The Sense of Scale
“We’re going down to London to see a friend of mine. Want to come?” The speaker – Dave, an odd-looking man with a scraggly beard and extremely thick glasses – was a member of the Kabbalah group at Oxford to which I went faithfully every Wednesday evening. The year was 1978 or early’79.
I wasn’t particularly eager to take the trip, but in the interest of broaden-ing my horizons, I decided I would. And so that Saturday five of us piled precariously into Dave’s three-wheeled motorcycle, of the colour the French call caca d’oie, and made the hour’s drive from Oxford to London.
It was a day that burned itself into my mind for several reasons. To begin with, there was something quintes-sentially English about the experience. Our first stop was a large and seedy pub somewhere in northwest London – complete with all the stereotypi-cal trimmings: etched-glass windows, dark furniture, the hazy smell of stale beer and tobacco, and even a drunken old man singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” to himself at full volume. Unwisely, I found myself drinking three pints of Guinness and cider in quick succession. Not an ideal preparation for an encounter that the I Ching calls “meeting with the great man,” but then I was unaware that I was about to have such an encounter.
Our motley assemblage proceeded to the neighbour-hood of Maida Vale, where we parked on a street lined with three-story brick buildings of flats and marched up to the top floor of one of them. When we were admitted, we went down the hall of a long, narrow flat and entered the kitchen, a room that I will always remember as both remarkably dingy and remarkably magical. The walls were a lifeless green, and the air was heavy with the smoke of roll-your-own cigarettes. A large image of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, with Tarot cards affixed to the tree’s paths, was painted on the near wall, half-hidden by a cluttered kitchen table. Seated in the corner, wearing a dark and not terribly clean sweater and producing the smoke that pervaded the room, was a man I shall never forget.
Although seated – he did not get up to greet us – it was clear that he was short and stocky. He had longish dark hair and a beard, black-rimmed glasses, and a broad face, kindly and shrewd to equal degrees, that somewhat resembled those in por-trait busts of Socrates. There was an air of impish wisdom about him that years later would lead me to wonder half-seriously, when I saw The Empire
Strikes Back, whether the character Yoda was not a cruel but very witty caricature of Glyn.
He was not, of course, rooted to that old armchair in the corner of his kitchen – over the years I would see him in any number of settings – but it was as if he were, as if he were a fixed and stable point around which the ever-changing world revolved. What he said to us all that afternoon is hope- lessly lost in the back chambers of my memory. The Guinness-and-ciders did their work, and I nodded off occasion-ally. If it was an inauspicious introduction to ancient wis-dom in the modern world, it nevertheless left an indelible mark on me.
Glyn – though it no doubt would have irked him to hear me say it – was the closest thing to a Master that I have ever met. In the nearly three decades in which I knew him, I did not see him often – there would be five- or six-year stretches after my return to America when I had no contact with him – but I would make a point of seeing him when-ever I went to England up to the time of his death in 2007.
More than once I went for that purpose alone.
The Sense of Scale
What did I learn? Some of the words I heard were famil-iar right away – the Kabbalah, the Tree of Life, Buddhism – while others – Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Sufism – aroused only the dimmest associations in me. Even apart from this, when I try to summarise the knowledge I gained in terms of intel-lectual discourse, my resources cave in. I find that the first thing I come up with is what I can fumblingly call a sense of scale.
It has happened to me more than occasionally. I remem-ber encountering it when I was a small
child, sitting at parties of my parents’. Usually I was unimaginably bored by the subjects the adults talked about, but sometimes the discussion would turn to the paranormal – Atlantis, UFOs, Edgar Cayce, and other matters that were of great interest to my father. No one knew very much about these things, but quite apart from the content of what was said, I noticed that the mood changed.
Suddenly we were no longer confined, or quite so confined, in a small living room, but the horizons of the universe seemed to open up subtly and we were surrounded by a vast and limitless space that was both awe-inspiring and some-what terrifying. I would later have the same experience in my Kabbalah group in Oxford, at Glyn’s, and in other places and groups in which I studied. Although I was aware of this dimension as a child, it was only half-consciously. It would take much longer to bring this awareness into focus.
Hence to speak purely personally, the first lesson I learned in my encounter with the ancient wisdom was precisely this sense of scale – the recognition that earthly reality and the mundane quibblings of our daily existence are not the only, or even the most important, reality. And the more I have seen of the ancient wisdom traditions that have come down to our time, the more I believe that this lesson is
fundamental to them.
Glyn’s background was in the Western magical tradi-tion. As the painting on his kitchen wall suggested, he used the Kabbalah and the Tarot as a spiritual vocabulary, and I would later learn that he had his own connection with what is sometimes called the Old Religion – the native British mystery tradition that is said to have preceded Christianity and even the coming of the Celts, the religion that may have inspired the builders of Stonehenge and Avebury, and which is still undoubtedly alive in England to this day.
