Quest Magazine

Printed in the Winter 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Goldsberry, Clare. "The Dangers of Staying in One Place" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 29-31

By Clare Goldsberry

Google is a great place to find philosophical tidbits. While this saying didn’t have an attribution, I copied it into a book I keep of great quotes:

Sometimes walking away has nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with strength. We walk away not because we want others to realize our worth and value, but because we finally realize our own.

It struck a chord with me because many times I’ve walked away from people, from situations, from relationships, and even from religions because they no longer fit or seemed right any longer. At these times I finally realize that the need to fulfill my own destiny (whatever that is), or to follow my path, steers me in another direction, because the direction I’ve been moving in no longer feels right. I have never been able to stay in one place very long — or with one person — and especially not with one religion. My Higher Self begins to stir something within me; my consciousness begins to shift, and I can feel myself beginning to pull away. It’s an odd feeling, even though I’ve felt it many times during my life. It is as if I am moving further from a particular situation or place in my life to make room for something else.

I seem to feel more comfortable in places and with people who offer me freedom from the constraints of rigid thinking or acting. I feel drawn to places in which “flow” can happen naturally and spontaneously. I love the natural world, and my connection to it grew out of the place where I grew up. As a child I was reared on a small farm that was primarily one big playground for my two brothers and me. Our father worked in the city, but our mother had been raised on a farm, so she did the gardening and the canning. We always had a couple of cows that were raised for meat, and some ponies for us to ride.

My world was one of the smell of green grass and fresh-cut clover hay, the tantalizing excitement of summer rains that came often and kept the air washed clean and invited the cry of the rain crows — which I later learned were mourning doves. My favorite spot was in my Thinking Tree — a great, noble sycamore with smooth, white-barked limbs mottled with flaking brown bits of overbark — lying out prone on a huge limb that had grown horizontally out over the creek that ran through our farm. I’d lie there for hours, listening to the music of the water flowing beneath me while I daydreamed of my life to come, even though it was always difficult to imagine being anyplace but on the farm.

It was there, in my Thinking Tree, at age ten, that I first heard my inner voice. I’d asked what I would be when I grew up. “You’re going to be a writer, Clare,” it said. It was plain and clear — a sound, yet not a sound that one would hear with one’s physical ears. Whose was that voice? I finally satisfied myself with the idea that it was God talking to me. After all, God knew me and knew my name. Surely it must have been God!

As much as I loved our little farm in Kentucky, I was always filled with a restless sense that I wanted to — needed to — move on. Being called away was the first step. Finding the path by which I could go forward was often the more difficult step.

For me, a lifelong spiritual seeker, the pursuit of religion and the spiritual path was my passion. I was always questioning everything. I’d question my Sunday School teachers until they were exasperated with me. “Just believe!” they would tell me, which certainly sounded easy enough but never really satisfied my longing to know.

When I became a teenager in high school, a new minister came to Bullittsville Christian Church who was very different from most of the ministers we’d had. He was an Old Testament scholar. He did not seem rigid in his religious thinking, but was open and seemed to enjoy my questions, which he was not at all reluctant to discuss with me. We’d spend hours in his office in the church talking about religion, the history of religion, and why people were (or weren’t) religious. When I married a Mormon man at age twenty-one, Rev. O’Neal told me that I would join the Mormon church. “No, I won’t,” I protested. “I like the Disciples of Christ church. I won’t change.”

“Oh yes, you will, Clare,” he replied. “Because you have too many questions and Mormons have all the answers.”

Not that those answers would be the truth or my truth — but they did have answers. After nearly ten years, however, their answers were no longer satisfying. I’d never really stopped searching for or pursuing the truth, and few answers the Mormons provided held any real satisfaction to my constant questioning.

And so my pursuit continued beyond Mormonism, back to the Disciples, out of the Disciples, and into the Eastern philosophies — first Buddhism, then its forerunner, Hinduism. I have often asked myself if the pursuit for knowledge, truth, and realization should ever end. Do we at some point settle into a single spiritual tradition and become content with what we find there? Or are questions an intrinsic part of our human search for the divine? And if the questions are an intrinsic part of our search, then are they more important than the answers?

There is something certain, reassuring, and comfortable in being dedicated to a strict dogma or to absolute doctrine. I’ve often thought that people like the Mormons, who believe absolutely and undoubtedly that their church is the only true church, that their belief system is the only true belief system and provides the one way to get to heaven, are perhaps more content and satisfied in their absolutes than we who are seekers. From time to time, I’ve felt envious of people who could find perfect contentment in one place for their entire life. But that wasn’t me. That’s not who I am, and so I must always continue on, listening to the call that it is time to leave.

There are dangers in staying in one place. One can get stuck in that place, and stuck in a way that becomes an obstacle. Belief systems can become our greatest obstacle to our spiritual growth because we begin to invest everything into the belief system, which can be rigid, unyielding, and unbending and fail to invest in the fluid and dynamic experiences which life can give us.

I’ve discovered over the years that I do not take being called away lightly. My first response is to resist that call, to tell myself that it’s just my own feelings of restlessness arising again and that if I just stick it out the feeling will go away. That tends to work for a while. But that nagging feeling of being called away stays with me, no matter how forcefully I try to tamp it down or push it to the back of my mind.

At these times I have a feeling that my work or my learning in this place is complete, and there is nothing more I can do here. The purpose for which I was called to this particular job or spiritual calling has been fulfilled, and it’s time for me to walk away from it and await my next calling.

