The Legacy of Glyn

“And the King said to his people:

Keep to the edge of the melting ice and follow the setting sun”.

For me, these words evoke something of the lineage and power of the man we knew as Glyn. He said them in the very early days of gathering a body of people (always relatively few in numbers) with whom to develop a re-formulation of ancient teaching The words convey a feeling both prophetic and apocalyptic, looking backward to a previous age and forward to the circle of the future. Continuing towards the setting sun will bring you around to its rising, and the task of keeping to an edge and following a direction demands constant alertness. The great ice-sheets of the past are melting.

When I first met Glyn in the 70’s I was not looking for a teacher or anything manifestly esoteric. If I had been seeking a teacher, it wouldn’t have been anything like Glyn, with his penetrating abstract mind and gruff, no-nonsense manner. Esoterically speaking, I was virgin territory with no pre-conceived ideas about the workings of the spiritual universe. I was raised in a sensible devout Catholicity, and had a framework of ideas about God which I had quietly set aside on coming of age, because it simply didn’t meet (at that time) the inarticulate sense of ‘God’ which had always nestled inside me.

However, Glyn met it fair and square, not so much in anything he said, but through his presence. In his presence, ‘it’ was present: a sense of the numinous, of vastness, of intelligence and of creative love. That is the best formulation I can offer. It was not him; he called it into being and I recognised something which was also of me. And this direct evoking of individual identity was maintained through all the years of working with many people because he resolutely and definitively refused to accept a mantle of guru, teacher, enlightened man, saint, magus or any other role we would have liked to put upon him to secure our personal place in his universe. We never knew what to call him or how to describe him, which is a trifle awkward if you’re trying to set up some kind of esoteric teaching school. No wonder Saros, the organisation he inspired for training and development of theory, never acquired a significant public face: its magnetic centre had no outlines!

He always said that his task was for 400 years in the future. It was to re-formulate the Kabbalah by clarifying ‘first principles’ (the root-principles of any metaphysic) , and to apply the same method to the superstitious accretions and outgrowths which often obscure essential principle in esoteric traditions like magic and astrology which he had studied in his early years. He joined the Study Society for a few years, and the influence of Gurdjieff was instrumental in stripping unnecessary mystique. Over subsequent years, this determination to re-enliven the essentials of spiritual and esoteric practice set him apart from his contemporaries, but Glyn’s work has had a pervasive though largely hidden influence for the last fifty years in the work of others. More directly, his ever-active organising intellect and psychological acuity gave rise to a detailed corpus of theory which had its origin in the ancient Jewish text of Sepher Yetzirah which he translated with the help of his Israeli wife. Among the many activities affiliated to Saros, which was created under his direction in the late 1970s, was a detailed meditation system and practical philosophical and esoteric training, which rigorously adhered to first principles. In later years, under the name Sareoso, Glyn produced an astonishing compilation of original metaphysical theory. The extra-challenging feature of Sareoso is that he labelled it all in Basque, a language he chose as an obscuring veil because it is a linguistic isolate with no affiliations to any other languages, and with roots unknown and ancient.

Any complex and comprehensive metaphysic (or theology,) is essentially a reminding system, an archive available for individuals to claim the knowledge held in trust within the words and symbols. The knowledge is living, so while Glyn’s detailed diagrams and expansion of abstract logic open new insight into the psychology of human being and our place in the universe, it was, and is, scaffolding to a mystery. What keeps the mystery alive from age to age, deathless amid endless dying and the crumbling of civilizations, has been called Oral Tradition.

Traditions and lineages are like threads visible in different religious frameworks, and appearing like ‘human lines of force’, which are traceable in texts and artefacts from early eras of human history, and potentially are still able to carry a living transmission. The ‘Tree of Life’ which is now most associated with the Kabbalah and Judaism, appeared first in ancient Sumer and Assyria, no doubt with a teaching to match the Age. Because the river of life and knowledge is ever flowing and changing (unlike ice), Glyn’s new ‘scaffolding’ of principle may serve both to hold and further transmission into the future.

In Glyn’s presence, I could sense these things even before I had the scholarship or experience to articulate them. For us now, facing the current turbulence of ideologies and confused emotion, the scale of which perhaps even Glyn could not have foreseen, it is essential to keep to the edge as instructed. Glyn had a keen and objective eye on the follies of humankind, and could wryly see which way currents were flowing. But he rarely talked politics or made social comment, perhaps having absorbed the lesson of the novel Grey Eminence by Aldous Huxley, which he recommended as a salutary study of cause and consequence.

"The life of Father Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu's aide, was a shocking paradox. After spending his days directing operations on the battlefield, Father Joseph would pass the night in prayer, or in composing spiritual guidance for the nuns in his care. He was an aspirant to sainthood and a practising mystic, yet his ruthless exercise of power succeeded in prolonging the unspeakable horrors of the Thirty Years' War. In his masterful biography, Huxley explores how an intensely religious man could lead such a life and how he reconciled the seemingly opposing moral systems of religion and politics." (Amazon summary)

Although Glyn was not a product of the normal channels of higher education, he seemed to know everything, and stimulated lively and expansive discussion among the intellectuals he attracted once he decided to embark on his task of gathering people via contacts at Cambridge and Oxford. Most of those who were drawn to him then, remained in his unique and powerful field until he decided to join the ancestors in 2007. The point of Glyn was not fame or followers, it was “Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts....” (Psalm 42). And from this recognition, I knew the obligation was on me as an individual to investigate where the call was coming from, to identify it in myself, to give it shape and form and to perpetuate it where possible.

What I have sketched is not an easy path:

"The deep sadness of ‘the people’ as they leave their king. No choice but to follow his instruction and travel into the everlasting unknown. Descendants of the ‘people’ seek ways of returning to their place around the king. " (CS)

To a king, or in service to a king? (Perhaps ‘the King on the Mountain’,. This was a mythic reference he would drop in from time to time without explanation).

To me and my companions in the Work he was a Herald, an announcer, a Hermes leading into the future, and I do not expect to look upon his like again.