Quest Magazine

By Thomas Walker

Originally printed in the Spring 2010 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Walker, Thomas. "A Path with Heart." Quest  98. 2(Spring 2010): 54-59.

For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking, breathlessly.
—Don Juan (Castaneda, 11)

The ancient Egyptians were obsessed with life after death. Of course it could be said that all of us are to a point, but the Egyptians really went extra lengths to ensure a proper passage from the world of the living to the plane of the afterlife. Their texts are filled with detailed instructions about the proper preparations for the journey. They even prepared a book about it, a kind of owner's manual and travelogue rolled into one called The Egyptian Book of the Dead. But what really demonstrates their commitment is the thing Egypt is best known for, the one romantic notion that is known around the world, the stuff of Hollywood feature films and ancient legends . . . mummies!

Even today, with all the technology we're so proud of—with advanced knowledge of chemistry, magnetic resonance imaging, gas chromatography, and the like—we still aren't sure exactly how the Egyptians achieved mummification. Their climate helped: hot, dry conditions go a long way by themselves toward making mummies. However, there's more to it than that; by all accounts, the process was complicated and carefully crafted. After the body was ritually washed and perfumed, the internal organs were carefully removed for special processing. These precious tissues were placed in their own containers—solid gold jars in the case of the elite—and were arranged within the burial chamber with extra care.

The human heart was given exceptional attention, as a mark of the respect due to the organ the Egyptians felt was not only the center of emotion, but, more importantly, the center of reason and thought as well. Regarding the brain, that unimaginably complex mass of neurons and supporting tissues, the Egyptians were rather blasé. For this legendary human organ, the Egyptians had no special plan, no golden chalice. Instead, the squashy mass was unceremoniously yanked through the nostrils and—without pomp, circumstance, or ceremony—dumped into the trash. The brain wasn't given a second thought. It was the heart that was held in high regard. In that respect, the Egyptians may have been on to something big, something we are just now beginning to rediscover.

Neurochemicals have now been found throughout the tissues of the human body. Why? The short answer is that "thinking" occurs in many places in the body besides the brain. And if cells can "think," then are they also aware? Preposterous, you say? Maybe not. Memory also appears to be a function found throughout the tissues of the body, all the way down to the cellular level. Interestingly, the heart seems to be of special importance.

For eons, people have placed special significance on the heart as the seat of emotions. Science tells us the opposite: that emotion all takes place in the brain, that the heart is just a dual-action, four-chambered pump, nothing more. Yet all of us, at one time or another, have felt our own heartstrings plucked (there really are strings in the heart—the chordae tendineae, connective tissues that keep the mitral and tricuspid valves from prolapsing, at least most of the time). We have all experienced feelings of profound joy or sorrow and felt them exactly, precisely . . . in the heart.

Spiritually inclined people attribute this sensation to the heart chakra, which connects us to our higher energy bodies. Now we have some scientific evidence to corroborate this experience. We need briefly to examine the work of Paul Pearsall, Ph.D., a pioneer explorer of the world of "energy cardiology."

For starters, the human heart is unique in several ways. It is composed of its own special type of muscle tissue, which is called, appropriately enough, cardiac muscle. In addition to its own unique anatomical structure, the heart also has something other tissues don't have—an innate, inherent ability to beat, a capacity entirely independent of the brain or of any other portion of the nervous system.

A heart completely disconnected from the body and placed in a nutrient solution will continue to beat for a long time. Even more interesting is that if two hearts are placed in separate containers close together, in short order their beats will become synchronized, regulated by some unseen energy present in the tissues. If we find this phenomenon unusual, what are we to make of the recent reports from heart transplant patients who suddenly find themselves experiencing their donors' memories? Is this all just fantasy?

After working as a psychologist for hundreds of such cases, Paul Pearsall doesn't think so. Taking the lessons gained from years of working with heart transplant patients, he searched out others who were working with subtle energy and energy cardiology. He soon came upon the work of Gary Schwartz and Linda Russek. Schwartz is a professor of neurology, psychology, and psychiatry at the University of Arizona and director of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health there. At the time Russek, who formerly taught at Harvard, was his assistant. The two scientists feel that, given the great complexity of living things, informational systems of some kind must be at work in biology, systems that modern science has failed to recognize. As a result, they have advanced their view of "info-energetics," the belief that biological energy is itself a form of information.

After combining modern biological concepts with the new findings of subtle energy and quantum mechanics, Schwartz and Russek concluded that the heart is an important center of energy in the body, and that this energy is a vital source of bioinformation. They developed their concept of energy cardiology into what they termed the "dynamic systems memory theory," which Pearsall describes as "the idea that all systems are constantly exchanging mutually influential energy, which contains information that alters the systems taking part in the exchange" (Pearsall, 13–14). The theory is based upon four central hypotheses:

1. Energy and information are the same thing. Everything that exists has energy; energy is full of information; and stored info-energy is what makes up cellular memories.
2. What we call mind or consciousness is really a manifestation of information-containing energy.
3. The heart is the primary generator of info-energy.
4. Because we are manifestations of the info-energy coming to, flowing within, and constantly being sent out from our total cellular systems, who and how we are is a physical representation of a recovered set of cellular memories. (Schwartz and Russek, 4–24)

Whether or not the heart is the major center of informational energy is subject to debate, but one thing that has been demonstrated is the concept of cellular memory. Dr. Candace Pert is a former researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and the author of Molecules of Emotion, and has been featured in the film What the Bleep Do We Know? She is also a world-renowned authority on neuropeptides, short protein strands that are active in the central nervous system and are at the very neurological core of memory. She is among the first to demonstrate that these chemicals are active in the brain during emotional experiences. However, further study showed something that came as a shock.

These special chemicals did not exist within the brain alone. Rather they were found throughout the blood circulation system, floating to all areas of the body. But without the specialized receptor cells in the brain that the neuropeptides activate, it looked as though the neuropeptides were of no functional use to the organism as a whole. At least that was the thinking until receptors were found to exist in many places throughout the body, including the heart (of course), the immune system, and even the gastrointestinal tract. Dr. Pert commented:

In the beginning of my work, I matter-of-factly presumed that emotions were in the head or brain. Now I would say they are really in the body as well. They are expressed in the body and are part of the body. I can no longer make a strong distinction between the brain and the body. . . . the more we know about neuropeptides, the harder it is to think in the traditional terms of a mind and a body. It makes more and more sense to speak of a single integrated entity, a "body-mind." (Pert, 9)

Later, when Pearsall discussed some of his ideas about memory transfer in connection with heart transplants, Pert was not at all surprised. Pearsall recalls, "She pointed out that, since the cells in the heart are loaded with molecules that necessarily contain at least some form of memory, these memories could well come along with the heart to join with the new body and brain" (Pert, 12).

