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A MAZE IN ZAZAZA ENTER ZAZAZA ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ THE MAGICALALPHABET ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262625242322212019181716151413121110987654321
WORK DAYS OF GOD Herbert W Morris D.D.circa 1883 Page 22
LIGHT AND LIFE Lars Olof Bjorn 1976 Page 197 "By writing the 26 letters of the alphabet in a certain order one may put down almost any message (this book 'is written with the same letters' as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Winnie the Pooh, only the order of the letters differs). In the same way Nature is able to convey with her language how a cell and a whole organism is to be constructed and how it is to function. Nature has succeeded better than we humans; for the genetic code there is only one universal language which is the same in a man, a bean plant and a bacterium." "BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE"
"BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE"
A HISTORY OF GOD Karen Armstrong The God of the Mystics Page 250 "(The Book of Creation). There is no attempt to describe the creative process realistically; the account is unashamedly symbolic and shows God creating the world by means of language as though he were writing a book. But language has been entirely transformed and the message of creation is no longer clear. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is given a numerical value; by combining the letters with the sacred numbers, rearranging them in endless configurations, the mystic weaned his mind away from the normal connotations of words."
THERE IS NO ATTEMPT MADE TO DESCRIBE THE CREATIVE PROCESS REALISTICALLY THE ACCOUNT IS SYMBOLIC AND SHOWS GOD CREATING THE WORLD BY MEANS OF LANGUAGE AS THOUGH WRITING A BOOK BUT LANGUAGE ENTIRELY TRANSFORMED THE MESSAGE OF CREATION IS CLEAR EACH LETTER OF THE ALPHABET IS GIVEN A NUMERICAL VALUE BY COMBINING THE LETTERS WITH THE SACRED NUMBERS REARRANGING THEM IN ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS THE MYSTIC WEANED THE MIND AWAY FROM THE NORMAL CONNOTATIONS OF WORDS
FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS A QUEST FOR THE BEGINNING AND THE END Graham Hancock 1995 Chapter 32 Speaking to the Unborn Page 285 "It is understandable that a huge range of myths from all over the ancient world should describe geological catastrophes in graphic detail. Mankind survived the horror of the last Ice Age, and the most plausible source for our enduring traditions of flooding and freezing, massive volcanism and devastating earthquakes is in the tumultuous upheavals unleashed during the great meltdown of 15,000 to 8000 BC. The final retreat of the ice sheets, and the consequent 300-400 foot rise in global sea levels, took place only a few thousand years before the beginning of the historical period. It is therefore not surprising that all our early civilizations should have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified their forefathers. A message in the bottle of time" 'Of all the other stupendous inventions,' Galileo once remarked, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3 If the 'precessional message' identified by scholars like Santillana, von Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn't just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn't that have been easier than encoding it in myths? Perhaps. "What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them" "WRITTEN IN THE ETERNAL LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS"
THE FAR YONDER SCRIBE AND OFT TIMES SHADOWED SUBSTANCES WATCHED IN FINE AMAZE THE ZED ALIZ ZED IN SWIFT REPEAT SCATTER STAR DUST AMONGST THE LETTERS OF THEIR PROGRESS AT THE THROW OF THE NINTH RAM WHEN IN CONJUNCTION SET THE FAR YONDER SCRIBE MADE RECORD OF THEIR FALL
NUMBER 9 THE SEARCH FOR THE SIGMA CODE Cecil Balmond 1998 Cycles and Patterns Page 165 Patterns "The essence of mathematics is to look for patterns. Our minds seem to be organised to search for relationships and sequences. We look for hidden orders. These intuitions seem to be more important than the facts themselves, for there is always the thrill at finding something, a pattern, it is a discovery - what was unknown is now revealed. Imagine looking up at the stars and finding the zodiac! Searching out patterns is a pure delight. Suddenly the counters fall into place and a connection is found, not necessarily a geometric one, but a relationship between numbers, pictures of the mind, that were not obvious before. There is that excitement of finding order in something that was otherwise hidden. And there is the knowledge that a huge unseen world lurks behind the facades we see of the numbers themselves."
THE ZED ALIZ ZED AGAIN IMAGES JUST THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF MAGI MAGIC
HAMLET'S MILL AN ESSAY INVESTIGATING THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND ITS TRANSMISSION THROUGH MYTH Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend 1969 Intoduction Page 1 (number omitted) " The unbreakable fetters which bound down the Great Wolf Fenrir had been cunningly forged by Loki from these: the footfall of a cat, the roots of a rock, the beard of a woman, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird. The Edda Toute vue des choses qui n'est pas estrange est fausse. VALERY
The figure of Hamlet as a favorable starting point came by chance. Many other avenues offered themselves, rich in strange symbols and beckoning with great images, but the choice went to Hamlet because he led the mind on a truly inductive quest through a familiar landscape-and one which has the merit of its literary setting. Here is a character deeply present to our awareness, in whom ambiguities and uncertainties, tormented self-questioning and dispassionate insight give a presentiment of the modern mind. His personal drama was that he had to be a hero, but still try to avoid the role Destiny assigned him. His lucid intellect remained above the conflict of motives-in other words, his was and is a truly con/ Page 2 / temporary consciousness. And yet this character whom the poet made one of us, the first unhappy intellectual, concealed a past as a legendary being, his features predetermined, preshaped by longstanding myth. There was a numinous aura around him, and many clues led up to him. But it was a surprise to find behind the mask an ancient and all-embracing cosmic power-the original master of the dreamed-of first age of the world. This essay will follow the figure farther and farther afield, from the Northland to Rome, from there to Finland, Iran, and India; he will appear again unmistakably in Polynesian legend. Many other Dominations and Powers will materialize to frame him within the proper order. Amlodhi was identified, in the crude and vivid imagery of the Norse, by the ownership of a fabled mill which, in his own time, ground out peace and plenty. Later, in decaying times, it ground out salt; and now finally, having landed at the bottom of the sea, it is grinding rock and sand, creating a vast whirlpool, the Maelstrom (i.e., the grinding stream, from the verb mala, "to grind"), which is supposed to be a way to the land of the dead. This imagery stands, as the evidence develops, for an astronomical process, the secular shifting of the sun through the signs of the zodiac which determines world-ages, each numbering thousands of years. Each age brings a World Era, a Twilight of the Gods. Great structures collapse; pillars topple which supported the great fabric; floods and cataclysms herald the shaping of a new world. Tradition will show that the measures of a new world had to be procured from the depths of the celestial ocean and tuned with the measures from above, dictated by the "Seven Sages," as they are often cryptically mentioned in India and elsewhere. They turn out to be the Seven Stars of Ursa, which are normative in all cosmological alignments on the starry sphere. These dominant stars of the Far North are peculiarly but systematically linked with those which are considered the operative powers of the cosmos, that is, the planets as they move in different placements and configurations along the zodiac. The ancient Pythagoreans, in their conventional language, called the two Bears the Hands of Rhea (the Lady of Turning Heaven), and called the planets the Hounds of Persephone, Queen of the Underworld. Far away to the south, the mysterious ship Argo with its Pilot star held the depths of the past; and the Galaxy was the Bridge out of Time. These notions appear to have been common doctrine in the age before history-all over the belt of high civilizations around our globe. They also seem to have been born of the great intellectual and technological revolution of the late Neolithic period. The intensity and richness, the coincidence of details, in this cumulative thought have led to the conclusion that it all had its origin in the Near East. It is evident that this indicates a diffusion of ideas to an extent hardly countenanced by current anthropology. But this science, although it has dug up a marvelous wealth of details, has been led by its modern evolutionary and psychological bent to forget about the main source of myth, which was