Word: mystics
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...book's best portrait is of the man who dwarfs the other three-Mohandas Gandhi, that tiny ascetic who for 30 years harried his British rulers with fasts and passive resistance. The mystic whom Winston Churchill once scorned as a "half-naked fakir" is a saint to his followers. "How can you say one thing last week," an associate asks him, "and something quite different this week?" Replies Gandhi: "Ah, because I have learned something since last week." The Mahatma continues to learn; he becomes at last India's soul and conscience. The most moving pages of Freedom...
...there are obligatory stops: Esalen, ESP and the elusive Carlos Castaneda, whom Goodman traps briefly in a stair well. "I'm Carlos' double," the gentleman insists before scooting off. Indeed, many people are not what they seem to be. Swami Hal, for example, is a 260-lb. mystic who runs a kind of Boys' Town ashram in the Northwest wilderness and talks like a dead...
...minor upset marred last Saturday's schedule, but the mystic from Albany, New York foresees no such disturbances this week...
...face of the pressure of public opinion. To most of us, an authentic aesthetic response is that ineffable "gut feeling," which in this age of narcissistic fiction, is resurrected to onanistic worship. But a gut feeling, exactly because its vague origin, which is so often confused with mystic truthfulness, is associational in its logic. The shudder of revulsion that comes when viewing a Lichtenstein is probably not an artistic response, but an externally motivated one, prompted by the antibourgeois biases of contemporary culture...
...Percy's claim to a perspective that "can commend itself ... more by reason of its ignorance than its knowledge" is more than an attack on the scientists' narrow focus; it questions the fitness of an analytical, scientific method to the task of comprehending language. Not quite a full-fledged mystic, Percy nevertheless doubts not only the possibility, but also the ultimate worth of understanding. On the one hand he glories in the achievement, unique to the human race, of making the associative leap from the group of sounds in balloon to the real balloon; yet at the same time...