I Inside Information
Just what should a young man or woman know in order to be "in the know"?
Is there, in other words, some inside information, some special taboo,
some real lowdown on life and existence that most parents and teachers
either don't know or won't tell?
In Japan it was once customary
to give young people about to be married a "pillow book." This was a
small volume of wood-block prints, often colored, showing all the details
of sexual intercourse. It wasn't just that, as the Chinese say, "one
picture is worth ten thousand words." It was also that it spared parents
the embarrassment of explaining these intimate matters face-to-face.
But today in the West you can get such information at any newsstand
Sex is no longer a serious taboo. Teenagers sometimes know more about
it than adults.
But if sex is no longer the
big taboo, what is? For there is always something taboo, something repressed
unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye
because a direct look is too unsettling Taboos lie within taboos, like
the skins of an onion. What, then, would be The Book which fathers might
slip to their sons and mothers to their daughters without ever admitting
it openly?
In some circles there is a
strong taboo on religion, even in circles where people go to church
or read the Bible. Here, religion is one's own private business. It
is bad form or uncool to talk or argue about it, and very bad indeed
to make a big show of piety. Yet when you get in on the inside of almost
any standard- brand religion, you wonder what on earth the hush was
about. Surely The Book I have in mind wouldn't be the Bible, "the Good
Book"--that fascinating anthology of ancient wisdom, history, and fable
which has for so long been treated as a Sacred Cow that it might well
be locked up for a century or two 80 that men could hear it again with
clean ears. There are indeed secrets in the Bible, and some very subversive
ones, but they are all so muffled up in complications, in archaic symbols
and ways of thinking, that Chris tianity has become incredibly difficult
to explain to a modern person. That is, unless you are content to water
it down to being good and trying to imitate Jesus, but no one ever explains
just how to do that. To do it you must have a particular power from
God known as "grace," but all that we really know about grace is that
some get it and some don't.
The standard-brand religions,
whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are--as now
practiced--like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. With some exceptions
not too easily found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery,
their rites, and their notions of the good life don't seem to fit in
with the universe as we now know it, or with a human world that is changing
so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete
on graduation day.
The Book I'm thinking about
would not be religious in the usual sense, but it would have to discuss
many things with which religions have been concerned--the universe and
man's place in it, the mysterious center of experience which we call
"I myself," the problems of life and love, pain and death, and the whole
question of whether existence has meaning in any sense of the word.
For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in
a trap: living organisms, including people, are merely tubes which put
things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps
them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce
going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things
in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even
develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that
they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow As and when
they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling
in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in
and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight
with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached
appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they
manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague
rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious
competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this
seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it,
it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely
odd.
It is a special kind of enlightenment
to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is
odd--uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that
it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which
do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed
at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if
they don't. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense
wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this
colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously
curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species
playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of "doing
it" from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom
to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?
Ludwig Wittgenstein and other
modern "logical" philosophers have tried to suppress this question by
saying that it has no meaning and ought not to be asked. Most philosophical
problems are to be solved by getting rid of them, by coming to the point
where you see that such questions as "Why this universe?" are a kind
of intellectual neurosis, a misuse of words in that the question sounds
sensible but is actually as meaningless as asking "Where is this universe?"
when the only things that are anywhere must be somewhere inside the
universe. The task of philosophy is to cure people of such nonsense,
Wittgenstein, as we shall see, had a point there. Nevertheless wonder
is not a disease. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts,
are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from
other animals and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.
Is there, then, some kind
of a lowdown on this astounding scheme of things, something that never
really gets out through the usual channels for the Answer--the historic
religions and philosophies? There is. It has been said again and again,
but in such a fashion that we, today, in this particular civilization
do not hear it. We do not realize that it is utterly subversive, not
so much in the political and moral sense, as in that it turns our ordinary
view of things, our common sense, inside out and upside down. It may
of course have political and moral consequences, but as yet we have
no clear idea of what they may be. Hitherto this inner revolution of
the mind has been confined to rather isolated individuals; it has never,
to my knowledge, been widely characteristic of communities or societies.
It has often been thought too dangerous for that. Hence the taboo.
