Gabriel and Tilda’s first business trip in the new year brought them to Budapest in Hungary, one of Gabriel’s favourite cities. From the Liszt Ferenc airport, they went to the Science Academy’s Guest House by taxi. For Gabriel, it was a pleasure to help the academy do business because it was under heavy pressure from the Orbán government’s stupid antiscience policy, which was bleeding it out by denying it funding. When he told this Tilda, she accused him of having naïve views on politics. “Why is Orbán such a bad guy to use his state apparatus and violence? Are the others any better? Nobody can tell me that it is justice when the Americans simply kill a persona-non-grata like Al Badawi,” she said. Gabriel winced at that but said nothing. After work, Tilda and Gabriel walked around Fisherman’s Bastion for some basic Budapest sightseeing. They had a nice vegetarian/pescetarian meal in a little Italian restaurant sitting outside in the streets of Buda with some heaters above and a candle between them. Gabriel had black spaghetti with shrimp. However, most interesting, indeed, was the dinner talk.

“Please tell me about your sports, Mrs Toelz,” Gabriel requested, and Tilda looked willing to provide information. “Why has such a gentle girl such as you chosen one of the most—if not the most—brutal martial arts and excelled at it?” he asked. She replied, “It feels good to never have to be afraid of anybody anymore.” And then she said, “I like showing off.” The latter Gabriel did not really get. “You do not come across as extroverted.” But she just smiled. “My boyfriend says the opposite. Do you actually want to hear me talk about my boyfriend? Do you care to know?” Gabriel answered: “I find this perfectly normal, and I am not bothered.” This was actually a half-truth: In his eyes, she should concentrate on her job. Furthermore, he would have preferred that she concentrated on him while they were travelling together and would not constantly refer to her bloody boyfriend.

Then, the conversation got really heated. They tried to speak about the Spanish experience. “You were a sight for sour eyes in the church,” Gabriel laughed. Tilda looked at him insulted. “I am not a believer. Leave me alone,” she said. “Yes, but you need to be a little more tolerant if we want to go to India together,” Gabriel demanded. “You went shut like a clam in that church in Spain! You must be a spiritual virgin or a long-suffering victim of the Catholic Church. You were shell-shocked by the whole environment. This can get interesting when we start journeying on the path of Bede Griffiths, going to the ashram in India and suchlike places. Will you then patiently wait in front of the ashram doors with the car engine running until I am done with the spiritual stuff? That is not the plan!”

Tilda shook her head. “Only because people do not share your standard Catholic spirituality, Mr David, you accuse them of having none at all. That is typically elitist behaviour.” Gabriel answered: “You are spiritually closed. You are like a machine. Only a special type of rationality and logic works with you. You are not open to any new insights. You will never appreciate a very important part of the human knowledge space. The whole Bede Griffiths story seems to leave you totally untouched!”

Then he used quite imaginative language: “I really wish you would accept getting hit by experience. What does not immediately compute on an abstract logical level does not get processed by your brain. Do not always shy away and keep your forehead out of the spiritual jet stream, Mrs Toelz!” Afterwards, he was afraid that he had overdone it with his imaginative metaphors. But Tilda had not even reacted to his accusations: “You are jailed in your celestial world view” was the only comment she gave him.

She did not want to argue: Dispute was nothing but a suppression instrument. She had her own spirituality, which she reflected on once she was alone in her hotel bed. “My first axiom is, do not blame others for your misfortune,” she angrily thought. “I am the only person I can change; when I change, my world changes. If Mr David feels unhappy with me, he should change his attitude. Do not put the blame on me. The second axiom of my spirituality is, identify your goals and develop your strategies to reach them. If he wants this Bede Griffiths stuff, he should follow it, but leave me alone. My third axiom is, shake off any idea of foreign determination or constraint—be it a ‘god,’ or circumstances such as birth, parents, whatever, or other people who think of themselves as rulers of your world. Replace it with your self-determination. This way, you are automatically becoming more powerful and happy. And more successful. You can live your true life.” Gabriel should leave her alone. Thinking about Gabriel made her sick. “Mr David obviously wants to change me. That is the best reason to keep him at bay: This evening, he just tried to make me an object that should better comply to his world views. However, my life is only about me, not about him. My own spirituality starts with living outside the hamster wheel, knowing myself and understanding what this life is really about.” She turned restlessly in her bed when she contemplated his request that she should let herself be hit by experience. “Does he not know? This world is nothing but a mere illusion. Experience tries to condition me. However, everything is false. My consciousness was manipulated and deluded by the people who rule. To become aware of this was very difficult. We have to work on ourselves. I am a creator. I can bring ideas to this world through my spirit. That is called creativity. I am a gatekeeper. Because all the other people permanently create this field of ideas with me, I can reaffirm certain ideas and filter out others. I am powerful. Therefore, everything here is about my advancement, about my creative mind and about my spiritual growth. Experience is not important. Mr David is not important in my world. He is in his world; I am in my world. That’s it. My spiritual mission is to keep my world going. Never give up on the idea of your life, why you want to stay alive. I will keep my forehead out of his spiritual jet stream.”

