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A Technique Of Spiritual Liberation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 August 2024
Extract
A technique of freedom? The expression is, quite certainly, too strong. A title says what it can, as briefly as it can. Properly speaking we have no right to hope from our own efforts anything but conditions favourable to the play of our freedom—let that be clearly understood from the start. Nevertheless we shall see better what we ought to hope from the means, and what cannot be expected of them, if we take up the matter in several different ways.
The word ‘means’ is wholly valid only when applied to material things. You hit a nail with a hammer and you (who are not clumsy) drive it in, and even do so in such a way that the effect is exactly proportionate to the communication of your energy to the nail and the resistance of the wall.
The ‘means’ is sufficient to the ‘end’. But when you ask yourself what you are going to do to become more vitally, more fully free, no-one will teach you the great means of all the means: it is simply to be free. There is no other means, and all that you can do will be worth’while only in order to vary this means according to the particular case.
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- Copyright © 1955 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Translated by kind permission of author and editor from La Vie Spirituelle, July' 1955, by Marion Parker.
2 In Yoga, edited by Cahiers du Sud, 1953, p. 126
3 Psychological Healing, p. 285.
4 Abellio in the weeklyArts, March 23, 1955.
5 Here we recognise the fundamental theme of all the themes of Holy Writ, which the Hebrew expressed by the word Berith (too partially translated by Covenant or Testament)-
6 Per certas vias.—'Every true technique is in itself infallible and necessarily produces the result it aims at, supposing all the conditions are fulfilled.’ (O. Lacombe, Revue thomiste, 1951, p. 136.)
7 Either this good or that good, particularly the last study of this collection: ‘The balance between the aesthetic and the ethical in the elaboration of personality'.
8 I shall be excused for directing attention again to my old article, ‘Irony and the Christian sense', La Vie Spirituelle, December, 1937. I should today bring to it certain siftings ana ramifications, but at least it exists.
9 one of the major themes of the Gospel. So Mt., 3, 8, 10; 7, 19; 13, 8, 23, 26; 41; Lk., 8, 15; 13, 7_; In, 12, 25. Must not our Lord's last miracle before his Passion be as significant in itS intention as his first, as a conclusion in action of his teaching? Now this is after drying uP of the fig tree on which he found no fruit—a miracle intentionally bizarre, after the manner of the prophets, in order the more to strike the imagination; it was not the season for figs: Mk, 11, 12-14 and 20-14 (where one sees also that this fruitfulness is obtained by prayer in virtue of faith). Cf. Spicq: ‘The Christian must bear fruuit', La Vie Sprirituelle, June,1951 .
10 For Gurdjieff, for instance, there are three men in us, but none of them loves spiritually. The first is the Psychic man the second the emotional man, the third the intellectual man. The higher states are reached by 'labour' starting from one of these three. there is no love except the emotional (or sensual). (Oupensky, Fragment of an Unknown Doctrine,
11 Another great theme of the New Testament: Cor., 8, 2-3; Gal., 4, 9; 2 Tim., 2, 19.
12 L'Expirience chritienne, Aubier, 1952 (v. particularly ch. I, II, DC, X, XI).
13 Ibid., p.21.
14 Ibid., p.14.
15 The words are Paul Serant's, in Pauwels's Monsieur Gurdjieff(reviewed in La Vie Spirituelle,May, 1955), pp. 295-6. How significant is the title of Keyserling's book, From Suffering to Plenitude