But the world is in an extremely
dangerous situation, and serious diseases often require the risk of
a dangerous cure--like the Pasteur serum for rabies. It is not that
we may simply blow up the planet with nuclear bombs, strangle ourselves
with overpopulation, destroy our natural resources through poor conservation,
or ruin the soil and its products with improperly understood chemicals
and pesticides. Beyond all these is the possibility that civilization
may be a huge technological success, but through methods that most people
will find baffling, frightening, and disorienting--because, for one
reason alone, the methods will keep changing. It may be like playing
a game in which the rules are constantly changed without ever being
made clear--a game from which one cannot withdraw without suicide, and
in which one can never return to an older form of the game.
But the problem of man and
technics is almost always stated in the wrong way. It is said that humanity
has evolved one-sidedly, growing in technical power without any comparable
growth in moral integrity, or, as some would prefer to say, without
comparable progress in education and rational thinking. Yet the prob
lem is more basic. The root of the matter is the way in which we feel
and conceive ourselves as human beings, our sensation of being alive,
of individual existence and identity. We suffer from a hallucination,
from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living
organisms- Most of us have the sensation that "I myself" is a separate
center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical
body--a center which "confronts an "external" world of people and things,
making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange.
Everyday figures of speech reflectt this illusion. "I came into this
world." "You must face reality." "The conquest of nature."
This feeling of being lonely
and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction
to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the
sciences. We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves
from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual
is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the
total universe. This fact is rarely, if ever, experienced by most individuals.
Even those who know it to be true in theory do not sense or feel it,
but continue to be aware of themselves as isolated "egos" inside bags
of skin.
The first result of this illusion
is that our attitude to the world "outside" us is largely hostile. We
are forever "conquering" nature, space, mountains, deserts, bacteria,
and insects instead of learning to cooperate with them in a harmonious
order. In America the great symbols of this conquest are the bulldozer
and the rocket--the instrument that batters the hills into flat tracts
for little boxes made of ticky-tacky and the great phallic projectile
that blasts the sky. (Nonetheless, we have fine architects who know
how to fit houses into hills without ruining the landscape, and astronomers
who know that the earth is already way out in space, and that our first
need for exploring other worlds is sensitive electronic instruments
which, like our eyes, will bring the most distant objects into our own
brains.)1 [Click the BACK button on your browser to
return from notes to where you were reading.] The hostile attitude
of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things
and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension
of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from
which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends.
The second result of feeling
that we are separate minds in an alien, and mostly stupid, universe
is that we have no common sense, no way of making sense of the world
upon which we are agreed in common. It's just my opinion against yours,
and therefore the most aggressive and violent (and thus insensitive)
propagandist makes the decisions. A muddle of conflicting opinions united
by force of propaganda is the worst possible source of control for a
powerful technology.
It might seem, then, that
our need is for some genius to invent a new religion, a philosophy of
life and a view of the world, that is plausible and generally acceptable
for the late twentieth century, and through which every individual can
feel that the world as a whole and his own life in particular have meaning.
This, as history has shown repeatedly, is not enough. Religions are
divisive and quarrelsome. They are a form of one-upmanship because they
depend upon separating the "saved" from the "damned," the true believers
from the heretics, the in-group from the out-group. Even religious liberals
play the game of "we-re-more-tolerant-than-you." Furthermore. as systems
of doctrine, symbolism, and behavior, religions harden into institutions
that must command loyalty, be defended and kept "pure,--and-because
all belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty-religions
must make converts. The more people who agree with us, the less nagging
insecurity about our position. In the end one is committed to being
a Christian or a Buddhist come what may in the form of new knowledge.
New and indigestible ideas have to be wangled into the religious tradition.
however inconsistent with its original doctrines, so that the believer
can still take his stand and assert, "I am first and foremost a follower
of Christ/Mohammed/Buddha, or whomever." Irrevocable commitment to any
religion is not only intellectual suicide; it is positive unfaith because
it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is, above all,
open-ness --an act of trust in the unknown.
An ardent Jehovah's Witness
once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would
certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for
the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy
the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon
one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and
thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and
experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not
real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is
like eating paper currency
Therefore The Book that I
would like to slip to my children would itself be slippery. It would
slip them into a new domain, not of ideas alone, but of experience and
feeling. It would be a temporary medicine. not a diet; a point of departure,
not a perpetual point of reference. They would read it and be done with
it, for if it were well and clearly written they would not have to go
back to it again and again for hidden meanings or for clarification
of obscure doctrines.
