I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.

Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run away… The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings.  The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them.