Books 39 – 50
BREAKTHROUGH
A “Spiritual” Revolution
The Beatles and Maharishi circa 1968
Books written from 1960 onward have quite a different character and bearing from those in the Background. The difference is marked by the great watershed of the sixties, when the New Age first assumed definition as a counter-cultural event. This development has been followed up in the eighties by a further stage of growth: the initial emergence of New Age interests into the mainstream.
Beatniks and Beatles
During the developmental period from 1900 to the 1960s, the results of a lot of original, pioneering work appeared in print, but alternative spirituality remained largely a matter of elite interest, more or less unknown to the public at large. Even in the mid-forties, when Autobiography of a Yogi appeared and became a best-seller, interest was sparked in Eastern masters, but it was nothing comparable to the widespread exposure they have gotten since 1967, when the Beatles embraced Maharishi Mahesh Yogi as their personal guru. Huxley’s superb anthology with commentaries, The Perennial Philosophy, appeared in the last year of World War II, when the populace at large had other concerns on their minds. It became a must-read for an elite group of questing intellectuals, those rare few who had the time and the inclination to dabble in mysticism.
But already, with the end of the war, other developments were unfolding that would prove to be extremely influential in opening alternative spirituality to wide social exposure. At first, soldiers returning from the Asian theater, and later, servicemen stationed in Korea during the conflict there, became the scouts who brought Oriental philosophy and Asian culture to Western shores. This firsthand contact with Eastern ways of thought and self-discipline launched a tremendous surge of cross-cultural insemination. Zen, Tai Chi, and the martial arts (Bushido) were popular among these servicemen, many of whom found their way into the circles of the Beat movement, defined in the middle fifties. Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums is one well-known personal account of this period.
A little-known event crucial to the dissemination of Eastern teachings in the West occurred in 1965, when the Oriental Exclusions Acts of the USA were repealed, opening the way for large-scale immigration from the Far East and India. Since the first appearance of Oriental emissaries to the West at the Conference of World Religions of 1897, swamis, gurus, and roshis had remained purely exotic; now they began to arrive in considerable numbers. In the brief span of a few years, America was swamped with them. All manner of missionaries of Eastern wisdom set up centers in major cities. Viewed in hindsight, the acceleration has been really staggering: less than a hundred years from Ramakrishna (guru to Yogananda’s guru, Shri Yukteshwar) to Rajneesh (eventually expelled from Oregon state because his cult got out of control).
By 1967, when the Beatles brought Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to worldwide media exposure, the image of spiritual masters from the East was fixed in glassy renown. In fact, it had already turned into a caricature of itself, the way things in the media-eye tend to do, curiously and with alarming rapidity, especially in America. The distorting overexposure of the media did not affect the modest and authentic renaissance of spirituality, however. What the public saw was often the least significant side of the counter-cultural revolt against traditional religion. In keeping with the rebellious spirit of the sixties, adherents of the new movements tended to be exhibitionistic, flaunting their ideas and manners before the uncomprehending masses. Probably the best-known example would be the devotees of the Hare Krishna movement founded in 1965 when anti-establishment fever was peaking. Among this group, as among many others, new personal names in Hindi and Sanskrit were adopted to signify the radical change of life-style and identity. Customs of dress, eating, physical austerity, and devotional rituals were also adopted on a wide scale among the counterculture. Mainstream fascination with the leading cult figures was exploited in national magazines, tabloids and TV talk shows. Little did the outraged or titillated public realize that Krishna-worship, which encourages dancing in the streets, is traditional in Hindu culture, not an alternative path at all. From the late sixties right through to the late eighties, the definition of what actually constitutes an alternative path (E2) was never an issue.
