Quest Magazine

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).

Printed in the  Fall 2021  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Oliver, Lucy, "Glyn: A Portrait " Quest 108:4, pg 12-16

By Lucy Oliver

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!

When Glyn and what we called “The Work” entered my life, it opened a whole new dimension. It was as if I’d been living in a small room with a balcony, only to discover that it was situated within a multiroomed mansion with cellars, garden, and private chapel, all open to me if I chose to investigate. Or indeed, like in Plato’s cave, I could turn away from shadows on the wall and face the authentic world beyond, if I held the intention to do so.

How does one recognize such authenticity, especially if it is not on a dais with flowers addressing a multitude?

I think of Glyn in any social context. What did he speak from? He needed no props, no badge, and you listened—a whole room would gravitate round this stocky little figure with the long hair, nicotine-stained fingers, and cigarette burns on a grubby jumper (sometimes turned inside out for the benefit of the clean side). He could look more presentable in clean gear and jacket on public occasions, but the shoes usually had no laces, just holes—he had a thing about laces.

Not everyone was enchanted, however. Some ran a mile, and he terrified others.

When you looked into his eyes you saw no thing, no one. Just a vast space.

His angle of vision was always unexpected, but always coherent, and when you examined it, it opened up new ways of thinking. When I first met him in the early seventies, he was just embarking on his phase of gathering people to help with his self-generated task of reformulating old philosophical ideas for modern understanding, particularly the Kabbalah, which was the basis of his training. In the newly enlivened esoteric and spiritual context of London in the sixties, new ideas arriving from the East mingled with a rediscovered Western heritage. Magic, mysticism, meditation, astrology, esoteric lodges, spiritualism, and theosophy were supplemented by elements from Jung and psychoanalysis, and the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky work presented a demystifying corrective to exotic and florid hocus-pocus. Glyn emerged from all this with a clear sense of a job to be done: to unclutter the fantasies and superstitions which accrete round any religious or esoteric way, and look to first principles in the roots of actual experience.

His bearded face was open, well shaped, and his gaze steady and appraising. Around his eyes were crinkle lines. The eyes usually gleamed a little as he looked at you, and a rumbly laugh was never far away, shaking his form quietly at the absurdity of the human condition. “Hours of innocent merriment” was a stock phrase. He would mischievously apply it, sometimes to an apparently serious endeavor, either his own or some other exercise in which a great deal of pompous self-investment was evident.

The Kitchen

His headquarters for nearly forty years was the Kitchen, tucked away at the back of a typical old west London apartment block. The Kitchen modified slightly over the years, but in general it presented mushroom-colored walls with a huge brown and yellowing Tree of Life emblem on one wall, and another circular diagram painted on another. Glyn would preside from a large, ancient chair, and all others would perch on a variety of old wooden chairs, some minus their backs, and one other semicomfortable, albeit elderly, armchair. Ashtrays abounded, and in the early years, your eyes would sting with the smoke haze, as most people smoked continuously. A rickety window would sometimes be propped open with a pole, allowing a freezing draft to circulate round your feet, which turned into solid blocks by the end of the evening. Glyn rolled his own cigarettes from a round yellow tin of Boar’s Head tobacco. In later years, concerned for his health perhaps, he inserted the wobbly fag into a holder, initially constructed himself from a ballpoint pen. Later he graduated to proper holders, but the elegant impression was always pleasingly incongruous.

In addition to aching buttocks and back, stinging eyes, and feet like ice, one’s upper section got rather warm. My face used to flush like a tomato from the heat of the single gas burner on the grubby stove, which was the sole form of heating in the winter. I learned to wear thick boots if possible, and old clothes that could go straight into the wash, as the smoke penetrated right to vest and bra. This used to amaze me as I picked them up next morning, smelling as if I’d been barbecued the night before.

