Every Branch In Me: Who are we as "human" beings?

Every Branch in Me: Essays on the Meaning of Man,
is an anthology published by World Wisdom in 2002. — *Every Branch in Me: Essays on the Meaning of Man*,
is an anthology published by World Wisdom in 2002.

Being born into the human state, and not some other possible state, is both a blessing and a challenge. What does it mean to fully realize our vocation of living as human beings?

The anthology Every Branch in Me: Essays on the Meaning of Man, published by World Wisdom in 2002, focuses on the “theomorphic” nature of mankind—man created “in the image of God.”

The concept of being created in the image of God is at once exhilarating, complex, and open to abuse. The essays included in this volume all address the concept in different ways and from different points of departure, but all help to make the concept more clear and more easily applied to an individual’s spiritual quest.

The title of the book is taken from one of its essays by the Swedish writer, Kurt Almqvist, who was using a phrase from The New Testament (John 15:1-2), which reads: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman (gardener). Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth (prunes) it, that it may bring forth more fruit.”

This is a powerful metaphor. A tree has many branches, some of which realize their full potential and burst into bud, flower, and fruit, while others do not. In a human being, then, what are the ‘branches that bear fruit’ within each person’s mind, spirit, and behavior? What are the ‘branches that bear no fruit’ that must be taken away? This slideshow presents some excerpts from Every Branch in Me that are intended (1) to shed some light on these questions, and (2) to turn our thinking to the great heights and depths for which the human mind and spirit are fashioned.

The Perennialist author, Frithjof Schuon

In his essay “To Have a Center” (1), Frithjof Schuon indicates that human beings are by their innermost nature centered on the Absolute; however, it is the plight of most people to be separated from that nature. Thus, the spiritual quest for most of us is to regain a state of being “centered,” which is both our birthright and our true earthly vocation.

To be normal is to be homogeneous, and to be homogeneous is to have a center. A normal man is one whose tendencies are, if not altogether univocal, at least concordant; that is, sufficiently concordant to serve as a vehicle for that decisive center which we may call the sense of the Absolute or the love of God. The tendency towards the Absolute, for which we are made, is difficult to realize in a heteroclite (2) soul; a soul lacking a center, precisely, and by that fact contrary to its reason for being. Such a soul is a priori a “house divided against itself,” thus destined to fall, eschatologically speaking.

(1) Taken from page 1 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in the book To Have a Center.

(2) “Heteroclite” means “deviating from common forms or rules.”

In his essay “Loss of Our Traditional Values”(1), the late Crow Sun Dance Chief and Medicine Man Thomas Yellowtail shows how a sense of the sacred within a traditional setting used to pervade daily life, which strengthened those ‘branches that bear fruit’ :

It is important that the young people understand the difference between the traditional ways and the modern world we live in today. I have spoken before about the sacred support that was always present for the traditional Indians. With this support everywhere, from the moment you arose and said your first prayer, until the moment you went to sleep, you could at least see what was necessary in order to lead a proper life. Even the dress that you wore every day had sacred meanings, such as the bead work designs on the clothing, and wherever you went or whatever you did, whether you were hunting, making weapons, or whatever you were doing, you were participating in a sacred life and you knew who you were and carried a sense of the sacred with you. All of the forms had meaning, even the tipi and the sacred circle of the entire camp. Of course the life was hard and difficult and not all Indians followed the rules. But the support of the traditional life and the presence of Nature everywhere brought great blessings on all the people.

(1) Taken from page 32 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in the book Yellowtail, Crow Medicine Man and Sun Dance Chief: An Autobiography, (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1994).

Titus Burckhardt wrote an essay to reveal the severe limitations of looking at all things human just through a lens of psychology. Adopting such an approach would lead to ‘branches that bear no fruit’ in regard to discovering the true meaning of human existence. In that essay, “Modern Psychology” (1), Burckhardt wrote:

The soul, like every other domain of reality, can only be truly known by what transcends it. Moreover, this is spontaneously and implicitly admitted in people’s recognition of the moral principle of justice, which demands that men should overcome their individual subjectivity. Now we could not overcome it if the intelligence, which guides our will, were itself nothing but a psychic reality; and intelligence would not transcend the psyché if, in its essence, it did not transcend the plane of phenomena, both inward and outward. This observation suffices to prove the necessity and the existence of a psychology deriving in a sense from above and not claiming a priori an empirical character. But although this order of things is inscribed in our very nature, it will never be recognized by modern psychology; despite its own reactions against the rationalism of yesterday, it is no closer to metaphysics than any other empirical science—indeed quite the contrary, since its perspective, which assimilates the suprarational to the irrational, predisposes it to the worst of errors.

