Source Text
Robert S. de Ropp was a household name among the “counterculture” of the sixties: his book The Master Game burst upon a naive reading public carrying the data that there are schools in the West and there is access to mastery on the spiritual path from where we stand.
His message is distilled to its essence in Self-Completion. It addresses the same crisis he addressed in the sixties, with the same sense of urgency. More than a doomsayer, far more than a scientific observer, beyond the limitations of a utopian dreamer, Robert de Ropp speaks out with the integrity and acerbity of an old Testament prophet.
To the Reader Greetings! I am an elderly hermit who lives on the side of a mountain in California. I share this mountain with deer, skunks, opossums, rabbits, hawks, mice, vultures, redwoods, oaks, pepperwoods, grasses, not to mention about a zillion nematodes, fungi, bacteria. I am part of a complex ecosystem, a very small part I might add, a member of a trouble-making species, a naked ape that has become the bane of the biosphere because it has failed to find its proper place in the scheme of things.
In their incompleted state human beings thought they were awake when they were really moving about in a state of hypnotized sleep. They thought they had will but they had no real will. They thought they were free but they were really slaves. They thought they had something they called “I” but they had no real I, only a multitude of petty selves with different desires and different aims. In their state of “waking sleep” humans voyaged from birth to death aboard a ship of fools. The captain was asleep, the steersman was drunk and the navigator had forgotten the aim of the voyage.
The System, if one understood it fully, would explain everything, from the origin of the universe to the peculiarities of human behavior. Everything was linked to everything else in a chain of interdependent cosmoses which ranged from the megalocosmos to the microcosmos. Each cosmos was governed by its own laws. The cosmos above imposed laws on the cosmos below. Man, the microcosmos, lived under laws imposed by the cosmos above him.
Man, who should become food for higher beings, becomes instead food for worms. He drifts down instead of rising up. He fattens his flesh instead of nourishing his soul.
The dreams save the dreamers from making serious efforts to awaken because they dream that they are already awake.
This is our little world, familiar, confining, dull. This is our “boss reality”. It imposes laws on us that we break at our peril. We must drive on the proper side of the road. We must get to work on time. We must pay taxes and bills, buy groceries, send the children to school. We live under many laws. We are not free agents.
The Lattice of Karma I AM HERE NOW. I AM. The full awareness of my own being is given to me only now and then. Why? Because, much of the time, I am lost in fantasy. I am definitely not here now. I am wandering around in the past or dreaming about the future, or thinking about something, speculating about something, talking to someone who is not even there, imagining, indulging. What a way to live! But the full sense of the I AM comes to me when I remember. With it comes awareness of place, the HERE, and awareness of time, the NOW. And with it too comes the sense of separation, the feeling of being outside spacetime, an observer standing on the bank of time’s river and watching the flow. This is zikr, remembering. Self-remembering? But I have many selves. I am a veritable ship of fools. Which self do I remember? None of them. This Self is outside of spacetime, the white bird, messenger of the pleroma, beyond change, beyond death.
This enables the gnostics to look directly into the mysterious forces that have shaped the cosmic drama.
AI Summary
Self-Completion by Robert S. de Ropp presents key insights from the contemplative tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.