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New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
A Traditionalist Perspective on Gnosticism with Charles Upton
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Beings called archons who rule different aspects of existence, and they're all false gods. So this universe is a false universe. And it's a universe, basically it's a cosmic prison. And that isn't true. But it's the way a lot of people feel nowadays, socially and, you know, and environmentally and who knows, whatever other reasons. How did I get stuck in this weird world?
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Keep watching to learn more.
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Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. Tart, 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
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New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spiritual the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu. you can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingalowed.org.
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Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
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Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we are going to take a traditionalist look at My guest is my good friend Charles Upton. He was regarded as the youngest member of the Beat Generation of poets back in the 1960s when he was still a high school student, and his poetry was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in San Francisco. Subsequently, he's become active in the traditionalist movement of spirituality. I'm sure he'll have a lot to say about that today. He is the author of many, many books on that topic. Some of his titles include Folk Mystical Meanings in Traditional Folk Songs and Spirituals Knowings in the Arts of Metaphysics, Cosmology and the Spiritual Path, the Science of the Greater Jihad, Essays in Principal Psychology, the System of the Truth and Falsehood in Postmodernism and the New Age Vectors of the Counter Initiation, the Course and Destiny of Inverted Spirituality, the Alien Disclosure, Deception, the Metaphysics of Social Engineering, and most recently, an autobiography, Giving Myself Away from Beat Generation to Protege to Metaphysical Social Critic, A Cultural History of America through 50 years of spiritual seeking. Charles is based in Lexington, Kentucky, and now I'll switch over to the interview. Welcome, Charles. It's a pleasure to be with you once again.
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A
Well, it's good to be back.
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B
We're breaking new ground because we'll be talking about something that's been on your mind for, I think it's fair to say, decades, and which you've hinted at in a number of your different publications but now you're becoming very explicit. And I've titled this interview A Traditionalist Perspective on Gnosticism.
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A
That's not untrue. I mean.
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B
And for the benefit of our viewers, many of whom won't have watched our many previous interviews, when we talk about traditionalism, let's just start there, because that's where, as best I can tell, you're coming from. Although I tend to think that your poetic nature is even deeper than your philosophical nature. But in any case, let's talk about traditionalism.
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A
Just to respond to the last thing he said, my philosophical nature was necessary to contain my poetic nature and let it develop, you know, in a. You know, in a framework or in a matrix that let it deepen, you know, because poetry can run all over the map. I'm reminded of Thomas Merton, who was, you know, a writer and a poet. He was a poet all along, but as a poet, he was a kind of a scattered. He had some interesting things to say. And so, you know, and his various attempts at writing were interesting, but they were never really going to go anywhere until he was taken or took himself and contained himself in the monastery of Gethsemane with a rule and an order. And that caused everything that was percolating in his soul to center and deepen. So the religious, philosophical and the poetic imaginative certainly, you know, can work together. They could be at all with each other, but they can work together too well, okay, the traditionalists or traditionalism, just very, very swiftly. There is a school of writers sometimes said to be founded by a French metaphysician, Rene Guinon, also Ananda Kentish Kumaraswamy, Anglo Indian writer on traditional art and metaphysics from Sri Lanka, is sometimes said to have been a co founder. And out of this, out of what they put together, some amazing writers emerged who would include Frischof Schum, Martin Ling's Marco Polus, Titus Burkhardt, the last living member of almost the first, not, you know, I would say the second generation of these people is Sayed Hussein Nasser, who's teaching at the George Washington University in D.C. and these people were very important to a lot of people. And a lot of us are the hippies or the people from the baby boom generation who needed once again to be contained in something, you know, in something more rigorous, more traditional and more philosophical than all of the possibilities we had entertained during the 60s and their aftermath. You know, the different possibilities of spirituality and psychic exploration and all of that, all of which was interesting but needed form, you know. And so for a while, the Traditionalists provided that form, and it didn't last for various reasons, but it was a very important step for a lot of people. Traditionalists basically accept that God has sent more than one revelation and that there's such a thing as the primordial tradition. The