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Now, inflation is the principle risk that attends each person who seeks the experience of depth, the experience of what is occult, which lives and works behind the facade of phenomena of ordinary consciousness. Therefore, inflation constitutes the principal danger and trial for occultists, esotericists, magicians, gnostics and mystics. Monasteries and spiritual orders have always known this, thanks to the immense pillar of experience which they have accumulated over millenia in the domain of the profound life. This is why their whole spiritual practice is based on the cultivation of humility by such means as the practice of obedience, the examination of conscience and the reciprocal brotherly help of members of the community. Thus, if Sabbatai Zevi (1625-1676) had been a member of a spiritual order with a discipline similar to that of Christian spiritual orders and monasteries, his illumination would never have led to his revealing himself (in 1648) to a group of disciples as the promised Messiah. Neither would he have had to become a Turk in order to save his life and continue his mission ("God has made me an Ishmaelite-Turk; he has commanded, and I have obeyed -- the ninth day after my second birth", he wrote to his followers in Smyrna). Because he would have been spared positive inflation, just as he would have been spared the negative inflation of which Samuel Gandor, his disciple, gives the following description:
It is said of Sabbatai Zevi that for fifteen years he has been bowed down by the following affliction: he is pusued by a sense of depression which leaves him no quiet moment and does not even permit him to read, without his being able to say what is the nature of this sadness which has come upon him. (Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism)
The history of the illumined Cabbalist Sabbatai Zevi is only an extreme case of the general dangers and trials which all practicing esotericists have to face. Indeed, Hargrave Jennings expresses this danger and trial in a successful way concerning the Rosicrucians:
They speak of all mankind as infinitely beneath them; their pride is beyond idea, although they are most humble and quiet in exterior. They glory in poverty, and declare that it is the state ordered for them; and this though they boast universal riches. They decline all human affections, or submit to them as advisable escapes only -- appearance of loving obligations, which are assumed for convenient acceptance, or for passing in a world which is composed of them, or of their supposal. They mingle most gracefully in the society of women, with hearts wholly incapable of softness in this direction; while they criticize them with pity or contempt in their own minds as altogether another order of beings from men. They are most simple and deferential in their exterior; and yet the self-value which fills their hearts ceases its self-glorifying expansion only with the boundless skies... In comparison with the Hermetic adepts, monarchs are poor, and their greatest accumulations are contemptible. By the side of the sages, the most learned are dolts and blockheads... Thus, towards mankind they are negative; towards everything else, positive; self-contained, self-illuminated, self-everything; but always prepared (nay, enjoined) to do good, wherever possible or safe. To this immeasurable exaltation of themselves, what standard of measure, or what appreciation, can you apply? Ordinary estimates fail in the idea of it. Either the state of these occult philosophers is the height of sublimity, or it is the height of absurdity. (Hargrave Jennings, The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries)
Let us say absurd as well as sublime, because inflation is always simultaneously sublime and absurd. This is what Eliphas Levi says about it:
There is also a science which confers on man powers apparently superhuman. They are enumerated thus in a Hebrew manuscript of the sixteenth century:
ALEPH - He beholds God face to face, without dying, and converses familiarly with the seven genii who command the celestial army.
BETH - He is above all griefs and fears.
GHIMEL - He reigns with all heaven and is served by all hell.
DALETH - He rules his own health and life and can influence equally those of others.
HE - He can neither be surprised by misfortune nor overwhelmed by disasters, nor can he be conquered by his enemies.
VAU - He knows the reason of the past, present and future.
ZAIN - He possesses the secret of the resurrection of the dead and the key of immortality.
(Eliphas Levi, The Dogma and Rituals of High Magic)
Is it a matter here of programme or of actual experience? If it is experience, it is one of inflation pushed very far. If it is a programme, he who takes its realisation seriously cannot fail to fall prey to inflation, be it positive (superiority complex) or negative (inferiority complex).
