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V From This Life Into That

Dean Inge, writing of the mystical experience, says,
"We did not feel as if our ordinary self was in communication
with the Divine Spirit, but rather as if the Divine Spirit
had for the time transformed our personality, raising it to
a higher state in which it could breathe a purer air than
that of earth, and see something of the invisible. All forms
of the mystical experience give the same impression of self-
transcendence..."

He speaks with caution, saying that we feel as if, that
an impression is given. Surely it befits us to be tentative
as regards the operations of the Divine Spirit. If, however,
we undergo a true major transformation there is more than a
sense of self-transcendence, more than a feeling that we have
been transformed. Such feelings often arise in minor trans-
formations. In a major changeover it actually occurs. We do
transcend the self. We are, for the time, newly born. We may
feel incredulous that such things can happen, but there it is,
clear-cut, a manifest reality.

I surmise that most of those who undergo radical changes
make no record of the experiences themselves. That such events
befell them must be inferred from other evidence. Of those
who seek to express such experiences in words, a goodly number
clothe them in poetry, novels, expositions. Dante, for example,
expressed his in his great poem (together with some matters
that certainly did not stem from his great experience). Blake

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and Walt Whitman expressed theirs in many poems. Dostoievsky wove his higher experiences here and there into his novels. Others, however, have written in the first person singular with the explicit intention of giving an unclothed report of what actually occurred to them. These undisguised records are of course the ones most readily recognized, and, in some ways, are the ones best adapted to quotation and comment. Though they may be inferior as literature, they tend to be more accurate as documents. You are sure that there are no deliberate additions or inventions. You know you have before you an honest attempt to give an accurate description of an experience had by the writer. There are in existence more of such documents than the person unacquainted with this field might suppose. The few I have selected are, with one exception, from among those written in our time.

Before looking at them it might be well to say a word about my attitude towards Christ and Buddha in this connection. They, I think, were beyond the kind of experiences we are considering. I regard them both as beings well advanced beyond the stage of needing to experience major transformations, as here defined. They had permanently transcended the self. In them a new creation was not only firmly established but largely if not completely developed. Theirs was a Being and a Consciousness as high above the human average as the human average is above that of plants. In a sense, they were not of our kind.

In growing from childhood to manhood, Jesus and Gautama doubtless underwent a series of major transformations. But,

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so far as we know, they made no record of these. The time
came when, once and for all, they arose and found themselves
permanently reborn. Neither is there record of this. Indeed
there is no explicit record at all of *their* experiences, as
told by them, nor of the world they centered in. From the
several gospels we may infer things about Christ's experiences;
but these are only our inferences. We do not know what went
on in him. I think that had Christ written, not only of what
he wanted to teach men, but of his own life and world, we would
have before us descriptions of a reality that the ordinary mind
is incapable of grasping.

Here I want to examine the experiences of men near to
us in stage of development, men pressing up towards a permanent
new creation. Men close to us in time also. Of the five to be
mentioned, four are our contemporaries, and four wrote undis-
guised reports.

George Fox wrote, "Now I was come up in spirit through
the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were
new; and all creation gave unto me another smell than before,
beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, and
innocency, and righteousness." This is an extremely shorthand
account, but there it is - the rise into what Fox in this in-
stance calls the paradise of God. In his "Journal" and other
writings there are more detailed reports of his experiences in
the ocean of light and love. Note how Fox says it happened.
"Now I was come up in spirit." In minor transformations the
spirit comes down to us. In major ones, we rise up and in to
spirit. Note too the reference to an unutterable newness.

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Minor transformations give us new feelings, new awareness; only a major one can place us in a whole world that is, to us, utterly new.

AE wrote, "The ways were open within. I rose through myself and suddenly felt as if I had awakened from a dream. Where was I?" Again note how it is said. The ways were open within. I rose through myself. There can be no doubt that AE and George Fox were referring to the same kind of experience - self-transcendence. That AE, like Fox, passed more than once from the ordinary self and its condition of exile into a larger life and more inclusive being, is certain. Reports of the several experiences are to be found here and there throughout his writings, particularly in "The Candle of Vision" and "Imaginations and Reveries".

Where was I? he asks. We too want to know something of the life in which he found himself after rising and awakening. Here are two indications:

> ...we hardly can tell where our own being ends and another begins, or if there is any end to our being.

> If they but light the candle on their forehead ... they will more and more be led by wonder and awe to believe that we and all things swim in an aether of deity, and that the least motion of our minds is incomprehensible except in memory of this: "In Him we live and move and have our being."

Thomas R. Kelly evidently wrote his wonderful book, "A Testament of Devotion", to convey the attitudes and practices whereby we may approach and enter "the Beyond that is within". He wanted to describe the entire frame of the dedicated life, not single out a few high experiences. Yet, from

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the very fact that he could write as he did, we may know that
he himself now and then did enter that Beyond, did live in
"a new dimension of life", did find himself on a "plateau of
glory". In fact, if we know what to look for, we will come
upon at least two passages that record what must have been
his own experience. Here is one of them:

It is an overwhelming experience to fall into
the hands of the living God, to be invaded to the
depths of one's being by His presence, to be, with-
out warning, wholly uprooted from all earth-born
securities and assurances, and to be blown by a
tempest of unbelievable power which leaves one's
old proud self utterly, utterly defenseless, until
one cries, "All thy waves and thy billows are gone
over me". Then is the soul swept into a Loving
Center of ineffable sweetness, where calm and un-
speakable peace and ravishing joy steal over one.
And one knows now why Pascal wrote, in the center
of his greatest moment, the single word, "Fire".
There stands the world of struggling, sinful,
earth-blinded men and nations, of plants and
animals and wheeling stars of heaven, all new,
all lapped in the tender, persuading Love at the
Center. There stand the saints of the ages, their
hearts open to view, and lo, their hearts are our
heart and their hearts are the heart of the Eternal
One. In awful solemnity the Holy One is over all
and in all, exquisitely loving, infinitely patient,
tenderly smiling. Marks of glory are upon all
things, and the marks are cruciform and blood-
stained. And one sighs, like the convinced Thomas
of old, "My Lord and my God". Dare one lift one's
eyes and look? Nay, whither can one look and not
see Him? For field and stream and teeming streets
are full of Him. Yet as Moses knew, no man can
look on God and live - live as his old self. Death
comes, blessed death, death of one's alienating will.

Elsewhere in the same book we find:

Is religion subjective? Nay, its soul is in
objectivity, in an Other whose Life is our true
life, whose Love is our love, whose Joy is our Joy,
whose Peace is our peace, whose burdens are our
burdens, whose Will is our will. Self is emptied
into God, and God in-fills it.

Again, it is like waking from sleep yet know-
ing, not by inference but by immediate awareness,

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that we have lived even while we were asleep.
For sole preoccupation with the world is sleep,
but immersion in Him is life.

The relation of each to all, through God,
is real, objective, existential. It is an eternal
relationship which is shared in by every stick and
stone and bird and beast and saint and sinner of
the universe.

Two people, three people, ten people may be
in living touch with one another through Him who
underlies their separate lives. This is an as-
tounding experience ... It is as if the boundaries
of our self were enlarged, as if we were within
them and as if they were within us.

The sense of Presence is as if two beings
were joined in one single configuration, and the
center of gravity is not in us but in that Other.
As two bodies, closely attached together and
whirling in the air, are predominantly determined
by the heavier body, so does the sense of Presence
carry with it a sense of our lives being in large
part guided, dynamically moved from beyond our
usual selves ... The energizing, dynamic center is
not in us but in the Divine Presence in which we share.

A vivid account of entering into that other life is
given by Paul Brunton towards the end of his book, "A Search
in Secret India". The experience to which he refers came
about as a result of conscious aim and effort, and he gives
an unusually detailed description of how it happened, the
stages through which he passed as he left the ordinary self
and world.

The power to think, which has hitherto been
a matter for merely ordinary pride, now becomes a
thing from which to escape, for I perceive with
startling clarity that I have been its unconscious
captive. There follows the sudden desire to stand
outside the intellect and just be. I want to dive
into a place deeper than thought. I want to know
what it will feel like to deliver myself from the
constant bondage of the brain, but to do so with
all attention awake and alert.

It is strange enough to be able to stand
aside and watch the very action of the brain as
though it were someone else's, and to see how
thoughts take their rise and then die, but it

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is stranger still to realize intuitively that one
is about to penetrate into the mysteries which
hide the innermost recesses of man's soul. I feel
like some Columbus about to land on an uncharted
continent. A perfectly controlled and subdued
anticipation quietly thrills me.

But how divorce oneself from the age-old
tyranny of thoughts? I remember that the Maha-
rishee has never suggested that I should attempt
to force stoppage of thinking. "Trace thought to
its place of origin" is his reiterated counsel,
"watch for the real self to reveal itself, and
then your thoughts will die down of their own ac-
cord". So, feeling that I have found the birth-
place of thinking, I let go of the powerfully
positive attitude which has brought my attention
to this point and surrender myself to complete
passivity, yet still keeping as intently watch-
ful as a snake of its prey.

This poised condition reigns until I dis-
cover the correctness of the sage's prophecy. The
waves of thought naturally begin to diminish. The
workings of logical sense drop towards zero point.
The strangest sensation I have experienced till
now grips me. Time seems to reel dizzily as the
antennae of my rapidly growing intuition begin to
reach out into the unknown. The reports of my
bodily senses are no longer heard, felt, remembered.
I know that at any moment I shall be standing out-
side things, on the very edge of the world's secret...

Finally it happens. Thought is extinguished
like a snuffed candle. The intellect withdraws
into its real ground, that is, consciousness work-
ing unhindered by thoughts. I perceive, what I
have suspected for some time and what the Maharishee
has confidently affirmed, that the mind takes its
rise in a transcendental source. The brain has
passed into a state of complete suspension, as it
does in deep sleep, yet there is not the slightest
loss of consciousness. I remain perfectly calm
and fully aware of who I am and what is occurring.
Yet my sense of awareness has been drawn out of
the narrow confines of the separate personality;
it has turned into something sublimely all-embracing.
Self still exists, but it is a changed, radiant self.
For something that is far superior to the unimportant
personality which was I, some deeper, diviner being
rises into consciousness and becomes me. With it
arrives an amazing new sense of absolute freedom,
for thought is like a loom-shuttle which is always
going to and fro, and to be freed from its tyrann-
ical motion is to step out of prison into the open
air.

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I find myself outside the rim of world con-
sciousness. The planet which has so far harboured
me, disappears. I am in the midst of an ocean of
blazing light. The latter, I feel rather than
think, is the primeval stuff out of which worlds
are created, the first state of matter. It stret-
ches away into untellable infinite space, incre-
dibly alive.

I touch, as in a flash, the meaning of this
mysterious universal drama which is being enacted
in space, and then return to the primal point of
my being. I, the new I, rest in the lap of holy
bliss. I have drunk the Platonic Cup of Lethe,
so that yesterday's bitter memories and to-morrow's
anxious cares have disappeared completely. I have
attained a divine liberty and an almost indescri-
bable felicity. My arms embrace all creation with
profound sympathy, for I understand in the deepest
possible way that to know all is not merely to
pardon all, but to love all. My heart is remoulded
in rapture.

How shall I record these experiences through
which I next pass..? Yet the starry truths which
I learn may be translated into the language of
earth, and the effort will not be a vain one. So
I seek, all too roughly, to bring back some memo-
rials of the wonderful archaic world which stretches
out, untracked and unpathed, behind the human mind.

Paul Brunton's experience came to him while he was
living in an ashram in Southern India, practicing a method
taught him by a holy man. How different were the outward
circumstances and the initial state of mind of Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry. As he tells us, he was piloting a fighter
plane on a scouting mission over enemy occupied territory
in France. In his "Flight to Arras" he describes what happened.

It was twilight over this part of France. For obser-
vation purposes he was flying low, at a suicidal altitude. A
few hundred feet above was a ceiling of heavy clouds. The
German ground batteries, some two thousand feet below, began
firing. The plane was hit and hit again, but kept flying.
The batteries that had missed, corrected their aim. They

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...in the instant when you are giving up your body, you learn to your amazement - all men always learn to their amazement - how little store you set by your body. It would be foolish to deny that during all those years of my life when nothing insistent was prompting me, when the meaning of my existence was not at stake, it was impossible for me to conceive that anything might be half so important as my body. But here in this plane I say to my body (in effect), "I don't care a button what becomes of you. I have been expelled out of you. There is no hope of your surviving this, and yet I lack for nothing. I reject all that I have been up to this very instant. For in the past it was not I who thought, not I who felt: it was you, my body. One way and another, I have dragged you through life to this point; and here I discover that you are of no importance.

"I have been expelled out of you." Recall Fox's "Now I was come up", and AE's "I rose through myself". So far, to be sure, Saint-Exupéry has told us only of what he left behind, not of what he entered. We have as yet no explicit evidence that he became another being and found himself in another life. But the stage is set. Withdraw from your body, as he did, and you must find yourself somewhere else. Realize that you are not your body, and you begin to sense who you really are. Saint-Exupéry says, "Your body belongs to you: it is not you. Your members? Tools." By this we may understand that he attained, for the time, the state defined by the Bhagavad-Gita in these words, "He knows himself other than the instrument." Know yourself other than the instrument and you are on the verge of knowing yourself as the principal.

Continuing his account, Saint-Exupéry says that the time came when it dawned upon him that he and his crew were going to win through. They seemed to be invulnerable. He was the captain of a winning team. "And from that moment each explosion seemed to me not to threaten us but to temper us."

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No longer did he live in expectation of death but in conviction of resurrection. The experience which began with detachment from the body advanced to the stage where -

> I lived in a sort of slipstream of joy, in the wake of my jubilation. A prodigiously unlooked-for pleasure was flowing through me. It was as if, with each second that passed, life was being granted me anew. As if with each second that passed my life became a thing more vivid to me. I was living. I was alive. I was still alive. I was the source of life itself. I was thrilled through with the intoxication of living. "The heat of battle" is a familiar phrase; the heat of living is a truer one. "I wonder," I said to myself, "if those Germans below who are firing at us know that they are creating life within us?"

Of course the Germans were not creating life in him.

They and their guns were but among the factors of a situation that had released the creative and transforming forces in the being named Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The statement of particular significance for us is, "I was the source of life itself". One must be taken into the source in order to identify with it so completely. It is true, of course, that not all who say and feel they are united with the center, actually are. We must examine the context, and look for supporting evidence. Also we should recognize that no statements on matters of this nature are one hundred percent exact: some err on the side of over-statement, others on the side of understatement. All things considered, I think we can be certain that Saint-Exupéry, already having realized that he is not his instrument, now realizes that he is the principal. In some measure he has become a source-man.

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Whoever transcends the separated self discovers the unitary life that underlies our separated lives. AE and Thomas Kelly made this discovery. So did Saint-Exupery. Having resurrected as man and being, he then extended into the life of men and beings. Particularly did he experience a profound inclusion in the life of his group, called Group 2-33, a new and deeper communion, a new right to participate and share. This aspect of the experience is described in some of the most moving and beautiful of his passages. He reports feeling, as never before, as he had never thought possible, a sense of one-ness, a plenitude of life, love, respect, a sense of the inner glow and dignity of human life, and a limitless responsibility.

