Bright Young Things discussion

I've just been alerted to a fascinating character called Gerald Heard who had links to some of our favourite authors Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, W. Somerset Maugham, H.G. Wells etc. and who was very influential during our time period.

...perhaps our members could tell us more of what they now about Gerald Heard?

His influence was world-changing and he was a Godfather to the New Age.

My essay about him from 2003 was the first since he died in 1973.
No longer have the file for it but it is in W.H. Auden: A Legacy, which can be found in university libraries which you can check by going into world-cat.

He also wrote fiction and was the first to define an old beekeeper as a "retired" Sherlock Holmes.

I love the guy.

The Incredible Gerald Heard

As they used to ask him whenever he arrived:
“Can you tell us what Gerald Heard?”
And he would respond —voluminously!

To Huxley, and Auden, and Isherwood,
And Bill Wilson of AA
To whom GH would become tres, tres important.
He wrote: Training for the Life of the Spirit
A manual for what Gerald called “Intentional Living,”
A way of giving one’s self
Over to “this thing,”
Heard’s way of saying God
So as not to scare away the jaded mask-wearers.
(But behind their sarcasms were spasms of desperate sighing;
The other side of a cynical man is a fallen hero.)

Did you know that Larry Darrell,
Maugham’s mystic warrior of The Razor’s Edge, is Gerald Heard?

Did you know that the world-changing training for sanity—
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions—was a mission given to “G. H.” by Wilson?
You will believe it if you read Heard’s manual written twenty years earlier.
So it goes.
The more things you know the more you don’t know.
Who can say if Gerald smiles with his marvelous blue eyes at this thought,

He,
One of the most influential spirits of the Twentieth Century,
Is virtually unknown… until now

