Quest Magazine

Printed in the Winter 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Horowitz, Mitch. "All You Can Be:  Why Positive Thinking Matters" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 15-17. 

By Mitch Horowitz

The method of positive thinking is simplicity itself: fix a goal in your mind, attempt to enter the feeling state that your aim has been achieved, and unseen agencies — whether psychological, metaphysical, or both — are said to come to your aid. Seen in this way, our thoughts are causative.

Over the past century and a half, this one simple idea has become the keynote of American life. Positive thinking underscores our political campaigns (“Yes, we can”) and advertising slogans (“Just do it”), and forms the foundation of self-help, business motivation, Twelve-Step programs, support groups, and mind-body medicine.

For all its impact, positive thinking, more properly known as New Thought, is widely disparaged in our culture. Journalists and academics often dismiss it as a philosophy of page-a-day calendars and refrigerator-magnet bromides. But most critics fail to grasp the history, impact, and effectiveness of positive thinking — all of which I explore in my most recent book, One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life.

While I write as a historian, my interest in positive thinking is also deeply personal. In some respects, positive thinking saved my life.

Growing Up (Not Quite) Positive

My journey into mind-power metaphysics began in my early adolescence in the late 1970s. My family made an ill-fated move from our bungalow-sized home in Queens, New York, to a bigger house on Long Island. It was a place we could never quite afford. After we moved in, my father lost his job and we took to wearing secondhand clothing and warming the house with kerosene heaters. One night I overheard my mother saying that we might qualify for food stamps. When the financial strains drove my parents to divorce, we were in danger of losing our home.

Seeking guidance, I devoured the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Talmudic guide to character called Ethics of the Fathers. These works asserted that our outlook could make a concrete difference in our lives. “Nerve us with incessant affirmatives,” Emerson wrote. “Be of good countenance,” the great rabbis intoned.

I prayed, visualized better tomorrows, and became a determined self-improver. I threw myself into attempts to earn money delivering newspapers and hauling junk to a local recycling plant. I divided my time between high school in the morning and drama classes in the afternoon. I handwrote college applications and sent letters to financial aid officers. We managed to piece together our finances and keep our home.

Positive thinking did not miraculously solve all of our problems. But I emerged from the period believing that a set of interior guideposts and principles had contributed to the solution. If my thoughts didn’t change reality, they helped navigate it. And maybe something more.

Later on in life, I grew intrigued by the example of my mother-in-law, Theresa Orr. At times she seemed to gain an additional, almost magical-seeming fortitude from affirmative-thinking philosophies. The daughter of an Italian immigrant barber, Terri received a scholarship to Brandeis University in 1959, becoming the first woman in her family to earn a college degree. In the years after, she became an associate dean at Harvard Medical School. While pursuing her academic career, she raised two daughters as a divorced and single parent, cared for an elderly mother, and sponsored members of a Twelve-Step recovery program, all from under the roof of a two-family home in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Terri devoured works of positive thinking, from the Serenity Prayer (“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . .”) to affirmations from the channeled text A Course in Miracles to pointers in positivity from Guideposts magazine. She papered the surfaces of her home — literally, from the refrigerator to the medicine chest — with business-sized cards on which she penned aphorisms such as “I can choose to be right or to be happy”; “My helping hand is needed. I will do something today to encourage another person”; and (my personal favorite) “When am I going to stop going to the hardware store for milk?” There was no question in her mind, or in my own, that injunctions to sinewy thoughts had made a difference in her life.

From my late twenties through my mid-forties, my personal search led me down many spiritual paths, and into serious esoteric teachings and traditions, including Theosophy. But New Thought, or positive thinking, always remained a part of me. As I began my adult explorations into the roots and methods of positive thinking, I experienced some kind of difference in my life, as Terri had experienced in hers. Was I imagining things? The practice of determined thought could seem so naive and simplistic. Most serious people regard positive thinking as a cotton-candy theology or a philosophy for dummies.

But I like “rejected stones” — they often hold neglected truths. Some of the leading voices in positive thinking, especially in its formative days in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had, like me, pursued many avenues of thought and religion, but returned to the concept that the greatest truths can sometimes be found in practices and ideas that are very simple, so much so that they are easy to dismiss.

Mind Pioneers

Like all widely extolled principles, from healthy eating to thrifty spending, aspiration toward positivity seems as if it has always been with us. But the concept is newer than we think. The story of positive thinking began in America with the experience of a Maine clockmaker named Phineas P. Quimby. In the 1830s Quimby discovered that a brightened mood helped lift his symptoms of tuberculosis. “Man’s happiness is in his belief,” Quimby concluded. The clockmaker’s insights and experiments coalesced into the movement of mental healing, which used prayer, autosuggestion, and early forms of hypnotism (then called mesmerism) to relieve illness. One of Quimby’s most dynamic students, the brilliant Mary Baker Eddy, went on to found the healing faith of Christian Science.

After Quimby’s death in early 1866, mental healing spread in popularity from New England to Chicago to California, and thousands of followers believed that some force — whether divine, psychological, or both — exerted an invisible pull on a person’s daily life. By the late 1880s, the boldest mental healers theorized that the energies of the mind could impact not only health, but also money, marriage, career and all facets of life. Their beliefs came to form the influential metaphysical movement called New Thought.

The notion of the mind as an invisible or divine force came very naturally to spiritual experimenters in the late nineteenth century. The era abounded with discoveries of unseen forces, from radio waves and electrical currents to X-rays and microbes. For a time mainstream science and avant-garde spirituality appeared united in a search to unveil the inner workings of life.