Glyn’s entertainment came from devouring fiction, especially science, and from an old television perched on a cupboard. He enjoyed watching what we tactfully called “his rubbish,” and would often make you wait if you sprang on him unexpectedly, until some cop drama or the hapless geriatric escapades in the sitcom Last of the Summer Wine (a particular favorite) had finished.

I never quite fathomed where his vast erudition came from, especially in pre-Internet days. He kept up with documentaries, of course, and had read very widely for many years, with a reading card at the British Library, which partly accounted for his extensive general knowledge and ability to discuss the most minute detail of just about anything with just about anyone. But it was the way he processed information which was unique. He incorporated it into some internal processor unlike anything I have ever encountered. He handled maths and scientific concepts with precision, and used them in the reams of delicate and detailed diagrams he generated constantly to back up, and indeed inspire, his metaphysical theorizing.

Glyn’s background was in electrical engineering and accountancy, and he was an intensely practical man. He loved to make things, and to make things work. He called it “bootstrapping,” a term derived from his days in the Royal Air Force after the war. Bootstrapping, as I understand it, meant you picked yourself up by your own bootstraps, not relying on anyone else. (A gymnastic feat, but worth the effort!) For example, part of ritual training was making things from the most basic materials, not purchasing them ready-made. To make a knife for ritual purposes, you boiled up the fish oil to make the glue, cut and tempered the blade in a fire, twined a rope together, and used it to wrap into a handle. That kind of basic! The physical was an analogy for other levels of operation. “Back to first principles” was the most fundamental aspect of his teaching.

The Kitchen was not a serious place. He liked to laugh, and in keeping with the “no guru” rule, we all took the mickey whenever we could. It was an achievement to make him laugh, so we all tried, and he enjoyed witticisms. Puns were a special favorite, and he came up with some delectably awful ones himself.

He was immensely patient, though, with all the raw young talent he constantly had to deal with. We would ring up and ask to come around then and there, somehow assuming he was always available for our benefit, or would always be pleased to discuss the solemn ideas of aspiring Knowledge seekers. He almost never refused, and welcomed you with a quizzical look as you walked in the door, assessing where you were at. “What news?” he’d say, leaning back in his chair and puffing.

The conversations would go on into the small hours. It was common knowledge that the best stuff happened well after midnight, so we would wait it out, feeling the feet solidify and the cheeks start to burn. The conversation got deeper. If there had been an assorted crowd in the kitchen (you never quite knew who would be there, or from how far away), the less determined gradually peeled off and went home, leaving the hardy to push the conversation into more intimate areas of metaphysics or gossip. It was like being fed. You finally stumbled off into the silent streets, hoping your car hadn’t been boxed in by double-parking, feeling replete and inwardly humming with a sort of psychic food, and possibly pages of scribbled notes. A visit to Glyn provided many weeks of internal stimulus.

His various personal peculiarities included not liking to have his hair cut (like Samson, I used to think), and it was most often tied into a ponytail behind him. The absence of shoelaces was owed to some very rational justification which I quite forget (he was heavy-footed when he stood and walked), and he went through a phase of wearing a bizarre housedress, like a jellaba, made by his wife, instead of trousers. More comfortable, he asserted, flicking the ash down his rotund middle, where little holes appeared, and a few assorted stains.

Once he startled us all by briefly shaving off his beard. It was not popular, as his chin was unexpectedly small. Normally he had the face of a traditional prophet or guru: an ample greying beard and moustache, well-proportioned nose, and eyes which saw right into your soul and into the soul of the universe. It was a noble head. He looked the part.

You could get lost in the eyes. Later in his life I used to deliberately stare into them, trying to see how far I could go, or if I could find anything. Because later in life he lived more and more on what has been called “Planet Glyn,” it was harder to connect with him. His voice sometimes trailed off as if he realized that people weren’t following, and indeed I often was not. He also wept. Tears would just emerge as he talked, especially at the mention of anything carrying a certain type of emotion—you could call it higher emotion, which wasn’t personal and involved humanity at its best: tales of people doing kindnesses, the ritual of royalty, the ethos of the British Commonwealth, accounts of death or birth. He would wipe his eyes and carry on talking.