Heard Gerald
1889-1971, In 1950 Christopher Isherwood believed Gerald Heard was fifty years ahead of his time. It is now fifty years later and it is time that Gerald Heard receives his just due for being the enormous influence that he was on Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, W. S. Maugham and many more. Heard advocated what he called called "intentional Living." That is, a way of living that took the part--the human mind--and integrated the individual mind with a world mind of evolving consciousness where each part acted in concert for the good of the whole.
Heard’s influence has been severely under-accounted for in previous studies and biographies of Huxley, Isherwood, and Auden. Only very recently has some light been shed on Heard's undeserved obscurity. With Isherwood's Diaries (1996), this author's studies of Auden and Isherwood, and Edward Mendelson's Later Auden (1999), Heard is emerging--slowly. Isherwood did say it would take fifty years.
Heard befriended Huxley, Isherwood, and Auden in 1929. Isherwood recalls Heard and Auden huddling for hours discussing Heard’s philosophy. Heard conveyed to Auden his theories on a universal evolving consciousness, which had won him a major prize from the British Academy that year for his breakthrough book The Ascent of Humanity. Books of fiction and non-fiction would follow almost yearly until his last in 1963 The Five Ages of Man, about which Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Kirsch said that it was "the most important work to date of this challenging philosopher, a volume which in scope and daring might be the Novum Organum of the Twentieth Century." From 1929 to 1963, Heard was revered among an intellectual circle that would listen to and spread his ideas and then become better known than he was. He didn't seem to mind. There is compelling circumstantial evidence that Heard anonymously influenced the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, with the handbook Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, which became the basis for the now ubiquitous Twelve-Step Recovery program that is based in the abnegation of the individual ego to a spiritual source that Heard referred to as "this thing." (Heard's euphemism was meant to mean God without saying so. He didn't want to scare off potential recruits for a movement towards evolving consciousness.) And while Huxley also had a hand in influencing Wilson, it is with Heard that Wilson had an almost thirty-year correspondence.
Heard was a guru to gurus. In addition to Wilson he corresponded with Huxley, Isherwood, W. S. Maugham (Maugham based The Razor's Edge hero Larry Darrell on Heard, and both Huxley and Isherwood made him a character in novels as well.), G. B. Shaw, Huston Smith, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Clare Booth Luce, Stravinsky, Arthur Waley, John Van Druten, Lewis Mumford, John Gielgud, J. B. Rhine, Ray Bradbury, Ethel Barrymore, Arthur Waley, Dave Brubeck, Vincent Sheann, Ivan Tors, Henry Miller (who wrote that he was "panicky" at meeting the great philosopher Heard before their first meeting), and dozens of theologians, artists, professors, and philosophers who sought his advice rather than the other way around.
Henry Fitzgerald Heard was Irish, though born in London on 6 October 1889 (hence, seven years older than Huxley, fifteen years more than Isherwood, eighteen more than Auden). John Heard of Wiltshire arrived in Ireland with Walter Raleigh in 1579. Heard's father Henry James Heard was a priest in the Church of England and was given a position in London just before Gerald's birth. Gerald's youth was split between London and Ireland. Gerald Heard intended to follow his father as a priest, but his inquiring mind began to question conventional Christianity and the internal conflict led to a nervous breakdown in 1916. The fact that he was Gay at a time when the Oscar Wilde case was not too distant a memory added to his confusion. When Heard recovered after many months, he began his quest for the esoteric. He became secretary to Irish Agricultural Movement Founder Horace Plunkett and through him met the Irish economist/poet/artist/raconteur George Russell, better known by his pen name, AE. AE introduced Heard to the concept of the Perennial Philosophy, which would later be taken up, of course, by Huxley, just one of many ideas that Huxley and Heard agreed on and promoted. Heard would also meet the visionary H. G. Wells.
In the early 1930s Heard was as well known for his popular weekly BBC radio program, This Surprising World where he would explain the latest in science for the lay listener. In the mid 1930s Heard and Huxley joined the pacifist cleric H. R. L. Sheppard's Peace Pledge Union. The duo gave speeches on pacifism and appeared on BBC radio. In 1937 Huxley and Heard toured with their pacifist lectures in America and at Duke University they visited Rhine's ESP lab. They decided to remain in America and ended up in California.
In 1939, Heard met Swami Prabhavananda at the Hollywood Vedanta Society (AE had been a Vedantist) and found that Vedanta cosmology was a good fit for much of his and Huxley's ideas as set forth in Heard's books and in Huxley's Ends and Means (1937). Isherwood arrived the same year and became devoted to Prabhavananda thereafter. Huxley and Heard did not remain so wholehearted. In 1941 Heard wrote the Swami a long letter detailing his and Huxley's philosophical differences with the Vedanta Society (Vedanta Society Archives). In sum: Heard and Huxley were interested in the cerebral aspects of Vedanta, but had no inclination for some of the more mundane Hindu group rituals. Both would continue to write for the Vedanta society's bi-monthly periodical Vedanta and the West and give lectures but otherwise rarely visited the center. From this point, much of Heard's history can be traced, if somewhat sketchily, in texts by and about Huxley and Isherwood. In particular, Isherwood's Diaries record an excellent and delightful history of a most fascinating man and mentor. Now that Isherwood's "fifty years" have elapsed, Huxley, Isherwood, and Auden scholars are giving Heard a second look, which will likely excavate the British years that led to the American years. (See also Vedanta)

From the Christopher Isherwood Encyclopedia

David wrote: "...Heard advocated what he called "intentional Living." That is, a way of living that took the part--the human mind--and integrated the individual mind with a world mind of evolving consciousness where each part acted in concert for the good of the whole....Isherwood recalls Heard and Auden huddling for hours discussing Heard’s philosophy. Heard conveyed to Auden his theories on a universal evolving consciousness, which had won him a major prize from the British Academy that year for his breakthrough book The Ascent of Humanity. ..."

I'm interested in learning more about the universal evolving consciousness. Philosophy is difficult for most of us to get our heads around but our time period of interest was awash with new ideas and to understand the literature we do need to understand more about the ideas.

Anyone who can make this concept of universal consciousness easy (or easier) to understand would be welcome to have a go!

Evolving consciousness: Part one

Mysticism is literature; literature is the means to an end and that end is mysticism.