At the start of the twentieth century, philosopher William James believed that New Thought, Christian Science, and all of the new mental therapeutics — which he called the “religion of healthy-mindedness” — held such promise, and hovered so mightily over modern religious life, that it amounted to the equivalent of a Reformation on the American spiritual scene. “It is quite obvious,” James wrote in 1907, “that a wave of religious activity, analogous in some respects to the spread of early Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism, is passing over our American world.”

While no high church of positive thinking today extends across American culture, the influence of mind-power metaphysics is greater than that of any one established religion. Methods of positive thinking are espoused across the religious spectrum, from New Age spiritual centers to evangelical megaministries. Positive thinking is the unifying element of all aspects of the American search for meaning. It is, in effect, the American creed.

Positive Reforms

For all of its promise, the philosophy of positive thinking is also riddled with inconsistencies and pitfalls. Over the past two decades, I have watched some of the best people in the positive-thinking movement — that is, members of New Thought churches or positivity-based support groups — depart or distance themselves after experiencing how an ill-conceived program of affirmative thought can effectively blame sick or suffering people for their ills.

A support group leader for female survivors of sexual abuse — and someone who had spent many years within a positive-thinking metaphysical church — wrote to me in 2012. She said that she had experienced both sides of the positive-thinking equation, witnessing how survivors could ably use a program of mental therapeutics to rebuild their sense of self, but also observing the kind of burden that affirmative-thinking nostrums could visit upon those recovering from trauma. She continued:

My husband, who experienced a massive stroke at the age of 22 while in “perfect” health and working as a farm hand has also felt an ambivalence toward the positive-thinking teachings. Such an emphasis gets placed on physical healing as a manifestation of right thought that it can alienate those people living with disabilities whose healings have manifested in other, possibly non-physical, ways.

In conclusion, she wondered: “Is there room for a positive-thinking model that doesn’t include blame and single-model definitions of success?”

I take the attitude that such a model can exist. But for positive thinking to reach maturity, its followers must take fuller stock of the movement’s flaws and its need for growth. To begin with, the positive thinking movement must do more to confront — and acknowledge — the tragedies of daily life. Suffering and illness cannot be explained away solely as the result of our thought patterns. As I argue in One Simple Idea, there is no compelling reason — and very little verifiable evidence — to view life as the result of one ever-operant mental superlaw, sometimes called the Law of Attraction. People live under many laws and forces, including those of accidents, physical limitations, and mortality. Positive thinkers must jettison the idea that thoughts alone are the engine of our experience.

Acknowledging that life is composed of myriad factors and agencies does not, however, detract from the key insight of positive thinking: that our thoughts contribute “something extra” to our life circumstances — and in ways that transcend ordinary psychology. The instinct that our thoughts possess an agency of influence is borne out in a long history of clinical science and compelling personal testimony.

Indeed, positive thinking has stood up with surprising muscularity in the present era of placebo studies, mind-body therapies, brain biology research, and, most controversially, the findings of quantum physics experiments. When considered without sensationalism, more than eighty years of data emerging from quantum physics shows that the presence of a conscious observer alters the nature and manifestation of subatomic particles. These findings suggest some vital, not yet understood verity about how the mind interplays with the surrounding world.

A related phenomenon plays out in the emergent science of neuroplasticity. Scientists at UCLA have recently used brain scans to show that our thought patterns actually affect — and can alter — the physical makeup of our brains. Researchers have found that when sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) actively and sustainably redirect their thoughts away from ritualistic behaviors, they also change the neural pathways associated with OCD. A thinking cure becomes a physical cure as well.

In late 2010, researchers at Harvard Medical School conducted a revolutionary “transparent placebo” study, in which sufferers from irritable bowel syndrome were told up front that they were being administered a sugar pill. Placebo studies are typically based on deception, in which a patient believes that he is receiving, or may be receiving, an actual medicine. The Harvard study participants knew they were not taking a medication but an inert substance — yet a majority reported relief. This is the first documentation that an “honest placebo” has significant effects, deepening questions about how the mind influences the body.

Developments in quantum physics, neuroplasticity, and placebo studies may challenge our conceptions of what it means to be human in the twenty-first century, at least as much as Darwinism challenged man’s self-perception in the Victorian age.

I believe that the contemporary positive thinking movement is poised for a greater phase of maturity and persuasiveness. But to reach that point requires those of us who care about positive thinking to:

· cultivate a sober understanding of quantum physics, neuroplasticity, and placebo studies, and what they say about the mind;
· ease away from an insistence on an overreaching Law of Attraction;
· and, finally, acknowledge that thought represents one factor — albeit an extraordinary one, with deep metaphysical implications — among many others that produce our lives.

These reforms would encourage a more elastic expression of positive thinking, and would return us to the best traditions of the movement’s early days, when it saw itself in league with breakthroughs in science and medicine. It falls to our generation to continue the spiritual and psychological revolution begun by the forebears of positive thinking.

A PEN Award–winning historian, Mitch Horowitz is vice-president, executive editor, and director of backlist and reissues at Tarcher Perigee. Mitch is the author of Occult America (Bantam) and One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (Crown). He has written on alternative spirituality for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, Salon, and Time.com. His article, “The Aquarian: Ronald Reagan and the Positive Thinking Movement” appeared in Quest, summer 2014. An earlier version of the article above appeared in Venture Inward magazine.