His presence carried such charge that once, leaving, I got as far as the front steps before the whole fabric of my being seemed to disintegrate into a huge void. What was left stood pressed against the door, the rest blown away; everything I thought was me, gone. What I’d come to talk about was completely obliterated. How did that happen, I thought? We had just chatted.

He never ceased producing material, right up to his final brief illness, methodically sketching neat little diagrams, transposing figures, weighing up propositions and terminology, and generating new angles and theory to reformulate the laws of the Eternal. It was always unexpected. He could turn things on their heads and would try out new ideas on everyone who came through the door. We were his sounding boards. He liked to be challenged and to engage in a good argument, testing out what worked and what didn’t. His regular revisions of theory kept us all busy for nigh on thirty years, exploring and developing what he expounded as the latest way of looking, religiously copying the latest diagram to take back to whatever groups we were in. “Glyn’s new diagram” was a prize to be shared.

In later years fewer people came, but he never stopped generating, late into the night when all was quiet, and throughout the day as well.

He was always interested in other people’s productions too, and was pleased when someone had done some original work. He regularly threw out titbits of ideas and stimuli, hoping they would be picked up and developed. Often they were too far out for the recipient to be able to relate to, and fell on fallow ground. In the early years when we were running a center, he was an active, almost explosive presence, directing, steering, pulling extraordinary rabbits out of hats, and generally creating an atmosphere of sheer magic and high adventure. The world was always richer around Glyn; the curtain of the mundane world pulled back to reveal wonders; the spirit bowed down to earth and was just about graspable.

	Lighthouse,” one of a series of sixty-four diagrams forming Sareoso, Web of Wholeness, Glyn’s final compendium of the principles of creation. Image from www.sareoso.org.

He was never unkind; irritable sometimes, ruthless when need be; humble, he kept nothing for himself, owned practically nothing, and refused all charity, even, if possible, from the state. Until pensionable age he mostly worked, but had very little money. After a heart scare in middle age, he refused the recommended pacemaker, declining to have a mechanical object in such a symbolic role. Responsibility for your own actions was a rule he taught and lived by. He could be fierce, and dealt harshly with some of the men on occasion. There was always a little frisson of trepidation when going to see him, as cherished notions might get knocked for six, but I remember going to see him once, expecting a rap over the knuckles for something and met only kindness and gentleness. I came away with my heart rejoicing, and feeling unexpectedly stronger. Visits almost always tuned you in to something greater and reminded, one way or another, but you could never be sure which way.

He trained us thoroughly in all the traditional esoteric skills and practices, if only so there would be no veil of mystique. “We are generalists,” he would say. Specialized in no particular area, a generalist has a little experience of all, enough to know the basic principles and be able to design or recreate should the knowledge be lost. It gives a very clear-eyed and sober appreciation of how the psyche works to generate human life and interaction, and is excellent insurance against glamour and inflation. “As necessary” is the golden rule. Speak and act only as necessary.

Authority

He had a personal rule of which he regularly reminded all who came: he would not keep secrets. Everything was passed on. It was a way of preventing the confidences of the self-important (which we all were) from accumulating round him, and then being used to manipulate him or others. (such as asserting authority: “I went to see Glyn, and he . . .”) It was not possible to manipulate Glyn. He kept nothing for himself and owned nothing, material or other.

I frequently had the experience of hearing something I had told to him repeated back to me by someone else, particularly if it reflected badly on me, and someone was trying to set me straight! Galling, but effective. So much human interaction consists of power games, trying to steal a march on another, present oneself as important, thoughtful, clever; to imply that one has the approval of an authority figure. But Glyn wouldn’t play.

“Authority is given, not taken. People give authority to others, be it wise or unwise” was his stand on the cause of so much grief and violence as it plays out in the world.