On May 17, 1910, Halley's Comet shatters the peace of Europe's skies. In or about December, 1910," claims Virginia Woolf, "human character changed." In truth, however, what changed was not character itself but the way it was viewed. At the end of King Edward's reign, as Woolf argues in [an] essay from the twenties, people suddenly became conscious of needs they never knew that they had. Up until 1910, artists had considered the needs of human nature to be adequately reflected by the material and historical conditions in which it was rooted. But at the end of the first decade external situations appeared to have lost their revelatory power, their complicity, as it were, with inner intention. Scientists and philosophers began to wonder whether the most well-established truths were nothing more than matters of impression and mood, of perspective and judgment. Positivism, realism, and naturalism appeared to have forsaken the subject they first intended to serve, but of which they had never really spoken: the human subject, the psyche, self, or however one wished to call it--the innermost truth of subjective experience--which was improperly reflected by historical events.
Thomas J. Harrison, 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance

The universe works in a way described by Aldous Huxley:

Any given event in any part of the universe has as its predetermining conditions all previous events in all parts of the universe.

This axiom summarizes the nature of what mysticism means: there is a whole in which all parts are unified in an ascending spiral of evolving consciousness. Halley's Comet and the transcendent mystical feelings derived from seeing it became a profound influence on 20th Century literature.

Earth and humanity are events in a contiguous and continuous perpetual continuum; the impetus for both began after the "big bang" banged.

Human beings have always had--consciously or unconsciously--an intuition that there is something going on that we don't understand and that whatever it is unifies rather than separates. Artists are intuitively compelled to turn a creative impulse into a medium that can be understood by the many and not just themselves.
The Perennial Philosophy1 (the philosophy of mysticism) has its seminal beginnings in the ancient Hindu sacred texts that are the first enunciations/elucidations of mysticism as an integral, continuous, contiguous, atomized essence within and without all of existence physically and psychically. Atoms move but we can’t see them; yet, they exist. We take their reality on faith. Consciousness evolves but we can’t see it; yet, mystical philosophers believe it—beginning with the ancient texts. These texts—the Vedas—made their way from India to inform the East then the West through the derivatively evolving disciplines of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Platonism, Zen, Christian Mysticism, German Transcendentalism, British Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, Theosophy, and on the eve of the 20th Century came full circle in the revitalization and dissemination of the Vedas through the worldwide Vedanta Society. The Greeks may have been the cradle of Western civilization, but the Vedas are the womb of world civilization. The links in the chain are definitive and strong; yet, for many in the West, Hegel, Emerson, Fredric Jameson are read as originals when they are merely—if creatively-- derivative. Hegel, with his dialectic, was one of the first Western philosophers to lecture extensively on Eastern Religion. Emerson was a devoted Vedantist who freely credited the Vedas as the source of his “Oversoul.” Jameson’s dialectics, his “combinatoire” (synthesis), is Hegelian, hence, Vedantic. This, however, is to the credit of these writers since the wisdom of the Vedas is not proprietary but meant to be revisited in different epochs and geographical locations. This wisdom is perennial from some amorphous, indefinable beginning to some future, as yet indefinable end—and then it will start all over again in an endless cyclical regeneration. The Vedas’ impetus of creation is exactly the “Big Bang” theory of an initial first cause that evolves as an ascending, widening spiral of the expanding universe, which scientists see as a physical process. The Vedas see it as both physical and metaphysical, that there is a corresponding psychical expansion and evolution concurrently.
According to mystical philosophy there are immutable constructs that change constantly in appearance but remain constant in their essence; still, the changes are distinct and recognizable to non-mystically inclined perceivers, which cause these perceivers to see only flux as defined by the five senses. These senses and the individuals using them feel a separateness devised by eye and ear that assumes that one is never part of a whole because one cannot see one’s self included with others without the aid of still water, a picture, photo or mirror--relatively recent methods that have not yet quite caught up with the thousands of years of “I am I’ you are not I.” Indeed, the revelation of a primal group standing over their reflection in still water must have been as astounding as thunder and lightning. Separateness is man’s physical condition; alienation his assumption inculcated from his inability to see himself with others. Thus, Vico's theory that humans created language to explain the disturbances to their senses (thunder, lightning) and from which they developed fables about natural events, was initially inspired by their awe/fear of the natural world. Language is a creation that attempts to overcome both the awe/fear of nature and human separateness, but in its development further separated individuals as no two people interpret language in exactly the same way. Vico believed that these awe-sociations that were derived from natural events became fables, then became poetic wisdom, then became esoteric wisdom (philosophy) in an ever-ascending and widening spiral of complexity that became so far removed from the initial feelings of awe-sociation that individuals can no longer intimate feelings of awe solely from the natural world as did their child-like primitive ancestors.
Feelings of awe are transcendent; concentration upon the feeling of awe is systematic transcendence. Mystics meditate; artists create—both are intuitive concentrations that hope—and often succeed—in evoking awesome transcendent feelings. The Katha Upanishad (1.2.22-24) explains the importance of intuiting the undifferentiated unity of the Self: “The wise who knows the Self as bodiless within the bodies, as unchanging among changing things, as great and omnipresent, does never grieve. That self cannot be gained by the Veda, nor by understanding, nor by much learning. He whom the Self chooses, by him the Self can be gained. The Self chooses him (his body) as his own. But he who has not first turned away from his wickedness, who is not tranquil, and subdued, or whose mind is not at rest, he can never obtain the Self (even) by knowledge.”
Intuition is paramount; however, spiritual intuition is less likely for the many that do not have any clue about achieving some form of inner self-understanding. Mystics and artists pursue self-understanding by design.
Disciples or audiences wish to share in the awe-sociations of the mystic and artist. This desire has not changed since the earliest fable-makers created Viconian “fabula.” The essence of awe has not changed either; the wise artist knows he is reflecting new images that are updated versions derived from the same long-evolving spiral begun by his ancestors. Artists are wise. A creator knew that the artist reaches into the primary world of the separating, utilitarian language of particularities to create a secondary world of essential universality that transcends individuality to move audiences as a unity. Poets take the earliest Viconian awe and the passion that awe inspires to claim literary art (and all art) to be the true bearer of the continuing, moment by moment, integral essence begun with the first people and the first awe. Fables to Poetry to philosophy—all the same. Sankara was right; Heraclites was right; Plato was right; Kant was right; Vico was right; Hegel was right, Emerson was right; Nietzsche was right; Jung was right; Aldous Huxley was right; Michael Polanyi was right; Iris Murdoch was right; Frederic Jameson is right; Flux is a process, not the chaos that is seen in the material world; dialectics is a process, not an end. Consciousness evolves from the reconciliation of opposites as described in the Isha Upanishad and in the sixth chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita:
The Isha Upanishad teaches that evolving consciousness comes through the reconciliation of opposites through the perception of an essential Unity of the apparently incompatible opposites, God and the World, Renunciation and Enjoyment, Action and Internal Freedom, the One and the Many, Being and its Becomings, the Passive Divine Impersonality and the Active Divine Personality, the Knowledge and the Ignorance, the Becoming and the Not-Becoming.
The Gita teaches that only the discerning man who chooses to be a calm center within life’s hurricane and understands the reconciliation of opposites can hope to see the undifferentiated unity of the Ultimate Reality.