Often I’ve received the call to move on at times when I believed very much that I had found my place and was doing exactly what I needed to be doing in my spiritual life. This shift in consciousness, which seems to come as my experiences change, leaves me feeling that I no longer need to hold on to past ideas. Although they seemed to fit perfectly then, they no longer feel like a part of my path. It’s not an abandonment of past ideas — I’ve stayed rooted primarily in Eastern philosophies — but it is more of a moving beyond what was “true” for me yesterday to a deeper understanding of what it means to be on path that is being created one step at a time as I experience it.

Buddhism was that path for me — and remains so. After many years of study, contemplation, and meditation on my own, I found (quite by accident — or maybe not!), and joined, Sangha, community. Nonetheless, with groups— particularly religious groups — it doesn’t take long for groupthink to set in. Even in Buddhism there are those who create a rigid, dogmatic system out of this tradition that, if one adheres to the Buddha’s teachings, is as open, spacious, and expansive as the mind. I once read this comment online: “There have been too many worthy attempts at pursuing the Dharma that have become bogged down in dogma, so the vitality is lost. We can’t live life without structure. But being bound by it is not living nor can it truly be practice.”

Of course seeking is a good thing as long as one does not get addicted to the search. I read an essay recently by Charles McAlpine, owner of Storm Wisdom, a center for intentional living in Phoenix that offers healing services and practices, crystals, and other tools for one’s path. He noted that at one time he’d become “addicted to the pursuit” shortly after he’d started “participating in retreats, workshops, classes and experiences that were designed to connect us with the deeper relationship with Self.” He said that it finally got to the point that all he could think of was “wanting more! Being someone who loves to learn, the pursuit was intoxicating.” He acknowledged how “the focus of pursuit would or could take over.”

Those words really touched me, not only because I’d often wondered about that for my own search, but because of a few friends who also seemed to be addicted to the pursuit. For myself, my search narrowed into the Eastern philosophies, but even those teachings can be found to various degrees in many other ancient and esoteric traditions, as if the ideas knew no human bounds, but everyone, everywhere at some point could meet up with them amidst their own search. I began to understand that in a way, the Eastern philosophies were the end of my pursuit. The more I saw those ideas embedded in the ideas and thoughts of other spiritually attuned persons, the more I realized that I could stay with Eastern traditions as the basis for the development of my personal truth.

But even that requires a winnowing and sifting.

Stephen Sohettni, in an article in Tricycle magazine, writes, “I began to see the path as a state of mind, an attitude that, when maintained, is itself Buddhahood — not an achievement but a process. Far from being a concrete, predictable, and infallible road map, the path is empty . . . Like everything, it’s uniquely related to one’s own mental formations. We find our path, I thought, by probing our own creativity.

“I prefer words of common sense and humor to the flowery epithets of wisdom and compassion,” he goes on to say. “I think less about awakening than simply staying awake to the enlightening moments that are everywhere for anyone who pays attention. Staying awake means continually reevaluating the ground on which we walk. It’s not about belonging at all, but letting go.”

Perhaps the search takes us along a path of knowing and ultimately to that which is beyond knowing to not-knowing, and that is where letting go is of importance. The idea of going beyond has a rich tradition in Buddhism. This beyond knowing is called “excellent wisdom” or “highest wisdom” in ancient Buddhist traditions; it is going beyond the wisdom of the world. “O wisdom which has gone beyond, gone beyond the beyond, to Thee homage.” (Om gate, gate, paramgate, parasamgate bodhi swaha.)

The apostle Paul too taught the idea of going beyond worldly wisdom to the enlightened state of spiritual wisdom. When we think we know everything we need to know and the search seems to be at an end, we must then move beyond knowing to not-knowing. It is in this space of not-knowing that we reach the enlightened mind, where the illusory phenomenal world falls away and the wisdom of ultimate reality becomes our true home.

Clare Goldsberry is a professional freelance writer and volunteer teacher with RISE, a continuing education program for older adults, on Eastern philosophies, the Ageless Wisdom, Gnosticism, and Kabbalah. Her latest book, The Teacher Within: Finding and Living Your Personal Truth, can be found on Amazon. She is a member of the Theosophical Society’s Phoenix study group.

Printed in the Winter 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Wadlow, René . "Alexander Scriabin: Music of Ecstasy and Light" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 22-23

By René Wadlow

The composer Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915) was a key figure in what is commonly called the Silver Age in Russian history (from the 1890s to the outbreak of World War I in 1914). This era saw a surge of interest in mysticism and in the occult and philosophical teachings of India and China, along with influences from Germany, including the thought of Nietzsche and the Christianized version of Theosophy developed by the Austrian visionary Rudolf Steiner. Rudolf Steiner’s second wife, Marie von Sivers, was a Baltic Russian. She helped spread Steiner’s views in Helsinki and Warsaw, cities in close contact with Russian intellectual circles.

One element of Theosophical thought, especially in H.P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, which Scriabin read closely, was the idea of esotericism — hidden or secret knowledge which passes from age to age and from country to country. This hidden knowledge is taught in small inner circles or can be discovered through a careful study of the literature and the development of the individual’s higher consciousness by meditation. For Scriabin, music of certain sorts had the power to open the door to this hidden and transformative knowledge. (For a Theosophical assessment of Scriabin’s music, see Cyril Scott’s book, cited below.)

