This is an exchange of letters between Franklin Wolff and Mael A. Melvin, who—like Wolff—left academia to seek Recognition. In the first letter in this file, Prof. Melvin introduces himself to Wolff: he has left his position as an associate professor of physics at Columbia University, and he, his wife, and their young son are currently caretakers at a theosophical camp on an island in Puget Sound. Prof. Melvin would like to visit Wolff over a three-month period the following January through March 1949.
Wolff’s response contains some commiserating words about leaving academia, the use of mathematical symbolism to express what is meant by Enlightenment, and the nature of scientific theories. Strangely, there is no mention of Prof. Melvin’s request to visit Wolff, which leads one to believe that this letter—which is based on a transcription—is incomplete as presented here. (Prof. Melvin and his wife would visit the following year, and in fact, stayed in the apartment above Wolff’s house.)
Prof. Melvin writes back thanking Wolff for his letter, and reaffirms that he hopes to see him early the next year. In the remainder of the letter, Dr. Melvin details how he is “happy in life, miserable out of God.” In a postscript he promises to get to some of the points that Wolff made in his last letter, and he shrugs off the article of his that Wolff has mentioned.
The next letter in this file is from Prof. Melvin, written shortly after the last. He notes that the two questions he expressed in the last letter, as well as the remainder of the letter, expressed “emotional states from which I seek emergence.” He then asks whether, from the point of view of the Awakened state, is there any value in distinguishing degrees of truth in the relative world? He also puts it another way: Why should an Awakened One choose to return to the illusory world and attempt to persuade others of the value of Recognition?
This letter is also based on a transcription, so it is not known how faithful it is to the original.
The last letter in this file is dated thirty-one years later than those above, and given that Dr. Melvin and Wolff remained lifelong friends, there can be little doubt that their correspondence included more letters than just those in this file. This last letter is a copy of a letter that Dr. Melvin sent to Swami Rama of the Himalayan Institute, which had promised to republish Wolff's books, Pathways Through to Space and The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object. Dr. Melvin expresses concern that this undertaking has not been fulfilled (and in fact, the Himalayan Institute did not publish these works—see Wolff’s correspondence with Swami Rama for more information). Dr. Melvin also includes with this letter an article that he has written titled “Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Starmaker or Yogic?”; he suggests that Wolff may be interested in reading it. (30 pages)