He who regards
With an eye that is equal
Friends and comrades,
The foe and the kinsman,
The vile, the wicked,
The men who judge him,
And those who belong
To neither faction:
He is the greatest. (81-2)

Through the fission of the reconciliation of opposites, activity creates graduated resolutions that proceed to another moment of the eternal now of “isness,” which is described by the Vedanta-influenced T.S. Eliot in “Burnt Norton.” Eliot echoes the Vedas and concludes:

And all is always now (www.allspirit.co.uk/norton.html).

The resolutions that graduate from the reconciliation of opposites exist in the eternal now and move fluidly without interruption to become the next sources of opposites needing to be reconciled while consciousness continues to move up the ascending spiral. The movement is fluid and imperceptible. The senses may see, hear, feel, touch, or taste the outcomes of these resolutions but these physical outcomes are static. The outcomes are the residue of a movement after a particular movement is over. One drinks water, eats food, touches silk only after the process of their becoming reaches its material end; one is rarely conscious of the process and becomes focused only on the results. For the many, awareness of process, whether of an apple or consciousness, is rarely and barely thought about unless an aspect of process becomes an expedient necessity such as drought or famine. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but for the many, “mother” often doesn’t speak until necessity is expedient and mandatory. Throughout history farsightedness has been in short supply and the barn door has been closed after the animals escaped. (Or a need to cut oil consumption is not seen as a necessity until chaos is recognized.) The many cannot grasp the hidden allness of the bigger picture. What is misperceived to be linear, to be before/after, cause/effect, is finite and confined to an expedient present disconnected from the process of evolution. To the misperceiving majority events are dots on a line and the majority cannot see the continuity and contiguity of the present dots and how they are related to previous dots. The previous dots are forgotten or they are only memories or histories. The majority also cannot see the future that is ahead and too far off to consider or imagine. Conversely, to artists and mystics time is only a man-made construct to which we adhere slavishly and detrimentally.

