In his Afterword to Paul the Sower Allan Brown takes up the question of just how a present-day reader, stimulated by the Apostle's epistles, might experience that living in Christ to which Paul testifies again and again. The answer is terse. "This matter of method," Brown asserts, "has never been committed openly to writing."1
This is in part because, no matter how well-honed our craft, speech acts lose something when mapped to written words. Speech acts assume multiple and simultaneous channels of communication, hearing of tone and pacing and much more besides linguistic utterance. They manifest states and embody manners of being. An entire discipline, Pragmatics, studies this.
To this Mr. Brown adds in "Of Time's Ruins Build Mansions in Eternity" that verbal and written utterances, by their very nature, articulate relationships and thus cannot transmit that upon which such relationships are founded. Insights of such uncommon and telling simplicity are found throughout these essays.
The lure and entrapments of language constitute a topic frequently returned to in Mr. Brown's essays. If that, or even the insights of Pragmatics, were Mr. Brown's chief topic, its value would be similar to that of any other quasi-academic essay concerning language. Here, however, that topic is but a shoal beside the deeper waters of Mr. Brown's chief communicative concern. He captures it best, I think, in his final essay, "Thinking in Forms."
If, like myself, one associates 'forms' with dialogs of Plato studied in college, this term may be burdened with preconceptions that have little to do with what Mr. Brown (and, quite likely, Plato) intend by it. Here's a suggestion: If the term 'form-thought' merely brings to mind boundaries or abstractions, try thinking of the phenomenon as 'three-dimensional-thought' or 'being-thought'.
Zen Buddhism has a famous riddle (koan) in which two monastics, at different times but both at the end of their ropes, ask their teacher, "Does [even] a dog have an authentic and perfect Buddha Nature?" To one the teacher replies, "Yes!", to the other "No!" "Thinking in Forms" explains not only why the responses are not capricious but, more importantly, why any helpful response to this question can never be a verbally expressible (printable, two-dimensional) thought but must be (in Mr. Brown's lexicon) a form-thought.
In every tradition, spiritual or other, that fosters individual experiences beyond those fixed in written language, the intersecting roles of mentor and student inevitably focus on essentially nonverbal relations. It could not be otherwise when these traditions have arisen, in part, to address the disharmony cultivated by societies that privilege story-telling over immediate experience. In Western cultures, ordinary negative emotions, for example, rely on story-telling.
Consistent with his assertion in Paul the Sower, then, Mr. Brown, in his Writings, does not provide bulleted lists of methods. Rather he provides pointers to key experiences and implicitly challenges readers to connect the dots for themselves. To aid us in making those connections, Mr. Brown writes succinctly, sometimes aphoristically. Make no mistake, though, these brief pieces are pregnant with profound and practical insights, couched intentionally in rhetorically neutral language.
The proprietor of this site thanks the CSA Press of Lakemont, Georgia for their kind permission to republish these writings.
1Had he been writing in the twenty-first century instead of 1932, Mr. Brown might have put this somewhat differently. There is hardly a shortage of published texts on methods today, including even descriptions of beginning exercises that Mr. Brown's teacher, Gurdjieff, assigned to this or that individual student.