It is the lack of understanding that causes a lot of conflicts, according to Assagioli, due to the misconceptions induced by our senses, emotions, and mental illusions.
By Roberto Assagioli, 1968, A Talk With Discussion, (Transcript from a 1968 Recording), from the Assagioli Archive in Florence, [i] Translated and Edited With Notes by Jan Kuniholm[ii] Image by: Anna Lund Sørensen.
- Abstract by Jan Kuniholm: Understanding can be accomplished in two ways: intellectual understanding and deeper understanding of spiritual meaning. Deeper meaning can be grasped only by intuition. A fundamental obstacle to understanding is illusions, which are of three kinds: material, emotional, and mental. Illusions of matter are caused by subjectivity of the senses. More serious is the attachment to material things. Emotional delusions arise out of desires and attachments. Some are more specific, caused by traumas, strong impressions and complexes. At another level are mental delusions, attachments to ideas, principles and ideologies. Obsessions arising out of ideologies have been shown to do great harm. Ordinary humanity lives in a sea of illusions. All spiritual writers speak of awakening from the dream of ordinary life. One arrives at understanding differently according to the level. Freedom from material illusion is achieved by detachment. The way to deal with emotional fogginess is clear mental vision. Mental illusions must be healed by the work of intuition. Each level can be understood and mastered only by activity at a higher level. For example some classic philosophical problems such as freedom and determinism can be solved only at an intuitive level. Discussion follows the talk.
Understanding the meaning of a communication can be accomplished in two ways: at two levels or octaves, one might say. The first is to understand what others have meant — which is already difficult for the reasons I have presented [in an earlier talk] — it is to clearly understand intellectually what has been communicated, if it has been communicated clearly. But there is another deeper or higher level (they are all metaphors) that gives not only objective understanding, but deep understanding — the understanding of what a communication, or even a fact, means spiritually; that is, what it means in the context of the whole of life, of becoming; the value it has, what it can lead to, what it derives from.
Now this is true understanding, and the deeper meaning of things, events, and people can be grasped only by intuition — the mind is not enough. The clear mind enables one to grasp — to distinguish [the two], one could use the word “grasp”[i] for the objective grasping of what one has communicated; and use the word “understand”[ii] for what is the deep, essential meaning. Even the word “understand”[iii] itself indicates this a little bit, it can be read as including, embracing; and “understanding” up to a certain point suggests a certain call to empathy, unification, identification. But the essential point in understanding is that nothing has true meaning if it is taken in isolation; one must always include it in as large a context as possible, and ideally in the totality of the flow of life. Only in relation to the whole of life does any thing, person or event reveal its meaning.
Now the fundamental obstacle to this spiritual understanding is illusion, taken in the broadest sense of the word. Illusions impede our perception of reality, and this happens at every level. Hence the need to expose them well and then use ways to get free of them. There are three basic types of illusions. Illusions of matter, which correspond to the word maya,[iv] or illusion in the strict sense; emotional illusions, which are called clouding[v] or blinding; and mental illusions. Let us examine them briefly.
Illusions of matter are caused by the limitation and subjectivity of our five senses. I have already discussed these [in another talk]. We naively believe that things are as we see them, that they have the color that we see, that they have the texture that we perceive; but this is not so. I have already said that colors are a purely subjective thing, that there are colors that we do not perceive but of which we have indirect notion, such as infrared and ultraviolet; it seems that certain animals have a keener sense of color than we do, that ants perceive ultraviolet rays and dogs hear sounds that we do not perceive — high-pitched sounds: there are dog whistles that dogs hear but humans do not. But then physics has even demolished [the concept of] matter: the matter of materialists does not exist; it is but a dance of energy particles. So this is a cognitive illusion about matter.
