#bibliomancy

Once many years ago I consulted a palmist named Spier, a Dutchman who wrote a famous scientific book on palmistry. He had an enormous scientific apparatus and knew all the various lines in the hand. He didn’t look at your hand but put soot on it, and then you had to make an imprint on paper and he read from that. He was a fantastic medium. I did not let him tell me my future; I thought I owned my own future and that was none of his business, so I bound him down only to tell me my past. He told it most accurately; he even saw an operation I had had two years before — and he didn’t say some accident, he said an operation. He was just fantastic. So then I got interested and had coffee with him and squeezed him and asked him exactly how he did it. Finally he confessed, he told me that he was a medium and that when a person came into the room to consult him, he knew all about him; he just knew it, but did not know what he knew, and this whole performance with the cracks and the handlines was to bring up the knowledge he had. In that way he could project his unconscious knowledge into these lines and inform his client, so they were a catalyzer to make him conscious of what he already knew. Really, he drew on what Jung calls the absolute knowledge of the unconscious, which we know exists, as we can see from dreams. The unconscious knows things; it knows the past and future, it knows things about other people. We all from time to time have dreams which inform us about something which happens to another person. Most of you who analyse will know that prognostic and telepathic dreams occur quite frequently to practically everybody, and this knowledge of the unconscious Jung calls absolute knowledge. A medium is a person who has a closer relationship, one might say a gift, by which to relate to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious, generally by having a relatively low level of consciousness. This explains why mediums are very often very queer and often even morally odd people — not always, but often — or they are slightly criminal, or take to drink, and so on. They are generally very endangered personalities because they have that low threshold and are so near to the absolute knowledge of the unconscious.

struggling to hold the danger back,

In Tibetan, the word for “Buddhist” is nangpa, which means “insider.” Buddhists are those who realize that happiness is an inside job. They know that meaning and joy come from within. This is another way to talk about Buddhism as a non-theistic tradition. There’s no need to look for salvation outside or in the future, as the theistic traditions maintain. Look within, right now, and you will find what you seek. As Yogi Berra said, “You can observe a lot just by watching,” especially if it’s in the right direction. I once saw a cartoon that summarized this playfully. In the cartoon there’s a sweet Christian monk holding up a big placard proclaiming, “Christ is coming!” Standing in the background is a reserved Buddhist monk with a small sign that says, “Buddha here now.” This “insider” theme is central to the nocturnal meditations, and to sleep in general, because when we go to sleep we’re being forced inside. Everything that would seduce us out into the world is turned off, so in we go. For the untrained eye, it’s dark inside. Not much to see. But for the trained eye, which is the meditative eye that has adapted to (become familiar with) the dark, there’s an entire world tucked away in here. Extraordinary vistas, and wondrous mindscapes within, await the skilled eye. Meditation and the nighttime practices can illuminate this inner world, transform the darkness into light, and help us see everything — day or night — in a shining new light.

The gnomes marry and have families, and the female gnomes are called gnomides. Some wear clothing woven of the element in which they live. In other instances their garments are part of themselves and grow with them, like the fur of animals. The gnomes are said to have insatiable appetites, and to spend a great part of the rime eating, but they earn their food by diligent and conscientious labor. Most of them are of a miserly temperament, fond of storing things away in secret places. There is abundant evidence of the fact that small children often see the gnomes, inasmuch as their contact with the material side of Nature is not yet complete and they still function more or less consciously in the invisible worlds. According to Paracelsus, "Man lives in the exterior elements and the Elementals live in the interior elements. The latter have dwellings and clothing, manners and customs, languages and governments of their own, in the same sense as the bees have their queens and herds of animals their leaders." (Philosophia Occulta, translated by Franz Hartmann.) Paracelsus differs somewhat from the Greek mystics concerning the environmental limitations imposed on the Nature spirits. The Swiss philosopher constitutes them of subtle invisible ethers. According to this hypothesis they would be visible only at certain times and only to those en rapport with their ethereal vibrations. The Greeks, on the other hand, apparently believed that many Nature spirits had material constitutions capable of functioning in the physical world. Often the recollection of a dream is so vivid that, upon awakening, a person actually believes that he has passed through a physical experience. The difficulty of accurately judging as to the end of physical sight and the beginning of ethereal vision may account for these differences of opinion.

However, there is speculation, and some evidence, that consciousness, at the most fundamental levels, is a quantum process. The dark-adapted eye, for example, can detect a single photon. If this is so then it is conceivable that by expanding our awareness to include functions which normally lie beyond its parameters (the way yogis control their body temperature and pulse rate) we can become aware of (experience) these processes themselves. If, at the quantum level, the flow of time has no meaning, and if consciousness is fundamentally a similar process, and if we can become aware of these processes within ourselves, then it also is conceivable that we can experience timelessness. If we can experience the most fundamental functions of our psyche, and if they are quantum in nature, then it is possible that the ordinary conceptions of space and time might not apply to them at all (as they don't seem to apply in dreams). Such an experience would be difficult to describe rationally ("Infinity in a grain of sand / And eternity in an hour"), but it would be very real, indeed. For this reason, reports of time distortion and timelessness from gurus in the East and LSD trippers in the West ought not, perhaps, to be discarded peremptorily.

She had died quite suddenly in a garret, according to one story, of typhus, or as another version had it, of starvation. Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife’s death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace,” but others say he wept without restraint like a little child, so much so that people were sorry for him, in spite of the repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions were true, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him. As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too.