Almost from the very start of heart transplantation, strange things began to be reported. Granted, heart transplant patients go through an extremely stressful, challenging ordeal; but even allowing for that reality, something profound seemed to be happening. One of the most unusual cases was related to Pearsall by a female psychiatrist who was attending an event where Pearsall was the keynote speaker. After the presentation, the psychiatrist approached Pearsall and began relating the event to him. In short order she began to cry gently and had difficulty discussing her experience, and within a few moments Pearsall understood why. As the psychiatrist described the event:

I have a patient, an eight-year-old little girl who received the heart of a murdered ten-year-old girl. Her mother brought her to me when she started screaming at night about her dreams of the man who had murdered her donor. She said her daughter knew who it was. After several sessions, I just could not deny the reality of what this child was telling me. Her mother and I finally decided to call the police and, using the descriptions from the little girl, they found the murderer. He was easily convicted with evidence my patient provided. The time, the weapon, the place, the clothes he wore, what the little girl had said to him . . . everything the little heart transplant recipient reported was completely accurate. (Pearsall, 7)

In another instance, a family physician named Glenda had been involved in a tragic automobile crash resulting in the death of her husband. Some years later, perhaps to bring things to a close, she sought to meet the young man who had been the recipient of her husband's heart. Pearsall made the arrangements and waited in the hospital chapel with Glenda for the appointment. After a half hour had elapsed, Pearsall suggested they leave, but Glenda was hesitant. Saying she "knew" her late husband's heart was nearby, she exclaimed, "Oh no, we have to wait. He's here in the hospital. I felt him come about thirty minutes ago. I felt my husband's presence. Please wait with me."

Glenda was correct. Almost immediately a young Hispanic man and his mother hurried into the chapel, explaining that they had had difficulty finding the room and had searched for half an hour. After introductions Glenda asked to feel her husband's former heart, and as she did so, she softly said a prayer to her late husband with the words, "I love you, David. Everything is copacetic." The mother and son were shocked. That word, copacetic, was the very first one the young man had uttered after awaking from anesthesia with his new heart!

Within the next few moments, they related how the young man's tastes had changed in other ways as well. It seems, for instance, that while he had once been a practicing vegetarian, he now craved junk food. While he was formerly a heavy-metal rocker, he now only listened to vintage rock and roll. Moreover, he was frequently plagued with dreams of an automobile collision, with bright headlights getting closer and closer until a horrendous crash occurred. By the time Glenda verified that these characteristics all belonged to her late husband, everyone was in tears. Glenda frequently experienced the very same dream. Although she was a highly trained physician, with all the science background that entails, she now became a believer in the phenomenon of cellular memory transference. She knew in her heart that it wasn't all just a matter of coincidence.

In another instance, a woman received a heart transplant and almost immediately began to complain of sharp, shooting pains in her lower back. The doctors explained the pain away as a response to surgery. Years later, however, she still suffered, awakening suddenly at night with shooting pains in her lumbar area. What's more, her husband noticed a significant change in her personal tastes; she now chose very feminine attire over the casual, unisex styles she had preferred before her surgery. And once they were able to resume sex, the wife seemed preoccupied with gay fantasies, asking her husband if he ever experienced them, which came as a shock to him. This went on for three years, at which time the woman met with the parents of the donor. He had been a young gay artist who had died during a robbery. He was killed by a gunshot wound to the lower back.

Pearsall mentions that other organs besides the heart seem to demonstrate the same odd capacity to transmit memory. Although the stories of heart transplant patients are often more dramatic than others, he states: "I have never spoken to a transplant recipient who did not have a story to tell" (Pearsall, 83).

Besides the exciting stories of cellular memories and changing personalities, the heart seems to be of supreme importance in other ways as well, particularly as a source of vitally important energy and information. We may forget that the heart is an organ of considerable power. A wonderfully designed hydraulic pump, it sends the fresh, nutrient-laden blood from the lungs throughout the miles of tubes that constitute the vascular tree, contracting about once per second for every moment of our lives—sometimes a bit slower, sometimes a bit faster, but continuing with its job until it finally stutters to a stop and life itself stops with it.

There's a lot of kinetic energy associated with all this pumping, but what we're concerned with at the moment are the other forms of energy generated by the heart. For one thing, the heart is also an organ of profound electromagnetic energies. We all know of the legendary electrical activity of the brain, the wave patterns that are measured and evaluated with EEGs, but compared to the heart, the brain is an electromagnetic pipsqueak.

Only in recent times have the electromagnetic fields of living things been generally recognized. Now we know that electromagnetism is an essential part of living things, as important as genetics, cellular respiration, or any of the dozens of processes that make up life (Laszlo, 157). And the heart is an organ of powerful electromagnetic activity, operating at a level five thousand times higher than that of the human brain (Clarke).

Like so many before him, Pearsall became intrigued with the question of what coordinates the massive amounts of energy present in the human body. We know the brain does some of it, and the instructions from DNA are a major player, but part of the puzzle appears to be missing. Pearsall commented on the known energies at work, starting with the source of all cellular energy for living things, the molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which fuels everything from elephants to E. coli:

A very powerful, sensitive, centrally located instrument is required to coordinate the immense energy and information generated by the billions of cellular vibrations taking place every second of our life. Multiply two million vibrations of ATP molecules by 75 trillion cells, multiply that number by the 51 to 78 billion cycles per second at which human DNA resonates and conveys its information within each cell, and multiply yet again by the energetic vibrations of the sixty or so neuropeptides that are the biochemical means by which our emotional state is manifested throughout our body. The total number would be a very rough low estimate of the energy surging within you as you read these words. (Pearsall, 103)

From his years of experience and from the work of Gary Schwartz and Linda Russek, Pearsall believes that the heart is the primary organizer of the body in ways that are just now being understood. He comments:

Every cell is literally a mini-heart humming with the energy. The ultimate biomedical illusion has been the view that the body is made of solid matter with fluid pumped through it by an unconscious heart and a powerful conscious brain that is the primary controller of the entire system. Energy cardiology suggests, however, that the heart and not just the brain is what holds this system together by a form of spiritual info-energy, in a temporary and ever-changing set of cellular memories we refer to as "the self." This "self" is the dynamic gestalt of information that might be considered the code that constitutes our soul. (Pearsall, 101; italics added)

Yes, Paul Pearsall strongly believes in the Force. He chooses to call it "L" energy, as in "life energy," but the meaning is the same. At other times he refers to it as the "fifth force," the other four being the primary forces of the universe recognized by modern physics: electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak forces of atomic attraction and decay.

