Quest Magazine

Originally printed in the January-February 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Crowley, Vivianne. "Explorations: Jung in England: Ghost and Personality Types." Quest  89.1 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2000): 28-29

By Vivianne Crowley

In 1920, Carl Jung, the father of Analytic Psychology, was invited to Britain to give seminars. In his leisure time he visited Tintagel Castle, the supposed birthplace of King Arthur, and mystical Glastonbury, where St. Joseph of Arimathea is reputed to have brought the Holy Grail for safekeeping. Jung's intuitive mind had been open to the paranormal from a very early age. In Britain, he was in a land steeped in history—and in ghosts.

Ghosts

Jung disliked hotels, so he asked a friend to help him rent a cheap country cottage where he could stay on weekends. However, when he was at the cottage, he got little rest. On the first weekend, he woke to find a sickly smell pervading the bedroom. The next weekend, the smell was accompanied by a rustling noise of something brushing along the walls. It seemed to Jung that a large animal must be in the room. On the third weekend, there were knocking sounds. By now, most people would have given up and decided to spend their weekends elsewhere, but not Jung. On the fifth weekend, he woke up to find a hideous apparition beside him on the pillow. It was an old woman, part of whose face was missing.

Jung questioned the cleaners, who confirmed that the cottage was indeed haunted. This explained the suspiciously low rent and the cleaners' reluctance to be there after dark. Not all of Jung's colleagues were inclined to believe in ghosts. The colleague who had rented the cottage on Jung's behalf was unimpressed with what Jung told him, so Jung challenged him to spend the night there. He tried, but was so terrified he did not even remain in the bedroom. He took his bed into the garden and slept outside with his shotgun beside him. Shortly afterward, the cottage's owner had it demolished—it was impossible for anyone to live there.

Personality Types

One of Jung's aims during his British seminars in 1920 was to refine his ideas about personality. In 1921, he published what is now the sixth volume of his Collected Works, entitled Psychological Types. In addition to two attitudes to the world, extroversion and introversion, Jung identified four personality types or functions: "sensation," "intuition," "thinking," and "feeling." Of these psychological types or functions, Jung wrote (Psychological Types 518):

For complete orientation all four functions should contribute equally: thinking should facilitate cognition and judgment, feeling should tell us how and to what extent a thing is important for us, sensation should convey concrete reality to us through seeing, hearing, tasting, etc., and intuition should enable us to divine the hidden possibilities in the background, since these too belong to the complete picture of a given situation.

The idea that there are four basic personality types is found in many cultures and is at the heart of astrology. The ancient Greeks believed that the whole of creation was made up of four elements—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Personality was seen as influenced by these four elements—people were a mixture of the elements, but in each of us one element predominates, affecting our personality and body type. The personality types relate to the four elements: sensation to Earth, thinking to Air, intuition to Fire, and feeling to Water. The idea that intuition is fiery may seem strange, but if you consider Jung's idea of intuition as akin to creative inspiration, then it begins to make sense.

The personality types also relate to the astrological signs through the four elements. In astrology, the Air signs are Aquarius, Gemini, and Libra; the Fire signs are Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius; the Water signs are Pisces, Cancer, and Scorpio; and the Earth signs are Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn. If a patient was particularly difficult to understand, Jung would send him or her to an expert astrologer to have a natal chart prepared, which Jung would then interpret psychologically. There is no simple relationship between sun sign and dominant personality type, but a skilled astrologer can predict the dominant personality type from the overall dynamics of the chart.

Four Functions

In order to function in the world, we need to receive information and then make judgments about how to act on it. Sensation and intuition are different ways of perceiving and receiving information. Thinking and feeling are judging functions. They are two different measuring instruments that help us to process the information we receive.

We cannot use two perceptual functions or two judging functions at the same time. The different modes of perceiving—sensation and intuition—are like looking at the world through different pairs of glasses with different lenses. We can only use one pair at a time. We call on the other when we need to, but it is less familiar to us and therefore we use it less skillfully. Similarly, we cannot use two judgment functions as measuring instruments at the same time. We use either thinking or feeling first to evaluate the data we receive, and then call on the other for extra information.

Jung's ideas on personality types are clearly illustrated by four characters in the original Star Trek series: Mr. Spock, the thinker; Dr. McCoy or Bones, the feeler; Scotty, the sensate engineer; and Captain Kirk, the intuitive leader. Captain Kirk's impulsiveness was always getting them into trouble, but his leaps of lateral imagination got them out again. When the team worked well together, they solved most of their problems.

Thinking and Feeling

Thinking tells us whether something is logical and rational, correct or incorrect. Thinking types enjoy analyzing information and making logical decisions. They tend to be good at science, mathematics, or business. Introverted thinking people like computers and classification systems. They can be good at playing the stock market and gambling. Extroverted thinkers love to organize others. They are born administrators.

Feeling tells us whether something is pleasant or unpleasant, good or bad, helpful or harmful. We need our feeling function when dealing with people and making relationships. Feeling people make good social workers who will move heaven and earth to help a deserving client. Feeling people build relationships of trust and are excellent parents, teachers, and ministers.

Sensation and Intuition

Sensation operates through the physical senses, and we use it to discover facts. Sensation types are usually practical people who spot physical clues that others miss. As doctors, they make good diagnosticians. As mechanics, they will often recognize the annoying engine noise that electronic faultfinding devices failed to identify. As fashion experts, they match color with an unerring eye. Sensation is reality-oriented, focused in the here and now. Sensate people remember names and dates and make great collectors, whether of stamps or antiques.