Printed in the Winter 2016 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "Knowledge, Inner and Outer:  An Interview with Cassandra Vieten" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 10-14, 40.

By Richard Smoley

One of today’s leading institutions in consciousness studies is the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), based in Petaluma, California. Founded in 1973 by astronaut Edgar Mitchell, it sponsors research not only into ordinary states of consciousness but paranormal ones, including telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance. IONS aims to explore these areas with the same rigor that is used in other scientific disciplines. TS members may recollect a Skype interview with parapsychologist Dean Radin, senior scientist at IONS, at the 2014 Summer National Convention.

At the 2015 SNC, participants heard an address by IONS president Cassandra Vieten. Vieten, a licensed clinical psychologist, has been with the organization since 2001. She has a doctorate in clinical psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is the coauthor of Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life(2008) and author of Mindful Motherhood: Practical Tools for Staying Sane During Pregnancy and Your Child’s First Year(2009).

I interviewed Vieten during her visit to Olcott in July 2015. Nancy Grace kindly transcribed the interview for the magazine.

Richard Smoley: One of the main missions of IONS is transformation. Could you begin by saying a little bit about what you think transformation is?

Cassandra Vieten: The Institute of Noetic Sciences is dedicated to fostering, on the largest level, a global transformation in consciousness. Transformation for us can happen on an individual level; it can happen on a level of a small group like an organization or an institution; and it can happen at a larger level of society. Take one example: there is a collective sense that when someone commits a crime, we should lock them into a cage. In general that’s agreed upon. And so I think, I wonder, if part of the work of the Institute of Noetic Sciences isn’t to challenge some of these prevailing worldviews.

Smoley: Noetic is an unusual word. What does it mean?

Vieten: Noetic is a Greek word that signifies a particular kind of knowledge: inner knowing or intuitive knowledge — when you know something is true but you don’t necessarily have external proof for it, or you don’t need external validation. William James talked about a noetic experience having a curious sense of authority. It may be inarticulate, but it still carries with it a truth. It’s the way you know that you love your children, or you know that you prefer something, and no one else could tell you that’s not true.

Then there’s the external form of knowing, which we call science, and when you put those together it’s noetic sciences, a combination of the internal way of knowing and the external way of knowing, with observation, validation, measurement, replication.

Smoley: Today as always, people have all kinds of noetic experiences. Curiously, a great deal of social energy is placed into telling people they didn’t have these experiences, or that it was just their imagination. Do you see a way of countering that?

Vieten: These experiences that we’ve been studying — precognition, clairvoyance, telepathy, remote viewing, ESP, near-death experiences, encounters with multidimensional beings—these are all experiences that people report. There’s a segment of society that takes all of this for granted. They have no problem with it, but they also may not have a lot of discernment about these experiences or a lot of knowledge about how biased our perceptions can be.

Then you’ve got another segment of society that says that, by definition, this is all false and imaginary. It’s also dangerous and holds the potential to contaminate our civilization of reason and logic. Not only did this experience not happen to you, but we also don’t want you to ever talk about it, because it’s going to take us to a superstitious place. It’s like a societal PTSD after the Dark Ages.

And then there’s this middle ground, which is where noetic science walks. It’s saying, these experiences are common. They transform people’s lives. They sometimes hold knowledge that leads to innovation and invention and creativity. In fact you could argue that most of the major advances of humanity came through some sort of intuitive inspiration. So this realm of experience is worth investigating scientifically.

Smoley: Religion has traditionally talked about these areas. But religion actually plays a remarkably small role in the debate that you’re talking about. We don’t see clergymen coming out and saying they’re really interested in discoveries like yours. We don’t see even quite liberal and enlightened clergymen or clergywomen embracing this approach. In the context of your work and the institute’s work, how has your relation been with conventional religion?

Vieten: We’ve had a subsection of people who are religious, who are very interested in science and in the nexus between science and spirituality. But the vast majority, I would say, of conventional religious people have an attitude that says, we don’t need external validation, we don’t need external confirmation. The fact that you’re even using words like validation or confirmation means that you have a lack of faith that threatens our tradition.

So there’s an inherent lack of faith in scientifically investigating a topic that is supposed to be just in a spiritual domain. We did a study once on distant prayer and whether it helped surgical patients after surgery. It pissed off almost everyone. You have the skeptics and the atheists and the secular folks saying, it’s ridiculous to spend research dollars on this. Why would anyone waste money to study something so silly? And then you have the religious people saying, you can’t study God. You can’t investigate prayer. It doesn’t work like that.

And then you’ve got this group of people who say, we really should look at this in a systematic way. If you look at the range of what people have practiced for their own healing or for the healing of their loved ones, prayer is almost at the top of the list. Let’s take a look at it and see what’s going on there.

Smoley: You describe two very powerful and entrenched establishments that are hostile toward the things you’re investigating — the scientific establishment and the religious establishment. With all this opposition, what hope do you have for seeing this kind of vision better integrated into society?

Vieten: I think things are changing over time. I wouldn’t say there’s a dominant hostility anymore in these groups. I would say that there are extreme and vocal factions of the religious side and the very skeptical — the professional skeptic community. They have very loud voices, and they talk a lot.