The heart is also important within the context of these primary forces, particularly in terms of Pearsall's preference for following one's heart rather than one's brain. As he states, "the heart has its own form of wisdom, different from that of the rational brain but every bit as important to our living, loving, working and healing" (Pearsall, 73). It is my personal belief that there are indeed two centers of focus in the body—the brain and the heart—but even if we take the idea of the heart as the center of consciousness simply as a metaphor, it still provides us with another perspective on life.

It is particularly interesting that Pearsall discusses heart problems, because cardiovascular disease has become the number one killer in industrialized nations in just a few generations. At the beginning of the twentieth century, infectious diseases were still the primary cause of death. Halfway through the century, they were replaced by cardiovascular problems—strokes and heart attacks. The traditional explanation for this change is the lack of exercise and activity resulting from the use of modern conveniences and the increased rate of atherosclerosis resulting from modern, high-fat junk diets. But there might be a little more to the picture.

In modern medicine the list of risk factors for heart disease includes high blood pressure, smoking, high cholesterol, and obesity. Yet half of the people who experience their first heart attack exhibit none of these factors. And 80 percent of those with at least three of these factors never experience a heart attack. How do we explain these discrepancies? It would appear that some other dynamic is at work.

Pearsall discovered something interesting in the years he has worked with cardiovascular disease patients. He began to inquire about . . . sex. In many cases the victims of heart disease had been celibate for long periods of time. Again and again he found that the patients had gone for a year or more without being intimate, even though most were married.

Pearsall had also worked for years as a sex counselor. He had been a director at the Kinsey Institute, had trained at the Masters and Johnson Institute, and had founded and directed a sexual dysfunction clinic in Michigan for several years. He knew a lot about human sexuality, and he was struck by the fact that so many victims of heart disease showed few of the traditional risk factors, yet had little if any sexual contact.

Pearsall immediately thought of the importance of sex to the flow of "L" energy. He became convinced of the relationship, and he felt even more confident when he discovered current research that backed up his hunch. More than 50 percent of heart attack patients had had no sexual contact of any kind for the entire year preceding their attack! This finding was published in 1996 in the Journal of the American Medical Association (DeBusk), yet the medical establishment ignored it.

Another thread in the weave comes from Dr. Dean Ornish, a leading authority on heart disease. He appears frequently on television as a guest discussing the near epidemic of cardiovascular problems in the industrialized world. Ornish has found that anger is a major factor in cardiovascular disease. Ornish is a cardiologist and a proponent of a change in lifestyle for heart patients, including diet and exercise, but he also advocates anger management and a gentler style of interacting with others.

Ornish's research has shown that reducing stress and anger, along with other lifestyle modifications, can reduce arterial clogging without the need for invasive surgery. He is convinced that in many cases this is the road to take. Of course, many people are unwilling or unable to comply with significant lifestyle changes, and consequently the medical profession can continue to emphasize bypass surgery and other invasive techniques as standard treatments.

Sexual abstinence in adults may impede the vital energy flow, as do anger and stress. All these states have a common result: they cause our muscles to tense. The result is a condition recognized both in ancient times and today; the Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich called it "muscular armoring." What we need is a change of heart; perhaps most of all, we need to decide to follow our hearts. A path with heart is one of meaning; it is a choice to pursue worthwhile things in life rather than to lust after money, power, and material objects.

Our wondrous human brain has devised heaps of modern technology to make life "easier"—things like microwaves, cable TV, computers, push-button windows, heated car seats, cell phones, Internet banking and shopping and socializing and what have you—yet people report that they are busier and more stressed out than ever. They are working more hours than people did just a generation ago. Families hardly see each other during the course of the day. Fast food has become the dietary staple; the obesity and other health problems that result have become, sadly, a worldwide phenomenon. In a typical American marriage both partners work, yet they're in hock up to their necks as they go crazy accumulating more and more "things," while the children are allowed to raise themselves.

Now more than ever, as Castaneda's don Juan recognized, "we need a path with heart."

References

Castaneda, Carlos. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. New York: Pocket Books, 1968.
Clarke, John. "Squids," Scientific American, (August 1994): 46–53.
DeBusk, Robert F. "Sexual Activity Triggering a Myocardial Infarction: One Less Thing to Worry About," Journal of the American Medical Association 275 (1996): 1447–48.
Pearsall, Paul. The Heart's Code: Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy. New York: Broadway, 1998.
Laszlo, Ervin. Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2007.
Pert, Candace. "The Wisdom of the Receptors: Neuropeptides, the Emotions, and BodyMind," Advances 3 (1986).
Schwartz, Gary, and Linda Russek. "Energy Cardiology: A Dynamic Energy Systems Approach for Integrating Conventional and Alternative Medicine," Advances: The Journal of Mind-Body Health 12 (1996): 4–24.

Thomas Walker, D. C., is a chiropractic physician, master-level martial artist, professor of natural science, and former Green Beret. This article is adapted from his book The Force Is with Us: The Higher Consciousness That Science Refuses to Accept, published in 2009 by Quest Books.

By Richard Smoley

Originally printed in the Spring 2010 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "What Is Consciousness?." Quest  98. 2(Spring 2010): 70-71.

One of the most basic and yet most elusive teachings of Theosophy is that consciousness is everywhere. "Everything in the Universe, through all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception. . . . There is no such thing as either 'dead' or 'blind' matter, as there is no 'Blind' or 'Unconscious' Law." (Secret Doctrine, I, 274).

Nevertheless, as this passage suggests, it is very hard to characterize consciousness without resorting to some sort of circularity: to be conscious is to be "endowed with consciousness." The problem remains if we define consciousness in terms of awareness, perception, or some similar term. What is consciousness? Awareness. What is awareness? Perception. What is perception? Consciousness.