human race has always known, essentially, or some members of it have known the basic structure of existence and the universe and the relationship between God and his creation. And this has always been known, and it's been talked about in different languages over different time periods. And, you know, after a while, it became expressed most through the great revelations like Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism even. And there's a unanimity of ultimate principles behind these various religions. And that's all very true, you know, and they attempted at this. That's the perennialist aspect of it. But they also tried their best to be traditionalists, which is to say, and each religion needs to be faithful to its own norms and be practiced in its own, you know, traditional forms, if possible, because mixing the forms of the various religions is not going to be helpful because it just muddies the waters. Nor is it necessary because there is a unanimous truth behind all of these which doesn't need to be added to, you know, put together from various pieces. If you have one. If you have one valid revelation, in a certain sense, you have the essence of all of them. Well, that's a difficult position to maintain because now, you know, this was sort of at the period that I like to see symbolized by Professor Houston Smith, who was, you know, at the end of his life, or quite a while, at the end of his life of the traditionalist school. But what he, you know, he. This is when, you know, it was exciting to go out and find all the new religions and go to the East. And, you know, say he was like an anthropologist that would go out and live with the natives and practice their rituals and all this and become part. And then come back to civilization and tell everybody that about the amazing things he saw. You know, we were excited about the different traditions, but then there was a rather abrupt change when suddenly it was no longer hip to say all religions are one. You know, the idea was the basic principle of the traditionalist, the transcendent unity of religions. All the religions united in their origin, not in their forms, which are going to have to be different. But, you know, that was sort of went without saying. And then suddenly people said, wait a minute. And postmodernism came in with a vengeance and said, listen, you know, it's not all One, anything, everything has its specific, different, and that's what you have to concentrate on. And anybody who thinks it's all one is out of their minds. And so now you hear people dismissing perennialism by saying, oh, they just say all the religions are the same, you know, eh, as if that, you know, it's a lot more to it than that. But that's all that got through. And it was partly because I'm afraid of Schoen was unable to really be a traditionalist in practice. And he was, you know, founded, you know, he was, he was nominally a Muslim who founded his own kind of Sufi tariqah. But, you know, there were various problems with it, you know, scandals of the very, you know, common type for the late 20th century, you know, guru meltdowns.
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B
And things like this, which we, about which we've done a separate interview that I can linked to.
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It didn't. But in any case, for me, the traditionalists, I mean, I hold to most of their principles. You know, I just, I just, you know, the idea that traditionalism or perennialism, let's say, is a sort of a higher spirituality that transcends all the different religions which shu and sort of went in that direction inevitably, you know, and it didn't work. You know, it's, that is where he went off the rails. So, but other than that, you know, the principles of traditional spirituality are the ones I hold to, you know, I take them from various traditions. But, you know, my practice is Islam and is Sufism, and that's what I concentrate on. So what that did, like I said in, in, in the introductory, one of the introductory sections to my modern gnostic system is, you know, I, I, I'd come up with something that, that, that impressed me so much, I thought, wow, you know, I, if I wanted to, after all, this is the 1970s, if I wanted to, I could start my own religion. Isn't everybody else doing that? I could do it too, you know, and, and you know, it was. And I could have gone too far in that direction except for the fact that my wife Jenny found the traditionalists and initiated me into them and said, look, you know, you can't just make up your own spiritual practice. Up to a point you may be able to do that, but, you know, the traditional forms that have come down to us are the ones which are really effective and the same with the doctrines. So I realized, well, okay, like I said in, you know, a modern gnostic system, she saved me from becoming a false prophet, which was great because false prophets do not have Happy lives. But what I did realize is I had a critical tool that allowed me to see where on the metaphysical level, let's say on the social level, where a social movement or institution was departing from the fullness of what it would be to serve the human essence. Put it this way, on the psychic level, where a particular kind of psychic imbalance was developing, you know, that worked against psychic wholeness and on the metaphysical level, where a particular fundamental misperception of the nature of God was developing which would lead to one extreme or another in the world of religion and metaphysics and all these having very negative consequences and you know, you can detect them through the use of this system. I said I still think that's true.
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B
As a starting point. I think it would be fair to say that from a traditionalist perspective, Gnosticism is viewed as minimally speaking, incorrect and very often it's couched as a heresy.
