Author: Richard Smoley

From New Dawn 157 (Jul-Aug 2016)

Even the greatest thinkers are uneven. They have areas of brilliance and other areas where they cannot avoid showing their weaknesses. Immanuel Kant, for example, one of the most admired philosophers in Western civilisation, is known for The Critique of Pure Reason rather than for Dreams of a Spirit Seer, his intemperate and embarrassing rant against the visionary Emanuel Swedenborg.

René Guénon is no exception. An esoteric philosopher of uncommon brilliance, he has become increasingly influential since his death in 1951. But he, too, has areas where his views seem poorly reasoned and out of accord with known facts.

Born in Blois, France, in 1886, Guénon was educated as a mathematician. As a young man, he was drawn into the occult revival that was sweeping France at the turn of the twentieth century. He was befriended by Gérard Encausse, better known by his pseudonym Papus, the celebrated occultist who, among other accomplishments, founded the Martinist Order. But Guénon soon became dissatisfied with both Papus and occultism and drifted into other esoteric circles.

The years between 1906 (when Guénon began to explore occultism) and 1912 were the critical points in his development. After breaking with Papus, he received initiations in lineages connected with Taoism, Freemasonry, and Sufism. He also began exploring what he came to call “Tradition” – meaning not merely what has been handed down from antiquity, but a body of universal esoteric doctrine that, he contended, underlies all the great world religions.

Guénon’s explication of this Tradition, set out in many books and articles he published up until his death in 1951, has a number of curious features. In the first place, it is strongly oriented toward Hinduism, although the sources of Guénon’s contacts with Hinduism, both in the Paris of the Belle Époque and later, are mysterious in the extreme. Indeed his first book, Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, was submitted as a dissertation to the Sorbonne but was rejected partly because, violating academic norms, it contained almost no references.

In the second place, although Guénon converted to Islam in Paris in 1910, and was initiated as a Sufi, before moving to Cairo in 1930, neither Sufism nor Islam plays any great role in his ideas. At the time of death, he had been living in Egypt for over twenty years, but his 3,000-volume library still contained four times as many books on Hinduism as it did on Islam, according to Mark Sedgwick in Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, an important study of Guénon and his followers.

Rather, for Guénon, the Traditional doctrine is most fully expressed in Hinduism. It is also focused on metaphysics. Today metaphysics – usually described as the philosophical study of being – is among the least sexy of intellectual pursuits. In Anglo-American academic philosophy, it is moribund. For Guénon it is central. Not surprisingly, his discussion of it is among the most masterful aspects of his work. But comparatively few of Guénon’s admirers give much attention to metaphysics.

Despite its failure to impress the Sorbonne, Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines was published in 1921. It is one of Guénon’s most important works and provides the best introduction to his thought.

Metaphysics – “Knowledge of the Universal…”

In it Guénon says that metaphysics, or metaphysic, in the singular, “is essentially the knowledge of the Universal, or, if preferred, the knowledge of principles belonging to the universal order… but in making this statement we are not really trying to propose a definition of metaphysic, for such a thing is a sheer impossibility by reason of that very universality which we look upon as the foremost among its characteristics.” Metaphysic stands above “that which changes or which is subject to the influences of time and place; the contingent, the accidental and the universal belong essentially to the individual domain.” Metaphysic deals not with this individual domain, but with the universal.

Although metaphysic “cannot contradict reason” of the conventional kind, “it stands above it.” Nor is metaphysic grasped with reason, but by the “intellect… that faculty which possesse[s] a direct knowledge of principles.” Intellect, in this sense, is not what present-day thought understands by that term. As Guénon describes it, intellect is a type of higher cognition – a direct experience of principles. And it is “infallible” because “its operation is immediate and, because, not being really distinct from its object, it is identified with the truth itself.” This, he adds, is exactly how Aristotle and his heirs, the Scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, understood the concept of intellect – in Greek, called nous, intellectus in Latin.

Intellect may be infallible, but the ways of expressing it are not. “Since all expression is bound to be imperfect and limited, error is inevitable in its form, if not its content: however exact one tries to make its expression, what is left out is greater than what is included.”

Symbolism of the Cross

One of the central themes of this metaphysics is what Guénon calls “the multiple states of being” (the title of one of his books). The best way to understand this concept is to picture it as Guénon does in what is probably his masterwork, The Symbolism of the Cross, published in 1931.

For Guénon, the significance of the cross goes far past its meaning in Christian symbolism. As he says, it is a virtually universal symbol. His explication of it magnificently illustrates not only his metaphysical system, but many otherwise obscure points in the symbolism of the world’s religions.

To begin with, the cross (pictured in its Greek, or equal-armed form) symbolises the juncture of the supernal with the mundane. The latter is represented by the horizontal line, which, Guénon says, represents the possibilities of manifestation at any given level of existence (such as human incarnation). The vertical line represents the ascent possible from one of these levels to another, and thus to “the indefinite series of states of the total being.”

Guénon expands this cross into a three-dimensional form. There are now two crosses, one perpendicular to the other, both with the same centre. The horizontal cross defines a plane – the plane of manifestation at any given level of being. This plane is not the only one there is. In fact at every point on the vertical line, another horizontal cross can be drawn, defining another plane and signifying another, different realm of being. The number of these realms is infinite, or, as Guénon puts it, “indefinite.”

Thus our human existence, complete with all the possibilities (both physical and spiritual) latent in it, comprises just one plane of this three-dimensional cross.

It’s not possible to go further into this schema here, which is sort of a Cartesian coordinate system of the levels of being (a comparison Guénon would have loathed; if he ever wrote a kind word about Descartes, I have not read it). But it masterfully ties together symbols and ideas from a wide and disparate range of traditions. One symbolic version of this cross is the World Tree, which is found almost universally.

In any event, these three books define the core of what he calls the Traditional doctrine:

Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines
Man and His Becoming according to the Vedanta
The Symbolism of the Cross

I would read them in the order given to get a comprehensive view of Guénon’s doctrine. They are not necessarily easy reading, but Guénon takes pains to write clearly and precisely. At any rate his style is free from the jargon-infested prose and pretentious neologisms favoured by many twentieth-century philosophers, particularly those on the European continent.