astronomy -the Royal Science. This obliviousness is itself a recent turn of events-barely a century old. Today expert philologists tell us that Saturn and Jupiter are names of vague deities, subterranean or atmospheric, superimposed on the planets at a "late" period; they neatly sort out folk origins and "late" derivations, all unaware that planetary periods, sidereal and synodic, were known and rehearsed / Page 4 / in numerous ways by celebrations already traditional in archaic times. If a scholar has never known those periods even from elementary science, he is not in the best position to recognize them when they come up in his material. Ancient historians would have been aghast had they been told that obvious things were to become unnoticeable. Aristotle was proud to state it as known that the gods were originally stars, even if popular fantasy had later obscured this truth. Little as he believed in progress, he felt this much had been secured for the future. He could not guess that W. D. Ross, his modern editor, would condescendingly annotate: "This is historically untrue." Yet we know that Saturday and Sabbath had to do with Saturn, just as Wednesday and Mercredi had to do with Mercury. Such names are as old as time; as old, certainly, as the planetary heptagram of the Harranians. They go back far before Professor Ross' Greek philology. The inquiries of great and meticulous scholars such as Ideler, Lepsius, Chwolson, BoIl and, to go farther back, of Athanasius Kircher and Petavius, had they only been read carefully, and noted, would have taught several relevant lessons to the historians of culture, but interest shifted to other goals, as can be seen from current anthropology, which has built up its own idea of the "primitive" and what came after. One still reads in that most unscientific of records, the Bible, that God disposed all things by number, weight and measure; ancient Chinese texts say that "the calendar and the pitch pipes have such a close fit, that you could not slip a hair between them." People read it, and think nothing of it. Yet such hints might reveal a world of vast and firmly established complexity, infinitely different from ours. But the experts now are benighted by the current folk fantasy, which is the belief that they are beyond all this-critics without nonsense and extremely wise. In 1959 I wrote: But they are tantalizing fragments of a lost whole. They make one think of those "mist landscapes" of which Chinese painters are masters, which show here a rock, here a gable, there the tip of a tree, and leave the rest to imagination. Even when the code shall have yielded, when the techniques shall be known, we cannot expect to gauge the thought of those remote ancestors of ours, wrapped as it is in its symbols. Their words are no more heard again Through lapse of many ages. . . We think we have now broken part of that code. The thought behind these constructions of the high and far-off times is also lofty, even if its forms are strange. The theory about "how the world began" seems to involve the breaking asunder of a harmony, a kind of cosmogonic "original sin" whereby the circle of the ecliptic (with the zodiac) was tilted up at an angle with respect to the equator, and the cycles of change came into being. This is not to suggest that this archaic cosmology will show any great physical discoveries, although it required prodigious feats of concentration and computing. What it did was to mark out the unity of the universe, and of man's mind, reaching out to its farthest limits. Truly, man is doing the same today. Einstein said: "What is inconceivable about the universe, is that it should be at all conceivable." Man is not giving up. When he discovers remote galaxies by the million, and then those quasi-stellar radio sources billions of light-years away which confound his speculation, he is happy that he can reach out to those depths. But he pays a terrible price for his achievement. The science of astrophysics reaches out on a grander and grander scale without losing its footing. Man as man cannot do this. In the depths of space he loses himself and all notion of his significance. He is unable to fit himself into the concepts of today's astrophysics short of schizophrenia. Modern man is facing the nonconceivable. Archaic man, however, kept a firm grip on the conceivable by framing within his cosmos / Page 6 / an order of time and an eschatology that made sense to him and reserved a fate for his soul. Yet it was a prodigiously vast theory, with no concessions to merely human sentiments. It, too, dilated the mind beyond the bearable, although without destroying man's role in the cosmos. It was a ruthless metaphysics. Not a forgiving universe, not a world of mercy. That surely not. Inexorable as the stars in their courses, miserationis parcissimae, the Romans used to say. Yet it was a world somehow not unmindful of man, one in which there was an accepted place for everything, rightfully and not only statistically, where no sparrow could fall unnoted, and where even what was rejected through its own error would not go down to eternal perdition; for the order of Number and Time was a total order preserving all, of which all were members, gods and men and animals, trees and crystals and even absurd errant stars, all subject to law and measure. This is what Plato knew, who could still speak the language of archaic myth. He made myth consonant with his thought, as he built the first modern philosophy. We have trusted his clues as landmarks even on occasions when he professes to speak "not quite seriously." He gave us a first rule of thumb; he knew what he was talking about. Behind Plato there stands the imposing body of doctrine attributed to Pythagoras, some of its formulation uncouth, but rich with the prodigious content of early mathematics, pregnant with a science and a metaphysics that were to flower in Plato's time. From it come such words as "theorem," "theory," and "philosophy." This in its turn rests on what might be called a proto-Pythagorean phase, spread all over the East but with a focus in Susa. And then there was something else again, the stark numerical computing of BabyIon. From it all came that strange principle: "Things are numbers." Once having grasped a thread going back in time, then the test of later doctrines with their own historical developments lies in their congruence with tradition preserved intact even if half understood. For there are seeds which propagate themselves along the jetstream of time. Page 7 And universality is in itself a test when coupled with a firm design. When something found, say, in China turns up also in Babyionian astrological texts, then it must be assumed to be relevant, for it reveals a complex of uncommon images which nobody could claim had risen independently by spontaneous generation. Take the origin of music. Orpheus and his harrowing death may be a poetic creation born in more than one instance in diverse places. But when characters who do not play the lyre but blow pipes get themselves flayed alive for various absurd reasons, and their identical end is rehearsed on several continents, then we feel we have got hold of something, for such stories cannot be linked by internal sequence. And when the Pied Piper turns up both in the medieval German myth of Hamelin and in Mexico long before Columbus, and is linked in both places with certain attributes like the color red, it can hardly be a coincidence. Generally, there is little that finds its way into music by chance. Again, when one finds numbers like 108, or 9 x 13, reappearing under several multiples in the Vedas, in the temples of Angkor, in Babylon, in Heraclitus' dark utterances, and also in the Norse Valhalla, it is not accident. There is one way of checking signals thus scattered in early data, in lore, fables and sacred texts. What we have used for sources may seem strange and disparate, but the sifting was considered, and it had its reasons. Those reasons will be given later in the chapter on method. I might call it comparative morphology. The reservoir of myth and fable is great, but there are morphological "markers" for what is not mere storytelling of the kind that comes naturally. There is also wonderfully preserved archaic material in "secondary" primitives, like American Indians and West Africans. Then there are courtly stories and annals of dynasties which look like novels: the Feng Shen Yen I, the Japanese Nihongi, the Hawaiian Kumulipo. These are not merely fantasy-ridden fables. In hard and perilous ages, what information should a well-born man entrust to his eldest son? Lines of descent surely, but what else? The memory of an ancient nobility is the means of preserving the / Page 8 / arcana imperii, the arcana legis and the arcana mundi, just as it was in ancient Rome. This is the wisdom of a ruling class. The Polynesian chants taught in the severely restricted Whare-wananga were mostly astronomy. That is what a liberal education meant then. Sacred texts are another great source. In our age of print one is tempted to dismiss these as religious excursions into homiletics, but originally they represented a great concentration of attention on material which had been distilled for relevancy through a long