Intuition shows us meanings and implications. It tells us how situations are likely to develop in the future. Intuitives have hunches and "know" things, but do not know how they know. Intuition is the function of the imagination. People with extroverted intuition have an idea where society is going and will be at the leading edge of new technologies, businesses, fashions, and creeds. They love new ideas and new projects. Introverted intuition is the function of the creative writer and of the daydreamer. Intuitives can be content to dream their lives away without ever bringing their brilliant imaginings to fruition—they start more than they finish.

Dominant and Secondary Functions

Our dominant and secondary functions are the perceptual and judgmental functions that we use most in everyday life. These functions impact on our outer personality, affecting how people see us and react to us.

Relating to a person whose first and second functions are opposite to ours can create problems. Sensate thinkers are interested in practical matters, business, and politics. They will be easily bored by discussions about people's feelings. Intuitive feelers are romantic. They like being told that their partner loves them. "Of course I love you," the sensate thinker replies, "I bought you that new CD player, didn't I?" Intuitive thinkers talk about abstract ideas and find sensate feelers materialistic. A sensate feeling parent may feel hurt by an intuitive thinking child's apparent coldness. When she or he is in the middle of doing something complex on the computer, an intuitive thinker may find it irritating to feel obliged to respond to a sensate feeling person's need for hugs. This does not make these relationships impossible, but it does make them more challenging.

Vivianne Crowley is a Jungian psychologist and the author of Jung, a Journey of Transformation: Exploring His Life and Experiencing His Ideas (Quest Books, 1999), from which this article has been edited.

VOLUME 88, NUMBER 1

Contents

René Schwaller de Lubicz and the Intelligence of the Heart
By Gary Lachman

The Wisdom of Ancient Egypt
By John Anthony West

Forming a Prayer Group
By Sam Menahem

Confessions of a Zen Jew
By Max Roth

Explorations: Jung in England: Ghosts and Personality Types
By Vivianne Crowley

Viewpoint: On Being Eclectic
By John Algeo

Thinking Aloud: Tourists or Pilgrims?
By Chris Richardson

Originally printed in the January-February 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Lachman, Gary. "Rene Schwaller de Lubicz and the Intelligence of the Heart." Quest  89.1 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2000): 4-11

By Gary Lachman

René Schwaller de Lubicz (1887–1961) is known to English readers primarily for his work in uncovering the spiritual and cosmological insights of ancient Egypt. In books like Esotericism and Symbol, The Temple in Man, Symbol and the Symbolic, The Egyptian Miracle, and the monumental The Temple of Man--whose long awaited English translation has finally appeared--Schwaller de Lubicz argued, among other things, that Egyptian civilization is much older than orthodox Egyptologists suggest, a claim receiving renewed interest through the recent work of Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval.

If his view of Egyptian antiquity wasn't enough to place him securely beyond the pale, he also argued that the core of ancient Egyptian culture was a fundamental insight into "the laws of creation." Everything about Egyptian civilization, from the construction of the pyramids to the shape of a beer mug, de Lubicz claimed to be motivated by a central metaphysical vision about the nature of cosmic harmony and an awareness of humanity's place in the evolution of consciousness. As his translator Deborah Lawlor remarks (introduction to Nature Word 47), Schwaller de Lubicz's Egyptian studies are only a part of his overall work as a metaphysician and philosopher.

Born in Alsace-Lorraine, then part of Germany, René Schwaller grew up in a polyglot atmosphere. (He was later given the title "de Lubicz" by the Lithuanian poet and diplomat O. V. de Lubicz Milosz, for his efforts on behalf of Lithuania in the aftermath of World War I.) Alsace-Lorraine has oscillated between French and German rule many times since Schwaller's birth, and this Franco-Germanic blend lends a curious characteristic to his work. As Christopher Bamford (introduction to Schwaller's Study of Numbers 1) suggests, Schwaller thought in German, but wrote in French. Added to the inherent difficulties of expressing nonlinear, "living" insights in "dead" linear language, this odd combination places many obstacles before a first-time reader. As he wrote apropos the insights into "functional consciousness," presented in his truly hermetic work, Nature Word (129): "Nature had shown me a great mountain, crowned with a peak of immaculate whiteness, but she was unable to teach me the way leading to it."

Readers wishing to grasp Schwaller's insights may feel that they, too, have found themselves at the foot of a very steep mountain. This challenging prospect would not have fazed Schwaller. He believed knowledge was the right only of those willing to make the effort to achieve it, the elite who would endure suffering in their pursuit of wisdom. This sensibility influenced his political views as well.

Early Years, Bergson, and Matisse

Schwaller's father was a chemist--apparently wealthy--and the young René grew up in a world of science, nature and art. Dreamy walks in the Alsatian forests followed hours spent painting and "experimenting." He also had two peculiar experiences. In 1894, at the age of seven, Schwaller had a kind of mystical insight into the nature of the divine. This glimpse of metaphysical reality would return seven years later when, at fourteen, he experienced another insight, this one into matter. "What is the origin of matter?" the budding metaphysician asked himself. The question occupied him the rest of his life.

In his late teens, Schwaller left home and went to Paris. He studied painting under Henri Matisse, who at that time was deeply influenced by the work of the most famous philosopher of the age, Henri Bergson. Today Bergson gets little more than a mention in books on the history of philosophy, but in the years before World War I he was world-known, immensely influential for his philosophy of intuition. Bergson argued against the static, mechanistic perception of the world, in favor of a living vital participation with its essence, the famous élan vital or life force. He was also something of a mystic. In one of his last books, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), written after his popularity had declined, Bergson made his famous remark that the universe was a machine for "making gods," a formulation Schwaller would not have found much fault with.

