Of the various pictures of what people imagine, “waking-up, being-enlightened,” to be, perhaps the most thrilling is the one of secret knowledge. Scattered throughout the five millennia of thinking man’s history are stories from all four corners and cultures concerning: The Mysteries, The Ambrosia, The Alchemist’s Stone, The Ark, The Grail, The Secret Name of God, and others.
When raised above their most simplistic interpretation, (that of gaining supernatural physical powers from their obtainment), they all represent man’s innate belief in the existence of some fact normally kept from man; whose knowledge would give him supernatural understanding; would answer all of man’s otherwise unanswerable questions and make everything about life that is confusing clear.
It is certainly not necessary that a man be mystically inclined, (a dazed-eyed, wooly-brained, occultist weirdo in a cape and funny cap with the aroma of camphor about him), to be interested in this matter. All men are interested, (even scientists), for wired into the thought-producing operations of man’s brain is an automatic positive response to the idea, regardless of whether the individual who hears it ever attempts to actively pursue it.
It matters not a man’s religion, race, culture, wealth or education. If he is ordinary and sane by the prevailing standards, his brain has available in its repertoire a thought that will immediately agree that somewhere, in some form, must be a piece of presently unknown information which would explain everything, (and not necessarily metaphysical in nature).
One bruising this has suffered is its commonly conceived connection to things and people irrational, other-worldly, and just plain old spooky. It is as though life does not want the majority, or even many humans, to take an active, sane interest in the matter, and indeed has motivated men’s minds to create the marginalized category of, “metaphysics,” as opposed to real physics and objective knowledge. But none of this stops the few, whose neural wiring concerning the subject has either an extra soldering juncture, or lacks one.
J.