By repeating to everyone who passed through his kitchen whatever was current, he prevented any logjams of personal authority. It was not for the sake of gossip, though he liked to know what was going on, but any personal stuff was fair game for sharing. Deeper matters, such as meditation checks or more profound conversations, were safe, however. You instinctively learned to tell the difference. Passing it on was more likely if the issue seemed personal, secret, or power-seeking. 

This practice was one of his deadly tricks to puncture self-importance, which is the greatest obstacle on a path of Knowledge. The greatest challenge for a teacher is the task of helping others to get beyond their natural egotism in a way which doesn’t diminish them, but encourages growth and development of Being. It’s one thing to give out teachings, but creating conditions to provide the shocks and provocations for change and self-insight is quite another.

So, despite his protestations not to give him authority, naturally everyone did, and sought his approval and imprimatur stamp for their ideas, theories, and projects. One of two things would happen. The Great Project might evaporate before your eyes once you’d aired it in his presence, and for no very clear reason, because there’d been no criticism. Or he chattily explored it with you, using it as a jumping-off point for whatever was preoccupying him at that time. You went away pleased, and somehow convinced of his approval. Except he hadn’t actually given it. He’d just encouraged you to do more of what you were determined to do anyway.

Rather than trying to change people or their ideas, he maintained it was often better and more useful to reenforce them, so that if there were cracks or weaknesses, they would become apparent to the person him- or herself sooner rather than later. If there is a crack, widen it. If a weakness, drive a wedge in. He employed this strategy consistently, and articulated it frequently as a useful methodology. “Make the inevitable happen.” Hence people would make their own assumptions along the lines they desired, and would depart with a comfortable assurance of authority bestowed.

However, because (a) you had accorded the authority yourself, and (b) there were no secrets, quite often your plans would later sneak up and hit you in the back from another quarter, because he would have told everybody, and probably not in the flattering terms you might have wished for. Others would gain a different impression of whether or not he approved!

In all this Glyn was absolutely up-front. He told everyone his strategies as a teaching point, but it was hard to believe him when it came to oneself. They were simple principles, consciously employed, and he would sigh and shake his head theatrically when he was accused of manipulating. He faced these accusations often, because it is human nature to invest authority in others, and then blame them if your expectations are not met.

I think Glyn made such an issue of authority, and of his own nonguru role, because there is no issue more important in the individualist and turbulent age we live in than understanding the nature of authority. The question To whom or what are you giving authority? underlies every conflict situation, every ideology. It is the nub of morality, aggression, victimization, and all “beliefs.” Secular humanist philosophies give ultimate authority to ourselves as humans. Others bestow ultimate authority on something outside us: Spirit, Consciousness, God. And finally, when artificial intelligence mimics human intelligence, will we give or withhold authority to the algorithms which apparently know us better than we know ourselves? What would that mean in practice?

These are not academic issues, but day-to-day realities. Just about all human interactions are shaped by authority and the power which goes with it. The principle that authority is given, not taken, is transformative and fundamental, and Glyn lived it out with every person he encountered.

Self-responsibility means standing on your own feet. Otherwise “where will you be when your One has passed away?” as it says in The Book of Jubilee, an esoteric text produced in Glyn’s circle. His methods were based on a view that the essence of Knowledge is common to all humanity, and on equality and self-responsibility, but did not pander to natural egotism, ambition, or the wish to be given the fruits of wisdom and peace without effort. He set up situations in the early years when he was still actively engaged in training, but it was for purposes of the Work, not to play with people.

He could travel into the future with an enormous vision of humankind in the multiverse. And into the past, with an impressive knowledge of history and a unique way of seeing relationships and the forces governing events. Forty years ago, when Islam seemed a benign, quiet presence on the world stage, I remember him warning that the big trouble to come was going to arise from Islam. It surprised me, as at that time many of us had links and great sympathy with Sufi groups and saw Islam mainly in terms of profound Sufi mysticism. I think of his prophecy every time a new Islamicist atrocity hits the headlines.