Spiritualism & Multiple States of Being

After Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, Guénon published two books on more narrowly defined topics: Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion and The Spiritist Error. These are the works in which his thought is the weakest. They aim to demolish the Theosophy of H.P. Blavatsky and her successors on the one hand, and, on the other, to combat the spiritualist, or spiritist,* movement that had reached its heyday in the nineteenth century. At the time Guénon was writing, in the early 1920s, many were drawn to spiritualism in the wake of the First World War. Bereaved survivors of dead soldiers often turned to it to be reassured of their loved ones’ continued life beyond the grave.

* The term applied to those who try to communicate with the dead is, in the English-speaking world, “spiritualism.” In French, it is spiritisme, “spiritism.” Guénon naturally uses the latter more often. There is some difference between these movements as they manifested in France and in the English-speaking world, but for convenience in this article, I will for the most part use the word spiritualism to apply to both.

Guénon did not believe that spiritualists genuinely contacted the dead, even in the cases where there was no fraud involved (and there were many in which it was). One of his main points has to do with the manifestations of spirits in séances. He did not think these “phenomena,” as he called them, were illusory. But he denied that they were actually appearances of the dead people in question. In his view, the essential core of the dead individual – the spirit – went on to another of the multiple states of being, and did so necessarily and without exception.

So who or what were the ghosts who appeared in séances? These, he claimed, were “simply those inferior elements that the being has in a way left behind in the earthly realm after the dissolution of the human complex that we call death. These are… what the ancient Latins called the manes. This is also what the ancient Hebrews called the ob, which is invariably the word used in biblical texts in regard to evocations” (cf. Deuteronomy 18:11; 1 Samuel 28:7). The root meaning of the Hebrew word ob (more correctly, ’ov) is “wineskin,” which suggests how the ancients conceived of these subtle remains. He explains:

It is, if you will, like a subtle form that can only take on an illusory corporeal appearance when manifesting under certain circumstances. This is the origin of the name the ‘double’ [ka] given to it by the Egyptians. For the rest, in all respects it is only an appearance. Separated from the spirit, this element cannot be conscious in the true sense of the word. Nevertheless, it possesses a semblance of consciousness, a virtual image, so to speak, of the living being. And the magician, reviving this apparition by lending it what it lacks, temporarily gives it enough of a reflexive consistency to obtain responses when he asks questions of it.

These astral remains thus are a kind of shell that the dead person has left behind, and which can be activated under certain conditions. They can even appear to answer questions.

This explanation does not cover all of the phenomena that take place in séances. Guénon also talks about materialisation, “perhaps the rarest of all phenomena.” In these cases a spirit actually appears to manifest palpably to participants. “A kind of substance, at first unformed and nebulous, seems to separate itself from the [medium’s] body, then gradually condenses. These entities often can be seen, touched, and even photographed (thereby excluding the possibility of hallucination).” In these cases, Guénon claims, the form arises from the mind of either the medium or of one or more of the participants. This is why there have been apparitions of people who turned out never to have existed. “Cases have been noted in which the ‘materialised’ forms quite simply copied portraits of fantastic figures borrowed from pictures or designs seen by the medium,” he writes. The energy is supplied by the medium or the participants or both.

Why does Guénon take such great pains to refute the ideas of the spiritualists? To return to his metaphysical system, in which each plane in the three-dimensional cross represents one level of manifestation – even, one could say, of reality – Guénon holds that an individual goes through each level exactly once and then passes on to another. He does not remain in connection with the previous level. It is to refute these fallacies that he makes his elaborate case in The Spiritist Error. One could even say that, in essence, this is the spiritist error.

His arguments are successful up to a point: they seem to fit in well with descriptions of the spiritualistic phenomena of his time and earlier. Furthermore, they help explain why most encounters with the dead take place in the few days after death, when presumably these residual elements have not had the time to break down fully. But Guénon’s claims stop short of explaining all such phenomena. There are instances in which the dead person appears much later than the time of death. Moreover, it seems to be in full consciousness and aware of things that were not known by the person to whom it appears. Such are the cases with warnings sometimes given by the dead to avoid certain voyages or plane flights.

One difficulty here, as with many of Guénon’s arguments, is that he holds rather rigidly to an extremely precise schema that is logical and consistent in its own terms but does not completely square with manifest reality. Indeed, even by his own theory, there must necessarily be some dissociation between the world of pure principle and the imperfect world of manifestation. But sometimes he does not seem to grasp the implications of this fact.

Guénon on Reincarnation

Guénon also takes great pains to refute the teaching of reincarnation. “The idea of reincarnation… like that of evolution, is a very modern idea; it appears to have materialised around 1830 or 1848 in certain French socialist circles” (Guénon, Theosophy, 104). Regarding the transmigration of human souls into animals, he says:

In reality, the ancients never conceived of such transmigration, any more than they did of a human into other humans, which is how one might define reincarnation. There are expressions, more or less symbolic, that could give rise to such misunderstandings, but only when one does not know what they are really saying, which is this: There are psychic elements in the human being which separate themselves after death, and which can pass into other living beings, human or animal, although this has no more importance than the fact that, after the dissolution of the same individual, the elements that made him up can be used to make up other bodies.

Unfortunately, the ancient accounts of reincarnation say nothing of the kind. At the end of the Republic, Plato tells the myth of Er, a soldier who has a near-death experience in which he learns the fates of individuals after death (Plato, Republic, 614b-621d). In one famous passage, Er sees the dead choosing their lots for new incarnations. Odysseus, the shrewdest of men, refuses lives of riches and honour and instead chooses the existence of an ordinary citizen. However “symbolic” this story might be, it is hard to see how it might accommodate itself to a theory like Guénon’s. One could make the same point about the teachings of the Pythagorean mysteries, to the extent that we know anything specific about them.

Guénon’s own views about the fate of the spirit after death are complex. Defining transmigration in what he considers the true sense, he contends, “It is not a matter of a return to the same state of existence… but on the contrary, the passage of the being to other states of existence, which are defined… by completely different conditions from those to which the human being is subject… Whoever speaks of transmigration is essentially speaking about a change of state. This is what all the traditional doctrines of the East teach, and we have many reasons to believe that this was also the teaching of the ‘mysteries’ of antiquity; it is the same thing even in heterodox doctrines such as Buddhism.” The last remark indicates that when he was writing The Spiritist Error, in the early 1920s, Guénon believed that Buddhism was not a pure reflection of the “orthodox” Traditional doctrine. Later in life, he granted it a certain grudging acceptance.

As we have seen, Guénon conceives of existence as a kind of three-dimensional grid, with a vertical axis transecting an infinite number of horizontal planes. The vertical axis represents the Self, the true essence of a given being; each of the innumerable horizontal planes constitutes a separate plane of manifestation. Human life on earth is only one of these planes. A given being can manifest itself only once on any particular plane. Therefore you cannot be born more than once as a human.

