My reading this episode is an excerpt from my book, Subtraction: The Simple Math of Enlightenment, where I describe the moments that led up to my enlightenment experience. It occurred as I was reading a transcript of Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s Induction talk, so this reading is a mix of my words and quotes from Merrell-Wolff’s talk. To help with context, I added a few additional quotes from Merrell-Wolff’s “Induction Paper” to those that appeared in the original book.
It is not lost on me that a transcript of a talk that Franklin Merrell-Wolff gave specifically to attempt to induce a spiritual experience in the listener is what ostensibly triggered my awakening. The whole point of my creating the Induction Series is that evidence suggests words that originate from a particular state of being have the power to cause change. We all know this at some level. “He who has ears, let him hear.”
This is podcast # 10 in The Induction Series. The aim of this series is to focus on “inspired” writings, those that carry the “living word.” Franklin Merrell-Wolff called them “mystic writings” and said that “when the ‘Voice of the Silence’ speaks into the relative world, the Meaning lies between the words, as it were, rather than in the direct content of the words themselves.”
Richard Rose said that “If you are interested in looking for Essence, from the point of the Process Observer you can be stimulated only by writings of inspiration rather than reason or direction” and referred students to his poem “Three Books of the Absolute.” While Rose used the term “inspirational,” clearly these are not necessarily inspirational, uplifting writings like one typically finds collected under that banner.
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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
Selected Links and Topics from this Episode:
- Listen the original audio recording from 1970 of Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s Induction talk.
- “And what you do, you can get into an infinite regression. You look at your ego. All right, here am I and all of a sudden it dawns upon you that which is looking at the ego is really the I. So you stick that one out in front. You look at it again, but then you realize it couldn’t be, because here is a something that is observable.” ~ Merrell-Wolff
- “I, Shawn, was ever an object, and ever a thing destined to die. It was obvious and undeniable that I was and always would be doomed to die. In the face of that stark realization, I felt my self fading away, but there was no fight. I did not run from death because there was nowhere to run. The runner himself was vanishing, and as that happened something became startlingly clear—the nothingness that I was fading into and had so feared was already inside me.”
- Leave a review on Amazon of my book Subtraction: The Simple Math of Enlightenment. Our goal is to reach 100 reviews by the end of The Induction Series. We’re now at 88!