Angels’ Play

Location:

Heaven above Budapest, Buda side, Fisherman’s Bastion. Shared-Office Cloud.

Time:

Real-time GMT, Tuesday, 9 April 2019, 20:34

Players:

The two angels as before and Bede Griffiths.

Setting:

Both angels are in deep discussion with Bede Griffiths, who is in a fully orange sannyasin outfit and has a small travel backpack on his shoulders. But he seems to be rather unfit. He sits in a wheelchair, where he constantly tries to get out of being softly pushed back by the angels.

GA

(anxiously):

Please, father, stay seated. You will get a stroke again. You are not well. Another stroke will make you worse.

BG

(patting GA’s little hand):

Tut, tut, my dear. I will tell you of my experience when I had a stroke. It was in January 1990. I was meditating at six o’clock one morning, and something came and hit me on the head. It felt like a sledgehammer. Everything went blurry.

A terrible force was pushing me out of my chair, and I did not know what was happening. I managed to crawl onto the bed, and I was found there after about an hour. Apparently, I had been unconscious for a week.

GA

(accusingly):

There you go. Unconscious! Stay in that wheelchair.

BG

(soothingly):

No, as I said, apparently, I was conscious. I did not speak, and I have no memory of it at all. But there were some wonderful people in the ashram, and they arranged everything for me each day. At the end of a week, I began to come round to normal consciousness, and there was a profound change…

TA

(knowingly):

Yes, you became disabled. You were on the mercy of others.

BG

(explaining):

I had died to the ego… The ego—the mind, and also… the discriminative mind that separates and divides, all seem to have gone. Everything was flowing into everything else, and I had a sense of unity behind it all. Then this began to open up. I thought I was going to die, and I… let go of the soul and body into the hands of God…

TA

(convinced):

And then you nearly died.

BG

(feeling totally misunderstood):

No, then somebody came and massaged me, and I came back to normal. A very important experience then happened. I felt rather restless and uncertain, and an urge came over me to ‘surrender to the mother.’ I surrendered, and an overwhelming experience of love came over me. They were like waves of love.

GA

(compassionately):

Some call it a post-traumatic experience.

BG

(wildly shaking his head):

I called out to someone who was watching there: “I am being overwhelmed by love!” I think what happened was a psychological breakthrough to the feminine. In each person is both masculine and feminine, and most men repress the feminine. I have done that to a very considerable extent, and I think it was the woman in me who came and hit me on the head! But then she came back to me as a loving mother.

TA

(repelled but somehow fascinated):

A woman? Goodness gracious! What type of woman? Was she good-looking?

BG

(fighting angelic ignorance):

When you let the feminine open and your unconscious lets her come up, then she is the loving mother, and in coming back to you, she transforms you. Because God is mother, we have to balance the masculine and the feminine in our nature. We must be aware of how we are repressing one aspect of our nature; by allowing it to come forth, we become whole.

TA

(not convinced and bristling):

But the stroke made you weaker!

BG

(shaking his head):

On the contrary! The stroke was a wonderful experience and the greatest grace I have ever had in my life.

GA

(reverently):

Father, are you really wanting to go down, yourself, with your arthrosis in the knees? We could do it for you. TA has Gotcha painting in its armour set and can fire the colour cartridges with its precision gun (TA proudly presenting a monstrous firearm for confirmation).

BG

(firmly):

Put that away, dear. This girl needs a revelation all for herself. I will go into her dreams and apparate without stressing my knees at all (with this, he evaporates downwards, wheelchair and all).

