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An
End to Ordinary History: Comments on a Philosophical
Novel by Michael Murphy
Elizabeth Peña-Velasco
Paper presented at Conference on Henry Corbin, Sorbonne, Paris,
17 December 2005
Introduction
Michael Murphy is one of
the co-founders of Esalen, an institute established in 1962 in Big Sur
on the central coast of California.
He describes it as “an educational center for cutting edge work in
the human sciences and the sciences promoting human values and human
potential. Esalen’s activities include public seminars, invitational
conferences and research…, cooperative projects and residential
work-scholar programs” (1).
Michael Murphy was intensively
active in maintaining exchanges with the Soviets, which went further
than exchanges of diplomacy or goodwill. His intention was “to
open the way” in a global manner to a new spiritual dimension.
This idea was particularly powerful in the Cold War period. The ideological
confrontation between the United States
and the Soviet Union is the specific
context in which we must situate the actions and the story of Michael
Murphy.
“The internal world is the
ultimate frontier” (2), says Michael Murphy, who has dedicated his life
to his own spiritual research and explored the paranormal and metanormal
capacities of the human being – as he calls them – to transcend mental
and physical limits.
An End to Ordinary History is a novel written in English,
inspired in particular by the work of Henry Corbin, Corps Spirituel
et Terre Céleste. The novel, published in 1982, is based some events
of the Cold War and on investigations undertaken by the governments
of each of the two superpowers in areas such as parapsychology in the
period from 1972 to 1982, investigations recognized in secret documents
made public by the American CIA through the Freedom of Information
Act.
Michael Murphy established
contacts with certain scientists involved in this research through the
Institute of Noetic Sciences and the Stanford Research
Institute. These included the director of NASA James Fletcher, the pioneer
of space shuttle construction Werner von Braun, the Apollo project astronaut
Edgar Mitchell, who said that he had had a mystical experience in space,
and the physicist and laser specialist Russell Targ. The latter introduced
these parapsychological works into various prestigious scientific publications
and even the Soviet Academy of Sciences (3).
As for Michael Murphy, he
states that he experienced an encounter with a feminine angel toward
the mid-1990s for a period of three months, an encounter that he describes
as a vision that was both subjective and objective, but profoundly real
and spiritual.
An End to Ordinary History
The novel deals with the
meeting of two scientists, one from the United
States and the other from the Soviet
Union – Darwin Fall and Vladimir Kirov -, each carrying
out research for his respective government on “the atomic structure
of clairvoyant perception” and “psychokinetic fields”. The Soviet scientist,
who is going through his own mystical experiences, realizes that many
connections exist between the North American’s work and the teachings
of the Sufi association to which he belonged in Samarkand.
Needless to say, the atmosphere in the URSS of that era was unfavorable to the development of Sufism.
On the one hand, the Soviet authorities were suspicious of anything
related to religion and, on the other hand, the conservative Muslims
considered that Sufism had negative effects on the life of Islam.
Kirov, the Soviet scientist,
incarnates this conflict in himself because his grandfather ‘Alī
Shirazī (let us note the reference to Mullā Sadrā)
was a Sufi master who had transmitted to him the teachings on the existence
of the world of Hūrqalyā in the line of the Neoplatonists
of Persia, Suhrawardī and Shaikh Ahmad Ahsā’ī.
Then Kirov’s
father, an important Soviet ideologist, introduced them into the political
system of the URSS. Kirov
would attempt to create a synthesis between mystical thought and official
scientific thought.
Thus, a passage in the novel
mentions Henry Corbin: “Only once,” Kirov
said, “have I done military espionage. I was in Paris in 1963 studying parapsychology. A Frenchman
was guiding my studies, a scholar of Iranian mysticism and friend of
Henry Corbin, who was an expert on Suhrawardī” (4).
Michael Murphy symbolically
represents the Orient and the Occident by the cities of Jābalqā et Jābarsā respectively, the
two emerald cities that also refer to the two ideological blocs. Murphy
indeed considered that a living spiritual heritage persisted in the
Oriental bloc. The following is Corbin’s description: “And
by virtue of the homology that makes the three worlds symbolize with
one another, the world of the Imaginal also presents a division corresponding
to the twofold Occident of the physical world; thus Jābarsā
and Jābalqā correspond to the terrestrial world of elementary
matter, while Hūrqalyā corresponds to the Heavens of the physical
world” (5).
The novel also relates the
experiences of the astronauts in a Soviet space capsule, a vision of
another dimension, of emerald green space and meetings with angels,
an event which ends in tragedy when the pilots lose control of the spacecraft
before the magnitude of the phenomenon. Likewise, the novel speaks of
various parapsychological experiences (psychic espionage, precognition,
telepathy, and clairvoyance). All are apparently based on real facts.
Main Ideas in relation to Henry Corbin
It is particularly interesting
to consider a work of this type, written by someone from the United States
during the Cold War era, and whose conception springs from the mystical
universe stated by Corbin.
