Meeting a Philosopher
Printed in the Fall 2021 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Godwin, Joscelyn, "Meeting a Philosopher " Quest 108:4, pg 18-22
By Joscelyn Godwin
This memoir was sketched in 1988 in order to capture the memory of a crucial encounter, and shared with a handful of others who had been present at the same events. Lightly edited and framed, its present purpose is to show that initiation can take forms that owe nothing to institutions, traditions, religions, or orders.
In the fall of 1968, a year that had already made political and cultural history, I first walked into the American Brahman Bookstore on State Street in Ithaca, New York. It was a shabby store, looking more as if someone was moving out, with a few shelves against the walls filled with books on yoga, mysticism, Zen Buddhism, and other subjects then coming into vogue. At a table, two men sat hunched over what appeared to be a horoscope. One of them looked up as I came in: a striking Mediterranean type in his late forties, with a very dark and beady pair of eyes, which he fixed on me as he invited me to look around. I found little there to satisfy my unformed appetite for literary odds and ends, but when his companion left, I could not resist asking the proprietor whether he actually believed in astrology. In a strong Brooklyn accent, he informed me that it wasn’t a case of believing, but of knowing what astrology was and what it wasn’t. I left the store with two books: P.D. Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, which looked intriguing, and Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret India, which I remembered having read some years ago, and which the proprietor said I would enjoy.
It was a painter friend who had told me about this new bookstore, and I was eager to share her impressions of the astrologer, who called himself Tony. Sitting among the canvases in her Cornell University studio, we agreed that he was someone quite out of the ordinary, and worth seeing more of. Apparently he was holding evening classes in the bookstore, so there we went.
Before two weeks had passed, I believed in astrology myself, and in much more. Things that I had dabbled with in my teens, like Theosophy, the idea of reincarnation, and C.G. Jung on flying saucers, came flooding back with a new meaning. The oriental art I had loved from childhood began to reveal its spiritual roots. Most of all, I realized that Tony Damiani was a teacher such as my privileged education had never provided.
Tony remembered this first meeting too. He indiscreetly told one of my fellow students that when I appeared in the bookstore, he said to himself: “Here he is again”—implying a link from the past, and not without a certain ambivalence.
I spent January 1969 working on my dissertation in New York City, with Paul Brunton’s The Wisdom of the Overself for company. This book was regarded with holy awe by the coterie that had formed around Tony’s classes, and I was not sure that I should be reading something so advanced so soon. Actually, it was so consonant with my own needs and convictions that I absorbed it like a sponge and formed a lifelong attachment to its author and his philosophy. I liked the photograph of Brunton that hung in the bookstore: such a handsome and aristocratic profile, with a slightly Indian cast to the features that was entirely appropriate. Later I learned that I had been admiring a photograph of J. Krishnamurti, and that Brunton was the bald man with the impériale beard and the lopsided smile who hung next to him. I forthwith grew a small beard and moustache.
As the winter wore on, I discovered more about Tony. When the evening classes came to an end, he would put on a gray uniform and leave to work fifty miles away on the New York State Thruway, taking tickets on the night shift at the Waterloo exit. With him he would take a box of books, in which I remember seeing the original folio volumes of Thomas Taylor’s translations: The Works of Plato (1810) and The Six Books of Proclus, the Platonic Successor, on the Theology of Plato (1816).
Tony’s home was an old farmhouse on Seneca Lake, to which he kindly invited me and my painter friend. There we met his wife, Ella May Damiani, and five of his six sons. The family was all vegetarian. They had lived in Brooklyn until quite recently; Tony had managed a large occult bookstore in Manhattan that I was later to know well as Weiser’s. Some of the books in the Ithaca bookstore were, in fact, sacrificed from the rich esoteric library that Tony had collected during that period. I wish I had had the sense to buy more of them, although even today Proclus is beyond me.
Tony was a memorable raconteur, and we heard of other things in his past that became the stuff of legend. For some years he had been a longshoreman, “to teach my body who’s boss.” During the same period, he had shaved off all his luxurious black hair, having decided that he was too attached to his appearance. He had worked on the New York subway, taking tickets at night—not many of them, for his station was next to a graveyard—and using the time for study and meditation. “I knew I was deeply in when I didn’t hear the trains go by,” he said. Once he was held up at gunpoint, and had quietly handed over the cash before his consciousness registered what had happened. One winter’s day, he sat down on a bench in Central Park and began to meditate; hours later, he found himself under six inches of snow.
These were the kind of stories he would tell to us neophytes; but he told them as if they were of another person, far away and eons ago. What Tony’s inner life had been like, I could not begin to imagine, and I still can’t.
