Chapter Notes
CHAPTER 2: THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
1
John S. Dunne, The Reasons of the Heart (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 141.
2
Among the spate of works, see Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, Holy Blood, Holy Grail (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1983); Margaret Starbird, The Woman with the Alabaster Jar (Santa Fe: Bear and Company, 1993); and the film Jesus of Montreal.
3
For a good introduction to this fascinating underground history, see Charles A. Coulombe, “The Secret Church of John,” Gnosis magazine, 45 (fall 1997): 47–53.
CHAPTER 3: THE MYSTICAL COMPLETION OF SOULS
1
Gnosis—the term often applied to this body of inner teaching—is very different from “gnosticism,” a first-century heresy property rejected by the early Church fathers.
2
J. G. Bennett, Sex (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1981), 54.
3
Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis, vol. 1 (Newbury, Mass.: Praxis Institute Press, 1989), 245.
4
For an excellent summary of this inner practice, see Jacob Needleman, Lost Christianity (New York: Doubleday, 1980), especially 166–68.
5
Maurice Nicoll, The New Man (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 76–77.
6
Ibid., 78.
7
Jacob Boehme, The Way to Christ (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1978), 182.
8
Matthew 22: 2–14.
9
G. I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (New York: Triangle Press, 1992), 702.
10
Jacob Boehme, The Three Principles of the Divine Essence (Kila, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing Co., ISBN 1-56459-213-8), 480.

The citation in the text is my own translation of this passage, working from the original German as well as the standard English translation by Boehme’s indefatigable seventeenth-century disciple John Sparrow. Sparrow’s somewhat antiquated version reads as follows:
“It [the soul] may be comprehended as followeth: If it hath promised somewhat in the time of the body and hath not recalled it, then that word, and the earnest promise, comprehendeth it (which we ought to be silent in here); or otherwise there is nothing that comprehendeth it, but only its own Principle wherein it standeth, whether it be the kingdom of hell or of heaven.”
For “if it hath promised somewhat,” Sparrow offers the variant of “hath been enamoured” to convey the sense, implicit in the German verloben, that this promise is in essence a love bond.

