Conversations in Apocalyptic Times: A Guide for the Spiritual Seeker

Introduction

This is an unusual book: it is your conversational introduction to a deeper, richer inner life. A collaboration between Robert Faas, a psychologist with a lifetime of counseling experience, now editor of Grailstone Press, and Arthur Versluis, an author and professor of religion, the book originated in conversations between these two friends over many years, and came into being through audio recordings of thematic conversations over more than a year. In this book, they provide a guide to contemporary and future spiritual seekers, expressed in the accessible and engaging form of a dialogue. So far as we know, this is the only book for general readers to make available practical advice on how to embark on a spiritually transformative inner life journey in this way.

The two speakers bring a wealth of knowledge and life experience to the conversation. Robert Faas, now retired, provided a psychological counseling practice for decades, informed by his deep knowledge of spiritual alchemy, of Christian theosophic mysticism in the tradition of Jacob Böhme, and of Eastern Orthodoxy, in particular, the hesychastic tradition. In addition to his psychology practice, he also guided and still guides a group of spiritual practitioners in the process he discusses here. Arthur Versluis is a professor of religious studies who has published numerous books on mysticism, esoteric religion, consciousness, and related topics, and in addition has trained in a range of secular and Buddhist meditation traditions.

In the contemporary world, there is a surfeit of information, but a dearth of embodied, experiential knowledge. There is scholarship available on all manner of focused subjects, but often it remains at best informational, while disconnected from the larger context of lived experience. This conversational book explores how one can deepen and enrich one’s inner life through a wide range of means, all brought together here in the context of a psychologically and spiritually transformative process that involves not just our intellect, but our whole being.

Direct and lucid, the conversational form brings us in, engaging us in the exchange and presenting what for nearly everyone will be a completely new way of understanding the spiritual life. Why is it new? Because in general both historically and certainly in the contemporary world, Christianity became primarily confessional, not understood as a Mystery religion with all that entailed. This Mystery perspective has historically been eclipsed, perhaps never more than in the modern era. But in the understanding developed here, drawing on the classical mystical tradition represented by Dionysius the Areopagite, Meister Eckhart, Jacob Böhme, Friedrich Schelling, and the hesychastic tradition, its profound dimensions are revealed in a clear way as a psycho-spiritual individual quest, as a movement through our underworld and into the light.

The themes discussed in these conversations are classical ones: the individual quest, of the grail mythos, and of our individual journey to understanding our burdens and woundedness, as well as how we can be healed and not only be illuminated, but illuminate. The conversations ultimately are about darkness and light. And the conversations are permeated by the great works of literature, philosophy, and religion, that is, by the humanities, and by a deep familiarity with those works primarily devoted to helping us understand ourselves not only as we are but also as we can be.

A technological world drives us by externalities, by distraction, and in fact, much of the anxiety and depression of our youth derives from this. People of any age scarcely have time to look inward. Simultaneously, our educational and entertainment apparatus systematically ignore the faint voice of our inner call to a higher and more profound way of life. As a result, you won’t find this kind of book, or what it represents in our universities or colleges, nor in our secondary schools. What we are offering here is not to be found in the self-help industry, or in the new age categories, indeed, anywhere else. In fact, this inner path has been very thoroughly eclipsed.

But in this little book, we open a great door, point through it, and let you know that a path beyond that door is there, that it has always been there, and it always will be there for you. Why? Because an expression of truth, by virtue of being true, existed in the archaic past, exists now, and will exist in the future. That is the very nature of what is true, for it is both within and beyond time. This is a little book about the Mysteries we can experience as humans, and about how you can embark on a quest to understand them yourself.

It is a book about both the darkness and the light. As Jacob Böhme so clearly saw, in this human life we can give ourselves over to wrathful and destructive energies, or we can begin to transform those energies through the Christic path into strength and loving kindness. It is not enough to imagine that a new age is somehow upon us, or soon will be upon us. To engage in a spiritual process of alchemical transmutation, we have to look unflinchingly at how we’ve gone astray and at the burdens and wounds we bear, but we also will move through our own underworld on our quest for healing and light.

This might be a disquieting book for you in places. It might express ideas or advice or observations you’ve never heard before. What we’d ask is that you be with what we say, and reflect on it without immediately judging it. Perhaps, like a seed, it will take root and grow. If not, that’s all right. If the book isn’t speaking to you, it might not be meant for you at this time. Let it go for now, and when you come back, perhaps you’ll see it in a different light. But if it does speak to you, if in it or through it you hear the call to this mysterious journey, the quest at the very heart of what it means to be human, we wish you godspeed on your path. After all, it was meant for you.

—Robert Faas and Arthur Versluis

1

Beginning the Journey

Robert Faas (RF), Arthur Versluis (AV)

AV: I’m sitting in the library of Robert Faas, and we’re talking about Schelling, and various metaphysical and spiritual topics. I thought that at the beginning of our conversation we might reflect, for a little bit, on what advice we might have for someone who is not familiar with the kinds of things that you find in a library, a really great library like this. What advice would we have for someone who is seeking, who is recognizing that something is not quite right in the society that we’re in? Who perhaps has gone through some kind of educational institution, has come out the other side, and recognized that a lot of things seemed to be missing. And wondered perhaps what those things were. What advice would you have for somebody who’s really beginning and investigating for the first time, looking for more meaning in life?