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A
Yeah, it's viewed as a heresy, you know, certainly from a Christian standpoint. Now Fritoff Schuman once in a while put in a good word for the Gnostics, but you know, very, you know, it's hard to fit that in with the rest of what he was saying. He just once in a while, you know, and my view now, as I said, narcissism is more associated with Christianity than any other religion. Not all of the Gnostics were Christians, but most of them were and you know, during they were in late antiquity, mostly in the area of the Roman Empire. And Gnosticism was never though officially condemned as a heresy at any church council, although there are different church fathers like Irenaeus who wrote against the Gnostic. So Gnosticism was considered to be a problem, but it never became an actual heresy. You know, false doctrine that could be condemned maybe because it was, you know, it was based on many different sects that had different mythologies and different doctrines, but all had certain things in common. And one of the main things they had in common, which is what makes Gnosticism very relevant strangely enough to our time, though heretical and erroneous though it might be, is the sense that this universe is created by an evil demiurge, you know, who deludes us but is also deluded himself and you know, whose agents are beings called archons who rule different aspects of existence and they're all false gods. So this universe is a false universe. And it's a universe, basically it's a cosmic prison. And that isn't true, but it's the way a lot of people feel nowadays socially and Environmentally and who knows, whatever other reasons, how did I get stuck in this weird world? And, or maybe it's just a computer simulation we say, you know, which is a very Gnostic attitude, you know, and so I'm saying, well, I mean, this speaks so much to people's condition nowadays, even though I don't believe this is a false universe created by a false God, you know, but if it feels like that to so many people, why is this? And what is the significance of Gnosticism in relation to this, this, you know, and, and so I came up with a simple thing that the Gnostics accept or emphasize the transcendence of God, but not his imminence. You know, they will say that some of them will call God the alien God, which is an interesting word to use in these, these days when aliens loom so large, you know, the alien God, and he's alien not just to the material universe, but to the psychic universe, you know, not only is matter a false, you know, a false creation that has no reality, but, you know, the way your psyche operates, the dominance of your psyche, are all ruled by these archons, you know, it's all, everything except the absolute transcendence is false. Now that's interesting. Now the truth is that God is in everything on every level, otherwise none of this would exist. Even as an apparition, you know, God has to be in it, you know, because you can't limit God to, I mean, if he's absolutely transcendent of any limitations, that means he is not prevented by any barriers from pervading everything, you know, and that's how transcendence and imminence are essentially the same thing. The Gnostics didn't get that, but boy, did they come up with something that speaks to our condition. Suddenly I thought, there's got to be a video game about Gnosticism. I could just see it in my mind's eye, you know, maybe somebody will do that. But so I said, well, okay, what is the truth of this if it isn't literally true? In what way is it true? It must be true in some way or it wouldn't speak to our condition so directly. And I said, oh, the evil demiurge that creates a false universe is the ego. Ah, that was it. That was my basic, you know, reinterpretation of Gnosticism. We don't even know if the original Gnostics actually knew that or some of them realized that because all we get is their sort of mythological writings where they say, well, you know, the demiurge did this. And then the eon known as Sophia broke away and tried to create the universes without cooperation with the masculine element. And this created this and this and, you know, all these huge mythologies. Did they take that stuff literally or was that their way of speaking of the dynamics of the ego? We don't know that. But in any case, that's what I think they were really up to, whether they knew it or not.
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B
Many people who have been on this channel talk about modern Gnosticism in the form of writers like William Blake or even more recently, the science fiction author P.K. dick.