11
Beatrice Bruteau, “Persons in Love,” The Roll (quarterly newsletter of the Schola Contemplationis, 3425 Forest Lane, Pfafftown, N.C.), March 1996, 9–10.
12
Boehme, Way to Christ, 122.
13
“And nature with its wonders is a fiery sharpness, and taketh hold of the eternal liberty [i.e., the eternal, unmanifest unity of God] and so maketh Majesty in the liberty through the wonders,” Boehme writes in The Forty Questions of the Soul (Kila, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing Co., ISBN 1-56459-266-9), 144. I will discuss the significance of majesty, a crucial parameter in understanding soulwork beyond the grave, in chapter 14.
14
Matthew 25: 14–30.
CHAPTER 5: THE EAST LESSON
1
Hermann Hesse, “Stages,” in The Glass Bead Game (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969), 444.
CHAPTER 9: WRESTLING WITH AN ANGEL
1
Helen M. Luke, Old Age (New York: Parabola Books, 1987), 95.
CHAPTER 10: THE BODY OF HOPE
1
Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot (Rockport, Mass.: Element Books, 1993), 471–72.
2
Ibid., 277–78.
3
Kabir Edmund Helminski, Living Presence (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1992), 118.
4
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Viking Penguin, 1958), 427.
5
Bruno Barnhart, The Good Wine (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1994), 196.
6
Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 427.
7
Helminski, Living Presence, 130.
CHAPTER 11: BUILDING SECOND BODY
1
Unseen Warfare, trans. E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 244.
2
Nicoll, New Man, 143.
3
For an excellent overview of the Gurdjieff work, see Jacob Needleman, “G. I. Gurdjieff and His School,” in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, ed. Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 359–80. In brief, the three mainstays of the Work principles are (1) inner attention: the effort to be fully present to whatever one is doing, not lost in daydreams or emotional reactions; (2) self-observation: the effort to look objectively at “how one is” in any given moment, including habitual physical, emotional, and mental postures; (3) self-remembering: the effort to stay connected to a deeper and more holistic sense of self, rather than losing oneself in the kaleidoscope of personalities, contrary desires, and external distractions that comprise our usual sense of selfhood.
4
Jacob Boehme, Confessions (Kila, Mont.: Kessinger Publishing Co., ISBN 1-56459-214-6), 50.
5
Maurice Nicoll, Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, vol. 3 (Boulder, Colo., and London: Shambhala, 1984), 927.
6
Valentin Tomberg, Anthroposophical Studies in the New Testament (Spring Valley, N.Y.: Candeur Manuscripts, 1985), 135.
7
Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 60.
8
Ibid., 61.
9
Ibid.
10
Ibid., 62.
11
Boehme, Forty Questions of the Soul, 189.
12
Hazrat Inayat Khan, The Call of the Dervish (New Lebanon, N.Y.: Omega Publications, 1981), 40.
CHAPTER 12: RAFE AFTER DEATH
1
John Cassian, Conferences, ed. Colm Luibheid (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1985), 49–50.
2
D. H. Lawrence, “Shadows,” from The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2, ed. Vivian de Sala Pinto and Warren Roberts (New York: Viking, 1964), 226-27. Rafe undoubtedly copied the poem from Helen Luke’s Old Age, 101–2.
3
Boros, Mystery of Death, 83.
4
Ibid., 164.
5
Ibid., 46.
6
Ibid., 55.
7
Boehme, Way to Christ, 182.
8
Boros, Mystery of Death, 83.
CHAPTER 13: DO THE DEAD GROW?
1
Boehme, Forty Questions of the Soul, 256.
2
Boros, Mystery of Death, 86–87.
3
“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Cor. 13:7). For a fuller reflection on the meaning of this passage and how it can be used as a touchstone for spiritual practice, see “Epilogue: A Wedding Sermon.”
4
Thomas Merton, “The Inner Experience” (unpublished manuscript, portions of which appeared sequentially in several issues of Cistercian Studies, 1983. Reprinted by permission of Merton Legacy Trust).
CHAPTER 14: ESSENCE AND MAJESTY
1
Boehme, Forty Questions of the Soul, 255.
2
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (Boston: Shambhala, 1993), 101.
3
Beatrice Bruteau, God’s Ecstasy (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 31.
4
Boris Mouravieff, Gnosis, vol. 2, (Newbury, Mass.: Praxis Institute Press, 1992), 257.
CHAPTER 15: THE ABLER SOUL
1
The pertinent lines from Donne’s poem, “The Ecstasy,” are quoted at the beginning of chapter 1.
2
Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love (Hudson, N.Y.: Lindisfarne Press, 1985), 51.
3
Mouravieff, Gnosis, vol. 1, 131.
4
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 81.
5
Mouravieff, Gnosis, vol. 1, 251.
6
A Recapitulation of the Lord’s Prayer (anonymous, privately circulated publication), 88–89. The author was an English gentleman and student of P. D. Ouspensky’s, who, along with a small group of Ouspensky’s most committed disciples, was with Ouspensky at the time of his death. So moved by this event, the writer withdrew into solitude in India for more than a decade. This small volume represents the synthesis of his lifelong erudition and spiritual wisdom. By great fortune, a copy of it fell into my hands in June 1995, and of course I shared it with Rafe. It became his most important sourcebook in the three months preceding his death.
7
Charles Upton, “Love Embattled” (unpublished manuscript, generously lent to me by the author), 20.
8
The other major modern variant on this tradition is Jung’s teaching on the animus and anima in which the “beloved” becomes a veiled image for individuation, the uniting of animus and anima (or male and female aspects) within one’s own soul. Both Jung and Mouravieff would agree that: “Every man is born bearing within him the image of his polar being. As he grows, the image grows within him” (Golden Book, quoted in Gnosis, vol. 2, 254). But their interpretations are diametrically opposite. In the ancient teaching, the animus or anima is the inner image of the actual objective beloved—not, as is the increasingly popular teaching today, the reverse: that the person is merely a “projection” of one’s inner archetype of wholeness.
9
For a full statement of this teaching, see chapter 3, “The Mystical Completion of Souls,” page 34.
10
According to the ancient mythology, in an earlier, primordial sphere, the two beloveds were originally one soul; their “fall” into bodies represented a cleavage of their primordial oneness, and their needle-in-a-haystack reconnection on earth is not a meeting but a reunion.
CHAPTER 17: LOVE AND DEATH
1
Boros, Mystery of Death, 47.
CHAPTER 18: WORKING IN THE WONDERS
1
A phrase borrowed from the Fourth Way tradition to describe the full entrance into this mastery—or, in terms I have been using, the full maturation of one’s majesty, up to the intended degree of luminosity. See Mouravieff, Gnosis, vol. 1, 54–62.
2
Boehme, Forty Questions of the Soul, 224.
3
I was quite pleased to have my instincts on this point confirmed by an observation in Meditations on the Tarot: “It is through obedience that the will is able to perceive” (p. 317; for bibliographical data on this work, see note 1, chapter 10). First one obeys, then one sees, and only finally does one come to understand. From the standpoint of soulwork beyond the grave, the traditional job descriptions of “husband” and “wife” contained in the marriage vows are not antiquated baggage, but precise descriptions of the path that must be followed.
1
Boehme, Three Principles of the Divine Essence, 391.
2
Patrick Hart, ed., Thomas Merton, Monk (Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1976), 90.
3
Jacob Boehme, Confessions, 41.
 
THE BOOKS WE USED
1
The intellectual and emotional centers correspond roughly with what in today’s parlance would be called “the head” and “the heart.” The moving center, perhaps best translated as “the wisdom of the body,” includes both autonomic/instinctive functions and voluntary movement.
2
Needleman, “G. I. Gurdjieff and His School,” in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, 359–80.
3
Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot, 281.
4
“Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart, and seek to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers that cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. But the point is: to live everything. Live the questions now” (Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, fourth letter). I am not sure what edition Rafe was copying from; the punctuation is his own. For a comparison, see Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell, 49–50.
FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON THE BODY OF CHRIST
1
Boros, Mystery of Death, 164.
2
Ibid., 77.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid., 78.
5
Ibid., 79.
6
Ibid., 150.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid., 149.
9
Ibid., 157.
A NOTE ON REINCARNATION
1
This also clarifies to a considerable extent Gurdjieff’s teaching, “Behind personality stands essence. Behind essence stands Real I. Behind Real I stands God.” It is also why Boehme can say, “The tincture is the true body of the soul” (Boehme, Forty Questions of the Soul, 123).
2
Joscelyn Godwin, “The Case Against Reincarnation,” Gnosis magazine, 42 (winter 1997): 32.
3
Ibid. This is Godwin’s paraphrase of Guénon.
4
I would prefer to say “to the next level of artifice,” if the term can be understood not in the sense of “artificial,” but as the product of a conscious creative process.
A NOTE ON SEXUALITY
1
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 54.
2
Upton, “Love Embattled,” 13–14.