period of time and which was considered worthy of being committed to memory generation after generation. The tradition of Celtic Druidism was delivered not only in songs, but also in tree-lore which was much like a code. And in the East, out of complicated games based on astronomy, there developed a kind of shorthand which became the alphabet. As we follow the clues-stars, numbers, colors, plants, forms, verse, music, structres-a huge framework of connections is revealed at many levels. One is inside an echoing manifold where everything responds and everything has a place and a time assigned to it. This is a true edifice, something like a mathematical matrix, a World-Image that fits the many levels, and all of it kept in order by strict measure. It is measure that provides the countercheck, for there is much that can be identified and redisposed from rules like the old Chinese saying about the pitch pipes and the calendar. When we speak of measures, it is always some form of Time that provides them, starting from two basic ones, the solar year and the octave, and going down from there in many periods and intervals, to actual weights and sizes. What modern man attempted in the merely conventional metric system has archaic precedents of great complexity. Down the centuries there comes an echo of Al-Biruni's wondering a thousand years ago, when that prince of scientists discovered that the Indians, by then miserable astronomers, calculated aspects and events by means of stars-and were not able to show him anyone star that he asked for. Stars had become items for them, as they were to become again for Leverrier and Adams, who never troubled to look at Neptune in their life although they had computed and discovered it in 1847. The Mayas and the Aztecs in their / Page 9 / unending calculations seem to have had similar attitudes. The connections were what counted. Ultimately so it was in the archaic universe, where all things were signs and signatures of each other, inscribed in the hologram, to be divined subtly. And Number dominated them all (appendix # I ). This ancient world moves a little closer if one recalls two great transitional figures who were simultaneously archaic and modern in their habits of thought. The first is Johannes Kepler, who was of the old order in his unremitting calculations and his passionate devotion to the dream of rediscovering the "Harmony of the Spheres." But he was a man of his own time, and also of ours, when this dream began to prefigure the polyphony that led up to Bach. In somewhat the same way, our strictly scientific world view has its counterpart in what John Hollander, the historian of music, has described as "The Untuning of the Sky." The second transitional figure is no less a man than Sir Isaac Newton, the very inceptor of the rigorously scientific view. There is no real paradox in mentioning Newton in this connection. John Maynard Keynes, who knew Newton as well as many of our time, said of him: Newton was not the first of the Age of Reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual world rather less than 10,000 years ago. . . Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher's treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed that these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements (and that is what gives the false suggestion of his being an experimental natural philosopher), but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia. He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty-just as he himself wrapt the discovery of the calculus in a cryptogram when he communicated with Leibniz. By pure thought, by concentration of mind, the riddle, he believed, would be revealed to the initiate.1 Page 10 Lord Keynes' appraisal, written ca. 1942, remains both unconventional and profound. He knew, we all know, that Newton failed. Newton was led astray by his dour sectarian preconceptions. But his undertaking was truly in the archaic spirit, as it begins to appear now after two centuries of scholarly search into many cultures of which he could have had no idea. To the few clues he found with rigorous method, a vast number have been added. Still, the wonder remains, the same that was expressed by his great predecessor Galileo: But of all other stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind must have been his who conccived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any othcr person, though very far distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the In dies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years) And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangement of two dozcn little signs upon paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of man. 'Way back in the 6th century A.D., Gregoire de Tours was writing: "The mind has lost its cutting edge, we hardly understand the Ancicnts." So much more today, despite our wallowing in mathematics for the million and in sophisticated technology. Page 2 Note *. The indulgence of specialists is asked for the form of certain transliterations throughout the text; for example, Amlodhi instead of Amlodi, Grotte instead of Grotti, etc. (Ed.) Page 9 Note 1 1 "Newton the Man," in The Royal Society. Newton Tercentenary Celebrations (1947), p. 29.
HAMLET'S MILL AN ESSAY INVESTIGATING THE ORIGINS OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE AND ITS TRANSMISSION THROUGH MYTH Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend 1969 Page 162 "Finally, there is one remarkable and disturbing coincidence from the same direction. It is known that in the final battle of the gods, the massed legions on the side of "order" are the dead warriors, the "Einherier" who once fell in combat on earth and who have been transferred by the Valkyries to reside with Odin in Valhalla-a theme much rehearsed in heroic poetry. On the last day, they issue forth to battle in martial array. Says the Grimnismal (23): "Five hundred gates and forty more-are in the mighty building of Walhalla-eight hundred 'Einherier' come out of each one gate-on the time they go out on defence against the Wolf."
CITY OF REVELATION John Michell 1972 Page 77 CHAPTER SEVEN 3168, The Perimeter of the Temple "If the numbers of the sacred principles, mentioned by St John in connection with the New Jerusalem, are obtained from the Greek text by the cabalistic method of gematria, it is found that they correspond to the dimensions of the city, set out in Fig 16. (Figure omitted) For example, the perimeter of a hexagon contained within the circle representing the earth, 7920 feet in diameter, measures 2376 feet, and 2376 is the number of (Greek text omitted), the twelve apostles of the Lamb (Revelation 21.14). 2376 x 2 feet is equal to 1746 MY, and 1745 = (Greek text omitted), the twelve apostles. The names of the apostles are said to be in the twelve foundations of the wall of the city. The wall is the circle of diameter 7920 feet and 14,400 cubits in circumference, and the foundations are the twelve corners of the double hexagon inscribed within it, fonowing the customary pattern of an astrological chart. The position of the twelve apostles in the scheme is thus clearly defined. Page 78 The perimeter of the temple is 3168, Lord Jesus Christ, when the temple is measured by the foot, the most sacred unit of ancient metrology. In terms of the megalithic yard (2.72 feet), however, the perimeter measures 1164, because 3168 feet = 1164 MY. Yet this makes no difference to the symbolic interpretation by gematria, for 1164 is the number of another name of Christ, (Greek text omitted) Son of God. As a geodetic or earth-measuring number, 3168 also demonstrates the antiquity and sacred origin of British metrology, for 31,680 ft. = 6 miles. 31,680 furlongs = 3960 miles = radius of the earth. 31,680 miles = perimeter of square containing the terrestrial sphere. 31,680 miles = circumference of circle drawn on the combined diameters of the earth and moon (10,080 miles) Other cosmological correspondences of 3168 are given on page 109. The Stonehenge sarsen circle with circumference of 316.8 feet 3168 in Plato's city 5040 = 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 39,916,800 = 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9 x.10 x 11 5040, the radius of the circular city, is the product of the numbers1 - 7; 7920, the side of the square city, is the product of numbers 8 - 11. In each case the perimeter of the city is 31,680. In Plato's Republic is the famous, cryptic reference to the 'marriage number', which should be consulted by the guardians of the state in all matters relating to the seasonal union of male and female. There appear to be two numbers involved, adding up to a third, but the riddle is so obscure that no firm solution has been reached despite the vast literature on the subject. For various reasons the number 12,960,000 or 36002 is most commonly proposed, and this would seem appropriate, for 12,960 = 5040 + 7920. 12,960 therefore represents the union of square and circle, symbol of the sacred marriage, and the gematria is also appropriate, for 1296 = (Greek text omitted) Mary mother of Jesus. FIGURE 24 (Figure omitted) Plato's city divided into 5040 rings, Perimeter = 31,680, Areas: A + a = B + b = C + c = 31,680.