Evolving consciousness: Part 2

Thornton Wilder wrote, “It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is a vast landscape, and it is only the eye of the beholder that moves” (The Eighth Day, 395). If one throws a rock into a pond, one can watch the process from the initial splash to the expanding circular ripples. If one could stand back far enough and see the “big bang,” one could see the first cause and follow the oval expansion of the universe moment-to-moment, istgeist to istgeist (isness to isness), and see the cause and effect of how each isness ripples into the next isness. From the expanding ripples in the pond to an expanding universe, these images—one real based on visible nature, one “metaphorized” as an extrapolation of invisible nature—help one’s actual eyes to “see” an idea, like atoms, that the mind’s eye can understand only by a leap of the imagination, even though atoms are real, not imagined. To imagine connotes “seeing” what isn’t there; but atoms are there, spinning in a circle that is the ultimate microcosm of the larger microcosm of the pond, and both the atom and the pond are within the ultimate macrocosm of the expanding universe. All the sense-perceived microcosms seem differentiated, but if one sees as the mystic sees, then Ultimate Reality is both isness and process. One sees a cloud that is made up of condensed water, from which drops of rain merge into an ocean. The drops are a process, a moment of isness that flows from one isness (cloud) to another isness (ocean).
From the eye of the beholder who sees the vast landscape, one can see both the isness and the process simultaneously and one can again refer to Huxley:

Any given event in any part of the universe has as its determining conditions all previous and contemporary events in all parts of the universe.

