“If, with regard to any subject whatever, we know too many things, our knowledge changes into ignorance—or else we have got to raise ourselves up to another kind of knowledge.” — Simone Weil1
When I was a child, I would skip recess to have the volunteer parent edit my stories. I was sent to the principal’s office for more than one of them. Depictions of skeletons, the undead, naked bodies, and evisceration did not bode particularly well in third grade at a small Christian private school that met in the basement of a church.
But I also imagined the stars being born out of shadows, assimilating space and matter to themselves so they could communicate to their distant kin. I imagined them as deep shadows gathering materiality around themselves. I had no notion of Goethe wherein Raphael declares, “The Sun sings out, in ancient mode, His note among his brother-spheres.”2 But it was only decades later that I found what I invented as a child had been discovered long ago by other minds.
I have since determined that the imagination reflects the world. If uninfluenced by lower prejudices, it is a true mirror. We can make strange combinations — placing the head of a crocodile on the body of a horse — but the components are true and belong to a broken whole which has become reassembled a confused admixture. Frankenstein combinations of fragments of unified wholes are easy to make, but only when we’ve lost sight of the unifying wholes themselves. When we learn to see symbolically and think by analogy, we ground our thought in the living world rather than mere abstractions. For, “we are the temple of the living God.”3 If our thoughts resemble dead objects, they are further from God than when they resemble plants. An imagination formed by cold concrete and steel will resemble the artificial nature of its environment. An imagination influenced by living things that grow, adapt, and reproduce will be much closer to the ecological dynamism of reality. The influence of art, music, and living plants on the soul cannot be underestimated. But a mind starved of these things is only half-human.
I practiced an ajna chakra exercise pretty consistently for over a year. That’s the place most people call the “third eye.” The internet is full of conspiracies about this part and the pineal gland. But it’s not quite what one might imagine. For me, very little happened. Initially, it was hard to keep any focus at that point between my brows at the root of the nose, but gradually I found I could keep my attention there without the exercise. The only thing I found that would easily displace my attention from that point would be while reading (or getting angry). But nothing else happened. I abandoned the practice after over a year, and that’s about when my Golgotha experience occurred. It’s as if the psychic build-up waited for me to pause the practice to break through.
Something changed.
If a text sang with truth, my attention would stay firmly seated in my third eye center. But if the author strayed into polemicism or partisanism, if I wished to follow the train of thought, I would have to enter the world of dispersal and leave the upper room. I’d been reading the Atlantic Monthly each month for quite a while. I had to cancel my subscriptions. It’s not that I don’t see potential value in what people offer, but sometimes it’s like seeking a needle in a haystack. I will only find what I have a practiced eye for recognizing, so the best way to practice is not sifting through roughage but contemplating golden verities.
My taste for polemicism dried up. It felt like being slapped in the face when the author moved from unifying to truth to living by the dividing sword of the intellect. My best advice is to ignore an author when he denigrates another. To me, when someone gets caught up in how they don’t like someone else’s ideas, it is like someone comes to a farm and says that manure smells “bad.” It adds very little insight and is not particularly practical. Someone who can suspend personal antipathies and perceive the value in excrement is better positioned to find the truth, even in what is ugly, and the beauty in what is largely false.
For those who’ve read my reflection on my kundalini experience, you’ll know that since that time, my crown and third eye have hummed perpetually. Is it a blessing or a curse? Is it just a brain tumor?
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But this is where it gets muddy. The temperament and source of visions matter relatively little. If St. Teresa of Avila were as docile as a cow, that wouldn’t change the fact that every spirit needs to be interrogated. Similarly, a saint with melancholia like St. John of the Cross (whose dark night of the soul lasted forty years) is not judged for that, but the contents must be weighed thoughtfully on their own merits.
After the veil was torn, everything became consciously symbolic. Everything is always symbolic, but for most of us, that appears in dream imagery and not in waking life. A door now looks exactly like a door, but it also means something like a mouth. The simplest way to put it is that the analogies between things become omnipresent, spontaneous, and almost unstoppable. Everything appeared in its kinship to everything else. Sounds fun? Not really. I would discourage anyone from toying with third-eye magic. Here’s why:
If you try to force open the doors to heaven, you may break in, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber; but he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.”4 Or, similarly, “‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and cast him into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.’”5 What happens if you do this? There are two possibilities, closely related: “unconscious compensatory inferiority tallies with conscious megalomania, and unconscious megalomania with conscious inferiority (you never get one without the other).”6 This means, practically, that a mind that suddenly sees everything symbolically will “read” the world in terms of itself. Still clinging to the ego, it will see (rightly) that the world is out to destroy it. The world is nothing if not an incinerator of egos. This results in extreme paranoia and a persecution complex, which many egotists already have. The alternative, though, is a compensatory megalomania: a god-complex.