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A
Well, yeah, actually both of those are good examples. I mean, Blake was the closest thing to a Dante of Gnosticism, really. I mean, And Blake was highly influential in me and on me in my modern Gnostic system. In fact, now my modern Gnostic system is based, let me quickly say, on four archons. The archon of law, the archon of selfhood, the archon of chaos, and the archon of fate. And I'll describe what those are later. But Blake actually has a couplet in which those four principles perfectly appear. And it goes like this. Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion. Wow, you know, how much is in those few little words, prisons? Now, selfhood is the self assertive, rebellious, criminal element. So it's in the prison, right? And it's oppressed by law. You know, stones. Prisons are built with stones of law. That's selfhood and law. Brothels with bricks of religion. Brothels is chaos and religion is fate, you know, and it's exactly, you know, and now Blake didn't work out his system of the four living creatures, the four Zoas, as he called them, on the basis of that couplet. That was another take that he could have expanded into a whole universe, but he went a different direction and it had a different quaternity. But yet Blake was so. I mean, what's interesting is that Blake was agnostic, except, you know, he was more. He said, you know, like matter, like matter does. Matter is a superstition. He doesn't say we literally live in an evil material universe created by false gods. It's matter, you know, what we have is vision, not matter. You know, like he said once, what was it? When you look at the sun, do you not see a round disc of fire, somewhat like a guinea, you know, like a gold coin? He says, oh, no, no, I see an innumerable heavenly host crying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts. You know, it's like, so in Other words, he wasn't anti nature like some of the Gnostics were, because he saw nature as all vision, you know, including sexuality and everything we identify with the body and physical life. He saw it as a visionary manifestation of the divine imagination. And so he wasn't a Gnostic in the same. Because the Gnostics would tend to have two attitudes toward the world and toward human life. One was that they would be extreme ascetics to the point where they would sometimes starve themselves to death. I will take no food from this false world. And so they will die. You die to this world and go to the next world. You know, the Cathars were known for practices like that, who were pretty much a Gnostic religion. And then there are. There are other ones who say, well, what we need to do is break all the moral laws of, you know, that are laid down by the evil archons, break all the moral laws and rebel. And so they would try to commit every sort of, you know, they could think of a little bit like Rasputin possibly, you know, could have been, you might say, that kind of Gnostic, I don't know. But Blake was more whole than that, you know, because it was all vision. And so there was nothing that was really left out and there was nothing that was ultimately, ultimately damned. You know, that's why he could write, you know, his first major philosophical work, you might say, was the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. You know, by a heaven, he meant reason. It was a slightly satirical use of the words, you know, by heaven he meant reason, like, you know, the Enlightenment Anglicanism of his time. And by hell he meant, you know, meant energy, you know, as in the creative artist. Well, you know, you can see how the creative artist, you know, gets a certain Luciferian cast, you know, Baudelaire and people like that, you know. But so Blake. Yeah, and Philip K. Dick. I mean, I haven't. I'm not as familiar with him as I wish I was, but, you know, things like. What's that book, the Divine Invasion? You know, the idea that we're still in some way under the Roman Empire and there's a divine invasion which is to free us from the Roman Empire. Well, a lot of the development of Gnosticism might have been influenced by the Roman. The oppressive quality of Rome. You know, Rome, I mean, socially speaking, Rome that had relativized and appropriated all of the gods of its conquered people and installed them as statues in the Pantheon in Rome, could be looked at as, you know, a false universe created by an evil demiurge called Caesar. You know, it's very close. You know, you can see why that Gnosticism might have developed in the Roman Empire in late antiquity.
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B
Well, in your system you're suggesting there are four archons, but they're not necessarily false gods in the way the Gnostics would have thought of it. Because if the true deity is immanent, then they're expressions of the true deity.
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A
Well, they're counterfeit or inverted expressions of the four major manifestations of the true deity, which you can see in like the books of Ezekiel and the Apocalypse is the four living creatures, you know, which Blake called the four Zoas, you know, in one of his prophetic works. And. Yeah, so what you would say one of the, one of the primary true ways of looking at God is as Blake's, the divine imagination, a creative exuberance which creates universe after universe in perfect order, but without imposing an order. So things have to become mechanistic. Things are always free of mechanism, and yet they're superbly harmonious and they're created out of an overflowing of divine exuberance and mercy. You know, that's one true approach to God. But when the ego, the ego's idea of that turns it into an archon, the archon of law, you know, there's only one truth here it is, and it will be imposed upon everything. And because