As time went on, more people were lured by the astrology classes at the bookstore. Tony was a master astrologer, his intuition being at its height when interpreting planetary aspects and the Sabian symbols. Once he used my horoscope as the example for a class. That analysis has stuck with me ever since as a guide to objective self-knowledge. Yet astrology of this personal type was only a lure, for what Tony wanted us to learn was philosophy, the “love of wisdom.” For that there were classes on Brunton’s works, which would branch off into Tony’s favorite studies of Neoplatonism, Vedanta, Buddhism, and Jungian psychology. At first I fumbled for reference points in my own discarded Christianity, but mention of that tradition was usually squashed. Many of the classes would end with silent meditation, following a few directives on the unfamiliar task of watching one’s own thoughts as they arise. For further instruction we were referred to Paul Brunton’s works, especially The Secret Path and The Quest of the Overself.
Some of us could not get enough of Tony’s mind and presence. Not content with dropping into the bookstore most afternoons and sitting in class several evenings a week, we started to go out to his house on Sundays. Ella May would make a lunch that encouraged us to persist in our new vegetarian diet, then everyone would sit around and listen to Tony until the sun began to set through the big window overlooking Seneca Lake. Not many people helped with the dishwashing, though those who did would discover that Ella May was herself a mystical philosopher, though her life had left her no time, and perhaps no need, for the intellectual path that had seized our imaginations. Many of us were attached to Cornell University or Ithaca College as graduate students, young faculty, or staff, but our new teacher spared us none of his disdain for universities, scholarship, academic philosophy, and anyone with a PhD. I duly inscribed at the end of my dissertation the Latin words dissertatione confecta incipit philosophia vera (“Dissertation finished, true philosophy begins”), confident that no one would read it carefully enough to query them.
Tony’s own higher education—and again, I relate anecdotes, not biography—had begun and ended in the space of a few weeks. While other teenagers were worrying about sports and dating, the young Damiani was tormented by the question: “How do I perceive a world?” Where would one go for an answer to this burning question? A university, naturally, where all wisdom is kept, and in particular to the department of philosophy. So Tony enrolled in freshman philosophy, I believe at Columbia. After a few lectures, as his problem was no closer to being solved, he went up to the professor and enquired when the class would be taught how we perceive a world. “That’s epistemology—not until the third term,” muttered the dignitary, and that was enough for Tony. He would find out for himself.
Not long after, Tony saw a display in a bookstore window of Paul Brunton’s works, and, curiously attracted, tried reading them. Immediately he found his question answered as academic philosophy had never been able to answer it. More than that, he found the epistemological explanation connected to a whole way of life, a whole reason for living. In gratitude to this author, Tony wrote to him in care of the publisher, hoping that his letter might reach Brunton in some Himalayan or jungle retreat. But Brunton happened, just then in 1946, to be in New York City, and there Tony met him. He had found his master, though one who never claimed such a role, describing himself in a letter as no guru but “just a student of these matters.”
Tony’s teaching was a carefully calculated blend of positive and negative touches. I remember going at sunset to find seclusion by an attic window, and imagining his great love for me and for all those he was helping streaming across Cayuga Lake. But the love which enabled him to put up with us was for our Overselves, not for our childish egos. Since my ego was currently vested in the music and art of the avant-garde, I found Tony’s taste for loud romantic music rather passé, while as far as I could tell, he had no taste at all in art. I wanted to have my own connoisseurship appreciated, but he was certainly not going to play along with that; nor, to my disappointment, was he the slightest bit interested in my own history and personality. Later I understood that a teacher of his kind cannot possibly get involved with the ego problems of his students, least of all when his teaching has to do precisely with liberation from the ego. As he wrote to me when I was beginning to appreciate his method, “You may have seen that the stance I subscribe to, is to regard the I-bound soul objectively, concretely and not to experience it subjectively. This comes from growth; not books . . .”
Deep philosophy has seldom worn such casual clothing. Tony’s conversation was so familiar and colloquial in style as sometimes to seem crude. His words, easy to understand, were often hard to accept, for they aimed at our pet delusions and felt out every chink in our psychological armor. He was one of those who have taken heaven by storm and wrested the truth from the wreckage of the ego. By no means all of his students, especially the women among them, were moved to emulate him. Everyone tried, or pretended, to read Plotinus or Malkani’s Philosophy of the Self, but few could keep at it all night. Obviously there was another side to Tony, or he would have repelled all but the hardy few.
