The idea underlying the lectures is that what may be called the mystical and transcendental is an inescapable part of all experience, thought and diction, and that our most ordinary transactions of things, of persons, let alone our higher scientific, aesthetic, religious, technical, political, philosophical and symbolic activities, involve it throughout. It is not some rarefied speculative addition to our ordinary talk about the world or our dealings with it, without which they remain significant and self-sufficient: without it the most ordinary activities lose all point, and the plainest statement becomes ill-formed and ungrammatical. The Discipline of the Cave (Gifford Lectures, 1966), p. 13. Possibly the queerest of all the queer things in this life is that we should find this life so very queer, and that we should even speak of it as this life, contrasting it by implication with some more normal state of which we none the less have no lucid view at all. That we do in fact find this life full of perplexities, absurdities, odd and arbitrary restrictions, things all pervasive that might none the less have been quite otherwise, does not admit of question. If we find even children capable of being thrown into a mood of wonder by the strange passing of time, shall we credit them with familiarity with the ways of eternity? If we wonder why, of all marvelous chances, we happen to be the individuals we actually are, does this argue acquaintance with the queer mechanics of becoming somebody else? If we find knowledge of other peoples minds hopelessly external and peripheral, does this point to knowledge of some more intimate way of penetrating privacy? Perhaps, however, the fact that we do thus find our present situation full of queer discomforts, and that it does seem to involve cramps, pressures, irruptions, strangenesses that are far from hiding a simple message or harbouring a discoverable sense, does point to some reversing, complementary, compensating situation of which we can not but have vague knowledge, and on which the precise character of out cramps and other difficulties can throw valuable light. The Discipline of the Cave, p. 13. J.N. Findlay (1903-1987), originally from South Africa, began his intellectual career by joining a local Theosophical Society and becoming fluent in Sanskrit while still in his teens. After winning a Rhodes Scholarship, Dr. Findlay (FBA, FAAAS) went on to become Professor at Kings College University of London, Clark Professor at Yale, and University Professor at Boston University. BU President John Silber - a man hardly given to soft-hearted rhetoric - liked to comment that Findlay (who some believe to have been Plotinus reincarnated) knew more philosophy and religion, east and west, than anyone living, or - who has ever lived. His 1980 visit to Fairfield is a part of the M.U.M. library videotape collection. www.jnfindlay.com
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