But there’s an increasing swath of people who are very interested in all of these phenomena. They’ve had their own personal experiences, so they would like to know, was that real, was that imaginary? A lot of them are not so much against studying these things, they just didn’t know you could, and they’ve been taught throughout their training that you can’t study them. So when they find out in fact there are rigorous methods for investigating this realm of existence, a lot of them are fascinated. I would say, younger people are even more interested than older people, because they haven’t been conditioned quite as much to fear this kind of thing. So when we are talking about a research project and putting out a call for internships, we often have an enormous amount of interest from young scientists, college students, religious scholars.

Even some of the most rigid skeptics still have a lot of curiosity about this topic. In fact, with some skeptics I’ve met, the depth of their passion comes because they feel so disappointed that no one has found evidence yet. And you can still say, wouldn’t it be amazing to do this right? Let’s do it really well. They start to say, what would that look like?

My hypothesis would be that a lot of this stuff has some measurable reality. If we can’t measure it now, we will be able to in the future.

Smoley: The mainstream intellectual media and journals of thought seem so horribly biased against these ideas. I remember reading articles in The New York Review of Books about topics like this, where the writer is nakedly and grossly uninformed. Similarly I see things in The New York Times that show not only an ignorance but a willful ignorance. Do you see any of that façade cracking?

Vieten: I certainly have a number of stories that confirm what you’re talking about. We’ve submitted papers for publication on studies of precognition or mediumship. One of the reviews was quite interesting, saying, this is an excellent study with good methodology, and it solves many of the problems of previous studies in this regard, and if it was on a different topic, it would be publishable. It went on to say that publishing this article would call into question hundreds of years of scientific discovery. So we also see, as you’ve said, a knee-jerk rejection in certain fields of inquiry. When you really inquire and say, how many of these papers have you read? They say, “I haven’t read any of them, because the idea is ridiculous.” It’s not that the data or the methods don’t hold up to scrutiny.

I start to ask people, do you believe in academic freedom? Do you believe that scientists should be able to study topics that are of interest to them and seem to have bearing on people’s health and healing and well-being? And do you think those should be held to the same standards of publication as other studies? Most people say yes.

So I say, OK, how about if those studies are on ESP? Then they say, “Oh, well, we really should move the goalpost at that point, and they should have more stringent criteria, because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

That’s true in a way: if you’re trying to overturn a collectively held belief with one or two papers, that would be foolish. But those papers should be published all the same. And they should be held to exactly the same criteria as biology, physics, chemistry.

Smoley: Could you tell us a little about what led you into this material?

Vieten: I grew up in a house with a father who was a biological scientist. He was a very staunch materialist and an agnostic at least—atheist probably. He used to take me to the lab after school. We would look in microscopes and use telescopes to look at the stars, and go get pond water, and all kind of things that stimulated a love of the natural world and a love of science. Even though he had that materialist perspective, he had a strong sense of mystery and wonder and awe in observing the natural world.

My mom was a therapist and was influenced by Jung and feminist symbolism and was very much a sort of inner dreamwork kind of person. So I also had an appreciation for that world. But neither was religious. We didn’t go to church or have any kind of spiritual practice at home. And as I moved into my teenage years, I thought, there must be something that we’re not seeing here. I tried going to church with a couple of friends, but I couldn’t really find anything there. I was interested in all the symbols, but that’s what they looked like to me —a lot of symbols. I wanted to know, what are these symbolizing?

I grew up in southern California. When I was an older teenager, we used to go out in the orange groves, and we had bonfires and looked at the stars. And I had a couple of experiences where I did feel this massive expansion of something, some dissolution of my boundaries.

Maybe the other clues for me were in science fiction. I loved Star Wars and the Force, and I used to go on this ride at Disneyland that was called “Adventures in Inner Space.” You shrink, shrink, shrink down into a snowflake, and you’re traveling through the atoms. I recently looked up the script for this ride and it said, “There was an entire universe in the atom.”

I took a class in Buddhism in college, and I thought, now this is a religion, this is something I can understand. So I started practicing meditation, and by the time I finished college I ended up going to the California Institute of Integral Studies — a graduate school that combined the integral philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and Eastern philosophy with Western psychology. That was real immersion into a number of spiritual practices and traditions at the same time as I was learning psychology. I probably would have become a spiritual psychologist, but I had this little science bug that woke up almost by the time I was done. I said, wait a minute, how do we know any of this is true? And not only how do we know, but how are we going to generalize it to ease the suffering of thousands or millions of people?

Smoley: You’ve worked at IONS for a number of years. Which of your own personal beliefs have changed as a result of what you’ve done and learned there?

Vieten: When I first came to IONS, I was primarily interested in meditation, mindfulness, spiritual practices, and personal transformation. I also had a fascination with ESP and telepathy. Since I’ve been there I’ve learned more about what we were just talking about — the extreme bias against these topics. I’ve also learned that fighting, or getting sullen, or getting a chip on my shoulder, or complaining actually doesn’t help at all. It doesn’t help the people who are against it, and it doesn’t even really help the people who are supporting you. What’s better is to — like water on a rock — just continuously do great research, do work with integrity that you can stand behind, and continually work toward sparking people’s curiosity and imagination about these topics.

I still have my own internal skepticism sometimes, so I went to talk with Dean Radin, and he was going to do a little remote viewing exercise with the audience. So he said, “I’m about to show a slide from a random selection from 5000 slides, and now move into this remote viewing mode, where you’re open and you’re not going to name anything too quickly,” and he gave some of the training. So I went down on this piece of paper and wrote big, giant swoops, with lines across and little circles. The next slide came up, and it was the Golden Gate Bridge. And I was like, “Dean, Dean, Dean, it worked, it worked!” And he was like, “I know. We work here.” So I had that hit. And even though I’m advocating the rigorous investigation of these topics as something potentially real, when it happens at an experiential level I’m still kind of thrilled and excited and surprised.