Scriabin came from an aristocratic Russian family. His father was a diplomat who was usually posted abroad and had little contact with his son. Scriabin’s mother was a well-known concert pianist but died when Scriabin was only one year old. He was raised by his father’s sister and mother, both of whom were musicians. As Scriabin showed an interest and talent for music, he started to learn the piano at an early age with a teacher who was also teaching the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. The two students became lifelong friends, and Rachmaninoff did much to promote Scriabin’s piano works after the latter’s early death at the age of forty-three.

Scriabin followed the classic Russian path for musicians, going to the Moscow conservatory, and at an early age he married another young pianist, Vera Ivanova Isakovich. Like many Russians of that time and class, they decided to travel abroad, and so from 1904 to 1909, they lived in Paris and spent time in London, Brussels, and the U.S. In 1907 in Paris, Scriabin collaborated with the producer Sergei Diaghilev to introduce Russian music, dance, and art to the French artistic milieu.

Scriabin found time to produce four children with his wife, as well as taking a second “wife,” Tatyana Schloezer. Finally Vera agreed to a divorce, and Tatyana became his legal wife. They had three children. In addition to music, Scriabin believed that sex was an avenue to secret knowledge. At the time in Theosophical circles there was a good deal of interest in the awakened kundalini, the serpent fire, said to be coiled at the base of the spine. With proper breathing exercises and meditation, the serpent can rise up to the Third Eye between the brows and then to the crown of the head, producing enlightenment and liberation from matter. Scriabin used yogic breathing exercises to work with the kundalini. One problem — which did not occur with Scriabin alone — is that the fire often rises from the base of the spine but only reaches as far as the sex organs and stays there. Later, in the period between 1930 and 1940, when Scriabin’s music was considered to be out of line with officially favored school of Socialist Realism, it was attacked for “its unhealthy eroticism.” Scriabin’s life was given as proof that his music stimulated sex and took the workers’ minds off production goals. Today, with Russia’s fast-declining birth rate, there seems to be a strong revival of interest in Scriabin’s music.

Alexander Scriabin

One of Scriabin’s most explicitly Theosophical-spiritual compositions, following concepts put forward in The Secret Doctrine, is Prometheus: Poem of Fire. In the usual account of the myth, Zeus has the titan Prometheus make humans out of mud. Prometheus, taking pity on the condition of the creatures he created, steals fire from heaven and gives it to them. Zeus punishes Prometheus by having him bound to a rock, although he is eventually freed by Hercules.

In Scriabin’s Theosophical retelling, Prometheus does not steal the fire but is given it consciously by Zeus in order to produce “the ray of light” in humans. Thus Prometheus is like Lucifer, the “light bringer” who imparts the mind with the capacity to understand the causes of progress and regression. In this version Zeus does not punish Prometheus. Instead, being bound to a rock is a symbol of the difficulties on the spiritual path, the progression of spirit through matter, to return liberated as spirit, but at a higher degree of evolution at the end of the cycle than at the beginning.

In the Soviet Union and even in today’s Russia, Scriabin’s music has been treated as music largely separate from his philosophical ideas. In 1922, after the end of the Russian Civil War, when the Soviet government could start thinking about culture, Scriabin’s Moscow apartment was made into a state museum and kept in the condition it was in when he was alive, with his esoteric books visible in the library. Except for the 1930–40 period — the harshest time of Stalin’s repression — Scriabin’s music has been played continuously in Russia. When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was orbiting in his craft in 1961, Russian radio sent up the music of Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy, which became a kind of theme song for the flight after Gagarin landed.

The spiritual foundation of Scriabin’s music is no longer unknown in Russia, but it is not stressed either. As is often the case, esoteric knowledge remains esoteric. With a knowledge of the spiritual quest, one can hear his music with different ears.

René Wadlow is president of the Association of World Citizens and is a representative to the United Nations, Geneva, on its behalf.

Suggested Reading

Carlson, Maria. No Religion Higher than Truth: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875–1922. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Rosenthal, Bernice G., ed. The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Scott, Cyril. Music: Its Secret Influence throughout the Ages. New York: Samuel Weiser, 1958.

Printed in the Winter 2016 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Horowitz, Mitch. "Till We Dead Awaken: The Quest for Higher Consciousness in Film, Fiction, and Theater" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 18-21.

By John Shirley

Because it flashed upon me with a sudden horror that you were dead already — long ago.

                                                                     —Henrik Ibsen, When We Dead Awaken

I was walking through “the yard” at San Quentin State Prison. The prisoners sunning themselves at tables near the worn baseball field would have pleased any casting director with their do-rags and the homemade prison tattoos on muscular bare arms. The man walking with me, though, was smallish, balding, middle-aged, and pale, making me think of an accountant. He might once have been an accountant, I don’t know; I do know he was a convicted murderer.

I was a volunteer, teaching writing to inmates. My companion had written a script, which was about a man driven by his origins to do bad things, but with something higher struggling to emerge in him. I asked, “You have sports, television, work, time to walk freely within the walls — and you’ve been here since 1978. Do you stay so busy you forget, for a while, that you’re incarcerated, and just feel like this is normal life?”

He told me that if he kept busy, he could “sort of” forget. But he added that he could never really forget he was in prison. “You try not to think about it too much, but . . .” He looked at the armed guard strolling by. “There are constant reminders. It’s always there. You feel it.” Even at the best times, the defining negativity of his situation loomed in the background, casting barbed-wire shadows.

