/author/Robert%20S.%20DeRopp

3 quotes by Robert S. DeRopp

Author:
Publisher: St Martins Press (1972)

A succession of Christian mystics, building on foundations offered by the Gospels, created a system of self-discipline that contained within it many of the principles of bhakti yoga. Out of the ir efforts emerged the method embodying in itself sound psychological principles, and cutting across the artificial barriers erected by the sects. Among the Catholics, Molinos and Fenelon, among the Protestants, Boehme and William Law, among the Quakers, Shillitoe and John Woolman all taught essentially the same method. The dogmas, rituals, theological wranglings and doctrinal squabbles were ignored by the seen lightened beings as unworthy of serious consideration. Their problem was simpler and at the same time far more difficult: how to evict from its ruling place the petty personal ego and replace it with a nun failing recollection of the presence of God.


Whereas the collective intellect developed explosively, the collective conscience (emotional equivalent of the collective intellect) remained on a rudimentary level. This explains why man of the twentieth century, despite technological achievements of considerable magnitude, has been guilty of collective atrocities which might have brought a blush to the hairy features of Australopithecus. It explains the extraordinary casualness with which contemporary man discusses, among the cocktails and canapes of this afternoon jabberfests, the prospect of total thermonuclear war and its attendant horrors. They will roast us, we will roast them. Abombs, Hbomb, Nbombs,..all discussed without a blush, without a grimace, without shame or any impulse to resign from the human race as if roasting the entire population of a large city were the most natural thing in the world. A curious phenomenon, demonstrating once again that the expansion of man's cerebral cortex took place without any corresponding development in the mid-brain, a primordial hell's kitchen in which are brewed the crude patterns of emotional behavior that, though they may once have aided man's survival, now merely serve to imperil his very existence.


decade to decade and might end in disaster for the whole human species, results from a conflict of aims between two large segments of earth's human population. But, when one comes to examine the conflict, it appears that neither side really knows what it is after. Ostensibly the quarrel is about human rights; shall man be free to pursue his personal aims or shall he be a puppet of the State. But the clear-cut opposition of a spiritual to a materialistic philosophy of life is lacking. Indeed it seems at times that the United States, leader of the Free World, vaunts her material wealth rather than her Declaration of Independence as a symbol of her glory, saying to Russians andChinese: 'See what riches! What an abundance of things!' To which these nations reply: 'You have indeed abundance now but the time will come when we will be richer than you are/'This reduces the great conflict to a mere competition in greed, with two huge power groups struggling to demonstrate which can squander more rapidly the dwindling resources of our planet.