A Tika on the Forehead

On Wednesday, Gabriel and Tilda left Budapest. It had been a really short stay after all. The preordered taxi came very early, at 5:30 am, to fetch them to take them to the airport. They were quite tired and at first sat in total silence, each in their corner of the backseat. Then, Tilda began to talk. She sounded exhausted and upset. “I had a dream last night, Mr David,” she revealed, “a strange nightmare.” “What was it about?” Gabriel was curious. “I dreamt about a big hall full of people—like a huge train station with many people moving around,” she said.

“Like the megacity scenes in the movie Koyannisquatsi? Such a place was shown there to demonstrate overpopulation and fast-moving, anonymous crowds. You might have seen the movie.” He thought that explaining her bad dream with a past visual experience would soothe her, but she did not respond to that. “Then I stood in this hall among floating people, waiting for something or somebody,” she quietly continued. “The next thing that happened was that I felt that something had hit my forehead with impact.” She winced in memory. “When I touched my forehead with my hand, I felt something wet. Looking down at my hand, there was a yellow fluid, which spilled from my forehead.” Gabriel looked at her with compassion. “I felt afraid, was badly injured and fell down to the ground.” “Did you wake up then?” Gabriel asked, wanting to know because this is what often happens in dreams. “No,” she replied. “People helped me to reach a kind of ambulance car, which stood in front of the big hall.” “Could you get in?” Again, he wanted to know. “Yes,” she answered, “but while doing this, I touched my forehead again and looked at my hand: The colour of the fluid had changed from yellow to red. I felt awfully scared.”

She looked silently out of the car window for a long time. Then she continued: “In the ambulance, there was an old man with a long white beard waiting in a wheel chair. He tried to get up to his legs to greet me but could not do so quickly—obviously he had bad knees, which might have been why he was in that ambulance car. When he finally approached me with a smile, he touched my forehead, and I woke up. I was so scared.”

She was really shaken. In a way, Gabriel’s conscience suffered because the dream was obviously inspired by his stupidly talking the evening before about how she should herself let be hit and so on. All this had given her was a nightmare. However, then he thought about some pictures he had seen of Bede Griffiths with an Indian blessing sign on his forehead—the tika: sometimes yellow, sometimes red. And suddenly, he could see who had visited Tilda at night and who the old man was in the car singling her out from the masses in the big hall. Of course, for Tilda, this was just a bad dream, but it could very well have been something totally different. Tilda saw the sign on her forehead as an injury inflicting pain, but it could have actually been a blessing. “There might be a positive interpretation of your dream,” Gabriel said cautiously, but she was still too flustered to pay much notice. However, he felt relieved. Tilda was finally subject to individual revelations as well. She had got a tika as a blessing from Bede Griffiths.

“Your brain will not run out,” he told her quietly. “The good message is that our key author did not lose his wits with such a forehead mark.” He showed her some pictures of Bede Griffiths on his mobile where Father Bede had yellow and red tikas, and he let her listen to a YouTube interview where Bede Griffiths wore a tika as well. “Look, this interview was taken after he had two strokes when he was over ninety. You can see and hear that despite visible exhaustion at the start of the interview, all his brain cells are working. He is trying to connect to his partner in conversation, with full concentration. I am further sure that Rupert Sheldrake probably wore such a forehead tika every now and again too, because he lived together in this ashram with Pater Bede while writing—and you think he is quite clever despite what I think about these morphic fields.” Tilda did not laugh at the weak joke. “A nice example how to turn a frightening, painful experience into a revelation from heaven. I was hit on the head with a near-death infliction of pain, and you see it as a blessing ‘tika.’ Great.”

