The Franklin Merrell-Wolff Fellowship

At the time he wrote this letter, Wolff was lecturing on behalf of the Benares League under the pseudonym “Yogagñani.” (For more on this period of Wolff’s life—as well an explanation of the reference to “keys” in the last question below—see the Benares League tab under “Organizations and Group Work” in the Wolff Archive.)

The letter contains Wolff’s responses to the following eight questions, which had been posed by Laura Felver, one of Wolff’s students in Chicago:

1. If all is the Absolute and the Absolute is all, and we proceed from the Absolute and our goal is union with the Absolute, why was it necessary for us to go forth as human atoms to struggle for existence and suffer?
2. How could the Absolute separate itself and why would it send part of itself forth to struggle for existence and suffer?
3. What are the seven principles of man, what are they made up of and what is their function and why?   
4. What is Soul? What is Ego? What is Spirit?
5. Do you know of any book or dictionary which gives Sanskrit terms and what they mean with the proper pronunciation of the terms?
6. If we are all One WHY the difference in us? Why are some good and some bad? Why if we are all one in essence and the thing we are working for is to realize union with all, why the necessity of physical bodies since they are the thing which separates us from this unity or rather from the realization of this unity? If we are already one in essence why all this fight, struggle, pain and unhappiness which we go through in physical bodies?
7. Who was the greatest, Buddha or Christ?
8. Faith in relation to the keys.

(7 pages)