Like much of Guénon’s thought, this is rigorously precise and would seem to be irrefutable except for one thing. Guénon assumes that any given plane – such as earthly human life – is static. But in fact there is nothing to prove that this is so. On the contrary, the earth and earthly life are changing form ceaselessly, whether we look at them from the perspective of geological ages or even of human history. The possibilities for human life on earth today are not the same as they were in the year 1000 or will be in 3000. You can never be born onto the same earth twice, any more than you can be born as the same person twice.

At that time Guénon could get away with saying that Hinduism and Buddhism did not teach reincarnation. The number of Hindus and Buddhists in the West was insignificant, and many of those were Western converts. It is much harder to make such claims now, when the West has access to teachers from high levels in these traditions. The Dalai Lama, for example, the supreme authority in Tibetan Buddhism, has written: “There have been and are found at the present time, many incidents illustrating rebirth, from many countries in the world. From time to time small children talk about their work in a previous life and can name the family in which they lived. Sometimes it is possible to check such cases and so prove that the facts remembered by the child are not at all nonsense but are indeed true.”

And of course the Dalai Lama’s credentials as an authority of “Traditional” teaching are far more solid than Guénon’s own.

For a Hindu perspective, we might turn to Paramhansa Yogananda’s classic Autobiography of a Yogi. Yogananda quotes his guru, Sri Yukteswar, as saying, “Beings with unredeemed earthly karma are not permitted after astral death to go to the high causal sphere of cosmic ideas, but must shuttle to and fro from the physical and astral worlds only.” The process of shuttling to and fro from the physical world would suggest that physical incarnation is not a once-only option. And again, the credentials of both Yogananda and Sri Yukteswar as transmitters of traditional teaching are far higher than Guénon’s.

A follower of Guénon’s might try to argue that all of these Eastern teachers have been somehow corrupted by Western views – but that comes very close to begging the question. If you are trying to determine whether “Traditional” Hinduism and Buddhism teach reincarnation, you cannot categorically say that any Hindu or Buddhist teacher who holds to such a doctrine is therefore “untraditional.” You are assuming the very thing you are trying to prove.

Why should Guénon work so hard to deny the ideas of both the spiritualists and the Theosophists (the leading proponents of reincarnation in the West in his time)? Because, in his view, they are corruptions of Traditional ideas that date, at the earliest, from the eighteenth century. And if you read both Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion and The Spiritist Error, you will see that he has an almost convulsive aversion to such concepts as “progress,” “evolution,” and reincarnation.

Guénon believed that the early nineteenth-century utopian French socialists Charles Fourier and Pierre Leroux invented the concept of reincarnation in order to explain inequalities among the human race. For Guénon, such inequalities are inevitable and even, one suspects, uninteresting. Every individual is different from every other; if it were otherwise, they would not be individuals at all. Thus of necessity all humans have different capacities and fates. Guénon accepts this eventuality with more equanimity than, I suspect, most readers would.

In an article on Guénon’s views of reincarnation, scholar Joscelyn Godwin points out the likely basis of Guénon’s reasoning. “In an infinite series, such as that of integers, each term appears but once. Likewise, in the infinite variety of the Universe, experienced in its totality by every being, no single state need or can be repeated.” By such reasoning reincarnation would be impossible.

Of course that would be true if the states of being were exactly analogous to mathematical integers, but there is no reason to accept such a thing a priori. In fact much of Guénon’s arguments against the failings of modernity have to do with its obsessive interest with number above all things – what he calls the “reign of quantity.” He quotes Thomas Aquinas, who wrote, Numerus stat ex parte materiae: “Number is on the side of matter.” This means that number, or quantity, has to do with matter, not with the world of the spirit. Number, as Guénon so intricately argues, does not apply to the higher, spiritual realms. There is, then, no reason to suppose that the laws of mathematics, however apparently inexorable, would apply either.

Every thinker has his own dynamic – meaning the tensions between two ideas or types of ideas that he struggles, more or less successfully, to reconcile. For Guénon it is the tension between the world of multiplicity, of number, of quantity, of matter on the one hand and the realm of the intellect, of the spirit, of what he calls “quality” on the other. This dynamic, as he understands, is a powerful, perhaps an all-powerful one. And he intuits – correctly, I believe – that the modern world is balanced far too much in the direction of matter and quantity. But I am not sure that he himself manages to step past this imbalance completely. He himself may be prone to the fault that he so readily sees in others: applying quantitative principles to realms where quantity does not apply. He is no doubt right in saying that the states of being are infinite, or virtually so. But then its possible combinations would be infinite as well, and it would not be wise to jump to conclusions about what is and is not possible within them.

Sources

The Dalai Lama XIV, The Opening of the Wisdom-Eye, 2nd ed., Quest Books, 1991

Joscelyn Godwin, “The Case against Reincarnation,” Gnosis 42 (Winter 1997), 28–32

René Guénon, L’erreur spirite, 2d ed., Éditions Traditionelles, 1952

René Guénon, Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion, Translated by Alvin Moore Jr. et al., Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 2003

Richard Smoley, “Against Blavatsky: René Guénon’s Critique of Theosophy,” Quest 98:1 (Winter 2010), 28–34; www.theosophical.org/publications/quest-magazine/42-publications/quest-magazine/1696-against-blavatsky-rene-guenons-critique-of-theosophy; accessed March 28, 2016.

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From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 7 No 3 (June 2013)

It is noon on a summer morning in California, and I am sitting in a dimly lit auditorium that is decorated in an Egyptian style with Art Deco touches. A group of us have shuffled in and taken our seats on finely polished wooden benches, and we are led on a guided meditation.

I don’t remember the exact content of the meditation, but I do remember the inner experience it generated in me. I had a strong sense of being in an Egyptian temple, seated on a stone chair on a stone dais in the centre of a room. The room had some kind of indirect lighting, and the only image I saw on the walls is a winged disk in front of me. Within me was a sense of coolness and centredness. I also had a slight glimpse, through a side entrance, of a bright blue sky with desert sand and some palms. I went into a deep meditative state and came out of it when the session ended.

The setting I was in – I mean in the physical world – was the temple of the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC for short) in San Jose, California. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that I should have a sense of Egypt – the entire property, Rosicrucian Park, which occupies a city block, is designed in a quasi-Egyptian style – but it is surprising that the sense of Egypt should be so powerful. Later I realised I had had a much stronger feeling of being in ancient Egypt during that meditation than I had ever had when I visited the country itself.

