is because they presupposed, a priori, that which they expected Truth to be, and so defined it, rather than sought it for whatever it might be when found.

The Bible indicates that we should seek if we wish to find. Yet with equal authority Christ exhorts us to believe in Him if we wish to be saved. Now finding the Truth and being saved may be two entirely different projects, but believing is not compatible with seeking. The believer does not seek; he accepts that which another extends.

And with this bit of ambiguity the Christian world, for one, is hampered in honestly seeking for Truth. Lazily each sect rests upon a belief rather than upon a conviction. They comfort one another with the mutual back-scratching, and make decrees to the effect that other religions are worthy seekers also, but perhaps less fortunate. They comfort their congregation and financial supporter by telling them that man was never supposed to learn the True nature of things, and dumbfound the mind with the cliche that the finite mind will never perceive the infinite.

It cannot be that terrible. Absolute Truth is not absolutely inaccessible to us, and relative truth is definitely accessible. We must desire the Truth, and have a capacity for it else we could not receive it even if it came to us by accident.

We cannot shut our mind to any phase of reality, and still have a capacity for Truth in another field. For if we rationalize about one thing, then rationalization may well be a mental habit cooperating with our laziness or desire-thinking, and we are liable to rationalize about vital things. We cannot lie to ourselves in little things, or what we consider little things, and still be competent to receive knowledge of that which we admit to be more vital or more important. The divergences of beliefs among men, whether these beliefs be religious, philosophic, or political, are not an indication of the infallibility of the masses nor of justification for the idea that everyone is correct to a degree. We like to think that the divergent observer is just looking at Truth from another or oblique angle. And rather than solve the problem, the divergent parties democratically vote everyone to be correct.

These procedures make for compatibility and social harmony, but they put the mind to sleep. We are either right or wrong. And if we are honest with ourselves and true to ourselves we do not wish to wait for twenty years to outgrow a religion. It is our sacred right as profaned animals to understand our state. It is our sacred right to doubt and to question. It must remain our valued trust, - that we trust no authority. We must listen and sit down with an occasional book, but any acceptance should be tentative until we have a complete picture.

When I say that we are either right or wrong, I am speaking of relative truth-seeking. In the absolute state, things may well be neither right or wrong, or both. And while we aspire to an absolute state, and to absolute Truth, it remains doubtful if we will ever attain the absolute Truth if we compromise relative truth, or shut our eyes to reality.

Let us not pretend to be seekers while we remain addicted to vanity or enslaved to conventions. Likewise we are living a lie when we dedicate years or decades to the pursuit of pleasure or ambition, when in the honest analysis, we can find no valid gain for our search. And when we are guided by fear or emotion to accept a creed, we have neither a chance for truth nor an honest self-identification.

Many people have found reality for the first time in the depths of alcoholism, or drug addiction, or rather, have found reality after passing through the depths. They managed to become alcoholics because alcohol alone, or drugs alone, made it possible for them to live with massive rationalizations in the form of religion or social mores, from which their inner intuition rebelled.

We live in a cloud of illusions. We cling to them, legislate them in our councils, create and deify them in our religious dogma, breed them into our children, and rarely realize that we are spinning this web of fiction for all the hours and days of our lives unless we are fortunate or unfortunate enough to die slowly. I was shocked the first time I heard a priest at a funeral pray that all of those present might be granted a slow death. For a moment I thought him a barbarian carrying to the extreme his cult of masochism. But perhaps that slow death may be the only moments of reality for the total life of many earthlings. Because a dying man is forced to face the fact that he is about to become zero, and the pseudo-comforts that promised glorious lights, trumpets and escorting angels, now have no meaning. All that the dying man knows is that he is about to begin to rot. Nothingness has more meaning to him, and embodies his world of reality more than all of the religions and cliches of a human-animal philosophy eternally cursed and confounded by language and its deceptions.

This dying man knows too late the value of the doubt, and the foolishness of faith unless that faith be in his own power to solve the problem or cut the Gordian knot. Blind faith is only rationalization. It is the little pig that does not wish to grow up, and procrastinates weaning. It is the weakling-child that replaces sturdy effort with boasting and lies of pretended achievement. The most fanatical and dangerous (that is recriminatory) type of religious zealot is the one that would make a political cause out of his favorite religion, rather than go through the effort to make his life a true religion of Search. There is but one Truth. To equivocate for the sake of social compatibility is to sell our spiritual nature for cowardly bargaining with the herd, when the bargaining is not necessary. For ages the wise men have served notice that we must remain inconspicuous, and this silence will help avert the teeth of the herd. But unless someone occasionally speaks up, the sincere will have no encouragement.

We might ask here, "How shall we know the Truth?" "What is Reality?" We can only know the Truth by teaching ourselves to face the truth in all things. If we encourage our computer to come up with erroneous answers, because they are more desirable, then we are developing a computer that we may never be able to trust.

Let us take examples in social experience. Many of us, and many people we know employ incomplete formulae to govern their lives. After decades of misery they realize that they were lying to themselves. The decades would usually be prolonged but the person's friends become alienated, or they continue until some disastrous climax brings the truth into focus. This distress is usually caused by inadequate or incomplete assessment of the general picture of life.

We have the young bully who thinks that he is invincible. Repeated conquests have led him to believe that kindness is a sign of weakness. He may even believe that he is a gigantic avatar sent by the gods to boot the peasants of the earth into line. He does not bother to find out what line the gods want him to follow, for in reality it is his line.

The bully will eventually be rebuffed. Someone will change his philosophy with the same convincing-force he meted out to others. His sadism will become inverted and he will see that he did not even have half of the picture of his destiny. But he may have rationalized half or three-fourths of his life away trying to be a bully before he relents and admits that he has little sure destiny except the all-conquering grave. And by the time he relents and realizes, it is too late for his brutalized brain to ponder anything beyond the grave.

Everyday we meet people who admit that they have been fooling themselves for years. They are generally up in years, and will be found more frequently in ale-houses than in churches. Instead of group-therapy, the churches specialize in mass-make-believe.

It is difficult to prescribe a conduct of Seekers of Truth. But Truth is that which is. A person who dyes his hair or wears a wig is not truthful. A person who wears clothes other than to cover himself is not truthful. A person who uses cosmetics except for comedy, is not truthful. The naked body with its tell-tale wrinkles, its sagging folds of fat, bowed legs, and collapsing organs, may be much more conducive to Truth than years of church-attendance, if we just observe in it our unglamorous destiny.

I am not advocating nudity since nudity may well be a rationalization or excuse to emphasize the urges of the body. Yet it is hard to tell which would do the worse for our salvation (enlightenment), - a parade of undyed nudes or a parade of vain clothes-horses on Easter Sunday.

Much of our religion is vanity. We clothe ourselves in it and strut about as if to mock the feathers of our neighbors. Too many of us think that we have chosen the true religion by virtue of our better intellect. We even manage to glorify ourselves by manifesting compassion for those who are less concerned with such toys as missionary work and conversion. We will carry a badge to show our superior position. The badge will be a quotation from the Bible, a talisman, a secret word, water on the head, or a missing foreskin.

What do we know for sure? We know very little. We find ourselves to be a rotting body, with thoughts and hope for something more permanent. Yet like children, we deck the body with importance, even as we vainly embalm the corpse to delay the truth. I am reminded of the case of the Narcissist, a woman who always wished to be a nun. She maintained that she was living for God, and that she was remaining pure for Him. In reality she was remaining pure because she abhorred change and aging. But her grand rationalization carried right through until her death. She refused a doctor out of modesty, and the result was a slow death. This woman never seemed to contemplate that God might have intended for her to reproduce. We evince the most blatant egotism when we announce that we are doing something for God. We who are not able to identify ourselves are about to oil the eternal mechanisms.

Let us look at this woman with candor. Let us just see that which she is. We will not presuppose that God created her, or that God is even around or concerned. This we do not know. But we know that she has been born with female organs, and feminine instincts to promote her female functioning. The prompting of those instincts, and the uncontrollable cycles imposed upon her by nature have become evil things or sins. She feels responsible for the hormones that might find their way into her blood, or the consequent thoughts that might find their way into her thinking. She lives a life of self-recrimination and confession in never-ending apology for having a body that she did not ask for, and which may have been created by agencies who are more responsible for it than the sufferer.

