[Vitvan’s] modern presentation of the ancient teaching… is couched in the language of the 20th century–the century when the sciences triumphed to make fantastic excursions into space. The “inner space” which they have neglected became his special province. And all that he wrote and taught over the long years was in elaboration of this, the structure-function-order of the Eternal Wisdom.
Many years ago I used the phrase, “the days of the giants are over.” Indeed they are. Vitvan was one of those remarkable giant-men who appear so rarely in world history and of whom there are so few that they become in due course of time milestones along the trail of our evolutionary struggles… No one previously has quite accomplished what Vitvan did. Most teachers have been partitive: expounding this or that phase of the ancient wisdom. Vitvan attempted to present an over-all view of the Gnosis couched in current scientific and philosophical language. He makes demands on his readers. His work does not permit a cursory overview from cover to cover.
He stands relatively alone. He was a gigantic figure in a desert inhabited only be a mere handful of human Joshua trees whose arms are uplifted to the Infinite and Eternal.
Israel Regardie, Studio City, California – Review for “Vitvan, an American Master”, Richard Satriano
Any firm foundation needs at least three sturdy legs to stand on. As Via Perennis’s stated aim is to provide a template for a Western spiritual practice and in keeping with the Occidental mentality grounded in empiricism and reason, three spiritual lights greatly influenced by or raised up in the modern-age Western milieu constitute a balanced and strong framework at its base for inspiration and guidance. Previously, we have considered the perspectives of Franklin Merrell-Wolff, raised and educated in North America, and Sri Aurobindo, who although of Indian birth, was raised and educated in Britain at the turn of the 20th century. He thus was able to blend the insights of Hindu and Eastern mysticism with a Western mindset educated in philosophy and the science of the time, including evolution. To these lights, we now add one Ralph DeBit, also known as “Vitvan” – a third proponent of the perennial wisdom.
Vitvan described his own awakening in one of his works:
“I liken it to lightning. The lightning strikes and it quite literally shakes you like an
Vitvan: An American Master, Richard Satriano
earthquake. You feel your ego in the grip of gigantic and titanic forces, of which, with all
of your understanding, you have never really had any conception, nor are you in any wise
prepared to handle. This is the cosmic process operating within your own being. It is not
something that has been ‘put on you,’ it comes from within yourself.
“It comes with a baptism of fire, for it is analogous to fire. In elementary school
physics it would be described as a completed arc. It is caused by the response of a
relatively lower octave of wave and frequency to much higher and more intense wave frequencies.
The latent power in the sacral pole of the axis or field is awakened, activated
and released. It leaps to the positive pole in the conarial center. A circuit is completed and
the individualized autonomous field is made incandescent, ablaze with Light.”
Vitvan’s work over 50 years was broad and varied. He came to maturity as a teacher at the dawn of the era of quantum physics and witnessed the birth of the atomic age and the revolutions of science leading to it. Vitvan realized that the winds were shifting, and the language of the new physics offered the perfect way to present a modern re-statement of the perennial wisdom. He began teaching in the old metaphysical symbols and allegories that proliferated through the ages in both Western esoteric circles and Eastern traditions. But in the late 1930s, dissatisfied with the adequacy of that approach for Western audiences, he stumbled on the general semantics work of Korzybski through the book Science and Sanity (1933). In reading this work, he realized that an overhaul of his entire philosophy and teaching method was called for and set out to re-envision his work and vocabulary in teaching the Gnostic wisdom. He thereby founded the School of the Natural Order in Baker, Nevada to promulgate his teachings. Vitvan’s thrust in teaching, then, was two-fold. He made an extensive effort to teach in a manner compatible with general semantics and to ensure his students mastered that approach. Additionally, he expressed the wisdom teachings from the perspective of non-technical field physics. This combination, making students more aware of their use of language and how it conditioned their perceptions and consciousness, and science as the foundation of his mystic philosophy, along with his own profound realization, makes Vitvan unique in the annals of Western gnosticism.
