ENDNOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 351; emphasis Ricoeur’s.
2. Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney, “A Gnosis Interview with Huston Smith,” Gnosis 37 (Fall 1995), 33.
3. Charlesworth, The Good and Evil Serpent, 7.
4. “The Stand,” The Economist, November 4, 2017, 41.
5. See Riley, One Jesus, Many Christs.
6. In Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 74.
7. See, for example, Emily Chandler, “Religious and Spiritual Issues in DSM-5: Matters of the Mind and Searching of the Soul,” Issues in Mental Health Nursing 33, no. 9 (September 2012): 577–82; and W. K. Mohr, “Spiritual Issues in Psychiatric Care,” Perspectives in Psychiatric Care 42, no. 3 (August 2006): 174–83.
8. I discuss this matter in How God Became God, 188–91, and will go into it later in this book.
9. Miguel de la Torre, “The Death of Christianity in the U.S.,” Baptist News Global (website), November 13, 2017.
10. See my How God Became God, xviii. The word is a translation of Heidegger’s Geworfenheit.
11. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 1970, 6.
1. WHAT IS GOD?
1. In Matt, The Essential Kabbalah, 29.
2. The Zohar 1:15a, in Matt, The Zohar, 1:107–9.
3. Papus, The Tarot of the Bohemians, 21.
4. Tao Te Ching §§1, 42, in Wei, The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu, 129, 181.
5. Blakney, Meister Eckhart, 200–201.
6. Guénon, The Great Triad.
7. In Barker, Humphreys, and Benjamin, The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, 52.
8. Henry Fountain, “Two Trillion Galaxies, at the Very Least,” New York Times, October 17, 2016.
2. THE FIVE-DIMENSIONAL BOX
1. Sefer Yetzirah 1.5, in Friedman, The Book of Creation: Sepher Yetzirah, 1. Transliteration of Hebrew words vary from author to author (sefer vs. sepher, etc., waw versus vav). The word Friedman translates as “alone” is the Hebrew belimah, a word of obscure and disputed meaning. It is often taken as deriving from beli mah, “without what,” and thus is sometimes translated as “nothingness,” i.e., “ten sefirot of nothingness.” It appears to have this meaning in its sole occurrence in the Hebrew Bible, in Job 26:7. See Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, 25. The Sefer Yetzirah exists in a number of editions and translations. I am using three different versions in order to highlight certain points.
2. The whole vision is recounted in Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 289–95.
3. Sudman, Application of Impossible Things, 4–6. See also my article “Natalie Sudman: Prophet of Another Reality,” New Dawn (November–December 2016): 31–36; reprinted in Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America (Summer 2017): 14–19.
4. Plato, Republic 614a–621d, trans. Paul Shorey, in Hamilton and Cairns, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 838–46.
5. Sudman, Application of Impossible Things, 38; emphasis Sudman’s.
6. Sudman, Application of Impossible Things, 44; emphasis and expurgation Sudman’s.
7. Van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari, 210.
8. Sudman, Application of Impossible Things, 27; emphasis Sudman’s.
9. For my information about the war hostel, I am relying on Tripadvisor; see the reviews of the Sarajevo War Hostel on that website.
10. Sudman, Application of Impossible Things, 43.
11. Plato, Cratylus 400c.
12. Plato, Phaedo 62b; my translation.
3. THE CLOUD OF OBLIVION
1. For a discussion of the translation of the opening word in Genesis, see Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response, 53–59. Josipovici argues, correctly, I believe, that the standard translations of this verse are theologically tendentious and grammatically unconvincing. As for the Greek, technically the ē in both tē and archē includes an iota subscript, indicating the dative case, but I have omitted them from my transliteration.
2. See Robertson, Jungian Archetypes: Jung, Gödel, and the History of Archetypes, 92.
3. Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology 1.1; Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, 2.163; and Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 99–120. For these references I am indebted to Matt, Zohar 1:107, which provides other examples as well.
