This file contains the Wolff’s correspondence with Bruce Raden, a student of Wolff from Phoenix, Ariz. Their exchange of letters begins in March 1970, with Mr. Raden writing to thank Wolff for his (recorded) reading of the first three cantos of Aurobindo’s epic poem, Savitri; he also inquires whether Wolff will have the time to record the remainder of the poem. Mr. Raden then reports on the production of a mimeographed version of The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object, asking Wolff if there are any changes we would like to make to his manuscript, and confirming some details about the distribution of the final product. Wolff responds and thanks Mr. Raden for getting the ball rolling on these efforts; Wolff then notes that he has recorded an “Epilogue” for the book, and that he will bring it to Phoenix for Mr. Raden’s review, along with a number of diagrams that he believes are necessary for understanding the second chapter in Part IV of the book. Wolff goes on to explain that he would have preferred to have Part III placed before Part II, but he understands that the pagination is already complete; accordingly, he suggests that a note be included in the book that the author suggests Part III be read before Part II. In this regard, Wolff makes the following remarks:
There [was] a struggle between the systematizing tendency of the speculative mind and the spontaneity of the transcriptive mind in the first part of the second chapter on Idealism, which became ironed out later. This is not satisfactory writing, but I finally left it with an explanatory footnote, which should be on the first page of the chapter, and not like the others at the end. This might even be of some interest from the psychological point of view as revealing something of the psychical process in this kind of writing. Ordinary writing is essentially simple. You just organize your material with the intellect and put it down. You know what that you are going to be able to do it and all it takes is work. But in the present kind of writing the “gods” take over part of the time and the intellect at other times and, sometimes, they get together. But you can’t order the “gods.”
The next two letters are from Mr. Raden to Wolff, the first providing some “feedback” on the book above; the second contains a number of questions for Wolff. Wolff responds to these questions in the audio recording titled “Introceptual Consciousness and the Collective Unconscious,” dated 23 June 1970.
The next letter is from Gertrude Wolff asking Mr. Raden if we would be willing to work with Alix Taylor on launching a new a periodical dedicated to the “Wisdom Religion.” Included with this letter is a memo in which Mrs. Wolff “bequeaths” the publication of The Seeker, which was a quarterly production that replaced the Bulletin of the Assembly of Man, to those “interested, willing, and capable” of this endeavor. In another letter, Mr. Raden reports that he has dreamed that Wolff was planning to leave the physical plane, and he requests that Wolff hold off on this, as Wolff will be needed to respond to criticisms of his books now that they are to be circulated more widely. This is a reference to the fact that Pathways Through to Space and The Philosophy of Consciousness Without an Object had been recently picked up by Julian Press, which was strongly encouraged by John Lilly to publish these works.
After a brief note from Mrs. Wolff, there is an unsigned note in this file from an individual who was living with the Wolff family. In this letter to Mr. Raden, this individual observes that Wolff operates on “three levels”: there is “the child-like Franklin,” who enjoys watching television, laughing at old episodes of Gunsmoke; there is the “Mephisto-Franklin,” with a cold, disciplined intellect that disdains “all things petty and worldly”; and then there is the “Maha-Shankara-Franklin,” which radiates the “Central-Being.” After another brief note from Gertrude thanking Mr. Raden and his wife Pam for reading some books on tape, there is a letter that accompanied the delivery of fifteen transcriptions of Wolff’s audio recordings made by Mr. Raden. It should be noted that almost all of the audio recordings transcribed on this website have produced by Mr. Raden, and that for this, the sangha is profoundly grateful.
At the end of this file is an exchange of letters between Mr. Raden and Robert Johnson, a Jungian analyst who was a great help to Wolff after the death of his wife, Gertrude. Mr. Raden informs Dr. Johnson of Wolff’s July 1978 heart attack and relates some details of his visit to Wolff shortly thereafter—in particular, what Wolff told him about the choices laid out in Dr. Johnson’s interpretation of Wolff’s “major dreams” (see the correspondence between Wolf and Dr. Johnson below). Dr. Johnson’s response follows. Also here are some of Mr. Raden’s musings on Wagner’s operas Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal, which he had included with his letter to Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson states that these notes “touched me deeply.”