AMORC was founded in 1915 by an American ad man named Harvey Spencer Lewis, who received certain initiations in the Rosicrucian tradition in Europe around 1910. Using American marketing techniques (such as advertising in magazines), he built AMORC into one of the largest and most visible esoteric orders in the world. And, he insisted, the lineage of this tradition went back to Egypt itself.

Does it? How could we possibly know? The amount of documentation that would be required to prove such a claim would be enormous, and anyway such materials would hardly be able to survive the assaults of the millennia.

I am not a member of AMORC myself – I was present for that meditation, and a couple of others like it, while I was attending a conference sponsored by the organisation in July 2010. Moreover, I’ve never felt any great affinity for ancient Egypt. I have no way of knowing whether my experience arose from a contact with a thought-form built up by decades of Rosicrucian practice or whether it genuinely conveys a living tradition that goes back to the days of the pharaohs.

The “Upper Room”

Perhaps it does not matter. In either case this experience suggests one characteristic of an esoteric order: it must have an “upper room.” The phrase goes back to the New Testament, which tells of Christ’s disciples gathering in an “upper room” after his ascension (Acts 1:13). The phrase also appears in Mark 14:15 and Luke 22:12, which speak of an “upper room” at which the Last Supper was to be held. The detail is striking: what difference does it make if you meet in a room that is on an upper storey rather than a lower one? In a literal sense, none; but in an inner sense, I believe that an “upper room” – that is, a place on an astral level, as it is sometimes called, or the realm of the psyche – is a necessary part of an esoteric order. This “room” can be created by the sustained work of visualisation by a group over a certain period of time, and after a certain point it can start to have a quasi-independent existence. The group can gather there in thought, if not physically. This kind of “upper room” may be what I glimpsed in my AMORC meditation.

Curiously, one of the requirements given for the brothers in a seventeenth-century text known as the Fama fraternitatis (“Rumor of the Brotherhood”), a chief inspiration for the Rosicrucian movement, is “that every year, on the day C., they should meet together at the house Sancti Spiritus [of the Holy Spirit], or write the cause of his absence.” It is not clear which exactly is the “day C.,” but there is some evidence, at least in certain strains of the Rosicrucian tradition, that, despite the difference in initials, it is the feast of the Epiphany on January 6. (I do not know if this is the case for AMORC.) In any case, it seems likely that “the house Sancti Spiritus” is not a physical building, but the kind of upper room that I have been talking about here.

None of this, of course, tells us exactly what an esoteric order is, so some explanation is needed. Let’s begin by assuming that there is a vast continuum of development in consciousness, from the most ephemeral subatomic particle to beings and dimensions greater than we can conceive. Let’s also assume that the realm of human life and consciousness forms a very narrow bandwidth on this enormous span. There are levels below us and above us. Moreover, these levels are not rigidly separate or discrete, but blend into one another, like the colours on the visible spectrum. That is, there is some communication among them. The most famous image of this process appears in Jacob’s dream in Genesis: “And behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it” (Genesis 28:12).

We might go on to make another assumption – that the interaction that takes place among these levels involves a certain degree of responsibility, that the level above is required to help the one below rise to a higher degree of consciousness. Taking all these possibilities into account, we have a sense of what esoteric orders might mean for human development.

By this view, there are beings who have a greater degree of awareness (and, we may hope, compassion) than we do. They are aware of us – dimly, perhaps, as we are aware of them – and are able to help us. But in fact we cannot see these beings on a physical level. They exist on some other plane, and we need to rise up to that plane in order to have some genuine communication with them.

Hence the need for an upper room. Hence also the need for a group or community that can train people to rise to this upper room and have some communion with the beings there. (The Jewish Kabbalists sometimes refer to this as “the academy on high.”) These groups would constitute the esoteric orders – some of them known but many, perhaps most, unknown to any but their own members. The esoteric orders would exist on the physical level, but they would also have contacts on levels above. These are sometimes called “inner plane” contacts.

To take another example – again from a group that I do not belong to – there is the little-known Esoteric School of Theosophy. The Theosophical Society (TS) itself is comparatively well-known. It was founded in 1875 by the Russian savant H.P. Blavatsky and several of her associates. Today it continues to function on a worldwide basis as a means of, among other goals, investigating the “unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity.” The TS is said to have been inspired by Blavatsky’s contact with certain Masters or adepts who possessed paranormal powers and whose mission was to elevate the spiritual state of humanity.

As the TS grew and spread, its purpose became more diffuse, and it attracted many members who were interested in studying about but not necessarily pursuing the esoteric path. Consequently, in 1888 Blavatsky formed what she called the “Esoteric Section” of the TS, which was more oriented toward practice. Later the name was changed to the “Eastern School of Theosophy,” and finally to “the Esoteric School of Theosophy,” an organisation that exists to this day. It is not a secret society per se, but it is comparatively discreet about its existence and is only open to members of the TS. Those who want to join the Esoteric School must pledge themselves to a life of purity, eschewing meat, alcohol, and sexual license. (Not all esoteric orders have these requirements.) Members of the ES, as it is known for short, also devote themselves to lives of study, meditation, and service, although they do not withdraw from the world as monks or nuns.

Part of the goal of the ES seems to be to maintain contact with the Masters or adepts of whom Blavatsky spoke. I do not myself know what the nature of this contact is, if it is genuine, or which Masters the members of the ES would claim to be in touch with. Nor do I know whether these Masters are believed to be living in physical bodies or exist only on the inner planes. I have occasionally put questions about these things to members of the ES but have only gotten vague and noncommittal responses. Nonetheless, this contact seems to be part of the task of the ES, and it helps illustrate the purpose of having an upper room. 

Initiation

Esoteric orders usually bring in new members through initiation. The word “initiate” is in some ways a misleading one. To some, it connotes someone who is highly advanced – as, for example, in Cyril Scott’s Initiate trilogy of occult novels from the 1920s and ’30s, whose hero, Justin Moreward Haig, displays astonishing paranormal powers. But the core meaning of the word is really “beginner” – an initiation is a beginning. Initiation can take many forms and can range from the extremely simple to the extremely complex, but often it contains a sequence of acts in which the initiate symbolically “dies” and then is resurrected in a new and transformed state. The most familiar version of this rite is Christian baptism, particularly in its original form, whereby the candidate is fully immersed in water. By this symbolic drowning and restoration, the new Christian takes part in the death and resurrection of Christ himself. (Christianity today, of course, is not an esoteric order, but there is some evidence that it began as an esoteric order and was later popularised.)