Unsurprisingly, the group of inmates composing screenplays often wrote, indirectly, about people who were trapped in some way. And it’s not surprising when screenwriters and authors, moving “freely” in the outside world, write about their own existential conditions, and spiritual conditions, even when they might suppose themselves to be writing about something else entirely.

When I saw the film The Invasion (2007), I remembered that day volunteering in prison. Starring Nicole Kidman, The Invasion is the second remake of the classic science-fiction horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Based on a novel by Jack Finney, the Body Snatcher movies portray an isolated town in the grip of an invisible alien invasion. The invaders take over the bodies of locals, making them, one by one, into cold-hearted players in an extraterrestrial conspiracy. Your wife and your father still look like your wife and father, and talk like them. But it’s not them anymore; they’ve become numb biological robots. Key to The Invasion — it’s even in the trailer — is the admonition “Don’t fall asleep!” Because, the film warns, it’s when you’re asleep that your body is snatched. In his essay for Invasion of the Body Snatchers: A Tribute, Parabola editor Jeff Zaleski observes:

Invasion of the Body Snatchers poses a terror that is fundamentally spiritual: the loss of that special something that makes us human . . . Yet the story also offers a metaphor for a less obvious but more insidious threat . . . It’s well known but rarely discussed that the world’s five major religions teach another fundamental truth about the human condition . . . that we spend our lives mostly in a dreamlike state — lost in our thoughts, so lost in our thoughts that we are cut off from the sensation of our bodies and full awareness of the real world. This teaching can be found in the esoteric branches of each major religion.

Both Finney’s novel and the Body Snatcher movies may have been intended more as political than spiritual metaphor. The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers came out in 1956, an era charged with a fear of communists supposedly bent on turning our world into a godless dictatorship of the proletariat. But political themes may mask deeper insights. A look at The Invasion and other films suggests that many popular films are actually unconscious (or only partly conscious) expressions of esoteric truths. Metaphors for spiritual conditions are found in unlikely places — but they are found persistently because, like the man who “kept busy” in San Quentin, we all know, on some level, that we’re in prison. We know, too, that there’s a possibility of freedom just on the other side of a certain wall.

Despite our straitjacketed condition, something in us senses that we’re asleep and struggles, at times, to wake up. Even when we haven’t encountered esoteric teachings, we know something’s wrong: that we are living in a twilight world, where the light is too dim; that we are driven by drivers we cannot see. This unconscious, uneasy half-comprehension of our condition finds expression in popular art — especially in theater, film, and fiction.

Consider the plays of Samuel Beckett. In his unnerving, austere productions, characters walk about in purgatorial loops, repeating nightmarish scenarios, seeming caught up in entrapping states of mind. They battle for dignity, for some eking out of individuality. In Beckett’s short play Catastrophe, two ruthlessly officious, controlling individuals, a “director” and his secretary, set about arranging, as if toying with a wire framework, a miserable-looking, ragged old man frozen on a stage. At the end, the old man, against directions, lifts his head, and looks up at the audience — a tiny act of defiance. It’s all he can manage, so controlled is he by outside forces. Beckett spoke of his plays as “objects,” and probably wasn’t consciously making a spiritual statement. But again and again he poignantly expressed man’s condition: trapped, mechanical, struggling to emerge from a puppet’s purgatory.

Television has its moments of inadvertent insight into our trapped, sleeping condition: going back a ways, one of the most popular television antagonists was the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Borg is all one being, made up of lesser beings, a cyborgian fusion of man and machine that assimilates individuals, overriding their free will and turning them into mindless components of an artificial Archon. Besides dramatizing mindless subjection to automaticity, the Borg may be a parable of our fear of becoming disastrously dependent on the electronic and digital superstructure of our smartphone-dominated culture.

Popular film resounds with themes that speak of our tendency to lapse into sleep when we think we’re awake. One of the most striking examples is The Matrix (1999). Starring Keanu Reeves, The Matrix is about a man who discovers that the entire human world is asleep and dreaming, kept that way by enslaving artificial intelligences. Human beings are so controlled by computers they become seamlessly blended into the digital world. A rebel leader has liberated a cadre of revolutionaries, one of whom makes a secret deal with the artificial intelligences: he will betray the rebels if he can be allowed a fabricated dream life of his own choosing. The traitor may represent the inner resistance a seeker feels when presented with the possibility of awakening.

Numerous films point to the same truths with a timeliness and convergence of intent that somehow make them part of an inadvertent “movement” in cinema. I’m thinking particularly of American Beauty, Fight Club, Dark City, eXistenZ, Mulholland Drive, The Truman Show, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life, S1m0ne, The Island, The Invasion, and Inception.

Sam Mendes’s 1999 film American Beauty, written by Alan Ball, is the story of a dysfunctional family lost in the centerless maze of modern life. Kevin Spacey’s character can’t touch his wife in any way that matters; he can’t reach his daughter, though she’s right in the same house with him. He has an encounter with a pot-dealing young bohemian who moves in next door — whose obsession with the innate visual beauty of the ordinary world seems an adventure in perception — and is inspired to wrestle his way free of his middle-class funk. The overall impression is of a man recognizing that he’s been asleep, dreaming his way through an air-conditioned, wall-to-wall-carpeted misery — who had forgotten the choices, the almost infinite ways out, that life offers to the wakeful in every single second of existence. As a side note, Ball’s television series Six Feet Under (2001–05) — about a family of morticians, each episode’s prologue dramatizing the death of a client — might be regarded as an oblique reminder of the importance of living consciously in the moment, with death always in the offing.