The circle can be difficult to break. Yet if consciousness is to be placed at the center of existence, it behooves us to say in clear terms what it is. Let me propose an extremely simple but, I believe, extremely fertile definition: consciousness is that which relates self to other. In terms of human cognition, this seems obvious. The sense of a self, an I present here versus an other present there, is central to the concept of consciousness. Knowing that I am present in my study, sitting at a desk in front of a computer, is essential to my being conscious here and now. If I were utterly oblivious to these things, I could not be said to be conscious at all, as, for example, during a state of dreamless sleep.

As soon as we've said this much, we realize that consciousness admits any number of degrees. When you're dreaming, you are not aware of the physical world, but some awareness still remains: there is the self that is a character in the dream, set off against other characters and settings and objects that also appear. This is not waking consciousness, but still it is consciousness of a kind. If we go further into dreamless sleep, there is apparently no consciousness at all—and yet below the surface the distinction of self and other does remain. After all, one of the most universally prescribed remedies for illness is sleep. Sleep, even and perhaps especially in its dreamless form, helps the "self" of the body fight off the "other" of the pathogens.

We can go further still. Anyone with even the slightest experience of animals knows that they too are capable of relating self and other. Dogs and cats cannot reason except in the most rudimentary sense, and yet they have emotional lives that are enough like our own to be more or less understandable. Can we, then, say they are conscious, not as we are, but conscious nonetheless? Or should we say, with René Descartes, that they are mere automata? Not many thinkers have wanted to agree with the great philosopher on this point. What about more primitive creatures, going down as far as plants and even protozoans? We may be fairly sure that they don't engage in Cartesian introspections, but their fierce attachment to life, to perpetuating their own existence, indicates that they too have some sense of themselves over and against an external world.

Like so many of the discoveries of the past few centuries, this insight would seem to erode the human sense of uniqueness and privilege in being the sole possessor of the magnificent gift called consciousness, but it has its consolations. The problem of human consciousness becomes less confounding if we see it not as something sprung mysteriously out of nowhere but as rather a stage on a continuum. Moreover, if it is taken to heart, this outlook may even help mitigate the feeling of isolation and separation from the natural world that is the unhappy side-effect of our arrogant sense of uniqueness.

Where, then, do we draw the line? At inanimate things? That apparently inanimate objects contain a rudimentary form of consciousness has long been known to esoteric thought. It appears elsewhere as well, sometimes in unexpected places. Here is an excerpt from an 1890 interview with Thomas Edison by the American writer George Parsons Lathrop:

"I do not believe," [Edison] said, "that matter is inert, acted upon by an outside force. To me it seems that every atom is possessed by a certain amount of primitive intelligence. Look at the thousand of ways in which atoms of hydrogen combine with those of other elements, forming the most diverse substances. Do you mean to say that they do this without intelligence? . . . Gathered together in certain forms, the atoms constitute animals of the lower orders. Finally they combine in man, who represents the total intelligence of all the atoms."

"But where does this intelligence come from originally?" I asked.

"From some power greater than ourselves."

Restating the point, we could say that a hydrogen atom "knows" how to recognize an oxygen atom and, under certain circumstances, how to combine with it to form water. It can perceive and relate to something outside of itself; it is, in a very rudimentary sense, conscious. If the atom could not, as it were, take a stance in the physical world and draw some kind of line between itself and what is not itself, it could not exist. Perhaps this is the secret of those tenuous submolecular particles about which today's physics speculates so imaginatively. They seem to flash in and out of existence, or, in certain instances, not to exist at all unless they are observed. It is as if their sense of themselves is so frail and ambiguous that it takes an external perceiver to bring them into being, much as the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley claimed that the universe would vanish if God were not there to perceive it.

In the language of The Secret Doctrine, "every external motion, act, gesture, whether voluntary or mechanical, organic or mental, is produced and preceded by internal feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind" (Secret Doctrine, I, 274). We could say that even before any motion or act is possible, there must be a sense of self and other that underlies and is prior to it.

None of this, by the way, presupposes a particular worldview—Newtonian, Einsteinian, or for that matter esoteric. After all, to speak of an object of any kind is to delineate it from the background of the rest of the world, to set it off as itself and not something other. And if things are to exist objectively and not merely as subjective impressions in someone's head, they must stake out their own place in relation to the universe. That is, they must take a stance as self as opposed to the other that constitutes the rest of reality. So they are endowed with consciousness, however unlike our own it may be.

If we see consciousness in this way, many of the conceptual difficulties that appear to surround it begin to diminish. Consciousness is now revealed as being present anywhere and everywhere in the universe; our own consciousness is simply one particular and not necessarily privileged form of it.

These forces have been given many names in various esoteric traditions. The Hindu Samkhya—the most ancient of all known philosophical systems—refers to self or "I" as purusha; the other, the world, is known as prakriti. These are the forces that make us up; without them we would not be what we are; we would not exist.

These observations lead to another: nothing in manifest existence is absolutely a self or an other. They are merely matters of perspective. As H. P. Blavatsky puts it, these forces are the "two poles of the same homogeneous substance, the root-principle of the universe" (Secret Doctrine, I, 247). A hydrogen atom has some consciousness in being able to recognize an atom of oxygen and interact with it under certain circumstances to form water and other compounds. From its point of view, it is a self and the oxygen atom is the other. To the oxygen atom, exactly the opposite is the case: it is the hydrogen atom that is other, just as I am other to you and you are other to me. This fact indicates that the relation between self and other, between "I" and the "world" outside, is a constant, dynamic interplay for all entities at all levels of scale and complexity.

As a metaphor, you might think of the game known as Othello or Reversal, which uses disks that are black on one side and white on the other. Each player takes turns setting them down on a grid, and the player who has more disks of his own color on the board at the end of the game wins. If, say, you are the black player and you manage to cap a line of white disks with your own black disks at both ends, the whole line of white disks flip over to black. Thus in the course of the game, whole lines of disks flip from white to black and back again. This process gives a hint of the ever-shifting reversal of self and other that prevails in the universe at all levels.