Despite her exhaustion, she wanted him to understand. “I will not go on endlessly about it,” she said, “but what do you know about pain? I’ve been living with pain every day since 2013. This has been going on now for seven years. My ankle is sometimes very bad. Nobody can do anything. I have consulted with many specialists. They all did their X-rays and spent expensive hours on diagnosis, ending with the same results. Unfortunately, I completed my fight before going to hospital when my ankle broke. It was a displaced fracture. Then, it was a Saturday, and no specialist was around at the hospital. My ankle blew up like a balloon. I spent a week in hospital, heavily drugged, just desperately staring at my ankle, which was secured in a strange iron cage called a fixateur externe, for stabilisation. It lasted for days before the swelling went down again and they could have a go at it with screws, metal plates and wiring. The operation did not go well. If my ankle had been corrected immediately after the fracture, things could have worked out. Blood vessels, nerves and soft tissues would not have been harmed so much. As it was, the bones never healed correctly either. Nobody dared to undertake a second operation in the years between 2013 and now, because it could have meant that I would lose my foot. The harmed structures were not safe to approach without ruining the functional parts. There was not one single surgeon in all of Germany who felt confident to operate again. This meant that there was no relief for my pain. I have to live with it for the rest of my life. I did as much physiotherapy as possible, but it did not really help. There were probably constant inflammations and instabilities that caused the pain I felt. All that I could do if it got too bad was take drugs against the pain. Anybody who tells me not to take drugs because you can become addicted, I am ready to kill. People have no idea.”

Gabriel was deeply shocked. He had not known this. Tilda continued with her story: “Do you know the fairytale of the little mermaid? Where every step for her is as if she were walking on knives and scissors? Of course, in the fairytale, this has a symbolic meaning. For me, it was just matter-of-fact experience. Walking, hiking, running: For me, these were things I could do sometimes but not on bad days. If I overdid it, like on a longer hiking tour, I was heavily punished for stressing my ankle afterwards. Sometimes it lasted for days before I could tread normally again after overstraining. I have made an art out of not to letting other people see how much pain I have to endure. I could smile in the face of pain. This was how I sometimes felt. I was walking on knives and scissors, and my task was to not let anybody know. So, please Mr David, do not play around lightly with me on the issue of pain. You have no idea. And I won’t have it that my bad dreams about inflicted pain are turned into something useful and nice. This is pure cynicism, and I hereby reject it. This is nothing to make fun of.”

The Intuitive Mind

Angels’ Play

Location:

Heaven above Berlin. Shared-Office Cloud.

Time:

Real-time GMT, Friday, 19 April 2019, 10:45

Players:

The two angels as before and Bede Griffiths. He wears his orange sannyasin outfit and has a red tika on his forehead. Around his neck is a floral wreath with flowers in all colours.

Setting:

Angels and BG are meditating, sitting cross-legged on the floor on a cushion. Many books are scattered around them. The air is full of incense.

TA

(half-opening its right eye to check on the other two):

Can we stop now?

GA

(trying to silence its colleague):

Shhhh…

BG

(still deep in meditation):

Ohm…

TA

(sighing unhappily):

It is boring. Nothing happens.

BG

(now opening one eye):

Of course something happens. Can you not feel it? But that is just what your rational mind cannot endure. You want to control everything. You are not prepared to be silent, to be still, to allow things to happen.

TA

(complaining):

I have been silent and still now for nearly ten minutes. I have allowed things to happen, but things did not take their chance. I cannot sit here forever doing nothing.

BG

(explaining):

This is ‘active passivity.’ It is what the Chinese call wu wei, action in inaction. It is a state of receptivity.

(nestling with his necklace) “Let us open our leaves like a flower,” said Keats, “and be passive and receptive.” These words inspired me at the very beginning of my journey, but it is only now that I realise their full significance.

There is an activity of the mind that is grasping, achieving, dominating like yours. But there is also an activity that is receptive, attentive, open to others.

This is what you have to learn.

TA

(defiantly):

Be open and attentive to whom, for example? And what would I gain from that?

BG

(fixating GA with his glance):

Open and receptive to GA, for a start. What is GA feeling about you right in the moment?

GA

(reddening):

No, please….

TA

(getting angry with its colleague without really knowing why):

What is wrong with you, you bloody cow…. (stopping at seeing the shocked face of BG)

BG

(quickly recovering his composure):

Yes, try to find out what GA feels. I speak of intuitive knowledge.

It is an integral knowledge embracing the whole, starting from the ‘blood,’ the physical being, passing through the heart, the seat of the affections, the psychic being, and finally reaching the ‘purer mind,’ not the reason but the intellect, the intuitive mind.

Thus, intuition exists at every level of our being.

TA

(sceptically):

Of your being maybe. Obviously, you need blood, a heart, a psyche. It seems you have to be a human being. Can angels and machines have intuitive knowledge?