Wisdom is born of such experiences - and Saint-Exupery, as his pages show, received his portion. "What we could offer up, we had sacrificed. And in that sacrifice we had learnt more about ourselves than we should have done after ten years in a monastery. We had come forth again after ten years in a monastery."

Something more tangible than wisdom is also born. Saint-Exupery makes no special point of this. What he has to say of a new creation comes out here and there in the midst of other matters which might seem to be of more importance. One must look to find. The following passage contains no more than a hint as to what the new birth, in his experience and terms, might be. "...there is a creature within me against whom I struggle in order that I may rise superior to myself. Except

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for that flight to Arras I should never have been able to
distinguish between that creature and the man I seek to be.
A metaphor comes into my mind. What it is worth, I do not
know, but here it is: the individual is a mere path. What
matters is Man, who takes that path."

In another passage, however - and this a memorable
one - his reference to a new creation is sufficiently explicit.

"That gun-fire over Arras", I said to myself.
It had cracked my stubborn shell, and I was released. Within that shell, I must have been setting my house in order the whole day through.
I had been the grumbling agent of an absentee landlord. I had been, in other words, an individual. And then Man had appeared. Very simply, he had taken the place of the individual within me. He had sent one look down upon that mob on the highway, and had seen in that mob a people.
His people. Man, the common denominator uniting me with that people. Because Man inhabited me I had flown homeward to the Group with the feeling that I was hurrying to a fire in a hearth. Because Man was looking at men through my eyes - Man, the common denominator of all comrades.

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VI Diagram

Diagrams have their advantages and disadvantages.
When we look at them everything seems so clear, so simple.
They over-simplify and make rigid, whereas in the reality
which they are supposed to represent there is complexity,
overlapping, and intermingling. But if we guard against
their limitations, diagrams can be real aids to understand-
ing. They depict and make graphic, as words alone cannot.
Though abstractions, they render the subject more definite.
There is need, I think, that certain psychological and reli-
gious ideas be presented and thought about with the help of
drawings and symbols. Among those I have worked out, the one
reproduced below has proved of special value with respect to
some of the ideas we have been considering. It helps us to
visualize the chief components of a human being and their re-
lations to one another.

- 63m-

We are supposed to be looking down at an outline of
the inner lineaments of a man. The man, so to speak, is in
an upright position. We, from above his head, are seeing
what is inside him.

The center, marked 1, represents the inner being. Per-
haps I should say at once that this center is the focal point,
in the given man, of that other life. It is what we have re-
ferred to as that other being, the real being. This real be-
ing has existed in some form ever since the man has. When it
arises and manifests, it is the new man, the new creation.

The shaded circular band immediately around the center
represents the barrier between the inner being and the outer
self. All of the space surrounding the barrier, marked 2,
represents the outer self. "I" is shown in its habitual loca-
tion, namely, in the outer person. The other markings need
not concern us for the present.

In picturing the inner being as much smaller than the
outer person, I do not mean to represent their actual relative
sizes, but merely to show the way we see them when we locate in
the outer person. So located, the inner being may even seem non-existent.

Under ordinary conditions, the inner being and the outer
person maintain their respective positions as shown in the dia-
gram. Under favorable conditions, however, something from the
center may move outwards into the outer self, as was mentioned
when considering minor transformations. Under exceptional con-
ditions, the essential ingredients of the outer self may move
into and be included in the center. This would be a major
transformation.

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"I" is a mysterious factor. How very mysterious is not realized until we attempt to understand it, to search out its characteristics and the part it plays. Usually we take it for granted. Usually we say "I", never stopping to wonder precisely what this "I" is. Strange and elusive though it is, certain facts come to light if we examine ourselves and our experience.

Observation of oneself discloses, for one thing, that "I" does habitually locate in the outer part of the human totality. Therefore it is this part and this alone, that ordinarily seems real. What is real to me depends upon where "I" locate. In other words, "I" seems to have the power to confer a sense of reality, and a sense of importance too, upon whatever part of a human being it inhabits.

Within the limits of the outer person, "I" can and does change location. What is meant here will become clear if we think of the outer self as composed of three parts ordinarily called the mind, the emotions, and the motor functions. "I" can and does move among these three. If I am thinking, "I" locates in the thinking functions. But suppose my emotions are suddenly aroused. "I" leaves the mind and rushes to the emotions. Or suppose that the mind slows down, the emotions subside, and the body becomes very active. "I" leaves wherever it was and goes to the motor functions. "I", in a word, travels. These peregrinations happen many times in the course of a day, though we are likely to be quite unaware of them. It would seem that a principle governs this "travelling". It may be

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formulated as follows: "I" tends to go to the scene of great-
est activity. If "I" is, as it were, passive, it goes where
it is drawn. But if, on the other hand, "I" is active, it can
go where it wills, can be the initiator of thinking, feeling,
moving. Reflection on these facts will disclose the strategic
importance of "I" as regards changing oneself, mastering one-
self, developing.

"I" travels, but as we must now emphasize, *within* the confines of the outer self. Ordinarily it does not travel into the inner being. If it moved as freely between outer and inner as it does around the outer, we would have as many experiences of our inner beings as we now have of our bodies, emotions, minds. Indeed if it so travelled there would be no separated outer and inner. We would be one and whole. What confines "I" to the outer self? What prevents it from moving into the center? The existence of an obstruction must be assumed. In other words, the fact that "I" does not readily pass into the real being is a certain indication that a barrier exists. Another thing we might say is that, under ordinary conditions, the outer self is so active, the inner being so passive, that the outer holds "I" in it by its greater activity, its greater power of attraction.

Exile is the condition arising when "I" is confined
within the limits of the separated self. If "I", then, somehow
breaks free of that confinement, or is drawn out of it, if, in
brief, the barrier temporarily ceases to exist, "I" enters the
condition of Being. "I" leaves the outer self and locates
somewhere in the center - in which case, the inner being becomes

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real to me, important to me, and the outer person ceases to
exist as such.

Ordinarily, however, the outer self not only exists,
but exists to us as the whole self, the only self. We are in
it and are so identified with it that we do not regard it as
the *outer* self. We say and feel, "This is me." Certain of our
psychological terms and religious expressions, not to mention
our views and values, are relative to and indeed are determined
by just this location and identification. Locating in the outer
self we call it the "conscious", while that which is behind or
below it is called the "unconscious" or "subconscious". Iden-
tifying with the outer self, we are likely to dismiss as a
fiction the idea that there is an inner being. Should some
manifestation of the inner being nevertheless come through to
us, we regard it as either unaccountable or alien. What we
want, work and hope for is limited to the desires of the outer
self, these being unquestionably accepted as "our very own",
and therefore to be gratified.

We are told that the kingdom of heaven is within. This,
for us, relative to our habitual location, is a true saying.
(In the diagram the kingdom would be represented by a point in
the very center of the center.) It is within. But if we were
within it, we would find it not only within, but without and
all around, traversing the universe.

Change location in yourself and your view changes. Some-
what detach from the outer self, and your views and values too
will change. Become entirely detached from the outer, wholly
attached to the center, and your very life will have changed

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radically. This is one reason why all the genuine religions
enjoin us, who are attached to the outer self, to practice de-
tachment, nonidentification.

In Chapters II and III we considered the matter of some-
thing of another life coming into this life, openings, minor
transformations. It may be well now to relate those ideas more
definitely to the diagram. That other life, as noted earlier,
is represented by the center, marked 1. Our habitual life is
represented by the part marked 2. The center represents the
source of the glow that sometimes illumines us, of the power
that sometimes empowers us, of our occasional awakenings.
When we receive these gifts from the center, it is almost as
though they were coming from another being, a very wonderful
being standing behind us. He comes into us. He invades us.
We remain located in the outer self, in our habitual life.
When and because this happens, inner and outer are somewhat
joined, and to this extent we are integrated and made whole.
But no matter how thorough the fusion may seem, it cannot be
complete if we remain located in the outer part of ourselves.
As long as we remain there, an outer and an inner will continue
to exist, each somewhat distinct and separate from the other.
No matter how wonderful the influx may be, we remain in exile
as long as we remain located in the outer. Ordinary life is
given a touch of the extra-ordinary, but it is not transformed
into the mainstream of that other life.

In Chapters IV and V we examined the possibility of
major transformations and new birth. Again referring to the

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diagram we can see what happens. The center becomes wonder-
fully active towards us, the barrier is temporarily swept away,
and the "I" is drawn from the outer to the inner. We are called
in. We are called up. "I" is literally transported, so that
it no longer locates in the outer but in the center. "Now I
was come up in spirit". "The ways were open within. I rose
through myself". Now we live and move and have our being in
the source, in our real beings, within the ocean of light and
love, in some measure in the kingdom. Man, as Saint-Exupéry
would say, has appeared, and we have become Man. Spirit, as
AE would say, has made its ancient claim on us, and we have
been included in it. This is the new creation.

When and because this occurs, the outer self, as already
mentioned, ceases to exist as such, and the inner being is no
longer regarded as inner because we are in it. There is, simply
but wonderfully, one whole being. We are completely made whole,
though not yet complete wholes. There is no "outer" as sepa-
rated from "inner", no "conscious" as split off from the "sub-
conscious". We are undivided - that is, individuals in the
real meaning of this term. There being no divisions within us
there are none between us and the rest of life. We are part of
all that exists, and we realize it. All that exists is part of
us. How represent this condition diagrammatically?

Instead of the center circle representing the inner being,
let it now represent the body-mind. Instead of the large sur-
rounding band representing the outer person, let it represent
the whole being. The barrier has gone. I am the entire figure -
and within me, as the smaller part, is the body-mind. I, as a

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being, am formed and established. Necessarily I realize that I am other than the instrument. Thus I am ready to use my body as an instrument for experience and expression in the world of beings with body-minds. Thus too my body is ready, as Gerald Heard once put it, to function as my expression and not as my limitation.

Now to look at the diagram as first interpreted and see what the other markings mean. The G and the B represent the "good" and "bad" sides of the outer self. By good I mean those factors and forces that have some kinship with the inner being and that, if activated, tend to promote the development of men as beings. By bad I mean those factors and forces that are contrary to the inner being and tend to hinder and arrest the development of men as beings.

These two sides revolve, as it were, around the axis of the center. Another way of expressing it is to say that they emerge and submerge. Sometimes the good side is dominant and to the fore, the bad side recessive, in the background. At other times the bad side is at the front, the good side eclipsed. Sometimes elements of both are to the fore at the same time, and we are torn between them, plunged into open conflict. People ordinarily have little or no control over these changes. Nine times out of ten we aren't even aware of them. Particularly does the change from good to bad take us unawares. Only in retrospect, if then, can we see what happened.

Ordinarily, we identify with whichever side is to the fore. When my good side is uppermost, I feel it to be me. This, within limits, is all right. But when my bad side is uppermost,

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I feel it to be me. And this is all wrong. For, if I take the bad side to be me, I take it to be good; and if I take it to be good, I have no desire to check or change it. This explains why so many people so often uncritically sanction their hates, prejudices, greeds, cruelties.

When the bad side sweeps up, it pushes the good side back. When the good side comes forward, it tends to push the bad side back. As a result, these two seldom meet squarely, face to face. Our left hand does not know what our right is doing. Yet, if the good is ever to come to real grips with the bad, it must face the bad. But we, in the usual course of events see neither side clearly. More often than not we are asleep at the switch. We may welcome sight of the good but shrink from sight of the bad. Thus our self-perceptions are partial, our self-knowledge rudimentary. Our part is to become conscious of both sides and to make them meet.

When the bad side is recessive, it does not dictate our outward behavior. We do not actively harm others - and this is good, though a negative good. Finding that, in this condition, our relations with others are more amicable, there is a tendency to repress the bad side. But is amicability our chief aim in living? If so, the practice of repression may somewhat serve us. If however, our aim is that of growing, developing, transforming, repression is not enough.

Certainly I do not underestimate the value of pleasant relations. With the world in its present condition, just ordinary friendliness is important. But the very situation that stresses its value also shows how precarious it is, how easily

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it may be destroyed by the eruption of the very things we have tried to repress. Repression doesn't work. This is one of the truths that should be impressed upon us by the volcanic state of man's society today. Repression alone is not enough to secure sociability, much less regeneration.

The bad side, though recessive, is still in us. It has not been overcome. Repression as a means of curbing, of course needs be employed. But more is to be done; and it is because human beings by and large have not attempted to do this more, that we continue to sit on dynamite. The evil that is in man, though latent, is still in him. It remains a constant threat to society. As for the individual, it remains a sizeable and all too weighty part of the outer self, holding us in that self, preventing us from transcending it. The mere fact that it is out of sight does not neutralize it. The fact that it is temporarily inactive towards others does not mean that it is inactive in us. Under the surface it continues its anti-being and anti-developmental operations. It acts as part of the barrier.

It follows, then, that if we are to promote our development as beings, we must endeavor to break up the bad side, actually reduce the evil, eventually uproot it. Catharsis is called for, a thorough-going purification. Provided that we see the evil and are somewhat detached from it, we can work upon it best when it is to the fore. If in the background, we can hardly work on it at all. We have no leverage upon what is behind us. It must be in front - though of course curbed too

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that it will not harm others. In short, it is precisely when
the bad side is to the fore that we have our opportunity for
contending with it. Just then is our chance to promote cathar-
sis as well as development. Means and methods of doing this
will be given particular attention in Part III, Chapter IV.

As for the good side, obviously we should cultivate it,
develop it through expression and action. We are to deny and
oppose the bad, affirm and reinforce the good. This applies
to me in relation to myself, also in relation to you. We
should recognize, however, that the good side is part of the
outer self, not part of the inner being. Much less is it the
inner being. Though there is some kinship here, though the
barrier between the good side and the inner being may be com-
paratively thin, nevertheless they are somewhat separated. Con-
sequently, even were it possible to keep this side to the fore
all the time, we would still be out of the center and in exile.
We would be good exiles. This distinction needs to be under-
scored because there is a tendency to believe that our good
sides are our real beings. So believing, we cultivate the
good side as an end, whereas it should be furthered as a means
of attaining life in the center. We should advance the good
as a way of outgrowing the entire outer self and moving into
our whole beings which contain a good more wonderful than any
we will ever find in the separated self.

One feature of the diagram is still to be commented on.
I refer to the channel-like section marked off by dotted lines
that connects the circumference with the center. This repre-
sents the pathway or bridge that some of us build up in our-
selves in the course of our lives. Though

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selves in the course of our lives. Though all too narrow,
though not free of obstructions, this bridge nevertheless
serves as a two-way passage from the outer to the inner, and
the other way around. Thanks to it, the gap between surface
and center is somewhat spanned, the barrier becomes more ne-
gotiable. It is made up of the ideas, ideals, truths, feel-
ings and values whose original source is the inner being.
One's own real being contributes, as do the real beings of
others. The scriptures of all the genuine religions are grand
sources of materials for the building of the bridge. Creations
of literature, music and the other arts, and those of science
in which the beings of men have had some part, are sources.
So are personal contacts with people whose beings are larger
than their personal selves. Vivid experiences of the marvels
of Nature, and especially of prayer, meditation, worship, con-
tribute to its construction. The importance of this pathway
is self-evident.