As far as I know, his only relaxation was music, in which his preference was for deep, melancholy, meditative pieces (Bach’s and Beethoven’s slow movements, Chopin’s Nocturnes) or for the exultant monuments of later Romanticism (Wagner, Mahler, Scriabin). He had no enthusiasm for the more objective music of earlier and later periods. In full-blooded Romanticism, perhaps he experienced in pure form the emotional energies that enabled him to keep going against all obstacles, first as a student and later as a teacher. There was behind his intensity—and it can easily be sensed in his recorded conversations—a reservoir of impersonal compassion for human ignorance such as fuels the efforts of every genuine spiritual teacher. There was never any doubt in our minds that we had known him before, and that, if we did not abandon the Quest, we would meet him again.
It was concern for Tony’s family, suffering the continual invasion of their home and feeding dozens every weekend, that gave some of the “questers” the idea of building a separate center for meditation and philosophic study. They put up a large log cabin on part of his land, which was henceforth known as “Wisdom’s Goldenrod Limited,” or “The Center.” The “Limited” was a discreet statement that the core of students had now formed, and that, while others would be welcomed if they wished to take the initiative, no further outreach would be made, no 100-level courses offered, as it were. Several people bought or built houses near to the center, so that a close community formed. One or two “monks” lived in small rooms in the meditation building and took care of the property, which was beautifully landscaped and maintained. A venerable Swedish lady took up residence in her own cabin on the Wisdom’s Goldenrod land. It was she who decided that it was inappropriate to call our teacher by a familiar name; Tony found himself promoted to “Anthony,” and so he has remained.
The locals on Seneca Lake regarded the center with some suspicion, and had to be reassured that it was not a cult, with all that that implied. Public recognition of a spectacular kind came in 1979. By then, some of Anthony’s early students had gravitated to Tibetan Buddhist circles and visited the Dalai Lama XIV in Dharamsala, India. The exiled leader accepted the invitation to visit Wisdom’s Goldenrod during his coming American tour, and to open the new library that had just been built. While it came as no surprise to those who already recognized Anthony’s worth, the Dalai Lama’s three-day visit did put a stamp of approval on his teaching which few could gainsay (Horstman, 5). It was also the beginning of Ithaca’s development as a center for Tibetan Buddhism: the city now houses the Dalai Lama’s official North American seat. (See the website of Ithaca’s Namgyal Monastery: http://www.namgyal.org.)
By the time the Wisdom’s Goldenrod Center was built, I had left Ithaca and felt little part in that increasingly focused community. Nor—and not for want of trying—could I understand “Astronoesis,” the system-of-all-systems that occupied Anthony’s mind and those of his closest pupils (Damiani, Astronoesis). My only attraction to Tibetan traditions came through an encounter, in the winter of 1978–79, with the noninstitutional Dzogchen. Most of all, I was set on building bridges between the academic and esoteric realms, convinced that each could benefit from the better parts of the other. The academy needed to break through the restrictions of the scientistic mentality, formed in reaction to religious dogma; the New Age that was then appearing as the public face of esotericism needed more rigorous and self-critical methods. (Some hope, I can hear Anthony saying!) Encounters with Brunton himself had already confirmed that I must go my own way, as did Anthony’s last “fraternal” communications.
The last time I saw Anthony was in 1984. I had been asked to come and talk to the students about the Traditionalist philosopher René Guénon. My translation of his Multiple States of Being had just come out, and they wanted to know about the works that were at the time untranslated, especially The Great Triad. (Guénon’s collected works have since been published in English by Sophia Perennis in Hillsdale, New York.) After my presentation, Anthony made some remarks about Guénon’s incredible arrogance and that of all the Traditionalists. (No matter that my discovery of them had come through him, and that I had purchased his own specially bound copies of works by Guénon and another Traditionalist, Julius Evola, at his bookstore.)
Talk turned to the future. Anthony’s view was very bleak. “Just so long as President Reagan keeps those missiles pointed against Russia” were his words. This was election year, and everyone else I knew was against Reagan and his aggressive policies. I went cold. But then I didn’t know that Anthony was already suffering from lung cancer, nor how the 1980s would turn out. He died in October 1984, leaving Wisdom’s Goldenrod without anyone remotely resembling a successor. Thus the institution was spared the indignities and rivalries that so often follow the founder’s demise.