In David Fincher’s visceral Fight Club (1999), characters desperate for connection to something real go to Twelve-Step groups for problems they don’t have, just to feel emotions by proxy. They are so desperate to rid themselves of existential numbness that they start a fight club, where ordinary people meet in secret to beat each other bloody. It isn’t the violence they want — it’s the return to realness in the moment, brought about by powerful, unavoidable living contact. They allude to a society caught up in consumerism and corporate striving, dumbfounded by masks and celebrity worship and empty recreation, and they recognize that it’s all a kind of sleepwalking, a hypnotic state that must be struggled with, even battered with bare fists.

Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998) is a stylish noir fantasy, a Gnostic fable about a man who finds himself on a search for truth and identity in a shape-shifting city that turns out to be a living urban stage designed for sinister, arcane purposes by malignant entities. All may be a dream — or may not.

David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) involves a virtual-reality videogame that — like so many Philip Dick–influenced tales — makes us wonder where reality ends and the game begins. Fantasy and reality inevitably overlap in this film. There are anti-game revolutionaries in the background, and the game’s player wonders what’s real, and if the game could be a game within a game . . .

In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), a young actress seems to have her soul, or identity, stolen by evil forces embedded in the city of Los Angeles (no one who’s worked in The Business there needs much convincing) as she goes through an enigmatic quest to find her real nature — in what turns out to be, apparently, a dream.

In Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), Jim Carrey’s character discovers he’s in a false reality, literally staged by people who are using him as entertainment and have done so for a generation. He must find the confines of the staging area and break out into the real world, to find actual love, an unscripted destiny.

Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky (2001) was inspired by a 1997 Spanish film called Open Your Eyes. This Tom Cruise vehicle once again gives us a hero who by degrees realizes that his nightmarish reality is fabricated, intricately computer-animated, and transmitted into his brain, which is in modified cryogenic freeze. He chooses to wake up and face the real world of a dark future rather than accepting the comforting dreams the cryogenics company offers him.

Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) — an intriguing innovation fusing conventional movie photography and animation — gives us a hero who keeps waking up from a complex dream that seems to push him into profound social and philosophical dialogues with the sundry intellectual outlaws he encounters. But each time he’s sure he’s awakened, he finds, once more, he’s only dreaming.

Andrew Niccol’s S1m0ne (2002) is a comedy about a movie director who’s so disgusted with actors that he computer-generates Simone, a beautiful actress programmed with the best aspects of all the great female movie stars. The audience falls in love with her, and people refuse to accept she’s not real, even when he tries to tell them so. S1m0ne sends up the public’s willingness to collaborate with illusion on a global scale.

In Michael Bay’s The Island (2005), the hero discovers that his world, which seems to be the only refuge in a world supposedly ravaged by catastrophe, is actually a factory for creating clones used by the rich for spare parts, and the free, living world is hidden but intact and waiting for him beyond the walls of social illusion.

While The Invasion, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, is less effective than the Don Siegel original, the film nevertheless dramatizes (probably unconsciously) the central dark fact of the human condition: when we allow consciousness to lapse, we surrender our ability to make choices, deferring to lower subselves and their mindless agenda.

Then there’s the Christopher Nolan film Inception (2010). Ostensibly a tale of corporate espionage — stealing some ideas and planting others in human minds through entry into their dreams — the movie can also be seen as a surreal take on the subjectivity of our normal reality. The filmmaker said he was seeking to make a coherent adventure in the world of dreams. But what if a hidden, deeper part of him was saying something more? As G.I. Gurdjieff tells us, “Life is real, only then, when ‘I am’.” Eventually the hero of Inception must find his way out of a subjective dream world, effectively learning what it is to actually be — what it is to be able to genuinely say, I am.

Whether these are great works of art is not important. What matters is the emergence of a remarkable number of films questioning reality itself — each suggesting a sinister puppeteer, pointing to a kind of dreamy disorientation prevailing in the median consciousness of the industrialized world — seems a defined cultural current, however unplanned, emerging from a consensus about our condition. What is it we’re trying to tell ourselves, with The Matrix, and all these other films on the same theme?

These filmmakers are not deliberately referring to esoteric ideas, but on some level they seem to confirm insights basic to vipassana Buddhism, certain forms of Sufism, esoteric Christianity, and Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way. Artists express their perception, however murky, of the human condition. And a perceptual consensus is beginning to emerge: mankind is asleep, mechanical, strictured, fragmentary.

Most everyone has had a dark dream that they struggled to wake from. A few nights ago I had a chance encounter on the street with an unbalanced stranger who claimed to have a concealed pistol. He threatened to shoot me if I got too close to his new truck. I doubted he had a gun at all, and took it in stride, shrugging it off, but deep down the encounter disturbed me. That night I dreamt I was in a crowded public square, where a belligerent man argued with me, then ran and got a large automatic pistol from his friends. The crowd watched in vague amusement as I ducked behind a car to avoid getting shot. On some level (this often happens when I have nightmares) I knew I was asleep. It took a few moments, but I somehow deliberately wrested myself out of sleep so that I wouldn’t have to dream of being shot.