More serious is the attachment to material things, an attachment that is due to our physical sensations and in general a false evaluation of material things. Our tendency for identification often turns to material things; first as possession: “my car” [for example]. A landowner once said, “I am my land,” that is, he identified [himself] with it. The Arab on his horse, and now the car-lover with his car; in a way they are the same — one can see that they are the symbol, the myth of the centaur. The centaur is man and horse together, so that one can say, much more prosaically, that the modern centaur is the man behind the wheel. A man feels differently behind the wheel than when he is on foot: he acquires qualities, or rather faults, that the man on foot does not have; there is the exhilarating madness of the motorist. These are crude but very common examples. In a sense, the attachment to material possessions and to money are also of the same kind.
We hold on to emotional delusions. Every strong emotion, every passion makes one “lose the benefit of the mind.” There are current expressions that indicate this; one speaks of a man “blinded by anger.” The “blindness of lovers,” described so well by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and even earlier by the Greeks who depicted Cupid blindfolded, is well known. Every desire, every attachment produces these cloudings, these blindings. In certain cases they are even more specific: all the emotional complexes brought out by psychoanalysis, certain strong impressions, and certain psychic traumas produce a localized emotional charge that fogs [the mind], that makes one regard everything about that area of experience in a completely wrong, unreal way. One of the most frequent and universal types of emotional illusions are “emotional swings.” At certain times we feel up emotionally, then on some days we feel down, depressed, even though nothing has really changed in our internal situation and the external world; it is only our emotionality that reacts in the opposite way. Libra types are particularly prone to these emotional fluctuations, but everyone has them.
At another octave [or level] there are mental delusions, which consist of attachments to ideas, principles, ideologies. And here again, it is not that a man has ideas, but rather he is possessed by ideas — at the extreme, he is obsessed with them. This, too, has been recognized in current language, when we talk about “fixed ideas” and fanaticism; in short, we have very recent and dramatic evidence of how obsession produced by ideologies can do harm in the world.[vi] So it is good to face reality: humanity lives immersed in a sea of illusions: the normal state of humanity is illusion; that is, the normal reactions of humanity are all mistaken. It could be said that normal humanity lives in a dreaming state, just as unreal as dreaming is compared to waking life. The title of the Spanish play Life is a Dream — La vida es sueño[vii] — has a very deep spiritual meaning. Ordinary life is a dream; that is, an illusion. It has its functions and its purposes that must be understood and evaluated, but in reality it is a dreaming state.
And in fact all spiritual writers have spoken more or less in terms of “awakening.” They talk about spiritual awakening, awakening to reality, especially in Buddhism, where the symbolism of awakening — which is not just symbolism, it is a spiritual reality — is accentuated. The effects of illusions are a series of misjudgments: we value what has no value, and don’t value what really does, and this leads to an endless series of misunderstandings — misunderstanding ourselves, misunderstanding others, and misunderstanding life. The whole modern attitude, of modern man, of many young people in the face of life, is one of complete misunderstanding. The attitudes that life has no meaning, life has no value — in short, that negative existentialism according to which man is alone, isolated, lost in a universe that he does not understand and in which he is not understood — all of this is based on this illusion, on this lack of understanding of what life is, of its value, its meaning, its goals.
And this is based on the fact that man considers himself and the life he experiences as isolated in itself, as not included in the great universal becoming and in the great laws that derive from this becoming; hence this negative, despairing, rebellious attitude against life. Whereas spiritual understanding offers the great gift of making one understand the “why” of all the negative aspects of life, and revealing its immense positive aspects, and thus produces understanding; and from this, acceptance; and from acceptance, cooperation. And so we return to cooperation — cooperation with life and with all that life contains, including first and foremost our fellow human beings; and cooperation leads to something higher: communion, and finally conscious immersion in universal life. You can call it communion with God, you can call it a cosmic sense, you can name it in various ways, but this is it: an ultimate fact of communication, understanding, acceptance, cooperation — this is communion, unity.
How does one arrive at understanding? The means are different according to the three levels. At the material level, of attachment to and over-valuation of material things, of objects, we get there through “detachment,” which is an attitude of disinterest and mastery, in the sense that we recognize that things have no real power over us unless we give it to them. It doesn’t at all mean condemning matter or material life; it means not being enslaved by them, not being caught in the veils of maya.