(1) Taken from page 41 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in the book Mirror of the Intellect

Seyyed Hossein Nasr in his essay “Man in the Universe, Permanence Amidst Apparent Change” (1) points out that just as the greatest realities of the universe remain unchanged, so do modern people still have the same ‘branches’ as people of earlier ages. This means that we can still perceive the permanence of the Real despite the limitations of our sciences and the tenor of our times:

During phases of the historical process symbols which are given special significance and power in a revealed religion through the revelation itself can gradually lose their efficacy, either partially or completely, as a result of the weakening of the spiritual basis of that religion, as can be seen in the case of the de-mythologizers of our day. Nevertheless, the symbols of nature are permanent and immutable. What the sky signifies symbolically, as for example the dimension of transcendence and the Divine throne (‘arsh), to use the Islamic image, is as permanent as the sky itself. The sun symbolizes the Universal Intellect as long as it goes on shining and the tree with its extended branches is a symbol of the multiple states of being as long as trees grow on the surface of the earth. That is why one may speak of a cosmologia perennis, of a qualitative science of nature which is always valid and which reveals an aspect of nature which is, to say the least, no less real than the changing aspect studied by modern science. The main difference between the traditional and modern sciences of nature lies in the fact that modern science studies change with respect to change, whereas traditional science studies change in the light of permanence through the study of symbols which are nothing but the reflection of permanence in change.

(1) Taken from page 65 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in Studies in Comparative Religion 2 (1968):244-252.

What is the result of convincing ourselves—or of our society convincing us—that the ‘branches within us’ that seek a Divine Light are mere delusion? And what brings this about? The Swedish writer, Tage Lindbom, in his essay “Lucifer” (1), equates the progressive fall of mankind with a tendency to no longer look outside itself, namely to the Divine, for reference points but instead to imagine itself as ‘divine’:

Draped in the shining garment of idealism and humanism, the West has accomplished a manipulation whereby the deepest meaning of the Fall of man is concealed. In the name of idealism and humanism, secularization is legitimized. More and more, Western man is living in a world in which he listens only to his own voice, which begins as the voice of rationalism; and listening to this voice, he is able to refer continuously to the “legitimation” that he believes the idealist and humanist pseudo-spirituality confers on him. In this world, secularization progresses because man can be represented as a higher being, carrying “the eternal” in his breast, conquering all creation, and at last proclaiming himself as universal sovereign. .

(1) Taken from page 74 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in Lindbom’s book The Myth of Democracy (1996).

Since the earliest days of their tradition, one of the great topics to occupy the minds of Christian thinkers and, indeed, believers, has been the question of the nature of Jesus. In what way was He God, and in what way was He man?

The mystery of the two natures of Christ has led those who seek nothing less than identity with God to ask: Is there a dual nature of all mankind, as well?

What if, while we are discovering those “branches” of ourselves that vibrate in the wind of the Divine Presence, we were to discover that the very sap that gives life to each branch is by its own nature divine? This is the very elevated concept that Prof. James Cutsinger (of the University of South Carolina) approaches in his essay “The Mystery of the Two Natures.” (1).

God became man. But since it was God who was this man, the man cannot but have shimmered with the Divinity of His other nature, and for this reason we are obliged to affirm that even His human nature was not quite the same as our own. In becoming man, says St. Gregory of Nyssa, the Word of God “took our nature within Himself, so that the human should be deified by this mingling with God. The stuff of our nature was entirely sanctified by Christ.”(2)

(1) Taken from pages 103-104 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in the journal Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, Winter 1998.

(2) Against Apollinarius, II.

There are many details of our everyday lives that we ignore as integral parts of our spiritual lives. Traditional societies put a rather different emphasis on the aesthetic ambience of the home, habits of speech, and so on.

In his essay “Do Clothes Make the Man?” (1), the Buddhist Traditionalist Marco Pallis points out that such seemingly unimportant ‘external’ aspects of our lives as the clothes we wear do, in fact, contribute to the processes that re-form the souls of spiritual aspirants. When we recognize the existence of our many “branches,” should those that have physical substance, including our bodies, be adorned basely or regally?