4. The Cloud of Unknowing, §4; University of Rochester, Middle English Texts Series (website). Emphasis added.
5. Quoted in Corbin, Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 112; emphasis in the original.
6. Chāndogya Upanishad, 8.11.1, in Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, 271.
7. Swami Jnaneshvara Bharati, “Yoga Nidra: Yogic Conscious Deep Sleep” (website).
8. The Cloud of Unknowing, §7.
4. THE REIGN OF NUMBER
1. Quoted in Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 429.
2. Plato, Timaeus 17a, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Hamilton and Cairns, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 1153. Cf. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 212..
3. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 210..
4. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 186.
5. In Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 212.
6. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, §§870–81; see also my Inner Christianity, 197–98.
7. Robertson, Jungian Archetypes, 269–70.
5. OF MIRRORS AND MADNESS
1. Kevin Loria, “Neil deGrasse Tyson Thinks There’s a ‘Very High Chance’ That the Universe Is Just a Simulation,” Business Insider (website), December 23, 2016.
2. Plato, Republic 515a; my adaptation.
3. I am taking this quote from Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, 344. Campbell is quoting (and presumably translating) from Schopenhauer, Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta’sche Bibliothek, n.d.), 8:220–25.
4. Prabhavananda and Isherwood, Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination, 90–91.
5. Zur and Davies, Sepher HaBahir, 167.
6. Zur and Davies, Sepher HaBahir, 171. There is some dispute about the exact translation of the Hebrew terms for some of the organs. On this point, see Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, 212–14.
7. Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah, 8–9.
8. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia 1.13, pp. 111–12; my translation.
9. On the authenticity of this maxim, see Bill Cherowitzo, “Let No One Ignorant of Geometry Enter Here,” PowerPoint presentation, Department of Mathematics, University of Denver (website).
10. For further discussion of this issue, see my articles “The Fires of Artifice,” Gnosis 26 (Winter 1993): 14–17, and “From the Editor’s Desk,” Quest 103, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 2.
11. Hoeller, The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermons to the Dead, 38.
12. Genesis 2:21. Cf. A Course in Miracles (T, 18).
6. A SUPPOSITIONAL MOMENT
1. Harman, foreword to Robert Skutch, Journey without Distance, i.
2. Quoted in Miller, The Complete Story of the Course, 126.
3. See Miller, Complete Story of the Course; Skutch, Journey without Distance; and Wapnick, Absence from Felicity.
4. Quoted in Skutch, Journey without Distance, 134–35.
5. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, chapter 36; in Hayford and Parker, 144.
6. [Tomberg,] Meditations on the Tarot, 142. This work was originally published anonymously; emphasis in the original.
7. THE LAW ON TWO LEVELS
1. Quoted in Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 84.
2. Besant, Dharma, 17.
3. Goethe, Die Geheimnisse [The secrets]; my translation. The original reads, “Von der Gewalt, die alle Wesen bindet, / Befreit der Mensch sich, der sich überwindet.”
4. The Course materials include some supplements that are not strictly part of the Course itself, but are held to be the work of the same Voice that dictated it. This passage comes from a short treatise of this kind called Psychotherapy: Purpose, Process, and Practice, 1. Originally published separately, it is reprinted in the third edition of the Course.
8. MEANING FOR A MEANINGLESS WORLD
1. [FitzGerald], Rubáiyát, stanza 27, p. 38.
2. I am taking this account from Eliade, Myth and Reality, 101.
3. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 122.
4. Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, 327.
5. The Song of Prayer: Prayer, Forgiveness, and Healing, 11. The Song of Prayer is another supplementary treatise to the Course, dictated by the same Voice. It too can be found as a supplement to the third Foundation for Inner Peace edition of the Course, but is paginated separately. Subsequent references to this supplement are cited using the method used for other Course Materials, i.e. (S, 11), “S” for The Song of Prayer followed by the page number.