it has divine sanction, and it will be imposed upon everything. And the archon of law will not even look, deign to look upon or hear any back talk from any of the aspects of existence upon which it is imposing this contrived order. It's a false imposed order on everything, you know, and the essence of oppression. So, well, that's what happens when the ego looks at the divine imagination and inverts it, you know, turns it into an arc. So let's say the next one is selfhood. Now selfhood, as I said, is, you know, the rebellious criminal or revolutionary tendency that wants to overthrow all norms, who wants to overthrow that oppressive order of law because law is the way selfhood sees the divine imagination. So, but what's behind selfhood? You know, that's the idea. The only way we can be, you know, self realized, self actualized, is through self assertion, you know, through, you know, like, like Sinatra saying I did it my way, you know, that, you know, that's it. But what that is a counterfeit of, that's the ego's view of the indwelling divinity within human form, you know, the imago dei, the image of God in the human heart or the atma, you know, the divine self, the divine witness which is within all of us and which is the essence of all. But when the ego looks at that, it turns it into. Yeah, right, you know, God. You bet I'm God, you know, and I'm going to prove it, you know, and it becomes, you know, it inverted and it becomes an archon of self. Okay, Then you can get the archon of chaos. And the archon of chaos is the idea that, well, chaos is freedom. The loss of form, the dissolution of all form is the way to freedom, you know, because all form is a limitation and a constriction. So, you know, just, you know, blow it all away. I mean, that was very big in. In hippie counterculture, of course, as all of them were. Ultimately. See, a lot of this came. My understanding of this came from the. The breakup of the counterculture, where things were going in these different directions because some transcendent center of things was being lost. And one of the ways the hippies lost it was through believing in chaos, which is, you know, all form is constriction and oppression. Therefore, to the degree that form of any kind can be dissolved, you're free. Well, that's great, except what kind of a life does that create? It does not create a life of freedom. It creates a life of desperation, addiction, and God knows what. But, you know, but what's behind chaos? You know, what's behind chaos is profound attraction of all things to the truth. You know, the melting of the heart, the melting of. Of all resistances to the profound longing to be united with God, united with truth. And that's one way you could define the Hindu concept of shakti. You know, is that power that comes from the truth and manifests the universe. And then, you know, when the turn happens, longs to return to the source of truth and a deep longing, you know, that's what's really behind chaos. And you can see, you know, if the symbol of chaos is the brothel, you can see both aspects of that. You can see just total dissolution and chaos, you know, and self indulgence. But you can see, you know, a longing for love which is not going to be fulfilled in that form, but it's real, you know, it's a real longing. And then the last one is fate. And fate is the hardest one to figure out. Fate. If law has to do with the imposition of an artificial order, and most likely a humanly created artificial order, fate is the inevitability of what must be according to Something like natural law, you know, this is what must be, you know, don't question it, don't inquire into it, because it's shrouded in mystery. But this is what must be, you know. And it's like, so what must be in time is the ego's counterfeit or veil over a deeper faculty or function which is, you know, what is an eternity, what must be in terms of necessary being, you know, it is because it must be. It's what the Tao Te Ching calls the always. So there is the always, so there is the truth. But when that truth is veiled, when what must be in the eternal sense is veiled, then that becomes what's going to have to happen in time. But you'll never know that in time. It'll always surprise you, it'll always spring itself on you and you'll say, damn, that same thing happened over and over again and I missed it again. And that quality of. And fate also. It's like what Wilhelm Reich called compulsive morality. You know, it's not law, it's morality. It determines fate, determines who is the right kind of person and who is not. Not whether you broke an explicit rule, but are you that, you know, what kind of person are you? Oh, that's one of those people, you know. And that whole zodiac of social stereotypes is under the archon of fate. So in a certain sense the whole system can be resolved to fate in a way. Because, you know, what actually is, is hidden. And so these four archons suddenly spring into existence and they have to do what they have to do. Law has to be oppressive and apply artificial order and selfhood has to be rebellious and self assertive. And chaos has to dive into the longing for destruction of all forms. And fate has to be fate, you know. And so what I saw is this is the way things go wrong on every level. On the social level, on the psychic level, psychological level, and on the metaphysical level. And these are four basic misperceptions of the nature of God that, you know, all of our problems come from. You could say one of the points.
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B
That you make is that each of these, I'll call them archons for convenience, one converts into the other. You start out with law and it's inevitable there's going to be a rebellion against the imposition of an arbitrary law. Once you're rebelling against a massive social order, chaos will ensue.
