List of authors
Download:TXTDOCXPDF
Plexus
dwell! No Promised Land in sight. Nothing on the horizon but empty symbols.

That gulf between the dawn man, who participated mystically, and contemporary man, who is unable to communicate except through sterile intellect, can only be bridged by a new type of man, the man with a cosmic consciousness. The sage, the prophet, the visionary, they all spoke in Apocalyptic terms. From earliest times the few have been attempting to break through. Some undoubtedly have broken through—and will remain forever outside the rat trap.

A morphology of history, valid, exciting, inspiring though it may be, is still a death science. Spengler was not concerned with what lies beyond history. I am. Others are. Even if Nirvana be only a word, it is a pregnant word, it contains a promise. That secret which lies at the heart of the world may yet be dragged into the open. Even ages ago it was pronounced to be an Open secret.

If the solution to life is the living of it, then let us live, live more abundantly! The masters of life are not found in books. They are not historical figures. They are situated in eternity, and they beseech us unceasingly to join them, in eternity.

At my elbow, as I write these lines, is a photograph torn from a book, a photograph of an unknown Chinese sage who is living today. Either the photographer did not know who he was or he withheld his name. We know only that he is from Peking: that is all the information which is vouchsafed. When I turn my head to look at him, it is as though he were right here in my room. He is more alive—even in a photograph—than anyone I know. He is not simply a man of spirit—he is all spirit. He is Spirit itself, I might say. All this is concentrated in his expression. The look which he gives forth is completely joyous and luminous. It says without equivocation: Life is bliss!

Do you, suppose that, from the eminence on which he is poised—serene, light as a bird, with a wisdom all-embracing—a morphology of history would mean anything to him? No question here of exchanging the perspective of the frog for that of the bird. Here we have the perspective of a god. He is there and his position is unalterable. Instead of perspective he has compassion. He does not preach wisdom—he sheds light.

Do you suppose that he is unique? Not I. I believe that all over the world, and in the most unsuspected places (naturally), there are men—or gods—like this radiant being. They are not enigmatic, they are transparent. There is no mystery about them whatever: they are out in the open, perpetually on view. If we are removed from them it is only because we cannot accept their divine simplicity. Illumined being, we say, yet never ask with what it is they are illumined. To be aflame with spirit (which is life), to radiate unending joy, to be serene above the chaos of the world and still be part of the world, human, divinely human, closer than any brother—how is it we do not yearn to be thus? Is there a role which is better, deeper, richer, more compelling? Then shout it from the roof-tops! We want to know. And we want to know immediately.

I do not need to wait for your response. I see the answer all about me. It is not really an answer—it is an evasion. The illustrious one at my elbow looks straight at me: he fears not to gaze upon the face of the world. He has neither rejected the world nor renounced it: he is part of it, just as stone, tree, beast, flower and star are part of it. In his being he is the world, all there can ever be of it … When I look at those around me I see only the profiles of averted faces. They are trying not to look at life—it is too terrible or too horrible, too this or too that. They see only the awesome dragon of life, and they are impotent before the monster. If only they had the courage to look straight into the dragon’s jaws!

In many ways what is called history seems to me nothing more than a manifestation of this same fearsome attitude towards life. It is possible that what we call the historical would cease to be, would be erased from consciousness, once we performed that simple soldierly movement of Eyes Front! What is worse than a backward glance at the world is an oblique one.

When we speak of men making history we mean to say that they Lave in some measure altered the course of life. But the man at my elbow is beyond such silly dreams. He knows that man alters nothing—not even his own self. He knows that man can do one thing only, and that that is his sole aim in life—open the eyes of the soul! Yes, man has this choice—to let in the light or to keep the shutters closed. In making the choice man acts. This is his part vis-a-vis creation.

Open the eyes wide and the stir must die down. And when the stir dies down then commences the real music.
The dragon snorting fire and smoke from his nostril is only expelling his fears. The dragon does not stand guard at the heart of the world—he stands at the entrance to the cave of wisdom. The dragon has reality only in the phantasmal world of superstition.

The homeless, homesick man of the big cities. What heart-rending pages Spengler devotes to the plight of the intellectual nomad! Rootless, sterile, sceptical, soulless—and homeless and homesick to boot. Primitive folk can loose themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual nomad never. Homesickness for the great city is keener than any other nostalgia. Home is for him any one of these giant cities, but even the nearest village is alien territory. He would sooner die upon the pavement than go ‘back’ to the land.
Let me say it unequivocally—after a reading nothing in the world of actualities had meaning or importance for me. The daily news was about as remote as the dog star. I was in the very center of the transformative process. All was death and transfiguration.

There was only one headline which still had power to excite me, and that was—THE END OF THE WORLD IS IN SIGHT! In that imaginary phrase I never sensed a menace to my own world, only to the world. I was closer to Augustine than to Jerome. But I had not yet found my Africa. My point of repair was a stuffy little furnished room. Alone in it I experienced a strange sort of peace. It was not the peace that passeth understanding. Ah no! It was an intermittent sort, the augur of a greater, a more enduring peace. It was the peace of a man who was able to reconcile himself with the condition of the world in thought.
Still, it was a step. The cultured individual seldom gets beyond this stage.

Eternal life is not life beyond the grave, but the true spiritual life, said a philosopher. What a time it has taken me to realize the full import of such a statement! … A whole century of Russian thought (the 19th) was preoccupied with this question of the end, of the establishment on earth of the Kingdom of God. But in North America it was as if that century, those thinkers and searchers after the true reality of life, had never existed. True, now and then a rocket exploded in our midst. Now and then we did receive a message from some distant shore. Such events were regarded not only as mysterious, bizarre, outlandish, but as occult. This last label meant that they were no longer serviceable Or applicable to daily life.

Reading Spengler was not precisely a balm. It was more of a spiritual exercise. The critique of Western thought underlying his cyclical pattern had the same effect upon me as the Koans have for the Zen disciple. Again and again I arrived at my own peculiar Western state of Satori. Time and again I experienced those lightning flashes of illumination which herald the break-through. There came excruciating moments when, as if the universe were an accordion, I could view it as an infinitesimal speck or expand it infinitely, so that only the eye of God could encompass it. Gazing at a star outside my window, I could magnify it ten thousand times; I could roam from star to star, like an angel, endeavoring all the while to grasp the unverse in these super-telescopic proportions. I would then return to my chair, look at my finger-nail, or rather at an almost invisible spot on the nail, and see into it the universe which the physicist endeavors to create out of the atomic web of nothingness. That man could ever conceive of nothingness always astounded me.

For so long now the conceptual world has been man’s whole world. To name, to define, to explain … Result: unceasing anguish. Expand or contract the universe ad injinitum—a parlor game. Playing the god instead of trying to be as God. Godding, godding—and at the same time believing in nothing. Bragging of the miracles of science, yet looking upon the world about as so much shit. Frightening ambivalence! Electing for systems, never for man. Denying the miracle men through the systems erected in their names.

On lonely nights, pondering the problem—only one ever!—I could see so very clearly the world as it is, see what it is

Download:TXTDOCXPDF

dwell! No Promised Land in sight. Nothing on the horizon but empty symbols. That gulf between the dawn man, who participated mystically, and contemporary man, who is unable to communicate