6. The discussion of this topic, along with the quotations cited, are from The Song of Prayer, 11–12.
9. FROM THE UNREAL TO THE REAL
1. Dick, Ubik, 192.
2. Dick, Ubik, 226.
3. Heraclitus, fragment 21 (Diels-Kranz). I am accepting Marcovich’s emendation of this text in his Heraclitus: Greek Text with a Short Commentary, 247.
4. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, 4; emphasis mine.
5. Jay Kinney, “The Mysterious Revelations of Philip K. Dick,” Gnosis 1 (Fall/Winter 1985): 7. A graphically illustrated version of this account can be found in R. Crumb, “The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick,” Weirdo 17 (website).
6. An abridged version of this text can be found in Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 112–16. On Egypt as a symbol, see Jonas, 118.
7. Kinney, “The Mysterious Revelations of Philip K. Dick,” 6–11. Some brief excerpts from The Exegesis are published see here of the same issue.
8. See Casti, Paradigms Lost, 25.
9. Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), 193. For this reference and the previous one I am indebted to Steve Hagen, How the World Can Be the Way It Is, 57. Chapter 2 of Hagen’s book offers a valuable discussion of these problems.
10. Underhill, Mysticism, 9.
11. In James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 397–98. James cites Trevor’s 1897 book My Quest for God as his source.
12. James, Varieties, 380–81.
13. Kline, Mathematics and the Search for Knowledge, 21; emphasis added. Again I am indebted to Steve Hagen’s book for this reference.
10. CREATING, MAKING, AND THE QUALIA
1. For an extensive discussion of the Four Worlds, see Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, Adam and the Kabbalistic Tree.
2. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” in Hofstadter and Dennett, The Mind’s I, 394. The article originally appeared in Philosophical Review, October 1974.
3. Michael Tye, “Qualia,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (website).
4. Howard Robinson, “The Mind-Body Problem,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (website).
5. For a brief discussion, see my How God Became God, 15–16.
6. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis [Miscellanies], 5.11, in Roberts and Donaldson, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 2:461; emphasis added.
7. The classic account of the Dweller on the Threshold appears in fictional form in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1842 novel Zanoni.
11. THE SCANDAL OF PARTICULARITY
1. Josipovici, The Book of God, 322.
2. Josipovici, The Book of God, 323.
3. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis, 15.
4. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis, 18.
5. Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 91.
6. See Wood, In Search of the Trojan War, 28.
7. Josephus, The Jewish War, 5.5.6; translation quoted from Goldhill, The Temple in Jerusalem, 71.
8. Letter of Aristeas 90; in Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, 2:103.
9. Ullucci, The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice, 75.
10. Faust, part 1, line 1740; my translation.
11. Homer, Odyssey, 11:35–43; my translation.
12. Cicero, De legibus, 2.36; my translation and emphasis.
13. Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 65.1, in Mead, Thrice-Greatest Hermes, 240.
14. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe, 27.
15. In A Course in Miracles, ed. Robert Perry, 1882–83.
16. In A Course in Miracles, ed. Robert Perry, 1884.
17. See “Reincarnation,” His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet (website).
18. A Course in Miracles, ed. Robert Perry, 1885.
12. BEING TOWARD DEATH
1. For a summary of Heidegger’s view of this subject, see Simon Critchley, “Being and Time, Part 6: Death,” Guardian (website).
2. Heidegger, Being and Time, 239. Emphasis here and in the following quote is in the original. Stambaugh renders Heidegger’s term as Da-sein rather than the more familiar Dasein, pointing out that this was Heidegger’s own preference for translations of the book; see her preface, xiv.
3. Heidegger, Being and Time, 238.
4. Heidegger, Being and Time, 243.
5. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, chapter 26.
6. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium,” in Collected Poems, 191.
7. Eliot, Four Quartets, in Collected Poems, 176.
8. Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, 1.