The Catholic Church has traditionally taught that the rite of baptism leaves an indelible mark on the soul, removing all sin. Writing on the occult significance of the sacraments in the early twentieth century, the Theosophist and clairvoyant C.W. Leadbeater was more cautious in his assessment. While saying that it was “distinctly… an act of white [beneficent] magic, producing definite results which affect the whole life of the child,” he also pointed out that “a Sacrament is not a magical nostrum. It cannot alter the disposition of a man, but it can help to make his vehicles a little easier to manage. It does not suddenly make a devil into an angel, or a wicked man into a good one, but it certainly gives the man a better chance. That is precisely what Baptism is intended to do, and that is the limit of its power.”

As this passage suggests, initiatic practices usually intend to transform the inner nature of an individual. The Freemasons sometimes claim that the aim of their secret initiations is “to make good men better.” This is generally a subtle process, and probably for most individuals the change they undergo is comparatively gradual and difficult to see unless you are looking for it. In some cases, however, initiation produces more dramatic effects.

Over twenty years ago, when I was editor of Gnosis, a now-defunct magazine of the Western inner traditions, I entered into correspondence with a gentleman from Jordan named Dr. Jamal N. Hussain, who was researching deliberately caused bodily damage (DCBD) phenomena. He told me about the Tariqa Casnazaniyyah, a Sufi order whose name means “a path that is known by no one.” (For a discussion of the Casnazaniyyah order, see http://ashraf786.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=sufi&action=display&thread=23998.)

This order, which traces its lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad, has a membership said to number in the millions, located chiefly in Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Jordan. Its initiation process is quite simple. It consists of a brief two- or three-minute ritual in which the initiate recites a vow while exchanging a ritual handshake with the master of the order or one of his deputies. The initiate then requests permission to perform certain types of miracles. The master grants permission on the condition that the initiate will perform them only to attest to the greatness of the Casnazaniyyah order.

After this initiation, the individual can pierce his body with sharp objects, swallow razor blades, eat poisonous scorpions, or handle fire, all without any apparent harm. Scientific explanations are difficult to come by. As Dr. Hussain pointed out, this effect cannot be explained by endorphins (the body’s natural painkillers), since the wounds heal spontaneously and immediately. Nor can it be explained by self-hypnosis, since the practitioners do not experience any altered state of consciousness. While I myself have never witnessed any of these phenomena, Dr. Hussain did send along a number of rather poor-quality Polaroid photos, which did not seem to be doctored. In one of them, a bare-chested man with a large belly was piercing himself with spikes. In another memorable image, a man was chomping down on a scimitar, which was cutting into his lips. Dr. Hussain invited me to a conference in Baghdad that was discussing DCBD phenomena, but I was unable to go.

No matter how exotic their manifestations may be, esoteric orders have the task of making and maintaining contacts with higher levels of consciousness and being, and inducing a transformation within their members that make this possible. A complementary task is to carry out some function in the world – to do some kind of work that furthers human advancement. For example, the monastic orders that grew up in late antiquity had the function of preserving the essence of classical civilisation in the wake of its collapse. They also cleared land for agriculture in Europe and managed it in a careful and responsible way, creating the foundations of Western civilisation. “In a sense they determined the whole history of Europe,” writes historian Paul Johnson; “they were the foundation of its world primacy.” As the Dark Ages passed and medieval civilisation flowered, the monasteries, having fulfilled their purpose, fell into corruption. Today the monastic orders still survive, but for the most part only as dwindling vestiges.

Some have tried to classify esoteric orders on the basis of their functions. In the 1990s the British esoteric school known as Saros came up with a twelvefold division, inspired by the verse in Revelation that speaks of “twelve gates” to the holy city (Revelation 21:12). The Saros schema comprises Teachers, Prophets, Magicians, Lawgivers, Traders, Artists, Craft Workers, Life Tenders, Warriors, Perpetuators, Priests, and Explorers. One can easily find examples of these in world history: the schools of the prophets or “sons of the prophets” under such figures as Samuel, Elijah, and Elisha (1 Samuel 10:11; 19:19–20; 2 Kings 2:3, 5; 4:38; 6:1); the military orders of medieval times such as the Templars and Hospitallers; and the various magical orders that have arisen in the West over the past century or so, like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

System of the Seven Rays

In fact one of the most illustrious pupils of the Golden Dawn, Violet Firth, writing under the pen name Dion Fortune, wrote what is probably the best introduction to the subject: The Esoteric Orders and Their Work, which was originally published in 1928. Dion Fortune categorises the orders of the West according to a system of the Seven Rays that is similar to the one found in Theosophical teaching. Her schema is worth looking at in some depth.

Beginning with the seventh ray, Fortune contends that this, “the Plane of Abstract Spirit,” cannot be contacted while in the physical body. Instead the higher Self must withdraw, leaving the body in a trance. Fortune says that this seventh ray is not highly developed in the West, being characterised for the most part by mystics and ecstatics; Teresa of Avila is one of the principal sources on the subject. This ray is not to be developed prematurely, before the other, lower ones have been brought to fruition; otherwise it produces a kind of spiritual inertia. The school of the Quietist mystics in seventeenth-century France and Spain offer an example of this problem. Hence orders of the seventh ray are chiefly to be expected in the future.

The sixth ray is connected with spiritual devotion, with what the Hindus call bhakti, and, Fortune says, “hereon are developed the spiritual qualities of Love, Truth, Goodness, Purity, and many others.” It is headed by the Master Jesus, she says, and hence is known as the Christian Ray. “It is the hidden power of Christianity which was taught to the disciples in the Upper Room whilst the multitude received but a rule of life – a rule, however, which if faithfully followed, would bring them to that Upper Room where they could receive the inner teaching.”

The fifth ray is connected with the use of abstract reasoning. Fortune says it is called the Pythagorean Ray because it reached its heyday in the mystery schools of ancient Greece, among which the Pythagorean school was prominent. For the philosopher Pythagoras, who lived in the sixth century BCE, the universe was grounded in the principle of number and hence was knowable mathematically. 