To give a very specific example: the essential modern problem is the relationship between man and machine. Well, ordinary man is dominated by the machine. He created the machines, but then the machine dominates him, so he lives as a function of his machines, so to speak. One negative solution was Gandhi’s, the rejection of the machine. He tried to reconstruct Indian life without machines, he urged people not to buy the industrially produced textiles imported from England, but for each person to make them at home. All this failed utterly. His devoted disciple Nehru had to recognize realistically that this did not work, and he promoted modern industrial development. So: neither slavery to the machine, nor rejection of the machine, but the natural life, the simple life even toward the […] of our problems.
Theoretically it is not difficult to say (practically it is another thing): be masters of the machine, use it to the extent and insofar as it serves higher purposes, but limit it to those. To take the most current example, that of the automobile; many people live according to their car, they want to buy a car that is always more modern, always bigger, and they get into debt. And then they do not take a step without going by car, even when it is absurd — driving around the city when it would be faster to go on foot — and so they do not make any physical movement, they get intoxicated — and all because they are under the influence of the machine.
So certainly there is no case to abolish cars, but only to use them to the extent that they truly serve human purposes; or even better, spiritual but also for human purposes — to the extent that they serve. So the car has a purely subordinate instrumental value, it has no value in itself. And so it is for everything else. So it is easy to see the attitude toward material objects, for example, even money. Money is a thing with which you can do magnificent things or you can do indifferent things; but very often you do things that are not good, and you are possessed by money instead of possessing it. This is something I have said many times: that is the disastrous results of big lottery or football pool winnings and so on have been demonstrated, because people who are morally unprepared to possess these sums have made very bad use of them. There was a priest who went crazy when he won ninety million — and he was a priest! Families split up, marital separations, etc.
Regarding emotional fogginess, the most direct means [to deal with this level of illusion] is that of clear mental vision. Here there is no need […] they are so clear, so obvious that they can be easily unmasked — I don’t say mastered, but unmasked — and there is no need to appeal to the soul or higher intuition. Only the use of the enlightened mind, of sound reason, is needed to see how many mistakes and foolish things create what used to be called the passions, the emotions, or the emotional attachments. So here the use of discrimination, of sound reason, of the enlightened mind may suffice; provided, however, that we have a developed mind and are willing to make use of it; whereas it is usually the mind that is enslaved to the passions. Very often the mind serves to justify emotions and passions, to give them a certain rationale; it’s like a lawyer defending a wrong cause. So it is first a matter of releasing the mind of the clouding produced by the passions, by the emotions; and second of using the light of the mind to dispel the clouding.[viii]
For mental illusions, the mind is not enough, because these are illusions at the very level of the mind itself, and are produced by the activity of the concrete human mind. Therefore the mind cannot heal itself: a higher faculty is needed; this is a spiritual matter. To dispel mental illusions requires intuition, because every mental illusion generally contains a part of truth, but it is a limited truth, circumscribed and detached from the rest and therefore disproportionate, which therefore gives an erroneous meaning or value, because it is not balanced or counterbalanced by other ideas or conceptions.
Now in order to evaluate the place of an idea in the whole, the mind is not sufficient: we need intuition, which gives precisely that sense of totality and is an instrument of higher cognition; it reaches levels of reality that the mind alone cannot reach. But in order for a person to become fully conscious of an intuition, it needs to be expressed and translated into mental terms. And even here two things can happen: first, the mind can misinterpret an insight, and then the mind becomes what Patanjali[ix] calls a “destroyer of the Real.” Mis-interpretation, mis-expression, mis-wording, mis-application of the insight are very common. Or, secondly, the mind assumes its proper, humble attitude as an interpreter of intuition, without interfering with that activity, and reveals itself to be a valuable tool, necessary for the “translation” of intuition into conscious terms.