Aquarian Hype
The last year of the decade, 1969, produced a significant instance of synchronicity. The hippie musical Hair came to national attention in the USA, mainly through the popularity of a theme-song that hailed “the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” In the same year, two scholars from the Harvard community published a baffling treatise on an obscure feature of celestial mechanics, the precession of the equinoxes. Hamlet’s Mill by historian Giorgio de Santillana and astronomer Hertha von Dechend was subtitled, “An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission through Myth.” Identical with the mysterious Sampo in the Kalevala (L17), the “Mill” of Hamlet, (Icelandic Amlothi) is the mechanism that produces a slow rotation of the polar axis of the earth around a central point in the heavens, a movement often compared to a top that wobbles as it slows down. Due to this motion, the pole star indicated by the terrestrial axis (currently Polaris in Ursa Minor, the Little Bear) changes over many centuries. Measured along the ecliptic (apparent path of the sun), the rate of precession is about one degree per 72 year, and the secondary effect of polar wobble is to shift the spring equinox against the background of the Zodiac, the band of visible constellations on the sun’s path (rendered invisible when the sun passes in front of them, of course). A further consequence of this obscure concatenation of heavenly mechanics is that the spring equinox is backgrounded by different images in the Zodiac as the ages transpire. The end result of this elaborate complex of ideas is that definite periods of historical time are signaled astronomically by the constellations of the Zodiac, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, etc. Thus we hear of the Age of Aries, the Age of Taurus and, of course, the Age of Aquarius.
All this is not so simple, and Hamlet’s Mill, one of the most discursive and rambling works of scholarship ever produced, does not help to simplify it. Nevertheless, this complex idea combining myth, astronomy and long-term chronology somehow found its way onto the mass mental wavelength at the very moment when a few dedicated scholars were dunking their minds into the dense swirling convolutions of Hamlet’s Mill.
Now one remarkable thing, the really mysterious thing here, is, no one knows where this arcane notion of cosmic Ages measured by precession in the Zodiac originated. Even Santillana and von Dechend do not know. They cite no classical source for the idea anywhere in their lucid but turbulent “essay,” because no such source had been identified, yet the idea was known to the lyricists of Hair. In the USA and elsewhere, millions of people were charged with the expectation of a New Age, without the slightest notion of the mytho-astronomical basis for that expectation.
Speculation about the dawning moment of the Aquarian Age is still rampant today. Seventy-five estimates have been recorded. Astronomically, it is not difficult to ascertain the transitional moment, even though the stars defining the two adjacent constellations, Pisces and Aquarius, overlap to some extent. The motion of the spring equinox due to long-term polar axial wobble can be tracked and computed with high accuracy. (The question of whether or not ancient astronomers who worked before the era of Greek science could do this consistently and accurately is a flashpoint in the current debate over Meta-History, E17. See also astronomical myth in the Lexicon.) It is indisputable that the spring point entered the constellation of Pisces around 120 BCE, and will shift wholly into the composite of Aquarius around 2800 CE. This is a dawn a long time in the making.
Mainstreaming the Quest
Hype for the immanent dawning of the Aquarian Age, aka New Age, is not supported by astronomical fact, but it still registers vividly in the collective psyche. Post-2000 AD it continues to inform the visionary efforts of the counter-culture born from the youthful revolt of the Sixties (for instance, Marilyn Ferguson, L48). Ahead in Essay 1, I will show how the New Age arose as a late outgrowth, even a mutation, of radical socialism going back to reformist sects of the nineteenth century. Its identifiable roots are to be found in the socialist-utopian movements in England, millenarian cults of the 1840s.
Toward the dawn of the third millennium, the New Age movement may be shaping into a sociological challenge on an international scale — at least in the literate cultures of the West. Planetary networking is a common theme nowadays. Although the new spirituality is based upon highly subjective versions of the quest (i.e., personal growth), it comes to expression more and more in external culture, in the media and societal attitudes, taking a long stride beyond the schismatic counter-cultural sixties radicalism. In short, the New Age appears to have entered a stage of consolidation since 1988 or so. Many of its advocates are now devoting their lives to global programs of one kind or another. “Think globally, act locally” is one example of bumper-sticker wisdom that signals this orientation. Although the impulses at work remain consistent with the original assumptions of the modern spiritual movement, going back to 1900, there is a huge dimensional shift. The trends outlined in Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy exemplify the mainstreaming of the quest. Is this the wave of the future, potentially strong enough for the leading impulses of the New Age to define and shape progressive aspects of social and cultural change, or is it a predictable dissipation of radical drives into ever more conventional channels? Only time will tell, but the Zodiacal clock is ticking loudly as I write.