"Plato declares that there are certain numbers that link these with each other and with all phenomena capable of being measured. As an example of these numbers, the study of which Plato recommends as the most sanctifying of all pursuits, he gives 5040."
SOME MYSTICAL ADVENTURES G. R. S . Mead 1910 AS ABOVE, SO BELOW. "Heaven above, heaven below; stars above, stars below; all that is above thus also below." *-Kircher, Prodrom. copt. pp. 193 and 275 Page 1 ." 'As above, so below.' Is this great 'word' a sacramental phrase, a saying of wisdom, an aphorism, a mystic formula, a fundamental law; or a two-edged sword of word-fence that will probably do the wielder serious damage, if he is not first put through careful training in its handling-which ? Whether this famous saying is of Hermetic origin or no, we will not stay formally to inquire. In essence it is probably as old as human thought itself; and, as probably, the idea lying underneath it has been turned topsy-turvy more frequently than any other of the immortal company. (*Copt. Text omitted) Page 2 'As above, so below' doubtless enshrines some vast notion of analogical law, some basis of true reason, which would sum up the manifold appearances of things into one single verity. But. the understanding of the nature of this mystery of manifoldness from the one-all one and one in all-is not to be attained by careless thinking, or by some lucky guess, or by the pastime of artificial correspondencing. Indeed-if the truth must out-in ninety-nine cases of a hundred, when one uses 'as above, so below' to clinch an argument, we find that we have begged the question from the start, ended where we began, and asserted the opposite of our logos. Instead of illumining, not only the subject we have in hand, but all subjects, by a grasp of the eternal verity concealed within our saying, we have reversed it into the ephemeral and false proposition: 'As below, so above.' Deus, inversus, est Demon; and there's the devil to pay. Yes, even along our most modern lines of thought, even in propositions and principles that are every day coming more and more into / Page 3 / favour in the domain of practical philosophising, we find our ageless aphorism stood upon its head with scantiest ceremony. In the newest theology, in the latest philosophy, we find a strong tendency to revive the ancient idea that man is the measure of the universewhether we call this opinion pragmatism or by any other name that sounds more sweetly. ' As below,' then, 'so above.' In fact we do not seem to be able to get away from this inversion. We like it thus turned upside down. And I am not altogether sure that it is not an excellent exercise thus to anthropomorphise the universe, if only to fling the shadow of our best within on to the infinite screen of the appearance of things without. For is not man kin really with all these-worlds, systems, elements, and spaces and infinitudes, times and eternities? But this way of looking at the thing does not as a rule' intrigue' the beginner in mystic speculation; it is all more naive. Fascinated with some little known fact of the below, marvelling at some striking incident that has come under his notice-striking, fascinating for him, of course-he usually puts a weight upon it that it cannot bear, exaggerates a particular into a universal, and, with a desperate plunge of joy, imagines that he has finally arrived at truth / Page 4 / -taking his topsy-turvy' as below' for the eternal' as above.' He has not the faintest notion that, had he truly reached to that 'above,' he would know not only the solitary 'below' that has come dazzlingly into his cosmos, but every other' below' of the same class. But again from this height of ' philosophising,' let us come down to mystic commonplace. Of things physical we have certain definite knowledge, summed up in the accurate measurements and observations, and by the general mechanical art, of modern science. Beyond this domain there is for mechanical science x simply; for the 'seeing' mystic, however, there is not a simple x, but an indefinite series of phases of subtler and subtler sensations. Now, as every intelligent reader knows, it is just the nature of these extra-normal impressions that is beginning to be critically investigated, on the lines of the impersonal method so justly belauded by all scientific workers. In this domain, of such intense interest to all beginners, how shall we say our 'as above' applies? And here let us start at the beginning; that is to say, the first discrete degree beyond the physical-the psychic or so-called , astral.' What constitutes this a discrete degree? Is it / Page 5 / in reality a discrete degree? And by discrete I mean, is it discontinuous with the physical; that is to say, is there some fundamental difference of kind between the two ?-' East is east, and West is west'; Psychic is psychic, and Physical is physical. But how? Sensationally only, or is it also logically to be distinguished; is there a fundamental law of difference between them? The first difficulty that confronts us is this: That, however keen a man's subtler senses may be, no matter how keenly' clear-seeing' he may have become, he seems unable to convey his own immediate experience cleanly to a second person, unless, perhaps, that second person can' see' with the first. Try how he may, he is apparently compelled to fall back on physical terms in which to explain. Indeed, it is highly probable that all that has been written on the' psychic,' has produced no other impression on non-psychic readers than that it is a subtler phase of the physical. And this, presumably, because the very seer himself in explaining the impressions he registers, to himself, that is, to his physical consciousness, has to translate them into the only forms that consciousness can supply, namely physical forms. Page 6 Indeed, there seems to be a gulf fixed between psychic and physical, so that those direct impressions which would pass thence to us, cannot. In other words, they cannot, in the very nature of things, come naked into this world; they must be clothed. Now if this is true, if this is an unavoidable fact in the constitution of things, then the very nature of the psychic is removed from the nature of the physical by an unbridgeable gulf. 'East is east, and West is west.' But is it really true ? Is it only that, so far, no one is known who can bridge the gulf perfectly? Or supposing even that there be those who can so bridge it; is it that they are unable to make their knowledge known to others, simply because these others cannot bridge the gulf in their own personal consciousness, and therefore cannot follow the continuum of their more developed brethren? Page 7 How, again, we ask, does psychic fundamentally differ from physical? Can we in this derive any satisfaction from speculations concerning the so-called' fourth dimension' of matter? This is a subject of immense difficulty, and I do not here propose to enter into anything but its outermost court. All that I desire to note, for the present, is that all analogies between an imagined' flatland' and our three-dimensional space, and between the latter and the supposed fourth-dimensional state, are based upon the most flagrant petitio principii:. It is a case of , As below, so above,' with a vengeance! 'Flatland '-space of two dimensions, plus the further gratuitous assumption of two-dimensional beings who have their living and their moving therein-is inconceivable as matter of any kind. A superficies is-an idea; it is not a thing of the sensible world. We conceive a superficies in our minds; it is a mental concept, it is not a sensible reality. We can't see it, or taste it, or hear it, or smell it, or touch it. Our two-dimensional beings are at best figments of the imagination. They are absolutely inconceivable in terms of space as entities; they can't move, they can't be sensible of one another. For in the abstract concept called a surface, there can be no position from the standpoint of itself / Page 8 / and things like it, but only from the standpoint of a consciousness outside it. Even the most primitive sense of touch would be non-existent for our' flatlanders,' for there would be nothing to touch. And so on, and so forth. Therefore, to imagine how three-dimensional things would appear to the consciousness of a 'flatlander,' and from this, by analogy, to try to construct four-dimensional things from a series of three-dimensional phenomena, is, apparently, a very vicious circle indeed. We can't get at it that way. We have to seek another way, a very different' other way,' apparently, by means of which we may get out of three dimensions into-what? Into-two, either way or every way? Who knows? Any way, the later Platonic School, curiously enough, called the' psychic' the' plane' -that is, the two-dimensional and not the fourdimensional, according to one of the so-called Chaldaean Oracles: "Do not soil the spirit nor turn the plane into the solid." The' spirit' corresponds to what we have been calling the , psychic' in its lower phase, and the' plane' to the' psychic' in its higher. Higher than this were the' lines' and' points,' which pertained to the region of mind-formal and formless. What, then, again we ask, is the psychic proper as compared with the physical? How do things appear on the psychic proper? For so far, in the very nature of things, whenever we talk' down here' of the psychic we have to talk of it in terms of the physical. In what, then, to use a famous term of ancient philosophising, consists its' otherness' ? Is' otherness' in this to be thought of as distinguished simply by a gulf in matter, a gap ?