A more general principle that can serve as a guide is this: that each level can only be understood and mastered by a higher level. That is to say, all that is emotional clouding and blinding can be understood and mastered only at the mental level; and so all mental illusions can be dispelled only at the intuitive level. The mistake people often make is to want to fight something on its own level; this is not the case. One must first ascend to the highest level and then from there act on the level below. One must keep this principle well in mind, because […]. So certain mental problems cannot be solved on the rational plane.
There are some problems that have been discussed by philosophers for centuries, for millennia, without ever arriving at a solution, because philosophers were searching on the purely mental plane. One must instead ascend to the intuitive level, have the direct spiritual experience of a certain truth, and then one can translate it into philosophical, scientific, mental terms; but one cannot solve the problem on the same plane [as it arises]. For example, the famous problem of free will and determinism cannot be solved on the mental level, on the human level; rationally it cannot be solved, because there are some data that would support determinism, others that would support freedom.
And this is a demonstration of the fundamentally mistaken alternative: ”black or white,” freedom or determinism, vice or virtue, truth or error. All of this is the purely logical setting, I would say, of Aristotelian logic that is mistaken:[x] there is no such thing as rigid dualism, there is no black and white, but an infinity of grays, as I have said other times. So there are partial truths that are limited to a given sphere of reality, to a given cycle, and no absolute things.
There are many examples even from science. Certain chemical laws and so many other things are valid at a given order of magnitude but no longer work at another order.[xi] And so between freedom and determinism there can be said to be infinite degrees of relationship. At the outset you can say that [an average] man is 99.9% determined, and a Buddha is 99% free —not 100%, because even he is also determined by certain planetary and solar limitations. So the problem of freedom, the problem of liberation, is a very practical and very useful thing. It is a matter of rising to greater and greater levels of freedom, and less and lesser states of determinism.
Basically what I said tonight about illusion can be translated into terms of freedom: those who are in illusion are determined by illusions; those who have freed themselves from a given illusion are free in that area, while they are determined by many other illusions. Therefore, dispelling illusions is a path of gradual liberation. We start with a minimum, with an infinitesimal amount of freedom, and we can go higher and higher; we will never be completely free, but we are never completely enslaved unless we accept being so. You see that the same thing can be expressed in different terms.
DISCUSSION[xii]
Z.: So when you are very high up you act according to divine laws, and then there is no choice: there it is.
Assagioli: Well, let’s take another material example: the law of gravity and aviation. Aviation does not abolish the law of gravity. Man does not abolish natural laws, they always exist; but, within this law, knowing it and using it, he frees himself from a number of limitations that gravitation imposes. The law of gravitation prevents us from flying [bodily], but with all the devices of aviation, that is, using the counter-thrust of the air [currents] and a number of things that I do not understand but that exist, man flies — not violating the law of gravitation, but freeing himself from consequent limitations of that law. He will never be completely free of it, but from the snake crawling, from man walking upright to space rockets, there is an immense progress in the mastery of the law of gravitation, and therefore of freedom from its limitations — staying within the law, using the law. And so for many other more subtle things in the psychological and moral realm, it’s not about abolishing laws, it’s not about such capricious and indeterminate freedom; it’s about — coming back to our theme — intelligent cooperation with the laws of the universe that turns us from slaves into collaborators.
Z.: It seems to me it is St. Paul who says “free in love.” [xiii]
Assagioli: Yes, precisely, it is a way of saying that by attuning ourselves to the law of love we are freed from a degree of slavery, of determinations. After all, the word “determine” means to limit, to close in certain terms, and so any broadening of freedom is a release from certain determinations, but certainly not all of them. It is always to move into something larger that does not exclude but transcends.
How does one recognize true insight? I will also say here in general: how do you recognize a truth from an error? By the law of consequences. [Early aircraft inventors] often made attempts, faulty airplanes, and these smashed on the ground: that was the demonstration that there was an error and not the truth. If, on the other hand, the airplane works well, it means that one has the truth of the relationship between gravitation and machine.
S.: It is the effectiveness.
