Quest Magazine

Consciousness from Zombies to Angels: The Shadow and the Light of Knowing Who You Are

Christian de Quincey
Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2009. 304 pp., paper, $18.95.

The quest to understand human consciousness might be compared to a treasure hunt, but I like to think of it more as a butterfly chase. The problem, of course, is that it's a case of human consciousness chasing itself, and so we are immediately faced with a quandary the poet Lew Welch described as groping around in the dark looking for a flashlight when all you need the flashlight for is to find your flashlight. And so if you plan to go after the darkling prize of human consciousness, you better have a good net. To that end, Christian de Quincey recommends we turn to philosophy. His latest book presents a compelling, albeit quirky, case for using it to outfit consciousness in order to catch itself.

De Quincey, a professor of philosophy and consciousness studies at John F. Kennedy University, has written what he calls a "step-by-step 'owner's guide'" for the mind. In the opening pages, he offers a caveat: "Reading this book is likely to challenge some of your basic assumptions about who you are, about the world you live in, and how it all fits together." Indeed, this book could very well unsettle some of its readers, but all of them are in for a bracing ride as de Quincey navigates the foaming waters at the confluence of science, philosophy, and spirituality. In response to the central question”"what is consciousness and how does it work in the world?"”he offers "seven steps to transforming your life." This smacks a bit too much of self-help gimmickry, but, thanks to the author's depth of knowledge and intellectual rigor, the book manages to succeed nevertheless.

The volume is divided into three main sections, each focused on a different mode that human beings use to know themselves and the world. De Quincey refers to these ways of knowing as "gifts," three distinct epistemological styles that he gathers under the headings of philosophical, scientific, and mystical. The first two sections lay the groundwork. Part one"The Philosopher's Gift"provides a succinct review of some key philosophical problems that confront anybody who delves into the nature of consciousness, not the least of which is the problem of language. De Quincey also touches on the problems of "other minds" (i.e., it's not "all about me"), the mind-body connection, and free will versus determinism. The considerably lengthier part two, titled "The Scientist's Gift," examines what contemporary science has to say about that marvelous "three-pound universe," the human brain. Following in the footsteps of Carl Jung, de Quincey uses "the physical sciences not to explain the psyche but as a potentially rich source of metaphors."

This is exactly what happens in the heart of the book, part three"The Mystic's Gift"wherein chaos theory supplies de Quincey with analogies to convey his central purpose: to encourage as many people as he can to embark on the journey of spiritual transformation, which he says leads ultimately to "a realm beyond all language, beyond all concepts and ideas, and even beyond distinction between knower and known." An ample body of spiritual literature from both East and West suggests he is on to something here. The book is most engaging when pondering the role of "attractors," a term used in chaos theory to refer to the tendency of a system to fall spontaneously into a pattern. In de Quincey's hands, the attractor becomes a metaphor of wide applicability, suggesting how we are able to distill meaning from apparent meaninglessness. Consider the unavailing routine of everyday life. Unavailing? Not in de Quincey's view. "Our lives follow these swirling paths carved out by our own sets of strange attractors, swirling around a multiplicity of basinsfor example, family, friends, work, church, club, hobby, pets, stores, politics, education, entertainment, media, and on and on. And with every strange attractor, we usually have nested systems of other strange attractors, many competing at cross-purposes. Think of all the goals, desires, wishes, and fears that drive us and orient our lives in different ways. Together, they all couple and merge to form the all-encompassing strange attractor that is our life." It would be difficult to find a clearer and more pertinent description of the mysterious causes and conditions that give rise to the extraordinary ordinariness of our daily lives.

Though nowhere does de Quincey mention the venerable William James, his book is very much indebted to James's tradition of generous-hearted, pragmatic spirituality. At one point, he echoes James's famous image of the stream of consciousness: "Let me be clear: When I use the word thought I mean an idea abstracted from the ongoing flow of experience." Other times he reminds me of Gary Zukav, and every once in a while of Alan Watts. Unfortunately, de Quincey is occasionally less than felicitous in his expression, as when we encounter passages that in their breeziness border on platitude: "We are active, voting shareholders in the cosmic corporation, cocreating the very next moment. Let's make it a good one." "You are not who you think you are." "Everything is connected to everything elsealways." Sentences such as these fall short of the lofty goal de Quincey sets for himself and his readers: to get beyond "the narrow prism of the ego." Shopworn expressions won't do it. Nevertheless, a good deal of common-sense counsel and indeed wisdom run throughout the book.

Despite the maladroit moments, De Quincey serves as a companionable guide through some dense philosophical thickets, and he seems aware of his own limitations as a writer. "In places, my tone and style have been ironic, even irreverent. But my intentions have been serious throughout. I wanted to engage you, to appeal to your mind and your heart; for you to realize and appreciate with me the stupendously simple and profound gift of being that we are and have. What a privilege just to be alive, just to existand to be able to know and enjoy it!" In the end, this book catches no butterflies, but that was never its author's intention. He sets you up to do it for yourself.

