Miscellaneous Correspondence

Annotation by Mary Brown: A gentle Bradenton Quaker worker.

The Subud procedure seems to me to be a case where the individual relied upon the words of another person rather than upon his own experience so that at the time we saw you I really wanted to know more about the movement. However, not long afterward, my friend Bennett, whom I had revered highly, became a Roman Catholic and I have not followed Subud anymore.¹

Annotation by Mary Brown: An old friend, a biologist.

I am not much of a biologist, but I believe, with you, that nothing can be achieved except by studying the whole rather than the parts. I call your attention to a book you probably know about now, New Paths in Biology by Adolf Portmann, Harper & Bro., publishers.²

Annotation by Mary Brown: Responsive new friends.

Thank you for sending me the article on Bishop P[ike]. I have been much interested in him from his early years. The first thing I got of his was entitled "How to Love a Man If You Do Not Even Like Him." I agree with his unorthodoxy but I feel that he although very acute in many ways has not understood the New Theology completely. He says he believes in a personal God but the Ground of Being is such a mystery that anything you can say about God is wrong. It is recorded that at one time a woman who wanted to support her daughter in the faith brought her around to William Blake and asked him if he believed that Jesus was the son of God. He answered, "Of course I do" and then he spoiled it by adding, "And so are you and so am I." I have come to the conclusion that Bishop P in using his undoubted intellectual activity and insight is working not for the work's sake but for his own advantage. If Bishop P had had any reality within him he would have let his son see not by precept but by example that there was a meaning to life. I may be all wrong in this and I shall be very glad to talk it over with you if you wish.

I was much disappointed to find that The Gospel According to Peanuts was not written by the creator of PEANUTS. Mary said that she thought it was rather heavy-handed. This is quite true but the author did as well as any ecclesiastic (or anybody) could do in trying to formulate reality in words. Jesus spoke only in parables and Schultz in comic strips. The reality can be seen behind if one has eyes to see.

Annotation by Mary Brown: A Gurdjieff student through Allan.

You are quite right. Orage used to tell me that the main difference between animals and so-called 'homo sapiens' was that animals do not know they are going to die but act as if they did; man knows that he is going to die and acts as if he didn't. As a matter of fact, death is a part of life and, as you say, that fact must be accepted. Meanwhile, we must live our life to the full. The way to the normal is through the abnormal. More and more, we must learn to control our physical tendencies, among which may be named the fear of death, so by such control we may be able to lay ourselves open to the direct influence of His Endlessness and become a cell in the mind of God, or an infinitesimal part of the great wholeness. Otherwise, death ends everything.

¹ John G. Bennett was a British philosopher, practical executive, and student of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky who, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, did much to spread the Subud movement to the West from Indonesia. A core practice of Subud is the latihan, no doubt "the procedure" to which Mr. Brown refers.

² Adolf Portmann was a Swiss zoologist whose chief study was marine animals but whose special interest was a "big picture" view of his field, as suggested by the title of his posthumously published Essays in Philosophical Zoology. It was surely this latter side of his intelligence that particularly interested Mr. Brown.