From Letter 1: The Living World We Felt as Children

Dear Vanessa,

When we are young, we experience the world, our world, as magical, alive, sacred. But as we grow up and go through the conditioning of schooling, television, listening to grown-ups' conversations, reading popular magazines, and so on, we gradually learn to ignore the magic of the world, to forget it, and even to deny it. We pick up, almost unconsciously, the notion that the magical world is childish and unreal and that we should put away childish things.

My purpose in writing this little book of letters to you, Vanessa, is to try to show you that there is a living, magical dimension to the world we live in. The magical dimension of our world is real, as real as the itch on your arm and the hand scratching the itch. It is the dimension that you and I felt as children but could not describe. We could not describe it because none of the adults around us ever spoke of it, so we did not have any language to describe it. I am going to show you that you don't have to choose between the sacred, magical world of the child and the world of the modern adult. You can live in both worlds, for they are one.

I saw your official education in the story of the Dead World begin when you were in the third grade. You came home from school one day and announced with a tone of excitement and seriousness, "Daddy, we learned what matter is today."Dreading what I was to hear, I asked, "Oh, and what did you learn matter is?"

You replied, "Matter is the stuff the world is made of."

Matter is stuff. Matter has no life or feeling. There's no mind in matter. We all learn that at school. So I became sad and angry, knowing that you too would gradually learn not to feel the mind and heart of your world. How different that Dead World made of matter-stuff is from the world you experienced when you were three years old! Although you didn't explain things logically, you expressed a living, feeling quality in your world. You seemed to feel connected with an alive and loving world.

Once we were driving home one moonlit evening in our old beat-up Checker cab, you strapped in your car seat on the front seat between Mom and me. As the moon crossed the telephone wires you said, "Look, the moon's falling," because it actually did appear to be falling. As we arrived home, you said, "Look, the moon came too." You were so glad that the moon had come with us.

And you loved that huge oak tree on the sidewalk outside our house. It had great branches that spread out over the sidewalk and into the road. You used to play with your dolls under it for hours. You felt that it gave you friendship and protected you. One day, while you were at preschool, the roadworks men came by and pruned it so that it lost almost all its big branches. It looked almost dead. When you came home, you stared at it in astonishment and then cried and screamed inconsolably, "They hurt my friend."

Of course, children do make up stories to explain things in terms they understand. The moon was not falling in the same way a stone falls if you throw it up. And it did not "come too" in the way our friends might have if they had been following us in their car. Yet the feeling you were expressing was true. The moon did, in a way, "come too," because it had never left us. And the feeling of the reliability and friendliness of the moon, and of the whole world, was what you were trying to express.

Like you, I too lived in a world full of feeling and meaning when I was a small boy. The world was magical. I don't mean that I believed in Santa Claus and magic wands that could change geese into fairies. My mother, your Granny, was a Protestant Christian (a Congregationalist), and my father, Grandpa, was a civil engineer, an expert in concrete. So they did not think it proper to encourage children to believe in invisible beings of any kind. I felt the world around me was magical because it glowed with feeling, with goodness, with life. And I felt that life and feeling were in the world, not just in me.

My bedroom window looked west across a wheat field. I remember my mother putting me to bed one summer evening when I was about six years old. I looked out my window as the setting sun shone on the golden, glowing, ripe wheat field. I remember feeling at that moment a quietly joyful feeling of loving the wheat field, a feeling that filled my body and was so dear that I remember it even now, fifty years later.

Between the ages of six and ten, I felt that everything in my world had a living, glowing quality to it. I used to love to wander around the large garden in the back of our house in England. It was quite a beautiful garden in places, with rose beds and perennial flower beds. In other parts it was shaded and uncultivated. In yet other places, where potatoes and carrots grew, it felt very pragmatic. Those parts felt like Monday morning, which was wash day, when my mother and grandmother used to spend half the day doing the laundry in a crazy old tub that clanked and groaned as it turned.