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A
Yes, et cetera, et cetera. And this is important to know because it appears when you look at these different, I mean, There are people who in their basic character will identify with one or another of these qualities. We all know them. We know the, you know, the conservative commentator in the suit and tie who identifies with law. We know that type. You know, we know the crazy, you know, drug taking lunatic, you know, identifies with chaos. We know the, you know, the sort of snow queen type woman who, who imposes fates and social identities upon others. You are that kind of person, so that's what's going to happen to you. You are this kind of person, so that's what's going to happen to you. We know that kind of person and we also know the rebellious revolutionary and, or criminal type who is all for self assertion. And people think these are real alternatives. If people feel oppressed by law, they will say, well, then the right thing to do is to go into selfhood and become rebellious revolutionary. What else are you going to do? Or if you kind of give up, the right thing is to sink into chaos and just fall apart because you don't feel the oppressiveness of law. But hey, these aren't really real alternatives because they're all working together. They're in collusion with one another. And so you can see how like each will turn into another. You know, I mean, I did a, you know, sort of a detailed section about that. Well, like you were saying about law, you know, law calls for rebel, you know, oppressive law calls for rebellion, and so it becomes rebellion. It's like the, you know, the revolutionary leader who overthrows the dictator in South America and then sits in the president's chair. Now, now you're law. Or now law is selfhood. In other words, it's, you know, the line is blurred. Or as I said, you know, powerful oligarchs and, and political leaders will turn at one point to astrologers and fortune tellers to support their. Because if they feel that their power is shaky, that they want to go to the local witch who will tell them everything's going to be okay, or give them a fetish that will protect them or something, or et cetera, et cetera, they will turn into each other.
- [41:18]
B
Well, wouldn't you agree, however, that there are many great philosophers like Spinoza and other spiritual teachers who say that if you accept your fate, whatever it is, that that's a pathway toward enlightenment.
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A
Well, accepting your fate isn't, you know, I mean, rebelling against fate is certainly not going to work. That I'll agree with that, you know, but, but it's, it's. What do you mean by your fate? If you Understand your, your fate, your destiny as providence, then you know you will gladly accept it because you know this, this is, this is what God has willed for me. And God is always right, you know, but it's not always easy to feel that, you know. And when you don't feel how your destiny is, is Providence, you will tend in your rebellion against your destiny, you will tend to generate the fate archon and feel that there is a power there that's thwarting you and is tricking you, and you have to overcome it somehow. So that's what happens when the ego intervenes and makes it difficult or impossible for you to accept your destiny as providence, so it becomes an inimical fate.
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B
In other words, I think what you're saying is that people, after they've rebelled against the social order and created enormous chaos in their own life, they may say, oh, this is my fate, I'm going to accept it, without realizing the role that they had in contributing to it.
- [43:09]
A
That's the wrong way of accepting faith. It's a beaten resignation. If you accept your fate with a beaten resignation, that's not going to do you any good any more than rebelling against it is going to do you any good. The veil of the ego has to be pardoned so you can see the form of what's happening. If you see the form of what's happening and how that's perfectly necessary and harmonious in line with truth, then it goes without saying that you will accept it because you see your place in it. But if you don't see that, then these archons develop and you start struggling with one against the other, et cetera, et cetera.
- [43:50]
B
So in other words, what you're suggesting in terms of Gnosticism, which I think you do regard as a heresy, but in spite of that, it has valid arguments about the nature of society that we need to pay attention to. But maybe not quite in the same way as the early Gnostics did.
- [44:14]
A
Well, yeah, of course we don't know, you know, we don't have the direct teachings of the Gnostic teachers. We have, we have their writings. And you never know whether the writings were taken literally. We have to take them literally because it says, you know, once upon a time this eon did this and this archon was generated. It's okay, it looks like that this is just an alternative literal creation steward, but maybe that was their way of talking about the kind of stuff I'm talking about. But we can't know. We can't know that because we don't have their teachings, you know, direct human teachings, so. But in any case, you know. Yeah, because we have to. We have to accept how alienated people feel from the world and human life now. You know, we can't just ignore that. You know, it's not going to do people any good to take that literally because that just, you know, fixes the problem. I mean, petrifies the problem in such a way that it can't be solved. But, you know, we can't ignore it either because there's a terrible alienation that people feel.
- [45:45]
B
We started out by talking about traditionalism, and it seems to me that the traditionalists, amongst the many things that they say, the one important thing I believe they're saying is that there is such a thing as an authentic spiritual path and it can be known and it can be pursued.
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A
Yes.
- [46:10]
B
At the same time, you say the traditionalist movement is sort of past its prime. It's dying out. I wanted to ask you if you were perhaps. Do you consider yourself a member of the third generation of traditionalists?