But there was no sectarianism in what Glyn taught; he moved easily between the mysteries of the Hebrew letters, the epistles of Paul, and the half-forgot-ten native faith of the ancient British.
I have said that one of the first things I learned from this version of the ancient wisdom was this sense of scale, but I don’t believe that this experience was unique to me. On the contrary, I sense that most, perhaps all, people have it at some point, whether it is aroused by a visit to some sacred spot,
a magnificent natural vista, or the pano-ply of the night sky. And yet for nearly everyone this experience is inadvertent. It comes and goes as it wills, and usu-ally leaves behind nothing more than a faint memory to haunt the imagination. And the ancient wisdom is about more than transitory moments of awe; it is about making some conscious connec-tion with the source of that awe.
Hence meditation. Countless books have been written about meditation, and countless more are continuing to be written. Some very competently set out techniques; others spell out the benefits to health and well-being; still advocate the practice as a means of reaching supreme illumination (al-though the number of people who have actually reached that illumination appears to be shockingly small). But I have seen very few that speak to the deepest and most genuine power that lies behind meditation, which Glyn pointed out to me.
Glyn had a restless and inventive mind. Not only did he understand many mystical systems, but created systems of his own as indefatigably as a hobbyist in his workshop turns out bookshelves and stools. In his later years, he devel-oped an interest in what he called the “peasant tradition of Europe” – a relative of the ancient religion of the Brit-ish Isles that, in his own way, he was perpetuating. At one point he told me about the Carbonari, the old guild of Italy and France that made a profession of charring wood until it turned to charcoal. And it is the case, as more than one source has pointed out, that the guilds of Europe – known in France as the compagnonnages – have retained much of the wisdom of the initiates. But even so, what esoteric signifi-cance could one possibly find in this humblest of practices? For Glyn, it was a symbol of meditation – which is, he said, “reducing the mind to its simplest essence.” Just as wood is burned down to produce charcoal – carbon – so the process of meditation refines the mind so that it attains to its simplest and most absolute form.
I have practiced meditation, both in the form that Glyn taught me and in oth-ers, for some thirty-three years now, and again I am stymied when it comes to spelling out the concrete results. I have no way of knowing how it has affected my heart rate or my blood pressure, or whether it makes me more peaceful and serene; but then I have been doing it for so long that I no longer know what I would be without it. Instead, as I grope toward an answer to the question of what meditation does, I return yet again to that sense of scale that I have already mentioned. Meditation does not necessarily produce that sense in each session, but, I would say, it does manage to make some connection be-tween that sense of scale in the outside world and a similar sense that you can find within yourself. It leads to the intui-tion that your own depths and the depths of the universe are
one and the same.
I wasn’t particularly eager to take the trip, but in the interest of broaden-ing my horizons, I decided I would. And so that Saturday five of us piled precariously into Dave’s three-wheeled motorcycle, of the colour the French call caca d’oie, and made the hour’s drive from Oxford to London.
It was a day that burned itself into my mind for several reasons. To begin with, there was something quintes-sentially English about the experience. Our first stop was a large and seedy pub somewhere in northwest London – complete with all the stereotypi-cal trimmings: etched-glass windows, dark furniture, the hazy smell of stale beer and tobacco, and even a drunken old man singing “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” to himself at full volume. Unwisely, I found myself drinking three pints of Guinness and cider in quick succession. Not an ideal preparation for an encounter that the I Ching calls “meeting with the great man,” but then I was unaware that I was about to have such an encounter.
Our motley assemblage proceeded to the neighbour-hood of Maida Vale, where we parked on a street lined with three-story brick buildings of flats and marched up to the top floor of one of them. When we were admitted, we went down the hall of a long, narrow flat and entered the kitchen, a room that I will always remember as both remarkably dingy and remarkably magical. The walls were a lifeless green, and the air was heavy with the smoke of roll-your-own cigarettes. A large image of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, with Tarot cards affixed to the tree’s paths, was painted on the near wall, half-hidden by a cluttered kitchen table. Seated in the corner, wearing a dark and not terribly clean sweater and producing the smoke that pervaded the room, was a man I shall never forget.
Although seated – he did not get up to greet us – it was clear that he was short and stocky. He had longish dark hair and a beard, black-rimmed glasses, and a broad face, kindly and shrewd to equal degrees, that somewhat resembled those in por-trait busts of Socrates. There was an air of impish wisdom about him that years later would lead me to wonder half-seriously, when I saw The Empire
Strikes Back, whether the character Yoda was not a cruel but very witty caricature of Glyn.
He was not, of course, rooted to that old armchair in the corner of his kitchen – over the years I would see him in any number of settings – but it was as if he were, as if he were a fixed and stable point around which the ever-changing world revolved. What he said to us all that afternoon is hope- lessly lost in the back chambers of my memory. The Guinness-and-ciders did their work, and I nodded off occasion-ally. If it was an inauspicious introduction to ancient wis-dom in the modern world, it nevertheless left an indelible mark on me.