Grasping to that which does not belong to us can only burn us:
“And it was said that ever after, if any man looked in that Stone, unless he had a great strength of will to turn it to other purpose, he saw only two aged hands withering in flame.”7
The least likely option is that the ego has already been killed, that you have already died to itself. Why? Because you’d have no reason to be driven to seek secret knowledge unless you were seeking greater power, which is the voice of the ego. It’s possible you could have no idea what you’re doing or have a spontaneous event, but even then, God says, “you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live.”8 The possibility of being reduced to a cowering beast or inflated to a god-delusion is significant. Power — and knowledge is power — easily corrupts. “‘Knowledge’ puffs up, but love builds up.”9 Rudolf Steiner warned that for each step of esoteric development that someone makes, three steps should be made to develop the heart. If we do not love more than we know, our knowledge of the spiritual world is dead. Faith, as confidence in the organized unity of the invisible and visible worlds, if unloved, is the kind of awareness that every devil has. A bloodless creed is an abomination. “Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”10
But let’s assume the abyss is traversed safely. There’s no reason to say that you have what is necessary to organize what you witness. If you see anything beyond your comprehension, it is stupefying and renders what you imagined you knew null and void. Many who see beyond the veil, but do not have the discipline to sort through their experiences and organize what they see, merely slip into a kind of divine madness. If relatively selfless when this psychospiritual break occurs, this may be relatively harmless, but if they cannot understand what they are seeing, they cannot communicate it either. Storming the gates of heaven may result in becoming crippled by paranoid fear or gaining a delusional god-complex or becoming a fount of unintelligible gibberish — or, if you’re particularly favored, you’ll attain the worst of option of them all: wisdom.
Pray to remain ignorant of secret things until you’re ready for them. And even then, ask that they be kept away unless you need them to do your work. “For in much wisdom is much vexation, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”11 If illumination arrives, it arrives, but seeking wisdom without self-abnegation is like attempting to buy the gift of the Holy Ghost — reducing a living gift to a dead market exchange. Peter condemns Simon the Sorceror, saying, “‘Your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money! You have neither part nor lot in this matter, for your heart is not right before God.” Only the heart that has become “virginal” (as Meister Eckhart puts it) can tolerate the immolation that is wisdom. Anyone who forces open their third eye without dying to self will see the world as persecuting them — and that is right in a sense because the world is designed to destroy egos. As it says in Sirach, “Seek not what is too difficult for you, nor investigate what is beyond your power. Reflect upon what has been assigned to you, for you do not need what is hidden.”12 For if you do not know what you are doing, the Master says, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” But if you know better and do worse than you know, that is especially bad karma because it is no longer ignorance but knowingly choosing the bad over the good.
I am fond of Frithjof Schuon’s traditionalist work. Himself a son of an anthroposophist and keenly informed by a sense of beauty, he explored numerous traditions but went through the hard work of submitting to the initiation process of distinct traditions. A fully initiated Sufi, he was also a full member of the Crow and Lakota.
Frithjof Schuon warns, though, against knowledge we do not need:
“A meaningless knowledge, a knowledge to which we have no right either by virtue of its nature, or of our capacities, and therefore by virtue our vocation, is not a knowledge that enriches, but one that impoverishes. Adam had become poor after having acquired knowledge of contingency as such, or of contingency in so far as it limits. We must distrust the fascination which an abyss can exert over us; it is in the nature of cosmic blind-alleys to seduce and to play the vampire; the current of forms does not want us to escape from its hold. Forms can be snares just as they can be symbols and keys; beauty can chain us to forms, just as it can also be a door opening towards the formless.”13
If we are superficial spiritual dabblers, we might visit one trailhead, take a few steps along the path, retreat, and find another path. This is an utterly futile process unless it results in sticking to one of the paths. I myself am wary of being too synthetic and straying into what I would call “Build-a-Bear” Spirituality. Imagine the head of Buddha, the torso of Christ, the arms of Shiva, and the bones of Kali. But even this I find less dangerous than comparative religion. Why? Because to have an “overview” of the Mountain and its various paths suggests not being on the mountain. To view the mountain from afar is not to be walking up the mountain at all. To have such an abstract view from a distance and to compare maps of the trailheads without daring to walk them is a severe danger, particularly for intellectuals.
As the Master says:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but within you are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.”14
Those who do obtain an unmerited “overview” of spirituality outside of practice — the kind from which I myself must seem to be writing — condemn themselves. Knowing better, they now have no legitimate excuse for their behavior. The danger of obtaining knowledge beyond your capacities is that you see what you should do, but your will is too weak to do what you see (and feel) should be done. Head knowledge heaps guilt on the soul that cannot implement what the heart grasps. As St. James writes, “Whoever knows what is right to do and fails to do what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”15
Simone Weil, Notebooks, vol 1., pg. 82
Goethe, Faust, part 1
2 Corinthians 6:16
John 10:1-2
Matthew 22:12-13
C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Introduction to a Science of Mythology; trsl. R. F. C. Hull, London, 1951, 137-138
J.R.R. Tolkein, The Return of the King, LoTR Book 5, Ch 7, The Pyre of Denethor
Exodus 33:20
1 Corinthians 8:1
James 2:17
Ecclesiastes 1:18
Sirach 3:21
Frithjof Schuon, The Essential Frithjof Schuon, “Man,” pg. 392
Matthew 23:27-32
James 4:17