My anxiety about the threatening man on the street was not unfounded in our gun-burdened society, and my dream was a way to process that anxiety. Films are like dreams; they extol the social subconscious. The films in our incomplete list are roughly along the same lines. They are cinematic dreams mulling over real dilemmas our so-called “conscious” minds are only dimly aware of. These films are external representations of inner processes: the higher part of us struggling to awaken, to warn us we’re in danger of losing our birthright.

Some of us drift through our lives like pollen; others bounce energetically from one interaction to another like the reflective silver sphere in a pinball machine. Sometimes, spurred by inner compulsions and external conditions, we imagine that we are doing great things in the world; we become reformers, or master criminals. We run for president.

But on some level, no matter what we seem to accomplish, we know that the whole time, we have been asleep. Like the people in comas who are often seen to struggle to awaken, we make feeble, indirect efforts to protest our numbness, to acknowledge that transcendence is tantalizingly near. We go to amusement parks for rocket-fast rides that thrill us into momentary contact with our bodies and the present moment; we try skydiving, bungee jumping, extreme sports. Some people go in for drugs and speak portentously of their fitful, veering experiences with altered consciousness. And filmmakers protest their sleep through movies like The Matrix, an adrenaline-pumping action movie that combines thrill seeking with the notion of our subjectivity to mechanicality and the possibility of awakening to real freedom.

These films rarely offer straightforward solutions to the dilemmas they pose. Although fight clubs do exist, the novel (by Chuck Palahniuk) and film Fight Club are actually presenting only satirical solutions — questioning the status quo — and a willingness to use desperate means for escape.

Still, The Matrix seems to symbolically suggest something like the process of self-observation found in Buddhism and the Fourth Way: the hero takes steps to wake up, only to find he’s connected to machinery that has kept him drugged, fed, and subjected to a false digital “reality.” Waking enough to see this machinery, he’s able to unplug himself from it and escape to liberation. That is, when a man really looks, really observes for himself that he is mechanical, he has the possibility of freedom from the machine.

The Invasion offers us only an alert willingness to question the apparent, and a feverish determination to find a way out of the trap at all costs. The Island’s implicit advice is essentially the same. Vanilla Sky’s hero chooses to face a harsh reality as it is — to look it square in the eye, acknowledging the painfulness of seeing what is, and intimating that in the end the discomfort is freeing.

The young actress in Mulholland Drive seems to be on a search for some lasting, essential self — something beyond the ephemeral — and Lynch hints that there’s an essence to be found, eventually. In Waking Life and eXistenZ we’re directed to question the status quo and our own assumed reality; we’re called to interrogate existence with an active mind.

In The Truman Show, Peter Weir goes farther. Question the status quo, then go on a journey, regardless of the difficulties and your own resistance, to the other side of the façade, where you’d better be willing to see not only the falseness of the staging, but your own.

There are, of course, films, like the heavy-handed but charming Tyrone Powers classic The Razor’s Edge (1946), Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day (1993), and Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991), that address spiritual themes more directly. There’s also Peter Brook’s Meetings with Remarkable Men (1979), a film version of Gurdjieff’s memoir of his spiritual search. In what seems a play on ideas of recurrence from Nietzsche and P.D. Ouspensky, Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day is condemned to live the same life over and over again till he sees himself, finally, as he truly is — and sees the consequences of real choices. In The Fisher King, Jeff Bridges plays a vain talk-radio host who inadvertently causes a tragedy. Tormented by guilt, he has to risk all, in an act of selfish love, to escape the suffering brought on by identification. In telling the story, the scripter uses Hermetic symbols like the Grail to symbolize the path to redemption through renunciation of the ego.

But films that express the human dilemma unconsciously, like a poignant cry from a child with night terrors, somehow strike more honestly to the heart of our condition. The sudden outpouring of films that show their heroes struggling to escape confinement by the walls of sleep makes us wonder. 

In my own work as a novelist, I try to walk a middle way. In my theosophical novel Doyle after Death and in my novel of “alternative apocalypse,” The Other End, I do use symbols on purpose, but I embed the symbol in story in a way that not only dramatizes, but, I hope, entertains.

But writing fiction to that end is fraught with the risk of coming off too precious, of seeming self-important and pompous. In short, it could easily become bad writing.

For me, the best approach is to engage a sense of real experience, both for myself and the reader. I try to immerse myself — and the reader — into the world of my story, without much, if any, authorial interpolation. But along the way I allow my own spiritual leanings, and important symbols, to emerge naturally from the story and its setting.

Whether it’s prose or pictures, that’s how it works best: the symbol and the story are one and the same. The symbol should emerge seamlessly from the script or the story. And what is usually symbolized, when we look around at the sense of the spiritual emerging from entertainment media, is our awareness, just hatching, that we’re not as conscious as we could be. And that realization is a call from the cosmos itself to emerge into the world of real consciousness.

When I write fiction, I feel a responsibility to call people to wake up to the human condition, to suggest our profound need to reach for higher consciousness, for true mindfulness. And when I’m calling out in that way, I’m calling to myself too. By constantly facing the subject, I’m reminded of my own tendency to give in to my resistance. I’m reminded of my proneness to fall back into seductive numbness and the dull, default level of consciousness — into pseudoconsciousness.

Like everyone else, I struggle to awaken. Writing about awakening, even through metaphor, encourages me to reach for it myself.

John Shirley is a novelist and screenwriter. He is the author of many books including Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas. His novel Doyle after Death was reviewed in Quest, fall 2014. His article “The Apocalypse of Consciousness” appeared in the same issue.