One day he announced he was learning Basque, a language with a unique root among languages and confined to a particular small area in the world, and where he intimated there could be an old tradition of knowledge. He found and hired a tutor and studied his dictionary diligently. With its help he then translated and presented in Basque some contemporary formulations of ancient principles (see www.sareoso.org). That it would require considerable effort to access them, reflects their value, and “burying the bone deeper” is designed to activate the teachings, not conceal them. It’s especially salient in an age when everything appears accessible and just there for the taking. Growth through consciousness is never like that.

He lived longer than he expected, having withdrawn from active steering in most capacities long before, and offering only “technical advice” for many years. He had a little pottery urn made all ready for his ashes, and everyone passed it daily as it sat on a shelf in the dim hallway. He seemed to have been preparing for a long time, and was entirely ready to take a journey into the realm of “the Player on the other side,” as he liked to refer to the Divine mystery. You felt he loved that Player. He would talk God in any one’s language, quoting from mystics, Christian, Kabbalist, Buddhist, or from any other tradition, emphasizing that the God we know is “God in you.” Some conversations about the spiritual that I had with him seemed to leave the earth; I only took away fragments jotted down afterwards, but the impression of an immensity opening up was awesome.

It wasn’t even in the words; it was something about the space created in his presence, and love was in the space.

Lucy Oliver has been a teacher and practitioner of meditation derived from the Western esoteric tradition for over forty years. Her book The Meditator’s Guidebook k has been in print since 1996. She lives in London, and after studies in sacred symbolism at Oxford University, has developed Symbolic Encounters, a method of pointing out the symbolic roots in language on a path of knowledge (www.meaningbydesign.co.uk). She was a founding member of Saros Foundation for the Perpetuation of Knowledge and of High Peak Meditation, established in the United Kingdom in the 1970s. This chapter is excerpted from her latest book, Tessellations: Patterns of Life and Death in the Company of a Master (published by Matador), an insider’s view of working within a Western oral tradition.

VOLUME 109, NUMBER 4

CONTENTS

Glyn: A Portrait
Lucy Oliver

Meeting a Philosopher
Joscelyn Godwin

Zoroaster: The First Philosopher and is Theosophical Revolution
Rasoul Sorkhabi

Blavatsky on How to Study Theosophy
Robert Bowen

Angel of the Pines
Janet Macrae

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

Viewpoint: The Princess an the Pea
Barbara Hebert

Members' Forum: Recollections of Dora Van Gelder Kunz
Ed Abdill

Printed in the  Summer 2021  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Grinnell, Dustin, "Learning to Love My Fate " Quest 108:3, pg 25-28

By Dustin Grinnell

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.  

For example, my writing for a hospital often involves interviewing patients and writing articles to “tell their stories.” After I develop an article about a patient’s experience, a team of marketers weighs in on my draft to edit, spin, and sterilize it in order to project the best possible image of the hospital. While the team’s edits don’t inject overt lies into the stories, they do omit any potentially negative aspects. As such, the published stories are based on real events but are far from genuine depictions.

During the coronavirus pandemic, I wrote many patient stories and articles designed to portray the hospital as safe to visit. These “don’t delay your care” stories were sophisticated attempts to influence the behavior of consumers seeking medical care. It was true that the hospital had been vigilant in implementing safety measures to limit the spread of the virus and safeguard both patients and staff. Therefore I could do the work and sleep at night.

Still, I was becoming discontented with writing marketing copy. I also had the sense that people were picking up on my cognitive dissonance. In the past four years, two employers have offered me new copywriting positions with more responsibility and higher salaries, but I turned them down because of my growing dissatisfaction with a copywriting career. A year later, I interviewed for two more jobs, but came in second each time. Was my evolving self-image obvious to employers? They likely saw that I could fulfill the duties of the job, but could they also see that I thought of myself as a corporate hack? Perhaps they sensed I was conflicted about my place in the world and might be uncomfortable churning out sales material. Why would an employer hire someone with such a “bad attitude”?