This sense of self versus other in ourselves is subtler and more profound than we may often imagine, and if we investigate it, it can lead to some striking insights. Consider your own experience now. Most likely you are not aware of yourself, except in a vague background sense. But if you bring your attention to it, you can feel yourself as an "I" having experiences. Many of these are sensory: this room, this chair, this book. You can go still deeper. You can be aware of your thoughts and feelings as they pass over the screen of your awareness (which is generally easier to do if you close your eyes). If you can be aware of even these most private and intimate thoughts as somehow "other," then where is the "I"? Who or what is it? It has no attributes as such, no qualities; it simply sees. Hence the Hindu sage Sri Ramana Maharshi said that the question "Who am I?," taken far enough back, will lead to enlightenment.

This article is adapted from Richard Smoley's book The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe (New World Library). Copyright © 2009 by Richard Smoley.

Originally printed in the Spring 2010 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "From the Editor's Desk - Spring 2010." Quest 98. 2(Spring 2010): 42.

One of the best-known horror movies of recent decades is the 1976 film Carrie, based on Stephen King's tale of a lonely and misunderstood pubescent girl. While the movie pioneered in offering buckets of blood for the audience's delectation (thus creating a highly durable cliche for the genre), in many ways the most terrifying part of the film involves Carrie's relationship with her religion-obsessed mother, who at one point locks her into a closet with a sinister crucifix.

While the portrait painted in Carrie is a lurid and sensational one, the film became a classic in its genre partly because it hit a nerve in the collective psyche. Carrie is the one of the mass media's first portrayals of religious abuse, a problem that has inflicted huge damage on our society.

The form of religious abuse to gain most attention of late is sexual molestation by Roman Catholic priests. According to a 2002 report by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, nearly 4400 priests—4 percent of all those who had served in the previous fifty years—faced some kind of sexual abuse allegation.

But religious abuse is not limited to Catholicism or to Christianity. Over the past generation we have seen it any number of times in Hindu, Buddhist, and New Age contexts. It can also take many forms. Sometimes it involves the misuse of spiritual authority to humiliate and manipulate people, or to extract money or sexual favors from them (adults are susceptible to this as well as children).

All these forms of abuse are, sadly, both familiar and obvious. Today we may need to ask if religious wounding extends still further. Is it abusive to expose children to lurid images of hell and the devil, to tell them that they risk eternal damnation for the smallest of sins, to force them to live in terror of a vindictive and sadistic God? I believe it is. It is one thing to teach children that their actions have moral consequences and quite another to instill a profound, nameless, and unquenchable sense of guilt in them. Many women feel that religion has inculcated a sense of inferiority and even sinfulness in them simply because of their gender. Still others have been ostracized because of their sexual orientation.

To these cases we can add religious wounding in a milder form—when it is not a matter of victimization but of loss of faith, of disillusionment with spirituality as a whole. If all human beings have a spiritual aspect to their natures, this disillusionment amounts to an alienation from a profound and essential part of the self. Whether or not they recognize it, these individuals too have suffered religious wounds.

No matter what background we may come from, it is time for us to begin recovering from this damage. With this idea in mind, the Theosophical Society has organized a conference entitled "Healing Our Religious Wounds," to be held at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Glen Ellyn, Illinois (about a ten-minute drive from our national center at Olcott), on April 23-25, 2010. The keynote speaker will be John Shelby Spong, who served as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Jersey for twenty-four years until his retirement in 2001. Dr. Spong's best-selling books include Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, A New Christianity for a New World, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Here I Stand. His most recent book is Eternal Life: A New Vision. He will speak on the topics "Religious Wounds: The Power of Guilt" and "Religious Healing: The Power of Wholeness."

Another powerful presenter at the conference will be spiritual counselor Maurice Proulx, a former Catholic priest who himself suffered sexual abuse by a priest when he was a child. Mr. Proulx will address the topic "Journeying beyond Childhood Sexual Abuse."

Christopher Bamford, senior editor of Parabola and author of The Voice of the Eagle, will also speak. Those of you who came to our October 2008 conference on esoteric Christianity will remember his inspiring presentation "Before Abraham Was, I Am." For this conference, his topic will be "Reclaiming Revelation: A Necessity for Our Time." TS president Betty Bland, TS vice-president Tim Boyd, and Olcott staffer John Cianciosi, a former Buddhist monk and author of The Meditative Path, will lead meditations. Ben Furman, another Olcott staffer, who has many years experience teaching chi gong, and John Guarrine of the Chicago area organization Play for Peace will begin morning sessions with gentle movement practices to help participants to ground and balance themselves.

Just as importantly, the conference will include one-on-one and small-group discussions in which participants will be able to share and discuss their own experiences and to move toward healing.

"Healing Our Religious Wounds" is intended neither to restore religious faith nor to destroy it. It is intended to heal some of the psychological damage, whether mild or severe, that may have come from our religious backgrounds and to help us move toward greater wholeness and integration. For those who do not feel that they have been damaged by religion, it will offer ways of avoiding spiritual pitfalls and deepening their understanding of the truths that underlie all faiths.
I look forward to seeing you at the conference here in April.

—Richard Smoley

By R. J. Reilly

Originally printed in the Spring 2010 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Reilly, R. J. "Owen Barfield: Prophet Against Positivism." Quest  98. 2(Spring 2010): 60-65, 69.

Owen Barfield (1898-1997) first became known to American readers as a friend of C. S. Lewis and a member of the "Oxford Christians," a group that included Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and a few others. A plaque on the wall of a room in the Oxford pub The Eagle and Child attests to the group's weekly meetings and their discussions of and arguments over the great issues of religion, philosophy, and literature. Two of Barfield's books, Poetic Diction and Saving the Appearances, achieved a kind of underground reputation among philosophers and teachers of literature even before his other works became more widely known. That reputation has now grown from what was at first a narrow but intense acceptance; he served as visiting professor at a number of American universities, and recently some of his devoted readers have formed the Owen Barfield Society with the stated purpose of making his work better known and more accessible to general readers. His work in theology, epistemology, and linguistics, and the intellectual brilliance of his work in general, have suggested to many readers that he is, as was said of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the finest mind of his generation.

In this essay, I want to describe my own debt to Owen Barfield, but I also want to suggest that I belong to a certain class or category, and that therefore what I learned from Barfield was learned, or could have been learned, by my fellow class members. These comprise the large number of young men and the smaller number of young women who came home from World War II and went into graduate schools of literature in the 1950s. Most of us, no doubt, are still extant and still teaching, though now we are approaching the graybeard stage (a sexist phrase I use only for convenience), and retirement is looming closer each year. In short, I want to assume that my experiences and training in graduate school were generic, not simply personal, and that therefore, like Whitman, I am large, I contain multitudes. It is for this reason that I use the first person plural pronoun here and there in this essay. I do not mean it as the regal or the papal "we."