The fourth ray is the ray of concrete, as opposed to abstract, mind; its quintessential master was the semimythical sage Hermes Trismegistus, and it bore fruit in the Egyptian and Chaldean mysteries of antiquity, as well as in its heirs, such as Gnosticism and the Jewish Kabbalah in late antiquity, as well as in the alchemists of medieval and early modern times. The Rosicrucians of AMORC, with their strongly Egyptian flavour, might come under this ray.

The third is the ray of beauty and harmony; “being an initiation of the emotions, its standards of value are aesthetic, not ethical.” It was exemplified by some of the earlier Greek mystery schools, Fortune says, particularly those of the Dionysian cult. Later it gave rise to the “Celtic racial culture” and hence is known as the Celtic Ray. It seeks to embody beauty and harmony in the manifestations of physical reality, and as a result is also known as the artist’s ray.

The second, “the Norse Ray,” is so called “because the purest contacts of this much-corrupted tradition which are available to us in the West are those of the Nordic mythology.” It deals with the plane of primitive instincts and the urge to overcome them; its ecstasy arises out of courage – the sublimation of fear in battle. Its dark side is cruelty, as can be seen from the ancient Viking practice of the “blood eagle,” in which a victim (usually a prisoner of war) had his rib cage cracked open from behind; his lungs were then ripped out and spread out on his back, producing a ghastly imitation of a pair of wings. Fortune suggests that this ray reached its zenith in remote primitive times.

The first ray principally involves the mastery of the physical body. The Casnazaniyyah order forms a rather extreme example of this type. Dion Fortune says that this ray is not “worked” in the West in the present day; and it probably was not in her time (she died in 1946), but we can see its resurgence on the contemporary scene with the wide popularity of hatha yoga. Although Fortune does not say this, it can probably be connected with the health and fitness cults of recent generations.

I must add here that Fortune’s picture of the seven rays is not quite identical with those of the classic Theosophical view (as outlined in, for example, Ernest Wood’s 1925 book The Seven Rays), but it remains comprehensive, particularly in trying to account for the different strains of the Western esoteric traditions. Again, it is easy to find examples of these different rays in many esoteric schools worldwide, whether we look at the way of the fakir or sadhu as practiced in the East (first ray) or at the schools of icon painters in Greek and Russian Orthodoxy (third ray). Other orders are more difficult to categorise. One would have to know more about the goals of the Esoteric School of Theosophy to be able to decide under which ray it fit.

For this reason at least, I would not view Fortune’s schema, or any other, as fixed and absolute. As usual, they provide categories for classifying and thinking about a certain area that remain useful as long as they do not form rigid conceptual barriers in the mind.

Coming to the end of this article, a reader may wonder about a number of things often associated with esoteric orders that I haven’t mentioned. What about the elaborate rites and costumes, the dazzling insignia, the extravagantly august titles often given to the leaders? Where do these fit in? They are external appurtenances – the hard shell around the order’s living core. At best they serve as reminders and confirmations of the ideals that it pursues. But if the members become too preoccupied with these appurtenances and they grow too cumbersome, this hard shell thickens and kills the living pith within. Thus when many people think of esoteric orders, they are often thinking of former esoteric orders that have died and are only going through the motions. If a seeker is only interested in these externals, most likely he will be drawn to groups of this kind, and may find them perfectly congenial. In most cases they are probably harmless enough.

More than many other subjects in this field, esoteric orders retain an air of mystery about them. The vast majority are probably unknown to all but their own members, and the role they play in human history is subtle and hard to pin down. Some may focus heavily on their inner plane contacts, while for others these may be only felt as a vague and remote influence. But insofar as these groups foster human development and point us toward vistas that lie beyond the bounds of conventional reality, they continue to underpin civilisation in ways about which we can only guess.

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Sources

Paul Foster Case, The True and Invisible Rosicrucian Order, Samuel Weiser, 1985

Dion Fortune, The Esoteric Orders and Their Work, Aquarian, 1982

Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, Atheneum, 1987

C.W. Leadbeater, The Science of the Sacraments, 2nd ed., Theosophical Publishing House, 1929

Richard Smoley, “Sufi Order Practices Way of the Fakir,” Gnosis 31 (Spring 1994), 8-9

Ernest Wood, The Seven Rays, Theosophical Publishing House, 1925

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From New Dawn 124 (Jan-Feb 2011)

The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.
– William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

If there is a central religious doctrine for the New Age, surely it is this – the belief that positive thoughts can bend reality to their own shape. It is an alluring concept. If it’s true, we don’t need to act or work or perform in the world. All we need to do is change our thinking. But is there anything to this idea?

To understand something about the doctrine of thought power, it’s helpful to look at its history. The father of the religion of positive thinking was an obscure New Englander named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–66). 

Quimby, like many men of his time, was a jack of all trades. He started as a clockmaker, but eventually became fascinated with alternative methods of healing and learned the art of mesmerism or animal magnetism, a forerunner of hypnosis. Quimby found that if he put an assistant into a trance, the assistant could diagnose and prescribe a remedy for a patient’s disease (much like Edgar Cayce, the celebrated “sleeping prophet” who lived a couple of generations later).

Quimby built up a successful practice this way, but soon he came to a startling conclusion: it didn’t matter what remedy was prescribed; it was the faith of the patient that made the difference. So Quimby dismissed his assistant and began to practice his own radical method of healing, in which he would simply convince the patient that he or she was already well. Quimby’s warm and gentle nature aroused a sense of confidence. His office filled with patients, and many came away from his treatments feeling great relief or even fully cured. He often treated people for free when they could not pay.

A self-taught man, Quimby was not a systematic thinker. But around 1859, he began to formulate his teachings in writing. He believed he had discovered the secret of the miracles performed by Jesus Christ, and he wished to make this knowledge available to all. 

“My philosophy,” he said, “will make man free and independent of all creeds and laws of man, and subject him to his own agreement, he being free from the laws of sin, sickness, and death.”

The teaching was simple. In each human being resides Truth, Wisdom, and Goodness. This is our natural birthright. But there is also another aspect: the mortal, material mind that is subject to error. And the chief error to which this material mind is subject is disease. 

“Disease,” Quimby wrote, “is false reasoning. True scientific wisdom is health and happiness. False reasoning is sickness and death.” Quimby never really gave a name to his teaching, though he usually called it the “Science of Health.” Once or twice in his writings he referred to it as “Christian Science.”