Vitvan’s aim in teaching Korzybski’s general semantics was to make the students aware of the human tendency to equate and confuse images and concepts, broken down into words with the reality they represented. This is done through the mental habit of abstracting, that is drawing a limited perceptual representation, whether an image or idea, from a much larger manifold of sensory or intuitive perceptions. This process of abstraction can be repeated to multiple levels, each level working on the level preceding it, further reducing and altering the sub-sample of “reality” (actually, only a model or representation of it) until finally we are left with nothing but words and thoughts. At this point, if the distinctions are not kept clear and awareness of one’s bearings and orientations towards concepts is not maintained, the map can be mistaken for the territory it supposedly represents. Furthermore, this process of abstraction, if unconsciously performed, is responsible for drawing the student into a private mental world, where one may exclusively live in a sort of hypnosis. This becomes the so-called “Veil of Maya”, a virtual mental world overlaid on the primary Reality that cuts the observer off from feeling and participating in the living Cosmos. Vitvan’s emphasis on using correct terminology and having referents for every term used in discussion short-circuits the mind’s tendency to make its own private mental world and mistake that “castle in the air” for the real thing where spiritual perception is concerned.
Vitvan’s presentation of the process of spiritual growth in the language of field physics and biology was unique at the time and remains rare in this age, though less so than in previous decades. He presented the cosmic kingdom as a living energy system and made every effort to discourage “thingifying”, i.e. the mental habit of making objects static, dead entities of matter and subsequently deprogramming perception to see it as such. He referred frequently to the findings of quantum physics and the underlying energy world when one attempted to subdivide matter beyond the atomic level and found only waves and indeterminate states. This, he said, was the Real World, and his teaching was predicated on re-conditioning his students to consistently see it this way. He spoke of frequency registration (we today might call this process the reception of sensory and spiritual impressions) and the necessity of receiving and entertaining those natively, without the intervention and mediation of mental interpretation. Through his own realization, he spoke of the human body in its highest spiritual aspect as an “Autonomous Field” and asserted it behaved much the same as other physical-biological fields in nature – having integrity within its own boundary, a relationship to the surrounding milieu, the possibility of visible and non-visible growth and maturation, a teleos or apparent purpose and direction in its development, etc.. Furthermore, he noted that some of the same principles found in the science of physics applied to the human being as well. Thus, he spoke of electromagnetic field behavior, lines or patterns of force (as in magnetic force fields), wave-forces and frequencies, resonance, energy pattern interferences, space-time in relationship to consciousness and its perception and the like. He likened the human being to a development in the life kingdoms that was a potential receptor of higher energy and thus needed to cultivate those latent abilities to actively cooperate with evolution’s direction and intent. His work was extensive, ambitious and impressive considering the age in which it was written. It was a first attempt, largely succeeding, to base and couch gnostic and mystic insights in the vernacular of science and thereby give Western students an opportunity to consider the teachings without the vague and foreign allegories and symbols of a purely disconnected (from the physical world) spirituality, formerly by and large Eastern in approach and character.
“This is a light-wave-frequency universe. Light and light alone is the essence of all
Vitvan, as quoted in “Vitvan: An American Master,” Richard Satriano
that is. The nature of light enables it to infold into energy and that energy to infold into
structural patterns, or configurational forms, which we label ‘matter’ and ‘living
organisms.’ Actually, both are ‘Living Matter.’ The difference between the two
designations is only relative to the degree of consciousness functioning therein. But no
matter, the configurated structures, whether appearing as mineral, plant, animal or man,
cannot be described as phenomenal. Which is to say, they cannot be considered as static
‘things,’ ‘objects,’ etc. They are dynamic energy systems in process. Modern physicists
have demonstrated that even the atom, once considered the cornerstone of material
substance, is itself composed of submicroscopic vortices of energy—a tiny contained
universe of light-wave frequencies. And so ad infinitum.
Logo of The School of the Natural Order
The serpent and eagle are ancient symbols. The serpent is representative of wisdom; its coiled form is suggestive of the latent power in the sacral center, known as the Kundalini in Sanskrit and the Christos in Greek. The eagle represents ‘spiritual vision’ and is supposedly the only creature that can look directly into the sun. The eagle with a serpent coiled around its neck has been the School’s logo since its inception as the School of the Sacred Science in the 1920’s; the eagle (‘spiritual’ vision) carrying the serpent (Christos power) to “great heights”, the ascent of the force to the crown center.
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The School of the Natural Order, Baker, Nevada
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