The Deeper Meaning of the Canon

Dear Editors and Translators:

I would like to welcome the newest member of our team. Our new Italian editor Elisa. Welcome Elisa. I would also like to discuss today a subject that came up with the Russian translator. That of sensate and ideational cultural swings. This will give the Harvest canon a necessary context and some things will seem a lot clearer.

The Russian sociologist Pitrim Sorokin discovered that history had a pattern of cultural swings that could be detected. Many cultures either had a material sensate bias or they had a more inner based ideational one. It was simply a range of psychological orientation from which the pendulum could swing in any given culture from the lower charkas to the higher ones. From the outer-rim of the mandala to its inner center.

In the West, Greece and Rome were a serious sensate phase of the pendulum swing. While the psychic and deeply spiritual had a place. Rational thought and material engineering were more crucial. This ended with the beginning of the Middle Ages. The pendulum swung back to the ideational. The psychic forces of man took over and the supreme example of this climax was the now defunct monastic complex in Cluny, France. It was an elitist center for all kinds of Christian yogas and it ultimately released the Crusades and the end of the ideational Middle Ages.

Today, the ideational is coming back in the West. The material worldview has simply exhausted itself. The big sensate blow-off of the last century has ushered in the beginnings of a new kind of ideational period for the West. Freud and Jung led the way here and Picasso and Joyce and later Pollack and the Beats used this rudimentary transpersonal psychology to start entering the inner mandala once again.

This is the context of Harvest of Gems. The transition between the sensate and ideationl is always a mix of both and Sorokin termed this transition phase idealistic. Well, then the Harvest canon is definitely idealistic. These pendulum swings can also be seen in China. The Tang dynasty was an ideational climax with Buddhism at its helm. Then the collapse ensued and today China is struggling with a sensate vacuum. India is a unique country. It has always had deep ideational currents despite the current sensate phase it finds itself in. courtesy of the West.

The author sincerely believes that the web and the digital revolution will speed up the next impending ideational phase as information and mind networking become the prime forms of all human activity. Cave-men manipulating smudge sticks were basically doing psychic networking. The West took a long detour. Now the global brain is arising once more. The computer is just an empty box. What’s important is just the communication that goes on between the individuals using this empty box. I hope that you all stop to reflect a little on this idea. . Civilization is like a compost. The new is always built on top of the ruins of the old. Sometimes also the old has to be tragically leveled as we have just seen in Bamiyan. This is the way of evolution. It works in strange and wondrous ways. It works in a spiral form with many echoes from the past fusing with the new elements of the future. It’s the spiral of re-incarnation. The big helix of karma. It’s all this and much more.

Newsflash: Harvest of Gems and The Little Monk are now available at Amazon.com. I will send paperbacks to all late next month.

Michael