Assagioli: Yes, the practical effects. Another example I often cite is the invention of electric light.[xiv] Edison tried to use wires of different materials and saw that they did not work; that is, it was not in accordance with the laws of electricity. Finally he found the carbon wire and that worked. Why? Because that one corresponded [in the desired way] to the strict laws of electricity. So he freed humanity from darkness, but not by violating any laws. And so it is for inner and spiritual things. If an intuition is true, one finds internal and external proofs of it; if an intuition is misinterpreted, one sees instead that it does not work.
S.: Yes, but on the other hand it is said that you cannot always judge a truth by its effectiveness.
Assagioli: No, you can always judge whether it is effective, but only on the proper level. It may not be a material efficacy, but a spiritual efficacy; or a mental efficacy — in short, on some level. An intuition translated into rational terms is shown to be right or wrong in that it works or doesn’t work.
D.: I have something I’ve been wanting to learn from you for a long time; that is, an explanation. I’ve been mulling it over in my head for a long time, but I can’t come up with an answer. At a certain point a religious truth — men often believe things that even with intuition are still illusion; even with intuition certain times. A religious Catholic, a Christian, sometimes intuits things in a different way than a Buddhist intuits them, because you have never heard that a Christian intuits, for example, that there is reincarnation.
Now I would like to say this: we know that sometimes thought determines, or creates forms that perhaps we can draw on; but then we can always draw on planes that are not really intuitive of truth. However, I would like to know this: if the truth is that reincarnation is a fact, if it is a law that really exists, then every time a very spiritual person has intuitions, in short turns to search for the truth, he should find it — he should sense and know that reincarnation exists even if he is a Christian. Conversely, even a great Pope, even a Pope John, never said — even this one does not say now, “no, reincarnation exists.” So I would like an explanation of this: “How come they don’t say it, if it is a truth?”
Assagioli: All this shows how intuition is something very high, and all these people are captive slaves of the powerful mental forms that are created, for example, by the Church; there are mental forms, real entities on the mental planes, which obstruct the vision of reality.
S.: But you could also say that the Buddhist is a prisoner of the thought forms of his culture.
Assagioli: Ah certainly, many Buddhists have a misconception of reincarnation. But then there are those to whom the problem does not matter, who do not care; there are great mystics who seek union with God. Some mystics have said, “If God wanted me in eternal hell I would go there with joy, loving God and celebrating God.” So they are so immersed in communion with God and love of God that their personal fate does not interest them, and therefore reincarnation also does not interest them at all. So [there can be] either obsession with powerful thought-forms, or lack of interest.
But not only the mystics. One case that I often cite, because it is surprising, is that of Hermann Keyserling,[xv]a very intuitive modern thinker, one of the most intuitive people, someone who made real prophecies that came true. Well, he says in his autobiographical writing that he does not know what will happen after the death of his physical body, but that it does not interest him at all. He knows that the spirit acts for the best, he knows that everything is arranged for the best, he relies on life and he is not at all interested in whether he will survive or not in the concrete sense, whether his personality will survive. He regarded his personality as an instrument of the Spirit, and he relied on the Spirit; he was also very open to esoteric things but he didn’t care about reincarnation or other personality things, he didn’t care at all, he was concerned with other things.
Between him and those who worry about who they have been, who imagine and try to guess whether they have been to India — all kings and queens, all great personalities, no one has been humble — or those who fret, who worry about “how and where I will be reincarnated,” etc., Keyserling’s position is much higher, much nobler. So even assuming that reincarnation is true, it is not something to give too much importance to, to be obsessed with.
And then you can conceive, one has to understand well what reincarnates, who reincarnates. If one identifies with one’s personality, one does not reincarnate at all, according to esoteric doctrines. If one identifies with the soul, it is not the soul that is reincarnated: according to esoteric doctrines, the soul creates a new personality for itself. So it is not so easy to say whether or not there is reincarnation, who is reincarnated, etc., the thing is very complex. Popular conceptions, even Buddhist ones, are all wrong; so it’s a matter of seeing which reincarnation — how, who reincarnates, in what sense, to what extent.
Z.: We have to consider ourselves a tiny part of the Whole — the only important thing is the Whole; we give too much importance to this tiny part.
