To Netnews Homepage Previous Next Index Table of Contents
From Intellect to Intuition - Chapter One - Introductory Thoughts
Looking back over the seventy or more years that have elapsed since Carlyle wrote these words, we know that mankind did not fail to go forward. The electrical age was inaugurated and the wonders of the scientific achievements of our time are known by us all. With optimism, therefore, in a time of fresh crisis, we can go forward with true courage, for the portals into the New Age are far more clearly seen. Perhaps it is true also that man is only now attaining his majority and is about to enter upon his inheritance and to discover within himself powers and capacities, faculties and tendencies which are the guarantee of a vital and useful manhood, and of eternal existence. We are completing the stage wherein the emphasis has been laid upon the mechanism, upon the sumtotal of cells, which constitute the body and the brain, with their automatic reaction to pleasure, to pain and to thought. We know much about Man, the machine. The mechanistic school of psychologists have placed us deeply in their debt [13] with their discoveries about the apparatus whereby a human being comes into contact with his environment. But there are men among us, men who are not mere machines. We have the right to measure our ultimate capacities and our potential greatness by the achievements of the best among us; these great ones are not "freak" products of divine caprice or of blind evolutionary urge, but are themselves the guarantee of the ultimate achievement of the whole. Irving Babbitt remarks, that there is a something in man's nature "that sets him apart simply as man, from other animals, and that something Cicero defines as a 'sense of order and decorum and measure in deeds and words'." Babbitt adds (and this is the point to note) that "the world would have been a better place if more persons had made sure they were human before setting out to be superhuman." - Babbitt, Irving, Humanism: An Essay at Definition. There is, perhaps, an intermediate stage wherein we function as men, sustain our human relations, and discharge our just obligations, thus fulfiling our temporary destiny. The question arises here as to whether such a stage is even yet generally possible when we remember that there are millions of illiterate persons on our planet at this time! But, along with this tendency toward pure humanity and the drift away from the standardization of the human unit, there emerges a group to whom we give the name of mystics. They testify to another world of experience and contacts. They bear witness [14] to a personal realization and to a phenomenal manifestation and satisfaction of which the average man knows nothing. As Dr. Bennett says "the mystics themselves have described their attainment as a seeing into the meaning of the universe, a seeing of how all things belong together. They have found the clue." - Bennett, Charles A., A Philosophical Study of Mysticism, page 81. Down the ages they have come forth and said in unison: there is another kingdom in nature. This kingdom has its own laws, its own phenomena and its own intimate relationships. It is the kingdom of the spirit. We have found it and you too can ascertain its nature. These witnesses fall into two groups; the purely mystical and emotional quester who sees the vision and falls down in an illuminated rapture before the beauty that he has sensed, and secondly, the knowers, who have added to the emotional rapture an intellectual achievement (an orientation of the mind) which enables them to do more than sense and enjoy. They understand; they know, and have become identified with that new world of being towards which the pure mystic reaches. The line of demarcation between these knowers of divine things and those who sense the vision is very slight. There is, however, a no-man's ground between the two groups on which a great transition takes place. There is an interlude in experience and in development which changes the visionary mystic into the practical knower. There is a process and a technique to which the mystic can subject himself which coordinates him and develops in him a new and subtle [15] apparatus, by means of which he no longer sees the vision of divine reality but knows himself to be that reality itself. It is with this transitional process and with this work of educating the mystic, that the meditation technique has to do. It is this with which we deal in this book. The problem of leading man into his heritage as a human being is the function of the educators and of the psychologists. They must lead him up to the door of the mystical world. Paradoxical as it may sound, the work of leading him into his spiritual heritage is the work of religion and of science. Dr. Pupin tells us that "science and religion supplement each other, they are the two pillars of the portal through which the human soul enters into the world where divinity resides." - Pupin, Michael, The New Reformation, page 217.
To Netnews Homepage Previous Next Index Table of Contents
Last updated Monday, July 6, 1998 © 1998 Netnews Association. All rights reserved.