Annotation by Mary Brown: A serious and responsive student, an Englishwoman, at one time a follower of Gurdjieff and now a follower of the Greek Orthodox church.
As soon as I saw him1, I felt kindred vibrations. Nietzsche has said, "Fellowship in joy, not sympathy in sorrow, is what makes friends." That may be true of "making" but empathy goes further.
Many of the Greek Orthodox have great understanding; I have in mind the saint depicted in The Brothers Karamazov[,] also the monk on Mount Athos who said sin was the lack of love.
Your letter raises many questions [for] which there are no words to answer. Only inner experience will tell. We are on the holy planet Purgatory now if we have made the choice.2 Judgement day is now. Most negative views of the planetary situation are due to measuring time by our lives instead of by the aeons of evolutionary time. I am optimistic for many reasons besides the one you mention[,] with which I agree.3 I name only one: I believe that creation and destruction are not contraries but two ends of the same stick held together by the ultimate reconciling principle, known by many names, for instance by the Hindus as Brahma, by Boehme as the Grund.
We are sending you a Quaker pamphlet4 and hope to be able to talk to you in the not too distant future.
I do hope your husband is making some headway with his changed treatment. O, these difficulties! But after all man was made to encounter and overcome difficulties. If we do not have them, we wallow without striving in self-satisfaction.
What you say about the Creator and the Destroyer is true generally. Good and Evil are merely human categories in no way corresponding to reality. They are two ends of the same stick to be rendered whole by the reconciling force. In view of your interest in the Russian Orthodox church I am sending you an article on Mt. Athos; I was particularly interested in the hermit's definition of sin.
That "becoming the object" is Martin Buber's doctrine. It is the actual realization of unity.
Watts is an unusually good expositor. I am impressed with Zen, also with Taoism.
Hope to see you soon. Here or in Highlands or somewhere. Your husband sends wavicles here.
Thank you for your letter. Give my solicitous regards to your husband and assure him that I have never thought to hold it against him that he does not write. He is my letters.
I have a number of books on Sufism but not the one you mention.
Gurdjieff studied with the Sufis but did not copy them. Their doctrine[s] have a similarity because ONE PRINCIPLE fills immensity. G taught only what had come to him from direct experience. That he talks about the NEW MAN does not mean that he was copying the apostle Paul.
You are quite right about the angry young men and the theatre of the absurd. "Mary Poppins" is from a book by Pamela Travers. She was a student under Orage, my old teacher, and very close to the Gurdjieff initiates.
Martin Buber is one of my stalwarts. He is not a Sufi but a Hasidic Jew. Goethe was more influenced by Sufism. Let me know what you learn in England.
How is your dear husband? I should be anxious about him but I know that his real self will be carrying on the future of us all wherever he is.
As to the deaths you mention, they will not interfere with the cosmic process. Their work will go on and perhaps be accentuated, for death is a part of life. Socrates, Jesus, Sir Francis Bacon and Shakespeare are dead.
I have enjoyed much your So Great [a] Mystery.5 I note particularly an excellent discussion of Mohammedanism and Sufism.
The state of the world is too much for me to discuss on paper. I do not speculate but live in a state of holy insecurity with entire confidence in the ultimate operations of the Ground of Being. The lack of incentive in the working man is no argument against socialism. The Roman Catholic church is becoming broader. I always thought the Greek church was nearer the spirituality of early Christianity.
I am a great admirer of Simone Weil. I never heard of Pinter. Please tell me more about him and his plays.
I am glad you could use that [clipping about] Epiphany that I sent you. My dentist, who is a Greek, told me that the boy who recovered the cross was the son of a friend of his, that his elder brother recovered it last year and that his father recovered it when he was a boy. Epiphany, of course, is an inner thing which cannot be put into words[—]but we always attempt it. The best description of Epiphany to my mind is given by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. I send another [clipping,] this time from Tarpon Springs, "The Sanctification of the Waters," and I hope it will be of interest to you.
If C[,] in his search for truth, is missing something, he will have to find that out from inside himself. It cannot be added from the outside.
Tolstoy says, "The kingdom of heaven is within you." For this statement he has eminent authority.6
Thank you for your report on the shows in New York. I am very much interested in Don Quixote and have very strong views on this work. I shall talk to you about it sometime.7 As to the so-called "theater of the absurd" I feel that it is in the nature of parable and means to impart a higher idea. It is indeed "Arcane."
I am glad you got the Maurice Nicoll book.8 Books are really a piece of life if properly digested. I hope I shall be able to discuss these with you.
This is indeed a critical period but every period has some contest between materialism and real being. We should be glad that we are alive just now because we who understand may be able to turn the scale.
You have spoken about how much better England is than America. As a matter of fact I think that the problem is individual rather than national. Ultimately it is not a question whether England or America discovers reality, but rather the position each individual takes for himself. It does not make any difference whether the individual is English, American or Zulu.
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