In the previous year, 1983, Anthony had given a series of talks, or rather conversations, to a circle of students in Sweden. These were gathered, after his death, into a book called Looking into Mind. The dialogue form recalls what survives of Socrates’ teachings; and the comparison is not a casual one, for the Athenian stonemason and the New York toll collector had many things in common. Both came of humble backgrounds and began to teach, neglecting their families, because of a sacred sign that left them no alternative. (In Anthony’s case, it was a revelation following a heart attack in 1967.) Both were spellbinding talkers, but neither could or would write his philosophy down. Socrates’ discourse was captured by Plato, or so the latter would persuade us; a fragment of Anthony’s was recorded, more reliably, on tape. Both had conservative political opinions that disconcerted some of their listeners. Neither was a feminist in the slightest degree. But that is irrelevant to the theme of Looking into Mind, which begins with the question of Anthony’s boyhood obsession—“how do I perceive a world?”—and ends with the dissolution of that world in the One which is, paradoxically, the only true reality.
Much later, I saw the whole enterprise in the context of the spiritual movements that have arisen in upstate New York. Of these, the Shakers, Mormons, Spiritualists, Adventists, Oneida Perfectionists, and Jane Roberts’ Seth Material (exactly contemporary with Anthony’s work) are the best known among a host of others (See Godwin, Upstate Cauldron, especially 295–301). But there is, to my mind, a great difference between their religious, social, or at best mystical goals and the independent philosophical path into which Anthony initiated us.
While some may argue over how to define initiation, I know from this encounter that it can come without a ritual, a degree, or a title. It can seek you out, rather than being sought, but need not enroll you in its club or cult. Fifty years later, I see it as a fundamental rearrangement of the soul that removes certain obstacles to its development. The technical details of how it is done are unknown to me, but the consequence is that a door opens, or even just a window, that can never be closed again. From then on, the path is open to solving the particular “equation” with which each of us is born, until all its factors are reduced to zero.
Sources
For the history and current activities of the Wisdom’s Goldenrod Center, visit its website: http://www.wisdomsgoldenrod.com. See also the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation (www.paulbrunton.org), which grew out of it. Paul Brunton’s extensive archive is now accessible at Cornell University’s Kroch Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.
Brunton, Paul. The Secret Path: A Technique of Spiritual Self-Discovery for the Modern World. New York: Dutton, 1935.
———. The Wisdom of the Overself. New York: Dutton, 1943.
Damiani, Anthony J. Astronoesis: Philosophy’s Empirical Context; Astrology’s Transcendental Ground. Burdett, N.Y.: Larson, 2000.
———. Looking into Mind: How to Recognize Who You Are and How You Know. Burdett, N.Y.: Larson, 1990.
———. Standing in Your Own Way: Talks on the Nature of the Ego. Burdett, N.Y.: Larson, 1993.
Godwin, Joscelyn. Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early New York State. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015.
Guénon, René. The Multiple States of Being. Translated by Joscelyn Godwin. Burdett, N.Y.: Larson, 1984.
Horstman, Judith. “Wisdom’s Goldenrod: Damiani’s Center for Dialogue,” Ithaca Journal, Nov. 3, 1979.
Malkani, Ghanshamdas Rattanmal. Philosophy of the Self, or A System of Idealism Based upon Advait Vedanta. Amalner, India: Indian Institute of Philosophy, 1939.
Joscelyn Godwin was born in England, educated as a musicologist at Cambridge and Cornell universities, and taught from 1971 to 2016 at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. He has written, edited, and translated many books on “speculative music” and on the Western esoteric traditions, including Symbols in the Wilderness: Early Masonic Survivals in Upstate New York (with Christian Goodwillie), The Greater and Lesser Worlds of Robert Fludd: Macrocosm, Microcosm, and Medicine, and translations of Introduction to Magic, volumes 2 and 3, by Julius Evola and the UR group. This article originally appeared in The Art and Science of Initiation, edited by Jedediah French and Angel Millar (London: Lewis Masonic, 2019).
We nearly lost him at Summertown, Oxford, in the summer of 1976, when he stepped into the path of a car in the Banbury Road and was just yanked back in time. Saved by a whisker! He was unfazed, but it stuck in my mind as an uncharacteristic lapse of attention in a man whose life work revolved around observation, investigation, and experience, which he called the three modes of attention. In this case, observation had slipped a little out of balance with the other two!
For more than a decade, I’ve worked as a writer for American organizations. I’m good at the work and have found a niche. But I have increasingly started to feel as though I am little more than a propagandist for business and nonprofits. In these jobs, where I often work within marketing departments, nothing I write is entirely truthful. Rather, everything is crafted and spun to promote a service, product, or brand. 
We can define spiritual struggle as a conflict or dissonance between what we hold sacred (our beliefs, including others who share those beliefs or the institution that houses them) and our experiences. This conflict results in emotions that often seem distressing.