In high school and college, I wanted to become a doctor. Scoring poorly on the entrance exam for medical school, I pivoted to graduate school in order to become a scientist. When I realized that the traditional scientific path wasn’t for me, I committed myself to writing about science—but never once did I envision myself as someone who would spin science and medicine for profit. Whenever someone learns that I work in marketing, I feel ashamed.

Nevertheless, I’ve been employed in marketing departments for ten years now, among people whose values I don’t share. Many of my coworkers majored in marketing in college, and most of them have spent time in advertising agencies. Proficient bureaucrats, they constantly jockey for advancement and scheme for power, always preoccupied with self-preservation. Because they scrutinize everything I write, I’m at the mercy of people I’m not particularly fond of.

My disenchantment with writing marketing copy grew in my early thirties, as I began to write more essays and fiction. At thirty-five, I enrolled in an MFA program in creative writing. There I wrote my third novel, several short stories, and a handful of essays. During our program’s ten-day writing residencies, I spent time with other writers who were passionate about writing and storytelling, and it was thrilling to compare notes. Following my growing interest in the arts and humanities, I read biographies and watched documentaries about sculptors, filmmakers, and writers. As I read and watched, I tried to comprehend how these artists had mastered their craft and gained prominence. Increasingly, all I wanted was to spend my time creating art, just like the people I was studying.

I also came to admire journalists, especially independent journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, who aren’t afraid to speak truth to power. I’m inspired by movies like Spotlight, State of Play, and All the President’s Men, which depict reporters “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable” and prove that journalists make a difference in the world. I never miss 60 Minutes and find journalists like Bill Whitaker and Lesley Stahl to be true heroes, taking on major issues for the benefit of the public.

I sometimes fantasize about writing for a newspaper or magazine full-time, but whenever I apply for a journalism job, I get no response. I’ve wondered if the Fourth Estate looks at marketing writers like me with suspicion. Perhaps I’m too subjective, too personal, or too imaginative for traditional journalism.

Over the years, my admiration has grown for creative writers with an activist spirit. One such writer is Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring, a book that sounded the alarm on pesticides and sparked an environmental movement in the 1960s. After poring over studies about the effects of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) on wildlife and the environment, Carson said, “What I discovered was that everything which meant most to me as a naturalist was being threatened, and that nothing I could do would be more important.”

Carson went to work in a time of great need, as all artists must do. Scientists had known about the problem of harmful chemicals, and the public had its suspicions, but it took an artist like her to change minds by turning scientific complexity into lyrical prose. Carson pioneered a novel way of writing about science that cut through the statistics and figures. She made people not only think but feel.

Since I am a writer of marketing material, my affection for Carson likely comes from the fact that her work is unbiased and pure, a far cry from the selling and spinning I do on a daily basis. Perhaps I admire journalists like Taibbi and Greenwald because they also write about subjects that matter. In my role as a hired gun for corporations, I often wonder whether the web pages, marketing articles, and promotional videos I develop are adding up to anything at all. Do people even read the stuff we dump onto the Internet? Does this content matter? What good does my work in my day job do in the world?

As I find myself called to a more artistic path, I’ve started to see my corporate work for what it is: a day job. As I continue to write essays and fiction in my spare time, I’ve started to clearly see how difficult it is to flourish in the world as an artist. It’s not until you devote yourself to creative work that you realize how much life seems designed to knock you down at every stage of your development. Even though the artist plays a vital role in society—as a social conscience who often interprets reality and writes about how (and why) to live—many individuals are intolerant of the artist’s flights of fancy. Most people are practical and have better things to do than entertain the artist’s idealism and unrealistic vision of the future. Most adults seem to want to gain enough money to keep themselves and their families healthy, maybe to catch a movie or a ballgame or host a barbeque. Most can’t seem to fathom why anyone hasn’t figured out their life by their thirties. Indeed, it’s often embarrassing to admit that I’m still struggling to find my place in the world.