Quimby attracted a number of disciples. One of them, Warren Felt Evans, was also a follower of the Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). It was in fact Evans who introduced the term “New Age” in his influential 1864 book, The New Age and Its Messenger. The “messenger” of the title was Swedenborg, who in his voluminous writings proclaimed 1757 as the year of the Last Judgment. But this event, he said, did not and was not supposed to take place on earth. It was enacted in the realm of the spirits, an intermediate zone between heaven and hell. The Lord purged this realm of evil, making it possible for heaven to transmit its influences to earth in a less impeded fashion. 

Swedenborg did not espouse the doctrine of thought power as it would later emerge: he held that the human mind was continually subject to influences from both heaven and hell and that the function of the human being on earth was to choose the good and renounce the evil impulses. Even so, Swedenborg’s thought, which reached the zenith of its influence in the early nineteenth century, prepared the ground for the New Age movement.

After Quimby’s death in 1866, his ideas lived on in the teachings of his most famous pupil, Mary Baker Eddy, who popularised the name “Christian Science” and created a religion around it, as well as in subsequent movements such as New Thought, Unity, and Religious Science.

New Thought is something of a blanket term used to cover these other movements in contradistinction to Eddy’s Christian Science. The American scholar of religions Charles Braden characterised the chief differences between these two strains as follows: 

1) Christian Scientists tend to be more authoritarian in their thinking, regarding Mrs. Eddy’s writings as definitive revelations, whereas adherents of New Thought stress that spiritual truths are being revealed every day;

2) Christian Scientists have tended toward denial – disease, matter, and “mortal mind” do not exist – whereas the New Thought movement has inclined more toward affirmations (“I am well”; “I am perfect”); 

3) Christian Scientists are generally opposed to working with traditional physicians or allowing their patients to do so, whereas proponents of New Thought have been more flexible and pragmatic on this count.¹

Ernest Holmes’ Religious Science

One of the more vibrant strains of New Thought in the twentieth century was Religious Science, founded by Ernest Holmes (1887-1960). Born in Maine, Holmes moved to Boston as a teenager where he took a two-year course in public speaking. At this time he was drawn to the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (another major influence on the New Thought movement), as well as to Eddy’s textbook of Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Later he would study other major figures in the New Thought movement, such as William Walker Atkinson and Thomas Troward.

In 1914, Holmes moved to Venice, California. In 1919, he published his first book, Creative Mind. His magnum opus, Science of Mind, was first published in 1926. Though most of Holmes’s ideas can be found in his nineteenth-century precursors, he offered a slicker version of New Thought in his thoroughly twentieth-century salesmanship. He liked to tell stories of persuading homely girls to smile; when their lips parted, he claimed, they were surrounded by rich men eager to pay the bills for orthodontia. Gail Thain Parker, a scholar of New Thought, writes, “Holmes’s smugness is very different from the more exploratory (and sometimes evasive) tone of the first- and second-generation mind curists…. He knew that nothing he would say would shock or surprise; his prose was full of lifetime warranties and unbeatable bargains.”²

Holmes, a powerful speaker but an ambivalent guru, nevertheless suffered his disciples to set up an organisation to promote his ideas. The Institute of Religious Science and the School of Philosophy was incorporated in 1927. In the same year Holmes also founded Science of Mind magazine, which is still published today. His influence was enormous, not only through his own writings but through those who were inspired by him. Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking, a best-seller of the mid-twentieth century, drew much of his message from Religious Science.

Holmes lived long enough to see his organisation subject to schisms and infighting. Shortly before Holmes’s death, his protégé Obadiah Harris (who went on to become head of the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles) confided to him that he was leaving the movement to find his own path. “I wish I could go with you,” Holmes replied.³

Even so, Holmes’s organisation survives to this day, and his teachings continue to inspire many. One of his central – and perhaps his most influential – ideas is the Law of Attraction. The term was originally coined in the nineteenth century to refer to the soul’s affinity for different spheres of the afterlife, but Holmes gave it its current meaning: “What we shall attract will depend on that on which our thoughts dwell.”⁴ 

If you think of prosperity, prosperity will come your way; if your thoughts dwell on disease, suffering, and misfortune, you are laying the ground for your own future unhappiness. These thoughts are not necessarily conscious ones, Holmes contended: 

“While most disease must first have a subjective cause, this subjective cause (nine times out of ten) is not conscious in the thought of the person who suffers from it, but is perhaps largely the result of certain combinations of thinking. So while it is true that disease has its prototype in subjective mind, it is also true that the individual who suffers from the disease, frequently has never thought he was going to have that particular kind of trouble. But this does not alter the fact that every disease which comes up through subjectivity, and appears in the body, must come through mind.”⁵

Healing, by contrast, comes from right thinking, as Quimby had taught decades before. Holmes taught his followers to heal in this way: “First recognise your own perfection, then build up the same recognition for your patient. You are then read to directly attack the thought that binds him, recognising that your word destroys it, and stating that it does. You may then take into account and specifically mention everything that needs to be changed, every so-called broken law or false thought. Then finish your treatment with a realisation of peace, remaining for a few moments in silent recognition that your work is done, complete and perfect.”⁶

Holmes said that the human mind was composed of two aspects: the “subjective” or “subconscious” mind on the one hand and the “objective” or “conscious” mind on the other. The subjective mind is not conscious but is creative; it is “that part of the mind which is set in motion as a creative thing in the conscious state.” The subjective “sets power in motion in accordance with the thought.”⁷ The conscious mind must, however, direct the subconscious toward positive goals.

A similar view can be found in the writings of Max Freedom Long, who, in such books as The Secret Science behind Miracles, taught an almost identical system that he traced back to the kahunas, the shamans of Hawaii. According to Long, the Hawaiians used the word unihipili to describe what Holmes called the “subjective mind” and the word uhane as more or less equivalent to Holmes’s “conscious” or “objective mind.” Although both authors use the word “science” in a metaphysical context, it is unlikely that Holmes or Long influenced each other; rather these similarities show how thoroughly these ideas pervaded the alternative spirituality of early twentieth-century America.

The Universe is “Mental”

By contrast, a work called The Kybalion, first published in 1908, was a likely influence on Holmes (see accompanying article). The title page of this anonymous work lists its authors merely as “Three Initiates.” The Chicago occultist William Walker Atkinson is generally acknowledged to have been one of these; Paul Foster Case, founder of the occult order known as Builders of the Adytum, is also sometimes suggested as one of the others.⁸ 

In any event, The Kybalion – its name allegedly going back to the Egyptian mysteries, although its meaning was supposedly lost – set forth seven principles of metaphysical truth, the first being “the principle of mentalism” – “The Universe is mental – held in the Mind of the all….the Universe and all It contains, is a mental creation of The all.”⁹ Compare this to Holmes’s statement “There is one mental law in the universe, and where we use it, it becomes our law because we have individualised it.”¹⁰ (The similarities extend to the printing of both sentences in all capital letters.)

