The Secret Teachers of the Western World Quotes

“There is a sense that people of the Middle Ages did not feel space in the same way we do, as an empty expanse through which we move, or as a box in which we are contained. In Saving the Appearances (1957), Owen Barfield suggested that medieval man did not feel he was within space as if it were a container. Rather, for Barfield, medieval man wore the world like a garment. Medieval man, Barfield suggests, saw the world quite differently than we do. For him the air was “filled with light proceeding from a living sun, rather as our own flesh is filled with blood from a living heart.” The night sky was not a “homogenous vault pricked with separate points of light, but a regional qualitative sky . . . from which . . . the great zodiacal belt . . . the planets and the moon . . . are raying down their complex influences on the earth.”16 Barfield says that although he may not have heard it, medieval man believed in the music of the spheres and he took for granted the correspondences between things on Earth and those above: the moon’s correspondence with growth, the sun’s with gold, Venus’s with copper, that of Mars with iron, and Saturn with lead. For Barfield, this meant that our medieval ancestors lived in a much more “participatory” relationship to the world than we do. They were “in” the world in a way that we are not, much more like figures in a painting than objects in a box. There was, we can say, a felt continuity between themselves and the world around them.”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“One of the major esoteric movements in the twentieth century, Traditionalism, takes as its central belief the existence of a primordial spiritual tradition, which was revealed by a divine source and flourished in the ancient past, but which has been subsequently lost. The founder of Traditionalism is generally considered to be the French metaphysician René Guénon, but other Traditionalists include the art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, the philosopher Huston Smith, and the far-right Italian esotericist Julius Evola.”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“The “meaning” of a book is in its words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. It is “really” there, in black and white. But unless I read it, that meaning remains mute. Reading is more than my simply looking at the pages and reflecting them, as a mirror would. I have to make the mental effort of absorbing the words, connecting them, and assimilating them to my experience.”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“Where the mystic desires union, the esotericist seeks knowledge—in other words, gnosis—and he reaches it through the imagination. Achieving gnosis through the use of disciplined spiritual imagination will become one of the fruits of the esoteric exodus out of Alexandria.”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“The philosopher no longer reflects on the good and true, using his intellect to understand them; he has become one with them. The reality he had contemplated is no longer outside him. He and it are one. This henosis, however, cannot be commanded or willed, although the philosopher works daily preparing the ground for it. He must be patient and allow it to happen. It is not exactly a kind of grace, as Plotinus does not believe that the One does anything; it does not bestow this union. But it is always present, always available, just as the stars are always present; it is only the proximity of the sun that obscures them. The philosopher must make himself a worthy vessel for the presence of the One by emptying himself of coarse matters. Or, to change the metaphor, he must quiet the racket within himself so that the sacred silence can be heard. It is solitary work, with no aim other than itself. Unlike Plato, Plotinus did not dream of philosopher kings, but of teachers who, like the One itself, radiate their knowledge and wisdom so that those who are drawn to the philosophical life and are capable of it may be guided in their quest.”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“In Book XI of the Corpus Hermeticum, Nous explains to Hermes that “within God everything lies in the imagination,” and goes on to give a description of what he can expect from gnosis. Command your soul to go anywhere and it will be there quicker than your command. Bid it to go to the ocean and again it is there at once . . . Order it to fly up to heaven and it will need no wings . . . If you do not make yourself equal to God you cannot understand him. Like is understood by like. Grow to immeasurable size. Be free from every body, transcend all time. Become eternity and thus will you understand God . . . Consider yourself immortal and able to understand everything: all arts, sciences, and the nature of every living creature . . . Sense as one within yourself the entire creation . . . Conceive yourself to be in all places at the same time . . . Conceive all things at once: times, places, actions, qualities and quantities: then you can understand God.26”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“Eventually, the highly efficient Cro-Magnon eradicated his laid-back but more intuitive cousin, but not before he mated with her, and in our own psyches we continue the battle between them, much as McGilchrist argues goes on between our two brains. It should be mentioned that Gooch did not see the struggle going on between the cerebral hemispheres, but between the cerebrum and the cerebellum.50 But although he disagrees on its location and participants, on all other accounts his version of the battle is practically the same.51 Our inheritance from Neanderthal, Gooch argues, is behind what, in Total Man and other books, he calls our “ancient adversary” and “other self” with whom our rational ego is in constant conflict. According to Gooch, this “adversary” has given rise to our myths and legends of vampires, werewolves, goblins, centaurs, to fairy tales and other fables, as well as to works of literature such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“It has been argued over the years that, among other things, Jesus didn’t die on the cross, but escaped to raise a family, and that he was not a human being but a mushroom.”