Again we do not denounce this unfortunate lady. Her tactic was her only means available to seek a better existence. She saw only a facet of the picture, and thought she had found the only door in the universe. She was a seeker in her own way, and her death-ordeal testifies to her intensity. But we cannot help but feel that her dynamic energy was wasted somewhat, and that the waste lies at the feet of the priest-union that preferred to let her make a life of sincere effort and tangential uselessness, out of what may have been a more articulate and understanding seeker. The priest-union preferred this to making an admission concerning the relative importance of moral teachings.

The purpose of this example is to show that it is possible for persons to follow a diligent tack all through life, which tack is absurd to minds of most other observers. It is possible that similar zealots find themselves on these life-long tangential paths because somewhere early in their lives they formed a fabric of rationalization rather than face reality.

That which is believed by the majority of humanity is not necessarily the truth. This is a common error, man makes. Man thinks that if everyone or the majority of people believe a thing, that popularity makes it the truth. At one time the universal concept was that the sun revolved about the earth. At one time the thinking or scientific world had a "phlogiston" theory which was later dissipated.

Faith can change material things to a limited degree only. It did not render the earth flat nor did it arrest the cycles of the sun. If the sun danced at Fatima it would have involved motions for that star which would not only have been noticeable elsewhere, but would have required that the sun travel at fantastic speeds out of its regular position. So that while millions of people may believe that the sun danced at Fatima, it is equally valid to offer or to believe that the minds of the viewers were simultaneously hallucinated, or hypnotized. I do not mean to imply that the hypnosis was caused by human agency, necessarily. Religious leaders when weary of their theological diggings, resort to edict and dogma. The scientific world, while more laborious, is prone to lean heavily upon its "concepts" and "theories," and much of the engineering in new fields treats these theories as fact by virtue of habit.

Again let us return to the observation of the two apparent' types of truth. There is actually only one real Truth, but too soon we must admit that real Truth is absolute and ideal in nature. We are apt to coin another word, "relative truth," for want of a better word to express our attempts to calibrate validity with a relative and restricted mind. It is better to understand that while searching for the Truth we will believe things that we will later no longer believe to be the truth, and this previous state of appreciation I would prefer to call incomplete truth, leading perhaps eventually to absolute Truth.

The human family is constantly finding things to be more true or less true. It is finding more perfect material formulae, and is discarding inefficient or erroneous formulae. If it can apply this weeding-out process to the vast tangle of metaphysical and religious formulae, it will begin to make progress.

The human family has been in the past in the habit of accepting ideas or spiritual concepts without even a half-hearted attempt to set up a formula. We know nothing of life after death, of the nature of our own essence, or of the motivating agencies of the visible or invisible worlds. The human family for centuries has just accepted that which sounded good or quieted their fears and made the children more tractable.

Our civilization has come to a point where we know about quality and demand that our food contain certain qualities, and that those who handle it do so with clean hands. But that admittedly most valuable food which is spiritual, too often comes from mountebanks, misfits, and often degenerates who know that their pretense may never be challenged, or their venality exposed. Modern society accepts religions that render compatibility, that keep down crime, and that work in harmony with the state.

We are allowing ourselves to be tortured by our clergy, even as the witch-doctor applied the needle of fear to keep his sinecure, in primitive cultures. The clergy maintained darkness for centuries with their "Anti-modernistic Oaths," or equivalents of such. They were not concerned with the laity, who over those centuries were reacting with more mature common-sense. While unable to deny that their function was that of a hammer, they maintained that God was the hand that swung the hammer. Generally if the peasant questioned the identity of the swinger of the hammer, he received a blow from the hammer.

[Illustration: "The Tower of Babel casts its shadow on all levels. We are dissembled and mute."]

A new trend now is growing. The men of science and the beatniks who proclaim their own common sense, have united to admit that God is dead. The new trend has no more validity than the old one. Yet, we may take a note. If the existence of God in the minds of men may be maintained by faith or belief, then denial or belief of non-existence may bring an end to God, - if God has no more existence than in the minds of men. We must seek for that which is, and we will find that such facts are indestructible and not dependent on belief or human acceptance.

There is but one way to begin and promote such a search. It is the sorting of the most likely answer from the oceanic froth of data. It requires courage, diligence, perseverance and an open mind.

THE GRAND WORK OF THE TAT SOCIETY

It has been my privilege to know, at different times in my life, three enlightened people. Besides those three, I know of several more whom I did not meet, but became aware of their depth of Spiritual awareness or their claim to have reached some enlightenment, by writing to them.

I found a common denominator in my association with all of these people, and that was that we could not work together. I considered Spiritual Work to be the most important human function, and I am sure that they did also. But privately all of them knew that we could not find a common language, nor could each find a common ground for working together in what appeared to be necessarily highly individualized systems or paths of teaching, and sometimes we could not even find a good method of just keeping in contact and exchanging ideas.

This knowledge made me feel very desperate and determined to do something about it. After all, are we not all working for the same goal, which is Truth, or for the Absolute, if the Absolute is found through a search for Truth?

There are millions of people looking for the Truth through established religions, and they profess that they are equating Truth with God. And the world is continually dismayed to find religious wars by millions who profess to be killing for the "true God." They do not know that they are killing for the "true God," they merely believe or have faith. And we can probably write off their isms, noting that they will not get anywhere until they quit believing and start seeking.

But there are hundreds of thousands who have turned away from blind faith, and have joined some esoteric, metaphysical or occult group in the hopes that this group will be recognized (by its fruits) as a bona fide method of searching and seeking. And in this smaller group of people we find that it is really a loose conglomerate of many cults, smaller still, each of which has a language and method peculiar to itself. Divisiveness is the chief denominator of these groups also. Some of this divisiveness is caused by financial competition, or the campaign for membership that sometimes involves one movement stating its claims in such superlatives that any future demonstrations for tolerance by its leaders or writers for other movements would imply the other movements might be worthwhile.

We go on to the highest form of Spiritual Work, the Realization of the Essence of Man. The final definition of man. And with this definition, - the realization of ultimate and absolute definitions of the nature of everything visible. This last sentence is included in this level of work because of the testimony of those who claim to have reached self-definition. The claim is that self-definition brings with it the definition of all things, and a realization of the Nature, or Absolute, or God, behind all things.

And this third category, whose membership involves no more than one in a million people if we are to believe Richard M. Bucke, has likewise no harmony between its members. The Tower of Babel casts its shadow on all levels. We are dissembled and mute.

Over a period of many years I tried to do something about this Spiritual Babel. I traveled back and forth across the country visiting people, temples, ashrams, and prelates of established churches. Everywhere I met the same smiles of patient condescension that indicated that I had just not reached their level of understanding yet. I received this attitude regardless of the level from which the person came. They did not bother to ask me about my level; each felt that there was only one church, - one spiritual path, - and one level and that was the one with which they identified themselves.

I did not give up. In 1956 I placed an ad in a magazine that was published for people of occult interests. I received hundreds of answers, and almost each represented a different tangent than the others. It was discouraging, but I still learned a lot from those letters.

For instance, I have just named three major categories of seekers. The first might be called the Believers. The second group, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands, might be called the Investigators. This second group are really trying to use their heads. They are very sincere, usually, but they spend entire individual lives in a single investigative search, such as Magic, Astrology, Trance Work, Yoga, Astral Projection, or in the examination of any or all of the gimmicks that come out of the East packaged as holy merchandise.

The third category we might call the Becomers. These people go in for ways to find the Truth by processes which usually involve a change of state of mind and this in turn leads to a change of being. Those who have reached enlightenment, (the word being synonymous with Sahaji Nirvakalpa Samadhi, an attainment of an Absolute state or ultimate trip) all equate that aquisition or realization with a necessary change of being. Man does not discover the Truth. He beomes the Truth.

I learned that you cannot just put people into these categories and pigeon-hole them securely. They infiltrate different levels and tend to convey naivete if they are reaching upward into a group beyond their complete understanding, and they convey unwarranted encouragement if they reach down to a group that may use their name and reputation to further the aims of a lesser group.