-this seems to be absurd; for" nature does not leap," she also" abhors a vacuum. Here then we are confronted with the other side of the shield, with the unavoidable intuition that there is a continuum in matter from grossest to subtlest; and we may speculate that if a human entity were to progress through this series of grades of matter in space, he would have successively to leave his various' vehicles,' molecular, atomic, inter-atomic, etc.-in states of ever greater tenuity-while, as in the case of John Brown, his soul would" go marching on," until it arrived at the last limit-whenever or / Page 10 / wherever that may be, in a universe that ever at every point enters into itself! All things, then, would appear to be solidified down here by the" sky's being rolled up carpetwise," to paraphrase the Upanishad. For the , sky' is here the' ether' -the one substance, the simplicity of things. The' above' is thus , involved' into the' below'; and if we could only follow the process, perchance we should then be able really to understand something of the truth underlying our aphorism. As a matter of fact, this continuum of matter is the ground on which all scientific thinking is based; perpetual and continuous transformation but no sudden leaps-orderly evolution, no miraculous or uncaused spontaneous surpnses. This seems immediately to follow from the major premise of a continuum of this nature; and many people believe it is so, and base themselves upon it as on a sure foundation of fact. But, somehow or other, I am by no means satisfied that this will be the case. Is our salvation to be dependent upon machines; are we to become dei ex machinis ? But what has all this to do with' As above, so below'? Why, this: If tbe sensible world rises by stages (and descends by stages, too, for that matter) from this gross state familiar to us by our normal senses, through ever finer and finer grades of matter, we finally reach-ay, there's the rub; what do we reach? Where do we start? The truth of the matter is-be it whispered lowly-you can't think it out in terms of matter. But take the' ever so thin' idea for the moment, as sufficiently indefinite for any mystic who is not a metaphysician, using the latter term in / Page 12 / the old, old way, where physis included all nature, that is, natura, the field of becoming. As above, so below'-how many stages above ? Let us say seven, if it is so desired. The' above' as compared with the' below' wiJl then be very nebulous indeed, a sort of innermost' primitive ground' of some at present inconceivable mode and fashion. There may be 'correspondence,' but that correspondence must be traced through numerous orders of matter, where the very next succeeding order to the physical already acts as force, or energy, to the matter which falls beneath our normal senses. Here we are again, at the very outset, face to face with the' psychic' or 'astral' x-which, compared with the physical, should be regarded as a 'system of forces' rather than as a mould of the same fashion and form as the physical. And if this view is, at any rate, one stage nearer the reality than the interpretation of the psychic by purely physical imagery and symbolism-what can possibly be the nature of our No. 7, or No. 1, 'primitive ground' stage; when already at the first remove we exhaust all our possibilities of description? For we certainly do not get much' forrarder' by simply flinging the forms and pictures of the physical, as it were, on to a series of mirrors / Page 13 / which differ from one another only in their tenuity. At any rate, it appears so to the reflecting mind; though at the same time it seems quite as natural that the impressions of the subtler senses should be clothed in physical forms when reflected in physical consciousness. Let it be understood once for all, that I have not the slightest pretension in any way to decide between these apparent contradictions of sense and reason; indeed, I personally believe it to be unseemly and disastrous to attempt to separate the eternal spouses of this sacred marriage. In most intimate union must they ever be together, to give birth to the true Man-who is also their common source. Still it is of advantage continuously to keep before our minds the question: What is a prototype; what is a paradigm; what a logosa reason; what an idea? What, for instance, to use Platonic terms, is the autozoon, the animal itself, or that which gives life to itself, as compared with all animals; what the ever the , same,' as compared with all the' others' ? The intuition of things that underlay the philosophising of the Western world at its birth in conscious reasoning, from the time of Pythogoras onwards, gives us preliminary help, it is true, in thus setting the noumenal or ideal over against the sensible or phenomenal-the / Page 14 / mind over against the soul. But the characteristic of union is that it 'sees,' not another, but itself, and knows it ever' sees' itself. This is the' Plain of Truth,' where ever are the true paradigms, and ideas, and reasons of all things; and when we say' where' we do not mean place or space; for it is the everlasting causation of these, and is not conditioned by them, but self-conditions itself. It would take too long further to pursue this high theme in the present adventure. One thing alone I have desired to call attention to: the careless translation of living ideas into rigid notions, the danger of falling too readily into that higher materialism that Stallo calls the' reification' of concepts. For when you have' reified' your hypothesis - be it gravity, or atomicity, or vibration-and reduced it to a rigid notion, a definite objective something for you, you have still got only the shadow and not the substance; the appearance, the phenomenon, and not the underlying truth, the noumenon. But to conclude; that' sight' which reveals to man the' reasons' of things, is surely a more divine possession than that' sight' which sees the sensible forms of things only, no matter how exquisitely beautiful and grandiose such forms may be. And when I say' sees' the' reasons' of things, / Page 15 / do I mean the intellectual grasping of some single explanation, some formula, some abstraction ~ By no means; I mean by' reason' logos in its most vital sense. I mean that when we 'see' the' reasons' of things, we see our' selves' in all things; for our real selves are the true ground of our being, the that in us which constitutes us 'sons of God '-logoi, as He. is Logos, kin to Him. 'As above, so below.' What, , above' where there is no place, no dimension, and no time? But even so, is the' above' superior to the , below '? Ah, that is where the mind breaks down, unable to grasp it. Is Eternity greater than Time ~ Is the Same mightier than the Other? Are we not still in the region of the opposites; neither of which can exist without the other, and each of which is co-equal with the other? \Ve are still in the region of words-words simply in this case, not living reasons; though the same term does duty for both in Greeklogos; showing yet once again that in verity Demon est Deus inversus. As Thou art above, so art Thou below; as Thou art in Thyself, so art Thou in Man; as Thyself is in Thee, so is Thy Man in Thyselfnow and for ever.
WORDS SWORD SWORD WORDS WORDS SWEAR OR DIE
SOME MYSTICAL ADVENTURES G. R. S . Mead 1910 AS ABOVE, SO BELOW. "Heaven above, heaven below; stars above, stars below; all that is above thus also below." *-Kircher, Prodrom. copt. pp. 193 and 275 Page 75 "He is for ever crucified upon the cross of the eternal opposites; and the passion of passions for man is the mystery of the creative energy which ever seeks to realise itself in the union of complementary natures."