Second, I want to suggest that the training that we received, though in many ways first-rate, encouraged in us certain attitudes and biases that were unfortunate and disabling, and that a reading of Barfield's work corrected many of these.

Third, I want to say that we took in Barfield's work according to our capacities as receivers—not that we agreed with his work as a whole, or even understood it as a whole, but that the parts we did take in and understand were enough to change our way of looking at literature, and enough to restore a vision of literature that we had lost.

The class of people I speak for was and is a class of literary people, not philosophical people. Our primary love and object of study was and is literature, "poetry" in the old sense, imaginative literature. We were not philosophical illiterates in graduate school, but we had little sense of an organic relationship between literature and philosophy. Barfield changed that. Barfield taught us that the relationship is organic. In that sense Barfield taught us philosophy and even became for us, or for some of us at least, a symbol of philosophy and literature as a whole. Dante's Beatrice, we are told, was for Dante both Beatrice and theology; and the nameless much-praised ladies of the dolce stil nuovo were similarly both human women and philosophy. Barfield was such a symbol for us, a symbol of literature and philosophy not as separate entities but as powers united in the human imagination. He was that rarity—a mind working so effortlessly in both fields that everything he wrote seemed to imply that there was no real division between them.

What were young scholars encouraged to read in the graduate schools of the 1950s? What were they encouraged to believe and what notions were they encouraged to discard? A few names and titles may bring back some of the atmosphere of those years: Freud and the Freudian critics—William Empson, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and I. A. Richards; J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge anthropologists; Kenneth Burke, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and the New Critics in general; Stanley Edgar Hyman's criticism of the critics and his anthology of critical pieces; Christopher Caudwell; E. E. Stoll and textual criticism; T. S. Eliot's early essays: "Tradition and the Individual Talent," with its strange argument for impersonal poetry; "Hamlet and His Problems", and "The Metaphysical Poets." If we had come into graduate school with some vague notion of poetry as somehow magical and divinely mysterious (and I think we had some such notion), we were certainly encouraged by this kind of reading to rid our minds of such an idea. For if there was one thing that all of these names and titles suggest, it is that poetry and imaginative literature in general are or should be explainable by some kind of rational and scientific analysis. In a word, the attitude toward literature that we were encouraged to adopt was reductive. We were being trained as positivists, though that term was not in such general use as it is now and was mainly connected with the British philosopher A. J. Ayer and the school of logical positivism—both of which we were taught to respect. We were led to believe that there was no magical or mysterious "inside" to even the greatest poetry. The making of poetry was simply a process involving what Coleridge called the Fancy: it was the selection of a proper "objective correlative"; it was choosing what T. E. Hulme called just the right curve or bend of the feeling, not much more than careful and accurate selection. Thus we were not encouraged to take seriously such writers as Shelley, Emerson, Whitman, and even Milton, who claimed to be somehow in touch with the divine mind.

And so of course we lost something of inestimable value: the belief—assumed in some form or other by Plato, Sidney, Shakespeare, and the Romantic writers like Shelley and Emerson—that there is something magical and mysterious and irrational or superrational about the highest poetry, and that this high and mysterious quality is in some way associated with divinity, that it is in fact evidence of the relationship between the human mind and the mind of God. But in the view we were encouraged to adopt, literature became for us something on the same plane as everything else. It was a purely human construct and therefore explainable in purely human terms. As H. L. Mencken said, a poet makes poetry as a chicken makes eggs—an interesting process perhaps, but hardly an ineffable one. Such a conclusion seemed exhilarating to us in those debunking years, but as we grew older it began to seem a counsel of despair, the closing of a door that for centuries had been, if not wide open, at least ajar.

Barfield opened that door again for us with his work on the human imagination. I have said that we took in Barfield's work according to our condition as receivers. Irwin Edman said long ago that when literary people turn their efforts to philosophy, they are likely to abstract bits and pieces of a system but not apprehend the system as a whole. I believe this is true of the group I represent. I want to mention some of these bits and pieces, saving for the end of the list the single overriding bit or piece: Barfield's work on the imagination. The subjects that follow overlap in all sorts of ways—I see that better now than when I first met them—but even in isolation they modified the way we looked at literature. I have listed them under the following headings: monism; etymology; the occult and the esoteric; evolution and the growth of self-consciousness; imagination.

Monism. Probably the most basic premise of any philosophical system is its view of the very composition of reality—whether the system holds for monism or dualism. C. S. Lewis debated this point with Barfield over a period of many years, arguing as long as he could for some form of dualism (mind versus matter, soul versus body, and so on), but finally conceded that reality had to be "in the last resort mental." Most of us, I believe, can understand and sympathize with Lewis's battle. Probably most literary people—perhaps most people in general—have toyed with the premise that reality is mental, but have either dismissed it or have finally decided to ignore it because it is such a difficult premise to maintain in the practical matters of life. It seems to contradict common sense, and so probably most of us metaphorically kick our stone, like Dr. Johnson, and say in effect, "Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley." But a serious reader of Barfield, as Lewis's case demonstrates, must come to regard monism (in this sense, the view that reality is mental) as what William James called "a live option." And clearly once we are able to maintain this position with some consistency, we discover that we live in a much different kind of world than the one we generally assume to be the real one, and just as clearly our view of literature is radically altered as well. A notion such as Platonic love, for example, becomes much more than a literary convention. The passages in Wordsworth, Emerson, and Whitman that we routinely label moments of "transport" or "nature mysticism" or "ecstasy"—and then as routinely forget—become the highest and the truest passages in those writers' works.