Science and Theosophy

Along with Matisse and Bergson, Schwaller came under the influence of the new physics of Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Like many people today, Schwaller believed that the strange world of quantum physics and relativity opened the door to a universe more in line with the cosmologies of the ancients, and less compatible with the Newtonian clockwork world of the nineteenth century. He was especially stimulated by the idea of complementarity, developed by the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, and the uncertainty principle of Werner Heisenberg.

Bohr sought to end the debate over the nature of light--whether it was best described as a wave or as a particle--by opting for a position that would see it as both. Heisenberg's "uncertainty"--which caused Einstein to retort famously that "God does not play dice with the universe"--argued that we cannot know both the position and the speed of an elementary particle: pinpointing one obscures the other.

Schwaller would agree with Einstein about God's attitude toward gambling. But he appreciated that complementarity and uncertainty demand a stretch of our minds beyond the "either/or" of syllogistic logic, to an understanding of how reality works. Complementarity and uncertainty ask us to hold mutually exclusive ideas together--the basic idea behind a Zen koan. The result, Schwaller knew, can be an illogical but illuminating insight.

This "simultaneity of opposite states" plays a great part in Schwaller's understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics. It characterizes what he calls symbolique, a way of holding together the object of sense perception and the content of inner knowing, in a kind of creative polarity. When the Egyptians saw the hieroglyph of a bird, he argued, they knew it was a sign for the actual, individual creature, but they also knew it was a symbol of the "cosmic function" that the creature exemplified--flight--as well as all the myriad characteristics associated with it. Hieroglyphics did not merely designate; they evoked. As he wrote in Symbol and the Symbolic (40), "the observation of a simultaneity of mutually contradictory states . . . demonstrates the existence of two forms of intelligence"--an idea the early twentieth century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead would discuss, with many similarities to Schwaller's thought, in his book, Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (1927).

Our rational, scientific intelligence is of the mind and the senses. The other form of intelligence, whose most total expression Schwaller eventually located in the civilization of ancient Egypt, is of "the heart." This search for the "intelligence of the heart" became Schwaller's life work.

Schwaller believed that the appearance of the new physics indicated humanity was moving toward a massive shift in awareness, an idea he shared with his near contemporary Jean Gebser. He related this shift to the precession of the equinoxes and the coming Age of Aquarius. But he also believed that science alone couldn't provide the deepest insights into the true character of the world. For this, he argued, a new kind of consciousness is necessary.

He sought signs of this new consciousness among less mainstream thinkers. In 1913–1914, Schwaller was active in French Theosophical groups and, one suspects, in occult circles in Paris in general. He read widely in Madame Blavatsky and other occult thinkers, and published a series of articles on the philosophy of science in Le Theosophe. Soon after, in 1917, at the age of thirty, he published his first book, A Study of Numbers, a Pythagorean essay on the metaphysical meaning of mathematics.

That book's central idea is at the heart of Schwaller's thought: the inexplicable splitting--or "scission," as he called it--of the unmanifest One, the Absolute, into the many--a question that, in a less mystical manner, occupies many leading cosmologists today.

For Schwaller this "irrational" eruption of absolute unity into the world of space and time is the central mystery of existence, the primal secret that will forever elude the simplifying grasp of the purely cerebral mind. Our rational mind is unable to grasp the central mystery, he argues, because our "sensory organization clearly seems to be imperfect." This condition can only be alleviated through a "perfecting of consciousness," something, he would later argue, the ancient Egyptians knew all about. "I earnestly anticipate the time when an enlightened being will be able to bring the world proof of the mystery of the beginning," he wrote in Sacred Science.

Alchemy and Fulcanelli

Dissatisfied with the scientific prejudices of the present time, Schwaller sought kindred spirits in the past. The study of alchemy fed his appetite for spiritual knowledge. Unlike many drawn to the occult, Schwaller's interest in science gave him a hard-edged, practical mind, unsatisfied with vague talk of higher worlds. Esotericism, he believed, should include factual knowledge of how the world worked; he rejected Jung's interpretation of alchemy as a purely psychic affair. Alchemy was a spiritual practice involving the consciousness of the alchemist, but it also involved objective insights into the structure of matter. This belief in the reality of objective knowledge fueled Schwaller's later investigations into Egyptian civilization.

He was fascinated with the esoteric secrets of Gothic architecture and became acquainted with the man whose name is most associated with the "mystery of the cathedrals," the pseudonymous Fulcanelli. Sometime between 1918 and 1920 in Montparnasse, Schwaller met Fulcanelli, who had gathered a band of disciples around him, aptly called "The Brothers of Heliopolis." (Schwaller would later claim that the word alchemy meant "out of Egypt.") Alchemy had found a home in the strange world of the Parisian occult underground, and Fulcanelli and the Brothers of Heliopolis studied the works of the great alchemists, like Nicolas Flammel and Basil Valentinus.

Fulcanelli and Schwaller met often and discussed the Great Work, the transmutation of matter, a possibility that the recent advances in atomic theory seemed to bring closer to reality. Then one day, Fulcanelli told Schwaller about a manuscript he had stolen from a Paris bookshop. While cataloguing an ancient book for a bookseller, Fulcanelli discovered a strange piece of writing: a six-page manuscript in fading ink, describing, Fulcanelli claimed, the importance of color in the alchemical process. But, said Schwaller, when it came to alchemy, Fulcanelli was a materialist, and so he didn't grasp the true nature of color. Schwaller enlightened him.