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN Thomas Mann 1875 - 1955 Page 466 "Had not the normal, since time was, lived on the achievements of the abnormal? Men consciously and voluntarily descended into disease and madness, in search of knowledge which, acquired by fanaticism, would lead back to health; after the possession and use of it had ceased to be conditioned by that heroic and abnormal act of sacrifice. That was the true death on the cross, the true Atonement."
SOME MYSTICAL ADVENTURES G. R. S . Mead 1910 AS ABOVE, SO BELOW. "Heaven above, heaven below; stars above, stars below; all that is above thus also below." *-Kircher, Prodrom. copt. pp. 193 and 275 Page 17 II HERESY "After the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers."-PAUL, in Acts xxiv. 14. PAUL was a heretic, Jesus was a heretic, Socrates was a heretic, the Buddha was a heretic. Indeed we might continue the list with most of the greatest names in history, and certainly with the names of all the founders of religions, philosophies and sciences. It is an instructive spectacle to see how every effort to make men think, and to render them more self-conscious, has been resisted with outcry, contumely and bitterness. The resistance to the new impulse is invariably begotten of devotion to that which in its day was new; for the heresy of to-day frequently becomes the orthodoxy of to-morrow. It is the swing of the pendulum. The pioneers of the world have invariably been considered heretics, for they are ever those who seek to shake themselves free from the inertia of the established order of things; they / Page 18 / labour in the pains of a new birth, striving to free themselves from the womb of convention, to come forth regenerate into the sunlight of self-conscious realisation. The lover of wisdom is thus a natural heretic for the orthodox of the moment, and his views and beliefs must naturally be considered by the lovers of things-as-they-seem-to-be as disruptive of their most cherished convictions. But is the lover of wisdom simply a heretic, in the ordinary sense of the word, when judged by an experience that looks beyond the conventional standards of the moment, both as to heresy and orthodoxy? I think not. He is a heretic in a far more extended sense. So heretical, indeed, that he may in many things be more orthodox than the orthodox; he looks beyond conventional orthodoxy and heresy towards a reconciliation of contraries, in the state of understanding that can appreciate all views at their just value. This at any rate is the ideal of such a lover; though undoubtedly many who think they are such lovers, are still content to remain in the inertia of a new convention, after they have freed themselves from the inertia of the generally accepted conventions of their day. It is of course heretical in the Western world of to-day to believe in the doctrines of karma and reincarnation; equally so is it considered / Page 19 / heretical, by many new believers in these doctrines, to hold to the dogmas of vicarious atonement and the immediate creation of the soul at birth. And yet the doctrine of vicarious atonement cannot be altogether foreign to the root-idea that lies at the back of the Mahayana Buddhist faith, for example, which, while basing itself on the doctrines of karma and reincarnation, at the same time teaches the renunciation of Nirvana, and the remaining on earth to save humanity. There is induhitably a measure of vicariousness in this doctrine; otherwise, if men have entirely to save themselves, there would be no meaning in preaching such an ideal. Again, the doctrine of Southern Buddhism with regard to the unreality of the soul is practically the same, in some of its forms, as the belief in the creation of a new soul at birth. For if the true Path of Wisdom lies precisely in the midst of all contraries, and the traveller on this Way is he who delights in the sport of magical transformation, whereby" the right becomes the left, and the left the right, the above the below, and the below the above, and the male with the female neither male nor female," as one of the old wisdom-sayings has it, then surely he will find, even in the most contradictory doctrines, some common elements that can become, as it were, the solvent which shall eventually transmute the two into a living unity. For Wisdom is that which includes all contraries. To me it has been one of the greatest joys of such study, that the more I have learned of the nature of the Gnosis, or by whatever other name we may choose to call the Wisdom that transcends normal knowledge, the more I have realised that no doctrine that has ever held the minds and hearts of men, is without some measure of ensouling truth. I have found that many a doctrine which, at first, I rejected as manifestly absurd, was seemingly so only because I had not learned to look at it with the right focus; I had paid more / Page 21 / attention to what foolish people had said about it, than to what the wise had said, and had not let the doctrine speak for itself in the court of uncommon pleas. For example, the dogma of creation out of nothing used to distress me, until I came across a pleader in that court of universal justice-old Basilides, who spoke wisely about the creation of the things-that-are from the things-that-are-not, so that I could link up the idea with the Sat and Asat of the Upanishads, and find contentment in the thought. Of course I do not for one moment pretend that anyone else must be satisfied with what Basilides says. It was he, however, who showed me the way out, although the orthodox call him a desperate heretic and overwhelm him with abuse. And so perhaps he may help some others, who prefer even a one-eyed gnosis to a blind faith, and who believe it is not a sin to use their intellect (as far at any rate as it will go) for fear of becoming unpopular with those who, in the pride of not-knowing, shout Credo quia absurdum on all occasions. Many of my readers must be familiar with the tyranny of a Church whose stereotyped answer to every questioning of its authority is: This is the pride of the intellect, my son, the most subtle of all sins. The virtue of humility, the / Page 22 / greatest of the virtues, is what you lack. It is in vain you protest your humility, when it is just this pride of intellect which makes you refuse now, at this moment, to submit yourself to the Church's authority. What this type of mind can never see, is that there is a right and wrong use of pride, and a wrong and right use of humility. Pride and humility are one of another, and the pride of humility is as much pride as any other form of that passion. The humble use of pride in God's good gift of reason is more truly worship of Him than a debasing of oneself before the tyranny of self-interest, that arrogates to itself the dominion over the souls of men. It is this jealous spirit of monopoly in God's good things that has given birth to all the horrors of religious persecution. Men are not ashamed to pray to their God to deliver them from all infidels and heretics as anathema. And times without number they have taken care to make this prayer come true by fire and sword and rack. And the irony of it all is that those nearest to them in faith, are invariably regarded as the most damnable. It is, indeed, a remarkable thing that when differences arise among those who have previously been most closely united in religious faith and aspiration, then is the hostility most bitter and / Page 23 / relentless. We see it on all sides. What is the reason of this great bitterness? May it not be, in some measure, that those who have been so closely associated in religious thinge, who have so intensely and blindly believed that theirs was the only way, theirs the one means of salvation for all men, who are convinced that there should be one Church, and that their own, are enraged beyond measure at the shattering of their hopes by the dissent of their brethren, and believe that it is their late comrades who are solely responsible for the outrage they have suffered, instead of recognising that they have throughout been living in a fool's paradise, and that their late associates deserve their deepest thanks for bringing them to their senses? There can never be uniformity of belief so long as man remains as he is; and God forbid that humanity should ever become a mechanical will-less organism! The end of man is not that he should be made in one mould; the destiny of the nations is not that the ideal of a grim industrial age should be realised, and so an engine be evolved which shall turn out a host of like products of monotonous similarity. The end of man is knowledge of man preparatory to union with God. God is not only one but many, single and manifold; and the / Page 24 / knowledge of this manifoldness is as necessary to true Gnosis as is the knowledge of unity. Gnosis is the knowing of these two as the necessary complements each of the other; and the proper gnostic meditation is the holding of both in mind at once, in a balanced contemplation, which will afford the right conditions for the truth to come to birth, in a fruitful conception of practical wisdom, that can find expression in all moods and modes of thought and action. It is of course impossible to prevent the believers in one set of exclusive doctrines regarding the lover of this wisdom as a heretic; but it should be possible for such lovers to be on their guard against falling into this naIve duality, and selecting a set of dogmas as orthodox, when the sole heresy for' those in Gnosis' should be the ceasing from the effort to reconcile even the most appalling contradictions. For surely one of our most cherished hopes is that one day we may be initiated into the final truth, and learn how God and Devil are two sides of one Ineffable Mystery, which indeed even now, in our ignorance, we are forced to believe, in spite of our inability to raise the veil, and in spite of the danger we all recognise in preaching such a doctrine to those unprepared morally and spiritually. If I am not entirely mistaken, it is precisely / Page