Imagination (intuition) can allow us to see the timeless interrelations. But imagination is not just about seeing what isn’t real; it is equally about “seeing” what is real—an atom. Imagination leads to the discovery of what is physically real and can be measured (science). Imagination also leads to the discovery of what is metaphysically real and can be “metaphorized” (art). Science and art are about seeing what previously was not seen but was imagined (intuited). Michael Polanyi said: We know much more than we can tell. 2 Telling is an outcome of what is already known, even when that telling might be imagining what is not yet known. (A science-fiction writer takes the known to imagine what an unknown future might be like. He wishes to transcend the known through the creative impulse.) Art is one vehicle for transcendence. Humans have a compelling desire for transcendence, which for most is an unconscious need without a cognitive—let alone, a philosophical basis. There are forms of upward transcendence and downward transcendence (Aldous Huxley). 3 Upward transcendence is more conscious of its own ambitions; downward transcendence is often crudely unconscious. Upward: Mysticism, art, spirituality, love (mystic love as Eros then transformed to the transcendently awesome love of Agape—the love for all existence); Downward: addictions (drugs, alcohol, sex, religious dogma and fanaticism, nationalistic fanaticism).
Transcendence, conscious or unconscious, is the desire of humanity; transcendence is the design of mystical philosophy, as first recorded in the Vedas. Still, long before the 3,000 year-old Vedas, awe-sociations were recorded by the primitive fabulists described in Vico’s New Science. The creative impulse of Art/literature is the reflective dialectical synthesis of moments in space. These moments recreate awe and evoke a sense of unicity that seeks to overcome feelings of separation. Unity with the Ultimate Reality is the goal of mystical philosophy.
The continuum of the statement above starting “any given event” includes the evolution of man’s consciousness. Within this philosophy is the concept of an Ultimate Reality or Ground of Being (perhaps Divine) that is both the first cause of the continuum and the continuum itself. An artistic perspective that is grounded in mystical philosophy is just now becoming a view that some critics, particularly in Europe and Russia—and Satya Mohanty in America-- have begun to apply to literature, seeing certain writers as exponents who have consciously or unconsciously incorporated this philosophy into their art. While the idea of a “Divine Ground” concerns a spiritual basis, mystical philosophy can still be a paradigm for literature with or without a belief in divinity. Vico’s Science asserts that man “created” stories to explain his sensory experiences as having a spiritual basis. (Where else could the awesomely scary thunder and lightning be coming from but a spiritual source?) All wisdom evolved from these initial “fabula.” Consequently, even if Vico did or did not believe in a spirit, he believed that his primitive constituents did believe in spirit and that rightly or wrongly this belief is the integral and dominating aspect of man’s psychological and philosophical evolution.
This metaphysical Great Yearning will explicate the nature and background of mystical philosophy as the impetus for the creative impulse, and thus the raison d’etre underlying all art, consciously or unconsciously. This initiative can then turn to and concern writers—and each writer’s Weltanschauung--that evoke the mystical philosophy consciously (the few) or unconsciously (the many). A literary theory only works when it can be applied to all literary art. For example, one can apply a literary theory based on Jungian psychoanalysis retroactively to the Greek tragedies, and one can apply Jameson’s neo-Marxian dialectic retroactively to Greek tragedies; mystical philosophy can also be applied retroactively to Greek tragedies. Jung, in fact, was influenced by the Vedas and said so; consequently, a Jungian analysis is a mystical analysis. Jameson was influenced by Hegel’s dialectics (reconciliation of opposites), also from the Vedas. Actually, since mystical philosophy preceded the Greek tragedies, perhaps it is not retroactive but the precursor to how these tragedies evolved. A purpose of this theory is to demonstrate that the wisdom of mysticism underlies and precedes all wisdom in any discipline. Mystical philosophy as a literary theory applies to all literary artists beginning with the first stories told by the primitive storyteller. All literary artists are writing art as an outcome of a process of living in their era. The art is one outcome in the process of evolving consciousness. Art demonstrates that the creative impulse and the art created are the representational reflections of an era’s essence, its moment of “isness,” its zeitgeist. The writer’s attitude towards his moment of “isness” cannot exist without the emotional effusions that result from the influence of the zeitgeist that forms him. The artist and art are outcomes of the metaphysical process that were derived from the discoveries occurring earlier in the process. The artist and the art become the influences in the process leading to the next generation’s outcomes. Terms such as “earlier” and “next” are expedient signifiers in order to account for the linear misperception of time. The terms also signify the inadequacy of language’s imprecise attempts to truly duplicate immediate experience.
As for form, the vast literature of mysticism has been given an encapsulated form by Huxley. Referring again to the “any given event” statement, this aphorism is a good basis for understanding what Huxley called The Minimum Working Hypothesis, which summarizes the common denominators of mysticism into four basic tenets that were first stated in his introduction to the 1944 Isherwood/Prabhavananda translation of The Bhagavad-Gita Gita (7). To consider these tenets as a prelude to this study’s views on language (and life) is to make the same metaphysical leap that philosophers and writers have made in their careers. If the reader is also able to make this leap even temporarily, then what this study describes will fit into a much clearer context:

Minimum Working Hypothesis
1. the phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness—the world of things and animals and even gods—is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.
2. human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference [intimating the Awe-sociations]; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition [i.e., meditation, art] superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.
3. man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with this spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
4. man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground of all existence.

The key to Huxley’s axioms is the role of intuition as a guide to knowledge not to be found empirically:

It is the task of philosophy to try to translate and understand analytically in terms of thought or conceptual thinking what has been presented in the living experience of intuition. It must start from experience and it must recognize experience to be the goal of all philosophy. Philosophy cannot give us an experience of the actual---it attempts to show what is possible, not what is but what may be. The merely possible demands verification or rather an actualization in concrete experience. This is supplied by intuition. A philosophy that does not base itself on this solid footing of perfect experience is a merely barren speculation that moves in the sphere of ideas alone, detached from Reality. This is what distinguishes Hegel's Idea from Sankara's Brahman. The latter is a concrete experience in ecstatic intuition, while the former is only the highest achievement of reason. (Brahma, 167)

Intuition drives the inspiration of the creative impulse even if hard work follows to see that impulse through to the art’s completion. Art is a means to the end for the artist and his audience to intimate the Awe-sociations that are harbored in the unconscious in order to identify with and come to “unitive knowledge of the “Divine Ground of all existence.” The poet/artist does so by using language that he has learned from the common, profane speech of the people in such a unique way that these words intimate the numinous and sacred. For both artists and audiences the goal of their reciprocity is ultimately to explain how, through poetry, both the poet and his readers might ask themselves the two paramount questions of individual existence:

Who am I?
Whom ought I to become?