This is the strangest book. Published by George Allen & Unwin in 1979, it opens with this startling line: “What do you want to ask?” said my Angel one evening.(1) The foreword explains only that he was a pupil of Nicoll, who had learnt the system from Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, that he realised he had to pay for consciousness, and to “establish a communication with a superior level of intelligence from which a wide range of new ideas began to be received.”

So, we assume that what he describes as “a voice beyond myself” came as a result of his efforts. However, we find ourselves in the middle of the process, with Reyner conversing with his “Angel” in a prolix manner I find not just odd, but a little disquieting: like a conversation with anyone you might care to name.

Reyner says that in fact the communication is “wordless,” but yet he has to use words. (3) Fair enough, but I am disquieted by the number and casualness of the conversation. So what is going on? The “Angel” is “an intermediary through whom communication is possible with higher levels of consciousness.” (3) Only then are we told that one day he heard a voice say “Find the name of your angel.” (4) We are not told much more about this, let alone what he was engaged in which may have contributed to this. If, however, this communication came as the result of a method, I do rather think there must be some story – and I conjecture that would be of some interest; although of course I cannot be sure.

I have devoted a number of posts to Reyner’s work, and I believe that he produced an extraordinary body of work. But even the insights in this particular book, strike me as something one could discover with the ordinary mind, e.g. that we receive so few impressions because if we received them all, we would be overwhelmed. (7-8) But is it so simple as that? I think we can receive more than we do now, without being swamped. How can we explore this? That is what is not covered.

Reyner covers intuition (“the immediate apprehension by the mind without reasoning”) (9), saying that by intuition we can have knowledge of matters unbound by time and space, and even communicate with others. (11)

Life, he says, is “a state of ceaseless change and functional activity peculiar to organised matter.” (14) But, he adds, life has been created by “a higher level for some purpose which would not be apparent to the ordinary intellect …” (14) He is, at this point, rephrasing the Gurdjieff ideas. He starts to become more individual when he argues that our sense of time is educated into us. (24) But I am not sure that we are bound to agree that the “Astral realm … must be envisaged as a timless region …” (25) Why? Time might be different, or it might not be, but why should we accept Reyner’s say so?