We do not need a new religion
or a new bible. We need a new experience--a new feeling of what it is
to be "I." The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound
view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax or, at
best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into
playing-- with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person
is basically willing to be hypnotized The most strongly enforced of
all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really
are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated
ego. I am not thinking of Freud's barbarous Id or Unconscious as the
actual reality behind the facade of personality. Freud, as we shall
see, was under the influence of a nineteenth-century fashion called
"reductionism," a curios need to put down human culture and intelligence
by calling it a fluky by-product of blind and irrational forces. They
worked very hard, then, to prove that grapes can grow on thornbushes.
As is so often the way, what
we have suppressed and overlooked is something startlingly obvious.
The difficulty is that it is so obvious and basic that one canhardly
find the words for it. The Germans call it a Hintergendanke, an apprehension
lying tacitly in the back of our minds which we cannot easily admit,
even to ourselves. The sensation of "I" as a lonely and isolated center
of being is so powerful and commonsensical, and so fundamental to our
modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that
we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the
scheme of the universe. I seem to be a brief light that flashes but
once in all the aeons of time--a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate
organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life
bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam
for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems
impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in
the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the
galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence
"I" am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and
goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow
of energy.
The difficulty in realizing
this to be so is that conceptual thinking cannot grasp it. It is as
if the eyes were trying to look at themselves directly, or as if one
were trying to describe the color of a mirror in terms of colors reflected
in the mirror. Just as sight is something more than all things seen,
the foundation or "ground" of our existence and our awareness cannot
be understood in terms of things that are known. We are forced, therefore,
to speak of it through myth-- that is, through special metaphors, analogies.
and images which say what it is like as distinct from what it is. At
one extreme of its meaning, "myth" is fable, falsehood, or superstition.
But at another, "myth" is a useful and fruitful image by which we make
sense of life in somewhat the same way that we can explain electrical
forces by comparing them with the behavior of water or air. Yet "myth,"
in this second sense, is not to be taken literally, just as electricity
is not to be confused with air or water. Thus in using myth one must
take care not to confuse image with fact, which would be like climbing
up the signpost instead of following the road.
Myth, then, is the form in
which I try to answer when children ask me those fundamental metaphysical
questions which come so readily to their minds: "Where did the world
come from?" "Why did God make the world?" "Where was I before I was
born?" "Where do people go when they die?" Again and again I have found
that they seem to be satisfied with a simple and very ancient story,
which goes something like this:
"There was never a time when
the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and
there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at my watch, which
tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again
and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve
and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping,
living and dying, summer and winter. You can't have any one of these
without the other, because you wouldn't be able to know what black is
unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side
with black.
"In the same way, there are
times when the world is, and times when it isn't, for if the world went
on and on without rest for ever and ever, it would get horribly tired
of itself. It comes and it goes. Now you see it; now you don't. So because
it doesn't get tired of itself, it always comes back again after it
disappears. It's like your breath: it goes in and out, in and out, and
if you try to hold it in all the time you feel terrible. It's also like
the game of hide-and-seek, because it's always fun to find new ways
of hiding, and to seek for someone who doesn't always hide in the same
place.
"God also likes to play hide-and-seek,
but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself
to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he
is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends
that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals,
all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has
strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening.
But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.
"Now when God plays hide and
pretends that he is you and I, he does it so well that it takes him
a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. But that's the
whole fun of it--just what he wanted to do. He doesn't want to find
himself too quickly, for that would spoil the game. That is why it is
so difficult for you and me to find out that we are God in disguise,
pretending not to be himself. But when the game has gone on long enough,
all of us will wake up, stop pretending, and remember that we are all
one single Self--the God who is all that there is and who lives for
ever and ever.
"Of course, you must remember
that God isn't shaped like a person. People have skins and there is
always something outside our skins. If there weren't. we wouldn't know
the difference between what is inside and outside our bodies. But God
has no skin and no shape because there isn't any outside to him. [With
a sufficiently intelligent child, I illustrate this with a Mobius strip--a
ring of paper tape twisted once in such a way that it has only one side
and one edge.] The inside and the outside of God are the same. And though
I have been talking about God as 'he' and not 'she,' God isn't a man
or a woman. I didn't say 'it' because we usually say 'it' for things
that aren't alive.
"God is the Self of the world,
but you can't see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you
can't see your own eyes, and you certainly can't bite your own teeth
or look inside your head. Your self is that cleverly hidden because
it is God hiding.
"You may ask why God sometimes
hides in the form of horrible people, or pretends to be people who suffer
great disease and pain. Remember, first, that he isn't really doing
this to anyone but himself. Remember, too, that in almost all the stories
you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the
thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better
of the bad. It's the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of
the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things
in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good
order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the
cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world."
