Editor’s Note: The following is a conversation between David Spangler and James Tousignant for Lorian’s Uncommon Conversations podcast. This transcript has been edited for clarity and the introductory and ending material in the audio version of the podcast has been omitted. You can learn more about the Uncommon Conversations podcast and subscribe here.
David: William Bloom sent out an interesting e-letter to his mailing list called “What is a Contemporary Mystery School?” When I read it, I thought this is a very good description of both the situation we're in vis à vis where people would have been 1000, 2000 years ago when the mystery schools were flourishing, and also he gives a précis of what a possible curriculum might look like. I couldn't help but be struck by the similarity and correspondences between what he’s suggesting and what we're actually doing in Lorian.
James: I found that to be the case as well, David. I know you sent it out to the faculty and board and most of the comments were - Doesn't he realize that Lorian already is meeting most if not all of the requirements that he laid out in his paper?
David: Yes. I honestly don't know how conversant William is with what Lorian’s doing.
William and I have had a good relationship and friendship for many, many years, but our paths are focused in different ways. He’s been very focused on the healing arts. I have been very impressed with what William does, I think he is one of the leading spiritual teachers in Britain at the moment. So I don't know if he had Lorian in mind–probably not–when he wrote this because he certainly has his own background in the esoteric and occult arts.
I think perhaps where William and I might diverge–and I say that with some hesitation because I don't know his full thinking in this area–but where I would be differing from this is that I would not choose to use the term “Mystery School” to describe what it is we're doing, for reasons that he actually brings up in the beginning of his paper when he talked about what's different between the contemporary scene and 2000 years ago, or 1000 years ago, when the Mystery Schools flourished in different cultures. One of the things he brings up is the fact that there just aren't any secrets anymore, that the things that the Mystery Schools taught are now common knowledge because they're represented in thousands of books and classes.
When I first heard about the mystery schools, I was in my late teens or early 20s and my response was, “Boy, I'd really like to join one of those!” because I was fascinated with the idea of probing the mysteries and gaining access to hidden knowledge and so on. Looking back on that now from 50 years of perspective I realize this is the spirit that I try to bring into Lorian–to realize that the world itself is our mystery school.
I become suspicious of anything that draws a boundary that says, this is a special domain, and if you enter this special domain, you will gain special knowledge. And in some ways, there’s a kind of separation between the initiate and his or her world. And I realized that that's just a surface perception because if a Mystery School is actually successful, if it's a genuine Mystery School in the sense that it's genuinely introducing individuals to the great spiritual mysteries of life, then the graduate of such a program would feel more at one with the world as a whole and with life as a whole.
So one of the objectives of a true Mystery School is to break down the separation, to break down boundaries that exist between the individual and others, or between our human nature and the non-human world. But nevertheless, there still exists this glamour around the idea. There's still this sense of, well, if you're participating in a Mystery School, that must make you something pretty special [chuckles]. And you see that in advertisements–it’s not that we actually lack for Mystery Schools these days. There are some…what I think of as more or less credible ones that have been around for 30, 40, 50 years, or more-100 years, and they spring up too when somebody decides, well, I'm going to sell myself as the Hierophant of a Mystery School [chuckles]. It still creates this sense of specialness that I think actually takes away from what the Mystery School program is trying to develop in an individual.
James: When you were talking about helping an aspirant…well, you didn’t use that word…the participant in the mysteries of life…It’s your life that’s the mystery and you're delving into your life. The specialness for me comes in recognizing the mystery of being alive and all that entails, and how I can be here within that mystery and be of service within that sense of awe and wonder of just being alive, of being incarnate.
David: Yes. And William, actually in other things that he writes and what he teaches is very good at conveying that well. My ambition has been to enable people to experience their everyday surroundings–their home, their work, whatever–as a sacred space and to find within their everyday surroundings the connections that in the past probably would have been called mystery connections, connections to the deep soul of things, or the spirit behind the appearances of matter.
I also know and I appreciate the value of getting out of our ordinary routines and our familiar places for periods of retreat or periods of study in ways that shake things up a bit and you're forced to look at things anew. I understand that it can be challenging to be sitting in your living room and see your familiar sofa that you've had for 20 years and this antique table that you grew up with that was passed down by your parents and things like that. You're so familiar with them that they have lost their sense of magic for you. It's a certain effort of will and a shift of perception to see them afresh as if they were new to you and to see them as the living presences of energy that they are. But I think that that effort of will is worthwhile, and it's what you would be taught in a Mystery School in any event [chuckles].
So, yes, let's look at what William has proposed here and compare it to what Lorian is doing and hopefully that will give a sense of the way in which we're actually implementing what he's proposed.
I love his criteria for an applicant. They are, “My heart is open, and I prioritize compassion; I have a sense of connection with the benevolent cosmic mystery; I have a sense of subtle energies, patterns and archetypes; I am humble in the face of this wondrous Cosmos; and I am responsible for myself.”
For me, it’s not just the humility. I would add to that “I have a sense of joy that I am a participant and a partner with this wondrous cosmos.” To me, that's very important.