Whatever it may be, the experience or programme of this Hebrew manuscript of the sixteenth century quoted by Eliphas Levi shows a remarkable similarity to the experience of John Custance, described by him in his book Wisdom, Madness and Folly: the Philosophy of a Lunatic. It is as follows:
I feel so close to God, so inspired by His Spirit that in a sense I am God. I see the future, plan the universe, save mankind; I am utterly and completely immortal; I am even male and female. The whole Universe, animate and inanimate, past, present and future, is within me. All nature and life, all spirits, are co-operating and connected with me; all things are possible. I am in a sense identical with all spirits from God to Satan. I reconcile Good and Evil and create light, darkness, worlds, universes. (John Custance, Wisdom, Madness and Folly: the Philosophy of a Lunatic)
The state described by John Custance is characteristic of that acute mania, and the author himself in no way denies it. But would he still look at it in this way, one can ask, if he knew that his experience is found described exactly in the Brhadaravyaka Upanishad, which says:
He who has found and awakened to the Soul that has entered this conglomerate whole -- he is the maker of everything, for he is the creator of all; the world is his: indeed, he is the world itself. (Brhadaravyaka Upanishad)
Can one say with certainty that this text quoted from the Upanishads is based on an entirely different experience to that of John Custance?
Thirty-eight years ago I knew a tranquil man of mature age who taught English at the YMCA in the capital of a Baltic country. Now, he revealed to me one day that he had attained a spiritual state which manifests itself through "the eternal gaze" and which is that of consciousness of the identity of the Self with the Eternal Reality of the world. The past, present and future -- seen from the pedestal of eternity, where his consciousness had its abode -- were an open book for him. He had no more problems, not because he had resolved them, but because he had attained the state of consciousness where they disappeared, having become of no importance. Because problems belong to the domain of motion in time and space; he who transcends this and arrives at the realm of eternity and infinity, where there is neither movement nor change, is free of problems.
When he spoke to me of these things, his beautiful blue eyes rayed out sincerity and certainty. But this radiance gave way to a dark and angry look as soon as I raised the question of the value of the "subjective feeing of eternity" when one is not aware of or one is unable objectively to do something more towards helping humanity, be it in spiritual (or other) progress, or in the alleviation of spiritual, psychic or bodily suffering. He did not forgive me this question and he turned his back on me, which was my last impression of him in this world (he made his way to India, where soon after he died as victim of an epidemic).
I recount this episode in my life only so that you may know, dear Unknown Friend, when and how the very serious problem of the forms of, and the dangers of, spiritual megalomania were awakened in me, and how I owe it to this objective experience that I began work on this problem, some of the outcomes of which I am in the process of showing.
Spiritual megalomania is as old as the world. Its origin is found well beyond the terrestrial world, according to the millenial-old tradition concerning the fall of Lucifer. The prophet Ezekiel gives a most moving description of this:
You were the signet of perfection,
You were full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
You were in Eden, the garden of God;
You were covered with every precious stone:
Sardonyx, topaz, and diamond,
Chrysolite, onyx, and jasper,
Sapphire, carbuncle, emerald, and gold,
With which you were adorned,
And which were prepared for you
On the day that you were created.
You were a guardian Cherubim, with outspread wings;
I placed you, and you were, on the holy mountain of God;
You walked in the midst of the stones of fire...
Your heart was proud because of your beauty,
You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.
I cast you to the ground;
I exposed you before kings, to feast their eyes on you...
(Ezekiel xxviii)
Here is the higher (i.e. celestial) origin of inflation, superiority complex and megalomania. And since "that which is below is as that which is above", it is repeated below in human earthly life from century to century and generation to generation. It is repeated above all in the lives of those human beings who are detached from the ordinary earthly setting and the state of consciousness belonging to it, and who transcend it, be it in the sense of height, or in the sense of breadth, or, lastly, in the sense of depth. He who aspires to a plane higher than that of the terrestrial setting risks becoming haughty; he who seeks breadth beyond the normal circle of earthly duties and pleasures risks considering himself to be more and more important; he who is in search of the depth, beneath the surface of the phenomena of terrestrial life, runs the greatest risk: that of inflation, of which C.G. Jung speaks.
The abstract metaphysician, who arranges worlds according to an order that he has chosen, can lose all interest for the particular and for the individual, in such a way that he comes to consider human beings to be almost insignificant as insects. He regards them only from above. Seen from his metaphysical height, they lose all proportion and become for him small or almost insignificant -- whilst he, the metaphysician, is great, since he participates in great metaphysical things, which clothe him in grandeur.
The reformer who wants to correct or save humanity easily falls victim to the temptation of considering himself as the active centre of the passive circle of humanity. He feels himself as the bearer of a mission of universal significance therefore he feels himself to be more and more important.
The practicing occultist, esotericist or Hermeticist (if he is not practicing, he is only a metaphysician or reformer) experiences the higher forces which work beyond his consciousness and which make their entrance there. At what price?... Either at the price of worshipping on his knees -- or otherwise at the price of the identification of the self with these higher forces, which results in megalomania.
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