Tired of the distractions of Paris, Schwaller moved to Grasse, in the south of France, where he invited Fulcanelli to join him in an alchemical retreat. There, after much work, they performed a successful opus, involving the secrets of "alchemical stained glass." The peculiarly evocative reds and blues of the rose windows of cathedrals like the unearthly Chartres had eluded artisans since the Middle Ages. In Grasse, Schwaller and Fulcanelli may have cracked the formula.

But there was tension between the two, and the suspicion exists that Fulcanelli stole more than a manuscript from a bookseller. The ideas for his most famous work, The Mystery of the Cathedrals (1925), are said to have been taken from Schwaller de Lubicz. Fulcanelli returned to Paris and against Schwaller's advice, tried to perform their work again. He wasn't successful. This was, Schwaller claimed, because Fulcanelli left out essential ingredients known only to him. Ignoring Schwaller's warnings, Fulcanelli persisted in performing the work in Paris. But his strange death from gangrene, a day before he was to reveal the secret to his students, brought an end to his opus.

Esoteric Politics

Schwaller found himself moving toward more political methods of embodying esoteric wisdom. He had already met the mystical poet O. V. de Lubicz Milosz, who had bestowed a knighthood on him. Heraldry and chivalric virtue became central items in Schwaller's personal philosophy. As he wrote in Nature Word, "The proper path leads you first in search of your 'Totem,' that is to a spiritual Heraldry." This is because "you cannot step into the shoes of another person, for you are yourself a whole, a particular aspect of universal Consciousness." He had also received his mystical name, "Aor" or "intellectual light" in Hebrew. In later years, his students would address him in this way.

Esotericism demands that one not only deal with esoteric truth intellectually, but as a living practice. Around this time, Schwaller took this maxim to heart and set out to bring to post World War I French politics some of the values and ideals of esotericism.

The merger of politics and esotericism was not uncommon in the Europe devastated by World War I. Rudolf Steiner had written something of a political bestseller with his book on the restructuring of Europe, The Threefold Commonwealth (1919). But Schwaller's political views were very different from Steiner's. Les Veilleurs ("The Watchmen" or "Vigilant Ones"), the political society Schwaller and Milosz began, espoused a decidedly conservative and elitist philosophy. Aside from a few exceptions, this seems common to many occult thinkers at that time, from W. B. Yeats to the more dubious individuals making up the notorious Thule Society. (Oddly enough, Rudolf Hess, a member of the Thule Society, was also one of "The Vigilant Ones.") Isha Schwaller de Lubicz, Schwaller's wife (herself the author of a strange work of Egyptian esoterica, Her-Bak), wrote that the aims of Les Veilleurs included "the common defense of the principles of human rights . . . the supreme safeguards of . . . independence."

Yet according to André VandenBroeck, author of Al-Kemi: Hermetic, Occult, Political and Private Aspects of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1987), these sentiments mixed with less democratic views--as well as a taste for dark shirts, riding pants, and boots—a questionable fashion statement in the years leading up to Hitler. A distaste for modern society and civilization runs throughout Schwaller's writings, a dissatisfaction with "mass man," a Nietzschean disdain of "the herd" that he shares with other esoteric thinkers like Julius Evola and René Guénon. It is clear that individuals like Schwaller would find our increasingly lowest-common-denominator society revolting, and we must see his interest in the pharaonic theocracy of ancient Egypt in light of his belief in the absolute value of the individual consciousness in a time of increasing spiritual and cultural mediocrity. But Schwaller's belief that contemporary human beings are by and large degenerate and his faith in an esoteric elite preparing for a spiritual renaissance often smack unappetizingly of less philosophically informed attempts to reestablish "traditional values" in the modern world.

Schwaller soon realized that politics are an unwieldy vehicle for truth and accepted that a literal theocracy wasn't feasible in his time. From the chivalric Les Veilleurs, he moved to a more withdrawn, communal approach. In the 1920s, René and Isha moved to Switzerland and established Suhalia, a center for research in a variety of scientific and alchemical studies. Physics, chemistry, microphotography, homeopathy, astronomy, woodworking, printing, weaving, glassmaking, and theatre--all found a place in Suhalia. There Schwaller developed a motor that ran on vegetable oil, which he hoped would help France to use less gasoline, an ecological vision ahead of its time. A ship designed according to the "principle of number and proportion" showed considerable capacity for speed and balance. At the same time he studied botany, and perfected his method of producing "alchemical glass."

Also at Suhalia, Schwaller's views on the evolution of consciousness began to coalesce. In a book distributed to his students called L'Appel du feu (1926), he recorded a series of inspirations via a higher intelligence that he called "Aor." These revealed to him the true significance of time, space, measure, and harmony. The basic insight was to think simply, to abstract oneself from time and space, and to "consider only the aspect common to every thing and every living impulse." As he would later write, "To cultivate oneself to be simple and to see simply is the first task of anyone wishing to approach the sacred symbolism of Ancient Egypt." This is necessary because "the obvious blinds us," the obvious being our perception of the world via cerebral consciousness alone, which divides, analyzes, and "granulates" experience--Bergson's "static perception." Schwaller would later discover that the Egyptians associated this type of consciousness with the "evil" god Set; its opposite, the "intelligence of the heart," they associated with Horus.