James: In my early youth I was all excited about entering a Mystery School and getting all these mysteries. But I go down this list, and I can see that this describes me today, not as I was at 17.
David: Yeah, that's exactly right. When I was a teenager, I was looking for things that would give me…I’m going to say it would give me power in the world, it would give me the ability to navigate my world successfully and to have influence–not ‘influence over’ necessarily, I wasn't interested in that; but I could shape things and make a difference. All of that kind of got subsumed under the notion of power. And yes, what William is proposing here doesn't have that, and that's true for Lorian, too–that we do want the people who study Incarnational Spirituality to become more effective in their lives and better able to meet the events and the opportunities and the challenges of their lives. But the idea of developing occult power over things, in some way having a dominion over the earth, so to speak, and over the subtle forces–that's not part of our curriculum, and it's not part of William’s either.
When you're 16, 17, 18, you may feel very confident. You have this sense of immortality and you have this sense of possibility, but at the same time there's a lot you don't know and you're trying to discover how to make your presence effective in the world. But when you're our age, James, we've done that in one way or another and we're looking for different things.
Well, let's look at the curriculum that William has suggested. The first thing he says is that it would offer a spiritual experience: “Using person-centered teaching methods, each student is enabled into a deepening daily practice of spiritual connection.” There's two things there that are important to me, and that I feel are there in Lorian. One is the idea of person-centered teaching. That is, I don't set myself up as a guru and nobody in Lorian does that because we see the participants in our programs as partners, and really what we want–and you've expressed this well in your classes–what we want is to empower and enable people to discover their unique sovereignty and to be able to express it. But I think through practices like the Presence exercise, the Spectrum of Love, Grail Space–these are all ways that we encourage people to have a daily practice of connection with the spiritual realms. So I would say we can check that one off.
James: I agree. We have books, but they're not dogma; they encourage individuals to take the exercises and make them their own. You're mostly the finger pointing to the moon.
David: That is something I try to emphasize with the exercises–that they are really more illustrations of a direction of what's possible than they are sort of rigid energy-manipulating, energy-producing technical exercises.
So the next one is reflective psychology. And here I can only speak for myself and say, this is an area where I think Lorian could offer more. But I feel that you do and Rue does, and there are certainly people in our programs who are professional psychologists and psychotherapists, but it's not my background, and so I don't approach the things that I teach through that lens. But I recognize the importance of it. Sometimes I get asked in our classes, and I know others do too, “Why don't we talk more about how to deal with trauma, how to deal with the shadow?” I have a couple of reasons why that's so. One of them is simply that the subtle beings that I work with have chosen not to put their emphasis in that direction. But I think that’s a very personal thing because of a particular kind of work that I'm called to do and that they've been doing with me. But I do feel that understanding and having tools to deal with trauma and what Jung called the shadow or the negative aspects of our personality are important. And so I look forward to that kind of knowledge being more integrated into I.S. at some point. The caution for me is to avoid psychologizing everything and in the process misunderstanding the energetic dynamics that really have little to do with our psychology, but have a lot to do with the energy state of our subtle bodies.
James: Let’s go on to esoteric meditation.
David: I wouldn't call what we offer esoteric meditation, but I think what we do offer in Lorian has the same effect which is to enhance the individual's awareness of the subtle and energetic worlds around them, and to be open to the impressions that come from that world. Classes like Working with Subtle Energies, and The Alliance Paradigm, are a large part of what is being covered there. The idea there really is just to say that we inhabit a whole world that contains both physical and non-physical elements and we have the capacity to interact with both and to integrate both. And so, let's develop those capacities.
I know what I wanted to say earlier. It relates to this as well. It is that the resolution of psychological trauma and psychological effects is increasingly being seen as lying within the body. That is, somatic therapies and somatic forms of psychotherapy are growing. They have the advantage of restoring us to our wholeness by saying, this is how we access the whole system. I feel that would be true for how we approach our ability to access the subtle worlds–that we do it not through any specific organ or a specific part of the body, like seeing through the eyes, or hearing through the ears. But, we do it through the whole somatic field that we inhabit. That’s what we’re trying to teach people.
James: Yes, I look at the words that William uses here–“to be quiet scanners and receptors, wisely guiding and assessing subtle sensations and impressions.” It doesn't just happen while sitting on a meditation cushion. It's in my living room, it's walking down the street, it's at the grocery store.
David: The next one is the soul’s journey. William writes, “Before birth, through life, and after death, students explore the nature and purpose of this journey.” That's essentially what Incarnational Spirituality is about. So we definitely check that box.
James: Yeah, I get that as well, David. That’s our reason for being for Lorian.
David: The next one is psychism. “Students understand their own psychic interpretive mechanism and how best to manage and develop it.” This one I'm less sanguine about. Actually, I don't see a whole lot of difference myself between that and the esoteric meditation, really. For what we do at Lorian, those two get combined. It’s what you said earlier–the ability to walk down the street and be aware of the subtle forces that are at play in one's environment. I think what William’s talking about here is the development of specific psychic senses, like clairvoyance and clairaudience, in an individual.