How true the diagram is to the reality, is an open
question; but I know that in one respect it is quite untrue.
From the way I have had to draw it, it would seem that, as we
ordinarily exist, the inner being is completely enwrapped by
the outer self and thus cut off from all life. This is not so.
It could not be so; we would perish. Though almost disconnec-
ted from the outer self, the inner being is at all times con-
nected with the mainstream. Though out of this life, it is in
that life, is part of Life itself. This is why, once we enter
our real beings, we find ourselves in touch with other beings,
find ourselves in the unitary Life that underlies our separated
persons.

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In my first chapter I expressed the conviction that it
is because we live as captive exiles that we frustrate rather
than fulfill one another, fight instead of cooperate, hate
more than love: men are not men, human beings neither beings
nor human. Keeping the diagram in mind, let us develop this
point of view.

To live as beings, the inner being would have to be our
whole being. Since we locate in and identify with the separa-
ted self, we cannot possibly live as beings and not often can
we even sense our true natures. To most of us most of the
time, being is an idea rather than an experience, a word in-
stead of a reality.

To live as human, we would have to be firmly established
in the good side, continually reducing the bad, working for
catharsis-development, aiming to become whole beings. As it
is, we are by no means secure in the good. The evil in man,
due to our negligence, periodically breaks loose and hurls men
into a condition that must horrify the beasts. Morality is
ripped to shreds, destruction overwhelms creation, and trans-
formation occurs in reverse - the new birth is a brute. Thus
it is that to some people the very word human refers, not to
the faculties that set us above the animals, but to the evil
powers that make us the plague of the earth.

Let us take a closer look at the situation. To treat
the matter briefly we will say that there are two sets of good
desires or urges. Every human being by nature has being-desires
and body-desires, both intended to serve growth. Among the

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being-urges I list: the desire to be, to attain, to develop and create, love, beauty, purpose, a large and real usefulness. Among the bodily urges I list the desires for food, sex, and constructive manual work. As everyone will grant, in order that our life proceed normally, both sets must move towards fulfillment. But as everyone knows, something untoward happens to both. But what happens?

The first thing to be noted here is that by far the larger portion of our being-urges are on the other side of the barrier, unavailable to us under ordinary circumstances. Our deepest resources are out of reach. We have for our use but a small fraction of the power of the human power-plant. This means that we, in exile, are just so much enfeebled. This puts us under an initial handicap. We simply haven't enough of the right kind of power for our being-purposes and ideals. Necessarily, we feel and are inadequate in our efforts to live as beings. In sharp contrast with this, the forces and desires of the separated self are all on this side of the barrier, all too available. So we have considerable capacity to live as egotists. Confronted with this situation, there are two possible steps for us to take.

We can take the long and difficult step towards opening ourselves and in other ways living so that more of our being-powers may empower us, foregoing our ready capacity to live as egotists. Or, we can take the short step to increasing our capacity to live as egotists, repressing the desire to live as beings. That is, we can take the easy step to pessimistic resignation and spiritual failure - as all too many do. The

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frustration due, in the first place, to insufficient being-
power, and secondly, to our choice of an ego-life rather than
a being-life, is, I think, the basic one that lodges at the
very springs of our life. _It can't be done._ Is not this the
verdict that hounds us? Is not this the terrible denial that
pops up from our depths whenever we contemplate the chances
of men resurrecting? And if we do not believe that men can
resurrect we will consign them to death. And if we consign
them to death we will have no compunction about depriving them,
exploiting them, enslaving them, or killing them outright. The
spirit of man suffers; the body is the visible victim.

Though the larger portion of our being-desires are on
the other side of the barrier, some of them without doubt are
on this side. We feel and are moved by them. For a while,
we try to live them in action, to live with dignity, to create
beauty, to dedicate ourselves without compromise to a great
service. And we are thrown back. We are thrown back by im-
pediments within us, by the obstructions of the outer world,
by the active hostility of a world that is organized for just
the opposite ends. Our being-urges, none too sturdy to begin
with, are rapped on the head. We are hurt where it hurts most,
and recoil. Some of us recover from the blows, rebound, and
are able to carry on. By right attitude we release enough in-
ward force to make developmental use of the obstacles. We
find in us enough fortitude to make good use of the suffering.
We make enough progress to make continued progress possible.
But others, and these the larger number, fare less well.

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Finding little encouragement and no effective help,
the time comes when they can no longer bear being hurt. So
they cover themselves, draw in, build up what is aptly called
a protective mechanism. They clamp down on their being-urges,
on their own vital centers. Self-frustration has begun. Self-
frustration is under way as the answer to a frustrating situation.

Now they take a "realistic" look at life. Evidently
they have been fools to try to live differently from others.
Ideals do not pay. High standards are penalized. You have
to fit in - "adjust" is the word used nowadays. You have to
play the game. Being-desires are handicaps to anyone who wants
to get along in the world. And now they decide that they want
to get along in the world. What else is there? Grown worldly-
wise, they turn around and systematically do to themselves
just what the world has been doing all along. They methodically
rap on the head every being-desire that still dares show itself.
Self-frustration advances. The protective mechanism grows
apace, becoming a hard rind or shell that strangles the life
within. The living being becomes progressively crustaceous.

This conscious and deliberate denial of being-urges
begins, as we have noted, as a protective measure. It advances
as a way of preventing one's own being from upsetting the
worldly person you are rapidly becoming, from interfering with
the worldly course you have set for yourself. You repress
your being-desires precisely so that they will not contend
with the separated self and its increasing egotism. The in-
evitable result is that the separated self and its egotism do
increase.

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I have already mentioned my belief that the repression
of our being-desires, for whatever cause or reason, is as de-
ranging as the unwise repression of sex. Now to note something
else. If you repress your being-desires you are repressing
your deeply good forces. Doing this, you in effect invite
your worst forces to come out. So out they come, and often
stay out. If, however, you also clamp down on your worst side,
the result is what we so often see - people neither really good
nor really bad, but neutral. People washed out, as if they had
no life at all. People neither saints nor sinners but cyphers,
their bodily life at as low an ebb as their spiritual.

The repression of avarice, hate, and other evil pro-
pulsions does not change their character; they do not thereby
become good forces. Would that they did. Being-urges, if
pushed back into their source, do not change character and be-
come evil; they simply remain inactive. But certain being-
urges, not allowed to live and act as such, cease to exist as
such. The force that was in them is perverted. The force of
the desire Ⓡ is perverted into egotistical ambition, exhibition-
ism. It reinforces whatever egotistical ambition may already
be present in the separated self. The force of the urge to
attain becomes a desire to obtain. It augments whatever greed
may already be present in the separated self. The force of
the urge to rise superior to oneself becomes a desire to feel
superior to others. The force of Ⓡ desire for spiritual reality
becomes a drive for material power.

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An essential function of our being-forces is that they
contend with and progressively overcome the expressions of the
egotistical self. Saint-Exupéry understood this when he wrote,
"there is a creature within me against whom I struggle in order
that I may rise superior to myself." In other words, it is by
means of our being-forces that we can bring pressure to bear
upon ourselves from within, each one upon himself. The more
I press against my own ego, the less will my ego press against
you. The other way around, the less I press against my ego
the more it will press against you. See what must happen, then,
when some of my being-powers become inactive while others, per-
verted, augment the egotistical self. There being no creative
tension within myself, all tension is between myself and you.
I put pressure on you. You, similarly conditioned, do the same
to me. And as with individuals, so with groups, classes, races,
nations. Most groups are pressure-groups. In short, we are
at war with one another.

Were man a being and only a being, there would be no
problem. Were man an egotist and an egotist only, there would
be no hope. But, since man is both, there is a problem and
there is hope.

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## VII How I Found a Way

The most important series of discoveries ever made by human beings may be summarized as follows. There is a universe and it is living, governed by law, presided over by a supreme Intelligence and Power, a Consciousness containing in itself all that is actual and all that is potential. Man is an epitome of the universe, and hence is capable of comprehending it. There is an Ultimate Reality which is both immanent and transcendent. Something of this Reality is in every human being; therefore it is possible for man to discover this Reality, to have it revealed to him, to experience it by being united with it in full consciousness.

What we called the Gurdjieff work was in line with these discoveries. The ideas gave an amazingly ordered and detailed conception of the cosmos, its chief laws and substances, its bodies great and small. The ideas gave a similarly ordered and detailed conception of man and his relation to the cosmos. We who were privileged to study the ideas and, in our measure, make them our own, felt that here was a source-knowledge of the highest order. Much we could not comprehend, but the general impression was that of having revealed to us the whole world and the whole of man.

The second most important series of discoveries may be expressed in a sentence. Man can promote his own development and transformation. The discovery of this possibility, when first made, must have had revolutionary significance. It still has. Our basic attitudes towards ourselves and the world

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change radically when we in our own lives discover that by working upon ourselves from within and from without we can press on, press up the Scale of Being beyond the point where Nature seems to stop her work on us. This ability is unique to man; no other creatures on the earth appear to possess it. This work is uniquely man's work.

Animals, products of their heredity and environment, do somewhat alter their environment, but not themselves. Ex-treme modifications of the environment may alter them by cal-ling forth new responses and adaptations; but they cannot, voluntarily, from within, by idea, by ideal, consciously raise themselves above the station fixed for them by Nature. Man, by exercise of consciousness can develop consciousness. Man, by ideal, by aim, by exercise of will and knowledge, can advance himself many stations beyond the body-mind product of Nature and of ordinary human society. Those of advanced development can create and re-create themselves into beings that hardly seem even foreshadowed in the ordinary human frame.

The knowledge that it is possible to continue develop-ing has been passed on from generation to generation. Some men in each new generation rediscover it independently. In each generation some people gather together to help one another fulfill their mutual purpose. Such a gathering was the Gurdjieff Institute. The Institute offered an over-all system of re-education and training to promote, as its name indicated, "the harmonious development of man".

The third most important discovery is that, though men can develop themselves beyond anything that the ordinary mind

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believes to be possible, they too tend to stop growing, to
become arrested at a level far short of their full potential-
ity. They stop, however, due to causes other than those that
apply to animals. Set against our potential for a practically
unlimited unfolding, are factors unique to the human species.
There are environmental obstructions, placed in the environ-
ment by men. There are internal impediments - the barrier
within us, and a host of definite and all too powerful anti-
developmental properties. Aldous Huxley, through one of his
characters, has expressed the idea:

> ...herrings, it is to be remembered, suffer
> only from external interruptions to their hatching
> and growth. Whereas, in this process of spiritual
> maturation, every human being is always his own
> worst enemy. The attacks come from both sides,
> and from within even more violently and persis-
> tently and purposefully than from without.

All of us understand that if we are to continue devel-
ping we must work to overcome the external obstructions, and
a fair number of people do this. But by no means all of us
understand that we must also work to overcome the internal ob-
structions; yet, because of the way we are constituted, just
this is even more imperative. We must work to liberate our-
selves in all respects. A triple effort is called for: an
effort to overcome internal impediments, an effort to overcome
external impediments, and an effort to advance the straight
line of our development, "to evolve further, to evolve con-
sciously, to evolve consciousness" as Gerald Heard puts it.
The difficulties are so considerable that if our threefold
effort is to be effective it must be guided and implemented
by methods.

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"You yourself must make effort," said the Buddha. So
said Gurdjieff. The Gurdjieff work was based, as all such
work must be, upon men making right effort. Definite methods
were taught and practiced. There were ways of working upon
the body, upon the emotions, upon the mind, upon consciousness
itself. The whole man was involved. The overall means was
covered by the words, "Conscious Labor and Voluntary Suffering".
The training included manual labor, gymnastic exercises, dances,
music, specially created situations, and, as already indicated,
a wealth of ideas to be pondered, assimilated, lived. All of
it was gathered into a dynamic whole which gave one the impres-
sion - Here is a complete work. Through the agency of Gurdjieff
himself, it was shaped to fit the particular needs of each
individual.

It seems to me in retrospect that my entire past life
had been moving me, by twists and turns, towards work of this
type. All of my significant experiences, it now seems, had
been preparing me to recognize the need and value of it.

As a boy I lived in a section of Washington, D. C. where
city and country mingled. It was as perfect a setting for
growing children as could be asked for. An old farm was at
the end of our street. New brick houses were going up. Open
lots and fields were all around. Most of the families had
children, and we all grew up together. I belonged. For the
first seven or eight years of my life I belonged to my family,
to the world of children, to the community of people and to
the equally real community of Nature.

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Love is the feeling above all others that joins us to
one another and to all growing things. Young love is called
puppy love. Perhaps it is; certainly it is immature. But of
the love I felt then, one thing is true: it was as pure and
as whole as I have ever known. Nothing was excluded. I loved
the grownups, loved my playmates even more, one girl especially,
and trees, birds, pet rabbits, dogs, stray creatures, the
changing seasons and their vivid elements. Love was ever with
me then; and, though it was often iced over later on, there it
was throughout, close to the surface, the magic that opened me
to my deepest experiences of joy, suffering, purification, and
the merging of myself with the animate world.

Now and again in those early years I had experiences
that the adult mind might call exceptional. One I remember
particularly. The family had been away to Saratoga Springs
for the summer. We returned home in late August. A bright
hot sun shone down. The fields teemed with weeds and wild
flowers and buzzing bees. The air was fragrant. I was elated
to be back in my beloved world. While my parents opened the
house and unpacked, I wandered around the rooms and then felt
an irresistible call to go outdoors. Not a playmate was in
sight, but there across the street was our favorite field. It
was awash with light. I went down the steps, then ran. Not
quite knowing what I was doing I ran into the field, and the
power that moved me made me throw myself down and embrace the
earth with rapture. I was within beauty. For how long I do
not know there was no distinction between me and that field,

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my life and that life. I was within the radiant existence of
all that lives. When I returned to the house my mother wanted
to know why I had gone out without changing into my play-clothes.

I had what one of my uncles called crazes. Interests
was too mild a word, in his sense of it. If I was interested
at all, my imagination would catch fire, and I'd have a passion
for it, a single-hearted devotion, an absorption. I had crazes
for building houses in trees, for stamp collecting, for elec-
tricity, for cameras, for music played on the mandolin.

When I was seven or thereabouts, I began to feel some-
what off to myself. At first, it was not a feeling of loneli-
ness but rather of aloneness. I had periods of aloneness right
in the midst of the world to which I had formerly belonged so
utterly. Certain outward factors doubtless contributed to this,
but I am fairly sure that essentially it was an inward thing.
Then, a year or so later, an illness layed me low. For several
weeks I had to stay in bed. An inner life was my only life.
Thereafter for a month or more I had to stay indoors, and my
crazes were confined to those I could engage in by myself. When
finally allowed out, I was shocked to discover that the boys
and girls had meanwhile built their world without me; I was a
virtual stranger. A stranger I remained, despite my doing all
I knew how to belong. Though I gradually remade a place for
myself, it was not the same. Though I came to take part in the
activities of the group, it was a thing of the surface; the in-
ner connection had been cut. Never again was I to be one with
them. Never since have I belonged to any group as I did to
that one in the early days.

- 86 -

From that time on my life has swung between the poles
of exile and belonging. Sometimes I have felt hermit-like,
having no sense of contact with my kind. At other times I
have shared the life of a small community. More rarely I have
felt close to the heart of all mankind. The phases have alter-
nated, a period of exile following a period of belonging, and
then exile again. The alternations have occurred as by design,
as by a pattern that was not subject to my will or desire.