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“The Epicureans also sought ataraxia. Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) held that the world consisted fundamentally of atoms and “the void,” the space in which the atoms moved. His materialist philosophy sought to free men from their worries about the gods and other superstitions, as well as the fear of death. There was no soul and at death nothing happened except that the atoms of one’s body returned to the flux. Like the Cynics, he advised a retreat from the public world, but a much more decorous one, and taught that one should “cultivate one’s garden.” One should, as he said, “live unknown.” “Epicurean” for us means refined and delicate tastes, but this is in some ways a misnomer. Although advocating a kind of materialist hedonism, Epicurus really argued for the simple life. Pleasure was the only good, and one should arrange one’s life to have as much of it as possible. This did not mean that we should jam as much pleasure into our lives as we can, as if it was an “all you can eat” buffet and we’d be losing out if we didn’t stuff ourselves. Such gluttony is simply quantitative. Epicurus preached discrimination aimed at providing the highest quality of pleasure. Self-discipline and self-control were central tenets of Epicureanism.”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“Synchronicity, Jung’s name for the phenomena of “meaningful coincidence,” tells us that something which in logical terms should not be meaningful or have any connection to my inner world nevertheless does. And the notion of correspondence tells us that something is more than itself, that it is also a symbol of some higher significance. For Aristotle, as for Gertrude Stein, a rose is a rose and nothing else. For an esotericist, a rose is a rose, but it is also much else.4 And”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“from what our official accounts allow.28 Schwaller too recognized that whoever built the Sphinx, the Great Pyramid, and the temples at Luxor and Karnak was mathematically and cosmologically astute. From 1936 to 1951, Schwaller and his wife, Isha, herself the author of a series of novels about ancient Egypt (Her-Bak: Egyptian Initiate is the best known), studied the ancient Egyptian monuments. Schwaller found evidence in them for pi, but also for much more: a knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes, of the Pythagorean theorem centuries in advance of Pythagoras, of the circumference of the globe, as well as evidence of ϕ (phi), known as the Golden Section, a mathematical proportion that was again supposedly unknown until it was discovered by the Greeks. As John Anthony West makes clear, the Golden Section is more than an important item in classical architecture. It is, according to Schwaller, the mathematical archetype of the universe, the reason why we have an “asymmetrical” “lumpy” world of galaxies and planets, and not a flattened-out, homogenous one, a question that today occupies contemporary cosmologists.29 In his writings, Schwaller linked phi to planetary orbits, to the architecture of Gothic cathedrals, and to plant and animal forms.”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“from what our official accounts allow.28 Schwaller too recognized that whoever built the Sphinx, the Great Pyramid, and the temples at Luxor and Karnak was mathematically and cosmologically astute. From 1936 to 1951, Schwaller and his wife, Isha, herself the author of a series of novels about ancient Egypt (Her-Bak: Egyptian Initiate is the best known), studied the ancient Egyptian monuments. Schwaller found evidence in them for pi, but also for much more: a knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes, of the Pythagorean theorem centuries in advance of Pythagoras, of the circumference of the globe, as well as evidence of ϕ (phi), known as the Golden Section, a mathematical proportion that was again supposedly unknown until it was discovered by the Greeks. As John Anthony West makes clear, the Golden Section is more than an important item in classical architecture. It is, according”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“As early as 1864, an amateur Egyptologist, the London publisher John Taylor, argued that whoever built the Great Pyramid had included π (pi) in their measurements, a number that was supposed to have been first discovered by the Greek mathematician Archimedes in 250 B.C.—that is, centuries later.27 (For those who have forgotten, π is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.) Much nonsense has been written about the pyramids, linking them to everything from biblical prophecy to UFOs, and giving rise to what some skeptics call a subgenre of junk literature written by “pyramidiots.” But to the unbiased reader it is clear that whoever was responsible for the pyramids and other Egyptian mysteries, such as the temples at Karnak and Luxor, knew a great deal more than what our official accounts suggest. Since 1894, when the British astronomer Norman Lockyer demonstrated in The Dawn of Astronomy that Egyptian temples, as well as the pyramids, were most likely, if not exclusively, used for astronomical purposes, many researchers have come to see that the kind of knowledge involved in their construction—as well as in other ancient structures, like Stonehenge (Lockyer was the first to suggest it was a kind of observatory)—was vastly different from what our official accounts allow.”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“The unconscious contents are not always polite; they can burst into our conscious life in sometimes terrifying ways. They are willing to work with us if we are open to them, but they will make themselves felt, whether we want them to or not. The first route is preferable but harder, and demands discipline and determination. The second route is easier: you just let yourself go mad.”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“the tip of the tongue,” but not quite being able to remember it; the French have a term for this, presque vu, “almost seen.”
― Gary Lachman, The Secret Teachers of the Western World