Smoley: Could you say a little bit about the figures, books, and texts you’ve found most inspiring along the way?

Vieten: I was a drug and alcohol counselor throughout my college years. I found the transformations I witnessed in the Twelve-Step programs — turning your life over to a higher power that comes in and removes something from you —I could see them happening, and I couldn’t tell what the difference was between the people who got it and stayed clean and sober and people who didn’t. But over the years I started to notice that it was kind of a shift in worldview. It was a deep shift in perspective. And I was really interested in knowing what that was.

Again, I was very inspired by Buddhism and Hinduism and Eastern philosophy. Buddhist vipassana seemed to me a common-sense way of approaching self-transcendence and easing suffering. And since then, integral philosophy — at first Aurobindo, and then Ken Wilber, and all kinds of philosophers and scholars that were bringing together the body, the mind, and the spirit as a whole system, instead of separate systems.

Smoley: Science deals with the quantifiable and the measurable. Do you ever think about the levels beyond which not only science is not measuring now, but even theoretically could never measure? The idea that there are things that are simply never going to be sifted through this net of empiricism?

Vieten: When you’re looking at complex phenomena, biologically, chemically, neurologically, or in this domain of the spiritual, this is the metaphor I like to use: it’s almost like you can put a circle of inward-facing mirrors around the phenomenon and you can look in those mirrors. Every one of those might be a study or a personal account, or an anecdote, or it could be all kinds of things. It could even be art or music. But you may not be able to ever get to the actual phenomenon itself.

Let’s say that the phenomenon is love. It doesn’t say we’re ever going to be able to capture love in a bottle. So sometimes I use the metaphor of catching a firefly in a bottle. If you catch the firefly, you’ve got to take a look at it and then you’ve got to let it go, or else it dies. Or it’s like pinning a butterfly to a card. You find a beautiful, rare butterfly in the jungle. You can keep it if you kill it, but then you’ve killed it.

Smoley: When people have paranormal experiences, experiences of God, and so on, a common scientistic response is that this is just the result of some brain state.

Vieten: One of the biggest questions facing us now is, is consciousness produced by the brain and the body, or do the brain and the body reflect consciousness? Or is there some sort of a filter? You know the filter hypothesis — that the brain and our physical being are actually filtering consciousness. I tend to land somewhere in the middle, where it’s probably a two-way street. It’s not just that the brain produces consciousness. Right now, if I asked you to think of an animal or a symbol, you would think of something, and that would make something happen in your brain in response.

Smoley: There’s a lot of fascination these days with the near-death experience. How do you see this phenomenon?

Vieten: What I know most about near-death experiences is their transformative potential, the way they change people’s lives. Many people have them, and they don’t feel a big change. Many people have them, and they feel more scared and insecure and worried. And then there’s a section of people who have near-death experiences, and it changes their lives and profoundly for the positive. It gives them a new perspective on prioritizing their values and their activities. So that much we know, but that doesn’t say whether or not they’re real. You can have that kind of a transformation even through an imaginary experience.

I think the jury is still out on the rigorous, scientific validation of survival of consciousness after bodily death. We have some enticing clues about the potential for measurable, reliable, physical ways of seeing this through mediumship research and through commonalities among people’s experiences. There are also things that people reported anecdotally that they couldn’t have known unless they had consciousness — even though at that point they should not have had any.

There are enough clues, but it’s going to take a lot of effort — on the level of an Apollo space program — to truly investigate this subject. I have a colleague who did an analysis. He said that if you put all of the research on psychic phenomena and clairvoyance and near-death experiences and all of these things together, it still doesn’t add up to the cost of one F-16.

What would be a bigger question for humanity than, does consciousness survive? It’s certainly in the top ten questions that we might like to know about. Why wouldn’t we spend an F-16’s worth of dollars to check it out?

Smoley: Earlier you mentioned Aurobindo and his integral philosophy. One of its main features is the concept of evolution of consciousness. It would seem that both Aurobindo and people who have been influenced by him view this kind of evolution of consciousness as something that we can foster ourselves. That is, you can help yourself evolve. Now the typical Darwinian view is that evolution is a completely blind process, governed completely by natural selection. How do you relate those two things? Do you see a way of integrating them? Do you see them as fundamentally in conflict?

Vieten: It’s possible that they’re both oversimplified, standing alone. So how do we look at the handshake between evolution of consciousness ideas and this random evolution idea?

Recently, you know, when we sequenced the human genome, we thought, OK, we’re going to have all the information we need to make lots of drugs that address specific genetic ailments, because we’re going to be able to see the tens of thousands of alleles that we have in our genetic code. We’re so complex that we must have 80,000–100,000 alleles. It turns out we have about 20,000. In terms of allelic variations, we have less complexity than a grain of rice. So the promise of the human genome project didn’t really pan out.

How do we achieve our level of complexity? It’s because of epigenetics and how we interact with our environment to change how our genes are expressed. Now we know that much of it is highly conditional. So if it is highly conditional, based on our outer environment and our inner environment, our minds, our stress levels, then we can participate in our own evolution. If I know that thinking about fear every single day, or being in pain or a sense of threat every day for a while, changes my gene expression, it stands to reason that being in love or contemplation or meditation or compassion every day would also change my gene expression — imagining that the first would be in a negative way and the second would be in a positive way. How will that affect our intergenerational evolution? That remains to be seen.