25 /
because the stereotyping of one particular form of faith is considered no longer to be desirable, that the spirit of the new age is endeavouring above all things to bring us face to face with contradiction on contradiction, to give us no pause and no peace, so that when we have thought at last we were safe in one position, established for ever in some great formula, we are suddenly shaken out of our inertia by the potent energy of some new idea that is forced upon our notice. 'What, then, can heresy and orthodoxy, in their ordinary connotations, mean to us, when it should be our joy to embrace them both and transcend them It will of course be objected by the many that a plain man wants a plain doctrine, and that this reconciliation of contraries is a juggler's business. Page 26 Well, we are not objecting to plain doctrines for plain folk; they are laid down with admirable precision in all the great religions, and we would no more think of doing away with them than of abolishing the police regulations. They are the bye-laws of the ethical code of the higher polity, and teach men to be good citizens of the world; but there is a still higher code of fundamental laws of wisdom, and one of them is precisely this reconciliation of the contraries. It is not a juggler's business, but Divine Magic, the Great Art of Wisdom, that transmutes evil into good, and transforms the impossible into the Great Potency wherewith the Divine perpetually energises. In the freer life of the Spirit we are for ever outbreathing some old heresy and inbreathing some new orthodoxy, and outbreathing some old orthodoxy and inbreathing some new heresy; it is the greater life of the Spirit, whereby we grow in wisdom. But if we would practise this true science of breath, the pranayama of Gnosis, we must hold our mental breath in balance, so that the great change of gnostic tendency may be effected, that from life we may pass to light, from the vitalisation of the mind to the illumination of the life. Page 27 Our minds are, at present, for the most part fixed; they are crystallised and formalised, and most rigidly so in the forms of our religious and scientific and philosophic beliefs. These masculine forms must be dissolved by the heat of the love of the feminine formless mind. Concentration must merge into contemplation, before the true re-formation, the' enformation according to Gnosis,' can be effected, and the crystals of the formal intellect be transmuted into the living essences of pure intelligence. How often has one paused amazed at the terror and hate of heresy displayed by the orthodox, and puzzled over the question: Why are they so terrified; why do they hate so bitterly? All the more so when it is found that the object of their detestation, not infrequently, proves on acquaintance excellent food for thought. This seems to differ little fundamentally from the commercial instinct that finds expression in Trusts. They fear for their monopoly, their trade-prospects, their combine. For naturally one would be foolish to fear for the Truth-that, at any rate, may be trusted to look after itself. But, it may be said that they fear for the souls of their fellows, lest they be led into error and so perish everlastingly. But have they not in this simply created a Moloch of their own / Page 28 / imagination, and would make all but their fellowslaves pass through the fire lighted by their inhumanity, in sacrifice to the black shadow of themselves which they worship as God? For the true lover of Wisdom there is no fear, but only joy in the unshakable belief that every questioning of opinion can end eventually only in the clearer shining forth of the Sun of Truth. His orthodoxy is to rejoice in heresy, and his heresy is to substitute any of the orthodoxies of the world for the Living Truth."
SOME MYSTICAL ADVENTURES G. R. S . Mead 1910 Page 29 III THE ELASTICITY OF A PERMANENT BODY "PERHAPS it may be thought that I propose, in this adventure, to treat of some recondite problem of physics; but that is not my intention. I propose briefly to consider the nature of the permanent element in a religious and international body. Many confuse the idea of body with notions of shape and form, but I would venture to suggest that form is of the mind while body is of substance. There is a doctrine that man is possessed of a 'permanent body,' the substantial ground, as it were, from which proceed and to which return the births and deaths of his impermanent appearances, the perennial root of his evolutionary becomings, and the storehouse of his diversified experiences. It is not asserted that this' body' is unconditionally everlasting, but rather that it is permanent in the sense of lasting as long as But this is apotheosis, the transcending of the man-state of separate existence, and the entering into the Communion of Those-that-are; that is to say, the energising in the Everlasting Body of all things. The' permanent body,' then, is not the Everlasting Body, but the age-long substantial limit of the separated man-consciousness. How long this reon of substantial limit lasts, depends on the nature of the man's activities; nevertheless this , body' must in any case be considered as permanent, when contrasted with the length of days of the bodies of incarnation which a man uses in his many lives on earth, or in the' three worlds.' When, however, we come to consider the meaning of 'body' in this connection, we should / Page 31 / be careful to keep our ideas concerning it as fluid as possible. We are here on the very borderland of individuality, and it depends entirely on the nature of the activities of the man whether, or no, the substance of this' body' shall be so condensed and crassified as to form , sheaths' to veil and dim the consciousness of the Self, or so wisely enformed and woven into such fine textures that it can supply' vestures ' of glory and radiance for the manifestation of the greater mysteries. The nature of this' body' changes completely, according as the desire of the man is set to 'go forth,' or the will of the man is fixed to 'return.' \Ve therefore find it described in the ancient books under quite contradictory epithets, such as ignorance and bliss; for it is on the borderland between the particular and the general, the individual and the cosmic. It is indeed one of the most difficult concepts for us to understand; for if we understood it really, we should have solved the riddle of what is called in Indian philosophy maya (illusion), and avidya (nescience ), and karana, that is to say' causal,' in the sense of its being the cause of our continuing to proceed forth into duality, and therefore the root of ignorance and the source of illusion. Nevertheless at the same time it is also the vehicle of our return to reality, / Page 32 / and our means of contact with unity; as such it is the complement of knowledge, and the spouse of the Divine energising. It is, therefore, evident that if we call it 'body,' we shall be doing less violence to the meaning of its actual nature, by qualifying it with the contradictory epithet' spiritual,' than by leaving it unqualified, to the danger of its being confused with notions of physical bodies. I should prefer to call it substance rather than matter, vehicle rather than body. The legitimate lord of this living nature is Atman or Spirit, the Self; this pure substance is corrupted by the misdeeds of men. When, therefore, we come to consider a body of individuals, we must be very careful not to beg the question, by assumming that we are dealing with a problem of a like nature to that of an individual human being. We are here face to face with the idea of a group, and should rather seek analogies in whatever notions we / Page 33 / may have, as to the nature of that far more difficult concept which is sometimes called the ' group-soul,' or ' group-spirit.' This idea connotes something that is other than the individual. The term is generally applied to animals, and not infrequently, without more ado, we conclude that the human individual is vastly superior, and in our conceit thank God that we have got beyond that stage. But this is a short-sighted view, based upon the comparison of a single man with a single animaL The group-soul idea, I would venture to think, is connected with far wider conceptions. In the first place, it is