But the most unfortunate thing that I learned was that truly enlightened people, are still confused about proper communication with those on lower levels, and this communication uses such poor systems or vehicles for conveying their instruction as to proper methods for attaining higher consciousness, - that the general enquirer often winds up doubting that the person is enlightened at all because of the latter's preoccupation with what is often a waste of time.

Paul Wood was one of the men whom I met, who convinced me that he was truly enlightened. However, his system was discouraging to almost everyone he met. He insisted upon having people repeat and study the Lord's Prayer. The Lord's Prayer is basically part of the structure of organized Christianity, which is identified as being in the group called Believers. Now the strange truth is that Paul himself came upon his Realization while clinging to the Lord's Prayer for counsel and guidance. He had an opening of the mind as a result. It seems only fair to assume that if Paul is going to transmit, it will be done by the same leverage that was used upon him. But this is not true... each man blossoms from a different catalyst. The only thing that enlightened men have in common is that which they find. So that it is better to encourage the inward search, without demanding to find for the student an exact formula or discipline. Likewise, we are saying that we should pursue the search, which process may be helped by creating conditions that will help anyone regardless of their unique catalysts. These conditions include the conscious effort to bring people together, and to provide retreats or ashrams for meditative purposes.

Katherine B., a lady who had experienced Cosmic Consciousness, approached me twenty years ago, enquiring as to that which she could do with her Realization. We have another case of genuine Realization, but accompanied by no direction or method. She was overwhelmed with the urge to now become a healer. She knew that no one would listen to her advice unless she met them on some sort of sensational basis, and exuded some sort of dynamic purpose and compelling language. She argued that she would attract attention with her healing, as Christ did, and then give out her advice in the form of a devotional message. I could not find myself in that type of picture and our correspondence ended. She was a living, walking example of a person who has experienced all of life and death, and who is now walking amongst us. But, this person cannot make herself properly understood, nor can she work with people on the "Becomers" level. She too is back in the "Believers" section, because she is talking of healing through faith.

We can see where the highest of levels can become once more entangled with lower levels and lose their importance. There are also many individuals who have reached the highest experience, but who despaired all their lives about communication, and did not ever communicate. I was one of these people until I accidentally met some energetic young people who pledged themselves to work at the grand task.

We can add more confusion to the problem when we realize that enlightenment is not the property of any particular level alone. Some Believers, like St. Theresa, and John of the Cross, penetrated their level and transcended it. The Kabbalists are Investigators whose literature gives evidence that some of them may have reached an ultimate formula. And on the other hand, many of those who join a cult aimed at Becoming, often get side-tracked in preconceptions of what they think Becoming should be for them rather than allowing themselves to change in response to the inevitable refinements of Truthfulness, and the parallel labor of constantly retreating from untruth.

And so we, as a group, set ourselves a task. We realize that we must make available, if possible, more advantage than that which brought us forth from ignorance, and uncertainty. The task lies in attempting to find better and better ways to reach into all levels or groups for the purpose of bringing fellows together. The aim is not gregariousness, but the sharing of many experiences that took many lives in the gathering. The aim is also the making available of the function of transmission for those who might recognize the usefulness of such.

The TAT Society undertook this in 1973, to bring together, in a sort of Chautauqua, people from all levels and experiences, so that people could meet other people of like and also of different interests. We speak of a Spiritual Ladder, and a Law regarding it. How can there be a ladder without rungs? While we know that we cannot function expeditiously on all rungs, and also know we can function at best on three, (the one we are on, the one above to which we look for advice and teaching, and the one below where we can help others without too much risk) we can still help someone on the rung below who in turn needs to work on still a more basic rung to help still more people. To provide people for all these opportunities needed to fulfill the Law of the Ladder we must be prepared to bring together people of all those many levels.

Of course, you cannot go out into the crossroads and drag in, or allow in, everyone who wants to mingle. There must be some fundamental purpose in each besides being involved socially. And each must abide by certain simple rules. No one should make a pest of himself, and no one should bring alcohol or narcotics to the meetings, in their body or on their body.

I know that many people who know of this effort of ours will minimize its importance, saying that things like this should be left to chance or gravity, or indicating that we can easily contact fellows of like interest through the many media whenever we wish.

It is true that we can advertise and get large responses. But it is another thing when we try to communicate with hundreds of people for the purpose of sorting out two or three that we can work with. I have been honestly trying to bring these various esoteric factions together for forty years, and in the first thirty-four years was able to meet only about a dozen people, who appeared to be in agreement with the idea of cooperation.

In the last six years I have been fortunate in meeting at least a hundred people who are in agreement. Part of this success has occurred because of a miraculous decade that began around 1965, and is now ending. The pendulum is swinging back into another long era of dormant, established religions, pressing against anything that appears less than that which is currently defined as being conventional. Esotericism has already been assailed as being the pastime of sinners, atheists and degenerates. And many of the cults that herded together under the banner of transcendentalism and esotericism, have rightly earned for themselves, and for the whole field of esoteric investigation, the criticism and disdain of the public.

We are returning to the dark days of forty years ago. The alchemist, kabbalist and mystic must once more become inconspicuous. And this is going to make it harder for mystic to find mystic, or for sage to find students of worth.

The job is upon us and it is worthwhile. The job is to encourage membership in the TAT Society, and to prepare at the farm, a better place for them to meet.

Richard Rose is the founder of the TAT Society. He has spent his life searching for the truth about the nature of man, and investigating religions, philosophies and movements that claim to lead people to the truth. He has been schooled in a Capuchin seminary, initiated into Radha Soami, studied under a Zen master and practiced hatha and raja yoga. He is the author of The Albigen Papers, Psychology of the Observer, and other works on esoteric philosophy and spiritual seeking.

The Way

Listen to the confusion of ignorance. For that which is wisdom belongs to the silent.

Are you of the tumultuous masses that agonize for definition? Then of the human babble of voices, can you hear this voice? For this voice speaks words, and all words define nothing.

In the abyss there is a path, that is invisible, that leads to the garden. Oh, what foolishness, to speak to the blind, and to those who hear words.

Only those who believe there is a path will ever find one. Only those with faith will find despair. And those who despair may come closer to Truth.

Now you have seen words with two eyes; for one eye will avail thee nothing. Though it is but one thing that thou seekest.

Two people must thou be, man and woman. Either must thou be, and yet neither.

Thou must lose to have, and forsake love to be Love.

If thy purpose be steadfast and certain, then unto the very goal be sure of nothing. But be certain that the paradox permeates all. For if thou art certain that thou hast eaten the dragon, and thy stomach feels vast, how much greater is thy nausea if thou cannot digest or regurgitate.

That which is important is to know, and to listen to words that will enable thee to know. But logic has only the pretense of knowing.

Then that which is important is feeling, but feeling without testing the feeling, even though it be a feeling of certainty, is but pretense. For even as disease at either end of a nerve renders unreliable feeling, so the subject or object of intuition may be rendered erratically.

So that there is not one without the other. And together they are Being. To know, and to know nothing. To feel, and cease feeling and become.

But before thou knowest nothing, thou must lie with the conceit of knowing. In what bed dost thou lie?

Know thou of salvation? Of Saviours and Adversaries? From what art thou saved? From death? Then know that all men die, even saviours. For it is only by dying that one knows of life. For life has no value until it is lost.

Know thou of faith? Dost thou seize thy mouth that it cry out not against thy ears? To know is to know that which is. To believe is to weave.

Know thou of love? Lovest thou which end of the nerve? Lovest thou thy body or the fat of thy intellect? Hast thou love, or art thou Love?

Know thou of thought? Hast thou proven everything with worded thoughts? Then great is thy vanity. For thou art caught in the whirling hub of the wheel, not in the seat of the chariot.

Know thou of piety? Then thou knowest of right and wrong, and knowing both is sweet sickness, that results from surfeit of impiety. But greater still is he that is both pious and impious, and is neither.