9. In Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow, 141; emphasis in the original.
10. A Course in Miracles, ed. Robert Perry, 1639n.
11. Skutch, Journey without Distance, 27–28.
12. Waddell, The Desert Fathers, 112.
13. Josephus, Jewish War, 2.8.
14. Longchenpa, Kindly Bent to Ease Us, 139.
15. From Richard Smoley, “The Diamond Approach: An Interview with A. H. Almaas,” Gnosis 25 (Fall 1992), 48.
13. RELATIONSHIPS, SPECIAL AND HOLY
1. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 599. Presumably the German Liebe extends across the same range of concepts as the English love.
2. Smoley, Conscious Love, 17.
3. Allen Watson, “What Is a Holy Instant?” Circle of Atonement (website).
4. Skutch, Journey without Distance, 33–34; emphasis in the original.
14. CHURCH AND SACRAMENTS
1. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, §750.
2. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, §752.
3. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, §760. The catechism is quoting The Shepherd of Hermas, vision 2.4.1.
4. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 251.
5. This telling of the myth is adapted from my editorial in “From the Editor’s Desk,” Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America 106, no. 1 (winter 2018): 2.
6. Blavatsky, Collected Writings, 8:408.
7. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 4.
8. Joyce, Ulysses, 34.
9. Case, The True and Invisible Rosicrucian Order, 64. For more about these ideas, see chapter 11, “The Rumor of the Brotherhood,” in my Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions, coauthored by Jay Kinney, as well as chapter 11, “The Secret Church,” in my Inner Christianity.
10. Wapnick, Love Does Not Condemn, 484; emphasis in the original.
11. In Wapnick, Love Does Not Condemn, 483.
12. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, 94.
15. THE LADDER OF PRAYER
1. An abundance of literature in English is available on Dzogchen. For a good introduction, see Chögyen Namkhai Norbu, Dzogchen: The Self-Perfected State.
2. A Course in Miracles, preface, ix.
3. Kaplan, The Bahir, 1; bracketed insertion and emphasis in the original.
4. Coton-Alvart, Les deux lumières, 22; my translation, emphasis from the original.
5. Turgenev, from “Prayer,” in Poems in Prose, at Bartleby (website). I have changed the wording to make it more idiomatic.
6. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 7.
7. Climacus, Ladder of Divine Ascent, 230. The passage alludes to certain Bible verses: Isaiah 2:3; Psalm 17:33; and Ephesians 4:13.
16. DISPENSATIONS
1. See Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People, 808–12. For a short but informative account, see Carl E. Olson, “The Twelfth Coming of Less-Than Glorious Fiction,” National Review (website), April 2, 2004.
2. Booth, The Course of Time, 9. Paul and Timothy Loizeaux were laten nineteenth-century publishers of material promoting the teachings of the Plymouth Brethren, who were influenced by Darby. Booth’s treatise explains the diagram. My source for this book, Books.Logos Free Online Library of Christian Classics (website), does not include the title page or the copyright page.
3. Quoted in McGinn, Apocalyptic Spirituality, 99.
4. Joachim of Fiore, The Book of Concordance, 2.1.10; in McGinn, Apocalyptic Spirituality, 133.
5. McGinn, introduction to Riedl, A Companion to Joachim of Fiore, 8.
6. Frances Andrews, “The Influence of Joachim in the Thirteenth Century,” in Riedl, A Companion to Joachim of Fiore, 241–42.
7. Swedenborg, True Christianity, §508; 2:80.
8. Evans, The New Age and Its Messenger, 87. An online version is available at Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free and Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine (website).
9. For a brief survey of Guénon’s views, see my article “Waiting for the End of the World: René Guénon and the Kali Yuga,” New Dawn (website), September 19, 2010.
10. For a history of this concept, see Liz Greene, “The Way of What Is to Come: Jung’s Vision of the Aquarian Age,” in Stein and Arzt, Jung’s Red Book for Our Time, 44–84.
11. The original three-volume work is Gnôsis: Étude et commentaires sur la tradition ésotérique de l’Orthodoxie orientale, and the English version, also in three volumes, is Gnosis: Study and Commentaries on the Esoteric Tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy. Citations that follow are from the English edition.