James: I took this a little bit differently. For me, this is developing my own vocabulary, my own images. How is my soul speaking to me? How does life speak to me? And it's like, well, you speak English and I speak cockney, you know? So it might be still English, but they're slightly different dialects, right? So you would have your dialect and I would have mine.
David: Well, that's interesting, James. And looking at it, I can see why you would say that. I think that's probably right. The words “psychic" and “psychism” have very specific meanings for me coming out of my background. I've been trying to help people move away from purely psychic interpretations of things. But yes, you're quite right–that each of us does inhabit our own psychic world, our own inner world that we interpret and define in our own unique ways. And actually, that is what we teach in Lorian - don’t depend on what David says or James says or Rue or Freya, or Julie. Rather, what are the symbols, what are the images, what are the patterns that are most natural to you and that represent your relationship with the cosmos?
James: Well, that fits really well with the next one–a map of subtle dimensions and beings.
David: Yes, we do that with the understanding that all maps are conditional and provisionary and a map has never been the territory itself. We do provide, I think, fairly comprehensive maps of the possibilities and the characteristics of the various subtle dimensions and beings.
James: And then I see that we then get to take our own coloring crayons and pencils and whatnot, and color in that map with our own interpretations, our own symbols, our own images, our own sensations of our experiencing of those dimensions and beings.
David: Yes, exactly. Because the territory exists within us. We’re really mapping our own internal being as well as the larger subtle dimensions of the world around us. That's sort of the adage of “as above, so below” and the microcosm and the macrocosm reflecting each other. This is very definitely an important part of what Lorian offers.
And then he ends up with “compassionate magic and energy work.” That’s what we do with energy tending and subtle activism and Grail Space. That’s really the objective of a lot of I.S. and what Lorian teaches is to enable people to be compassionate magicians and workers with subtle energy.
Just using the outline that William has presented here, I feel that Lorian definitely falls into the category of being a contemporary Mystery School.
But I would rather say we're a school of integrative spiritual learning of ways to become part of our world as partners and collaborators. There’s no mystery to it [chuckles].
When I read this–and it was the reason why I sent it around to the faculty and to the board–because I thought, yes, Lorian does correspond to what William is presenting here. But the actual feeling I had that prompted me to want to share it was one of pride in what we're doing and acknowledgment of the role that Lorian is playing in the world at the present time. We approach this without undue glamour–we’re not trying to puff ourselves up and say we're the new Mystery School, we're the new this or that. We’re really just getting about doing what needs to be done to help the world using the tools that we have and the knowledge that we have and empowering others to do the same. But I think we have done a good job, are doing a good job and will continue to do a good if not better job in the future. And to some extent, there is power in acknowledging that we're fulfilling a role in society that would have been fulfilled by the Mystery Schools in the past. That is the niche that we're occupying, and the service that we're offering.
There's one other side to this, though, that we haven't talked about and I would like to do so briefly. And that is the role of the aspirant, the person who has actually been admitted into the Mystery School.
Traditionally, that was not an easy thing to do; you couldn't just show up and say, here's my 100 shekels, let me take a class. There were certain requirements. In a way, William mentions this a little bit in his entrance requirements. There is an understanding that when you enter into this course of study, it's not like attending an ordinary school where you're simply a student and you're learning information for your life. You really are taking on a mantle, you're taking on a responsibility because you’re being invested with knowledge that does give you power. It does give you influence and you need to be accountable to that and be responsible to it.
I am sure that people, human beings being what they are, entered into Mystery Schools and ran Mystery Schools for all kinds of motives and reasons. But the ideal was that the aspirant was one who was saying, I want my life to be of service. I want my life to be a blessing to my fellow humans and to the world in which I live.
I feel that’s the same charge that we communicate to those who participate in our programs. At one level we're offering tools that anybody could use to help improve their lives. But if you go a little deeper, and the people who take our advanced courses I feel are going deeper, you're saying, I'm taking on a mantle of service. I have a role to play in the world and that's why I'm studying this. I'm not just trying to develop myself for personal reasons, I'm acknowledging my responsibility to the rest of the world and I'm willing to make myself a partner in service to the world.
James: David, I'm smiling both inside and outside because what you're describing is what we experienced in having our conversations for the Cultivating a New Gaian Ecology year-long program within Lorian. Every individual who said yes to the program has a commitment and a calling for the work. This class is now a program of study where the individual is making a commitment to show up and take on a mantle and invest themselves in service to the world.
David: Yes, that's right. If Lorian itself in its educational program is a contemporary Mystery School, then the ChaNGE program is the most mystery schoolish part of it. [chuckles]
James: And it does require you to take some foundational skill-developing classes, to make an investment in yourself for your own development, and also to listen deeply for that “to be in service” call.
David: Exactly. Yes, individuals sign up for our programs and then suddenly realize, hey, wait a minute–I’m in a Mystery School! [chuckles]
James: Yeah, well, they will after this recording! [David laughs]. Is there anything else you'd like to address, David, in this writing?
David: I think we’ve covered it pretty well, James, and I'm appreciative to William for his e-letter highlighting this particular topic because it definitely gave me an opportunity to appreciate exactly what we are doing, what we have, and an appreciation for all the people who are aligning their lives with I.S. and with Lorian through the Commons.