Criteria and Design
All the books cited in the Breakthrough category reflect the trend toward mainstreaming of the quest. They are not the products of brilliant forerunners like Wilhelm Reich or masters of the great overview like Aldous Huxley. For the most part, they are testimonials to the enormous social and cultural changes now underway. They exemplify in some instances the growing impact of a pragmatic historical vision of planetary transformation. Due to the bad press associated with cults (E10) and the nationwide exposure of the Rajneesh scandal in Oregon, specific instances of gurumania are dropping off and a more sober, far-reaching interest in Eastern and alternative spirituality is arising. Initially and superficially defined by spurious fads (such as crystals, E7, and channeling, E9), this new trend is fed by far deeper currents and may well have long-term effects in the mainstream of American culture and beyond.
The source books for the Breakthrough reveal a frame of activity far wider than the eclectic world of spiritual pioneers in the Background. They indicate how the New Age may be developing toward a new social agenda, a solid and legitimate infra-culture, I would say, rather than a precarious counter-culture. Of course this is taking a generous view. Everything depends on the dedication and qualifications of the proponents and activists for alternative spirituality now appearing in diverse realms of contemporary life. The reading in this category will help us to identify the viable aspect of the current trends. Some of them have redefined ancient genres of experimentation — Tibetan Buddhism L30 and L42, shamanism L44, Aboriginal vision L50. Others present techniques and approaches for healing and self-change: L46 and L47. Yet others are significant for the challenge they posed to the persistent power of degenerating world-views: L43 and L49. Ideally, the summary effect of this selection is to configure our intentions for the way ahead.
Breakthrough: Books 39 – 50
39. Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism (1960) by Lama Anagarika Govinda. Masterwork by a Westerner (German by birth) who disappeared, body, mind and spirit, into the creamy white hole of Asian metaphysics. Organized conceptually on the pattern of the sacred mantra OM MANI PADME HUM, this exposition of occult theory and practice has not been surpassed by any teacher native to the tradition. Here is the formal and technical structure of Vajrayana, the Tibetan variant of Mahayana Buddhism, complete in detail and grand in scale, yet this is not merely a scholarly exegesis. Lama Govinda’s gift for teaching lightens what would otherwise be a morphine overdose of esoteric psychology-iconography-symbolism. Contains exceptionally fine passages of the Bodhisattva Vow, the role of the dakini in Tantric initiation, the bardos, the Tibetan Wheel of Life and the chain of karmic links (nidanas) that bind us to rebirth. Tibetan Buddhism formally excludes explicit treatment of Kundalini from the waist down, by contrast to its kissing cousin, Hindu Tantra Vidya, which gives the Serpent Power a central place in theory and technique. To his credit, Lama Govinda points out this little-known fact and openly discusses the contrast. Personally, I do not know if this work is widely read by Western Buddhists today, but I cannot imagine exploring that particular region of the labyrinth without having it tucked snugly into my yak-pack.
40. Psychotherapy East and West (1961) by Alan Watts, genial scholar and psychedelic scout. Troubled by the incidence of three women authors in this category of ten, I found myself wondering, Who was the female counterpart to Alan Watts? She must have existed and been known in the Sixties — most likely as a poet, I reckon. Until she turns up, I will recommend Watts as the most elegant and entertaining exponent of East/West studies on record. This book puts Taoism and psychotherapy together like a fractal mesh that melts in the mind, M&Ms style. Watt’s stated pretence, to be merely an entertainer, beautifully disguises his finesse as a true Zen wizard, the one who said, “For a glimpse of Buddhist emptiness, the Void, consider how your head looks to your eyes.” This book integrates every major contribution to the modern spiritual movement up to the dawn of the Sixties: Esalen, Existentialism, Jung, Maslow, Norman O. Brown, Radhakrishnan, Eliade, Rollo May, Reich, Gregory Bateson, D. T. Suzuki (E33), Erikson and more, all as if you were being whirlwinded on a slow-motion tour by the Mad Hatter of Satori. Watts loves Chuang-Tzu (L3), whom he resembles rather in the way a moth resembles a butterfly. He is delightfully lucid on the fictitious nature of the self-conscious ego: “One’s life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man who has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If the one is paranoid, the other metanoid.” Let it never be said that he never attained the unattainable, but let it never be said that he attained it, either.