12. For a discussion of this point, see Olivier Santamaria, “Boris Mouravieff et l’ésotérisme chrétien,” Slavica bruxellensia 3, no. 1 (2009): 48–60, at OpenEdition Journals (website). Santamaria also provides a brief account of Mouravieff’s life and ideas.
13. Mouravieff, Gnosis, 2:49. Emphasis here and in other quotes from Mouravieff is in the original.
14. Mouravieff, Gnosis, 2:37.
15. Mouravieff, Gnosis, 2:44.
16. For more on this point, see my book The Essential Nostradamus, 295–97.
17. Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, 2.
18. See, for example, Antony Black, “‘The Axial Period’: What Was It and What Does It Signify?” Review of Politics 70 (2008): 23–39. But even Black concedes, “There was significant mental [geistlich] development at that time” (39).
19. For comparable passages, see 1 Samuel 15:22; Psalms 50:8–15; 51:16–18; Isaiah 1:11–12; Jeremiah 7:21–24; and Amos 5:21–24.
20. Ullucci, Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice, 42–48.
21. On Pythagoras’s own views, see Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 230–31. For a useful summary of Pythagorean attitudes toward sacrifice, see Ullucci, Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice, 59–60; Ullucci cites Diogenes Laertius, 8.12.
22. Hume, Thirteen Principal Upanishads, 52–54.
23. Plato, Laws 716e–717a; quoted in Ullucci, Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice, 35. Ullucci is quoting Paul Shorey’s translation in the Loeb Classical Library.
24. Graves’s translation of this satire is published as an appendix to his novel Claudius the God, 514ff. For the quote about Janus, see 522.
25. Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, 103.
17. THE AGE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
1. Cumont, Les religions orientales, 291–92; my translation. Available at Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free and Borrowable Books, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine (website); I am grateful to Wouter J. Hanegraaff for bringing this passage to my attention.
2. See, for example, Justin Martyr, First Apology for the Christians, 1.6.
3. Mead, Echoes of the Gnosis, 22–23.
4. C. G. Jung, letter to Victor White, April 10, 1954; in Gerhard Adler, ed. C. G. Jung: Letters, 2:167. I am taking both the quote and the reference from Liz Greene’s article in Stein and Artzt, Jung’s Red Book for Our Time, 66, 82.
5. Watts, letter to Jim Corsa, January 17, 1947; in Collected Letters, 210.
6. Robinson, Language of Mystery, 1.
7. Popper Selections, 140.
8. Olivia Goldhill, “The Idea That Everything from Spoons to Stones Are Conscious Is Gaining Academic Credibility,” Quartz (website), January 27, 2018.
9. Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching, §18.
10. Yu Hua, China in Ten Words, 7.
11. For a survey, see Erin O’Connell, “The New Face of Global Christianity: The Emergence of ‘Progressive Pentecostalism,’” interview with Donald Miller, Pew Research Center (website), April 12, 2006. See also Pulitzer Center, “Atlas of Pentecostalism: An Expanding Database of the Fastest Growing Religion in the World,” Atlas of Pentecostalism (website). Pentecostals usually belong to one of the historical Pentecostal denominations, such as the Assemblies of God or the Church of God in Christ. Charismatic Christians are found in other Protestant denominations as well as in the Catholic Church.
12. Ahlstrom, Religious History, 816–22.
13. Quoted in O’Connell interview with Miller, “The New Face of Global Christianity.”
14. Horowitz, One Simple Idea, 73n.
15. Quoted in Byrne, The Secret, 101.
16. Zaleski and Zaleski, Prayer, 329.
18. SUMMA THEOLOGIAE
1. Shapiro, Holy Rascals, 2.
2. See Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 26.
3. Singh, Commentaries on “A Course in Miracles,” 75.
4. Asclepius 24, in Copenhaver, Hermetica, 81. The Asclepius, which survives only in a Latin translation, is not always regarded as part of the Corpus Hermeticum per se, which is written in Greek, but it is generally acknowledged to be part of the same body of material.