Once the veil of matter has been penetrated or shown to be illusory, the homogeneity of reality is revealed. The barrier between self and other disappears, and we see ourselves as involved in a seamless and continuous reality—"embosomed in nature," as Emerson says, able to "see into the Life of things," as Wordsworth says. Whitman's wild words become simple truth: "I celebrate myself and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume." Mind flows into mind as the waters of a river flow into a sea. We are not only at one with nature but at one with each other. In the sight of God, the mystics tell us, all men are one man. Many other radical consequences follow from adopting this monistic view, of course, but so far as literature is concerned, I think we find ourselves evaluating writers on the basis of whether or not they are aware of this great secret of homogeneity and whether or not they can convey it. We reassess writers whom our earlier training tended to downgrade: Blake, Shelley, Emerson, Whitman. Moreover, even other writers who are not obviously Romantics occasionally come into better focus—Henry James, for example, with his insistence on the continuousness of all human experience, both inner and outer, and his assumption that his characters, his "super-subtle fry," are in spite of their subtlety on the same line as the rest of us. For James, all human experience is generic.

Etymology. Tolkien remarked in his essay on fairy stories that "antiquity has an appeal in itself" and proceeded to illustrate the remark with his Middle Earth trilogy. According to his own account, he constructed his stories with their various beings in order to give a context for the languages that he had invented. Barfield disclosed the same kind of appeal in antiquity by means of more traditional etymological studies. Reading Barfield's work on words is not at all like reading in the Oxford English Dictionary but very much like reading in the Tolkien trilogy. There is the same kind of excitement at looking into the minds and souls of beings that long preceded us, but the minds that Barfield looks into are our own minds—or the single human mind—as it existed at various stages of the past. One who has seriously read Barfield's History in English Words, Poetic Diction, "Greek Thought in English Words," and other works can never again read Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton in the old uninstructed way. What we get from Barfield's etymological work is not so much information as revelation. Barfield makes it clear that to read older writers properly is to look into minds that stood in a different relation to God than we presently recognize. Much of the appeal of Barfield's etymological work is of course related to his larger argument regarding the evolution of self-consciousness, but even the reader unaware of that argument finds himself taking words and phrases seriously in older writers, puzzling over certain passages that are at once familiar and strange, like our own dreams remembered, as if we looked into what Shakespeare called "the prophetic soul of the wide world / Brooding on things to come."

It was not till I had read Barfield that I began to understand some of the magic of Shakespeare's language, the oddly moving effect of some lines: "Put rancors in the vessel of my peace"; "The dawn in russet mantle clad / Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill"; "Smite flat the thick rotundity of the world"; and so on. It was Barfield who suggested that concrete and abstract words were not as distinct for Shakespeare as they are for us, so that he often could use them almost interchangeably. Similarly with Milton: Adam and Eve "emparadised in one another's arms"; the unfallen angels in the presence of God the Father—"About him all the sanctities of Heaven / Stood thick as stars, and from his sight received / Beatitude past utterance"—and the Son entering heaven in the presence of the Father, "Who into glory him received, / Where now he sits at the right hand of bliss." And the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century: it may be true, as Dr. Johnson said, that they lay on the wait for novelty, but a good deal of their startling effect on the modern intelligence derives from the same casual conjunction of the concrete and the abstract that we find in Shakespeare and Milton. Their differences from the other writers of their time are more accidental than substantial.

The occult and the esoteric. One cannot read far in Barfield without coming to terms with notions and attitudes that seem occult or esoteric. This is perhaps the most difficult problem for the group of people I am discussing. By definition, the occult, the esoteric, and the transcendental were excluded from our positivist point of view. This exclusion sometimes led to odd and inconsistent treatment of writers like Blake and Emerson and Yeats. They were clearly major writers, yet somehow they were also tainted and suspect. Often we evaded this paradox by dealing only with the portions of their work that are explainable by reference to the mainstream of thought in their time. Thus we had Blake and Emerson without Swedenborg and Yeats without Theosophy; Blake treated as painter and political radical; Emerson treated as a kind of American Carlyle; Yeats treated as the poet of Celtic national feeling and political activist.

But it soon becomes evident that the reader cannot have Barfield without Anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner; it is not possible to ignore the repeated references to Steiner as source and even master. Ultimately, since it was not possible to dismiss Barfield, we turned reluctantly to Steiner, with much nervous anticipation of Rosicrucianism and gurus and perhaps spiritualism. We were compelled to look at Steiner, even though, like Melville's Bartleby, we preferred not to. When we did turn to Steiner, we discovered, as C. S. Lewis did, that Steiner was far from being a Tibetan guru, that his work has in fact what Lewis called "a reassuring Germanic dullness" to it. I doubt that many of us have read very widely in Steiner's enormous body of work—I certainly have not—but what we have read is not crankish or bizarre. It is a meticulously argued and rather ponderous assertion of the philosophical viewpoint that we find perfectly acceptable in Barfield: systematized and Christianized radical monism, an argument that is based on two premises: that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is true, and that reality is solely mental.

This is a dreadful simplification, I know, and I will try to amplify it later on. For now I merely want to make the point that to read Steiner is not either demeaning or especially exciting—not at all the sort of experience that we might expect reading in the occult to be, much more like reading Kant than reading Madame Blavatsky. I am not endorsing the occult in general, but it does seem to me that we might regard fewer things as a priori occult (in the sense of outrageous or bizarre) if we were to remind ourselves that much of our bias against the occult stems from our unthinking allegiance to a dualistic viewpoint that perhaps half of the world's thinkers have thought false. Such things as clairvoyance, second sight, and unexplainable recoveries from fatal diseases are by definition impossible only if we hold to a dualistic view of some kind. In a world that consists of thought and thinking, almost nothing is beyond thought; perhaps the notion of an infinite universe illustrates that as well as anything else.

Evolution and self-consciousness. For the kind of literary mind I have described, Barfield's views here are less a set of ideas than a way of thinking itself—one that challenged and finally upset our former way of thinking. We accepted the idea of Darwinian evolution as a matter of course, without much examination, rather as we accepted the law of gravity. Some form of matter emerged (we assumed), probably from the sea, and at some later indeterminate time became mind and thus became human. In short, since we were dualists, we believed that one kind of thing became another kind of thing that was entirely different. That did not strike us as strange, as long as we assumed that the change was gradual, though if early man had leaped full blown from the forehead of a dolphin we might have thought it marvelous and rather mythical. But Barfield showed us that this change, gradual or not, is not possible, or at least that this kind of change cannot be evolution. Evolution must mean not radical change but "sameness in difference." There must be a constant something in the process, a persisting identity under various forms. But the only persisting thing in Darwinian evolution was matter, which could only become mind by ceasing to be matter. Gradually we saw that if we took logic seriously, we had to agree that it made much better sense to say that mind took on the appearance of matter while at the same time remaining mind—which was of course what the great monistic systems of the world had always said. It was enormously upsetting for us to have to conclude that the mind had existed before it became associated with the brain, as the hand exists before it puts on the glove.