This story, obviously mythical
in form, is not given as a scientific description of the way things
are. Based on the analogies of games and the drama, and using that much
worn-out word "God" for the Player, the story claims only to be like
the way things are. I use it just as astronomers use the image of inflating
a black balloon with white spots on it for the galaxies, to explain
the expanding universe. But to most children, and many adults, the myth
is at once intelligible, simple, and fascinating. By contrast, so many
other mythical explanations of the world are crude, tortuous, and unintelligible.
But many people think that believing in the unintelligible propositions
and symbols of their religions is the test of true faith. "I believe,"
said Tertullian of Christianity, "because it is absurd."
People who think for themselves do not
accept ideas on this kind of authority. They don't feel commanded to believe in
miracles or strange doctrines as Abraham felt commanded by God to sacrifice his
son Isaac. As T. George Harris put it:
The social hierarchies of the past, where some boss above you always
punished any error, conditioned men to feel a chain of harsh authority reaching
all the way "up there." We don't feel this bond in today's egalitarian freedom.
We don't even have, since Dr. Spock, many Jehovah-like fathers in the human
family. So the average unconscious no longer learns to seek forgiveness from
a wrathful God above.
But, he continues--
Our generation knows a cold hell, solitary confinement in this life,
without a God to damn or save it. Until man figures out the trap and hunts .
. . "the Ultimate Ground of Being," he has no reason at all for his existence.
Empty, finite, he knows only that he will soon die. Since this life has no meaning,
and he sees no future life, he is not really a person but a victim of self-extinction."
2
"The Ultimate Ground of Being"
is Paul Tillich's decontaminated term for God" and would also do for
"the Self of the world" as I put it in my story for children. But the
secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground
of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is
assuming, or "pretending" to be, but that inmost Self which escapes
inspection because it's always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo
of taboos you re IT!
Yet in our culture this is
the touchstone of insanity, the blackest of blasphemies, and the wildest
of delusions. This, we believe, is the ultimate in megalo- mania--an
inflation of the ego to complete absurdity. For though we cultivate
the ego with one hand, we knock it down with the other. From generation
to generation we kick the stuffing out of our children to teach them
to "know their place" and to behave, think, and feel with proper modesty
as befits one little ego among many. As my mother used to say, "You're
not the only pebble on the beach." Anyone in his right mind who believes
that he is God should be crucified or burned at the stake, though now
we take the more charitable view that no one in his right mind could
believe such nonsense. Only a poor idiot could conceive himself as the
omnipotent ruler of the world, and expect everyone else to fall down
and worship.
But this is because we think
of God as the King of the Universe, the Absolute Technocrat who personally
and consciously controls every detail of his cosmos-- and that is not
the kind of God in my story. In fact, it isn't my story at all, for
any student of the history of religions will know that it comes from
ancient India, and is the mythical way of explaining the Vedanta philosophy.
Vedanta is the teaching of the Upanishads, a collection of dialogues,
stories, and poems, most of which go back to at least 800 B.C. Sophisticated
Hindus do not think of God as a special and separate superperson who
rules the world from above, like a monarch. Their God is ''underneath"
rather than "above" everything, and he (or it) plays the world from
inside. One might say that if religion is the opium of the people, the
Hindus have the inside dope. What is more, no Hindu can realize that
he is God in disguise without seeing at the same time that this is true
of everyone and everything else. In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing
exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only
because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play
hide-and-seek with himself. The universe of seemingly separate things
is therefore real only for a while, not eternally real, for it comes
and goes as the Self hides and seeks itself.
But Vedanta is much more than the idea
or the belief that this is so. It is centrally and above all the experience, the
immediate knowledge of its being so, and for this reason such a complete subversion
of our ordinary way of seeing things. It turns the world inside out and outside
in. Likewise, a saying attributed to Jesus runs:
When you make the two one, and
when you make the inner as the outer
and the outer as the inner and the above
as the below . . .
then shall you enter [the Kingdom] . . . .
I am the Light that is above
them all, I am the All,
the All came forth from Me and the All
attained to Me. Cleave [a piece of] wood, I
am there; lift up the stone and you will
find Me there. 3
Today the Vedanta discipline comes
down to us after centuries of involvement with all the forms, attitudes, and
symbols of Hindu culture in its flowering and slow demise over nearly 2,800
years, sorely wounded by Islamic fanaticism and corrupted by British puritanism.