Schwaller claimed that the knowledge he received at Suhalia was from a past life. Like Plato, Schwaller believed that all real knowledge is a kind of re-membering--a bringing back together what had been separated, a reparation of the "primordial scission."

Suhalia continued until 1929, when finances caused Schwaller to shut it down. The next few years were spent at Grasse and aboard his yacht. Two years of comparative solitude in Palma de Mallorca ended with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The moment seemed right to follow up an idea Isha and René had toyed with for some time--a journey to Egypt.

Luxor and Conscious Man

Ironically, it was Isha, not René, who first felt the pull of Egypt. Concerned with alchemy, matter, and the evolution of consciousness, Schwaller hadn't thought much about Egypt. But Isha knew they had to go. In 1936, on a visit to the tomb of Rameses IX in Alexandria, Schwaller had a kind of revelation. A picture represented the pharaoh as a right-angle triangle with the proportions 3:4:5, his upraised arm adding another unit. Schwaller thought it demonstrated the Pythagorean theorem, centuries before Pythagoras was born. From the picture it was clear to him that the knowledge of the medieval masons had its roots in ancient Egypt. For the next fifteen years, until 1951, Schwaller de Lubicz remained in Egypt, investigating the evidence for what he believed was an ancient system of psychological, cosmological, and spiritual knowledge.

Most of Schwaller's work was done at the temple at Luxor, his study of its remarkable architecture and design a natural outcome of his early fascination with the mystery of number. On his first visit in 1937, Schwaller was impressed with a tremendous insight. The temple, with its strange, "crooked" alignments, was, he was certain, a conscious exercise in the laws of harmony and proportion. He called it the Parthenon of Egypt—somewhat anachronistically, since he believed Luxor was concrete proof that the Egyptians understood the laws of harmony and proportion before the Greeks.

Schwaller searched Luxor for evidence of the golden section, phi. If the golden section had been used, that would prove the Egyptians had knowledge of it much earlier than the Greeks, a revelation that alone would cause an uproar in orthodox Egyptology. But as John Anthony West in The Serpent and the Sky (1978), a study of Schwaller de Lubicz, points out, phi is more than a central item in classical architecture. It is the mathematical archetype of the manifest universe, the means by which we have an "asymmetrical" "lumpy" world of galaxies and planets, and not a bland, homogenous sameness, a question that contemporary cosmologists are also concerned with. Schwaller linked phi to the orbits of the planets, the proportions of Gothic cathedrals, and the forms of plants and animals. It was a "form constant," a blueprint for reality, a law of creation. And the Egyptians knew it.

The Egyptians knew much else: the precession of the equinoxes, the circumference of the globe, and the secrets of pi. The knowledge of the Egyptians indeed made the Greeks seem like children. Their forgotten mathematical wisdom led Schwaller increasingly to realize that Egyptian civilization must be far older than we suspect--the clear evidence of water erosion on the Sphinx also suggests that. He concluded that their knowledge may have been inherited from vanished Atlantis. But more important than any of those conclusions, was his growing conviction that the Egyptians had a radically different consciousness from ours. They viewed the world symbolically, seeing in nature a "writing" conveying truths about the metaphysical forces behind creation—"the Neters," as Egyptian gods are called. It was a vision Schwaller believed we desperately need to regain.

At the center of this vision was Conscious Man, the King. For the ancient Egyptians, Conscious Man was the crown and aim of the universe, a perception many nature-centered mystics would dispute. But Conscious Man was not "man as we know him." He was the individual in whom the "intelligence of the heart" has awakened, one who has had the experience of "functional consciousness."

Functional Consciousness

Schwaller believed Luxor was a kind of living organism, a colossal compendium of esoteric truth, whose every detail, from its total design down to its very materials, voiced one central revelation: that Conscious Man was the goal of cosmic evolution. "Each individual type in Nature is a stage in the cosmic embryology which culminates in man," he wrote. Different species, Schwaller believed, developed various "functions"—what the Egyptians called "Neters" and we translate as "gods"--which have their apotheosis and integration in Conscious Man.

The essence of Schwaller's evolutionism has to do with what he calls "functional consciousness," an idea we can benefit from understanding, regardless of our opinions of elites or theocracies. And although Schwaller developed his ideas about functional consciousness in an Egyptian context, that context is ultimately not necessary. The essence of those ideas goes back to Bergson and intuition. Needless to say, Schwaller took this basic insight and, with his Egyptian revelations, developed an original, powerful, and imaginatively thrilling symbolic system.

"Functional consciousness" is a way of knowing reality from the inside. Schwaller believed ancient Egypt was based on this inner knowing, very unlike our own outer-oriented one. The ancient Egyptians, he argued, were aware of the limitations of purely cerebral consciousness, the Set mind that "granulates" experience into fragments of time and space and is behind our increasing abuse of nature and of each other. Granulated experience produces our familiar world of disconnected things, each a kind of "island reality." From this perspective, when I look at the world, I see a foreign, alien landscape, which I can know only by taking it apart and analyzing it. As the poet Wordsworth wrote, "We murder to dissect."

But as Schwaller wrote in Nature Word (134), "The Universe is wholly activity." There is another way of knowing, one very similar to Taoist forms of perception, which can heal the ruptures of cerebral consciousness, without recourse to dubious ideas of elites or theocracies. In a section called "The Way" (135), Schwaller advises us to "leave all dialectic behind and follow the path of the Powers." Poetically, he continues by calling on us to

Tumble with the rock which falls from the mountain.