Know thou of teachers? Know that teachers beget teachers, even as words beget words. And if the words of the teacher are kind to the ear, then the ear hears that which it wishes to hear. Then how shall the ear hear of that which IS? For the real teacher speaks neither to the ear, nor the mind, nor the heart, but by circumstance and acts. Yet the real teacher is not a man, and is known only in that circumstances befall us.

Know thou thyself? Art thou the asker of the question or answerer of thine own questions? Thou art not the quest, and yet first must thou find thyself.

To be the quest, oh soul, thou must first be a seeker. To avoid action, thou must first determine for great action.

Peace to the wanderer.

Sexual Energy and Kundalini
by Mark Jaqua

With the importation of much Eastern religious knowledge to the West, the phenomenon of kundalini is becoming more widely known. The East does not have a science of psychology, per se, but the profounder aspects of Eastern religion deal almost entirely with psychology. Perhaps the East has transcended us in this realm to an even greater degree than the West has transcended the East in technology and physical science. The Eastern science of kundalini makes enlightening connections in the areas of genius, psychosis, and sexuality that have not been made in the West. The kundalini is a reserve source of psychic energy which can be purposively or accidentally released to produce dramatic mental changes. This reserve energy manifests similarly to the superhuman strength people are sometimes able to display in emergency situations - as in the many cases when someone is able to lift a car off a trapped victim in an auto accident. In a kundalini experience the magnitude of energy is similar but the energy is released psychologically rather than physically.

Kundalini, The Evolutionary Energy of Man, is the classic account of the kundalini experience available today; I recommend it to all who are interested in the kundalini phenomenon. It is a personal account by Gopi Krishna which is simply overwhelming. Before his experience Krishna knew nothing about the kundalini nor was he in any way trying to stimulate an experience. His experience followed seventeen years of daily meditation which culminated in such an explosion of psychic energy that it almost killed him physically from the effects on the body. The blissful aspects of his experience were no more intense than the equally intense hellish phases.

"Suddenly, with a roar like that of a waterfall, I felt a stream of liquid light entering my brain through the spinal cord. Entirely unprepared for such a development, I was completely taken by surprise; but regaining self-control instantaneously, I remained sitting in the same posture, keeping my mind on the point of concentration. The illumination grew brighter and brighter, the roaring louder. I experienced a rocking sensation and then felt myself slipping out of my body, entirely enveloped in a halo of light. It is impossible to describe the experience accurately. I felt the point of consciousness that was myself growing wider, surrounded by waves of light. It grew wider and wider, spreading outward while the body, normally the immediate object of its perception, appeared to have receded into the distance until I became entirely unconscious of it. I was now all consciousness, without any outline, without any idea of corporeal appendage, without any feeling or sensation coming from the senses, immersed in a sea of light simultaneously conscious and aware of every point, spread out, as it were, in all directions without any barrier or material obstruction. I was no longer myself, or to be more accurate, no longer as I knew myself to be, a small point of awareness confined in a body, but instead was a vast circle of consciousness in which the body was but a point, bathed in light and in a state of exaltation and happiness impossible to describe."

It is important to state that this release of energy was not under Krishna's conscious control. When the kundalini is released it can result in a wonderful spiritual experience or in the most horrible disintegration of the psyche. Sometimes the experience manifests both aspects and this was the case with Gopi Krishna. Krishna experienced the negative side of the kundalini and it nearly robbed him of his mind and life.

"For weeks I had no respite. Each morning heralded for me a new kind of terror, a fresh complication in the already disordered system, a deeper fit of melancholy or more irritable condition of the mind which I had to restrain to prevent it from completely overwhelming me by keeping myself alert, usually after a completely sleepless night; and after withstanding patiently the tortures of the day, I had to prepare myself for the even worse torment of the night... I completely lost confidence in my own mind and body and lived like a haunted terror-stricken stranger in my own flesh, constantly reminded of my precarious state."

Although the use of the term kundalini has only become popular in the West in this century there are numerous Western mystics whose experiences could be classified as due to the kundalini. St. John of th Cross, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Saint Teresa, Jacob Boheme, and many others give accounts of such experiences. There are also effects that may not prove as profound as some of these experiences. In a book on his kundalini experience, And the Sun Is Up: Kundalini Rises in the West, W. Thomas Wolfe describes how he experienced a persistent feeling of weightlessness, intimate rapport and telepathy with friends, external effects such as loud crackings in walls, and consistent mental illuminations. People in his vicinity also reported definite effects on their own states of mind.

All authorities agree that the source of the kundalini is in an accumulation of physical sexual energy. It seems that in some manner sex-energy is stored in the body if it is not all spent on the physical level. By doing mental work such as meditation or mathematics this sex-energy is, by some mysterious process, changed into a different form of energy - mental energy. Vedantists call this mental energy Ojas. The Vedantist Vivekananda has this to say about Ojas:

"The Yogis claim that of all the energies that are in the human body the highest is what they call 'Ojas.' Now this Ojas is stored up in the brain, and the more Ojas is in a man's head, the more powerful he is, the more intellectual, the more spiritually strong. One man may speak beautiful language and beautiful thought, but they do not impress people; another man speaks neither beautiful language nor beautiful thoughts, yet his words charm. Every movement of his is powerful. That is the power of Ojas.

"Now in every man there is more or less of this Ojas stored up. All the forces that are working in the body in their highest become Ojas. You must remember that it is only a question of transformation. The same force which is working outside as electricity or magnetism will become changed into inner force; the same force that is working as muscular energy will be changed into Ojas. The yogis say that that part of the human energy which is expressed as sex energy, in sexual thought, when checked and controlled, easily becomes changed into Ojas... "

Superficially it would not appear that sexual energy had anything to do with mental power. Experiments by yogis, religious men and even scientific geniuses like Tesla, Newton and Da Vinci indicate that a restraint in the sexual area can reap great benefits mentally. This stealing of sex-energy and using it in other pursuits has been a secret among athletes, warriors (such as the Spartans and American Indians), and modern-day salesmen (see Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich).

The amount of over-all energy your body can generate depends on how much physical work you do as well as on other factors. By doing physical work over a period of time much more personal energy is generated than is actually consumed in doing the work. This can be demonstrated by observing young men who do hard physical work for an occupation. Some can work all day, stay up half the night drinking, and still work hard the next day. They are developing a surplus of physical energy through hard labor. Physical work also gets the body "in tune" so that it becomes capable of producing energy more efficiently.

Some claim that it is possible to tap into a universal store of energy - and that this is what happens in a kundalini experience. I personally do not believe that this is true but that we have no more energy at our disposal than we have generated through work and consuming food. If a person builds up more energy than he spends through dissipation, then he in some manner "stores" this energy. Gopi Krishna claims that it is stored in every cell of the body. This stored energy may be released in a kundalini experience, it may be used to live a dynamic lifestyle, make one a business success, or in insuring health and virility into old age. Most authentic faith-healers also use this stored energy - giving their own personal energy to someone who is sick to cure them. This is illustrated in the Bible when Jesus felt something leave him when a sick woman touched his garment and was healed.

It is possible that an accidental release is causative or concurrent with many cases of psychosis and these people are usually labeled "manic." Some occultists even claim that strokes are an errant discharge of kundalini. We are warned by all kundalini authorities concerning possible mental derangement. This is why it is important not to directly attempt raising the kundalini. Chances are at least equal that a negative experience will result as a positive one. Some "left-handed" schools recommend techniques that are highly dangerous. I had a friend who began using some of these techniques and within a year he became mental wreck.

It is not necessary to raise the kundalini in one leap. The best method is to progressively raise it by mental concentration. Whenever one concentrates on a mental problem somatic energy is being transmuted to the brain, albeit not in a dramatic fashion. Many people experience this as a light-headedness or giddiness. It seems that there is an improvement in the mental power after continual transmutation. Mental yoga authorities claim that raising energy to the head will in time increase intuition and produce psychic abilities. Franklin Merrell-Wolff author of Pathways Through to Space, recommends mathematics for this process.