As a young fellow I was moderately healthy, physically
apt and quite active, though never very strong. Then came the
illness already referred to. In the wake of it I was left so
weak and unable that I had to begin all over to learn how to
live. I could hardly use my legs for walking, much less for
running, playing games, climbing trees. Beginning then, I had
to take myself in hand, to recover what had been lost, to face
the world on new terms, to promote the growing and the streng-
thening that occur without special effort in those who remain
strong and healthy. At that early age I learned that it is dif-
ficult to grow and continue growing. One must work for it. I
acquired towards myself an attitude that was partly curative,
partly developmental. My concern for human development dates
from that time. I was then nine or ten years old. Ever since
then I have had recurrent occasions for taking myself in hand,
either to improve my health or to effect changes in line with
changing ideals as to what a man ought to be. By the time I
was twenty the truth that one must contend with oneself was
part of my nature.

- 87 -

As I grew up I pushed my head, and my heart too, into
the murky troubled life that adults make. As I pressed into
manhood I experienced my share of man's inhumanity to man,
though never exposed to cold hate and brutality. No one ever
deliberately tried to break my spirit and hold me down. In
fact I was helped far more than hurt. Nevertheless sex pro-
blems, race problems, war problems, the problems that arise
as people live, and those that arise when people die, all had
their turns at me. Sometimes I felt I was under heavy water,
trying to reach the surface before I suffocated.

Whenever I was not having a good time I was critical
of life. As my mind matured I became, on the one hand, in-
creasingly appreciative, and, on the other, increasingly cri-
tical. Appraising the world, I found it wanting. It was true
that people were living, but this that I saw was not life. And
it wasn't true that people were living. Most of them were dy-
ing on their feet. The older people were not maturing but rot-
ting. They were "grownup", but they weren't. All they did
was to put up fronts in the hope of keeping you from seeing what
was underneath. They bluffed, they pretended, and all
of it was hollow. It was during my high school years that,
reacting against the falsity I saw everywhere, I became arti-
culate in demanding that people be real, that men be really
men, women really women. Realness became my first value. As
I expressed it then, "You've got to have the stuff." Sometimes
I said the real stuff, and in those three words I condensed all
that to me made human life a thing of worth and dignity. My

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thoughts were undeveloped but my feelings sure, and from them
arose an ideal of man that I wanted to live up to, regardless
of what others did.

In my last year of high school a moral force of some
strength suddenly arose from within me, producing a kind of
awakening. By this new force I was given an elevated but often
intolerant standard of human conduct - a heightened sense of
how life and people, by rights, ought to be; and an equally
keen sense of how they all too often are. I moved a long step
towards the clarification of my ideal human being. He was to
be real. He was to live really, and for worthwhile ends, not
merely to get a job, not merely to gain position in society,
certainly not to sink under a dull daily routine. There was
to be adventure in his life, a growing beyond earning a living,
beyond having a family, beyond the cubby-holes of race, color,
class - towards man, unqualified American. Beyond that was
the larger but as yet dim outline of what I today call univer-
sal man. Rashly and prematurely I declared myself to be on
the way to becoming such a man.

I have since realized how very rash that declaration
was; but it would seem that two things were accomplished then
and there. The urge to become in full measure a man was re-
leased and set in motion. To become, not a particular kind of
a man - not a business man, not a clergyman, not a craftsman,
not a statesman - just man. The ground was prepared so that
ideas of the possibility of a higher type of man, when I came
upon them later on, took root.

- 89 -

Acting on the determination that my life was not to
follow the usual tracks, I went west to college to take up
scientific agriculture at the University of Wisconsin. And
there I got a jolt, for in less than a year I found out that
I was not suited to the life of a farmer. Next I attended the
American College of Physical Education in Chicago. After a
year I quit that and went to the College of the City of New
York to study sociology, history, psychology. These changes
were symptoms of an increasing disorganization. They were also
symptoms of a continuing search to discover the outward career
that would match my inner desires. World War I ripped into my
emotions and tore me away from City College, and that was the
end of my college days.

It was while I was attending the American College that
a rather far reaching experience occurred. A friend took me
to hear a series of lectures being given Sunday afternoons at
a Loop theatre. Clarence Darrow and Arthur M. Lewis were the
principal speakers. Their subjects - natural science, social
science, and the theory of evolution. After about two months
of listening to those men, reading the books they recommended,
and pondering it all, a really terrific thing happened. There
was a collision between these new ideas and my anthropomorphic
idea of God, and the latter was shattered. As no other idea or
sense of God arose to take its place, God disappeared from my
world and was replaced by Darwin and the doctrine of evolution.
The bible and the poets gave way to Haeckel, Herbert Spencer,
and Huxley. God vanished and took with Him, along with a lot

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of rubbish, certain basic views and faiths that had shaped my
attitudes and supported my life far more than I had realized
up to this time. The Christian world, which I had believed in
more than I knew, seemed devastated as by an earthquake or a
war. My private world collapsed, and I with it. I felt like
a hanging man.

My eyes were unsealed, but at first I did not like what
they saw. So this was it - life, human life, a relentless bru-
tal struggle for no purpose at all. So this was the truth -
God, a fiction, religion either a fraud or an impotent wish.
Men exploiting men, men fighting men, like dogs for bones. This
interpreted and explained certain brutal aspects of the world
which I had seen since leaving the protected partial life of
my home environment.

My mind revived before my heart. My mind grew active
and strong on this new fare. To gain knowledge became my pas-
sion. I was led from one thing to another until I came upon
socialism. I read Bernard Shaw, the Fabian Tracts, Karl Marx,
Morris Hillquit, Scott Nearing. It seemed to me that socialism,
and it alone, was a way of introducing sanity and human values
into man's affairs. My social conscience stirred. The evil in
man, the world-wide injustice inflicted upon men by men, and
suffered by all, became tangible facts. My personal frustra-
tions and hearthaches were seen to be but drops in the ocean
of human misery. Humanism, a kind of religion of man, became
my new faith. Social action became the action I wanted to be
capable of. I was in process of forming a realistic conception

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of human society as a whole, and, on this basis, a definite
and attainable ideal. I saw clearly that the attainment of
my ideal for myself was inextricably bound up with the attain-
ment of the ideal by all.

The descent of God brought to an end a phase that had
lasted from childhood to my twenty-second year. The ascent of
socialism marked the beginning of a new phase that was to last
about three years. After several months in the new phase, one
day my mind, as a center, suddenly awakened. This was not simply
an access of new mental interests or the birth of a powerful
idea. My whole mind, it seemed, was born, as though up to this
time it had been unborn. By contrast I could see that formerly
I had but had thoughts, opinions, an undeveloped reasoning pro-
cess - in fine, the elements of a mind. Now I had the complete
organ, and was able to use it with the readiness of a muscle.
By its birth I entered the mental world, living inside of it,
at home with the minds I contacted through books, recognizing
that heretofore I had but met them superficially as an outsider.
Another result was that I was forced to recast my views as to
what man has in him. I began to feel, not only to see, that
human beings contain unsuspected possibilities. Extraordinary
things can happen in people, unpredictable events, things quite
other than what you will find in scientific or everyday accounts.
If the mind can suddenly awaken in a person in his twenties,
what else may as suddenly come to birth in the years that follow?
Growth, I realized, is something that continues under the sur-
face, suddenly to manifest in the most surprising ways.

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Not quite a year after my mind had come to life, I underwent a kind of transformation. It was one of the strangest yet simplest experiences that ever befell me. It happened in a day. An inner door opened, and a new person stepped out. That was it, and that was all. A new person stepped out. He was endowed with new qualities and perceptions, was, as I say, a different person. Yet I was the same person as before, because the new person instantly took on many of the qualities and characteristics of the old. In a way, I was never again to be the same. Yet, in a way, I was just the same.

Thanks to this transformation I gained a greatly increased grasp of my life-situation, its problems and prospects. Suddenly I seemed to have acquired a destiny. I knew and felt that I was living for something, an unnamed purpose that existed within me yet was beyond me. Now, as never before, I felt profoundly sure of myself, and as sure of something greater than myself. What that greater something might be, I could not imagine. Certainly not a God created in the image of man; my anthropomorphic idea of God was dead beyond revival. Certainly not any of the fictions of religion. But as surely as church-religion was in error in its pictures of deity, science was at fault in its conception of life as accidental and soulless. By my own experience I now knew that life is anything but mechanical, blind. There is Something real, Something at work behind the scenes, and human beings are related to this Something, are indeed within it. The word mission is not right, yet it is the best that comes to mind. It was as though I had been given a

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mission in life, or perhaps a commission, that I would inevi-
tably accomplish. Nothing could befall me that would defeat that.

It must be confessed that my ego pounced upon these events
and misappropriated them, making me feel self-important, ex-
ceptional, superior to the common run. But it is also true
that my mind, without set plan, having no point it wanted to
prove, pondered them. The very nature of the facts pointed
me to what is *within* man. Now I had a heightened feeling that
men are veritable storehouses of extraordinary potentialities.
I saw the other side too, namely, that men are also storehouses
of problems and evils. Man himself is the source of it all.
The good that is in the world comes from man. So does the evil.
What is out there is a projection of what is within. Therefore
to change the world you must change men. Social measures are
necessary, indeed imperative. I still held to my belief in
socialism. But now I recognized that social measures are not
enough. They do not go straight to the heart of the matter,
but are round about. Some other way is also necessary. Some
other way is as imperative - a way that will work upon men from
the inside, changing their hearts, changing their persons,
changing their consciousness. I began wondering if there were
such a way, or if it had to be left to the mysterious operations
of the inner life.

Before indicating how this questioning worked out, it
should be said that my outward activities also of course had a
bearing on what I eventually came to. Beginning when I was quite
young I took part in athletics, playing football, baseball, ice
hockey and tennis; and then, at a somewhat later period, swim-
swim-

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ming, basketball, and gymnastics. For a number of years I was or fancied myself to be something of an athlete. It was this, plus the fact that I had worked on my body off and on ever since that boyhood illness, that decided me to take up physical education after learning that I was not cut out to be an agriculturalist.

As a young fellow I was an amateur electrician, then a repairer of rowboats, a sailor of small craft and of larger ones that took parties fishing. I sold *The Saturday Evening Post*. I bought, repaired and sold motorcycles. I had jobs as a motorcycle delivery boy, a drug store clerk, an usher in a theatre. During and after my college days I had the following occupations: farm hand, assistant in a college library, grocery clerk and district manager, resident worker in a social settlement, music student, shipyard worker, temporary teacher, apprentice writer. How I packed all of that into twenty odd years, and still held together, seems rather amazing in retrospect.

My grandparents were people of moderate financial means. I owned and for a time received rent from a house left to me on my mother's death. As long as grandfather lived and the house remained in my hands I never had to earn money; yet, as just indicated, I frequently did. I've always liked work, whether I had to do it or not, with or without pay. At every job, I worked more for the experience than for the cash. Consequently my finances suffered now and again; and it is something of a wonder to me that I've always had enough to live on. At times when I could not help myself, help has come when really

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needed. To those people I am deeply grateful. The facts of
my life show clearly, to me at any rate, that man's life is
not accidental and chaotic as it often seems; design is in it.

I lived by turns in Washington, New Rochelle, Chicago,
and here and there in Wisconsin, Illinois, New York State,
Massachusetts. Sometimes I changed place to get out of what
I felt to be a prison-condition; and, having moved, often
found myself after a time in a blind alley, and had to move
again to get out of that. I tried this and that. I saw
America variously. I saw the ways that all sorts of people
live, and the ends they seek. Some of those ends at times
strongly attracted me. More than once I sold my integrity
and was paid in disillusion. Many a time I lied or bluffed,
reaching for the glitter that is dangled before the eyes of
young Americans, that people everywhere, young and old, grab
for as the only prize of life. As it turned out, none of that
was for me. I do not know who or what to thank that I escaped
from the common snares, certainly not my conscious self. Through
all my jobs and in all the places I lived I was driving and
being driven, groping, seeking, struggling towards something
that I could not clearly envision or even put into words that
satisfied me. All I knew was that there was something I had
to seek. Deep down in my dark earth there was a seed that
sought the light.

But for a protracted period, instead of finding a life-
work I found chaos. Many a time I wished I had followed a
beaten track. To die on your feet is less painful than to have
no visible footage at all. To be hollow inside causes less

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distress than prolonged inner struggle.

Books, to me, were experiences. Certain books were decisive influences. This proved to be particularly true of the writings of Goethe and Walt Whitman. I was still at loose ends when first "Wilhelm Meister" and then "Leaves of Grass" came into my hands. Then I began to come together. Different as these men and their writings are in many respects, both evoked in me a sense of human greatness; each from a different angle revived my feeling of the man I wanted to be; and both were avenues leading to the same large life and world. It was a world in which I felt at home. It was the only world, other than the world of my childhood, in which I had felt at home.

One day Lewis Mumford, learning of my interest in Whitman, suggested that I read the Bhagavad-Gita. From Whitman to the Gita, and from the Gita into the philosophy and religion of India, and then to Plato and Plotinus.

At the age of twenty-five I arrived at three convictions that were to influence me far more than I could know at the time. They were to become, in fact, the basis of my future life. I became sure that there exists, above and beyond the world of ordinary experience, a very wonderful life and world, not made by men, not dreamed of by most people, but which men can enter; and I wanted to enter that world, not vieariously through reading, but in full reality. I became sure that one cannot enter that world simply by living as people ordinarily live, simply by growing as we ordinarily grow, but that specific and special means and methods are necessary. It seemed certain to me that those who had penetrated that realm, Plato and

- 97 -

Plotinus for instance, must have used methods unknown to me, unknown to the generality of people, not taught in colleges or churches, but to be found somewhere; and I wanted to find, to learn, to use those means. I became conscious that means exist. Since I did not find any satisfactory means in any book (the fact is that I did not recognize them when I saw them, but of course I did not know that at the time), I became sure that they were transmitted from living person to living person through personal contact - in other words, that there are teachers of means; and I wanted to meet with such a teacher.

These desires were not superficial, but neither were they unswervingly strong. The truth is that I, the rest of me, the whole of me, was not yet ready to live up to them, to carry them out. And so it happened that after a time of more or less fruitless search, another interest claimed me. I had already come upon the books of contemporary American writers, Waldo Frank, Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Van Wyck Brooks, and the imagist poets. Having some feeling for words, I had already begun to try my own hand at writing. Though I was living at this time much to myself in out of the way Washington, something of the literary renaissance that centered in New York and Chicago touched and kindled me, and my interest in the literature of that day became absorbing. Now I felt that creative writing might be my means, my way. For I felt that I too had something to say about America. Besides, it seemed to me that writing was the only means whereby I could make good use of my varied experiences, giving value to much that otherwise would be wasted.

- 98 -

Around writing I could organize my life. By writing I might
build myself into the man I wanted to be.

The decision was made. I wrote - that is, I tried to write. Day and night I did hardly anything else. I thrived myself into it as if life depended on it. Never before had I dedicated myself so thoroughly, in fact so desperately, to any work - and it was far more difficult than I had anticipated. Never had I undertaken anything so difficult. But I had to do it. At this I had to make good. Other projects had been left unfinished; this must be continued. In those I had failed; this must succeed. I would stand or fall by this effort. And thus it was that a newly discovered will-power reinforced my impulse and desire.