…every being is yogi (2) in that any kind of existence apart from the Self is a sheer impossibility, even in the sense of an illusion; that being is a yogi—called thus by courtesy, as it were—in so far as he, she or it strives, by the use of suitable disciplines(sadhana), to realize Self-union; the selfsame being is the Yogi in virtue of having made that union effective. No element in life can therefore be said to lie outside the scope of yoga.

(1) Taken from page 123 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in Pallis’ book The Way and the Mountain.

(2) Editor’s note: Pallis uses the word yogi here to mean a spiritual aspirant who is seeking union with the Divine Self, though he is showing us that this is our birthright and that we are, whether we realize it or not, yogis by the fact of our very existence as human beings!

What is more human than to laugh? Even this solely human capability has its roots in a divine ground; at the same time its “branches” project out into the world but are made resistant through humor to the many ill winds that might arise from any side.

In a very unique essay, Patrick Laude looks to the metaphysical origins of humor. Despite the imposing concepts, the essay, “Holy Fools” (1), points out the absurdity and unreality—and thus the “funniness”—of many things around and within us. The following gives some of the metaphysical background:

The “funny side of things” is what reveals both their lack of absoluteness and their pretension to be treated as the Absolute. Humor stems from a subtle sense of the distance separating what appears to be from what actually is. It therefore implies duality: God’s humor arises, as it were, from the level of His Relativity—that of the relatively Absolute, to use one of Schuon’s key concepts—as it would have no meaning independently from a consideration of it. It could also be said that there is no room for “humor” or “laughter” in the Supreme Non-Duality unless one wishes to consider the All-Possibility as an Infinite Matrix or “Pandora’s Box” prefiguring the unfolding of Mâyâ.

Be that as it may, God’s “humor” may be considered as lying in His apparent negation of Himself in Mâyâ. Esoterism is accordingly akin to humor because, by contrast to exoterism, it is supremely aware of the relativity of manifestation as a veil upon Reality or as “unreal reality”.

(1) Taken from page 143 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in the journal Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, Winter 1998.

Every Branch in Me begins with a question posed in the Preface, “What is the vocation of man?” We tend to think of our “vocation” as being our job, our profession, but this book challenges us to think of our vocation as being much more. We are asked to discover for ourselves why we are placed on this planet with an intelligence and a heart capable of grasping far beyond its physical limitations.

Yet, we are earthbound and must seek “our daily bread.” The British author Brian Keeble in his essay “Work and the Sacred” (1) reveals that work is not intended to be a fruitless “branch” to be ignored as a spiritual aid, but quite the opposite:

To speak of there being a “spiritual core” to work is not only to invoke a certain image of man, it is also to hint at the existence of a subtle thread that joins the sacred to whatever demands are made upon man in order that he sustain his physical existence. It is to presuppose, in some way or other, that the spiritual forms the implicit context of our lives and that our being is not fully real without this hidden context. If this is not so then we would have to face an awkward question: how it ever came about that, in order to sustain his earthly existence, man should be obliged to follow a course of physical action that seems a direct denial of his deepest nature, as if by some ghastly mistake of his Creator it is man’s destiny to follow a direction that leads him away from the very thing it is his nature to be? If we are to avoid such a dilemma, we must conclude that in some way work is, or should be, profoundly natural and not something that must be avoided or banished as being beneath our dignity. So, we are here concerned to enquire whether, in what ways and under what conditions, work possesses a contemplative dimension.

It is evident that humans learn in a way that is quite different from any other kind of being. Our capacity is, clearly, much beyond our actual attainment. Is it there to provide a ‘one-way’ outlet to the external world, to permit endless absorption of external data? Or are we providentially provisioned with capacity and means to learn in order to come to a new level of awareness of truths locked within the human spirit itself?

The Perennialist writer, editor, and translator William Stoddart has written an article “The Role of Culture in Education” (1) to examine how a process of education can lead us to further discovery of our many ‘branches’ and ‘buds’:

The spiritual life has been described as the “interiorization of the outward” (khalwah) and the “exteriorization of the inward” (jalwah) (2). Education is an aspect of the latter process; the very etymology of the word (e-ducare, “to lead out”) is an indication of this. As a “leading-out”, education is a rendering explicit of the immanent Intellect (Intellectus or Nous), the seat of which, symbolically speaking, is the heart. As Frithjof Schuon has said more than once: “The Intellect can know everything that is knowable”. This is because “heart-knowledge” (gnosis) is innate, and thus already fully present within us, in a state of virtuality. This virtuality (3) has to be realized, and this realization is education. This corresponds to the Platonic doctrine of “recollection” (anamnesis), which in the last analysis is the “remembrance of God” (memoria Dei). “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”