An explanation of why the kundalini sometimes instigates psychotic experiences concerns the Indian system of chakras. In yogic psychology there is a series of chakras, or nerve centers, on five points of the spinal cord and two points in the brain. The kundalini energy rises like a "coiled serpent" from the base of the spine to the brain and on the way passes through each of these chakras in consecutive order. Each of these chakras is important in a particular area of our psychology. The first chakra is the source of personal energy, the second concerns sex, the third personal power, the fourth desire and affection, the fifth intellectual faculties, the sixth intuition, and the seventh and highest concerns spiritual perceptions. The psychological "domain" of each the chakras is much more complex than what I have presented here. It is also said that there are three channels in the spine along which th kundalini can ascend - the Ida, the Pingala, and the Sushumna.

Each aspect of a person's character development is said to be concerned with a particular chakra. If a person does not have a balanced development concerning each chakra (areas of his character) - then if his kundalini develops he is likely to "blow out" one of these chakras and obsession or psychosis can develop. W. Thomas Wolfe maintains that it is necessary to attain a balanced maturity before the kundalini is awakened:

"There are a number of self-imposed obstacles that delay the Kundalini or prevent it from coming altogether. While I cannot guarantee that removing these obstacles will always trigger a Kundalini awakening in one who expects it, I can say with some degree of assurance that people in who these obstacles are not removed will not experience the Kundalini awakening. Or worse yet, if by some chance they do see Kundalini, it will be through the windows of Hell."

Wolfe also holds that the Hindu chakra system is only symbolic of human psychology and does not represent anything that actually exists in the body. He writes:

"In any event, the Sushumna, Ida, Pingala, Kanda and Chakra systems are esoteric devices that do not exist in the physical body, but are provided through antiquity to explain the unusual internal feelings experienced by people in whom the Kundalini has begun to rise."

I would recommend that it is not wise to become overly addicted to any particular system. Other systems also describe aspects of the Kundalini but in different terminology. Some have compared the Christian "Holy Spirit" with the Kundalini. If one becomes too addicted to a system he can begin to create symptoms which are in accord with the system. He can also develop unnecessary fears and complications because he has read about such possibilities. There seems to be a process of suggestion which causes a person to create whatever he believes in. The consequences can be just as severe even though the creations be only in imagination.

George Arundale in Kundalini, An Occult Experience says that Kundalini "destroys ruthlessly when it is sought to be awakened before its due time." Part of this "due time" concerns moral and mental purity. Arundale writes further:

"Much stress is, therefore, laid on the dangers of arousing Kundalini... First and foremost there is the danger of sexual stimulation so that the individual becomes drained of sexual vitality through sex-obsession. Mental unhingement lies along this line. Sexual vitality and activity are very closely allied to Kundalini, for both are supremely creative in their nature, and the development of the one is bound to stir the development of the other. All sexual urge must be under complete control, at the will of the individual and must be in a condition of what may be called sublimation.... "

The image of Saint George conquering the dragon is a symbolic representation of the man who has gained control of his sexual nature. Saint George does not kill the dragon but subjugates him. If he killed the dragon he would destroy the source of his own life's energy, the kundalini power that is necessary for mental and spiritual development. But the saint (the conscious man) must struggle to win the battle with his lower nature and make this power available for his intentional use.

An unprepared person will have no control of the sudden upsurge of energy in a kundalini experience. It may become so uncomfortable that he will seek to dissipate it in any way possible. The most ready dissipation is sexual and he may embark on a herculean hedonistic binge. The need to discharge this extra energy may approach an obsession. This energy may be directed downward into sex or it can be sublimated upward mentally into a spiritual experience. This may be a very difficult thing for someone not used to a mental discipline, or if he has lived a sordid lifestyle in the past. It is doubly true that moral purification is necessary to a spiritual endeavor. The purification has a double action in that it releases energy to a higher sphere and that it protects one from derangement in a kundalini experience. An impure sexual lifestyle is the core of many mental illnesses, according to some authorities. This is even more so if the kundalini is involved. Gopi Krishna writes in Human Dimensions magazine:

"Research on kundalini is research on bioenergy and can lead to the causes responsible for vitiation of the psychic currents and their cure. Modern psychology clearly accepts the close association of sexuality with mental disorder but the actual mechanism is never signified... The observation of the sexual behavior of the mentally afflicted, belonging to this category, must in course of time yield important clues for the identification of the mechanism responsible for the maladies."

Gopi Krishna intimates that the cause of much mental illness is directly related to sexual practice. In the East these dangers are circumvented by means of yogic purification which is a bodily, sexual and mental cleansing process. M.P. Pandid, editor of World Union magazine makes an observation similar to Krishna's:

"Care must be taken that the bioenergy so freed is not contaminated by impurities - physical or psychological - caused by unrestrained sex indulgence, desires of the animal kind, or other lower movement. A 'toxic condition of bioenergy' can cause serious mental and physical disorder. The writer repeatedly cautions those interested in kundalini against attempting the adventure lightheartedly or without authentic guidance."

It is true that thus far kundalini is a subjective science - if these two latter terms do not contradict. Aspects of kundalini will always remain subjective as they seem to transcend the realm of the physically measurable. It is also true, though, that a great deal of objective and "laboratory" experimentation could be done to investigate this area that so much personal account and literature authenticates. Although psychology has theorized for a hundred years about the relationship between sexuality and psychosis, there have never been any definitive studies in this area. This study would also concern the kundalini. Psychology, by nature, is a subjective science. It is hoped that in time Western psychology may be able to investigate Eastern psychology systems and present some valuable discoveries for the Western mind. Thus far, Western psychology has been a "statistical" failure. There is no conclusive evidence whatsoever that Western systems produce more than chance improvements in their patients (see Martin Gross's The Psychological Society). Investigation into the ancient Eastern psychological systems, especially kundalini and bioenergy, could provide a impetus that is direly needed.

INVITATION TO NONSENSE
by Essa George Hannoush

The Ultimate Utopia

A lunatic went to see a minister. This minister was famous. He was an authority on the Bible, a great scholar, a rational human being, and above all, an excellent logician. He, besides being a religious psychotherapist, was a well-known preacher, heard through every medium available, including TV, radio, and the local newspaper.

It was a warm, humid summer day. The lunatic parked his car in the minister's driveway, and both then sat on the patio.

"Reverend," said the lunatic, "I have lost my mind."

"What's the problem?"

"Well, you see, Reverend, this world is bad! Wars, disease, frustrations, death, unhappiness, taxes, hard work, insecurity - it is intolerable! Isn't there a better place than this?"

"Of course there is! "

"What is this place?"

"It is the Kingdom of Heaven, The Garden of Eden."

"But where is it? In the sky?"

"No, No! It is Paradise on Earth."

"But I looked I didn't find it!"

"Patience, patience. It is to come, it is to come."

"I feel relieved."

"I am happy for you, for there is hope for you."

"Please, Reverend, is Paradise on Earth better than this life?"

"Better? It is much better. It is the best."

"Please, please, describe it to me. My soul is about to jump outside my body. Please tell me about it! "

"Very well, my friend. When the Kingdom of Heaven gets established on Earth, it will be exactly like this: Happiness without sorrow. Pleasure without pain. Health without sickness. Life without death. Light without darkness. Day without night."

Suddenly, as soon as the minister uttered the last word, a ripping flash of lightning shot across the overcast sky, followed by a booming clap of thunder. This was followed by a heavy downpour, as if the clouds were falling down altogether.

The lunatic started to sob and cry. He looked at the sk and said: "Hey, you! Detergent first, detergent first!"

"Whom are you talking to?" asked the minister.

"But don't you see, Reverend, I am praying to God to make it better. My car over there is dirty. All this water is going to waste. If it would rain detergent first, my car would benefit much more than from plain water alone!"

Logical Judo

A king once sent his messenger, Juha, with a sealed letter and a present of ten sheep to a neighboring king with whom Juha's king wanted to establish friendly diplomatic relations.

On the way, Juha got hungry and helped himself to one of the ten sheep. The following day he arrived at his destination and gave the message and the present to the king.

After reading the letter, the king said: "Your king says in the letter that he is offering me a present of ten sheep."

"Yes, Your Majesty," said Juha.

"Are these the ten sheep?"

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"But these are nine sheep."

"Yes, Your Majesty, they are nine sheep."

"But they must be ten sheep."

"Yes, Your Majesty, they must be ten sheep."