41. The Morning of the Magicians (1964) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, a pair of French journalists. Sensationalistic account of the little-known metaphysical and occult movements behind the scenes of history in the 20th century. A cult bestseller when it appeared, it still holds up in most ways, although its panoply of outrageous ideas and stranger-than-fiction facts seems less bizarre now that the world at large is more bizarre. Whatever shred of planetary folklore you might contemplate, especially on the sinister bend, some of us read it here first. From Vatican spies to Nazi third eyes, from Apocalypse to Ice Age catastrophe, from Fulcanelli (legendary alchemist alleged to live for centuries) to Borges (Argentinian author who plotted the forking paths of the maze), this is tabloid surrealism at its finest.
42. The Psychedelic Experience (1964) by Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary, and Ralph Metzner, three Harvard professors who went their separate ways after Leary was busted for privately administering LSD in November, 1963, three weeks before JFK was assassinated. Previous to this incident (the infamous Millbrook raid, led by G. Gordon Liddy, the CIA thug who later broke into Watergate), they had been conducting clinical trials with LSD under the auspices of the Harvard Fellows. The result of these experiments was a version in catchy modern idiom of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (L8), adapted specifically for guidance through the psychedelic experience. In effect, the ego-death undergone with LSD was substituted for the literal death-experience — a brilliant transposition. The taboo-busting power of the Psychedelic Era survives here in its original tone. The ordinary reality of the ego-self is brilliantly deconstructed into “game-networks” and its abiding neurosis exposed. The language used to describe psychedelic vision is clear and direct: “All solidity is gone. All phenomena are paper images pasted on the glass screen of consciousness. For the unprepared, or for the person whose karmic residue structure stresses control, the discovery of the wave-nature of all structure, the Maya revelation, is a disastrous web of uncertainty.” Dedicated to Lama Govinda, this little manual holds up well due to its sharp, innovative treatment of human hang-ups and mental blocks, those scrappy sphinxes sitting along the paisley-paved pathway into the Clear Light. Come to think of it, paisley is a self-enclosing meander, the fractal swirl of the cosmic rainbow, perhaps, but it’s the emotion-saturating pull of the colors that brings us back to life, over and over, say the Tibetans.
43. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1965) by Marshall McLuhan, counter-cultural guru of the Sixties. Dense, dazzling, and difficult, enigmatic and eye-opening, this book is the Rosetta stone for the age of electronic media. Decades before the specter of IT (information technology) was foisted on humanity by a cabal of wiffling nerds, McLuhan had deciphered how media works to capture, reflect, distort and then re-program our attention, broadcasting it right back into our faces and mutating human perception at all levels, personal, social and global. Why does he view this development with such apparent benevolence? I suspect that McLuhan was an idealist at heart. What would he say today, faced with the crass commercialization of the Web, or the jack-hammer editing of soft-porn, “barely legal” videos for the pubescent addicts of MTV? I reckon he would either scream or faint, or scream and then faint. Companion to his more well-known opus, The Gutenberg Galaxy, this is a textbook in the esoteric psychology of modern communication, as avant-garde now as it when it appeared, although its author has long since gone out of vogue. Considering the prospect that media technology might support a planetary culture and expose the masses to New Age options in healing, nutrition, politics, environmental awareness, lifestyle, et cetera, McLuhan deserves a careful rereading. Indeed, the prospect may not hold up unless it can be critiqued on the standards he introduced. Essential for anyone who wants to understand behavioral modelling through media-feedback, but definitely not for the woolly-headed.
44. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968) by Carlos Castaneda. The first in a sequence of nine books culminating in The Active Side of Infinity (1998), this report of anthropological field work on Mexican shamanism was originally published as a dissertation by UCLA/Berkeley, but it far transcends the genre it served to define. Carlos moves from the traditional Toltec balams (jaguar priests) to the horizon of next-generation sorcery by a succession of dazzling leaps. More effectively than any other written works in our time, these books relocate the boundaries between the actual and the invented, the real and the imaginal. Starting here, Castaneda elaborates a complex system of experimental psychology based on the elusive interplay of two realms, tonal and nahual, ordinary and non-ordinary reality. The journey has to be followed from its first step, for Carlos keeps his pretences right out in the open and amuses us with the spectacle of their progressive disintegration, book after book. Here is true mystery and no bogus mystification. It matters not if one disbelieves Castaneda, for you do not have to believe it’s raining to get wet, and it is ridiculous to argue about whether or not his exploits have been invented. What is real and true also has to be invented. Sorcery is about cultivating power (i.e., attention) and manipulating perception. It is the way to make oneself receptive to the intent of the universe and align human intent to multiple dimensions, the full bandwidth of 48 currents. This is not a contradiction of known reality, but an augmentation of the faculties by which we experience it. In his paunchy way, Castaneda exemplifies the stumblebum method of initiation identified with Parzival. His style is mock-Socratic, with don Juan the improbable midwife. The wild trajectory of his journey of Ixtlan (the Unknown) glows like the welcome flare from a passing supernova.
45. Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (1970) by Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder. Dense, clear and well-researched study of advanced experiments conducted in the Soviet Bloc is the early sixties when, for some reason, the Stalinist taboo on things psychic was temporarily lifted. The mind-body link, telepathy, telekinesis, UFOs and PSI, dowsing, alchemy, Kirlian photography, astrological birth control, prediction, suggestology, psychotronics, cybernetics, past-life recall, time-travel, pyramid power, aura-reading, and acrobatics of the bioplasmic body (see plasmic double) — an extraordinary panoply of bizarre revelations, all based on solid research. Anything but credulous, this book is sober and analytical without being tedious. It goes deep into parapsychology and the paranormal, anticipating many later developments in the West. For instance, “ESP-ionage” practised under KGB direction during the space race preceded the CIA program, code-named “Stargate,” which employed teams of spies in remote-viewing exercises and was unknown to the public until the early nineties. To my mind, one of the most startling facts in this book concerns the mitogenic radiation discovered by Alexander Gurvitch in the 1930s. The authors quote a line from Harper’s Magazine, July 1934: “Life whose wheel is driven by light may also be a generator of light. This is the amazing concept proposed by a series of experiments in a Russian lab.” Today biology has advanced a little way on this revelation, for it is known that mitochondria, the organic “batteries” of our cells, contain the secret of life and radiate light. As I write these words, two epoch-making papers have appeared in Nature and Science on the implications of the full mapping of the human genome. I wonder how long it will be before genetics in the West converges with the science of bioplasmic fields pioneered by the Soviets over seventy years ago. Gurvitch’s discovery confirms the Gnostic teaching that the “Eye of Adamic Light-Intelligence,” called Allogenes, is a biogenetic matrix, and there is a great deal more in Psychic Discoveries to verify the high status of the sacred biology in ancient times.
46. The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (1971) by Joseph Chilton Pearce. Stirring account of a man’s breakdown and departure from ordinary reality, approaching the trajectory of Castaneda at some points. The author shows the necessity of breaking away from consensus-reality to find truth on one’s own terms. This book is especially valuable in the range of difficult propositions it tackles (not always with success or clarification) and in the way it depicts the author’s struggle to interpret and explain to himself the breakthrough he underwent (in this, also, he resembles Carlos), without at first understanding where it was taking him (in this, he resembles us all). Provides many maps and signs for rigorous pathfinding.
47. Joy’s Way (1976) by W. Brugh Joy, a doctor dedicated to the practice of New Age healing. When it comes to pretences, “healing the world” is one of the worst, and the most widespread, in the New Age. Countless books purporting this aim have been foisted on the public, but this one, subtitled “A Map for the Transformational Journey,” contains the best to be found in most of them, and very little of the worst. Brugh Joy is more sincere than his look-alikes and more competent by a long reach. His treatment of the chakras is superior to volumes of psychic flim-flam, and his style thankfully avoids the breathless hyperbole that comes with the New Age pretence of discovering Divinity within ourselves. Brugh Joy’s theology is modest, almost self-effacing. (All he asserts of Unconditional Love, for instance, is that “it connects the body to the soul.” Well, ‘nuff said.) There are revealing case-histories plus plenty of exercises and hands-on techniques, including the unusual “spiral meditation” which incorporates an extra array of chakras beyond the classical seven. Clear and reliable.