Certainly, the novel associates
mysticism and politics, but this idea belongs exclusively to Michael
Murphy in this work, because Henry Corbin never thought in those terms.
Nevertheless, the book is not so much concerned with politics as it
is a philosophical statement. Nor is it science fiction, which is “imaginative
fiction based on postulated scientific discoveries or spectacular environmental
changes” (6). Rather, its basis is facts that occurred, and the notion of the Imaginal is
of the order of reality; this is a reality proper in which real events
take place.
Murphy expresses some of
the deep concepts of Corbinian thought in a greatly simplified manner
as follows: First, the notion of the Imaginal expressed by the world
of Hūrqalyā is the key to the novel and to the inspiration
that Michael Murphy finds in Corps Spirituel et Corps Céleste.
The Soviet character in the novel, Kirov, on several occasions
expresses the necessity of the mundus imaginalis as the place
where the visions of the enlightened and the events of the Soul occur.
Hūrqalyā is the Celestial Earth, the earth of emerald cities,
the world of Resurrection, the interworld where human beings will accomplish
their ultimate journey. There is no confusion here with outer space,
“our spaceships will not fly there… our bodies, though,
when they become vehicles of light, can make the journey” (7).
The distinction between the imaginary and the Imaginal seems clear.
Second, although conditioned
by his own historical circumstances, Michael Murphy suggests that the
Imaginal History of which Henry Corbin speaks surpasses the traditional
concept of history. Traditional history is linear and progressive, including
the Marxist concept of history as “putting revolutionary ideas
into practice, especially the communist idea or the idea of the new
state of the world” (8); this history is the one that Michael
Murphy calls ordinary.
The Imaginal History of Henry
Corbin takes place in Hūrqalyā; this History Michael Murphy
calls Extraordinary, and hence the novel’s title, An End to
Ordinary History. Like Corbin, Murphy denounces the false dilemma:
either history or myth. Indeed, for Corbin, Hūrqalyā is the
place neither of history nor of myth in the current sense of these words
(9). For Murphy, this Imaginal History represents hope and simultaneously
real possibility.
Third, in the novel Hūrqalyā
is also the Earth of Resurrection. Murphy picks up the expressions of
Shaikh Ahmad Ahsā’ī: Nūr wujūdī dhā’ib,
Nūr wujūdī jāmid, Tajdīd al-khalq
(10). In other words, “The Spirits are light-being in the fluid
state (Nūr wujūdī dhā’ib), while bodies
are light-being in the solid state (Nūr wujūdī jāmid).
The difference between the two is like the difference between water
and snow” (11). The Renewal of Creation (Tajdīd al-khalq)
announced by the second sounding of the trumpet by the Angel Seraphiel
(Qur’ān
39:68 (12)) is a restoration of all things to their absolute paradisiacal
purity, a new cosmic cycle (13). For Murphy, it is simply that “Both
souls and bodies are made of the same holy light, and they will become
one in the New Creation” (14).
Michael Murphy confers major
importance on the earthly body of flesh and reduces the complex concept
of the body at the time of the Resurrection according to the Shaikhīe School
to the Jasad (body of ordinary elements), which – he says
– will become identical to its original person (Jism
al-aslī). In
this way – continues Murphy – “The body will become
the luminous face of the soul, events which can only take place in the
Earth of Hūrqalyā” (15).
In conclusion, An End
to Ordinary History is not a Corbinian novel in the philosophical
and metaphysical sense proposed by Henry Corbin; however, Michael Murphy
considers that the mystical experience is an event of everyday life
that his ordinary characters experience.
The interworld of Hūrqalyā
is omnipresent, but only the Hūrqalian organ of perception can
see and perceive it. Consequently, our ordinary historical perspective
can be transformed into an Extraordinary History, the Imaginal History
that Henry Corbin has shown us.
Translated by Christine Rhone
1. The Esalen Catalogue
(Big Sur, California: Esalen Institute, 2004), p. 88.
2. Jackie Krentzman, “In Murphy’s Kingdom”,
Stanford Magazine, http://www.stanfordalumni.org/ news/magazine/1998/janfeb/articles/murphy.html.
5. Henry Corbin, Corps Spirituel et Terre Céleste: De l’Iran Mazdéen à l’Iran Shî’ite, 2d ed. (Paris :
Buchet Chastel, 1979). Buchet Castel also published the 3d ed. in 2005.
The present paper refers to the 3d ed., p. 105 : “Et en vertu
de l’homologie qui fait symboliser l’un avec l’autre
les trois mondes, le monde de l’Imaginal présente aussi une division
correspondant au double Occident du monde physique, c’est ainsi
que Jâbarsâ et Jâbalqâ correspondent au monde terrestre de la matière
élémentaire, tandis que Hûrqalyâ correspond aux Cieux du monde physique.”
16. Ibid.,
p. 82.
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