"But they are only nine sheep!"

"Yes, Your Majesty, they are only nine sheep."

"You idiot! If they are only nine sheep, and your king says that he has sent you with ten sheep, then there must be missing sheep. Right?"

"Right, Your Majesty."

"Now where is the missing sheep?"

"Which missing sheep, Your Majesty?"

"The tenth sheep, you bum!"

"Well, he is over there - the little one, you see him?"

"Listen to me, you idiot. Tell me, how many sheep are these?"

"Ten sheep?"

"No! They are nine!"

"Well, fine, they are nine. Where is the problem, Your Majesty?"

"But I want ten sheep!"

"Well, fine, Your Majesty; here are your ten sheep."

The king, now tired, exasperated, and infuriated, called in ten soldiers. "Now listen, you dodo. You said that there are ten sheep, right?"

"Yes, Your Majesty, that's exactly what I said."

"And how many soldiers do we have over there?"

"Ten soldiers, Your Majesty."

The king then ordered the soldiers to grab a sheep each. That done, the king closed in for the kill. "Well, now tell me, you idiot, if there had been ten sheep for ten soldiers, how come this soldier does not have his sheep?"

"Because he's a lazy bum, Your Majesty. All the sheep were in front of him. Who was preventing him from grabbing one??!!"

Moon Madness

A lunatic once admitted himself to a mental hospital. The attending psychiatrist started to interview him. "What's wrong?" he asked.

"You see, Doc," said the lunatic, "I was walking alone last night, and the moon was full. I put one finger over one eyeball and pressed a little. I suddenly started to see two moons."

"OK, then what happened?"

"Then, while still keeping the pressure on, I closed one eye and could only see the moon on the left side. Then I closed the other eye and could only see the moon of the right side."

"Fine. This is understandable. You have produced a known medico-optical phenomenon called diplopia, or double vision. But now, what is your problem?"

"But Doc! Which of the two is the true moon?"

Suddenly, the psychiatrist lost his mind!

Wisdom of the Heart

Under normal conditions, the cardiac muscle beats at the rate of sixty to eighty beats per minute. During each cardiac cycle, the muscle contracts (systole) for a fraction of a second and decontracts (diastole) for a longer period of time. Perfect efficiency.

However, modern man is unlike his heart. He believes (in an analogous situation) that if seventy beats per minute is good, then three hundred beats must be much better. And since the heart is actually "loitering" in diastole, then diastole must be abolished! Result? Fibrillation, heart failure, and lung edema (drowning). Yet, stranger than that, he still insists upon calling this state of affairs "efficiency."

Why do you think that tranquilizers and psychiatric consultations are so common nowadays? Huh?

The Truth About Genesis

About 3 million years ago, there evolved a species of animals called mice. The capabilities of these animals for survival were magnificent. They were happy and living in peace.

After about a million years, they got bored with their life-style. They wanted to progress into a higher stage of evolution. Some of the mice, who were endowed with a higher intelligence, started to eat more and stuff themselves with food forcefully. They became different. They became big mice. They were then known by the name of rats.

The community of mice, finding that these few were bigger, started to respect them for their achievement and gave them the privilege to organize the society of mice. The rats became the organizers, the leaders, and the presidents. Rathood came to be regarded as the ideal state. So every one of the mice started to improve himself in order to become rat. The "rat race" began.

However, some of the mice were not satisfied with the rat race and started to eat different types of food. They became cats. The Old Testament ends here. For the New Testament which tells about the conflict between mice, rats, and cats, please read the well-known fable, "How to Bell the Cat." If you are also interested in the Book of Revelation, please read the fable, "The Emperor's Robe."

Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Zero, Ignition!

A very intelligent, sane man, a monotheist by religion, set out to examine people's beliefs and credos.

"Sir, do you believe that God is One?"

"Well, yes and no."

"How can that be?"

"God is three - Father, Son and Holy Ghost - yet He is one... "

"You are a polytheist. You are a blasphemer."

"Sir, do you believe that God is One?"

"No, He is everything, He is many."

"How can that be?"

"He is the Sun, He is the Moon, He is the stars and the Earth. He is Man, He is the Lion, He is the insect and the grass."

"You are a pantheist! You are hallucinating! You are dreaming."

"Sir, do you believe that God is One?"

"No, He is Zero. He is nonexistent."

"You are an atheist. You are a communist! You will go to Hell."

"Sir, do you believe that God is One?"

"I am sorry. I have no idea about Him whatsoever."

"You are an agnostic. You will die in your ignorance."

Then the monotheist approached the lunatic. "Sir," he said, "I have examined all sorts of educated people and found all of them sinners, heretics, and ignorants."

"Well, you don't expect everybody to be a saint, do you?"

"Hmmmm - I think you are wise. Let me ask you, do you really believe that God is One in Three?"

"No."

"Good, at least you are not a polytheist. Do you believe that God is many and everything?"

"No."

"Good! At least you are not a pantheist. Do you believe that He is a zero or nonexistent?"

"No."

"Excellent. At least you are not an atheist. Do you believe that you should abandon the question and give up the search?"

"No."

"Excellent. Excellent! You are not an agnostic or a foolish scientist. At least there is one who agrees with me that God is One."

"I don't agree with you."

"But impossible. If you are none of those classes, the you must be a monotheist."

"I don't agree with you."

"But it can't be! We have examined all possibilities."

"Except two."

"Two other possibilities? I don't understand."

"What is it that you do not understand? Ask me your question."

"What are the two other possibilities? How many is God?"

"The first possibility is 0.99863. The other possibility, 1.00264."

"I think you are a lunatic. You will die in your lunacy."

"Zonk! Zonk! "

How to "Bonk" Your Neighbor

Juha, the crazy philosopher, called upon his rich neighbor to borrow some money. "Can you give me a loan of one hundred dinars?" he asked.

"What do you need a hundred dinars for?" asked the neighbor.

"I want to buy a caravan of donkeys."

"But since you do not have any money on you, how are you planning to feed your donkeys? You know, it costs quite lot to feed a whole caravan of donkeys, and besides - "

"Listen!" interrupted Juha, "I came here to ask for loan, not a lecture!"

I am a Man with Soul

Some people are telling me that the soul starts to exist simultaneously with the body, yet it survives the body at death. But I have always wondered: when does this soul start to actually coexist with the body? At fertilization? At the fourth month of pregnancy? At the sixth month of pregnancy? At nine months? At birth?

If it appears at the moment of fertilization, then how big is it at that moment? Microscopic? Does it grow along with the fetus?

One more question: does sperm have a soul or not? If not, then what makes it wiggle?

Somnambulism and Hypnosis

Many people are fascinated by such psychic phenomena as somnambulism, hypnosis, and post-hypnotic suggestions. They find the subject mysterious, and some even read books about it. But, why? These phenomena are very common, occurring all the time and everywhere around us, and there is absolutely nothing mysterious or mystical about them.

Last week, I was lying on my bed at night watching TV when I suddenly got hit by a volley of commercials which advertised a new deodorant, a new soap, a cake mix, and a new car.

The following day I went out and bought them all.

The Modern Satirical Dictionary

achievement: a state of hard work culminating in a state of ecstasy at the age of 60 to 65 years.

armed forces: our instrument of peace; their instrument of war.

atheism: theism (or deism) upside down.

beer: a device for selling aluminum to those who do not need it.

body [human]: a car made of skin and driven from the inside by a driver called "I."

book: an intellectual chamber pot endowed with authority.

civilization: the conquest of nature; the act of raping the environment.

common sense: a respectable category of collective delusion.

death: an evil which we will eventually conquer through technology.

education: an approved form of hypnosis.

evangelist: a businessman who sells invisible products and/or holy hysteria.

God: the Supreme Bureaucrat who has files on everybody in addition to the ability to bug and monitor our thoughts.

happiness: the state of having a house, two cars, a color TV, plus status.

health: a modern type of business.

heaven: paradise - a form of holy science fiction utopia.

