More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
psychologically sound and historically respectable.
the best of Indianism, the best of Christianity, and the best of those Other Worlds of transcendental experience, where the soul knows itself as unconditioned and of like nature with the divine.
but abaft we remain uncovered, at the mercy of all the winds of circumstance.
All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call “a gratuitous grace,” not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available.
The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills.”
We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into
Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience, it inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s.
Education limited by language
The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware of the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored.
this matter of education in the non-verbal humanities will not fit into any of the established pigeonholes.
be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning.
enLIGHTen· Clarisse
Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.
!!!!!!!
But the man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less cocksure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable Mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.
In the first case the soul is transported to its far-off destination by the aid of a chemical—either mescalin or lysergic acid. In the second case, the vehicle is psychological in nature, and the passage to the mind’s antipodes is accomplished by hypnosis. The two vehicles carry the consciousness to the same region; but the drug has the longer range and takes its passengers further into the terra incognita.
permit the entry into consciousness of certain classes of mental events, which are normally excluded, because they possess no survival value.
Another inhibitor of visionary experience is ordinary, everyday, perceptual experience.
Their self-inflicted punishment may be the door to paradise.
The experiences encountered under the influence of mescalin or deep hypnosis are very strange; but they are strange with a certain regularity, strange according to a pattern.
the experience of light. Everything seen by those who visit the mind’s antipodes is brilliantly illuminated and seems to shine from within.
to be effective, symbols do not require to be colored.
What is good enough for the waking consciousness is evidently good enough for the personal subconscious, which finds it possible to express its meanings through uncolored symbols. Color turns out to be a kind of touchstone of reality.
We are forever attempting to convert things into signs for the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention. But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.
Spontaneous or induced, visions are never our personal property. Memories belonging to the ordinary self have no place in them.
From the Source
For a second or two the whole world appeared as a blaze of glory. When it died down, it left me with something I have never forgotten and which constantly reminds me of the beauty locked up in every minute speck of material around us.”
significant light shines on, or shines out of, a landscape of such surpassing beauty that words cannot express
Every paradise abounds in gems,
acquire such a stone is to acquire something whose preciousness is guaranteed by the fact that it exists in the Other World.
When worshipers offer flowers at the altar, they are returning to the gods things which they know, or (if they are not visionaries) obscurely feel, to be indigenous to heaven.
This sacred jewelry has always been associated with the light of lamps and candles. For Ezekiel, a gem was a stone of fire. Conversely, a flame is a living gem, endowed with all the transporting power that belongs to the precious stone
we have become too familiar with bright, pure pigments to be greatly moved by them. We admire them, of course, when we see them in some grand or subtle composition; but in themselves and as such, they leave us untransported.
Familiarity breeds indifference.
the impossible paradox and supreme truth—that perception is (or at least can be, ought to be) the same as Revelation, that Reality shines out of every appearance, that the One is totally, infinitely present in all particulars.
intermediaries between man and the Clear Light.
content merely to exist.
To be busy is the law of our being. The law of theirs is to do nothing. When
these have one characteristic in common: a profound stillness. And it is precisely this which gives them their numinous quality, their power to transport the beholder out of the old world of his everyday experience, far away,
mystical art of the Far East—the art where “denotation and connotation cannot be divided” and “no distinction is felt between what a thing ‘is’ and what it ‘signifies.’”
Man, we like to say, is the measure of all things. For Monet, on this occasion, water lilies were the measure of water lilies; and so he painted them.
And then there is the horror of infinity.
This negatively transfigured world has found its way, from time to time, into literature and the arts. It writhed and threatened in Van Gogh’s later landscapes; it was the setting and the theme of all Kafka’s stories;
They know that works alone are powerless and that it is faith, or loving confidence, which guarantees that visionary experience shall be blissful.
Loving Confidence or Kindness
the rationale of yogic breathing exercises.
high concentration of carbon dioxide in the lungs and blood, and this increase in the concentration of CO2 lowers the efficiency of the brain as a reducing valve and permits the entry into consciousness of experiences, visionary or mystical, from “out there.”
The way to the superconscious is through the subconscious, and the way, or at least one of the ways, to the subconscious is through the chemistry of individual cells.
In the currently fashionable picture of the universe there is no place for valid transcendental experience. Consequently those who have had what they regard as valid transcendental experiences are looked upon with suspicion as being either lunatics or swindlers. To be a mystic or a visionary is no longer creditable.
*****
The first result of an inadequate diet is a lowering of the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for biological survival. The undernourished person tends to be afflicted by anxiety, depression, hypochondria and feelings of anxiety.
He is also liable to see visions; for when the cerebral reducing valve has its efficiency lowered, much (biologically speaking) useless material flows into consciousness from “out there,” in Mind-at-Large.
At this season of the highest religious excitement and the lowest vitamin intake, ecstasies and visions were almost a commonplace.
Exponents of a Nothing-But philosophy will answer that, since changes in body chemistry can create the conditions favorable to visionary and mystical experiences, visionary and mystical experiences cannot be what they claim to be, what, for those who have had them, they self-evidently are. But this, of course, is a non sequitur.
For an aspiring mystic to revert, in the present state of knowledge, to prolonged fasting and violent self-flagellation would be as senseless as it would be for an aspiring cook to behave like Charles Lamb’s Chinaman, who burned down the house in order to roast a pig.
the aspiring mystic should turn for technical help to the specialists—in pharmacology, in biochemistry, in physiology and neurology, in psychology and psychiatry, and parapsychology.