Assagioli: Exactly, we have to realize that reincarnation is a particular case of the cyclic law of universal manifestation.
D.: I would like to know this: I give a modest example, but nevertheless: many times I had a sense of regret that I was not born into a particularly Catholic, practicing, spiritual family; so that until I was 15 or 16 years old I never attended Church and I still don’t really know its prayers, services, etc. This, on the other hand, was the only thing that allowed me later on to develop a conception outside the Church, to be able to believe in reincarnation, to have other concepts like that, because if I had been caught up in this business from an early age I probably would have adhered to it with enthusiasm and would have created so many closures for myself that I would not have come out of it, or perhaps I would have only come out of it very laboriously.
X.: On the other hand, on the contrary, I was practicing, religious and everything, and at a certain point I didn’t want to any more, and I put it all out without any effort.
Assagioli: This shows the existential truth of the fact that each case is unique. This is a fundamental principle about illusion, that we should never generalize, that every existential situation is unique and unrepeatable. Even astronomically, the Earth never goes back to the same point where it has been in the past, because through its various cyclical movements it is always at a different point in the universe, and therefore subject to ever-changing influences. So every human being is always in an unrepeatable condition, always different, always new, and this is wonderful. Free from the illusion of “staticity” (of things being stable or static), there are no closed doors, there is always something on the street corner, whether individual, planetary, or cosmic. So this continuous change, this continuous flow, this continuous renewal, makes everything possible.
Again, there are many examples from life. One that I often cite is that of Wagner.[xvi] There was a time when Wagner was harassed by creditors — at the time debtors were put in prison, according to German law — and he had fled to the mountains of Bavaria to avoid being put in prison, desperate and thinking of suicide. Everyone had abandoned him after the failure of [the opera] Lohengrin in Paris: he was in debt and saw no way out; apparently there was no way out. Just then King Ludwig of Bavaria had discovered Wagner’s music, became enthusiastic about it, and sent out [messengers] to seek Wagner by sea or land. Finally an officer managed to scout him out and brought him offers from King Ludwig to become a court musician with all the honors, money, etc., and then [later] he built him the […].[xvii] There are no desperate situations: desperation is the arch-illusion. Despair is the denial of life; that is, of the law of life, which is a continuous progress and renewal — it is an isolation from the flow.
One of the ways to arrive at deep understanding and to activate the use of intuition is the use of symbols; that is, the interpretation of symbols, the intuitive grasping of the deep meaning of a symbol, and possibly of every symbol. Step one: the general attitude toward symbols, that is, the recognition that all manifested life is symbolic. This was wonderfully put by Goethe: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” — everything transient is only a symbol. Of what? Of what is not transitory. So our every act, our every attitude, every situation is symbolic and it is a matter of interpreting it. This is the continuous attitude of interpreting the meaning inherent in every situation, every condition. And basically the sacred life, which in all religious ages has been implemented more or less, every ritual, is symbolic. So it is living symbolically in a conscious way, and therefore [even] eating and drinking can be considered symbolic. In fact, in communion, in various religions, all the use of food, bread, wine, has been used in a entirely symbolic sense.
X.: But one can go wrong; for example, for a dead religion, from the past, how many times has one been wrong in interpreting the symbols of that religion.
Assagioli: Oh, certainly! This [is a] case of a standard being wrong. The normal condition is a mistake, precisely because the deep interpretation of symbols requires intuition. Now the normal man is not intuitive, and so he makes a mistake. And then he takes the symbol as reality: he takes the ritual as having meaning in itself, in its form and not because of what it means.
Z.: And then in intuition, I think, as our psyche develops more and more highly — now intuition is a higher degree than the mind. Now we have already developed the mind, more or less, but intuition is something that we just begin to understand. Now occasionally there are times when we have it completely, but only in flashes; but overall we have not yet reached the level of intuition, so we can more easily make mistakes with intuition than with reasoning.