As often set forth, Vedanta rings no bell in the West, and attracts mostly the
fastidiously spiritual and diaphanous kind of people for whom incarnation in
a physical body is just too disgusting to be borne.4 But
it is possible to state its essentials in a present day idiom, and when this
is done without exotic trappings, Sanskrit terminology, and excessive postures
of spirituality, the message is not only clear to people with no special interest
in "Oriental religions"; it is also the very jolt that we need to kick ourselves
out of our isolated sensation of self.
But this must not be confused with
our usual ideas of the practice of "unselfishness," which is the effort to identify
with others and their needs while still under the strong illusion of being no
more than a skin-contained ego. Such "unselfishness" is apt to be a highly refined
egotism, comparable to the in-group which plays the game of "we're-more-tolerant-than-you."
The Vedanta was not originally moralistic; it did not urge people to ape the
saints without sharing their real motivations or to ape motivations without
sharing the knowledge which sparks them.
For this reason The Book I would pass
to my children would contain no sermons, no shoulds and oughts. Genuine love
comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt. How would you like
to be an invalid mother with a daughter who can't marry because she feels she
ought to look after you, and therefore hates you? My wish would be to tell,
not how things ought to be, but how they are, and how and why we ignore them
as they are. You cannot teach an ego to be anything but egotistic, even though
egos have the subtlest ways of pretending to be reformed. The basic thing is
therefore to dispel, by experiment and experience, the illusion of oneself as
a separate ego. The consequences may not be behavior along the lines of conventional
morality. It may well be as the squares said of Jesus, "Look at him! A glutton
and a drinker, a friend of tax-gatherers and sinners."
Furthermore, on seeing through the
illusion of the ego, it is impossible to think of oneself as better than, or
superior to, others for having done so. In every direction there is just the
one Self playing its myriad games of hide-and-seek. Birds are not better than
the eggs from which they have broken. Indeed, it could be said that a bird is
one egg's way of becoming other eggs. Egg is ego, and bird is the liberated
Self. There is a Hindu myth of the Self as a divine swan which laid the egg
from which the world was hatched. Thus I am not even saying that you ought to
break out of your shell. Sometime, somehow, you (the real you, the Self) will
do it anyhow, but it is not impossible that the play of the Self will be to
remain unawakened in most of its human disguises, and so bring the drama of
life on earth to its close in a vast explosion. Another Hindu myth says that
as time goes on, life in the world gets worse and worse, until at last the destructive
aspect of the Self, the god Shiva, dances a terrible dance which consumes everything
in fire. There follow, says the myth, 4,320,000 years of total peace during
which the Self is just itself and does not play hide. And then the game begins
again, starting off as a universe of perfect splendor which begins to deteriorate
only after 1,728,000 years, and every round of the game is so designed that
the forces of darkness present themselves for only one third of the time, enjoying
at the end a brief but quite illusory triumph. Today we calculate the life of
this planet alone in much vaster periods, but of all ancient civilizations the
Hindus had the most imaginative vision of cosmic time. Yet remember, this story
of the cycles of the world s appearance and disappearance is myth, not science,
parable rather than prophecy. It is a way of illustrating the idea that the
universe is like the game of hide-and-seek.
If, then, I am not saying that you
ought to awaken from the ego-illusion and help save the world from disaster,
why The Book? Why not sit back and let things take their course? Simply that
it is part of "things taking their course" that I write. As a human being it
is just my nature to enjoy and share philosophy. I do this in the same way that
some birds are eagles and some doves, some flowers lilies and some roses. I
realize, too, that the less I preach, the more likely I am to be heard.
(1) "I do not believe that anything really worthwhile will
come out of the exploration of the slag heap that constitutes the surface of
the moon . . . Nobody should imagine that the enormous financial budget of NASA
implies that astronomy is now well supported." Fred Hoyle, Galaxies, Nuclei,
And Quasars. Harper & Row, New York, 1965.
(2) A discussion of the views of theologian Paul Tillich
in "The Battle of the Bible," Look, Vol. XIX, No. 15. July 27, 1965, P. 19.
(3) A. Guillaumont and others (trs.), The Gospel According
to Thomas. Harper & Row, New York, 1959. pp. 17-18, 43. A recently discovered
Coptic manuscript, possibly translated from a Greek version as old as A.D. 140.
The "I" and the "Me" are obvious references to the disguised Self.
(4) I said "mostly'' because I am aware of some very special
exceptions both here and in India.
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