Printed in the Winter 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Horowitz, Mitch. "All You Can Be:  Why Positive Thinking Matters" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 15-17. 

By Mitch Horowitz

The method of positive thinking is simplicity itself: fix a goal in your mind, attempt to enter the feeling state that your aim has been achieved, and unseen agencies — whether psychological, metaphysical, or both — are said to come to your aid. Seen in this way, our thoughts are causative.

Over the past century and a half, this one simple idea has become the keynote of American life. Positive thinking underscores our political campaigns (“Yes, we can”) and advertising slogans (“Just do it”), and forms the foundation of self-help, business motivation, Twelve-Step programs, support groups, and mind-body medicine.

For all its impact, positive thinking, more properly known as New Thought, is widely disparaged in our culture. Journalists and academics often dismiss it as a philosophy of page-a-day calendars and refrigerator-magnet bromides. But most critics fail to grasp the history, impact, and effectiveness of positive thinking — all of which I explore in my most recent book, One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life.

While I write as a historian, my interest in positive thinking is also deeply personal. In some respects, positive thinking saved my life.

Growing Up (Not Quite) Positive

My journey into mind-power metaphysics began in my early adolescence in the late 1970s. My family made an ill-fated move from our bungalow-sized home in Queens, New York, to a bigger house on Long Island. It was a place we could never quite afford. After we moved in, my father lost his job and we took to wearing secondhand clothing and warming the house with kerosene heaters. One night I overheard my mother saying that we might qualify for food stamps. When the financial strains drove my parents to divorce, we were in danger of losing our home.

Seeking guidance, I devoured the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Talmudic guide to character called Ethics of the Fathers. These works asserted that our outlook could make a concrete difference in our lives. “Nerve us with incessant affirmatives,” Emerson wrote. “Be of good countenance,” the great rabbis intoned.

I prayed, visualized better tomorrows, and became a determined self-improver. I threw myself into attempts to earn money delivering newspapers and hauling junk to a local recycling plant. I divided my time between high school in the morning and drama classes in the afternoon. I handwrote college applications and sent letters to financial aid officers. We managed to piece together our finances and keep our home.

Positive thinking did not miraculously solve all of our problems. But I emerged from the period believing that a set of interior guideposts and principles had contributed to the solution. If my thoughts didn’t change reality, they helped navigate it. And maybe something more.

Later on in life, I grew intrigued by the example of my mother-in-law, Theresa Orr. At times she seemed to gain an additional, almost magical-seeming fortitude from affirmative-thinking philosophies. The daughter of an Italian immigrant barber, Terri received a scholarship to Brandeis University in 1959, becoming the first woman in her family to earn a college degree. In the years after, she became an associate dean at Harvard Medical School. While pursuing her academic career, she raised two daughters as a divorced and single parent, cared for an elderly mother, and sponsored members of a Twelve-Step recovery program, all from under the roof of a two-family home in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Terri devoured works of positive thinking, from the Serenity Prayer (“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .”) to affirmations from the channeled text A Course in Miracles to pointers in positivity from Guideposts magazine. She papered the surfaces of her home — literally, from the refrigerator to the medicine chest — with business-sized cards on which she penned aphorisms such as “I can choose to be right or to be happy”; “My helping hand is needed. I will do something today to encourage another person”; and (my personal favorite) “When am I going to stop going to the hardware store for milk?” There was no question in her mind, or in my own, that injunctions to sinewy thoughts had made a difference in her life.

From my late twenties through my mid-forties, my personal search led me down many spiritual paths, and into serious esoteric teachings and traditions, including Theosophy. But New Thought, or positive thinking, always remained a part of me. As I began my adult explorations into the roots and methods of positive thinking, I experienced some kind of difference in my life, as Terri had experienced in hers. Was I imagining things? The practice of determined thought could seem so naive and simplistic. Most serious people regard positive thinking as a cotton-candy theology or a philosophy for dummies.

But I like “rejected stones” — they often hold neglected truths. Some of the leading voices in positive thinking, especially in its formative days in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had, like me, pursued many avenues of thought and religion, but returned to the concept that the greatest truths can sometimes be found in practices and ideas that are very simple, so much so that they are easy to dismiss.

Mind Pioneers

Like all widely extolled principles, from healthy eating to thrifty spending, aspiration toward positivity seems as if it has always been with us. But the concept is newer than we think. The story of positive thinking began in America with the experience of a Maine clockmaker named Phineas P. Quimby. In the 1830s Quimby discovered that a brightened mood helped lift his symptoms of tuberculosis. “Man’s happiness is in his belief,” Quimby concluded. The clockmaker’s insights and experiments coalesced into the movement of mental healing, which used prayer, autosuggestion, and early forms of hypnotism (then called mesmerism) to relieve illness. One of Quimby’s most dynamic students, the brilliant Mary Baker Eddy, went on to found the healing faith of Christian Science.

After Quimby’s death in early 1866, mental healing spread in popularity from New England to Chicago to California, and thousands of followers believed that some force — whether divine, psychological, or both — exerted an invisible pull on a person’s daily life. By the late 1880s, the boldest mental healers theorized that the energies of the mind could impact not only health, but also money, marriage, career and all facets of life. Their beliefs came to form the influential metaphysical movement called New Thought.

The notion of the mind as an invisible or divine force came very naturally to spiritual experimenters in the late nineteenth century. The era abounded with discoveries of unseen forces, from radio waves and electrical currents to X-rays and microbes. For a time mainstream science and avant-garde spirituality appeared united in a search to unveil the inner workings of life.