It so happened that about a year after my apprenticeship
had begun in earnest, I was offered out of the blue a chance to
go to Georgia as the acting principal of an agricultural and
crafts school for Negroes. I went. It was my first trip into
the deep South; and there, in the midst of folk-life in rural
Georgia, my creative force was somewhat released. Due partly
to the unusual tension set up in me by an unprecedented and
rather complex situation, partly to the beauty and sorrow of
the life I beheld, my root-life was quickened, and it sought
expression. Up to now, my writing had come mainly from my head.
Now my heart and body took over. I was in Georgia not quite
three months. On returning to Washington I went to work full
time, writing sketches, poems, dramas. Some of the shorter of
these, it seemed to me, were good enough for publication; so I
began sending them to the literary magazines which were multi-

- 99 -

plying in 1922. The Double Dealer of New Orleans, John McClure editor, was the first to accept. Presently I had enough for a book. Incredible as it seemed to some people who had followed my broken career, amazing as it felt to me, it was done. I who had started and stopped so many things had at last carried one thing through. My first book was finished, and I knew it was a book, despite its impurities. I called it Cane. Thanks to Waldo Frank a publisher was found - and the way opened to a life that in many respects was a development of what had gone before, but which in one basic respect was a completely new departure.

The summer before Cane was published I began having a series of experiences the net result of which was to revive my sense of the need of methods other than and in addition to those of creative writing. I was in New York City at the time. Through a love-experience I found myself on the frontiers of, if not within, the radiant world reported by Whitman, Plato, Dante. I experienced something I could never forget, and never thereafter be content to do without. Here was beauty. Here was wonder. Here was meaning. Here was realness. Here was the resurrection of my deepest life out of its long death. Here was the reality of the soul.

I made some notes at the time. They were not attempts to express the experience. They were simply reminders of attitudes and dates. Here are three of them.

One's highest gift should be utilized until one has attained a faculty that is higher than it.

Let a man say -
I am of a consciousness whose earth-eye
is my body;

- 100 -

Let a man say -

I am of a consciousness which is beyond me.

My intellect is its brilliance in this
world,

My emotions are its glow.

When will my body open?

Let the evening of November 17th, 1923, mark
the time of my greatest illumination, of my purest
vision, of the most comprehensive experience that
has yet come to me.

And from that experience I fell. I had risen before, and
fallen before, the one following the other with the regularity
of natural rhythm. After that November experience I relapsed,
not to recover for quite a time. Having been liberated from
myself I fell back into my ego-prison. Having tasted union
I fell away, to use the words I used then, into an unholy
separateness. By the way it happened I could not help but
realize that I was as nothing, except a greater reality infused
me, except as I was joined with the great things of life.

Here it was - my vivid memory of that large life, my
naked experience of this confined life. I had to want that
life with every fibre in me. I had to want to get out of this.
Life had liberated me. Life had shown me it was possible.
Could I not do it for myself? Could I not find and use some
means of emerging from dead separateness into living union, a
means within my control? Now with a sense of real urge I
resumed the search for conscious means to Consciousness.

My contacts were fairly wide. I talked with almost every-
one I met, in season and out. Except for one or two people, no
one seemed to recognize the need of methods other than those
they already used. Writers considered writing a sufficient
means. Painters considered painting a sufficient means.

- 101 -

Scientists considered science a sufficient means. Psycho-analysts might have given me something, but it seemed to me that by and large their goals were not mine. Most of them, I was sure, were concerned with only a part of man, not with the whole. Neither did they envision a new man in a new and higher condition. They aimed to repair the old. They, like most doctors, were therapists only. Their methods were designed to patch people up so that they could function tolerably well in a life that to me was meaningless and unwanted. It never even occurred to me at this time that any branch of organized religion might answer my need. I had long since been disillusioned about the churches. Church religion, it seemed to me, was neither a spiritual nor a social force. It was a pious inertia that stifled the very life it should have quickened.

The sense of urgence arising from my personal situation was fortified by my view of the world situation. Another war was in the making, I felt sure. Nobody wanted it; everyone spoke against it, said how unspeakably awful it would be; but the nations were heading straight for it. All too vividly I remembered the disruptions caused by World War I. The next would be far worse. I remembered too a conversation with a friend of mine, a conservative economist, a couple of years after World War I had technically ended. One day I said to him: "Another war's coming." "It surely is", he replied. "When?" I asked. "As soon as the nations can finance it". "When will that be?" "In ten years or so", he said. The conversation had taken place around 1920. This was '23. If my friend was right, World War II would occur in the early 30s.

- 102 -

Seven years to go. Not much time to accomplish what I had in mind.

I had just about given up hope of finding what I sought in New York or anywhere else in America, and was contemplating the prospect of going elsewhere, perhaps to India, when a piece of news came my way. I was told that an English writer and editor, A. R. Orage, had arrived in New York as the representative of a man named Gurdjieff. This latter, it was said, directed an institute for the development of man, at Fontainebleau, France. He and some of his pupils would soon arrive in America. I was eager to know more about this Gurdjieff. Learning that he had been Ouspensky's teacher, I became all the more interested. Ouspensky's "Tertium Organum" was known to me. With enthusiasm and some criticism I had discussed it with Margaret Naumburg, Gorham Munson, Hart Crane, Waldo Frank. I think that the several of us felt that, whatever the book's faults, Ouspensky himself must be on the way up the "new slope of consciousness". Gurdjieff, Ouspensky's teacher! Gurdjieff, soon to be in New York! I had a feeling that what I sought was coming to meet me.

Shortly afterwards I was handed a pamphlet entitled:

G. GURDJIEFF'S
INSTITUTE FOR THE
HARMONIOUS
DEVELOPMENT
OF MAN

Reading it, happy exclamations broke from me as I came upon passage after passage that said just what I wanted said, and more. To me, the ideas had an authentic quality all their own. As no other ideas had ever done they "spoke to my condition", to use George Fox's perfect expression. Here, without doubt, was

- 103 -

real knowledge of man. Here was the prospectus of a complete
training worked out, I felt sure, by one who knew. The pamphlet,
towards the end, listed some of the lectures that were given at
the Institute. The titles suggested fascinating subjects: The
Law of the Octave. Wherein Consists the Chief Defect of Modern
Science? The Fakir, the Monk, the Dervish, the Yogi. The
Science of Numbers, Symbols, and Diagrams. The Ancient Sacred
Art, Proof of the Unity of the Origin of all Religions.

Here are some excerpts from the text of the pamphlet:

The civilisation of our time, with its unlimited
means for extending its influence, has wrenched man
from the normal conditions in which he should be liv-
ing. It is true that civilisation has opened up for
man new paths in the domains of knowledge, science
and economic life, and thereby enlarged his world
perception. But, instead of raising him to a higher
all-around level of development, civilisation has de-
veloped only certain sides of his nature to the detri-
ment of other faculties, some of which it has destroyed
altogether. Civilisation has robbed man of the natural
advantages of his type, without at the same time pro-
viding him with what was needed for the harmonious
development of a new type.

...modern man's world perception and his own mode of living are not the conscious expression of his being taken as a complete whole. Quite on the contrary, they are only the unconscious manifestation of one or another part of him.

Every really conscious perception and
expression of man must be the result of the simulta-
nous and coordinated working of all three centers
(the thinking, the emotional, and the moving centers),
each of which must fulfill its share of the whole
task, i.e. furnish its quota of associations. A
complete apperception in any given case is possible
only if all three centers work together. But, owing
to many disturbing influences affecting modern man,
the working of the psychic centers is almost dis-
connected. Consequently his intellectual, emotional
and moving functions fail to complete and correct one
another, but, on the contrary, they travel along dif-
ferent roads which very rarely meet, and thus allow
of very few moments of consciousness.

- 104 -

Observation of the disunited and contradictory
action of the centers shows that man cannot be master
of himself, since it is not he who governs his centers,
and he himself does not know which of his centers
will begin to function next. People do not notice
this, because they are under the illusion of the unity
of their "I's" and of their general psychic constitution.

If a correct observation of the psychic acti-
vities of man is made, it will be clearly seen that
modern man never acts of his own accord, and for
reasons within himself, but by his action merely ex-
presses the changes that are induced in his mechan-
ism by external causes. It is not man who thinks,
but something thinks in him; he does not act, but
something acts through him; he does not create, but
something creates in him; he does not accomplish but
something accomplishes through him.

...the first thing necessary to the harmonious
development of man is to train him to be able to in-
troduce immediately the work of his three centers
into each of his psychic functions. The work of the
centers must be of equal intensity at one time, and
then the three main wheels of the human machine will
work smoothly without obstructing one another and
with the highest efficiency, both as regards their
separate functions and as regards the level of con-
sciousness which it is possible for man to obtain,
but which he never reaches in ordinary circumstances.

When it is borne in mind that the degree of de-
velopment possible in each center differs with every
individual and that their contents (impressions re-
registered) are also different, we are forced to the
obvious conclusion that each person's approach to
the work must be strictly individual.

All the functional disorders to which the human
machine is liable, in the conditions of ordinary life
increase as time goes on. And this machine can only
be made to run smoothly after a long and determined
struggle with the defects that have arisen.

But man is unable to carry on this struggle un-
aided and by his own efforts of will. Nor will it
avail him to work upon himself by the various methods
of self-training and self-development now widely
current. These recommend for all and sundry general
methods and processes, such as various physical ex-
ercises, exercises in meditation and concentration,
breathing and physical exercises, various systems
of diet, fasting, etc.

- 105 -

Such methods, prescribed for everybody without distinction of individual needs and abilities and without due regard to the peculiarities and qualities of each person, are not only useless, but may even become dangerous, for while ignorant attempts to overhaul a defective machine may possibly bring about certain changes, these will at the same time cause other changes, which an inexperienced person can neither foresee nor guard against. It should be borne in mind that the human machine is always in mechanical equilibrium, whether running smoothly or irregularly. Therefore any change wrought in one direction, is bound to bring about a change in another direction, and it is absolutely essential that this should be foreseen and allowed for.

In order to obviate unexpected and undesirable consequences, it is necessary when working upon oneself to conform to the discipline imposed by the special and strictly individual methods aiming at the development of new and particular "inertiاس", by means of which the old ones may be regulated and changed. In other words it is necessary to develop new faculties, unattainable in ordinary life, and which man can neither develop unaided nor by recourse to any general method.

The adoption of strictly individualized methods of education of this kind is possible only on the condition that every particular of man's organic and psychic condition as well as his previous upbringing and all the conditions and circumstances of his life are taken into account. In order to determine these particulars with absolute accuracy, a long time is necessary. This is mainly owing to the fact that man from his earliest days, as a result of modern upbringing, acquires an external mask, that is to say an external type that has nothing in common with his real type. During his lifetime, this mask gradually grows thicker and thicker, until man is unable to see himself for his mask.

But as it is necessary, in order to establish the individual particulars relating to each person, to discover the features and faculties of his type, his mask has to be destroyed, which is a question of time. It is only then that we can proceed to study and observe the man, that is to say his real type; it is only then that a programme can be drawn up for his further work.

- 106 -

Gurdjieff and his pupils arrived. Demonstrations, as they were called, were given in the Neighborhood Playhouse. I sat in the audience but felt myself a participant. I followed the unusual exercises, trying to understand what they meant, what part they played in the reeducation and development suggested in the pamphlet. I was struck by their dynamics, their amazing combinations of movements, and a certain majesty. In times past I had taken part in German and Swedish gymnastics. I knew something of the exercises developed by F. Matthias Alexander to bring about re-coordination and conscious control. These of Gurdjieff were in a class by themselves.

I listened to the music. It awakened memories of a sacred world I may once have dwelt in, but from which I had long been exiled. It was a march back to that world. It called all who had become lost to return, to resurrect and remember the part they were to play in the grand procession of the conscious universe. I projected myself into the dances. One of them, called "The Initiation of a Priestess", was so deeply moving and beautiful, so sheerly religious, that I felt I would go to the Institute if for no other reason than to become able to participate in it. Orage gave expositions of the ideas. I met and talked with him. The gist of what he said was this. Man is in an unholy mess, but _there is a way out_. This latter was just what I wanted to hear from him. I felt that he knew by personal experience whereof he talked.

The exercises, the dances, the music, the ideas, each in its different way seemed to say the same essential thing.

- 107 -

Each, through a different approach, impressed the same message on one's being. And it was to one's innermost being that they spoke. All together they evoked a life and world that seemed profoundly native to me. This, I was sure, was a religious training, a discipline, an invitation to conscious experiment, a flexible and complete system, a way of life to which I could dedicate body, mind, and soul.

As for Gurdjieff himself, here was a man if ever I had seen one. Not a holy man, not a saint, just man. He was so much man that I had difficulty conceding that he might be a master. He seemed to incorporate, in his own person, everything that he taught. He seemed to have all that could be asked of a matured and developed human being: knowledge, integration, many-sidedness, power. In fact he had a bit too much power for my comfort. That he could teach me all I wanted to know, and a great deal I had never dreamed of, I was certain. About one thing only was I in doubt - that power of his, that extraordinary coiled power. If I joined the group, if they accepted me, I would do it with my whole heart. How would Gurdjieff use that power on me if I surrendered myself? I did not like the way he was sometimes overly attentive to certain people known to have money. Gossip about him was going the rounds, most of it unfavorable, some of it quite unsavory. The hearsay did not influence me; I myself had too often been its victim; but what I saw and felt did.

I did not ask to join them. Instead, strange as it may seem, I left New York and stayed away several months. Had you asked me why, I could have told you; yet I couldn't have. I

- 108 -

would have said I wanted one last try at making the grade on
my own. I would have said I wanted - well, other things. My
experiences of the past year and my realizations were pressing
for expression. Writing again seemed important. Two books,
one a novel, the other a philosophy of life, were taking shape
in my mind, and I wanted a chance to work on them. As it hap-
pened, once away from New York I started work on the philosophy
first, and work went very well for a while. I even came to
feel that the Gurdjieff work was not so necessary after all.
One day, however, my very last prop was yanked from under me.
A realization that must have been coming on for some time,
crashed full into my consciousness.

I realized my basic ignorance. I realized I knew nothing,
nothing whatever. I had not and never had any real know-
ledge of a single thing. I used words, manipulated ideas,
dealt in generalities and abstractions, without any true grasp
of reality. I assumed, postured, pretended to know - and now
in my own eyes I was shown up. It was a rather terrific ex-
perience, in some ways as devastating and in the long run as
regenerating as the shattering of my anthropomorphic idea of
God. That earlier experience had ripped the props from under
my spiritual life, this knocked them from under my mental life.
It shattered my picture of myself. The perception of my true
state was so thorough and so shocking that, for a time, it was
impossible for me to credit even the few genuine understandings
I may have had. In my sense of it, I was, always had been and
always would be basically ignorant - unless, starting from

- 109 -

scratch, I went in for a new and radically different way of
living, building my life from the bottom up on sound foundations.

Among the notes written at that time I find the follow-
ing. It was written in the late spring of 1924.

I Do Not Know

Body is a name. What a word is, I do not know. It is clear that I know nothing at all of this body. I may say it is slender. But what is slender? I may state it is covered by skin from which hairs, long and short, curly and silken, project. What is skin, hair, long, short, curly, silken? I will not know the body even though I have seen it cut open and dissected. I will say words about it. And what words are, I do not know.