GA

(eagerly):

Machines no, I suppose. Angels yes! (triumphantly reaching out and citing page 2 from a book by Rupert Sheldrake and Matthew Fox titled The Physics of Angels):

Listen, angels are even called experts.

(reading out loud)

“Angels are essentially understanding beings. They think deeply. They are experts at understanding—at standing under. The primal thoughts that uphold all our other thoughts, angels know through intuition, according to Aquinas and other teachers on angels. Angels don’t have to go to school to learn the essence of things. They don’t need discursive reasoning and experimentation to learn. They get it all intuitively, immediately. They are experts at intuition, and they can assist our intuition. This is one reason that angels and artists befriend one another so profoundly.

When we look at the wonderful, amazing images of angels that artists have given us, we are dealing not just with a rich subject of painting but with a relationship going on between angels and artists. Intuition is the highway in which angels roam.”

Isn’t that very sweet? And it is very true. (proudly) Some of my best friends are artists.

TA

(matter-of-factly):

But we have no body. Remember: Intuition starts with the ‘blood,’ with bodily awareness. (turning to Bede Griffiths) Right, Father?

BG

(confirming):

Yes. However, dear, angels can jump this level with their astral body, because even at this level, the intellect, the self, is present.

By the bye, my good friend from the Saints Section, D. H. Lawrence, who was the prophet of this kind of knowledge, has expressed it well (reaching out and taking another book from the floor).

“We have lost almost entirely the great intrinsically developed sensual awareness or sense-awareness and sense-knowledge of the ancients. It was a great depth of knowledge, arrived at direct by instinct and intuition as we say, not by reason. It was a knowledge based not on words but on images. The abstraction was not into generalizations or into qualities but into symbols, and the connection was not logical but emotional.”

TA

(rebelliously):

But that is not knowledge! I would call it just ‘feeling.’ (under its breath) Or nonsense.

BG

(authoritative):

No, it is real knowledge: It is not merely sensual or emotional experience. It is sense awareness, emotional experience reflected in the mind—not in the rational mind, the abstract intelligence, but in the intuitive mind, the passive intellect.

(gets up, dancing a few waltz steps, to the utter amazement of both angels)

It finds expression not in abstract concepts but in concrete gestures, in images and symbols, in dance and song, in ritual sacrifice, in prayer and ecstasy.

(gets more ecstatic in dancing, to the growing embarrassment of the angels)

This is the sphere of imaginative intuition. It is here that the intuitive power of the mind is most clearly manifest.

(sitting down again, to the relief of both angels, and pointing to another book on the floor). It is the sphere of what the famous psychoanalyst Jung called the archetypes.

GA

(retrieving again the book of D.H. Lawrence):

Yes, and artists bring these archetypes into the light of consciousness. They write stories about images and symbols; they compose music and perform imaginations. They transform images from the ground up.

BG

(now becoming very flowery and poetic but only in language):

To be precise, the passive intellect receives these images from the depths of its physical and emotional experience and sheds the light of intelligence on them.

This is when the intuition begins to emerge from the darkness of physical and emotional experience into the clear light of knowledge.

TA

(soberly):

That sounds like machines cannot do it. And for me, I have serious doubts as well. Where does all this intuition come from and go to, and what exactly is it good for?

BG

(radiantly smiling):

There is a point where intuition, having passed through the realms of darkness and of twilight into the sun, now passes beyond.

It carries with it all the deep experience of the body and the blood and all that the emotions and the imagination have impressed upon it, and now, passing beyond images and thoughts, it ‘returns upon itself’ in a pure act of self-reflection, of self-knowledge.

TA

(looking enviously at GA, who has gone back to cross-legged silence):

This is why angels have intuition, and why I should meditate to get closer?

BG

(resuming his lotus seat position and lecturing the angels about meditation):

Indeed. This is the experience of the mystic, who, set free from all the limitations both of body and of soul, enters into the pure joy of the spirit. The spirit is the culminating point of body and of soul, where a man transcends himself and awakens to the eternal ground of his being.

(GA slightly shuddering at the gender bias and successfully trying to hide it; TA grinning)

The obscure intuition of physical being, the broadening intuition of emotional and imaginative experience, the light of reason discovering the laws and principles of nature and of man (again a nearly invisible shudder from GA, followed by an even deeper grin from TA)—all these are reflections of the pure light of intuition, in which the soul knows itself, not merely in its living relation with the world around or with other human beings but also in its eternal ground, the source of its being.