- [46:25]
A
Well, if anyone says that about me, I won't disagree. It's just, you know, the traditionalists became. I mean, unfortunately, their view was as follows. Only a few will understand these principles, and we are those few. And so we are the club. And either you're in the club or you're not in the club, you know, and most people weren't in the club. So they said, the hell with this club. You know, which is understandable. You know, it was. There was a certain freezing of these ideas because the idea, these are. Because they truly exquisitely expressed metaphysical principles like few writers have ever done. So they said, now we got it. That's perfect. Okay, stop. You know, no one else, you know, no longer taking applications. That's it. And of course, to the degree to which they. They spurned the world in a negative sense, you know, other people, those poor. I always remember reminded of a friend of mine, who James Wetmore, actually, who was my publisher, you know, with a lot of my books. He was once sitting with a major member of that school, Martin Lings, on the steps of, you know, the British British Museum, British Library in London. And he was sitting with Lyngs, and Lyngs was looking down to the madding crowd and he looked over them and he said, lost. All lost. So there you got it, you know, I mean, if they're all lost, we're all lost. No reason why should we listen to you anymore. So that's what happened to the school. Yet the principles so many of them are eternally valid and I will always hold to them. So if that makes me a third generation or fourth or whatever traditionalist, so be it.
- [48:33]
B
Well, it does suggest that the traditionalist movement still has a lot of juice, so to speak, but it needs some correction, some modifications, some addressing of the present situation.
- [48:48]
A
There are a number of intellectuals working today who I believe many of them went through a traditionalist or a perennialist period and learned from them. But they don't have that aloofness. You know, they're really engaging with situations with the human condition as it is today in a very creative way, such that the older traditionalists, you know, never believed they could. You know, they didn't feel, strangely enough, they wanted a mass audience because they published books and we all would like to have a mass audience. And yet they didn't believe the mass would understand them, you know, but. And the people I'm thinking of, particularly Jonathan Peugeot, is really an important guy now. I mean, he just, he has a YouTube channel called the Symbolic World. And, you know, he went through the Perennialists. At one point he said the Perennialists saved him from basically a secular modernist worldview, you know, and then he saw problems with them and a lot of people did, you know, they said, boy, these people were so important to me. But then I couldn't go along with a lot of this stuff, you know, and that's a very common, common response. Actually, he reminded me that I was the one that introduced him to James Kutzinger, who was a Christian of the traditionalist perennialist school, Eastern Orthodox and later Byzantine Catholic. And so I'd forgotten that. But Jonathan Pichot is one. Richard Rohlin, John Vervecki, Paul Kingsnorth, maybe Rupert Sheldrake. Up to Rupert Sheldrake started out as a guy, just thought, well, this is a guy with a crazy theory which is very interesting. Moral morphogenetic fields, well, the whole Hundred Monkeys thing, whatever that was, you know, And I thought, interesting, you know, but now I see. And you see, he's actually learning this now quite late in life. You know, he says, I'm reading, you know, the Divine Comedy for the first time and he's dialoguing with people about what that is, you know. And so he's becoming a sage of a wider angle than he started out, not rejecting his earlier conceptions, but there's a list of people and Ian McGilchrist who you would identify with. Well, he's the right brain, left brain guy. But starting from that point of view, he becomes a very wide Angle and intelligent sage, you know, that addresses a lot of issues, you know, so he does. He's not just like Sheldrake. He's not just another guy with a, you know, a semi crank theory which turns out to be very interesting. You know, he. Much more than that. So these are the people. Jordan Peterson opened the door for all these people. Jordan Peterson was like a berserker who was coming into, you know, public prominence, a lot of it through YouTube and a lot of. I know these people mostly from YouTube. You know, a lot of, you know, in YouTube, there were not a lot of people saying this kind of stuff when he was starting out. And so he sort of smashed himself against the opposing, you know, worldview, which is, you know, pretty much of ultra liberalism. But, you know, you could just see he was so keyed up, so tense, you know, because he was like the Norse berserkers. He ran out naked, you know, in a battle fury, you know, carrying nothing but a sword and to mow down a hundred of the enemy before he was finally felled, you know, and, you know, as a super, you know, psychological shock troop for a new, necessary way of thinking. Not that it has never become dogmatic, and we hope it never will, but, you know, he opened