Seek light and rejoice with the rosebud about to open:

. . .

labor with the parsimonious ant;

gather honey with the bee;

expand in space with the ripening fruit.

All of those injunctions are classic examples of the kind of "knowing from the inside" that Bergson had in mind in his talk on intuition. In this way, we participate with the world, rather than hold it at arm's length, objectifying it, as modern science is prone to do. With recent developments in genetics, this "objectification" is now dangerously focused on ourselves.

My aim is not to reduce Schwaller's remarkable achievement to a simple variation on Bergson. Understanding what "functional consciousness" is and developing methods of achieving it are two different things. Schwaller's immense work on an entire civilization devoted to "inner knowing" entails ways of reaching this deeper perception, and we would be wrong to ignore it. But I think it's important to bring the essence of Schwaller's thought to an audience possibly put off by his talk of elites. The "intelligence of the heart" may be difficult to acquire, but it is something we and the whole world—not only a select group of enlightened theocrats— can benefit from by experiencing. In the long run, Schwaller himself understood this. "To be of the Elite," he wrote (Nature Word 102), "is to want to give and to be able to give . . . to draw on the inexhaustible source and give this food to those who are hungry and thirsty." With his study of ancient Egypt, this is a truth Schwaller de Lubicz took to heart.

References

• Bauval, Robert, and Graham Hancock. Keeper of Genesis: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind. London: Heinemann, 1996.

• Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton. New York: Holt, 1935. Orig. pub. 1932.

• Fulcanelli (pseud.). The Mystery of the Cathedrals. (Le Mystere des cathédrales et l'interprétation ésotérique des symboles hermétiques du grand oeuvre.) 3rd ed. Paris: Pauvert, 1964. Orig. pub. 1925.

• Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin. Trans. of Ursprung und Gegenwart by Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1982.

• Hancock, Graham, and Robert Bauval. The Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind. New York: Crown, 1996.

• Schwaller de Lubicz, Isha. Her-Bak. 2 vols. Cairo, 1950. Trans. as Her-Bak "Chick-pea": The Living Face of Egypt and Her-Bak: Egyptian Initiate. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1954, 1967.

• Schwaller de Lubicz, René. L'Appel du feu. Saint-Moritz, Switerland: Montalia, 1926.

• Schwaller de Lubicz, René. The Egyptian Miracle: An Introduction to the Wisdom of the Temple. New York: Inner Traditions, 1985.

• Schwaller de Lubicz, René. Esotericism and Symbol. New York: Inner Traditions, 1985.

• Schwaller de Lubicz, René. Nature Word. West Stockbridge, MA: Lindisfarne, 1982.

• Schwaller de Lubicz, René. Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy. New York: Inner Traditions, 1988.

• Schwaller de Lubicz, René. A Study of Numbers: A Guide to the Constant Creation of the Universe. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1986.

• Schwaller de Lubicz, René. Symbol and the Symbolic: Egypt, Science, and the Evolution of Consciousness. Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1978.

• Schwaller de Lubicz, René. The Temple in Man. Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1977.

• Schwaller de Lubicz, René. The Temple of Man: Apet of the South at Luxor. 2 vols. Trans. Deborah Lawlor and Robert Lawlor. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1998.

• Steiner, Rudolf. The Threefold Commonwealth. New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1943. Also pub. as The Threefold Social Order. Orig. pub. 1919.

• VandenBroeck, André, Al-Kemi: Hermetic, Occult, Political and Private Aspects of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. 1987.

• West, John Anthony, Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1993.

• Whitehead, Alfred North. 1927. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect: Barbour-Page Lectures, University of Virginia, 1927. New York: Fordham University Press, 1985.

Gary Lachman is an American writer living in London. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Mojo, Gnosis, and Lapis, as well as the Quest. Currently he is writing a book on the occult revival of the 1960s, to be published by Macmillan.

By Aidan Rankin

Originally printed in the JANUARY- FEBRUARY 2008 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Rankin, Aidan. "Green Karma." Quest  96.1 (JANUARY- FEBRUARY 2008): 17-20.

One of the most potent images associated with the ancient Jain tradition of India is that of the monk dressed in white who covers his mouth with a band of cloth, and as he moves, sweeps the ground before him with a delicate brush. These devices are simple precautions against injuring any form of life, however minuscule, in the course of breathing or walking. They reflect the Jain principle of iryasamiti, which means "careful action" or "care in movement." Jain ascetics are required to take that principle to its logical conclusion. This will help them develop the higher consciousness that can point towards enlightenment, or moksha: release from the cosmic drama of material attachment and the repetitive cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Lay men and women also practice careful action, but even in a modified form, the practice might still seem radical when viewed from a mainstream Western perspective. Jains will avoid killing wasps or swatting flies, for instance, adopt a vegetarian diet, and refrain from occupations and activities that involve exploitation of or harm towards fellow humans, fellow creatures, or the earth.

Careful action is more than merely abstaining from abusive and harmful behavior. It involves considering the consequences of—and crucially, the intention behind—all forms of action. In Jainism, the concept of action encompasses thought. Thoughts and ideas can harm or uplift the thinker as they are the starting point for all acts of himsa or injury, as well as all beautiful, creative, loving actions. Iryasamiti is closely associated with the spiritual ideal of ahimsa: non-violence or non-injury to life. This, too, is far more than simple abstinence. It is about cultivating an attitude of calm and a state of equanimity through the practice of maitri (friendship with all beings) and recognizing that worldly entanglements, including material gain, political power, or academic success are but transient trifles of no ultimate significance.