Survey my own body, with whatever perception
or intellect you will, I shall not know it. I
know nothing of the air it breathes. I know nothing
of the food it eats. What bread is, I do not know,
nor what is mercury, or what is the human organism.
Sex is evidently a word. Passion, emotion, vitality,
mind, spirit - words. And whether I speak of god-
head or a stone, or what not, I do not know. I have
used words. I know nothing of them, or of that re-
ality which may or may not lie beyond them and which
they are supposed to symbolically express. I do
not know.

It is my burden and my support to exist, to
affirm existence and the possibility of an uncon-
ditioned knowing, after having eliminated the as-
sumption that I know.

It was of course impossible to continue writing. I
put my manuscript away and it was a long time before I could
bring myself even to think of writing anything but notes.
Discussion seemed meaningless. I could readily have taken a
vow of silence. Ideas were without ground, like uprooted
weeds. I wanted no more of them. I wanted only tangible
things, simple, elemental realities, things that could be
directly experienced.

As I thought over the situation two courses presented
themselves. I might somehow maneuver myself back into a child-

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like, animal-like, pre-verbal existence. At first sight I
knew that course to be as impossible as it was undesirable.
Any such attempt would be futile and disintegrating, a be-
trayal of everything I had lived for. The other course was
to make new effort in a new way to become a new man. Though
this strongly appealed to me and I believed it possible, I
knew I could not do it unaided. I needed outside help. There
was no doubt about it now. I needed to be directed by some-
one far wiser and abler than myself. How could I make the
grade on my own? I knew nothing - and realized it. I was
nothing, except as a greater reality infused me - and realized
this too. I was caught in the trap of myself. Thus condi-
tioned, how could I possibly by my efforts alone attain real
knowledge and emerge into real being and freedom? It couldn't
be done. It had taken me my entire life to recognize that
the little self, the separated self, the unholy ego, is ut-
terly unable. Well, now I realized it - and with this reali-
zation I was at the final end of my rope.

I had lost my life, and now perhaps would find life.
Was there any lingering doubt that I should go to the Gurdjieff
Institute? I had the sense that I had been preparing for some
such step ever since first becoming dissatisfied with myself
and with the world around. This step seemed to explain the
curious pattern of my life. It seemed inevitable; and so it
was decided. I returned to New York with the feeling that I
was embarking on an extraordinary adventure, the most signifi-
cant and the most serious adventure that a man could undertake.

- 111 -

Gurdjieff and most of the others had departed. Orage, however, was still in the city. I sought him out, explained my desires, and was admitted to membership. I booked a passage for France. Orage invited me, while I waited to sail, to attend the group he was conducting. I wasn't enthusiastic. More ideas, I said to myself. But I've been thankful ever since that I did. I learned some things that helped immensely when I got to the Institute. I was prepared, mentally at least, for what I would find there, especially for the manual labor that was the chief means of training at just this time. Of most importance, I learned the first practices of a method.

The method was called Self-Observation and Nonidentification. It will be described in Part III, Chapter II. For the present it is enough to say that from that day on I had something to do, within myself - a new effort that brought a new faculty into play, an inner-action that started me on the way, that gave purpose and meaning to everything else I did, even to my otherwise most trivial behavior.

The Institute occupied an estate known as *le Prieure*, on the outskirts of Fontainebleau. It was said to have been the site of a priory in days gone by. Now there was a handsome chateau, extensive grounds and woods, all surrounded by a high stone wall in the French style. A shock awaited me when I arrived. Gurdjieff had been injured in a motor-car accident, resulting, it was said, in concussion of the brain. He was in bed. I was not permitted to see him. Gloom hung over the place. Little or no work was going on, and that half-heartedly. I was burning to come to grips with things. The

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only tangible thing was the wordless depression and anxiety
that arose from the people who had been associated with
Gurdjieff for many years, whose life he was.

I had come to Fontainebleau to find a world, a way of
life; I found, instead, that to a large extent I had to create
my own and make my own way - and the atmosphere of the place,
instead of helping me, made it doubly difficult. Presently,
however, one of the men, Bernard Metz, took me under his wing
and showed me work I might do, odd jobs in the kitchen garden.
The same things might have been done back in America; but
there was a difference. Orage, as already said, had primed
me as to the aim of manual labor at the Institute, and the
ideas behind it. So I fell to, trying to apply those ideas,
trying to feel as I imagined it would were Gurdjieff active
and the place really humming.

From light work I progressed to heavier tasks. I thanked
my stars that I had done physical work before, but even so, it
was far from easy. My body, unused to strenuous prolonged
labor for many a year, suffered, protested, rebelled. More-
over, and strange as it may seem, the very fact that this was
completely voluntary work done for the sake of conscious de-
velopment, acted as a drag instead of a spur. Had my *body* and
other *bodies* been dependent upon the products of my labor, I
would have felt far more incentive to do it. Then and there
I graphically learned that one more readily works for the body
than for the soul.

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All in all, the first week was agony. The second was not much better. Often I lost contact with my purpose for coming to the Institute, and could only think of leaving. Yet through it all, I was driving myself, practicing the ideas passed on to me by Orage, one idea particularly. It was this. Work hard as long as you feel like it, and then, when you have reached the point of not wanting to, work twice as hard. It is the work done after that, that really counts. When desire ends, then and then only can *will* come into play. When your automatic activity slows down and would stop, then is your chance for voluntary, nonhabitual action. And it is precisely action of the voluntary nonhabitual kind that enables a man to get out of the ruts and become re-created as a new man capable of new experience.

Insofar as my attempts were successful, I was learning how to make effort. I was learning to make effort in the face of internal resistances that were ever so much more formidable than the external ones. I was becoming able to make new effort, increasingly.

One day I came upon one of Gurdjieff's sayings that became the basis of another method, **that has since become my central practice.**

> You are here having realized that you have only yourself chiefly to contend with. Therefore thank those who give you the opportunity.

I was as ready for these words as for any I had ever heard. The saying took instant hold of me, found purchase in my very roots; for it expressed the need and the value of doing what I had found I must do daily here at the Institute;

- 114 -

it crystallized practices that I had engaged in earnestly,
though none too consciously and not consistently at all, ever
since becoming aware of traits in myself that, if unchecked,
got me into trouble with people - indeed ever since that boy-
hood illness. There were some new features, however.

In the past I had been more apt to contend with others
than with myself. Now I was pointed squarely to myself. The
emphasis was taken off other people, and placed fully upon me.
Suppose everyone did this. Suppose everyone stopped contending
with others and contended, developmentally, only with himself?
That would be the end of strife between men, wouldn't it? It
would be the end of racial, economic, and social conflict; the
end of wars within and between nations. It would mark the be-
ginning of each one overcoming the evil in himself and develop-
ing into full sized man, capable of meeting and living with
other men on the basis of goodwill, love, and the values that
are common to mankind. So it seemed to me then; so it seems
to me now. Is there any other way?

The entirely new angle was the attitude of actually
<u>thanking</u> those who give you the opportunity to contend with
yourself. I could remember, on several occasions in the past,
being spontaneously grateful to those who had made me face my-
self and see traits that I ought to struggle with and overcome.
But thank <u>everyone</u> who calls out your faults, your hidden
weaknesses, your pet vanities and prejudices, your meanness,
your impatience, your covetousness, your egotism; thank them
sincerely, consciously, voluntarily; make a determined daily

- 115 -

practice of it! Here indeed was an utterly new effort, one
whose value struck me at once but whose full significance was
to become clear only after years of trial and reflection.

I began then. The first steps of this method were
worked out and applied to myself that summer at Le Prieure.
I have since developed them in the form that will be found in
Part III, Chapter IV.

In less than a month Gurdjieff recovered enough to
appear on the scene and direct the outdoor work from an arm-
chair. Then everybody came out, men, women, and children.
Things began to hum. It was amazing what his presence did.
Extra life, extra will, new zest and new power sprang up in
us. The children of course worked or played as they wished,
but the rest of us worked hard all day long and sometimes into
the night. It was again the real Institute. The project was
to clear a space in the woods for a new kitchen garden. Trees
were felled by some of the men who knew how to do it. My task
for a while was to saw the trunks into useable lengths. At
the other end of the two-man saw was an Englishwoman with more
stamina than five huskies. She was the pace-maker, I had to
keep up. Then I uprooted stumps, not by dynamite but by digging.
I carted wood in a wheelbarrow. By now I was in the swing of
manual labor. My body grew strong and limber. Now I liked to
use it, up to a point - and it was always beyond that point that
I had to go. Evenings until midnight or later, we would do the
exercises, listen to the music, practice the dances; Gurdjieff
was creating new dances and new music.

- 116 -

Thanks to it all - to the manual work itself, to the situations that arose as we worked and lived together, to the ideas and aims as pondered and applied in daily action, and to the presence of Gurdjieff - there were inner results and experiences that I will not try to describe here except to say that they linked me with the larger life I sought and gave deep assurance that this was a religious training, not simply a work of man's muscles, mind, and will.

One day a man from the outside paid us a visit. He was an intellectual with an earnest and well-informed interest in the "higher consciousness". He sat at our long common table for dinner. He talked. He talked about what he assumed we at the Institute were working for. He spoke of ordinary life in contrast to the life of the path. I mentioned Cosmic Consciousness. Meal-time was one of our few times for relaxing. We seldom talked, unless about some small or amusing incident that helped us to relax and enjoy the food. Our visitor's words echoed around the room. He was in words, in pleasant ideas, in a roseate fancy, quite remote from the raw difficulties of actually attaining what he talked about. He reminded me of myself as I had been, only a few months back.

This is what I was finding. When you work as we did, the blood is drawn from the head into the body. The mind rests from its accustomed thinking while the body engages in its unaccustomed labors. To be sure, the mind must take a very active part in nonhabitual physical work. In doing so, it functions as it never functioned before; but it is not doing what

- 117 -

is commonly referred to as brain-work. It has a holiday from
verbal thinking. The blood, vigorously pumped through the
body by this intentional and sustained bodily activity, is
purified. The purified blood revitalizes, well-nigh regenerates the body. Then, after a time, there is a surge upwards
into the brain. The purified blood, revitalizes the mind. The
total result is a recharged body-mind: a body purified, energized, strengthened, a mind able, lucid, with greatly increased
power to grasp and to comprehend. Freed from many a constrict-
ing habit, you are ready for new experience. You feel and in
some measure actually are a new man.

By fall, I was in wonderful shape, feeling that I could
continue with this life and work on and on, wanting no other.
All other life seemed, by contrast, flat, static, unstretching,
ungrowing - above all, unreal, a mere dream-life of vague sur-
faces. So life in Paris seemed to me on the few occasions I
went into the city.

Then a bolt struck us. One fine day, Gurdjieff called every person on the place to gather around. Whereon he simply announced that he would close the Institute - liquidate it, was his word. We would please never again refer to it as the Institute. That was finished. From now it was to be known as *le Frieure*, only, his home where he would invite those sympathetic to him personally. All my life I have lived for others, he said, now I will live for myself. No other explanation was given. We were left to make of it what we could. Some people did not believe he meant what he said. They thought it was one of the

- 118 -

"shocks" he sometimes administered. Presently they were to learn otherwise. Some believed that in this way Gurdjieff was ending the Institute in its present form, preparatory to the creation of a new form. Others thought that he might have discovered that, as a result of his accident, he was unable for the time being to direct the work as it should be directed. No one thought that he meant to give up his life-work, now and forever. But whatever the thoughts, the announcement had one and the same effect.

We were shot into the air and stayed there, suspended, for an uncomfortable length of time. Day after day you would see people, sometimes singly, sometimes in twos or threes, in conference with Gurdjieff, talking over their future plans, where they would go, what they would do. I had such a conference. He said I might stay on, if I wished. I thought it over. Not much work would go on; the life of the place had already begun to fall to pieces. But had I come only to leave after a few months? Where would I go? What would I do in line with continuing the work that I felt to be so well started? Of course, I had acquired two methods. I could practice them here, there, anywhere, whatever else I did. The matter before me was to decide just what to do, in addition to practicing the methods. After quite a struggle, something clicked. I knew I was again hungry for ideas, for more of these ideas. No doubt of it, Orage in New York would be a better source than Gurdjieff or anyone else at *le Prieré* under present conditions. I began to see still other very attractive possibilities in New York. And so it was decided. New York it would be. New York it was.

- 119 -

I returned there, utterly surprised at the turn of events
that brought me back to the city I had left not so long ago
with the feeling that I might not see it again for many a
year, if ever. Arrived there, I became a member of one of
Orage's growing number of groups.

Of the ideas expressed in the groups I will mention but
one, and this because of its bearing on the experience which
befell me a year or so later. According to this idea, four
states or conditions of consciousness are possible to man.
These states are called: the Sleeping State, the Waking State,
Self-Consciousness, and Cosmic Consciousness. As Sleeping is
to Waking, so Waking is to Self-Consciousness. As Waking is
to Self-Consciousness, so Self-Consciousness is to Cosmic Con-
sciousness. In other words, these are four orders of conscious-
ness, each radically different from the others. The Waking
State is not an expansion of the Sleeping State; increase sleep
and you will not get into the Waking State. To enter the Wak-
ing State you must awake from the Sleeping State. On awakening
you pass into a different kind of consciousness. Similarly,
Self-Consciousness is not an expansion of the Waking State. To
become Self-Conscious you must awake from the Waking State.
This, so to speak, is a second awakening, or, if you will, a
second birth. Still a third awakening is possible, that from
Self-Consciousness into Cosmic Consciousness.

The idea of the possibility of ascending, by mutations
or transformations of consciousness, into higher orders of con-
sciousness is set forth by Richard Maurice Bucke, among others,
in his book "Cosmic Consciousness". Confusion will be avoided
by understanding that what Bucke refers to as self-consciousness

- 120 -

is that listed as the Waking State in the above scale. Some
of the cases he regards as instances of Cosmic Consciousness
are, in my opinion, but flashes of true Self-Consciousness.
Cosmic Consciousness is something higher still - a state at-
tained by Christ and Buddha and some others, but not by as
many as Bucke believes.

In the next part of this book I call the third state
Being-Consciousness instead of Self-Consciousness for reasons
that will be seen. I might also mention that in that part we
shall come upon the source of some of the understandings al-
ready expressed.

I was in my thirty-first year, still in the Gurdjieff
work, having been in it not quite two years, when the expe-
rience of Being-Consciousness befell me.

121

I The Unexpected

On an April evening in 1926, having taken a friend
home, I was on my way back to my rooms. The first stage
of the return trip had brought me onto the platform of the
66th Street "L" station; and there I stood, waiting, I
would have said, for a downtown train. Surely I had no
sense of waiting for anything else. Spring was in the air.
After the confinement of winter it was good to be out of
doors; so I just rested there, leaning against a railing
as one does on shipboard.

A train came up; I let it pass. Another went by.
I had decided, it seemed, to remain where I was until
prompted to move. Here on the platform I had an enjoyable
feeling of being at large in the world, at peace with my-
self. There was no rush or reason for returning to my place
at any set time. The night, as we say, was mine; and so was
this all too rare mood of quiet aliveness and freedom; bet-
ter experience it while I could. This was the extent of
my awareness of my state and motives.