Assagioli: Quite right, and here it is a matter of saying that very often what we call “intuitions” are things that are only psychic, telepathic or premonitory impressions; but these have nothing to do with true intuition. Even a correct premonition is not intuition; it is simply a parapsychological faculty, a perception at certain invisible levels of what will later manifest; but it is not intuition. Intuition always has to do with something profound, universal, suprapersonal. So one of the many illusions is to believe intuition to be something that it is not. But knowing that it exists and that it is a latent faculty in each of us, and that it is worth trying to develop it even through a series of mistakes — that is the point. The scientist is not afraid to make mistakes, and one of his slogans, one of his methods is “trial and error;” experiment and make mistakes, and through a subsequent series of mistakes, arrive at a scientific truth.
Z.: Or as Einstein said, that he intuits something, and then with mathematics and everything tries to verify whether the intuition was right.
Assagioli: Quite right, he says that he got the intuition of relativity lightning-fast; immediate; but then it took him years and years of mathematical calculations, to verify whether it corresponded or not, and then [others] carried out experiments with astronomical results to see if they corresponded [with his theory].[xviii] So an intuition may take years of retesting, but scientists accept that. Instead, it is the others who would like to understand right away, to know immediately whether it is right or not, and they are afraid of making a mistake: no, you have to seek this continual retesting. This was the motto of the Academy of Cimento,[xix] a scientific society: its motto was “trying and trying again.” Now “trying again” has two senses: it can mean “trying again,” and also it can mean rejecting the data; that is, trying and then seeing if what was found was wrong. Truth is found by “trying and trying again” in both senses: as in science and technology, so also in the science and art of life, “trying and trying again.”
D.: In fact, by trying and trying again with the Fabbri vaccine,[xx] many cases of disease were eliminated.
Assagioli: But that takes the humility to recognize the possibility of being wrong, and the courage to be wrong. So it takes two moral qualities: courage and humility.
S.: But that example of Einstein having this intuition shows that the intuition works independently of us — it happens or it doesn’t happen. So we are not responsible whether we have the intuitions or not.
Assagioli: So, there is certainly intuition which fortunately happens sometimes spontaneously and therefore independently of our waking consciousness. But intuition, like all functions — physical, muscular, imaginative and mental — can be cultivated and developed with practice,[xxi] in two ways: first, by creating favorable conditions for it to happen; and second, by the right interpretation. But it can be cultivated, it is a real function that can be cultivated and developed.
Z.: I think it’s like mountaineers learning how to place the pitons[xxii] well. First they put a piton well up, and then they see if this piton holds; if it holds, they go further up and put another piton in. But first they have to discern how [and where] to place the piton in well, and then they see whether the piton was inserted well; and so I think it’s intuition.
Assagioli: It’s always an experiment. But that’s what’s interesting. If everything was easy it would be boring. We always remember this, this curious, somewhat funny contradiction of the human being: on the one hand, the human being seeks comfort; we would like everything comfortable, easy, and we invent lots of things to make life easier. On the other hand then he is discontented, and in many people, in the best ones, there is instead the desire for risk, adventure, danger, discomfort. Look at mountaineering! Who forces people to undergo all that discomfort, expense, training and risk? No one. It is their spirit of adventure, of risk, of developing and mastering their own bodies confronted with natural forces. Now if many spiritualists were as heroic as mountaineers are they would reach spiritual summits. I sometimes when I read these conquests of mountaineers and feel a sense of embarrassment. They do it only to conquer […]. [xxiii]
X.: Not me, I would not feel embarrassed, because I would primarily feel the responsibility to my loved ones, the pain I can cause if I die.
Assagioli: But that’s another thing. Let’s leave that out for now. But in short, the fact is that they take risks, they undergo hardships; it’s a form of modern asceticism — a non-religious asceticism — but it’s a real asceticism. If those who do spiritual things would do the same, they could accomplish great things.
[i] capire in Italian. —Tr.
[ii] comprendre in Italian. I have chosen to render this word as “understanding” rather than “comprehension,” even though these two words are often used interchangeably in English. See Note 5 below. —Tr.
