Popular Works
Like Aldous Huxley he had taken mescalin, but Zaehner came to a different conclusion. In his 1957 book Mysticism. Sacred and Profane. An Inquiry into some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience, he aims to uphold a distinction between an amoral monism on the one hand and theistic mysticism on the other. In part he relies on a personal experience recorded by Martin Buber. Here and elsewhere, he thus sets himself against Huxley's adoption of the Perennial Philosophy.
In his later book Our Savage God, especially in his essay "Rot in the Clockwork Orange", Zaehner argued against aspects of an ancient monism which he saw as leading logically to excess, not only of the kind propagated by Timothy Leary, or even earlier by Aleister Crowley, but perhaps eventually, ultimately to the criminal depravity of Charles Manson. Here Zaehner provides a warning how the misuse of theology can result in horror.
Read more about this topic: Robert Charles Zaehner
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or works:
“The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the head, and we shall not know the shape of his hammer. He makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind them, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall prey to the arch enemy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)