The time was around ten o'clock. Quite a few people
were abroad, walking the streets, standing on street cor-
ners, as if they too felt the call to be out and at large.
Over on Broadway, the glittering front of a movie house
accentuated the artificial brightness of the main avenue.
The crosstown streets, in contrast, seemed like dark alleys
that turned men into shadows. Above the roofs of houses

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122

the night sky arched immensely. From my point of elevation, the stars seemed as close as the people down below; New York's inhabitants seemed as remote as the stars.

As the Gurdjieff ideas were almost constantly in my mind, those days, I doubtless reflected on the condition of man in the light of one or another of them, as I stood there. Thoughts of the possibility of higher states of consciousness may have presented themselves, but without evoking in me the slightest intimation that I was about to undergo any such transformation. I was given no hint, no warning. My mind might as well have been an utter blank. Then, just suddenly, it began.

I was startled by an uncommon inward event. It was as though I had been touched from within in an extraordinary quiet way that stilled my functioning and momentarily suspended me between what had been and what was to come. My very life had been stopped, so it seemed, and yet I was about to live again, live anew, and strangely. Somehow I understood I was going to be moved, regardless of my wish or will, into a nameless experience.

My attention was held to a mysterious working in my depths that instantly impressed me as an authentic action utterly different from any I had hitherto known. It bore no likeness whatsoever to anything I had ever experienced, nor to anything I had ever read or heard of others experiencing. As this unfamiliar inner-action increased I became increasingly incredulous, expectant. My sensations

- 3 -

123

could not have been more strange had my body quietly left
the ground and soared into the air. I had just that
feeling - the impossible is happening. It can't be!

But it was!

I was changing. Throughout my entire presence I was
changing. It seemed I was being taken apart, unmeshed and
remeshed. I seemed to become malleable and flowing. My
very substance was in motion.

I did not exclaim, This is It! I had no way of recognizing these workings, of knowing that here was the beginning of the experience I had worked and hoped for. This is it was said in me with undeniable authority by the action itself. What it might be I could not imagine.

But this I knew. I had not started it, nor could I
stop it or influence it in any way. What had begun would
unfold. What had started would be carried on and irre-
sistibly accomplished. I would go where I was moved. For
I was helpless, now that help had come.

My body and my life were in the power of a Power.
Some kind of revolution was occurring in the named and
unnamed parts of all of me, occurring with sheer ease and
complete harmony. It was perfectly quiet. It was quietly
perfect. But how strange!

My very being was at the disposal of the Power that
had come. That Power was drawing me. Regardless of me, it
was moving and making. I recognized - A master is at the
controls. My master has come and I have met him. And in

- 4 -

that moment my will became his will; and I felt - Thy
will be done. Thy wonderful will!

I became as a child, captivated by a wonder-work.
At a stroke my mind was emptied of thoughts. As a child
I gazed raptly. Myself was melted down to a single simpli-
city. Constrictions and fears, desires, plans, all vanished.
I had no thought of myself, no wish for anything other than
this amazing present happening. Now was important. Now was
all. Past and future were no more. Place, people, passed
out of sight and reckoning. The world itself temporarily
disappeared. I was taken out of all that, and felt a rap-
ture so serene, so interior, that no sign of it would have
been visible to another person even had he been watching.

The entire rigid frame of the habits of the body-mind
was quite dissolved, and I was made ready for I knew not what.

Now there was a growing, as of an inward seed. What
remained of myself was as a pod being outgrown by a great
seed. A life within my life was in motion. A being within
my being was rising and gathering. All within was wondrously
fertile and portentous.

The moving was not of me. I felt this distinctly now.
The chief moving was not of me but of something other than
me. The moving seemed, now, not in me at all, but outside,
behind me, occurring in another being.

Another being was in motion. Another being, in action,
by action, was rising as Consciousness.

I beheld that other being as a stranger entering my

- 5 -

life. To that other being I probably was a stranger en-
tering its life. Stranger was meeting stranger on the bor-
der of a mysterious world, and what would be the issue?

There was creating, but not by me. Quite evidently,
I was not creating. I could not so create. I was being
created anew by the Power that had created me.

Yet it became increasingly clear that I was not the
center of this working in any way. Not the source, not the
main objective. Not subject, not object. I was as if de-
centered, off to the side as a spectator. That other being
was the center, the source and chief recipient of its own
actions. Sprung from a seed, it was creating itself, using
living substance, using me and my life, and life drawn from
a higher order, beyond me.

I was losing my life. It was being taken away for a
more noble creation. Life was in that other, in that won-
drous visitor. There was Being, Consciousness, an Existence
so large and deeply powered that it would surely absorb me
as a mere particle.

Now the moving was in light. The light was moving.
The moving light was in changing design. My inner world
was softly illumined. If, more deeply in, there was a great
source of light, I did not yet behold it. I surmise I was
still closed to the Inner Light itself, to the Eternal Beam
beheld by Dante. There was no blinding flash, no overpower-
ing splendor. I witnessed, rather, the events that proceded
within the sphere of this soft lighting.

- 6 -

I was given insight. I seemed gifted with psycho-
logical clairvoyance. My eyes simply opened inwardly; and,
though it seemed miraculous at first, I came to know that
it is as normal and as necessary for one's eyes to open to
the inner world as for them to open to the outer. Blind-
ness is the unnatural condition. Blindness to the world
outside and to the world within, is abnormal. Outsight
and insight are faculties that every human being needs,
and should have, for the right process of his whole life
and orientation. I saw inner events as clearly as one sees
outward forms in the luminosity of dawn or twilight, with
this significant difference: one's outward sight is usually
of objects only, whereas this inward vision was a seeing of
processes - and forms that ordinarily are invisible.

I beheld, inwardly. I saw the main forms of my total
human being. I witnessed the workings of the Power. I be-
held creating. I beheld myself awakening!

I continued to feel - The impossible is happening.
It cannot be. I could not credit it that such marvel ex-
ists in man. I could not believe that this was a true dis-
closure of inner reality. Time had to pass, I had to be-
come more used to this order of experience before I could
accept the real as real. And now another feeling became
prominent.

The wonder was at hand, yet I felt it to be inacces-
sible. Though it was within my human totality I felt I
could not touch it or contact it in any way. It was "off
there", like a star a child beholds but cannot take into
his hands.

- 7 -

The moving seemed to have a center whose location,
as accurately as I can designate it, was in the torso and
to the rear, as though behind me. In my sense of it, it
was not in my body at all, or in any part of myself with
which I was familiar. This must be repeated. The center
of the entire experience seemed outside of this-me. I had
the impression that I was witnessing, not subjective but ob-
jective phenomena. These extraordinary events seemed to be
taking place as much outside of me to the rear as the events
of the external world seem outside to the front. No external
object has ever appeared more clearly not-me than this inter-
nal subject. No other man has seemed as different from me
as this inner being.

These impressions, I think, were true to the facts.
Later phases of the experience showed beyond doubt that
that being was another being, not my ordinary self, and that
consciousness was a different consciousness, not my ordinary
awareness expanded. The Power, the center of creative action,
was outside of this-me, though residing somewhere in my
total being.

The motion started, in so far as I was aware of the
beginning, as a simple motion. It seemed literally to grow,
to become increasingly complex. It became, as it were, a
field of motions, waves of moving. The spreading pattern
was beautiful beyond description. The motions unfolded,
gathered, spread, interweaving, sometimes spiraling. So
far as I know, the only visible workings of the external

- 7 -

128

world which bear some resemblance to these of the inner
world are to be seen in the art of the color-organ. And,
yes! the Northern Lights. Here, however, there was no color,
simply light in threads and bands, against a darker background.

So the living light gathered and spread in waves that
continually built up, built up. So, in time, the living
waves came to envelop my whole self, extending downward as
far as the base of the spine, perhaps farther, upward as high
as the crown of the head, higher, and frontward as well as
rearward.

They seemed to acquire thickness, solidity. They
seemed to form a veritable body, a body that enveloped this-
me and the physical body, a voluminous body, a vehicle capable
of great stretching, a new form with new faculties.

How shall I say it? I did not know the truth of it,
so what shall I say? Shall I say that this was in fact a
<u>body</u>? Shall I say it was a second body, a body in addition
to the physical, composed of subtler matters, having its own
forces and appropriate functions? I felt it as a body. In-
deed I saw it as a body. But neither to myself nor to any-
one do I insist it was that.

What I know is this. By the mysterious operations I
have tried to describe, there was a transformation and an
arising of a new form. This was no extension of my personal
self, no expansion of my ordinary awareness. I awoke to a
dimensionally higher consciousness. Another being, a radi-
cally different being, became present and manifesting. And,

- 8 -

129

for a time, this-me remained this-me, that-being developed
as that-being, each distinct from the other.

So was I visited by Grace. For the Power is Grace
when it manifests to us. (To be in the Power is to be in
Grace. To be out of the Power is to be in dis-grace. Dis-
grace and exile are one and the same condition.)

So Grace, as a bright hand with prescient fingers,
worked in my total human being.

So the Power touched this life, touched it perfectly,
radically changed it without halt or flaw, effortlessly
wrought an intricate and sweeping revolution, ordered
everything, opened the creature to the creator within
and brought me, together with that manifesting being,
through the initial stages of the unimaginable.

O wonderful that Power!

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130

## II Transport

For a time, exactly how long I cannot say, there were two of us, this-me and that-being, contiguous, yet perceptibly distinct, as though each were an independent entity.

In this-me I continued to locate. For yet awhile, I remained identified with this-me, so that I felt, as I always had, "This is me". Thus I looked in and beheld the coming-into-life of that-being, that self-behind-me, and felt it to be not-me. Now, of all times, it did not occur to me that that-being was my real being. Had someone wise in these matters told me the truth I would not have believed him, so contrary would the truth have been to my sensations.

Nothing that I had ever heard or read helped me to recognize this reality. This seemed strange, as if no man had ever experienced it and passed on his findings to others. This seemed utterly new and unique, as though it had never been present even as an idea in the mind of anyone. Nor did my past experiences of my "inner being" provide the slightest basis for recognition of this extraordinary entity. In this writing I call it "that-being", and this term is true to the actual experience; but at the time I could not name it.

I did see it. I also saw this-me. A light seemed to be thrown on both of us, so that presently I realized where I was locating. As clearly as a man sees in what part of a lighted room he stands, so did I see that I was in this-me,

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and that this-me was the front or outer part of this
astonishing combination.

There I was, stationed on the surface, out of the
center. There, I suddenly realized, I had been, all my
life, but without realizing it. Always I had been out in
front, knowing but not knowing it. Occasionally, my in-
ward powers had come out to me. Never had I had a deeply
inward centering. I had moved around as on the rim of a
wheel, all the while assuming that that was my natural
place, that so, in the nature of things, I must move.
Never had I been poised in the hub. But why not? Appa-
rently I had been held where I was.

These perceptions flashed and passed. These reali-
zations came and receded. But they were indelibly impressed
on my memory. They formed the basis of later understandings
of self-imprisonment, uprootedness, exile.

One does not make inquiries when such events are
taking place; one simply marvels. Yet questions must have
been wrung from me. What is this? What is it doing, where
is it taking me? And the thought may have occurred that,
whatever the eventuality, there simply could not long con-
tinue being two of us, both in consciousness.

Meanwhile that-being was growing in size, solidity,
power. It was rising as a tide of life. Presently, we may
assume, its force of attraction became stronger than that of
the personal self, became irresistibly strong - and then the
transit began. I was withdrawing from this-me, from the
body-mind, being extricated from life-long involvement in

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the personal self, and set in motion towards that-being.

I was moved across from this world of the self to
that World of Being; and as I moved I lost some of my life,
never missing it, and the rest, liberated, followed where
I went.

There was no choice. I was touched and taken. I
was claimed. The Power had me in its power. I had to go.

Without the slightest feeling of dislocation I was
radically changing location, leaving every known thing -
and there was no clinging, nor any need for surrender; I
had been surrendered, and was moving into the unknown.

I was being transported. I was. Not my body. It
stood there motionless on the "L" station. Not my being.
It was there in its world, waiting to receive me. Pre-
cisely I was being transported from exile into Being.

Transport is the exact term; so is transcendence.
I was rising above my habitual level. I was coming over
all that formerly had kept me from my real life and being.
Liberation is the exact term. I was being freed from my
ego-prison. I was going to a strange incredible place
where I belonged, even though I did not yet recognize that
I belonged there.

And then, in less time than it takes to tell, I was
at my destination. I was there. I fulfilled the first
stage of the ancient testimony - "Thou art That".

O the wonder of it!

I was taken into that-being, and instantly that-being

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133

became this-being, my being, and that-me ceased to exist,
and I was one and whole. I was one being, one consciousness,
alive in a life so different from ordinary life that there
seemed to be absolutely no relation between the two.

Had I been asked - Are you alive? - I would have
looked my astonishment and said - I don't know, I don't
know where I am or what this is, or even if I am any more.

Yet I was, was as never before.

Here in this-being I located. Here I centered.
High in me I was joined with myself. Deep in me I was
connected with my roots and source. Here in being I be-
came my realness, this extraordinary I AM.

I AM! And AM is greater than I!

Something in me knew it to be real, to be reality
as I had never before experienced reality. For the rest,
I knew nothing at all, except that everything was starkly
unfamiliar.

And so for a while there was an involuntary contest
between a new certainty and intense incredulity.

It was - but how could it be?

I was being shown that resurrection can happen;
that the resurrected do really live; but the question per-
sisted - Am I living?

I was being shown what my real being is, but I could
not accept it as me, so utterly different was it from my
ordinary person. Though in myself, I did not yet recognize
myself.

One thing, however, I knew without doubt. My ordinary

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self had vanished. It was gone, and therefore I could not go back to it even if I wished. I was on a voyage, and what I had left ceased to exist when I left it. Return to the familiar was impossible. I had no choice but to accept this incredible being as myself. I had no choice but to be in this being and become accustomed to its life and world. There was this sharp feeling of irrevocable necessity.

My knowing that my ordinary self had vanished was later confirmed. The personal self no longer existed in my thoughts, or in my feelings, or as part of my totality, except as a memory which had no reality. All that pertained to it completely dissolved for the duration of the experience.

Why did that self vanish? I do not know. I simply state the facts of the occurrence. That self began changing and dissolving when my real being became present and manifesting. It ceased to exist as an entity when I was withdrawn from it. And yet, when I eventually fell from Grace, there, bless me, was the personal self waiting to receive me!

In my new state of being there seemed to be but two carryovers from my former condition. One of them was I. I had been transported - but I was I. It was the same I that had inhabited the body-mind throughout the thirty-one years of the body-mind's life. Now it was the I of the revealed being - thus showing itself to be a unit of the human totality, detachable from other parts and therefore capable of changing location.

I was I, in being as in body. There was an *identity* -

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135

a tenuous but persistent identity that survived the radical
changes. (Is "I", then, the seat of one's sense of oneself?
Does it enable each one somewhat to recognize himself, no
matter what transformations occur? Is it the core of our
sense of continuity? This is certain. "I", its location,
and change of location, are the most strategic factors of
a man's life.)