As was mentioned in the first slide of this show, the title of the book Every Branch in Me was taken from the title of an essay (1) by the Swedish writer Kurt Almquist. He actually begins his essay with a metaphor for human existence. He writes that the soul of a human being (and indeed the cosmos) is ‘woven’ like a rug, with the vertical “warp” of invisible (i.e., divine) threads binding together all the separate individuals together that exist along the horizonal (i.e., earthly) axis, the “woof.” He builds upon this symbolism to show that our individual egos only have significant meaning when considered as inextricably bound up with the invisible substance that holds it together:

…the ego holds a median position between the true, enduring, innermost Self which is one with the kingdom of God, and the surrounding world, similar to the central position where woof crosses warp. To the extent that the ego remains subject to the kingdom within as prescribed in Revelation (2)—in other words, to the degree that it holds itself to be a servant of this kingdom —it will serve the inner world in the outer environment. Throughout all its struggles and efforts it never ceases to be permeated with the flow from within: to be the branch which “abides in the vine” (John 15:4). This is self-forgetfulness or self-sacrifice in a more than moral sense.

It is quite misleading, however, to speak of self-effacement or self-annihilation without some further explanation. Even if the metacosmic sphere is the only absolute reality, the world of the senses is by no means completely unreal. It has reality insofar as it reflects the supersensuous and is illusory insofar as it asserts independence apart from its source This means that in man his reality flows directly from the spiritual Self like a ray from the Sun. This may then be said to be man’s only real Self, though the outward mortal self has reality to the degree that it reflects and manifests the inner, immortal Self. In the final analysis only the divine Self (Âtman) is real; but, as the Hindus say, all is Âtman.

(2) Editor’s note: Almquist is using “Revelation” here to signify the Divine descent of any message of salvation for humankind—not a particular revelation.

that had as its root the constant and pervasive awareness of the Divine Presence in all beings. Joseph Epes Brown’s essay, “On Being Human” (1), also focus on the Native American perspective on man’s place in the world.

Brown is perhaps best known for The Sacred Pipe (1953), his famous recounting of the sacred rites of the Oglala Sioux, and the inner meaning of those rites. “On Being Human” demonstrates that the traditional Indian way of being can only conceive of an active participation in spiritual realities, with everything in life recalling to humans the vibrant ‘branches’ of the spirit that intertwine with all other life:

Many Native American peoples today retain, even though often in fragmented manner, elements of a heritage of ancient primordial origins. Present within all the dimensions, forms, and expressions of this heritage, or rather of these multiple heritages, is a pervasive sense for the sacred. In one manner or another all life is seen to participate in the sacred, all cultural forms express the sacred, so that inevitably within this context the lives of those peoples who live close to their sacred traditions may be called religious, and they are thus beings who are religiously human. Religion pervades all of life and life’s activities leading a native person once to remark, “We do not believe our religion, we dance it!”

(1) Taken from page 207 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in Joseph Brown’s book The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian, The Crossroad Publishing Company, copyright l982, pages 123-129.

Many people know only a life of the senses. Although we often associate this with a kind of shallowness and refusal to ponder life’s deeper mysteries, our senses are also “branches” that guide us toward a profound knowledge of God’s Presence in the world and in our ourselves.

The well-known writer on esoteric Islam, Jean-Louis Michon, wrote an essay titled “The Vocation of Man According to the Koran” (1) which shows how a tradition that has been given to humankind as a guidance (in this case, Islam) can include in its central scripture specific reminders on how the senses can provide an opening to God’s Presence. The citations in the passage are from the Qur’an.

…in the words of the Prophet, man has been created “in the image of God” (‘alâ sûrati-Allâh). Let us now turn our attention to this form that is so beautiful that it resembles the Divine.

Externally, man is endowed with five senses that give him the ability to:
see the blessings of God, His signs, and His reflection “on the horizons” (according to a Koranic expression, XLI, 53);
hear the song of creation, for “All that is in the heavens and the earth glorifieth Him” (LIX, 24 et passim);
smell the scent of flowers, symbol of the invisible presence of the Creator within his work;
taste the fruits of His generosity: the dates, pomegranates, figs and grapes that, even after the Fall, have retained the taste of Paradise;
touch, so that he may know her whom God has given him as a companion.
Man is also endowed with inner faculties, which permit him to enter into contact not only with visible things and beings, but also with the Invisible, with the hidden face of things. They are the memory, the imagination, the will, the reasoning mind and, above all, the spirit (rûh), which God has breathed into him. Spirit is also intellect (‘aql), direct and intuitive intelligence that is able to grasp the deeper nature of things and beings without passing through the reasoning process.

