Guest Post: Cameron on “High Conceptual Thinkers”

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

High Conceptual Thinkers

by Charles Cameron

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen Eric Drexler’s advice on this topic, but unless Zen mentioned it previously, or perhaps John Robb, I don’t know where I’d have seen it before. This is the part that gets to me:

Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. Include Science and Nature.

Don’t avoid a subject because it seems beyond you – instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to absorb more vocabulary, perspective, and context, then circle back.

Each time I see that, I have to laugh. Here’s the same tale, told from the arts and humanities side of the house…

*

When I was a lad, they sent me to Wellington College, the private boarding school that prepares officers’ sons for admission to Sandhurst, and the life of a British army officer. I was not that way inclined, to be honest, and soon found myself a nice corner of the library with a comfortable chair, which I made my own.

I scanned the books in that area more closely than most, and one set of books caught my eye. It was the set of six volumes of the Eranos Yearbooks.

Eranos was a yearly gathering in Switzerland, at which CG Jung more or less presided, and at which his scholar friends read learned papers to each other at the highest levels of their own expertise.

These books night as well have been in Ge’ez, as far as I was concerned. They talked about things like “Theriomorphic Spirit Symbolism in Fairy Tales” (which is actually about gods in wild animal form, Ganesh with his elephant’s head for example), “Aeschylus: The Eumenides” about the Greek tragedy of that name, “The Spirit of Science” (that would be Erwin Schodinger speaking, which will give you an idea of the caliber of invitees) — and those are just picked from the first of the six volumes.

And how these folks went at their discussions! If a nice quote from Horace was in order, Latin’s the language. French, yes, German too, for Kant or Nietzsche. That’s okay. But Coptic? Egyptian hieroglyphs? Diagrams culled from Kabbalistic treatises about how there’s a waterfall of grace that falls constantly from G*d through ten distinct steps to the creation we inhabit, and how to climb carefully back up before the Throne?

Scattered through the six volumes were Jung, Schrodinger, Rahner, Kerenyi, Zimmer, Puesch, Quispel (between them, these two covered the waterfront on Gnostic studies), Massignon, Corbin (ditto for Islam and its mystics and martyrs), Neumann, Eliade, Tillich, Suzuki (he brought Zen to the west), Danielou, Zimmer, van der Leeuv, Wilhelm (he brought the west the I Ching), LL Whyte… I don’t believe Wolfgang Pauli ever   attended, but 400 of his dreams were discussed there under cover of anonymity by CG Jung.

I had not the least idea what these folks were on about, maybe a third of the nouns and verbs were nouns and verbs I’d never met before, and maybe a sixth of those weren’t even in my trusty Concise Oxford Dictionary: this was true scholarship, and I was aware I was in paradise.

I left that school, thankfully, and went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where I studied Theology, and learned early on that my interest was not in studying that “particular subject as if you had to pass a test on it” — I scraped by Oxford’s intense finals with what was called a “gentleman’s Third” — and I have spent the rest of my life searching out scholarship and experiences having to do with inspiration, intuition and imagination.

I’ve found myself trotting around the globe, studying now Zen then Hinduism then Lakota shamanism, at last returning to the European west via Jung and Hermann Hesse, singing Gregorian Chant under the baton of the choir master at Solesmes, meditating, sweating my buckskin out (as they say) in “stone people’s lodges”, teaching creativity in the Los Angeles atelier of a master artist, Jan Valentin Saether — and somewhere around the age of forty, I discovered the six volumes of the Eranos Yearbooks again in a second hand bookstore, and once more read them.

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