VOLUME 104, NUMBER 1

CONTENTS

Knowledge, Inner and Outer: An Interview with Cassandra Vieten
Richard Smoley

All You Can Be: Why Positive Thinking Matters
Mitch Horowitz

Till We Dead Awaken: The Quest for Higher Consciousness in Film, Fiction, and Theater
John Shirley

Alexander Scriabin: Music of Ectasy and Light
Rene Wadlow

The Twisted History of the Swastika
Richard Smoley

The Dangers of Staying in One Place
Clare Goldsberry

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

Viewpoint: Applying the Principles, Part 2
Tim Boyd

President's Diary

Printed in the Fall 2015 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Moody, Edmund. "Krishnamurti’s Inner Life" Quest 103.4 (Fall 2015): pg. 143-147.

A glimpse into the great teacher’s awakening.

By David Edmund Moody

J. Krishnamurti’s stated philosophy from the public platform is assiduously secular. He scrupulously avoids any suggestion that he has personal access to or special knowledge of another dimension, spiritual, supernatural or otherwise. On the contrary, his public philosophy, expressed on countless occasions, on several continents, over the course of decades, is limited almost entirely to the delineation of the dynamic nature and structure of ordinary consciousness as it is experienced by virtually everyone. His stated concern is to serve as a mirror to the mind of the individual listener in order that each one might become “a light to oneself,” and in so doing bring about psychological freedom, the ending of conflict, and an end to sorrow. His references to God and religion are almost uniformly disparaging. God is merely a concept, he maintains, a comfortable invention, and organized religion a trap in which most of mankind is imprisoned. To be sure, he does suggest that an orderly mind, a mind that is attentive, might come upon something that is sacred, something that is not merely the product of thought. References to the sacred, however, are few and far between and are always accompanied by the admonition that no form of seeking or desire can possibly bring one into contact with it.

Against this philosophy, there exists another current in Krishnamurti’s life and work. As he often pointed out, he himself was not what mattered to his audience; he was not their guru, he said over and over again; he was not speaking as the voice of authority — psychological, spiritual, or otherwise. In keeping with that attitude, he kept his inner life private and not a matter for public display. To do so was wholly consistent with his insistence on his own insignificance.

Nevertheless, Krishnamurti did enjoy an extraordinary inner life, one that he allowed to become a matter of record only as he approached his eightieth year. By that time, his stated philosophy had fully matured and taken on a life of its own, with little possibility of any distortion or distraction from the revelation of his personal experiences. This inner life was described in an authorized biography, as well as in three volumes of a kind of diary he kept for occasional periods beginning in 1961. Although these experiences did not represent the content of his message to the world, they are not entirely separable from it. In any case, no description of his outlook on life is complete without including them.

Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya came to Ojai, California, in 1922, when he was twenty-seven and Nitya was twenty-four. They had been invited there by A.P. Warrington, then head of the American Section of the Theosophical Society, who traveled with them to a property owned by a local Theosophist, Mary Gray, where the brothers could stay for an indefinite period of time. Shortly after arriving there, Nitya described the Ojai Valley in the following terms:

In a long and narrow valley of apricot orchards and orange groves is our house, and the hot sun shines down day after day to remind us of Adyar, but of an evening the cool air comes down from the range of hills on either side. Far beyond the lower end of the valley runs the long, perfect road from Seattle in Washington down to San Diego in Southern California, some two thousand miles, with a ceaseless flow of turbulent traffic, yet our valley lies happily, unknown and forgotten, for a road wanders in but knows no way out. The American Indians called our valley the Ojai or the nest, and for centuries they must have sought it as a refuge.

After they had settled in Ojai for a few weeks, Krishna began to meditate for half an hour each morning and again in the evening, with the general intention of resolving the sense of discontent he felt with the entire course of his life and the path that others had charted for him. As he wrote in a letter to a friend:

Since August third, I meditated regularly for about thirty minutes every morning. I could, to my astonishment, concentrate with considerable ease, and within a few days I began to see clearly where I had failed and where I was failing. Immediately I set about, consciously, to annihilate the wrong accumulations of the past years.

Two weeks after he commenced to meditate in this manner, Krishna began to complain of a pain in the nape of his neck, and Nitya observed a knot or swelling there about the size of a marble. This initial symptom developed in the next day or two into something systemic, involving intense pain in the head, neck, and spine, accompanied by episodes of shivering, alternating with a burning sensation. Krishna complained bitterly of the dirt of his surroundings, even though his bed had fresh linens and his room was immaculate. At times he was not his normal self, and he reverted to a distinctly childlike persona. He was able to sleep the night through, but the symptoms resumed the next morning and continued for three days.

Present to observe these events were Nitya, Warrington, and Rosalind Williams, a nineteen-year-old American woman whose mother was friends with Mary Gray. Rosalind had struck up a friendship with the two brothers and made herself useful in the care of the ailing Nitya. She was the only person whose presence Krishna could tolerate when his symptoms became intense. When the pain was acute, he would sometimes cling to her and cry out for his mother, who had died when he was ten.

