It is that by which we move from the phenomenal world of dualism, of conflict and decay, to the Real. This is what Melville was talking about. Moby Dick is not about whales and harpoons. It's about Life, about the Absolute, about bridging that gap. Unless the point is there, unless you have actually shaped and honed your point and applied it to the end of a harpoon, there can be no real movement from the phenomenal to the transcendent.
People go through twenty, thirty and forty years reading books about it.
They want it at some level, but they never galvanize their forces so that it can happen. You meet them years later and they're still talking about it, still ruminating, still reading the same books, still spinning round and round, not ever actually taking the plunge. Frank Crocitto is the director of the Discovery Institute, a school for self-development in the tradition of G.I.Gurdjieff based in New Paltz, New York.