48. The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980) by Marilyn Ferguson, a leading advocate of brain/mind research. An informative survey of the New Age movement, tracing its historical background (including Transcendentalism) and concentrating on its scientific, technical, and sociological prospects. All the latest developments and promising ideas in the forefront of our quest for empirical knowledge of the deeper aspects of human experience are inventoried here. Ferguson offers an eye-opening tour of the front lines of the new sciences, but the real value of her book lies in the sociological overview she develops. Scientific progress is one thing, and conspiratorial advance of the human species to a higher stage of evolution is another. The latter is the outstanding pretence of this author and her elite circle of colleagues. Her attitude belies a superiority complex that also infects current versions of Meta-History hatched here and there under the hairy brown egg of the California sun. The argument in both cases is persuasive, because a sociological overview shared by key agents in society, people who work in academia and in laboratories, can undoubtedly influence radical change and bring to maturity the trends that it identifies. Oriented to the mainstream, Ferguson’s vision of a planetary network facilitated by a vanguard of evolutionary agents in all fields of human endeavor is strongly pragmatic and optimistic. Consistent with New Age utopianism, it anticipates a vast evolutionary shift that can make the world a better place for all people, especially those living in California.
49. The Chalice and the Blade (1987) by Riane Eisler. Breakthrough work in the battle to rewrite history from a non-patriarchal viewpoint. Eisler uses the example of Minoan culture to support her thesis that egalitarian, Goddess-based societies of high cultural achievement existed before male-ruled civilization. This book launched into public debate the implications of research done by archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, who established high cultures (though not full-blown urban civilizations) in Old Europe (the Balkans) as early as 7500 BCE. An entirely new scale of values comes into play with Eisler’s notion of gylanic society, balanced between masculine and feminine imperatives. Her definition of the dominator model of society has changed the discourse, and her warning that global society stands at a critical forking of paths in the labyrinth cannot be ignored. Complemented by the discoveries of James Mellart at Catal Huyuk in central Turkey, this stunning revision of history could also be supported by a parallel reading of Dionysos by Karl Kerenyi (cited in the Introduction on zoë and bios). Reconciliation of the genders in Erotic/Dionysion spirituality is one of the hottest flashpoints in Meta-History. Whether the blade (violent male dominance sanctioned by patriarchal ideology) will prevail over the chalice (life-generating and nurturing powers of our species) is a very real question, whose outcome effects us all. Eisler opens the floodgates of Eden.
50. Voices of the First Day (1991) by Robert Lawlor, artist and esoteric scholar who lives on an island in Tasmania. Drawn from living native testimony and beautifully interpreted under the author’s sensitive eye, this book recovers aboriginal wisdom in its full depth and scope. Specifically, it treats the culture and sacred traditions of the indigenous people of Australia and Tasmania, but the issues brought to light bear on the fate of humanity at large. Here is Meta-History turned inside out, exposing the luminous seams of the Dreamtime, songlines that lure us back to our origins. Resonant with the Kalevala (L17) and the Popul Vuh (L22), the Voices evoked are full of magic. The moral and the supernatural are interdependent, even symbiotic — this is how I would translate the primary revelation afforded by Lawlor’s book, an immense contribution to the native agenda. Its sophistication — the synthesis of “Dream, Earth, and Identity” (Ch. 14), for instance — marks it as a masterwork of comparative cultural mythology, but it is for the most part far more lyrical than academic. Rare achievement of a sacred calling, indispensable guide for aboriginal tracking in the labyrinth.
Runner up for position 50 in the Essential Library is Mutant Message Down Under by Marlow Morgan, which appeared in the same year, 1991. The contribution of women to the recovery of native wisdom is gaining strength. See ahead, E13 on the Goddess Revival.