A young artist also learns that making art, especially in the early stages, isn’t a path to riches. One needs money to pay rent and buy food; hence developing artists live in limbo between the practical world of commerce and the dreamy, sometimes subversive spaces where they produce their work. Young artists must play the game. They contribute to the world’s affairs while working a day job that exploits their talents for profit. The artist might long to be free, but he must rely on the capitalistic machine for financial security, perhaps wounding his dignity in the process.

If society is set up this way, why not leave the workforce and live cheaply while writing essays and fiction? I tried that for a year and ran out of money, realizing that a day job supports me in growing and learning my craft. Plus, moving to a cabin in the woods to live the life of a “true artist” may not be the solution for my existential dilemmas. First of all, a day job, it turns out, provides grist for the mill. The “real world” is a mess, but it can be a big, beautiful mess and can often be the source of stories. Moreover, while it can sometimes be disheartening to work in the corporate machine, it can also be thrilling to be part of this world and its everyday affairs. In the modern-day office, I occasionally feel like an actor on the world’s stage, playing a small part in the grand theater of life.

Though it might sound counterintuitive, I sometimes feel drawn to the absurdity of bureaucratic systems, which I can challenge and try to fix. In my current day job, I’m in the big, beautiful mess, solving business problems. Rather than developing theories in the halls of academia, I prefer to apply philosophical concepts to real-world problems. Every once in a while, I even find myself trying to elevate the banal conversations around the office by sometimes asking “big questions” in the most palatable way: through humor. In the office kitchen, there’s nothing quite as amusing as dryly asking a question like, “Why do so many of us die without ever learning how to live?” while your coworker adds half-and-half to their coffee.

There’s also something comforting about being anchored to the hustle and bustle of civilization through a day job. When I was freelancing for a year and mostly living off savings, I felt unmoored from the happenings of the world. I was following my dreams to write creative nonfiction and fiction, but I was a man without a cause, and I spun out because of it. I often wonder if that’s why the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche descended into madness toward the end of his life, much of which he spent as a nomadic explorer of the human condition in place of the teaching post he’d had for several years.

While a day job can sometimes be a hard pill to swallow, it can provide a ready-made purpose each day that helps keep my feet on the ground as I navigate my uncertain creative life. Perhaps most importantly, a day job also provides the budding artist with security, freeing the mind from worry over money. Feeling safe and secure—as much as one can in a human life—fuels writing projects. I’ve found that I can’t create art if I’m fretting over my bank account. During the year that I wasn’t working a traditional nine-to-five job, I didn’t write a word of fiction. Instead, I wrote news reports and marketing copy—stuff that pays (though not much).

Furthermore, being productive and creative in my staff writing job often breeds inspiration and efficiency in my creative writing. I have many examples of times when I fictionalized circumstances from my job.

Why am I so ungrateful toward corporations? Most of my employers have supported my career development. They’ve mentored me, paid for me to attend conferences and workshops, and bought me meals while traveling. Moreover, without the money from my salary, I wouldn’t be able to move my creative projects forward. I reinvest a lot of my money into hiring editors, designers, illustrators, videographers, website developers, even writers. The salaries from my day jobs have given me the freedom to be creative on the side.

Why do I perceive working for corporations as an exploitation of my skills? Why can’t I see it as my duty as a citizen? In his book Meditations, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius said that he got himself out of bed each day by reminding himself that many people were relying on him. It was his duty to show up for work. Couldn’t I look at my day job similarly? Why not make some commercial art by day while writing essays and fiction on the side? It’s a rather privileged position in society: many people would love a full-time writing job like mine. Perhaps I should try to be grateful for what I have instead of criticizing my place in the world and always striving for more.

Moreover, if I can maintain a high level of production in my creative life while holding down a corporate job, am I already doing what I should be doing? Do I already have what I want? Have I already arrived, so to speak? Then again, how many commercial writers like me toil away at day jobs and never break through with their more artistic work? Is this a matter of talent or luck? Or do some people give up too soon? For me, writing is a compulsion, an activity that I find immensely challenging yet rewarding. It is something that gives my life meaning. But how long does it take to break through, and am I willing to wait as long as it takes?