You can learn that in meditation. Marry intuition to reason. Overcome dualities!

TA

(obediently closing its eyes but investing not much hope in achieving anything by it):

OK. One, two, om….

What Men and Machines Cannot Do

Gabriel had spent a restless weekend puzzling over Tilda. He started to feel really bad about her. Why was he having this strange, intuitive relationship with Tilda of all women? Why had she been present every time something interesting had happened in the past months in what he started to call the Bede Griffiths project? What was her role in that exactly? He wanted to push her out of the game. Very strange things had happened since he started the Bede Griffiths readings. For him, life would have been easier if all this had had nothing to do with Tilda. If she just had been in the right place and the right time as a prompter. Having talked about cows and having said ‘Rupert Sheldrake’ and been done with it. Then he could shake her off and go on all by himself. But if the objective was to save the world, she might be much more than just a prompter. It was time to find out. He had to talk to her about their strange connection.

“What is intuition for you, Mrs Toelz?” he asked her the next day when they walked together to the B1 cafeteria for lunch. “Is it the same as empathy or telepathy?” Tilda looked at him strangely. He continued without responding to her gaze: “For me, intuition is having a sudden, deep and direct understanding of a person or a situation without having factual knowledge. It might lead to telepathy, yes. And intuition is doubtless and per definitionem right. Otherwise, it would not be called intuition.” “Aha,” Tilda said. She looked at him uncomfortably. She felt that he had started to talk about their relationship and the meaning behind their telepathic connection. “Do you think that one should always follow one’s intuitions and that intuitions are always good?” she asked hesitantly. Gabriel blinked. She was certainly on the right trail. “Whether following it will always result in the best for the world as a whole—that is, whether the consequences of following intuitions are right in terms of morals—is a very interesting issue. I have no idea. Maybe my intuition is not as good as it could be,” he answered cautiously. “Who do you think is better in intuition?” she asked next, turning again a little back to her prickly self. “You, Mr David, or me?” He was puzzled. He had never thought about this. For him, it had seemed as if the capacity for intuitive knowledge of each other had been evenly distributed. “People say that women are more intuitive than men,” Tilda said triumphantly.

“I thought you were so proud of your rational mind and your computer literacy,” Gabriel said amazed. “Why do you suddenly claim female intuition against male rationality?” She looked at him furiously. Gabriel evasively answered his own question: “I apologise. I bet Bede Griffiths has some ideas on this issue.” Tilda looked sceptical. A monk having ideas about women and intuition? “Let us have a look at the contents table of Essential Writings,” she suggested. From his rucksack, he fetched the book that was always on him. They both bent over it. Tilda’s eyes widened. “The Masculine and Feminine,” she read loud. “Page 77, let us see what he writes.” “Woman represents the intuitive power in human nature, while man represents the rational mind. These are two complementary aspects of human nature, and a human being is only complete when these two functions of human nature have been ‘married,’” Gabriel read loud. “There you go. What bullshit,” Tilda said disgustedly. “This is nothing but prejudice from old white men.” Gabriel grinned. “You might be right, but let’s see what Father Bede makes of it.” He continued reading but under his breath because he was already expecting to read something that not all the staff of B1 in the cafeteria should overhear. Maybe it was not gendered enough or politically incorrect in other ways.

“It is important to recognize that these functions are complementary; both are equally necessary. Man and woman are equal and opposite. A woman does not become more equal to man by seeking to become like a man but by revealing his opposite character. Yet it must be recognized that every man and woman is both male and female; reason and intuition exist alike in every human being, but in the man, reason is dominant and intuition is subordinate. In a perfect man or woman, the ‘marriage’ of opposites takes place, and in fact, the very purpose of an exterior marriage is to enable the man and the woman to complete one another by an interior marriage. On the other hand, when reason and intuition, the man and woman, are separated, then disaster follows. Reason without intuition is intelligent but sterile; intuition without reason is fertile but blind. The woman who seduces man is the blind intuition which listens to the voice of the serpent, the animal intelligence, or sexuality. This is the normal course of sin. The feminine mind, instead of being guided by reason so as to open itself to the Spirit, and so to achieve the marriage of intuition and reason and the integration of the personality, surrenders to animal instinct and drags down the reason with it.”