John P. O'Grady

John P. O'Grady's latest contribution to Quest was "Shadow Gazing: On Photography and Imagination" in the Fall 2009 issue.

Pavel Florensky, A Quiet Genius: The Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Russia’s Unknown da Vinci

Avril Pyman
New York: Continuum, 2010. xxiii + 304 pages, hardcover, $29.95.

One of the most remarkable but least known figures in the Russian spiritual renaissance of the early twentieth century, Pavel Florensky (1882–1937) was a polymath genius. An ordained Russian Orthodox priest, he made wide-ranging and seminal contributions to mathematics, physics, electrodynamics, folkloristics, philology, marine botany, art history, earth science, philosophy, theology, and esotericism that were part of his lifelong quest for a comprehensive worldview that would unite science, religion, and art; reason and faith; Orthodox tradition and futuristic thaumaturgy. Works by and about Florensky, long suppressed, have only in recent years begun to reappear, and Avril Pyman’s fine book is the first extensive study of him in English.

Especially valuable are her chapters on Florensky’s family and early years, disclosing the Armenian, Georgian, and Azerbaijanian contributions to his breadth of culture and soul. Pyman also describes Florensky’s deep Platonic friendships with a series of brilliant young men; his unromantic but happy marriage to a good woman from a simple peasant background; his devotion to his family; his happiness in daily service as parish priest; and later, after his arrest in Stalin’s terror, his iconic stature among his fellow gulag prisoners. In all this, Pyman helps us see Florensky not only as an extraordinary genius but also as an exceptionally good man.

Although the book generally gives a clearer picture of the man than of his ideas, Pyman does provide valuable guidance to Florensky’s difficult spiritual classic, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, and helps unravel his profound but challenging ideas, such as the connection between discontinuity in non-Euclidian mathematics and the semiheretical Russian spiritual practice of imiaslavie (name worship). Indeed, Florensky’s great theme was the relationship of the latest advances in mathematics and physics to the deepest traditions of mystical Orthodox spirituality. The image that sticks is of Father Pavel in a worn white priest’s cassock lecturing about electrification projects to workers and uniformed communists in a village classroom with a bust of Lenin beside the podium.

Florensky died in Stalin’s gulag in 1937. The publication that led to his last arrest and eventual execution was a paper arguing that the geometry of imaginary numbers predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity for a body moving faster than light is the geometry for the kingdom of God. Even while serving his sentences in Siberia and in the furthest north, Florensky continued to conduct important scientific research on permafrost and on the extraction of iodine from seaweed. Though unable to conduct religious services in the gulag, he did serve as shepherd, friend, and comforter to his fellow inmates.

If, as it should be, this excellent book is eventually reprinted, a few minor errors could be corrected. In the useful glossary of names, and elsewhere in the text, the birth year of the Russian thinker Nikolai Fedorov should be 1829; the name of Fedorov’s friend and follower should be Vladimir Aleksandrovich (not Valentin Alekseevich) Kozhevnikov; and the birth year of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel should be 1770.

George M. Young

The reviewer, a specialist in Russian literature and thought, is adjunct in English and language studies and fellow of the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England.

Transcribed and annotated by Michael Gomes
The Hague: I.S.I.S. Foundation, 2010. xvi + 687 pp., hardcover, $103.10.

The publisher of this work is not the Egyptian goddess, but the International Study-centre for Independent Search for Truth of the Dutch Point Loma Theosophical Society, which has done a notable work in making this book available.

Shortly after the publication of her major work, The Secret Doctrine, in 1888, H. P. Blavatsky met with a few of her students to explore their many and confused questions about that book. Those meetings were recorded by a stenographer, but until now only a severely edited version of the first twelve sessions had been published. This volume is a full transcription of all twenty-two sessions held during the first six months of 1889. As such, it is an invaluable guide to the study of HPB’s major work and, in repeated spots, a delightful read because of the informal nature of the discussions and the witty interchange between HPB and her disciples.

The editor of the volume, Michael Gomes, is one of our best Theosophical historians, noted for such works as The Dawning of the Theosophical Movement (Quest, 1987) and Theosophy in the Nineteenth Century: An Annotated Bibliography (Garland, 1994), as well as his excellent abridgments of HPB’s major works: Isis Unveiled (Quest, 1997) and The Secret Doctrine (New York: Tarcher Penguin, 2009). New as it is, this volume is clearly a major Theosophical classic, which every student of Theosophy needs to know and which even the casual reader can find informative and entertaining.

John Algeo

The reviewer is past president of the Theosophical Society in America and past vicepresident of the international Society.