For me, the answer to the latter is yes, but I suppose every evolving artist wonders if it will ever happen for them. Much ink has been spilled about the famous 10,000 hours a person supposedly needs to accumulate to master any given skill. Having started writing seriously in my late twenties, I’m surely close to that mark. Is a breakthrough imminent, or does it differ for each person, as I suspect it does?

I suppose that most creative people never think that their time comes quickly enough. When I got my first copywriting job a decade ago, hoping that the position would help make me become a better writer, I thought I might leave the workforce and write full-time after the publication of my first novel. I thought wrong. Having self-published two novels and now looking for an agent for my third, I know that achieving our dreams doesn’t happen as fast as we’d like.

I’ve found some comfort in reading about the lives of other writers who held down day jobs to support their creative work. Many writers wrote advertising copy before their creative writing took off: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dr. Seuss, and James Patterson come to mind. John Grisham worked as a lawyer for years while he wrote legal thrillers at night. Sam Shem, author of the satirical novel House of God, went to medical school knowing that practicing medicine would be his day job. He wanted to be a writer, but he didn’t want to have to make money from it. Medicine paid the bills.

Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks found a similar dynamic in his life. In fact, some of Sacks’ most fascinating patients became published case studies, which he crafted to read like fiction. A recent documentary about Sacks described him as a writer who “storied” people into the world. Had he retreated to a cabin in the woods to write what he wanted, the world might not have benefited from his observations about the brain and mind and their malfunctions.

Even so, this idea of moving to a cabin in the woods is a romantic notion among those with artistic sensibilities. It captured the imagination of Henry David Thoreau. When he decided to become a writer, he first moved to where all the great writers were—in New York City. But he failed to thrive there. A rugged individualist and a bit rough around the edges, Thoreau wasn’t accepted into the city’s literary society, so he went back to Concord, Massachusetts, where he had lived and grown up. Not long after, he began his great experiment in living at Walden Pond.

So what path am I on? I don’t think it’s the path of the scholar, the educator, or even the journalist. It’s the path of the artist, and the discontent and confusion I feel comes from the fact that there is no set path for the artist. The creative life is one of always making it up as you go. As I work on one creative project after another, it’s tempting to reach for a metaphor that depicts life as an endless struggle without meaning. I could imagine myself like Sisyphus, who was forced to endlessly roll a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it fall to the base. Could I, as Albert Camus did in “The Myth of Sisyphus,” imagine Sisyphus as happy in the absurdity of his situation? Perhaps, but that’s not the metaphor I want to choose for myself. It doesn’t accept the fact that despite my best efforts to roll those boulders happily, I will always be trying to take control.

Instead, the metaphor I choose to guide my life for now is the notion of “loving one’s fate,” as Nietzsche put it—to know that everything that’s happened in my life has contributed to who I am and what I’m doing in this moment, to know that I’m both limited by my circumstances and also free to pursue any project I find meaningful. I’m both restricted by my circumstances and free to try to transcend them. This is the compromise of living a human life.

What if I never write my way out of corporate work? What if I always need a day job? These outcomes may not be entirely within my control. Maybe my proverbial cabin is coming. Maybe I just need to gather more experience before I leave the workforce for good. But maybe not. Only time will tell. Indeed, these questions might not even matter. For now, I accept where I am, who I am, and what I have found myself doing at this time of my life. I will try as best I can to love my fate, because as Nietzsche said, it is my life. 

Dustin Grinnell is an essayist and fiction writer. He has an MFA from the Solstice MFA Program and an MS in physiology from Penn State. His creative nonfiction has appeared in The Boston Globe, The LA Review of Books, Writer’s Digest, and many other popular and literary publications. He lives in Boston, where he is a full-time copywriter for Bose Corporation. Learn more at www.dustingrinnell.com.