I can recall the feeling of each part of the garden as, in my imagination, I walk around it now. The living quality of each part of the garden is lodged, not just in my visual memory, but in my whole body. I feel, in my body as well as my mind, the cool dampness of the southeast corner, under the fence and shaded by the house. Rhododendron bushes grew there, and there was a slight feeling of foreboding and loneliness. I feel the sunny raised area farther down the south side, on which there were rose beds and a paved area for deck chairs. Farther down still was the bright, colorful, and happy-feeling perennial bed. Then came the large area for vegetables, surrounded by low black currant and gooseberry bushes, which a had rich and inviting quality in the summer but felt deserted and forlorn in winter. And so it went, all around the garden.

Well, as I grew up, I also began to learn that the world is made of lifeless, mindless stuff and all the feeling of living connection with the world was buried. I was taught that competition and aggression were the only way to succeed in this life because "it's a jungle out there—red in tooth and claw." I forgot that I had a body. Oh, if someone had asked me, "Do you have a body?" I would have said, "Don't be stupid; of course I do; you can see it." But I came to live so much in my head that I forgot to feel my body, to be in my body. When we are six, or eight, we feel our body all the time, and we feel the world through our body. We might not realize this until much later, after we have lost it and then regained it. And when we regain it, we regain the memories that went with it, and the feeling of a living world.

When I was seventeen I fell in love with physics after reading The Mysterious Universe, a book written in the 1930s by a major physicist of that time, James Jeans. Jeans said that twentieth-century physicists were not just discovering mindless matter but were reading the mind of the universe. Jeans suggested that the "matter" of the universe was more like condensed thought than dead stuff. For a moment, as I read Jeans's description of physics and thought about it, I felt again the wonder and joy of being a child in the world, of feeling the world to be living and to be radiating life and affection to me.

I remember the moment I discovered quantum theory, reading that book. I was sitting by an apple tree in the garden I loved so much. It must have been early spring because the apple tree was in fill bloom, and I looked up at the blue sky through the apple blossoms and felt again, for just a moment, some living, feeling, presence all around. And from that moment I decided to study physics at university. I walked around muttering to myself "quantum theory, quantum theory," which did not endear me to the girls.

My love for quantum physics was a love for the world and a longing to rediscover the livingness of the world. But once I was at university, I became disappointed, lost heart, and lost my way. It became dear to me that physicists by then believed that physics proves there is no mind or feeling in the universe, rather than discovering it there, as Jeans had.

Still searching for the living world, I turned to molecular biology. It was a tremendously exciting time. There was an almost religious fervor that the "secret of life" had been found to be nothing but chemistry. I went on for four years trying to find life in biology, but the living energy of love and feeling seemed to have been taken even out of the study of life.

Now I began to question, "What is consciousness?" and I read a ton of spiritual books—Ramana Maharishi, Krishnamurti, and so on—at this time. At the same time as finding some glimmer of a new vision in these books, I felt increasingly angry and desperate. That vision seemed to be dead and gone in the world I was in. I suppose, looking back, that I was on the edge of a deep self-hating and world-hating depression. I believe a lot of your friends may be in this state of mind right now, Vanessa. Please tell them, "Don't give up!"

Then something magical happened: I found a genuine living spiritual tradition, in the form of the teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff was born in Russia around 1877. As a young man, be disappeared and traveled in India, Tibet, and the Middle East. He went "in search of the miraculous," that is, in search of something that could nourish all the possibilities for human life. He appeared again in Moscow in 1912, and for the next thirty-six years he taught, first in Russia, then in France and America. He called his teaching the Fourth Way, or the Way of the Householder, to distinguish it from religious approaches to spiritual training.

Meeting the Gurdjieff world in 1966 was a powerful event in my life. After I had been with the group for about a year, I attended a group meeting in the living room of one of the members, an ordinary, middle-class living room. The group leader started speaking, and I looked across at him. Suddenly the room changed. The space became full and rich and the face of the person speaking was dancing and glowing in that living space. I was inthat space, and the space flowed through me and brought me a feeling of quiet joy and intense vividness. For the first time since I was a small boy, I clearly felt that there is a dimension to our ordinary existence that is profoundly rich and alive. And as we grow up, we learn step by deliberate step to deny this reality and ignore any hint of it in our life. This discovery was not just something new to think and believe but something that I also felt deep in my body and heart.