Finally, man is endowed with the faculty of speech, which makes him fundamentally different from all other beings in the animal kingdom.

(1) Taken from page 218 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in Fragments of Infinity: Essays in Religion and Philosophy, edited by Arvind Sharma, Prism Press, copyright 1991, pages 135-152.

Mark Perry, in his essay “The Forbidden Door,” (1) undertakes the important task of warning us of the many pitfalls that can block our paths as we seek to discover our many ‘branches.’ In speaking of character and getting back to essentials, he points out the fundamental human elements that must always be made whole before spiritual (and even societal) security can be assured:

To be born a man is to be endowed with the divine gifts of will, love, and intelligence. And these attributes, if they are to be properly developed, Deo juvante, find their fulfillment respectively, as expressed by the Neoplatonists, in the good, the beautiful, and the true. Practically speaking, this means—to paraphrase Schuon—that man is meant to will the good, to love the beautiful, and to know the truth.(2) The pursuit of happiness is inconceivable without a proper understanding and integration of these elements whose absence opens up onto the subhuman. And what characterizes traditional man and, by extension, a whole traditional civilization whose architectural summit is a Chartres, the Temple of Heaven, a Taj Mahal, or the Dome of the Rock, is the crystallization of these tripartite faculties into modes of dress, behavior, and art that surrounds man in both a protective and liberating mold which prevents him from either forgetting or escaping the Divine.(3)

(2) In this delineation, we are following a trinity whose leitmotif is found in all of the great traditions, most notably in the Vedanta, Neo-Platonism (including its ramifications in Christian gnosis), and Sufism, and, recently, magisterially expounded and crystallized anew in the works of Frithjof Schuon.

(3) For a full development of this perspective, which is as far from the arbitrary as one can imagine, see Frithjof Schuon’s Light on the Ancient Worlds or Titus Burchhardt’s Sacred Art in East and West. Both works explain the inherently intellective nature which constitutes the basis of a sacred civilization. The celebrated historian Arnold Toynbee, on a far more discursive level, himself recognizes that the genesis of the main civilizations originates each in a divine revelation.

Undoubtedly the most intensely personal essay in Every Branch in Me is “Even at Night the Sun is There” (1) by Gray Henry. In this piece, she recounts the trial of a crippling disease that afflicted her and that could not be diagnosed for many months. Despite the incredible suffering and uncertainty, she came to the realization that the human state, with its capacity and even vocation for opening up to the Eternal, is so much to be thankful for that it outweighs all burdens of earthly life. She makes it very clear that tremendous strength can come from knowing who, as human beings, we really are, and that these ‘branches’ can never in themselves be weakened by the weaknesses of the body:

…it began to dawn upon me why Muslims always reply with Al hamdulilah (the same as Alleluia) whenever anyone inquires as to their health. I had always wondered why one could ask someone who suffered from an obviously terrible physical or emotional pain or loss, “How are you,” and all one could get out of him was, “All praise belongs to God.” I kept wanting them to talk about their pain with me, to share their suffering, and I wondered why they would not. Suddenly I realized that they were praising God for their state of being. The suffering they endured, no matter how great or small, was an opportunity to be purified, which is the very aim of human existence. In an instant, my own illness was seen in a new light. I no longer patiently tolerated it—I loved it, I flowed with it. I saw how blessed I was to have been given, not something small, but something as total as paralysis.

As I loved my illness, my fingers suddenly began to regain movement. Bit by bit the movement in my hands returned, until at last in late spring, I was restored. What had been the most painful and difficult time in my life turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. I had gained a deepened perspective, a sense of proportion and freedom. God had blessed me with near total dependence on others, a symbol reminding me of my utter dependency on Him. And even when I had not been able to move one inch, I was able to be in touch with His Divine Presence.

(1) Taken from pages 279-280 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in the journal Parabola: The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, Spring l993, The Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition, copyright 1993, pages 60-65.