“Oh, bloody hell,” Tilda stopped him. “That is awful. The woman as the voice of the serpent. This is so idiotic.” She was totally embarrassed. So was Gabriel because things took a turn that he had not expected. They had started to talk about intuition and telepathy. Now they seemed to shift into a discussion of sex. How did this happen? Was Father Bede mad? What had the serpent to do with everything? He haltingly read on. “The serpent certainly has a sexual significance, but it is not that sex is evil,” he desperately read aloud as he read on. “Hallelujah, I am so happy to hear that. Sex is not evil, per se. Good to know,” Tilda burst out. “Shhh,” Gabriel replied, trying to calm her down. People around were starting to look at them. “Let us see where this goes. What about the snake?” Tilda asked curiously. She had obviously mastered her embarrassment. They both read the next passage but silently:

“Sex is an animal instinct which, when the woman surrenders to the man and the man to the woman, becomes the means of their communion in the Spirit. Thus the serpent becomes the Savior, as it was said in Saint John’s Gospel, ‘As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.’ It is the separation of sex from intuition or feeling and from reason and understanding which is the cause of sin, while the integration of the sexual instinct with feeling and imagination—that is, the intuitive mind—and with reason and will—that is, the rational mind—brings about fulfillment of both man and woman in the life of the Spirit.”

“Aha,” Tilda said mockingly, “now the snake is suddenly the saviour. How weird can it get? All this talking about men and women, sex and snakes in the desert! What is it good for exactly, Mr David?” Gabriel had scanned the rest of the text. His face went pale, and he said tonelessly, “It is good for saving the world from destruction. At least in the opinion of Bede Griffiths. And it has to do with India.” “What?” Tilda impolitely asked in disbelief. He read the last passage, out loud again:

“In the West today the masculine aspect, the rational, active, aggressive power of the mind, is dominant, while in the East the feminine aspect, the intuitive, passive, sympathetic power of the mind, is dominant. The future of the world depends on the ‘marriage’ of these two minds, the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the intuitive, the active and the passive. In India and all over the world today these two minds are meeting, but often the impact of the West on the East is that of a violent aggression, whether by armed power, as in the past, or by the much more subtle aggression of science and technology… Yet it still remains possible to conceive of a development of science and technology which would not seek to dominate nature in the style of the West but to work with nature, building up from the basis of the village economy, as Mahatma Gandhi sought to do, and so create a new culture, in which humankind and nature, reason and intuition, the Yang and the Yin in Chinese terms, would be brought into harmony.”

“Bloody hell,” Tilda said again, “what has this serpent thing between man and woman to do with justice in the world and Mahatma Ghandi? What are we supposed to do now? Is life not complicated enough?” Gabriel pointed to the editorial remarks of Thomas Matus on this section of Essential Writings and said, “Look, here is a kind of answer to your question.” She read:

“The experience of his first stroke in 1990 … raised Father Bede’s consciousness of the feminine in general and of the feminine dimension of his own personality. Although he admitted to having repressed his sexual instincts as a young adult, his fondness then and later for the erotic themes in D. H. Lawrence’s fiction and poetry betrayed his fascination with the male–female archetype.

Bede Griffiths’ attitude toward sex was quite close to the paradoxical attitude of Indians, who on the one hand observe a sort of exterior ‘Puritanism’ while on the other they deal with sex as a purely natural need, with few ethical implications. Father Bede’s sexual ethics were quite traditional, although when counseling persons he used great pastoral tact and discretion, respecting always the individual’s conscience. Always a contemplative, Father Bede peered into the archetypal depths of the male–female dyad and saw there the key to the complementary relationship of peoples, cultures, and religions.”

“Anyway,” Tilda resolutely resumed, “so far, my intuition says that we should go to India to find out more about it. Maybe Indian people know more about intuition than we do, and maybe we will get better when we’re there. Let’s do some autoethnography and try it out!” “This from your mouth, Mrs Toelz,” Gabriel replied, not disguising his surprise. “Before India, though, we will be going to the US next week, remember.” Then he had an idea. “We can maybe visit the place where D.H. Lawrence lived. Taos it’s called. We will pass by the area when we are over there.” “To do exactly what?” Tilda asked suspiciously. “Reconcile the male and the female?” Gabriel did not answer.