connected with the tradition of the' sacred animals,' which all but a few in the West have relegated to the limbo of exploded superstitions. The' sacred animals' are said to be 'lords of types,' of whom the mass of animals of that type are, as it were, the corpuscles of their body. These' corpuscles' are ever coming and going, ever being born and dying; but so long as that' type' is manifested, there is a permanent vehicle for it even on the physical plane. These' lords of types,' it is said, are great intelligences of the Master-mind; they are the truly' sacred animals,' types of intelligence as well as orderers of modes of life. Now what obtains among the animals, we may well believe, is not in principle confined to / Page 34 / them alone; it is rather a showing forth, in modes and forms that man can distinguish plainly in the external world, of the mysteries of his own greater nature. As there are forms and modes without, so tbere are forms and modes within; and within our own kingdom there is, I would venture to suggest, a precise analogy with the animal groupsoul and the lords of its types. Families, clans, and peoples, are all, according to types, conditioned by super-human intelligences, and representative of the' permanent bodies' of such greater beings. Here the bond is blood; and blood is, I venture to think, more potent than mind, using the term mind here as indicative of mind in individual man. When, however, we come to consider a religious body, we are confronted with a still more difficult problem; and, therefore, whatever suggestions one ventures to put forward, must be advanced with all reserve. I can well believe that the real work of such a body may be the evolution of a conscious instrument, or permanent ground, for the incarnation or manifestation of a Great Soul; that is to say, that while at the same time it affords the conditions for its individual members to perfect themselves, it should also have a common object that no individual in it can achieve by him / Page 35 / self, and that this object should be the endeavour to realise consciously a corporate common life, by means of which the power, wisdom and love of a Great Soul may manifest itself to the world. Page 35 This, I believe, is also a question of' blood,' for 'the blood is the life.' But this blood will be the Blood of those who are' of the Race of Him.' There is much talk of a 'new race,' and some people are looking for a new type of race on the lines of the old separated nations and peoples but I would fain believe that the' new race' will, as it has ever been prophesied concerning it, be of every nation under heaven, as far as its physical bodies are concerned. This has been attempted before; nations and communities of religionists have boasted themselves to be the people, are doing so to-day. This exclusiveness should be avoided, if we would live according to reality and grow in wisdom. Performance, and not the making of claims, should be our business, if we would attain to gnosis. The Spirit that we desire to see incarnate is, I believe, not the spirit of the individual, but a Spirit that subordinates individuality to the good of the whole. Many are endeavouring after this ideal in manifold instinctive ways.
Some, again, have / Page36 /
the ambition consciously to set about this great work, and knowingly to be about this holy business; they long to come into conscious contact with a Great Soul of the order of Him who uses the whole body of humanity as His Body, and knows that all types of bodies and souls and minds are necessary for the purpose of the expression of His Life. Page 37 Temperature, in the case of living beings, applies especially to the blood; and temperature, when thought of in connection with the deeper meaning we have ventured to give to the idea of blood, in an organism bound together for a spiritual purpose, is rather temperament.
SOME MYSTICAL ADVENTURES G. R. S . Mead 1910 XVI. MYSTIC REALITY Page 221 "
IN the modern Western world in general, and perhaps nowhere more so than in England, there exists an innate prejudice against all that savours of the mystic life. Not only among the people, but also among those who set the thought - fashion of the day, the mystic is viewed with suspicion when not treated with contempt. Page 224 It is not proposed, in this short adventure, to inquire into the noumenal nature of theoretical reality as a truth abstracted from the changing phenomena of practical reality, but rather to insist that there is in essence and fact only one Truth, of which the theoretical and practical, or rather the theoric and pragmatic, realities, noumenal and phenomenal energies, are the simultaneous in-breath and out-breath of its instantaneous life. From the point of view, then, of this mystic reality, or let us say of the man who is attempting perpetually to initiate himself into the gnosis of self-realisation, what meanings should be given to the theoretical and practical ? In the first place it would seem that, above all else, he should strive to value them equally, and so keep them in himself in perfect balance and poise, for his goal is the Birth of the Justified, the Birth of Horus. The theoretical, or contemplative, for him is the mode of his nature in which he conceives the living ideas of Truth, and the practical is the giving birth to these ideas in the actual. To know Truth, he must live Truth. To live Truth his thoughts, words and deeds must match; so alone can / Page
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Truth for him become instantaneous and immediate. There is then a straight path in himself from within without, and the without instantly becomes the within for him; reality is actualised as one and not as twain, as self and not as other, and Truth is all in all. If the present' practical' of science very readily lends itself to subserving the selfish interests of man, this should not be a matter of much surprise. For whenever a great impulse starts in humanity, the first manifestations of it naturally disclose what appears to be the wrong side of things, or the topsyturvydom of it. It is the manure which enriches the soil in which the true seed is sprouting. Is it not also the same in no few branches of science herself? Is not physical science not infrequently made the handmaid of the false practical in the sense of commercial? The sympathies of the mystic and idealist must be all on the side of the famous discoverer of one of the rare elements, who when the ubiquitous and earth-bound interviewer asked him what was the practical application of his discovery, what was its value for commercial purposes, replied: No use whatever, thank God!
SOME MYSTICAL ADVENTURES G. R. S . Mead 1910 ON THE WAY OF THE PATH. Page 216 "More wise is the advice which is given in that / Page 217 / excellent little treatise known as Light on the Path, when it says: " Seek out the way. This is balanced advice, the way of the life of the spirit, which lives in the union of the inbreath and out-breath; indeed in the mode of the spirit the in-breath and out-breath are not consecutive but simultaneous. This admirable little book tells of the nature of the way with true insight; and there must be few who cannot see that such instruction completely rebuts the charge of unpracticality that has so often been brought against the mystic way; for it shows that its pursuit is the most immediate, intense, wakeful, agile, living thing in the world. Spontaneous intensification of awareness, instantaneous operation, immediate comprehension, perpetual agility and adaptability,-these spiritual powers and many another of like nature can hardly be called unpractical; they are rather magical, and miraculous. It is therefore well said in The Voice of the
Silence: "Then in this way know (or think) God; as having all things in Himself as thoughts, the whole Cosmos itself. Page 219 "Become more lofty than all height, and lower than all depth. Collect into thyself all senses of all creatures,-of fire, and water, dry and moist. Think that thou art at the same time in every place,-in earth, in sea, in sky; not yet begotten, in the womb, young, old, and dead, in after-death conditions.
SOME MYSTICAL ADVENTURES G. R. S . Mead 1910 MYSTIC REALITY. Page 230 "To be free of form connotes the possibility of taking any form at will; to be free of change means that one is ever changing. True life is this power of freedom; to be stuck in one form of body, or feeling, or thought, to be incapable of change, is true death. That which is ever changing is that which is instantaneous in life, and therefore essentially superior to change; that which can take all forms is ever present in every moment of time, and alone is immortal. Page 218
REVELATIONC 21 V 1And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away;and there was no more sea.2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God. 4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. 5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. 6 And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely. 7 He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.
I THAT AM THE HE AS IN SHE THAT IS THEE
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