I: a psychological blind spot which knows everything including the qualities of God and the Devil, but cannot know itself.

intelligence: the ability to believe what everybody else believes in.

job: a device for obtaining money.

knowledge: what is printed in a book.

life: a necessary prerequisite for obtaining cars, money, and fame.

logic: a form of absurdity used for proving prejudices.

man: a natural wheel composed of tire (body) and inner tube (soul).

moon: a dumb piece of rock useful for rocketry and marksmanship.

natural resources: free products useful for making money

nature: a dumb entity which lacks human intelligence.

orange juice: a good imitation of orange juice.

patient: a consumer of medical products.

peace: a balance of power and a fair distribution of hydrogen bombs.

philosophy: a device for manufacturing theories that suit our needs.

plastics: a scientific triumph that saved us from washing dishes.

priest [or minister]: a professional Christian.

religious dogma: a useful invention similar to the perpetual motion machine.

sanity: the ability to conform.

school: a device for obtaining jobs.

security: the acquisition of material goods in this world, with a promise of more goodies in the next world.

soil: a device for manufacturing edible merchandise.

space: an empty container containing useful materials.

stars: dumb zombies which obey our mathematical rules.

sun: a potential source of energy useful for solving our energy crisis.

tree: raw material for books and newspapers.

ultimate: the state of being a president.

vegetable soup: the contents of a can marked "vegetable soup."

war: a device for making peace.

woman [liberated]: a good imitation of man.

world: a mixture of earth, sky, I, they, car, house, TV, restaurant, church, cinema, and money.

xmas: a useful device for selling useless things.

yellow: the one who won't fight reds.

zombie: an expert in mechanical intellection.

excerpts reprinted by permission from Invitation to Nonsense. Copyright 1975 by Essa George Hannoush. Invitation to Nonsense is available from TAT Book Service.

The Wisdom of Franz Hartmann

Selections from Magic: White and Black

We are born into a world in which we find ourselves surrounded by physical objects. There seems to be still another - a subjective - world within us, capable of receiving and retaining impressions from the outside world. Each one is a world of its own with a relation to space different from that of the other. Each has its days of sunshine and its nights of darkness, which are not regulated by the days and nights of the other, each has its clouds and its storms, and shapes and forms of its own.

As we grow up we listen to the teachings of science to try to find out the true nature of these worlds and the laws that govern them, but physical science deals only with forms, and forms are continually changing. She gives only a partial solution of the problems of the objective world, and leaves us in regard to the subjective world almost entirely in the dark. Modern science classifies phenomena and describes events, but to describe how an event takes place is not sufficient to explain why it takes place. To discover causes, which are in themselves the effects of unknown primal causes, is only to evade one difficulty by substituting another. Science describes some of the attributes of things, but the first causes which brought these attributes into existence are unknown to her, and will remain so, until her powers of perception will penetrate into the unseen.

Besides scientific observation there seems to be still another way to obtain knowledge of the mysterious side of nature. The religious teachers of the world claim to have sounded the depths which the scientists cannot reach. Their doctrines are supposed by many to have been received through certain divine or angelic revelations, proceeding from a supreme, infinite omnipresent, and yet personal, and therefore limited external Being, the existence of which has never been proved. Although the existence of such a being is - to say the least - exceedingly doubtful, yet men in all countries have bowed down in terror before its supposed dictates; ready to tear each other's throats at a sign of its supposed command, and willing to lay down their money, their lives, and even their honour at the feet of those who are looked upon as the confidants or deputies of a god. Men and women are willing to make themselves miserable and unhappy in life for the purpose of obtaining some reward after they live no more. Some waste their life in the anticipation of joys in a life of which they do not know whether or not it exists; some die for fear of losing that which they do not possess. Thousands are engaged in teaching others that which they themselves do not know, and in spite of a very great number of religious systems there is comparatively little religion at present upon the Earth.

The term Religion is derived from the Latin world religere, which may be properly translated "to bind back," or to "relate." Religion, in the true sense of the term, implies that science which examines the link which exists between man and the cause from which he originated, or in other words, which deals with the relation which exists between man and God, for the true meaning of the term "God" is Supreme First Cause, and Nature is the effect of manifestation. True religion is therefore a science far higher than a science based upon mere sensual perception, but it cannot be in conflict with what is true in science. Only what is false in science must necessarily be in conflict with what is true in religion, and what is false in religion is in conflict with what is true in science. True religion and true science are ultimately one and the same thing, and therefore equally true; a religion that clings to illusions, and illusory science, are equally false, and the greater the obstinacy with which they cling to their illusions the more pernicious is their effect.

A distinction should be made between "religion" and "religionism"; between "science" and "scientism"; between "mystic science" and "mysticism."

The highest aspect of Religion is practically the union of man with the Supreme First Cause, from which his essence emanated in the beginning.

Its second aspect teaches theoretically the relations existing between that Great First Cause and Man; in other words, the relations existing between the Macrocosm and Microcosm.

In its lowest aspect religionism consists of the adulation of dead forms, of the worshiping of fetiches, of fruitless attempts to wheedle oneself into the favour of some imaginary deity, to persuade "God" to change his mind, and to try to obtain some favours which are not in accordance with justice.

Science in her highest aspect is the real knowledge of the fundamental laws of Nature, and is therefore a spiritual science based upon the knowledge of the spirit within one's own self.

In its lower aspect it is a knowledge of external phenomena, and the secondary or superficial causes which produce the latter, and which our modern scientism mistakes for the final cause.

In its lowest aspect scientism is a system of observation and classification of external appearances, of the causes of which we know nothing.

Religionism and Scientism are continually subject to changes. They have been created by illusions, and die when the illusions are over. True Science and true Religion are one, and if realised by Practice, they form with the truth which they contain, the three-lateral pyramid, whose foundations are upon the earth, and whose point reaches into the kingdom of heaven. Mystic science in its true meaning is spiritual knowledge; that is to say, the soul knowledge of spiritual and "super-sensual" things, perceived by the spiritual powers of the soul. These powers are germinally contained in every human organization, but only few have developed them sufficiently to be of any practical use.

Mysticism belongs to the vapoury speculations of the brain. It is a hankering after illusions, a desire to pry into divine mysteries which the material mind cannot comprehend, a craving to satisfy curiosity in regard to what an animal ought not to know. It is the realm of fancies, of dreams, the paradise of ghost-seers, and of spiritistic tomfooleries of all kinds.

But which is the true religion and the true science? There is no doubt that a definite relationship exists between Man and the cause that called humanity into existence, and a true religion or a true science must be the one which teaches the true terms of that relation. If we take a superficial view of the various religious systems of the world, we find them all apparently contradicting each other. We find a great mass of apparent superstitions and absurdities heaped upon a grain of something that may be true. We admire the ethics and moral doctrines of our favourite religious system, and we take its theological rubbish in our bargain, forgetting that the ethics of nearly all religions are essentially the same, and that the rubbish which surrounds them is not real religion. It is evidently an absurdity to believe that any system could be true, unless it contained the truth. But it is equally evident that a thing cannot be true and false at the same time.

The truth can only be one. The truth never changes; but we ourselves change, and as we change so changes our aspect of the truth. The various religious systems of the world cannot be unnatural products. They are all the natural outgrowth of man's spiritual evolution upon this globe, and they differ only in so far as the conditions under which they came into existence differed at the time when they began to exist; while his science has been artificially built by facts collected from external observation. Each intellectual human being, except one blinded by prejudice, recognises the fact that each of the great religious systems of the world contains certain truths, which we intuitively know to be true; and as there can be only one fundamental truth, so all these religions are branches of the same tree, even if the forms in which the truth manifests itself are not alike. The sunshine is everywhere the same, only its intensity differs in different localities. In one place it induces the growth of Palms, in another of mushrooms; but there is only one Sun in our system. The processes going on on the physical plane have their analogies in the spiritual realm, for there is only one Nature, one Law.

If one person quarrels with another about religious opinions, he cannot have the true religion, nor can he have any true knowledge because true religion is the realisation of truth. The only true religion is the religion of universal Love: this love is the recognition of one's own divine universal self. Love is an element of divine Wisdom, and there can be no wisdom without love. Each species of birds in the woods sings a different tune: but the principle which causes them to sing is the same in each. They do not quarrel with each other, because one can sing better than the rest. Moreover religious disputations, with their resulting animosities, are the most useless things in the world; for no one can combat the darkness by fighting it with a stick: the only way to remove darkness is to kindle a light, the only way to dispel spiritual ignorance is to let the light of knowledge that comes from the centre of love shine into every heart.