the door to all these other people I was talking about. He was the guy. And I don't know where he is now. He seems to have been captured by a strange group of people who I'm not too terribly clear on, but I do not. The various things he's said recently have not, you know, have not warmed my heart, put it that way. But these guys, a lot of these people really, I mean, Jonathan Petrochot knows everything that Joseph Campbell knew and everything that Carl Jung knew and everything that Petrov Schuan knew, you might say. But he carries it so organically and lightly and speaks of it as if it's second nature, you know, and so he is intellectually responsive like few other people. Although that list is. I mean, you know, Ali Lakhani is still doing his journal, Sacred Web, which is now, you know, online. I don't know if there's a hardcover hard copy still coming out. So, yeah, it continues. But Churchill Schoen took the wind out of a lot of the sails, of them, because he was the most brilliant of all of them, without doubt. I mean, just you read page after page and say this incredible brilliance, and then once in a while and then you run into something and said, that's ridiculous. You know, there would be these, you know, he Hit nine perfect notes and then the sour note. Oh, you know. But, you know, he really did some amazing things. But he believed that he was a Sufi master. If he just stayed as a philosopher, he would have been great. But he thought of himself as this. And maybe he was capable of fulfilling that role up to a point. But he ran into a lot of problems. There's a lot of spiritual leaders do, you know. So anyway. But the people I've mentioned, most of those are Christians. John Vervaeke is a Buddhist. And if there's any successor movement to the older traditionalists, I would say it's them. And they would not all. Some of them will credit the traditionalists, perennialists. Some of them will say, well, that was a sin of my youth. I don't do that anymore. But they all learned from the traditionalists, a lot of them, or whether they learned personally. The traditionalists opened up certain areas that became, you know, that made certain kinds of dialogue and speculation possible across the board. And, you know, they did wonderful work in that regard. My mind drifts back over the 60s and 70s in processing every religious viewpoint or psychic possibility that there was. What does one make out of those? I'm still a little at loose ends from all of the input I took.
- [56:45]
B
But it's made you the person you are today.
- [56:49]
A
Well, whoever that may be. But Jonathan Pigeot, I just see, you know, it's all organically united in him. You know, it's got an inevitability to it, which gives him a kind of ease and facility in so many different modes of expression that somebody like Jordan Peterson doesn't have, who is always just on the edge of cracking. You can tell. So in any way, you know, how can my system be used? Well, if people can assimilate it, you know, because I just saw as the counterculture of the 60s was breaking up in the 70s, it was separating into these archives. I said, wait a minute. There used to be unity here in which all. Now it was a weird, you know, unity which was not destined to last. Everything was thrown together, you know, and, you know, just add lsd. And so everything becomes one in a certain sense, temporarily. But, you know, there was, you know, an approach to a real understanding of something profoundly transcendent. And then people separated into their different tribes, you know. And I remember I was living up in Canada, and I was, you know, sending letters to, you know, I was saying, God, it's all falling apart. We need to get together. You know, I sent a letter to Ram Dass and a letter to Eldridge Cleaver. I said, can't you guys talk, you know, can't we have a conference where, you know, the different fragments of this consensus, you know, can come together again? Well, you know, as they say about Humpty Dumpty, you can't do that, you know. You know, and. But, you know, so that was. I had to make sort of for my own sanity, I had to make sense of how things were breaking up, you know, and how it was the ego in its most primary form intervening to veil spiritual truth once again on the collective level.
- [59:06]
B
Well, Charles, I'm very pleased to be able to share your traditionalist perspective on Gnosticism and your Gnostic with the New Thinking Allowed audience. And once again, I'm very grateful that you're able to spend time with me and with our audience.
- [59:26]
A
Well, I'm always glad to be here. I mean, and what a mystery. Who knows who's listening and what they think? I'll never really know. But it's what needs to happen now.
- [59:40]
B
So thank you so much for being with me today.
- [59:44]
A
Glad to be here once again.
- [59:47]
B
And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
- [60:18]
A
Book four in the new Thinking Allowed dialogue series is Charles T. Tart 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.
- [60:32]
B
New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs. You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org for early access to our videos and livestream events. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter at New Thinking.