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Chapter One
The Eternal Quest
The hope of mankind today lies in the great undiscovered depths within. The time is at hand when men everywhere must forsake the fruitless search of the world at the circumference of being and embark upon a courageous quest into inner space. It is a very real world, and its depths can be sounded, its potency released. It is not a conquest but a bequest. It is not as much something within man as it is the deeper level of man. "Come, ye blessed . . ., inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world" (Matt. 25:34).
The history of man on the eternal quest has been a strange odyssey. In his search for the "holy grail" man has looked everywhere and in vain, but be has failed to look within himself. Occasionally, a prophet came, telling of the world within. But instead of following him into the deeper experience, men invariably made a god of the prophet—worshiped him and built monuments to him. They then trapped themselves in a religious practice that had no within. How many times has this happened? How many religions are there in the world?
The pages of history tell and retell the story of mystic teachers who found it and of the ensuing religions that lost it. And the earth is dotted with monuments that tell of inner-space flights that never quite got off the ground.
Yet somehow man has always known with Walt Whitman that not all of him is included between his bat and his boots. He has felt, with Wordsworth,
A sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And theblue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things.
There is a strange paradox in the world today. The pressing social problems—warfare, the struggle for equality between races, and the exploding population and lagging production of foods—are framed between two contrasting spectacles: (1) the research and exploration into outer space, and (2) the psychedelic "trips" into the inner depths of consciousness. The one, meticulously scientific; the other, about as unscientific as you can get.
Both of these activities may well be symbolic of a sense of frustration with the world of today—an attempt to "stop the world, I want to get off." And the amazing thing is that both of these completely unrelated and contrasting quests may well have deep spiritual implications.
For one thing, space research has enabled man to achieve a breakthrough into another dimension. The more he sees of the Universe around him, the more he realizes that space and time are relative, and that the whole cosmos is like a great thought in the Mind of God. He begins to see that the Universe exists, as far as he is concerned, because he sees it. The center of the Universe, as far as you are concerned, is within you. As far as you are concerned, the Universe exists as an extension of you. The sun and moon and stars are there because you see them.
In Zen Buddhism this point is made in the image of the "moon and the water." The moon-in-the-water phenomenon is likened to human experience. The water is the subject, and the moon the object. When there is no water, there is no moon-in-the-water, and likewise when there is no moon. But when the moon rises, the water does not wait to receive its image, and when even the tiniest drop of water is poured out, the moon does not wait to cast its reflection. But the water does not receive the moon's image on purpose. The event is caused as much by the water as by the moon and, as the water manifests the brightness of the moon, the moon manifests the clarity of the water.
Viewing the vastness of the Universe, we tend to become confused when we seem to be losing our identity. But we must remember that the Universe has meaning because we have meaning, and we have meaning because the Universe has meaning. All discovery is self-discovery and all knowledge is self-knowledge. Thus the greatest discovery in science is not the outward accomplishments, but the inward revelation and the Truth that sets us free to take the outer step.
Nations today may be pouring billions into the hardware needed for outer-space flights, but it is seldom realized that this is all being made possible because of the discoveries within matter, which are actually spiritual discoveries. We have come to know that matter, in the sense of something occupying space, does not exist. We can no longer view the Universe as a vast collection of nebulae, stars, and planets scattered about in empty space. All through the universe there are "force potentials." What we have called "space" is really a presence, for there is one continuous, unified, intelligent, and inexhaustible potential that here and there precipitates itself as that which we call matter.
Thus the ultimate of our research into the Universe around us must come in the knowledge of the Mind that sustains it, the Mind in which it actually has its only existence. And the study of Mind can only be done through introspection, self-contemplation, and spiritual research. In the words of Tennyson:
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
The other activity that along with space research is forming a frame around the world's serious problems is that of the group, perhaps only caricatured by the "hippies," attempting to forsake the decadent civilization of contemporary times by psychedelic flights into the world within. Much has been written on the subject of LSD and the newer STP—the so-called "consciousness-expanding" drugs. On the one hand, Dr. Timothy Leary leads a group who insist that the drugs are here to stay and that it is but a matter of time until everyone will be having his religious experiences synthetically...
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