Biography of Charles Upton, Page 2
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As part of the course taken by many San Francisco poets in the ‘70’s, I had read Robert Graves and Carl Jung and Erich Neumann and Joseph Campbell. This was my first deep though oblique approach to metaphysics, via mythopoeia. Jenny then discovered, in the following order: the books of Jungian analyst and writer on fairytales Marie-louise Von Franz; those of Sufi popularizer and tale-collector Idries Shah; and finally the books of Frithjof Schuon and the other Traditionalists: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Martin Lings, Ananda Coomaraswamy, René Guénon, Titus Burckhardt…all of whom profoundly changed our lives.

In the early 80’s she and I were on the governing board of a small Presbyterian church we had joined to participate in the Sanctuary movement for Central American refugees; during this period I was more deeply immersed in the leftist peace movement tht I had ever been during the Vietman War. We produced and distributed a video, Through the Needle’s Eye, containing testimonies of refugees who had been tortured by U.S.-funded Salvadoran death squads.

This church experience was a turning-point for us in many ways. The action of the Holy Spirit was palpable in that group. The Spirit and our love for each other were very real, but there was no traditional form to contain them; a crash was inevitable. Nor was the mixture of serious political commitment (we were all up for 5 years in proson for conspiracy if the Feds decided to move) with Christian worshipvery conducive to long-term group stability.

After the crash we became peripherally involved in “hippy” Sufism through the “Sufi Dancing” founded by Sufi Sam, and explored the New Age. I was heavily influenced by the Seth material, and began a course of psychic exploration on a slightly “lighter” but no less dangerous plane that the heavy sorcery of Castaneda. This led me to “sublimate’ my political activism by becoming involved in various new Age international peace-prayer days, culminating in Harmonic Convergence, August 16 and 17, 1987. I designed, organized and led a ceremonial retreat for 50 persons on that very strange “holiday.”

That was both my debut and my swan-song as a New Age workshop leader, though I later organized a group-dreaming network called Gate of Horn, where members would incubate dreams on dark-of-the-moon nights to try and come up with solutions to global problems. With Gate of Horn I organized a “U.S.-Soviet Dream Bridge” with dreamers in Russia, which turned up at least one apparent instance of dream-telepathy, for what that’s worth.

The, I woke up. I woke up wondering what the hell I was up to, messing with mass psychic energies and zero tradition and zero guidance to back me up. It was the, at the end of the 80’s, when I realized that I could not “serve two masters,” i.e., Traditional metaphysics and esoterism, and new Age magic and occultism. This realization was greatly aided a few years later by revelations make to me by my best fiend at the time—who had been my partner and “older brother” through years of psychic and psychedelic exploration—about his interest in “Nazi spirituality” and possible acts of incest with his daughters. I saw in him the face of the corruption I myself was involved with due to my life as a “spiritual freelance.”

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And so, a year or so after Harmonic Convergence, my wife and I were initiated into a traditional Sufi order. As soon as I walked through the door of that sacred place, I stopped drinking, and never touched alcohol again. (Jenny has since moved on, first to another Sufi order more directly related to the Traditionalist School, and finally to Russian Orthodox Christianity, without in any way diminishing her esoteric understanding; quite the reverse, in fact.) During this period, Jenny “found” Dr. Huston Smith, who was speaking at a local church. He has remained a close and faithful friend ever since, and also introduced us to someone who was to become our closest spiritual friend and Traditionalist ally, Scott Whitaker. In 1988 I wrote a book of “versions” of poems by and legends about the Sufi saint, Rabi’a, who had also first been discovered by my wife. It was entitled Doorkeeper of the Heart, and was published by Threshold Books. Later on I spent three years, in the early 90’s, working with the homeless in Marin County, in a small two-person social service agency.

Traditionalism has given me a way to distance myself from the errors and excesses of the Left without polarizing with it. (My interest in it was undoubtedly prepared for by my more-or-less traditional education in Catholic high school, where looking at life and the world through the lens unchanging principles was the natural thing to do.) Unlike so many burned-out leftists of my generation, I didn’t move to the Right--I moved Up. You might say that I am now part of the diminutive Left-wing of the quite conservative Traditionalist world (which unfortunately includes, among many honorable, intelligent and even saintly men and women, a few Neo-Nazi “followers” of René Guenon, who have “adopted” him now that he is dead and can’t do anything about it--Guénon having been the furthest thing from an anti-Semitic Nazi as can be imagined, since he was firmly a-political, and eventually became a traditional Muslim and dressed as an Arab, spending the last years of his life in Egypt. I’m here to say that the Nazis can’t have him.) To speak of the Traditionalists in terms of Left and Right, however, is very misleading. Traditional metaphysics is not political, at least not legitimately so. It has to do with eternal Principles, from which (and only from which) stable moral and social values can be derived, which values in turn can only be effectively preserved by the great revealed religions. In some ways the “Right” is closer to these values, at least part of the time; in some ways the “Left” is closer--at least part of the time. But Traditionalism has nothing to do with Left-wing atheism or materialism, any more than with Right-wing desecration of the environment and hatred of the poor. Its criterion is the Human Form itself, as it rests eternally in the Mind of God, and the sacredness of Virgin Nature, not worshipped in itself but recognized as the many “signs” of God in this world, of Whom the “theomorphic” Human Form is the central representative. If Man is Shaktiman, Nature is his Shakti.

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I have been with my Sufis for 13 years now, during which time the grace of my Master (who shall remain nameless, not because he is a big secret, but because I don’t want whatever errors or bitterness my writing may contain to be attributed to him), has slowly purified my soul--God willing--from the psychic poisons I had fed it for so many years. At the same time, my reading and intellectual understanding of Traditional metaphysics were growing and deepening; one fruit of this development was Hammering Hot Iron: A Spiritual Critique of Bly’s Iron John, brought out by Quest Books in 1993. It was my first work of “metaphysics and social criticism” which, besides pointing out both the psychological wisdom and the dangerous Neo-Pagan tendencies of Bly’s version of the “Men’s Movement,” mapped out the trail I had taken from Jungian mythopoeia to Traditional metaphysics. (The book is out of print, but still available through me, the author.) Finally, my years of spiritual practice and reading challenged me to confront in writing the dangers and errors of the New Age to which I had given all those years of my life; thus The System of Antichrist: Truth and Falsehood in Postmodernism and the New Age was born. It began as a proposal from Huston Smith that we collaborate on a review of The Only Tradition by William Quinn, which I suddenly realized was an attack on the Traditionalist School from the Occultist/New Age direction.