On the evening of the third day, a marked change came over Krishna as his symptoms subsided and he recovered a more normal demeanor. He had been moaning and writhing in pain in his cottage as twilight fell, while Nitya, Warrington, and Rosalind sat on the porch outside. Nitya recorded the events that followed in a long and detailed narrative. He wrote, “Our lives are profoundly affected by what happened . . . our compass has found its lodestar.”

Toward the end of the third day, after the others had finished their evening meal, “suddenly the whole house seemed full of a terrific force,” Nitya wrote, “and Krishna was as if possessed.”

He would have none of us near him and began to complain bitterly of the dirt, the dirt of the bed, the intolerable dirt of the house, the dirt of everyone around, and in a voice full of pain said that he longed to go to the woods . . . Suddenly he announced his intention of going for a walk alone, but from this we managed to dissuade him, for we did not think that he was in any fit condition for nocturnal ambulations.

Warrington noted that he knew Krishna’s bed was perfectly clean, because he had personally changed the linen that morning. Nitya continued:

Then as he expressed a desire for solitude, we left him and gathered outside on the verandah, where in a few minutes he joined us, carrying a cushion in his hand and sitting as far away as possible from us. Enough strength and consciousness were vouchsafed him to come outside but once there again he vanished from us, and his body, murmuring incoherencies, was left sitting there on the porch . . .

The sun had set an hour ago and we sat facing the far-off hills, purple against the pale sky in the darkening twilight. 

A young pepper tree stood at the entrance to the cottage, “with delicate leaves of a tender green, now heavy with scented blossoms.” Warrington suggested to Krishna that he might like to go and sit under the tree, and after a moment’s hesitation, he did so. Presently, those on the veranda heard a sigh of relief, and Krishna called out to ask why they had not sent him there much earlier. Then he began to chant an ancient song, one familiar to the brothers from their childhood. A few moments later, according to Nitya, something occurred outside the parameters of ordinary reality. He claimed there was an unusual light in the sky, and he had an overwhelming sense of the arrival of some transcendent personality or intelligence. “The place seemed to be filled with a Great Presence,” he wrote, and “in the distance we heard divine music softly played.“

After this evening, the strange process ended. Krishna recorded his own impressions of what had transpired over the course of the preceding days:

There was a man mending the road; that man was myself; the pickaxe he held was myself; the very stone which he was breaking up was a part of me; the tender blade of grass was my very being, and the tree beside the man was myself. I almost could feel and think like the roadmender, and I could feel the wind passing through the tree . . . I was in everything, or rather everything was in me, inanimate and animate, the mountain, the worm, and all breathing things.

Krishna invoked images of nature to convey what occurred under the pepper tree. His experience there is not easy to correlate with the days of pain and semiconsciousness that led up to it:

There was such profound calmness both in the air and within myself, the calmness of the bottom of a deep unfathomable lake. Like the lake, I felt my physical body, with its mind and emotions, could be ruffled on the surface but nothing, nay nothing, could disturb the calmness of my soul . . .

I have drunk at the clear and pure waters at the source of the fountain of life and my thirst was appeased. Never more could I be thirsty, never more could I be in utter darkness. I have seen the Light. I have touched compassion which heals all sorrow and suffering; it is not for myself, but for the world.

As dramatic as these events may have been, they turned out to be merely a prelude to a much longer series of related experiences. The pain in Krishnamurti’s head and neck resumed in subsequent months, although now the episodes were confined to one or two hours in the evening. In his letters to Annie Besant, Nitya described these events as Krishna’s “process,” and that name has been employed for this purpose ever since. The process continued to recur at regular intervals, sometimes daily, throughout the remainder of his life. He never sought treatment for it, although he once consulted a Theosophical doctor who observed the process for a week and agreed it was not a condition requiring medical intervention.

The meaning and significance of the process and of the experience under the pepper tree remain somewhat obscure to the present day. What is clear is that Krishnamurti avoided any mention of these personal experiences in his public talks. He sent accounts of these events to a few close associates, but he insisted that they not be shared with others. He evidently regarded it as a private matter, unrelated to the truth or validity of his teachings, but a potential source of distraction or confusion for his audience. Only toward the end of his life did he allow these experiences to become known.

An even more insightful avenue into Krishnamurti’s inner life is contained in a diary he composed over a period of seven months beginning in April 1961. Krishnamurti’s Notebook was published in 1975, almost simultaneously with Years of Awakening. Although it did not receive as much attention as the biography, it is in many respects a more extraordinary document. It consists of approximately two hundred entries, each one a page or two in length. These entries have several recurrent and interrelated themes. In order of the sheer number of words devoted to each theme, they are as follows: descriptions of scenes observed in nature; comments on the psychological characteristics of humanity; the quality of a mind in meditation; the intermittent presence of an unusual force or energy that envelops him with a sense of the sacred; and the ongoing, occasional pressure and pain in the head and neck, sometimes intense, that he still refers to as “the process.”

Taken together, these themes represent a kind of panorama of the landscape of Krishnamurti’s daily consciousness. If we consider them not in terms of the number of words devoted to each theme, but rather in terms of their apparent significance to him, their order might be construed as follows: the presence of the sense of something sacred; the beauty of nature; the mind of man, coupled with the transformative quality of meditation; and the process. After about the first thirty entries, he discontinues any further mention of the process, as if its description requires no further elaboration, although presumably it continued on almost a daily basis. In some respects, it appears as though the entire diary exists mainly for the purpose of bringing the sacred quality to light. The other themes are important in their own right, but similar material is described elsewhere in Krishnamurti’s work. Here the other themes seem to serve as a kind of context for the introduction of the sacred element.

