#spiritual search

“Much on earth is hidden from us; but to make up for that we have been given a precious mystic sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why the philosophers say that we cannot understand the reality of things on earth. God took seeds from different worlds and sowed them on this earth, and His garden grew up and everything came up that could come up. But what grows lives and is alive only through the feeling of its contact with other mysterious worlds. If that feeling grows weak or is destroyed in you, the heavenly growth will die away in you. Then you will be indifferent to life and even grow to hate it. That’s what I think.”

—Father Zossima from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karazamov, trans. by Constance Garnett (New York: New American Library, 1957). 

Wisdom gathered in our Spring 1984 Issue on Hierarchy, available in our online store here.

Pictured: Ilya Repin, Refusing Confession, 1885.

Celebrated composer, Laurence Rosenthal recounts his experience with LSD in our summer issue: THE WILD: 

I had known about drugs given to novices in mystical schools of the East at the beginning of their training, for the purpose of providing a confirming glimpse of the kind of state they might one day reach through their own inner work. In fact it was a motive related to this idea that led me to try LSD. And now the mounting magnificence of the hours, growing constantly more radiant, finally melted all resistance.

To read the entire essay, click here.

Photograph by Josep Molina Secall