"True religion and true science are ultimately one an the same thing."

All religions are based upon internal truth, all have an outside ornamentation which varies in character in the different systems, but all have the same foundation of truth, and if we compare the various systems with one another, looking below the surface of exterior forms, we find that this truth is in all religious systems one and the same. In all this, truth has been hidden beneath a more or less allegorical language, impersonal and invisible powers have been personified and represented in images carved in stones or wood, and the formless and real has been pictured in illusive forms. These forms in letters, and pictures, and images are the means by which truths may be brought to the attention of the unripe Mind. They are to the grown-up children of all nations what picture-books are to small children who are not yet able to read, and it would be as unreasonable to deprive grown-up children of their images before they are able to read in their own hearts, as it would be to take away the picture-books from little children and to ask them to read printed books, which they cannot yet understand.

The Ideal

"God is a Spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." - John iv. 24.

The highest desire any reasonable man can cherish and the highest right he may possibly claim, is to become perfect. To know everything, to love all and be known and beloved by all, to possess and command everything that exists, such is a condition of being that, to a certain extent, may be felt intuitively, but whose possibility cannot be grasped by the intellect of mortal man. A foretaste of such a blissful condition may be experienced by a person who - even for a short period of time - is perfectly happy. He who is not oppressed by sorrow, not excited by selfish desires, and who is conscious of his own strength and liberty, may feel as if he were the master of worlds and the king of creation; and, in fact, during such moments he is their ruler, as far as he himself is concerned, although his subjects may not seem to be aware of his existence.

But when he awakes from his dream and looks through the windows of his senses into the exterior world, and begins to reason about his surroundings, his vision fades away; he beholds himself a child of the Earth, a mortal form, bound with many chains to a speck of dust in the Universe, on a ball of matter called a planet that floats in the infinity of space. The ideal world, that perhaps a moment before appeared to him as a glorious reality, may now seem to him the baseless fabric of a dream, in which there is nothing real, and physical existence, with all its imperfections, is now to him the only unquestionable reality, and its most dear illusions the only things worthy of his attention. He sees himself surrounded by material forms, and he seeks to discover among these forms that which corresponds to his highest ideal.

The highest desire of mortal is to attain fully that which exists in himself as his highest ideal. A person without an ideal is unthinkable. To be conscious is to realise the existence of some ideal, to relinquish the ideal world would be death. A person without any desire for some ideal would be useless in the economy of nature, a person having all his desires satisfied needs to live no longer, for life can be of no further use to him. Each one is bound to his own ideal; he whose ideal is mortal must die when his ideal dies, he whose ideal is immortal must become immortal himself to attain it.

Each man's highest ideal should be his own higher spiritual self. Man's semi-animal self, which we see expressed in his physical form, is not the whole of man. Man may be regarded as an invisible power or ray extending from the (spiritual) Sun to the Earth. Only the lower end of that ray is visible, where it has evolved an organized material body; by means of which the invisible ray draws strength from the earth below. If all the life and thought-force evolved by the contact with matter are spent within the material plane, the higher spiritual self will gain nothing by it. Such a person resembles a plant developing nothing but its root. When death breaks the communication between the higher and lower, the lower self will perish, and the ray will remain what it was, before it evolved a mortal inhabitant of the material world.

Man lives in two worlds, in his interior and in the exterior world. Each of these worlds exists under conditions peculiar to itself, and that world in which he lives is for the time being the most real to him. When he enters into his interior world during deep sleep or in moments of perfect abstraction, the forms perceived in the exterior world fade away; but when he awakes in the exterior world the impressions received in his interior state are forgotten, or leave only their uncertain shadows on the sky. To live simultaneously in both worlds is only possible to him who succeeds in harmoniously blending his internal and external worlds into one.

The so-called Real seldom corresponds with the Ideal, and often it happens that man, after many unsuccessful attempts to realise his ideals in the exterior world, returns to his interior world with disappointment, and resolves to give up his search; but if he succeeds in the realisation of his ideal, then arises for him a moment of happiness, during which time, as we know it, exists for him no more, the exterior world is then blended with his interior world, his consciousness is absorbed in the enjoyment of both, and yet he, remains a man.

Artists and poets may be familiar with such states. An inventor who sees his invention accepted, a soldier coming victorious out of the struggle for victory, a lover united with the object of his desire, forgets his own personality and is lost in the contemplation of his ideal. The ecstatic saint, seeing the Redeemer before him, floats in an ocean of rapture, and his consciousness is centred in the ideal that he himself has created out of his own mind, but which is as real to him as if it were a living form of flesh. Shakespeare's Juliet finds her mortal ideal realised in Romeo's youthful form. United with him, she forgets the rush of time, night disappears, and she is not conscious of it; the lark heralds the dawn and she mistakes its song for the singing of the nightingale. Happiness measures no time and knows no danger. But Juliet's ideal is mortal and dies; having lost her ideal Juliet must die; but the immortal ideals of both become again one as they enter the immortal realm through the door of physical death.

"The truth never changes; but we ourselves change, and as we change so changes our aspect of the truth."

But as the sun rose too early for Juliet, so all evanescent ideals that have been realised in the external world vanish soon. An ideal that has been realised ceases to be an ideal; the ethereal forms of the interior world, if grasped by the rude hand of mortals and embodied in matter, must die. To grasp an immortal ideal, man's mortal nature must die before he can grasp it.

Low ideals may be killed, but their death calls similar ones into existence. From the blood of a vampire that has been slain a swarm of vampires arises. A selfish desire fulfilled makes room for similar desires, a gratified passion is chased away by other similar passions, a sensual craving that has been stilled gives rise to new cravings. Earthly happiness is short-lived and often dies in disgust; the love of the immortal alone is immortal. Material acquisitions perish, because forms are evanescent and die. Intellectual accomplishments vanish, for the products of the imagination, opinions, and theories, are subject to change. Desires and passions change and memories fade away. He who clings to old memories, clings to that which is dead. A child becomes a man, a man an old man, an old man a child; the playthings of childhood give way to intellectual playthings, but when the latter have served their purpose, they appear as useless as did the former, only spiritual realities are everlasting and true. In the ever-revolving kaleidoscope of nature the aspect of illusions continually changes its form. What is laughed at as a superstition by one century is often accepted as the basis of science for the next, and what appears as wisdom today may be looked upon as an absurdity in the great tomorrow. Nothing is permanent but the truth.

But where can man find the truth? If he seeks deep enough in himself he will find it revealed, each man may know his own heart. He may let a ray of the light of intelligence into the depths of his soul and search its bottom, he will find it to be as infinitely deep as the sky above his head. He may find corals and pearls, or watch the monsters of the deep. If his thought is steady and unwavering, he may enter the innermost sanctuary of his own temple and see the goddess unveiled. Not everyone can penetrate into such depths because the thought is easily led astray; but the strong and persisting searcher will penetrate veil after veil, until at the innermost centre he discovers the germ of truth, which, awakened to self-consciousness will grow in him into a sun that illuminates the whole of his interior world.

Such an interior meditation and elevation of thought in the innermost centre of the soul, is the only true prayer. The adulation of an external form, whether living or dead, whether existing objectively or merely subjectively in the imagination, is useless, and serves only to deceive. It is very easy to attend to forms of external worship, but the true worship of the living God within requires a great effort of will and a power of thought, and is in fact the exercise of a spiritual power received from God. God in us prays to himself. Our business consists in continual guarding of the door of the sacred lodge, so that no illegitimate thoughts may enter the mind to disturb the holy assembly whose deliberations are presided over by the spirit of wisdom.

How shall we know the truth? It can be known only if it becomes revealed within the soul. Truth, having awakened to consciousness knows that it is; it is the god-principle in man, which is infallible and cannot be misled by illusions. If the surface of the soul is not lashed by the storms of passion, if no selfish desires exist to disturb its tranquillity, if its waters are not darkened by r