Glyn – though it no doubt would have irked him to hear me say it – was the closest thing to a Master that I have ever met. In the nearly three decades in which I knew him, I did not see him often – there would be five- or six-year stretches after my return to America when I had no contact with him – but I would make a point of seeing him when-ever I went to England up to the time of his death in 2007.
More than once I went for that purpose alone.
The Sense of Scale
What did I learn? Some of the words I heard were famil-iar right away – the Kabbalah, the Tree of Life, Buddhism – while others – Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Sufism – aroused only the dimmest associations in me. Even apart from this, when I try to summarise the knowledge I gained in terms of intel-lectual discourse, my resources cave in. I find that the first thing I come up with is what I can fumblingly call a sense of scale.
It has happened to me more than occasionally. I remem-ber encountering it when I was a small
child, sitting at parties of my parents’. Usually I was unimaginably bored by the subjects the adults talked about, but sometimes the discussion would turn to the paranormal – Atlantis, UFOs, Edgar Cayce, and other matters that were of great interest to my father. No one knew very much about these things, but quite apart from the content of what was said, I noticed that the mood changed.
Suddenly we were no longer confined, or quite so confined, in a small living room, but the horizons of the universe seemed to open up subtly and we were surrounded by a vast and limitless space that was both awe-inspiring and some-what terrifying. I would later have the same experience in my Kabbalah group in Oxford, at Glyn’s, and in other places and groups in which I studied. Although I was aware of this dimension as a child, it was only half-consciously. It would take much longer to bring this awareness into focus.
Hence to speak purely personally, the first lesson I learned in my encounter with the ancient wisdom was precisely this sense of scale – the recognition that earthly reality and the mundane quibblings of our daily existence are not the only, or even the most important, reality. And the more I have seen of the ancient wisdom traditions that have come down to our time, the more I believe that this lesson is
fundamental to them.
Glyn’s background was in the Western magical tradi-tion. As the painting on his kitchen wall suggested, he used the Kabbalah and the Tarot as a spiritual vocabulary, and I would later learn that he had his own connection with what is sometimes called the Old Religion – the native British mystery tradition that is said to have preceded Christianity and even the coming of the Celts, the religion that may have inspired the builders of Stonehenge and Avebury, and which is still undoubtedly alive in England to this day.
But there was no sectarianism in what Glyn taught; he moved easily between the mysteries of the Hebrew letters, the epistles of Paul, and the half-forgot-ten native faith of the ancient British.
I have said that one of the first things I learned from this version of the ancient wisdom was this sense of scale, but I don’t believe that this experience was unique to me. On the contrary, I sense that most, perhaps all, people have it at some point, whether it is aroused by a visit to some sacred spot,
a magnificent natural vista, or the pano-ply of the night sky. And yet for nearly everyone this experience is inadvertent. It comes and goes as it wills, and usu-ally leaves behind nothing more than a faint memory to haunt the imagination. And the ancient wisdom is about more than transitory moments of awe; it is about making some conscious connec-tion with the source of that awe.
Hence meditation. Countless books have been written about meditation, and countless more are continuing to be written. Some very competently set out techniques; others spell out the benefits to health and well-being; still advocate the practice as a means of reaching supreme illumination (al-though the number of people who have actually reached that illumination appears to be shockingly small). But I have seen very few that speak to the deepest and most genuine power that lies behind meditation, which Glyn pointed out to me.
Glyn had a restless and inventive mind. Not only did he understand many mystical systems, but created systems of his own as indefatigably as a hobbyist in his workshop turns out bookshelves and stools. In his later years, he devel-oped an interest in what he called the “peasant tradition of Europe” – a relative of the ancient religion of the Brit-ish Isles that, in his own way, he was perpetuating. At one point he told me about the Carbonari, the old guild of Italy and France that made a profession of charring wood until it turned to charcoal. And it is the case, as more than one source has pointed out, that the guilds of Europe – known in France as the compagnonnages – have retained much of the wisdom of the initiates. But even so, what esoteric signifi-cance could one possibly find in this humblest of practices? For Glyn, it was a symbol of meditation – which is, he said, “reducing the mind to its simplest essence.” Just as wood is burned down to produce charcoal – carbon – so the process of meditation refines the mind so that it attains to its simplest and most absolute form.
I have practiced meditation, both in the form that Glyn taught me and in oth-ers, for some thirty-three years now, and again I am stymied when it comes to spelling out the concrete results. I have no way of knowing how it has affected my heart rate or my blood pressure, or whether it makes me more peaceful and serene; but then I have been doing it for so long that I no longer know what I would be without it. Instead, as I grope toward an answer to the question of what meditation does, I return yet again to that sense of scale that I have already mentioned. Meditation does not necessarily produce that sense in each session, but, I would say, it does manage to make some connection be-tween that sense of scale in the outside world and a similar sense that you can find within yourself. It leads to the intui-tion that your own depths and the depths of the universe are
one and the same.
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