Lilian Staveley’s book *The Golden Fountain*

One of the most remarkable spiritual voices of the 20th century was that of Lilian Staveley. Within an outward life as the wife of British general, she led a deeply spiritual life, almost completely untutored, as a writer of profound mystical insights. Mrs. Staveley wrote her three books about her spiritual journey in complete anonymity. The excerpt (1) of her wonderful book The Prodigal Returns found in Every Branch in Me emphasizes her belief that everyone, no matter who, could lead a rich contemplative life despite all outward circumstances. We must discover the life in our own ‘branches,’ but need not turn outward to find them:

Those who could most easily develop their powers of contemplation are those to whom Beauty speaks, or those who are delicately sensitive to some ideal, nameless, elusive, that draws and then retreats, but in retreating still draws. The poet, the artist, the dreamer that harnesses his mind—all can contemplate.

The Thinker, thinking straight through, the proficient business man with his powers of concentration, the first-rate organizer, the scientist, the inventor—all these men are contemplatives who do not drive to God, but to the world or to ambition. Taking God as their goal, they could ascend to great heights of happiness; though first they must give up (“sacrifice”) all that is unsavory in thought and in living: yet such is the vast, the boundless Attraction of God that having once (if only for a few moments) retouched this lost Attraction of His, we afterwards are possessed with no other desire so powerful as the desire to retouch Him again, and “sacrifice” becomes no sacrifice.

Truly, having once known God, we find life without Him to be meaningless and as unbeautiful as a broken stem without its flower: pitiful, naked, and helpless as the body of a butterfly without his wings.

Huston Smith

It is the saint who knows more fully than anyone else who he or she truly is before death. Upon death, this great mystery will be unlocked for all. The author of the classic The World’s Religions , Huston Smith, turns our attention to ultimate realities in his essay “Hope, Yes; Progress, No” (1). The message is clear: Discover the life within your hidden ‘branches’ in this life, rather than the next.

Body dies, but the soul and spirit that animate it live on. At death man is ushered into the unimaginable expanse of a reality no longer fragmentary but total. Its all-revealing light shows up his earthly career for what it truly was, and the revelation comes at first as judgment. The pretenses, rationalizations, and delusions that structured and warped his days are now glaringly evident. And because the self is now identified with its Mind or vital center rather than its Body, Mind’s larger norms, to which the embodied ego paid little more than lip service, now hold the balance. It is thus that in hell man condemns himself; in the Koran it is his own members that rise up to accuse him. Once the self is extracted from the realm of lies, the falsities by which it armored itself within that realm become like flames and the life it there led like a shirt of Nessus.(2) When the flames have consumed these falsities—or to use other language, when truth has set the distortions of terrestrial existence in perspective—the balance is restored and the distortions, too, are seen to have had their place. This is forgiveness.

(1) Taken from pages 321-322 of Every Branch in Me, this chapter is also found in Huston Smith’s book Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition, Harper Collins Books, copyright 1976, pages 118-145.

(2) “The experience of death resembles that of a man who has lived all his life in a dark room and suddenly finds himself transported to a mountain top; there his gaze would embrace all the wide landscape; the works of men would seem insignificant to him. It is thus that the soul torn from the earth and from the body perceives the inexhaustible diversity of things and the incommensurable abysses of the worlds which contain them; for the first time it sees itself in its universal context, in an inexorable concatenation and in a network of multitudinous and unsuspected relationships, and takes account of the fact that life had been but an ‘instant’, but a ‘play’. Projected into the absolute ‘nature of things’ man is inescapably aware of what he is in reality; he knows himself ontologically and without deforming perspective in the light of the normative ‘proportions’ of the Universe.” F. Schuon, Understanding Islam (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 1998), p. 92.

Lilian Staveley’s book The Golden Fountain

The final essay in Every Branch in Me is by Lord Northbourne, and the very last paragraph in the book is quoted below. It sums up not only his essay, “The Survival of Civilization,” (1) but sums up the purpose of the book—to reacquaint ourselves with the ‘sap’ that courses to each living ‘branch’ within us and that gives us not just our reason to live but also, through that awareness, a way to live more fully (that is, to ‘bear fruit’) as both individuals and as a society:

In exalting our own powers over Nature we diminish ourselves, for the realization of our full potentiality does not depend on the development and exercise of those powers for our own terrestrial advantage; it depends entirely on the fulfillment by us of our spiritual function; for that alone can keep us in touch with the imperishable and finally bring us into union with it. Such is our appointed destiny, and only to the extent that we follow it for its own sake and without ulterior motive can harmony between man and man and between man and Nature become a reality, and with that harmony a civilization that is worthy of the name, and is at the same time as fully protected from corruption and dissolution as any collective human organization can ever be.