RF: I would suggest two things: one is to be quiet. Silence. Begin to seek out more quiet in your life. If you want to begin on a quest, one of the most detrimental things right now, to any form of inner quest, is the amount of noise and constant distraction that goes on. I’d begin by suggesting that someone start creating zones or times of silence and quiet for themselves. Which would be preparation for the soul to go deeper. And I think the other would be to seek out some of the mystery in things that still exist beneath the surface, but again in modern society we’ve pretty much lost the element of mystery. Technology, all the modern things, really don’t speak at all to the mystery of the human being, or the mystery of existence, or spiritual mystery. Beginning means seeking for things that are beyond the everyday.

AV: I would add to that. I think both of those are absolutely true. Many of the students I see and work with, and I myself for that matter, we’re all immersed in technology. We’re trapped by technology that distracts us and keeps us occupied at a superficial level. And that in itself provides stimulation and it provides a reward for stimulation, which is more stimulation. Leaving that behind, at least for a time now and then, and having a time during the day when you don’t have that around. I would suggest keeping your technology, at least part of the time, on mute. Have it so it doesn’t bark at you all the time. Another thing I would suggest, and this ties in with both of the things you were talking about, is finding time to be in nature. Increasingly, because we live in technological bubbles, we’re not in the natural world. We’re in an artificial world. It’s a world, to some extent, also of our own superficial, materialistic consciousness. It exists on a materialistic level that is really superficial and that is really based in a kind of stimulus-response kind of relationship with other people, with things. Whereas being in nature has meaning as well. It is a place where you can discover meaning in a primordial way. Meaning comes out of a context, and part of our contextualization, as human beings, requires silence. And it requires nature, the natural world, untamed mountains, valleys, the ocean. It’s in that kind of context that we can begin to discover meaning in a deeper way. You were using the term quest, and that’s not accidental. I wonder if you might talk a little more about thinking of life as a quest, and as an inner quest?

RF: Yes, you’re right, it’s not accidental. I really believe that humanity is meant to be on a quest, a spiritual quest, a quest regarding our existence, in order to really deepen our existence. And that the whole idea of a quest was much more prominent, even in the more recent past. But, like a lot of things, it’s just not spoken of very much these days. No matter what religions you look at, the fact is that a quest is so important, is really central to religion. And I think, especially in Christianity, the quest of the individual soul had enormous meaning and probably the most meaning of all in terms of one’s destiny. So to no longer be questing, in a sense, is much like a death. And it turns one over to whatever forces that are there as a kind of a plaything. Because a quest helps to establish a ground.

AV: There’s a journey, and it has a purpose, which is discovering meaning, and it’s a journey, which means a movement through time and space. And that’s very much part of the grail cycle and the grail tradition, which plays an important role in Western European culture, although it’s not widely discussed now. Maybe you could talk a little bit about quest in terms of the grail and in terms of grail mythology and that tradition and the role that it plays.

RF: I think it’s certainly true that the idea of a quest, and the grail quest, is at the center of both Eastern and Western Christianity. Jung talked about these things a lot, especially that the soul is meant to undergo a quest. And in Christianity, the quest often had something to do with the process of divinization, theosis or regeneration, rebirth, and then gradually began to, more and more, go into the time of the grail. In a way, the whole purpose is to undertake the quest, which would point to, ultimately, again, one’s regeneration and the process of what you must do in order to successfully complete the quest. And to say the grail was really another way of referring to the Risen Christ and the light. The quest has to do with the light. And to follow that meant everything.

AV: How does the grail correspond to the light? How do you see that connection? The grail mythos and light, how does that appear?

RF: I think that especially in the descriptions and the imagery of the vessel, the cup, you know it’s always a shining, a very spiritual vessel connected to both light and substance. So it has to do with the brilliance of the light, which brings both clarity and undergoing a process of what we would term a refining process many times. This is the process in which we have to go through the death of our ego-self, and allow that to happen. What sustains us, in that, is the light. And here we’re talking about the Christ as the risen light, especially in the grail. Someone, or something, beyond the self has to be able to take one through the journey. Fundamentally, the journey means the giving up of the old self, in order that one undergoes the necessary changes for a new or regenerate self to become birthed.

AV: So for someone who is coming out of a contemporary environment where many of these things are unfamiliar, still, there’s probably a sense of recognition of what you’re talking about that stirs or awakens for some people, someone listening to this or reading this, someone hears it or reads it and thinks, yes, I understand what it means, what you’re referring to, about a quest and also about leaving behind the old self and ego and moving toward and realizing what’s beyond that. What’s beyond ‘self.’ That’s a way of expressing in universal terms what manifests in particular ways in stories and myths and a particularly pure form of it is the grail mythology. But what more would you have to say about the experience