Among the salient characteristics of the sacred quality is its essential unknowability. Krishnamurti uses a variety of terms to refer to it, none of them entirely equal to the task. He most commonly refers to it simply as “the other” or “that otherness.” Additional appellations he employs include “the benediction” and “the immensity.” He ascribes to this quality a sense of overwhelming power, something impenetrable, vast, innocent, and untouchable. The manner in which the sacred element is woven into the diary can perhaps be gleaned from two of the briefer excerpts.

On September 27, 1961, Krishnamurti was in Rome, and he wrote as follows:

Walking along the pavement overlooking the biggest basilica and down the famous steps to a fountain and many picked flowers of so many colors, crossing the crowded square, we went along a narrow one-way street, quiet, with not too many cars; there in that dimly lit street, with few unfashionable shops, suddenly and most unexpectedly, that otherness came with such intense tenderness and beauty that one’s body and brain became motionless.

For some days now, it had not made its immense presence felt; it was there vaguely, in the distance, a whisper, but there the immense was manifesting itself, sharply and with waiting patience. Thought and speech were gone and there was a peculiar joy and clarity. It followed down the long, narrow street till the roar of traffic and the overcrowded pavement swallowed us all. It was a benediction that was beyond all image and thoughts.

The following month, Krishnamurti was in Bombay. On October 24, he wrote:

The dark leaves were shining and the moon had climbed quite high; she was on the westerly course and flooding the room. Dawn was many hours away and there was not a sound; even the village dogs, with their shrill yapping, were quiet. Waking, it was there, with clarity and precision; the otherness was there and waking up was necessary, not sleep; it was deliberate, to be aware of what was happening, to be aware with full consciousness of what was taking place. Asleep, it might have been a dream, a hint of the unconscious, a trick of the brain, but fully awake, this strange and unknowable otherness was a palpable reality, a fact and not an illusion, a dream. It had a quality, if such a word can be applied to it, of weightlessness and impenetrable strength.

Again these words have certain significance, definite and communicable, but these words lose all their meaning when the otherness has to be conveyed in words; words are symbols but no symbol can ever convey the reality. It was there with such incorruptible strength that nothing could destroy it for it was unapproachable. You can approach something with which you are familiar; you must have the same language to commune, some kind of thought process, verbal or non-verbal; above all there must be mutual recognition. There was none. On your side you may say it is this or that, this or that quality, but at the moment of the happening there was no verbalization for the brain was utterly still, without any movement of thought. 

Even for someone schooled in the intricacies of Krishnamurti’s philosophy, it is hard to know what to make of the “otherness.” He hardly seems to know what to make of it himself. However, he is adamant that what he is witness to is not a matter of imagination or invention; the “other” is far beyond any possible creation of thought or ideation. It is not something that can be brought about by any act of intention, desire, or will; it comes and goes of its own accord; indeed an attitude of indifference to whether or not it occurs is essential for it to take place. And yet it represents a kind of balm, a healing, transformative energy, without which life seems somewhat barren, empty, and meaningless.

Krishnamurti’s Notebook is confined to a period of seven months, and he offers no explanation for why he started it or stopped. In a brief foreword, his friend Mary Lutyens claims that he did not know himself what moved him to compose it. It is the only record we have, however, of his experience of the “otherness.” In subsequent years, he composed two additional diaries of a similar nature, but without any references to the sacred quality or energy. It seems reasonable to assume that the “otherness” continued to come and go, but there is no way to know for certain, or even whether it matters.

Krishnamurti’s Journal is a shorter work than the Notebook, commencing for some six weeks in 1973 and resuming for the month of April 1975. Like the Notebook, the Journal is occupied largely with vivid descriptions of scenes from nature, coupled with observations about ordinary consciousness and meditation. No reference is made to his process, or to the “otherness” or benediction. The psychological observations closely parallel his statements from the public platform, although in a somewhat condensed and, if possible, a more immediate form. In reading the Journal, one has the impression that he is being a little more direct than in his public talks, stating facts bluntly, without any compromise. The descriptions of nature and of a mind in meditation serve to soften and offer some relief from the realities of ordinary consciousness.

Krishnamurti to Himself was the last of the three diaries. It consists of just twenty-seven entries, composed in 1983 and 1984. These entries are a little longer, on average about four pages each, perhaps in part because they were dictated into a recorder rather than written out in longhand. In this final journal, Krishnamurti introduces an imaginary interlocutor, a visitor who comes to inquire about certain points raised in the teachings. He finds this format conducive to elucidating various issues, and it resembles the pattern of individuals who came to seek his counsel throughout his life.

The three diaries taken together represent a remarkably comprehensive exposition of the inner quality of Krishnamurti’s daily life and consciousness. The journals span a period of two and a half decades and reflect a consistency of style, theme, and content. The depictions of nature are stunning in their fine detail, suggestive nuance, and variety. The observations about consciousness and about meditation are at one with the teachings as they were articulated to the public. Only the references to the process and the “otherness,” confined to the Notebook, suggest a kind of experience and a depth of awareness not evident elsewhere in his work.

David Edmund Moody, Ph.D., is the author of The Unconditioned Mind: J. Krishnamurti and the Oak Grove School (Quest, 2011). This article is adapted from Moody’s book An Uncommon Collaboration: David Bohm and J. Krishnamurti, forthcoming from Fohat Productions in 2016.