Robert Charles Zaehner

[19] "[T]he plot to overthrow Mossadegh and give the oilfields back to the AIOC was in the hands of a British diplomat called Robin Zaehner, later professor of Eastern religions at Oxford.

[23][24][25] In the 1960s, MI5 counterintelligence officer Peter Wright questioned Zaehner about floating allegations that he had doubled as a spy for the Soviet Union, harming British intelligence operations in Iran and Albania during the period following World War II.

Radhakrishnan previously had been advancing a harmonizing viewpoint with regard to the study of comparative religions, and the academic chair had a subtext of being "founded to propagate a kind of universalism".

[47][48] As a professor Zaehner "had a great facility for writing, and an enormous appetite for work… [also] a talent for friendship, a deep affection for a number of particular close friends and an appreciation of human personality, especially for anything bizarre or eccentric".

If such profound dialogue rested on a false or a superficial "harmony and friendship" it would only foster hidden misunderstandings, Zaehner thought, which would ultimately result in a deepening mistrust.

This book provides an original discussions of an influential theological deviation from the Zoroastrian orthodoxy of ancient Persia's Achaemenid Empire, which was a stark, ethical dualism.

Then after the final triumph of the Good Religion the wise lord Orhmazd "elevates the whole material creation into the spiritual order, and there the perfection that each created thing has as it issues from the hand of God is restored to it" in the Frashkart or "Making Excellent".

[95] As to value-neutral criteria, Zaehner situated himself roughly as follows: "Any man with any convictions at all is liable to be influenced by them even when he tries to adopt an entirely objective approach; but let him recognize this from the outset and guard against it.

[123] Following Surendranath N. Dasgupta, Zaehner describes five different types of mysticism to be found in Indian tradition: "the sacrificial, the Upanishadic, the Yogic, the Buddhistic, and that of bhakti.

Instead, what Zaeher suggests is a profound difference between, e.g., the pantheistic vision of a nature mystic, admittedly pleasant and wholesome, and the personal union of a theist with the Divine lover of humankind.

"[162][163][164][165]Yet, when approaching this delicate subject, especially at the chaotic threshold to a New Age, the rapid changes afoot may confound sex talk and conflate opposites, which elicits diverse commentary.

[187] An endemic problem with such an analytic typology is the elusive nature of the conscious experience during the mystical state, its shifting linguistic descriptions and perspectives of subject/object, and the psychology of spiritual awareness itself.

[198] In part, about nature mysticism, Zaehner relies on William James,[199][200][201] Carl Jung,[202][203][204] a personal experience recorded by Martin Buber,[205][206][207] the descriptions of Marcel Proust and of Arthur Rimbaud, among others.

[213][214] A primary aims of Zaehner appeared to be making the distinction between a morally open experience found in nature mysticism as contrasted with the beatific vision of the theist.

Prakriti includes even the nature affecting personal qualities, such as the three gunas (modes), the buddhi (universal intellect), the mind (manas), the body, the ahamkara (the ego): all of which the purusa sheds.

[253][254] Zaehner's typology often focused for comparative articulation on some Hindu forms of mysticism, i.e., the Astika of the dualist Samkhya and of the non-dualist Vedanta, and Sankara versus Ramanuja distinctions.

Au contraire the Samkhya dualist understands that in his transcendent meditation he will begin to perceive his own emergent Self as an isolated purusa, in process of being purified from enmeshment in a nonetheless existing 'objective' prakrti.

Although his wife escapes slavery, the bitter loss in the dice game is only a step in the sequence of seemingly divinely-directed events that led to a disastrous war, involving enormous slaughter.

[292][293] In his 1971 book Evolution in Religion, Zaehner discusses Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), a modern Hindu spiritual teacher, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955), a French palaeontologist and Jesuit visionary.

"[302][303] According to Aurobindo, the aim of his new yoga was: "[A] change in consciousness radical and complete" of no less a jump in "spiritual evolution" than "what took place when a mentalised being first appeared in a vital and material animal world."

Yet Zaehner remained skeptical, at the risk of alienating those in the ecumenical movement whose longing for a festival of conciliation caused them to overlook the stubborn divergence inherent in the momentum.

Features in common included an authoritarian command structure (similar to the military), guided by a revered theory (or dogma), which was articulated in abstract principles and exemplars that could not be questioned.

Instead, what perplexed him were other aspects of Marx and Engels: the artful pitch able to inspire popular motivation, its putative visionary import and quasi-religious dimensions that could attract the interest of free peoples.

[343][344][345][346] Zaehner explored its explicitly materialist perspective, an ancient philosophical view further developed post-Hegel, then adopted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

[349][350][351] Zaehner writes that Friedrich Engels in his later life combined "Marxian materialism, Darwinian evolution, and eastern mysticism" in a philosophy that resembled religious teaching.

Writing in a philosophical mode, Engels utilized "a religion without a personal God and even without a Hegelian Absolute" in pursuit of fostering his nascent communist ideology.

[365][366] Zaehner, however, sought to find and to honor the beneficial and illuminating points in the grand materialist, humanistic vision of Karl Marx,[367] from among its otherwise disastrous teaching of calculated animosity, soulless violence, murderous class war, followed by an apocalyptic dictatorship.

[373][374] Engendered is the mystical body of Christ as an active symbol of transformation, Christianity as a soul collective, which carries "the promise of sanctification to the material world re-created by man.

[399][400][401] In his last three books, Drugs, Mysticism and Makebelieve (1972), Our Savage God (1974), and City within the Heart (1981) [posthumous], Zaehner turned to address issues in contemporary society, drawing on his studies of comparative religion.

[413][414] Zaehner warned of the misbehavior propagated by LSD advocate Timothy Leary,[415][416] the earlier satanism of Aleister Crowley,[417] and ultimately the criminal depravity of Charles Manson.