The other carryover, strange as it may seem, was my
everyday awareness. Though the personal self vanished, my
ability to be aware of and move about in the world of daily
affairs remained with me, as was shown when the test came.
This was no trance I had entered, but a higher state of con-
sciousness in which many of my ordinary faculties were retained.

When a man wakes from the sleeping state, he leaves
the sleeping state behind. Certainly he is not in the sleep-
ing *state* and in the waking *state* both at the same time. In
this experience I awoke again, that is, awoke from the wak-
ing state, yet did not lose it. I left its limitations.

What had happened was this. Once I entered Being-
Consciousness, at that instant my ordinary consciousness
became an integral part of this greater consciousness.
There was a merger into one seamless whole.

Elsewhere I have stressed, and with reason, the dif-
ference between ordinary awareness and Being-Consciousness.
Now we should note the balancing truth, namely, that how-
ever different they may be, both are consciousness. There-
fore they can be joined.

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People speak of integration, unification, meaning what? Some mean the unification of the human character. Most, although unintentionally, mean the integration of man as a personal self. This is because they believe the personal self to be the whole man. But this little self ought not be integrated, but disintegrated. It blocks the way to true wholeness. It obscures the being. Hence it ought to be overcome, not built up. Most people aim to do just the reverse of this. Thus we have the cult of the "bigger and better" personality - with the result: an increase of egotism and disunity. This may help explain the evident but perplexing fact that some who sincerely aim to become unified actually become, instead, increasingly self-involved and divided.

The truth is that man as a personal self cannot be integrated in any true and creative sense, for it is the nature of this self to be separated from the real being. Therefore as long as a man remains a personal self he is divided within himself. Indeed just in proportion as the personal self coheres and develops will the man be split off from the larger and deeper part of his total human being.

In this experience I discovered that it is possible to integrate the human being as a whole, as a being. This I believe to be the only possible real unification. It is accomplished, as we have seen, by a dissolution of the personal self and an incorporation of its essential elements into our real beings. Then and then only is a man thoroughly

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137

mended and made whole. Only then is he one man, one being. Only then is he a being-individual, which is to say, a being undivided within himself. In my opinion, the only human beings who deserve to be called individuals are those who have thus become undivided and indivisible. Others ought to be called dis-individuals, or, if they are progressing towards true individuality, individuals-in-the-making. To think that exiles are individuals is to misunderstand both conditions. To apply the term individual to egotism is to misuse a term that ought to signify an attainment much to be desired.

Now if I can be joined within myself, and you within yourself, can it not also happen *between us*? Cannot *we* be joined? Consciousness is consciousness, in whomever it may be. The difference between "your" consciousness and "my" consciousness is no greater than that between ordinary awareness and Being-Consciousness. Evidently it is possible for you and myself to come together within one consciousness. You and I can become one.

Extend this thought and it will be recognized that it is possible for the whole of mankind to become one in consciousness - and this I take to be the real basis of our potential ability to realize the brotherhood of man. Extend this reasoning still further and we will understand that it is possible for men, in consciousness, to become one with the Universal Consciousness.

Let us recognize, however, that these possible

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138

attainments will never come to pass, cannot come to pass, as long as each one remains divided within himself. My inward divisions divide me not only from myself but from you. Only as I become joined within can I become joined without. Only as I cease being a separated self and become a unified being can I unite with you and others. This truth, if realized, would put an end to man's futile attempt to gather egotists into a brotherhood, to weld exiles into a world-community. It would initiate our fruitful effort to attain brotherhood by overcoming egotism, to bring about a world-community by developing out of exile and into Being.

Nor will these splendid ends be achieved simply by expanding our ordinary awareness, though such expansion is necessary as a means. What we really need is a new consciousness, a consciousness which by nature is large and inclusive, which makes us cognizant of inner and outer realities unreachable by the ordinary awareness however expanded. This ordinary awareness is but a segment of our greater consciousness, and it ought to be re-joined with its parent. When and only when this happens will we realize, not merely think and wish, that men are kin of one another and members of the one Life that exists throughout the universe.

These realizations came to me, as may be guessed, not at the time of the events on which they were founded, but later. I have expressed them here and now because they may help to bring out the larger human significance of happenings that otherwise might seem to have meaning only for the special student.

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139

During the initial phase of the experience, as has been indicated, I was absorbed in the inner events. The outer world seemed nonexistent. The time came, however, when I gazed outward, and then it was shown that I retained the ability to relate myself to the usual surroundings as one does in the ordinary waking state. There the world was. I saw the "L" station, my body resting at the railing, and, down below, the people on the streets, the traffic, the glittering front of the movie over on Broadway. I saw these things through the glow of my new state; I, as a being in Being, looked at them; but they were the same things with the same shapes. Trains were trains. Streets were streets. Human bodies were human bodies. How extraordinary, indeed how impossible it would have been had it been otherwise!

When I looked up above the roofs of houses and beheld the night-sky, there was nothing apocalyptic in it. High in the heavens were the same sparkles called stars, pin-points of light piercing the black dome of the world. I saw the same night-universe I had seen all the nights of my life. But how purely those stars shone, and what quality in the darkness! No night had ever seemed so sheerly beautiful, so fresh, so complete, so original.

Everything seemed original, as if the world out there had just been created, as if I were beholding the newly finished work of the First Creator.

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140

## III Birth Above the Body

From my depths came a thanksgiving, a rejoicing,
a hymn to the Nameless. I was penetrated with aliveness
in every particle. I was and felt new-born, utterly ex-
posed to a reality whose quality was electric. I felt
everything I had ever wanted to feel, and none of it was
as I had thought it would be.

How strange to have awakened and to be!

And when I looked at my body - how strange! It
seemed removed from me, placed "out there", and below me,
as though there were space between myself and it. It
seemed to have become small, a mere appendage. Though I
knew I was still attached to it, or it to me, I felt no
relation to it whatsoever. It could have walked off and
gone about its business, vanished, and I would not have
missed it.

I had been born above the body. To me the body was
an object. This was no attempt to objectify it, or to de-
tach. This was complete accomplished nonattachment - a
new relationship, a psychological reality, existing not in
attitude only but in full experience.

Gone was the feeling - I am a body, I am my body.
Identification with the body was so utterly dispelled that
it seemed impossible I had ever been in such a condition.
Present was the knowledge - I have a body. I have it, but
it is not "mine". I was nonpossessive.

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141

It had happened! What I had tried to do, without much success, by the practice of nonidentification, was accomplished - was done for me, effortlessly, with incredible success! So this is the way the body looks when one is really born above it. This was it - the attainment towards which the practice of detachment and other methods of re-birth tended. How perfectly extraordinary!

Only a short while ago I had located in that body. (Had I? It seemed incredible.) I had felt it to be me; at any rate, an inseparable part of me. From its position I had looked in and up and beheld this-being, and had felt this-being to be not-me, a stranger. Now, in and from this-being, I was looking down and out, seeing that body - and it was a stranger, a total stranger.

As I continued to contemplate this new relationship, realizations came to me. A body is a body. A being is a being. Each is itself. These components of the human totality, though intimately related in the living whole, are in nature distinct and separable. Therefore it is possible for them to unmesh. The being separates from the body at the time of death. The being can all but separate from the body while the man is still in this life. The basic internal relationships can in fact be altered so radically as to result in a man resurrected within himself and, thereby made new in his relation to the entire world.

I have a body. I am not that body. I am a being. The same was true of everyone. That people did not realize

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it did not make it untrue, unreal; it simply made it un-
real to them. Human beings literally and really are human
beings. We are beings at the human stage of cosmic evolu-
tion. The term *being* designates our real essential nature.
The term *human* designates our actual evolutionary stage.
To every human being at this stage, in this life, a physi-
cal body is attached.

If people could only bring themselves to realize
that they are beings, primarily; not bodies, not personal
selves, but *beings*. I had a sense of the profound inner
and outer changes that would inevitably occur if men awoke
to this truth. An end of *bondage* to the body. An end of
the cravings and prejudices that arise when people believe
that they and others *are their bodies*. An end of imprisonment in the little self. An end of the strife and false
goals sought when men believe they are their false selves.
The beginning of *being-life*. The beginning, everywhere on
earth, of a world created by human beings for human beings.
I also had a sense that in no other way would these changes
come about. It seemed to me that the revolution which man-
kind awaits depends upon this one realization above all others.

We know that the vitals of the body are not in the
hands and feet, but in the head and torso. The hands and
feet may be cut off; the body will live. I now knew that
the vital centers of my life were not in my body but in my
being, in my spiritual torso. It was starkly clear to me
that I was in no way critically dependent upon that small,

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143

insubstantial physical frame. I knew as surely as I could
know without it actually happening, that should the slender
threads that held me to the body be cut, I would continue
being, existing, living. Should the body die, my earthly
life would of course terminate for this time. But, just as
the body was only a part of my being-totality, so my earthly
life was only a segment of my total universal existence.

Universal existence? I could not doubt it. What I
was experiencing made me sure of it. As a being, I had a
life enduring. The body is bound to this space, to this
time. Just as certainly, the being is not so bound. The
being has its own great space and long time. The being pre-
cedes the birth of the perishable body and succeeds its de-
struction. In a total human being there is that which is
imperishable - and therefore perfectable. We can develop
and perfect our beings because, as I realized, our beings
remain in existence long enough for this long-range purpose
to be accomplished.

This came to me not as a pleasant belief in an easy
and guaranteed immortality, but as a reality, stark and re-
lentless as it was hopeful. Our beings _have_ to endure, re-
gardless of our wish. They _have_ to accomplish what they were
created to accomplish, however long it takes, whatever the
labor, whatever the suffering, no matter what the unenlightened
will of man may do to the contrary.

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IV First Sight

Inward moving continued. Growing, expanding, pro-
ceeded. This-being, now that I had entered it, continued
creating itself. I continued developing. I became volu-
minous, towering. It was as if some miraculous yeast were
in me, so that I was rising, rising. It was as though a
cubit actually were being added to my stature - and not by
my taking thought.

Below me spread a strange earth. Above me arched a
strange universe. Down in front of me stood a strange man.

As I seemed above my body, so I seemed above New York,
only more so. I saw the dark earth, and it seemed remote,
far down and removed from the center of the universe, a small
globe on the outskirts. I was close enough to see the night-
life of the city, but the traffic of cars and people seemed
"way down there". These are the exact words I used.

As I was nonattached to my body (and because I was non-
attached to it), so was I nonattached to the ordinary world
and its objects. As my body did not seem to belong to me,
so I did not seem to belong in the world that met my eyes.
Not only was I not of that world, I could not feel myself
even to be within its boundaries. I was as if outside, in
the universe, beholding a planet that only recently had come
into my view. Though I knew I had seen it before, it felt as
though this were my first sight of the earth, of its people,
their buildings, their city.

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I realized - The Earth is the Earth. Of all the bodies of the universe, Earth is just this particular planet. Here it is, in all its unfamiliar reality. Not my pictures of it - the planet itself. Not some small part of it, but the whole globe. This was a consciousness of the Earth not such as is gained by travel and study but as directly perceived from a cosmic vantage point. Perhaps a man in a plane flying high enough to have some sense of the whole planet yet low enough to discern its features might have a similar awareness. This awareness, once it had come, remained with me thereafter. It came to be my natural awareness whenever I had occasion to take cognizance of the Earth. I continued to be what we may call Earth-conscious.

I saw people on Earth, a strange body bearing my name among them. People, I realized, are earth-beings. Of all the places of the great cosmos they arise just there. They live just there. I gazed at people intently, as one does at things of interest that one is seeing for the first time. I took in what I could witness of their life. As I continued to look a new feeling came over me. Something was missing from that life.

Earth-people walked the streets, drove motor-cars, went in and out of buildings, but they were not awake, not aware of themselves, did not realize they lived, did not realize they were beings with bodies, did not realize. They were closer to unconsciousness than to real consciousness - and that was the way I had been before awakening. I was viewing somnambulists.

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Consciousness was missing. The so-called waking state, when separated from Being-Consciousness, is more akin to sleep than to wakefulness. It is a dark unbreathing condition - but, as I had learned, dispersable by the light and power from within. It is an intolerable condition.

The waking state is inadequate to human-being-life. By means of it people can not realize who they are, where they are, why they live, where they are going. Ordinary awareness is tragically inadequate. By its dim light men can not cope with, because they can not discern, the basic issues and possibilities of their own complex composition. Problems are mountainous, consciousness puny.

Man, the master of himself? Man, the wise manager of his affairs? How possible? Can a sleeping man direct? Men, evidently, were out of hand, except as governed by automatic regulators. What chance had they to control their actions, foresee consequences? What wonder that most of their attempts to remedy what is wrong result in still more wrongs requiring still more remedies? They are not aware enough to know that their first efforts should be to increase awareness.

I felt a sort of horror, and pity, and indignation. Something must have been done to people. It was unnatural that human beings pass their lives as somnambulists. It was diabolical that men be unequipped with the consciousness needed to enable them to live as men.

But how could it be? How was it possible that human

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beings were sleep-walkers? Why do not all human beings
awake? Why did not the Power touch all people as it had
touched me, and lift the human race into a consciousness
adequate for the life of man?

Why - but there it was. People were sinking under
the accumulating weight of their own complicated uncon-
sciousness, blindly fighting each other as they went down.

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## V Expanse

I was discovering that my being was in vital contact with the vast universe. Through being, as had never been possible through body, I was becoming connected with the all-embracing world. Now I realized with certainty and astonishment - I live and move within the Universe.

Universal life, the limitless spread of creation, became ever so much more real to me than the particularized life of men and bodies. The whole world became ever so much more real than the partial reality of the tiny planet called Earth. The Universe became real to me.

Now I was aware - The Universe exists.

The Universe is. It is not a conception of man's brain, not a projection of his dreams. It is a stupendous reality. In its own grand right it is living.

From this moment, whatever the particular focus of my attention, something in me was constantly aware of the living Universe, and that I was in it. And it was at this time that I began to have the knowledge and the feelings that became overpowering later on. We are in the Universe, and we cannot escape from it. Not by death, not by any means whatsoever. It is not for us to decide whether we shall or shall not be. It is not for us to say whether we shall live or not. We are being and living in the Universe, and cannot cease.

Ever more vividly I recognized that the Earth is but

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a small province of the great world. Those who dwell on it as if it were the one and only place of life, are provincial. Travel the Earth around, and if that is all, you remain provincial. Increase your mental cognizance of it; this will not make you a citizen of the world. Direct your thoughts to distant stars; but you will be viewing them from the standpoint of a man on Earth. One must rise above the Earth to become universal. One must experience the Universe, not in thought alone but with his whole being, in order to become aware of himself as a being of the Universe; and to do this, one has to rise above himself, to be born above the body, above the personal self.

I seemed to understand that there are two directions of moving, one horizontal, the other perpendicular - and a third, the spiral, which includes the other two.

Bodily motion is horizontal. It moves outward on a surface that seems flat but actually curves, so that the motion ends where it started. Personal self motion is similarly horizontal. Being-motion is perpendicular and spiral-ling. It moves outward and inward and at the same time upward, attaining level after level of ascent.

A man may keep his body in constant motion and send it to the ends of the Earth; he remains a body, on its level, in consciousness body-bound, earth-bound. He may extend his personal self; he remains a personal self, ego-bound. (Power over others does not help a man to transcend himself; it prevents; it increases the self-imprisonment of both parties.)