Since the universe was “mental” in its essence, Holmes prescribed what today is called “creative visualisation” as a means of attaining well-being. Here is his advice to someone who is seeking success in business: “Every day he should see his place filled with people. See them looking at and finding pleasure in his merchandise; see them comparing prices and realising that he is offering good values; see them delighted with the service he is giving…. Make a mental picture of it all. We are dealing with Intelligence, and we should recognise the Power we are working with – realising our Oneness with it – and then we should ask for what we wish and take it.”¹¹

A related approach is affirmation. Like the ancient Semites, who believed in a mystical unity between a word and the thing it represented, Holmes believed that the spoken word held the power to transform reality, and he included affirmations as part of his prescribed practice. 

He recommended making this statement, for example, as part of a “treatment” for “supply”: “I always have an abundance of money and an abundance of whatever it takes to make life happy and opulent. There is a continuous movement toward me of supply, of money, of all that I need to express the fullest life, happiness and action.”¹²

Science of Mind and Magic

Anthropologists have classically distinguished between magic and religion. Magic uses certain techniques such as incantation, sacrifice, and ritual as a way of manipulating unseen powers. Religion often uses the same methods but it does so as a way of supplicating God or the gods through prayer and meditation. Magic is a kind of sacred technology, while religion usually involves a relationship to a personal deity. Science of Mind – and the religion of positive thinking as a whole – is much closer to magic than to religion. While it does not prescribe arcane rituals or weird spells, it does attempt to manipulate the primordial force of the universe – mind – on the practitioner’s behalf. 

There is no theological problem in this from a New Thought perspective, because God is all-good and all-loving and wants us to live in health and abundance; our failure to do so is simply the result of faulty thinking and a failure to claim our due. The constant use of the word “Science” by figures from Quimby to Holmes underlines the quasi-technological mindset that operates in these teachings, and suggests how much they owe to the industrial age that gave them birth: mind is an impersonal force that can be harnessed in much the same way as steam or electricity.

While New Thought and Religious Science insist that they are part of a tradition that has always been known to adepts – the healing miracles of Jesus are frequently cited as cases in point – there is comparatively little in traditional esotericism that resembles these teachings. Certainly it has long been taught, particularly by Plato and his philosophical descendants, that there is an ideal world of forms that can be perceived by the higher intellect and that serve as prototypes for the things of materiality. But the teaching that someone can not only perceive these archetypes but manipulate them to change physical reality is extremely rare. The traditional view was that a true philosopher did not care about the material world and occupied himself as little as possible with it.

Even the occultism of the Renaissance, with its cumbrous magical technology, did not lay any particular emphasis upon thought power. According to Renaissance savants such as Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa, the magus can affect the higher dimensions, but does so by operating upon their corresponding objects in the physical world. To bring down beneficent solar or jovial influences, one wears stones or eats herbs that are associated with these benign influences. Magical formulae were also employed, but not as affirmations – many of these incantations consist of words in no known language – and the goal was often to subject spirits and demons to the magician’s will.

The world of traditional magic is thus very far removed from the streamlined positive thoughts and affirmations of Religious Science and its kin. To speculate wildly for a moment, perhaps this is one sign of the New Age proclaimed by Swedenborg and Evans – that what formerly required intricate spells and bizarre operations can now be accomplished by using the power of the mind and the spoken word.

This, of course, assumes that the methods of Religious Science actually work, and such claims are hard to assess. Certainly there are any number of people who have been willing to testify on behalf of these procedures, and their claims must be taken seriously enough. But we have no way of knowing how many of them there are as opposed to the numbers of those who have tried and failed. Most of the people I have known through New Thought circles appear no richer, happier, healthier, or more successful than much of the rest of humanity. And while I have known people who have gotten rich over the years – some of them staggeringly rich – their secret was probably not affirmations or thought power but the usual combination of talent, hard work, and sheer luck – and, indeed, enormous quantities of all three.

Nonetheless, the claims of the thought power gurus from Quimby to Holmes (not to mention latter-day figures such as the entity known as Abraham, channelled by Esther Hicks, and Rhonda Byrne, author of The Secret) cannot be dismissed wholesale. Thought power, like so many aspects of the metaphysical realm, occupies a liminal space between truth and falsity. As soon as you have decided it is all nonsense, something pokes you on the shoulder and tells you it may not be nonsense after all. But if you become an enthusiastic believer, you may end up disappointed.

To speak personally, I would be willing to say this much. The basic idea behind positive thinking is true: there is a mental world that underlays the physical, and thoughts can influence events in ways that can seem bizarre or even paranormal. But the interplay of thought and actuality is not entirely explained by a few simplistic axioms and the usual lifetime warranties. Other factors operate as well – the obscure but overwhelming forces that are sometimes called fate and destiny; the actions of a mind that cannot always be understood, much less manipulated, by the conscious ego; and of course the “time and chance” that, the Bible reminds us, “happeneth to all” (Eccl. 9:11).

To the extent that positive thinking and mental science help us focus upon our goals and eliminate negative mental patterns, they can be useful. But they are usually not very effective substitutes for action. And if they foster a self-centred attitude that focuses on “my” prosperity and “my” health, or, still worse, dismisses the suffering of others on the grounds that somehow they brought it all upon themselves by wrong thinking, these ideas can cause serious trouble. We must never lose sight of the fact that the power of thought includes the power to enslave the mind. And the ultimate goal of liberation may not be to make our thoughts manifest in the world of desire, but to free ourselves from them as much as is possible in this world of entanglements.

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Footnotes

1. Quoted in Gail Thain Parker, Mind Cure in New England from the Civil War to World War I (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1973), 4–5.

2. Parker, 16-17.

3. Horowitz, 97.

4. Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind, rev. ed. (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 1998), 294.

5. Holmes, 201-02; emphasis and capitalisation here and in other quotes are from the original.

6. Ibid., 202.

7. Holmes, 30.

8. Mitch Horowitz, Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation (New York: Bantam, 2009), 210. Horowitz, however, believes that Atkinson was the sole author.

9. “Three Initiates,” The Kybalion (Clayton, Ga.: Tri-State Press, 1988 [1908]), 53, 57.

10. Holmes, 30. 

11. Holmes, 300.

12. Holmes, 263.

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