[iii] The Italian word here is comprensione, from the Latin “take or grasp” and “together.” We have chosen to translate it with the English word “understand” because in this language “comprehend” often has a narrower connotation. —Tr.
[iv] Maya is a Sanskrit word meaning “illusion” or “magic” and originally denoted the magic power through which someone is made to believe in something that turns out to be an illusion. —Ed.
[v] In other contexts this condition of “clouding” has been referred to as “glamour.” —Ed.
[vi] Probably a reference to European ideologies of the 20th century, particularly communism, fascism, and national socialism. —Ed.
[vii] The play Life is a Dream (Spanish: La vida es sueño) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, first published in 1636, is a philosophical allegory and considered one of the “supreme examples of the drama of Spain’s Golden Age.” —Ed.
[viii] Assagioli clearly makes a distinction between clouding of the mind, which actually occurs on an emotional level, and illusions of the mind. Releasing the mind from “clouding” may sometimes be accomplished by an act of will; whereas a mental illusion requires action at a higher level, as he discusses in the next paragraph. —Ed.
[ix] Patanjali (c. 2nd century BCE) was a Hindu author, mystic, philosopher and author of the Yoga Sutras. —Ed.
[x] Deriving from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in classical logic the “law of the excluded middle” (which modern semantics calls a fallacy) proposes that “there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories, but of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate. . . it will not be possible to be and not to be the same thing at the same time in the same way.”—Ed.
[xi] see Lecomte du Noüy’s échelle d’observation (scale of observation). —Author’s Note. Pierre Lecomte du Noüy (1883-1947) was a French biophysicist and philosopher, associate of the Rockefeller Institute and head of the biophysics division of the Pasteur Institute. His is best known for work on surface tension and other properties of liquids and wrote several books and over 200 scientific papers. —Ed.
[xii] Editor has not altered some of the spoken dialogue even if it appears non-sensical or ungrammatical, unless a clear alternative is implied in the language. —Ed.
[xiii] This may be a reference to Galatians 5:13, in which Paul says, “For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another.” (RSV) Or it more likely refers to St. Augustine’s phrase, “love, and do what you will,”from his sermon on 1 John 4. —Ed.
[xiv] This is a correction. The original reads “electric current,” but the subject is actually Edison’s discovery of the material to be used as a filament for an electric light bulb, which occurred in 1879. His previous attempts all burned out after a very short use. The carbon wire lasted over 13 hours. Edison and others continued to search for materials that would last long enough to make light bulbs commercially feasible, and the long-lasting tungsten filament was introduced in 1906.—Ed.
[xv] Hermann Keyserling (1880-1946) was a Baltic German philosopher and founder of the School of Wisdom in Darmstadt, Germany, from whose many writings Assagioli quoted often, whom Assagioli referred to as being “the greatest psychologist without being a professional psychologist.” —Ed.
[xvi] Richard Wagner (1813-1883), German composer chiefly known for his operas. —Ed.
[xvii] King Ludwig settled Wagner’s debts, staged his operas, and partially funded the construction of a unique opera house designed by Wagner himself at Bayreuth. —Ed.
[xviii] The general theory of relativity was published by Einstein in 1915, and the first evidence that verified it was the result of a solar eclipse in 1919. —Ed.
[xix] Academia del Cimento was an early scientific society founded in Florence by students of Galileo and others about 1657, and ceased to exist about a decade later. It had several well-known patrons and members. It published one important document which has been called the “laboratory manual of the 18th century.” —Ed.
[xx] The reference of this phrase is unknown. —Ed.
[xxi] A phrase that was repeated in the original transcript has been deleted here. —Ed.
[xxii] Pitons are pegs or spikes driven into a rock or crack to support a climber. —Ed.
[xxiii] Mountaineering was Assagioli’s favorite sport when he was young. He successfully climbed some of the highest peaks in the Alps. —Ed.
[i] Source: psicoenergetica.com —Tr.
[ii] Interpolations by the Editor are shown in [brackets]. Elisions shown thus […] are in the original transcript.—Ed.
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