Careful action is based on recognition of the four following ideas:

Each life—and this includes all forms of life—is individual, unique, and precious.
All life is interconnected and interdependent.
Human beings and their concerns are but one small part of the earth and the cosmos; therefore, we should approach the rest of existence with humility and modesty.
Human intelligence has evolved to give men and women the capacity for spiritual development and the possibility of liberation. However, this intelligence is a double-edged sword for it confers the possibility of choosing destructive over creative power, gross materialism over spiritual insight, himsa over ahimsa.

Careful action is therefore a form of conscious choice to minimize harm and act in ways that benefit others, both human and non-human.

The brushes and mouth coverings of Jain ascetics apply the principle of iryasamiti in as exact a manner as is humanly possible. They also dramatize for laymen and women the importance of respect for life in all its variety and the knowledge, discovered millennia before microscopes, that the tiniest life forms although invisible to the human eye could have the most profound significance. Iryasamiti stems from the understanding that human beings are not separate from, above, or beyond the rest of nature; that the earth does not exist for us to exploit; that resources are finite and that the web of life is as fragile as it is intricate. In other words, the practice of careful action corresponds well with a principle at the heart of the emerging green consciousness: the reduction of our ecological footprint.

The idea that humans have the responsibility to conserve and protect life and that we should use our intelligence to work with the grain of nature, is derived from spiritual awareness at least as much as political consciousness. Reason underpins and science confirms our sense of ourselves as part of the natural world, a world that is beyond monetary value because it sustains all of life. The Jains call this Jiva Daya—identification with all living beings. Familiar to Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, this oldest and most powerful form of spiritual sensibility is being slowly rediscovered by an urban civilization that has reached the limits of its possibilities. The realization that we should consume less, individually and collectively, combines rational self-interest with an ethic of environmental and social justice. All but the most obdurate now realize that our present patterns of consumption have already eroded the quality of human life, and if continued, could destroy life on earth. Consumer culture destroys the ecology of human relationships as well. The breakdown of communities, the "bowling alone" society of narrow, cheerless individualism, violent crime at home, aggression and brutality overseas all stem from the notion of unlimited human entitlement—the idea that we can, and must have more. For the Jains, this demand for more is a sign of limited human awareness rather than progress, as we in the West have long assumed. For millennia, Jains have realized that living as simply as possible is the key to a balanced and fulfilled life. When we discriminate between genuine needs and passing desire, we are acting in our own interests as well as connecting with something larger than ourselves.

That sense of connectedness at the heart of Jainism arises from the awareness that every life is unique and the individual is supreme. To those used to the Western "either/or" reasoning, this might seem paradoxical. We associate individualism, after all, with "bowling alone," with rugged self-reliance, or even Ayn Rand's "virtue of selfishness." Western thought associates connectedness with subordination and we believe that we must continuously choose between the two principles. Jainism, based on "both/and" rather than "either/or" sees the issue in more complex terms. It promotes a more rounded view of individualism and individual liberty in which individual fulfillment is identified with social responsibility and restraint, while greed and hedonism destroy the true self. Furthermore, the concepts of "social" and "society" extend to animals and ecosystems as well as humans. The Jain idea of self differs radically from that of the West. Rather than simply being an individual in his or her present existence, the self in Jain teachings is a strand of continuity between existences, which was shaped by past lives that span the whole evolutionary spectrum, and now makes decisions and choices that will affect future lives. Therefore, self-awareness involves an understanding of genetic and spiritual evolution along with a sense of unity in diversity. Each self is equal in that each is part of the same process and is on the same journey towards higher consciousness.

Jains have always been aware that the universe is teeming with life. Each individual—human, animal, plant, or micro-organism—contains a jiva, which in Jain terms is a unit of life energy, a life monad; somewhat similar to the Western idea of a soul. Every jiva is on the same journey of the spirit, whether it is conscious of this or not. Unlike most Buddhist and Vedantic traditions, the Jain path does not lead to the extinction or transcendence of the self. Moksha is the fullest realization of the self, its return to its point of origin as pure consciousness, where it retains its individual identity. All the identities it assumes along the path to enlightenment are karmic embodiments, part of the process of self-discovery that is spiritual evolution. Material preoccupations are a confusion of jiva, the life force with ajiva, which is all that is not alive and contains no soul. Human destructiveness, including environmental despoliation, arises from attachment to ajiva and with this comes a false sense of supremacy over nature, closely akin to delusions of racial superiority. By contrast, Jiva Daya is recognition of the life force that is contained in each of our fellow beings. Although unique, each jiva has the same essential characteristics as our own and is in the same situation of working through samsara, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

It was this understanding of shared characteristics and common interests that led Mahavira, the Great Hero of the Jains and contemporary of Gautama Buddha, to the insight that "kindness to all beings is kindness to oneself" and that conversely "you are that which you intend to hit, injure, insult, torment, persecute, torture, enslave, or kill." This is surely an ecological message for our time, transcending mere conservation or protection to include a repudiation of all bigotry and violence in human relationships, as well as relationships between humans and fellow creatures. Just as they emphasize the relationship between hateful thoughts and violent acts, Jain teachings recognize that violent, exploitative relationships among humans —including vast disparities of income and access to education or health care—create the psychological conditions for violence against the earth. On the other hand, respect for the earth and its variety of life is linked intimately to cooperation between human beings and the pursuit of economic and social justice.