The Masters Speak: An American Businessman Encounters Ashish and Gurdjieff

Seymour B. Ginsburg
Wheaton: Quest, 2010. xi + 307 pp., paper, $18.95.

Seymour B. Ginsburg has written a useful book that might have been better titled “Notes on the Path to the Higher Self.” In fact there are no masters here, and they do not speak. What we have is the story of Ginsburg’s progression toward the higher Self. Beginning as a businessman (he was the first president of the Toys “R” Us chain), Ginsburg found himself increasingly dissatisfied with the “ruthless competition in the business world.” Finally, the shock caused by the death of his young wife in 1971 led him to question the foundations of life.

Ginsburg’s search initially led him to the writings of H. P. Blavatsky (he has long been involved in the Theosophical Society in southern Florida). In 1978 he journeyed to India, where he met Sri Madhava Ashish, a Scotsman (born Alexander Phipps; 1920–97) who had become a Hindu monk and was living in a small ashram in the foothills of northern India. Ashish is best known to Theosophists as coauthor (with his teacher, Sri Krishna Prem) of Man, the Measure of All Things, a commentary on the Stanzas of Dzyan in The Secret Doctrine. Writing on his own, Ashish also produced a sequel, Man, Son of Man. Ashish’s letters to Ginsburg over the following nineteen years form the core of The Masters Speak.

Around the time of his meeting with Ashish, Ginsburg was drawn to the ideas of the spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff (1866?–1949). Gurdjieff was born of a Greek father and an Armenian mother and brought up in Kars, an area on the Turkish-Armenian border then recently incorporated into Russia and inhabited by a mixture of peoples: Greeks, Armenians, Turks, Kurds, each with its traditions, folklore, and faiths. As a young man, he traveled in search of wisdom to the Middle East and especially to Central Asia. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, he went to Moscow and St. Petersburg and started speaking about what he had learned.

Much of Central Asian Sufism—a likely source of Gurdjieff’s teachings— is expressed through sacred dance. Gurdjieff disassociated the dances from their Islamic context, but not from their aim of self-awareness and self-observation. In regard to this approach, Ashish advised Ginsburg: “Your loyalty must be to the goal itself and nothing more or less. The ancient wisdom is nothing if it is not present here, present as a living reality and not merely as a series of texts and mouthed words. It is nothing to you unless you find it in yourself. . . . Dances, postures, movements, and other exercises may provide opportunities for identifying particular states of mind that will help you on your path, but you will not travel further by seeking out new exercises. All that you need is already in you.”

The Gurdjieff “Work” (as it is called) sets out some techniques for moving toward the higher Self. Gurdjieff was once asked what it would be like to have higher consciousness, and he replied, “Everything more vivid.” Since in Gurdjieff’s view the higher Self is a “more vivid” version of the lower self, it is with the components of the latter that the higher must be reached: the body, the chakras, the emotions, intuition, will, and the mind. The physical body is the most concrete of these components, and thus it is used as a starting-point for much of the Gurdjieff work, as the mind is often the starting- point for many Buddhist schools. Despite these differences, there is wide agreement that, as Ashish advised, “The path is inward, inward into the heart of your own being, the center of your own being. . . . When in doubt, go to the source—namely meditate, cultivate awareness, hold back from unnecessary activities, don’t let the mind run on recriminations and self-justifications. . . . Seek for the thing where it is—within.”

The passage to the higher Self is usually gradual. For some, there can be a dramatic breakthough, such as a powerful dream or an experience of wholeness and unity. But for most people, segments of the old Self will fall away more gradually: the emotions are refined; intuition becomes clearer, the will more focused, the mind a better servant. As Ashish writes, “When the condition of the Higher Self is reached, the individuality does not vanish; personality is illuminated in every aspect and can play its true role, which is to bend and adapt to every changing need.”

The Gurdjieff groups with which Ginsburg was associated discouraged members from following more than one path at a time as well as from speaking about their experiences, doubts, or sentiments with those outside the group. Such prohibitions can lead to a sectarian approach, and in such a context one can easily become locked into a system. In response to these issues Ashish wrote to Ginsburg: “You’ve found the path. Travel it. Don’t let yourself be pulled away from it. Once you can get your aim clear, problems about how to live, what to do, how to reconcile the outer life with the inner, etc. begin to get straightened out. This is why I try to get people to clarify their inner aim first. . . . Our work is so difficult that we need every bit of help we can get. It really does not matter where or from whom we take help, provided that we have enough intelligence and a clear enough view of our goal to be able to take help that is consonant with our aim and to reject those components that are contrary to it.”

It is always useful to follow the story of the spiritual development of others. This is no substitute for one’s own steps on the path, but it is always helpful to know that one is not alone.

René Wadlow

The reviewer is editor of the online journal Transnational Perspectives, which focuses on world politics and social policy.