So it became apparent that there is indeed evolution going on but that logically it must be, and must always have been, the evolution of the mind. Here Barfield's work in etymology came into play. If evolution was a process of mind evolving—but always remaining mind—then it was possible to see that the real difference between ourselves and our ancient forebears was simply the quality of mind, and that this changing quality of mind would be evident in language. That was not only logical but even observable; all we had to do was to recall the way we thought and talked as children and contrast it with the way we think and talk as adults. Barfield's term for this is the evolution of consciousness into self-consciousness, like the gradual growth of the child into the adult, the developing of a sense of personal identity. The key word here is of course "develop": we do not change from child to adult but retain our childhood as a part of our adulthood—sameness in difference. We were conscious as children—sentient, able to feel hunger and pain—but became increasingly self-conscious as we grew up, progressively more aware of ourselves as distinct persons. Not this and then that, but this and that together; not separation but continuation with change.

Once we had adjusted our minds to this notion of a continuum—a very large adjustment—then of course we had to recall our basic premise that reality is monistic. If we were not really cut off from our childhood, we were not really cut off from anything else either. For to say that mind was evolving was to say that all reality was evolving along with ourselves. The apparently disparate elements of reality truly existed only in relation to each other, in what Barfield called a relation of polarity. As our adulthood exists only as something retaining and related to our childhood, so the present exists only in its relation to the past, and what we call the conscious mind only in relation to what we call the unconscious mind, and what we call ourselves only in relation to what we call nature, Emerson's "Me" and "Not-Me," Whitman's "float forever held in solution."

Those of us who had been exposed to Aristotle's and Aquinas's concepts of act and potency felt that for the first time we had some notion of what those terms really mean. The child was the adult in potency; an amorphous feeling was an idea in potency; what we called nature was mind in potency. I can still recall the excitement I felt when I read T. J. J. Altizer's remark that Barfield believed "Steiner's mystical thesis that nature is man's unconscious being," because it was suddenly clear to me that it was not a mystical thesis at all but a logical inference from a basic philosophical point of view, and it was what Barfield meant in Poetic Diction when he wrote that what man "let loose over Hiroshima . . . was the forces of his own unconscious mind." In arriving at this way of thinking, we had come a long distance from our early positivist viewpoint to a wholly different way of viewing reality, and thus a wholly different way of viewing literature–and ourselves, and God.

Imagination. Earlier in this essay I described Barfield's philosophy as Christianized radical monism, a description vague and simplistic enough to make a true philosopher throw up his hands in despair. But I am speaking for a literary class, and for us the great issue of Barfield's work is that in this world of evolving mind, which is a process of consciousness becoming self-conscious—this world-soul or mind becoming more and more conscious of itself—the evolutionary movement is not only a philosophical concept but a religious tenet as well. The ultimate end of an evolution of consciousness into self-consciousness is total self-consciousness: the movement is from potency to act, from passivity to power. The adult mind is more powerful than the child's mind. As the process of evolution continues, the human mind, growing in power over its environment, growing more aware of its relation to reality, growing more aware of the nature of evolution, begins to develop power traditionally associated with divinity.

In our own time we see that the human mind has through its command of physics the power to annihilate the world, and we see it in its command of chemistry moving toward the power to create a new world. These are powers that were formerly allowed only to divinity. This growth process, this growing up to Godhead, is what Barfield equates with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. From this point of view the evolutionary process is the progressive growth of Christ, or God, within the human mind. Said differently, this process is the growing awareness in the human mind that it is potentially divine, on the route to infinite power. This awareness must lead to a growing faith in the human mind, a growing respect for it and for its operations—in short, to a growing subjectivity.

Now literary people like me and the class I speak for were taught to disparage this kind of subjectivity as morbid sentimentality and to look only scientifically at the workings of the mind. Thus the downgrading of the writers who had faith in the human creative imagination, who were becoming aware of this cosmic process of the divinizing of the human mind. Goethe, Blake, and Coleridge were the ones who most associated the process with Christian doctrine, perhaps, but Shelley and Whitman were surely as intensely aware of the great secret. In this sense the Romantic writers of the nineteenth century were, in Ezra Pound's phrase, the antennae of the race. In historical terms, the evolution of consciousness shows most clearly in these writers and in their successors like Yeats.

It follows, as I suggested earlier, that these writers are the ones whom people in my group now rate most highly—a complete reversal of the judgments we were encouraged to make in the 1950s. G. K. Chesterton once said, without paradox or qualification, that Whitman was the greatest poet of the nineteenth century because he asserted the divinity of the common man. It is that kind of judgment that people like me have been led to make through reading Barfield. No doubt there are other ways of arriving at this means of judging writers—Chesterton is an example—there are of course always many ways of arriving anywhere. But for the people I am trying to represent, Chesterton's way was not a live option. Chesterton did not live to see the kind of education that my class was given, though he certainly saw its beginnings. Perhaps if he had been a contemporary and colleague of ours, he would not only have seen it but seen through it at once, rather than gradually, as we have done, but we are not Chestertons. Nor do we handle religious matters with the ease and nonchalance of Chesterton, the great Catholic convert and apologist. We are perhaps even less able to articulate the religious aspect of Barfield's work than we are the philosophical, because if we are not philosophers as such, we are certainly not theologians either. But then we were never able to articulate very well our original belief in the relation between the poetic imagination and the divine mind, the ancient doctrine of inspiration which was at the very heart of hearts of our love of literature and which gave to our love and our labors dignity and importance. It was enough that the doctrine, or something like it, had to be true. That belief was always more a tenet of faith than of reason. And so it is with Barfield's reaffirmation of that relationship. Exactly how this thing can be so we cannot say, but that it is true we always felt, and we are grateful to Barfield for restoring the great and mysterious "inside" to the highest poetry, the interior dimension that our earlier positivist training temporarily destroyed.

R. J. Reilly is emeritus professor of English at the University of Detroit. His published work includes Romantic Religion, a study of Owen Barfield, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and J. R. R. Tolkien, and "Henry James and the Morality of Fiction," which won the Norman Foerster Award for 1967.