For twenty-first century men and women, the first step towards more harmonious relations with the planet is to adopt an attitude of non-violence and to question the false priorities associated with materialism, a shift of priorities from ajiva back to the source of life. Awareness that jiva is present in everything that lives, breathes, and moves points towards a spiritual democracy of all beings, in which each life form has its own place, its own indispensable role and its own legitimate viewpoint. The human concepts of rights and responsibilities extend to all of life, just as they cross the boundaries of race, caste or class, gender, and faith. Jains recognize the principle of biodiversity and give it a spiritual dimension.
Jainism's view of karma distinguishes it from other Indic traditions.  For the Jains, karma is, as to Buddhists and Hindus, the cosmic law of cause and effect.  All actions in the universe connect with each other and our own deeds influence our future as much as our present lives.  But the principal meaning of karma in Jainism is a substance, made up of particles of subtle matter that adhere to the jiva and imprison it in the material world. Karma is a material bond as much as a spiritual process. When moksha is achieved, it is seen as a physical liberation, a release from the karmic bondage that weighs down the soul and entraps it in material concerns. The Christian image of shedding the "mortal coil" has resonance here. Karmic particles also have a muddying effect on the jiva. They reduce its clarity of vision and obscure its knowledge of itself.

In Jainism, as in modern physics, everything in the universe is cyclical. There is no creator god or First Cause. Instead the cosmos—and with it, life—arose spontaneously and passes continuously through upward and downward cycles, utsarpini and avasarpini, which last for many millions of years, and are divided into ages which are likened to the spokes on a wheel. Each jiva also spontaneously arises as a unit of pure consciousness. But its movements or vibrations bring it into contact with karma. The encasement of the jiva by karmic particles enmeshes it in the samsaric cycle, where it is reborn until it achieves enlightenment and returns to its point of origin as an unsullied, all-knowing jiva. Living simply and avoiding unnecessary luxuries brings spiritually aware men and women closer to that ideal, helping them to understand the austerities of Jain ascetics and the restraint displayed by even the wealthiest laypeople. The latter are obliged to use their wealth for the benefit of others, animals as much as humans. They are keenly aware that privilege, like human intelligence, brings with it material dangers, and that the most auspicious rebirth is as an ascetic, who is closest to freedom from karmic bonds.

Karmic bondage need not be a permanent condition and should not serve as an excuse for fatalism or pessimism. On the contrary, it gives us the opportunity to take control of our own lives, present and future, break with negative patterns, and rethink our priorities. At personal and political levels, these goals are identical with those of the ecology movement. Green philosophy, unlike deterministic doctrines such as neo-liberalism and Marxism, has the individual consciousness as its starting point. In the Jain worldview, the reduction of karmic influence is identified with the reduction of material consumption and the abandonment of the attachments. The widespread human addiction to materialism destroys our sense of true self and damages the planet. The attachments to which materialism gives rise restrict our thinking and lead us into one-sided positions, such as greed and fanaticism. Reduction of karma is achieved through careful action, and through the principle of aprigraha, or non-possessiveness. This means carefully evaluating our material requirements, but it also involves a new attitude of mind, by which the people, creatures, and natural formations around us are valued in their own right, rather than seen as objects to be controlled, dominated or suppressed.

Aparigraha means still more than this, for it requires us to clear our minds of clutter as well. Mental attachments are as karmic as material bonds. One of the most destructive forms of karma is known as mohaniya, the karma of delusion. It is associated with a conviction of absolute truth and the desire to impose that truth on others. The restrictive claim that "either you are with us or against us" is an explicit example of mohaniya, as are the actions of terrorists and the bigoted proclamations of fundamentalists, whatever faith they claim to represent. Mohaniya leads to mittyatva, a one-sided or distorted world view, which affects spiritual progress within this life and influences the prospects of an auspicious rebirth. Mittyatva is human arrogance, which spans the spectrum from self-righteous forms of political correctness, which more often hurt those they are meant to help, to the illusion of our dominance over nature. Measured conduct, friendship with all beings, and the cultivation of a quiet, calm mind all serve to lighten the karmic burden, so that it eventually falls away as illusory attachments are relinquished.

Clearing the mind of grasping impulses and controlling the desire to exercise gratuitous power are both part of the practice of ahimsa. Karmic influence is reduced through non-violence of the mind, which is achieved through contemplation and simple living, recognition that truth is multi-faceted and that all beings are working towards it, and that only at the moment of enlightenment can it be fully grasped. The starting point for green or ecological consciousness is similar, for it grows from a primal awareness of the complexity of living systems and the subtle interactions between them.

Jainism also shares with the Theosophical movement a perception that no single human idea can encapsulate the truth, and that our common search for enlightenment transcends all artificial barriers of faith. Jains call this approach anekantavada, or many-sidedness. They recognize that a diamond's clear light can be glimpsed through many facets. The summit of a mountain can be reached by many paths, some straight, some winding, but all pointing towards the same place. Many-sidedness celebrates the diversity of life and thought, but reaches beyond that diversity to the common source of life. What more suitable path could there be for the interesting times in which we find ourselves today?

Aidan Rankin is on the National Council of the Theosophical Society in England.  His book, The Jain Path: Ancient Wisdom for the West is published by O Books (Winchester/Washington, DC), www.o-books.com . Aidan is currently working on a book about many-sidedness, karma, and ecology. Email: aidan.rankin@tiscali.co.uk