At the start of the twentieth century, philosopher William James believed that New Thought, Christian Science, and all of the new mental therapeutics — which he called the “religion of healthy-mindedness” — held such promise, and hovered so mightily over modern religious life, that it amounted to the equivalent of a Reformation on the American spiritual scene. “It is quite obvious,” James wrote in 1907, “that a wave of religious activity, analogous in some respects to the spread of early Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism, is passing over our American world.”

While no high church of positive thinking today extends across American culture, the influence of mind-power metaphysics is greater than that of any one established religion. Methods of positive thinking are espoused across the religious spectrum, from New Age spiritual centers to evangelical megaministries. Positive thinking is the unifying element of all aspects of the American search for meaning. It is, in effect, the American creed.

Positive Reforms

For all of its promise, the philosophy of positive thinking is also riddled with inconsistencies and pitfalls. Over the past two decades, I have watched some of the best people in the positive-thinking movement — that is, members of New Thought churches or positivity-based support groups — depart or distance themselves after experiencing how an ill-conceived program of affirmative thought can effectively blame sick or suffering people for their ills.

A support group leader for female survivors of sexual abuse — and someone who had spent many years within a positive-thinking metaphysical church — wrote to me in 2012. She said that she had experienced both sides of the positive-thinking equation, witnessing how survivors could ably use a program of mental therapeutics to rebuild their sense of self, but also observing the kind of burden that affirmative-thinking nostrums could visit upon those recovering from trauma. She continued:

My husband, who experienced a massive stroke at the age of 22 while in “perfect” health and working as a farm hand has also felt an ambivalence toward the positive-thinking teachings. Such an emphasis gets placed on physical healing as a manifestation of right thought that it can alienate those people living with disabilities whose healings have manifested in other, possibly non-physical, ways.

In conclusion, she wondered: “Is there room for a positive-thinking model that doesn’t include blame and single-model definitions of success?”

I take the attitude that such a model can exist. But for positive thinking to reach maturity, its followers must take fuller stock of the movement’s flaws and its need for growth. To begin with, the positive thinking movement must do more to confront — and acknowledge — the tragedies of daily life. Suffering and illness cannot be explained away solely as the result of our thought patterns. As I argue in One Simple Idea, there is no compelling reason — and very little verifiable evidence — to view life as the result of one ever-operant mental superlaw, sometimes called the Law of Attraction. People live under many laws and forces, including those of accidents, physical limitations, and mortality. Positive thinkers must jettison the idea that thoughts alone are the engine of our experience.

Acknowledging that life is composed of myriad factors and agencies does not, however, detract from the key insight of positive thinking: that our thoughts contribute “something extra” to our life circumstances — and in ways that transcend ordinary psychology. The instinct that our thoughts possess an agency of influence is borne out in a long history of clinical science and compelling personal testimony.

Indeed, positive thinking has stood up with surprising muscularity in the present era of placebo studies, mind-body therapies, brain biology research, and, most controversially, the findings of quantum physics experiments. When considered without sensationalism, more than eighty years of data emerging from quantum physics shows that the presence of a conscious observer alters the nature and manifestation of subatomic particles. These findings suggest some vital, not yet understood verity about how the mind interplays with the surrounding world.

A related phenomenon plays out in the emergent science of neuroplasticity. Scientists at UCLA have recently used brain scans to show that our thought patterns actually affect — and can alter — the physical makeup of our brains. Researchers have found that when sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) actively and sustainably redirect their thoughts away from ritualistic behaviors, they also change the neural pathways associated with OCD. A thinking cure becomes a physical cure as well.

In late 2010, researchers at Harvard Medical School conducted a revolutionary “transparent placebo” study, in which sufferers from irritable bowel syndrome were told up front that they were being administered a sugar pill. Placebo studies are typically based on deception, in which a patient believes that he is receiving, or may be receiving, an actual medicine. The Harvard study participants knew they were not taking a medication but an inert substance — yet a majority reported relief. This is the first documentation that an “honest placebo” has significant effects, deepening questions about how the mind influences the body.

Developments in quantum physics, neuroplasticity, and placebo studies may challenge our conceptions of what it means to be human in the twenty-first century, at least as much as Darwinism challenged man’s self-perception in the Victorian age.

I believe that the contemporary positive thinking movement is poised for a greater phase of maturity and persuasiveness. But to reach that point requires those of us who care about positive thinking to:

· cultivate a sober understanding of quantum physics, neuroplasticity, and placebo studies, and what they say about the mind;
· ease away from an insistence on an overreaching Law of Attraction;
· and, finally, acknowledge that thought represents one factor — albeit an extraordinary one, with deep metaphysical implications — among many others that produce our lives.

These reforms would encourage a more elastic expression of positive thinking, and would return us to the best traditions of the movement’s early days, when it saw itself in league with breakthroughs in science and medicine. It falls to our generation to continue the spiritual and psychological revolution begun by the forebears of positive thinking.

A PEN Award–winning historian, Mitch Horowitz is vice-president, executive editor, and director of backlist and reissues at Tarcher Perigee. Mitch is the author of Occult America (Bantam) and One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (Crown). He has written on alternative spirituality for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, Salon, and Time.com. His article, “The Aquarian: Ronald Reagan and the Positive Thinking Movement” appeared in Quest, summer 2014. An earlier version of the article above appeared in Venture Inward magazine.