Quest Magazine

VOLUME 104, NUMBER 4

CONTENTS

Parenting in the Twenty-First Century
Pyarvin Abbasova

The Stages of Spiritual Development
Barbara Herbert

Unbelief on the Path to Enlightenment
Clare Goldsberry

Levels of Awakening
Richard Smoley

The Ripening of the Soul: Thoughts on Aging
James L. Bull

Meeting the Needs of the Dying
Nelda Samarel

Peaceful Passages:Glimpses into the Life of a Hospice Nurse
Janet Wehr

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

Viewpoint: An Embodied Spirituality
Tim Boyd

President's Diary

Printed in the Spring 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Boyd, Tim, "President’s Diary" Quest 104.2 (Spring 2016): pg. 82

The end of September found me in New York City. On my way back to India, I had stopped off to have an early celebration of my mother’s ninety-seventh birthday. For a change I did not have any specific TS responsibilities awaiting me, but while in the city I took time to contact a couple of people doing some fascinating things in the Theosophical realm. Two days after I was scheduled to leave New York, the second and final stage of the academic conference entitled “Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy and the Arts: Texts and Contexts of Modern Enchantment” kicked off. This major conference, whose first session was held in Amsterdam in September 2013, attracted participation from an international group of academics.

Theosophical author and historian Michael Gomes was one of the people presenting. Over lunch we got a chance to catch up. Those who know Michael know that he is a quintessential New Yorker. Even though I was born and raised in New York, whenever I get together with Michael I feel like a tourist. Invariably he exposes me to some new place I didn’t know about, or to some longstanding establishment I have never entered. This meeting was no exception.

While there I also had a meeting with the organizer for this year’s Enchanted Modernities conference, Dr. Gauri Vishvanathan. She is a professor of English literature at Columbia University who is deeply interested in Theosophical texts such as the Mahatma Letters, not just as teachings but as literature. For her, it is not only the ideas and concepts that have value, but the way in which those ideas were expressed and what that says about the time and place in which they were written. We first met last year, strangely enough, at Adyar. Originally she is from Chennai and frequently goes home to visit over the Christmas holiday. Like many people in Chennai, she has a lifelong relationship with the TS in Adyar, complete with memories of the people and places going back to childhood. While in Chennai she tries to attend some of the talks at our convention. After I spoke last year she introduced herself and we exchanged contact information.

From New York it was on to Chennai and Adyar. As you probably know, TS members around the world refer to the international headquarters in India with one word — Adyar. To us it is the name of our spot on the globe. Outside of India it works fine. Back in the 1880s, when the TS set up shop there, we were the only thing in the area. Over time, as the city of Chennai has grown, the sleepy little undeveloped area that once was Adyar has become a busy crowded place. Today Adyar refers to an area within the city, shared by thousands of people and businesses. But for our purposes Adyar is still a good shorthand way of identifying our headquarters.

After I caught up on some of the latest happenings, it was off to Varanasi and the TS India Section’s national headquarters. (Just to make things clear: our international headquarters are in Adyar, near Chennai. The headquarters of the Indian Section, however, are in Varanasi, formerly Benares, some 858 miles north.) Almost a year earlier I had agreed to conduct a North Indian Study Camp on the Three Objects of the TS. In his introduction, the Indian Section president, Mr. S. Sundaram, pointed out that this was the first time that this fundamental subject had been addressed in one of the camps. Around one hundred members, predominantly from North India, but many from all over the country, attended. There was even one lady from Australia who would come to play a significant role in this visit.

The Study Camp lasted five days. It was energizing and quite interactive. During my time there, a large ceremony was held at which I inaugurated the newly constructed building for the Besant Theosophical High School on the campus of the Indian Section. A year earlier when I was visiting, they had just broken ground for the building, and they assured me that when I returned in 2015 I would see the new place.

At the end of the camp my wife, Lily, and I traveled to Rajghat to visit with Prof. P. Krishna and the folks at the Besant School — the second-oldest Krishnamurti school in India. One morning had been arranged for me to talk to, and with, the upper-level students. It was a lively and fascinating exchange. They are a sharp bunch wracked with the normal concerns about adapting to the fast approaching world of responsibilities and meaning outside of the school walls. I left feeling quite hopeful for the future.

During the Study Camp, Bronia, the lady from Australia, and I were talking. It turns out that she is an accomplished artist working in a number of mediums, including photography. In one brief conversation she mentioned the paintings that were used in the groundbreaking book Thought Forms by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, published in 1901. For more than a year I had been searching for the original paintings for this book all around the world. In 2014 I had been approached by the curator of a major exhibit in Istanbul, Turkey. This world-class exhibition was named, and focused on, Thought Forms. (A limited version of the show came to Chicago in January.) Its curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, wanted us to lend the paintings so that they could be featured. At first we looked in the Adyar archives with no luck. Next was the TS in America with the same result. By the time our search finished, in addition to India and Wheaton, we had looked in London, Australia, Los Angeles, and the Netherlands, all with no result. So when Bronia told me that the paintings were hanging in the library at the TS headquarters in Varanasi — one hundred feet from where I was sitting — I was dumbstruck. I mentioned it to Sundaram, and within an hour all of the paintings were taken down and brought to where they could be closely examined. It turned out that twenty-one of the original forty-five paintings were there. Time had taken a toll on some of them, but overall they are powerful images, a true heritage for Theosophy and the world.

From Varanasi it was back to Adyar for a short time before traveling to Mumbai (Bombay) for meetings at the Bombay Federation and the Blavatsky Lodge in Mumbai. While there, we stayed at the Theosophical Colony in Juhu — a Theosophical community in the north part of the city, situated right at the shoreline of the Arabian Sea. It is a beautiful, long-standing gated community comprising thirty or so houses, available only to members of the Theosophical Society.

The 2015 School of the Wisdom. Tim Boyd is at center, with Kim Dieu of the French Section on his left.

Back at Adyar we were working out the details for the upcoming convention. The first session of the School of the Wisdom had begun in November, but the anticipated monsoon rains had not appeared. Normally the monsoon season in Chennai begins around October 15 and ends by December 1. Some longtime Adyar residents were starting to voice concerns that this might be a lean year for rain, which would affect our wells and our ability to provide water for the convention. The rains started toward the end of November, intermittently at first, then without stop. Driving throughout the city became tricky as streets and neighborhoods started to flood. On December 1, at about 2 a.m., it started raining heavily. All that day the rains built in intensity until by day’s end we had twenty inches of rain! It was a disaster for the city. Whole neighborhoods were under water. Streets were impassable. Bridges crossing the Adyar River were submerged. The entire city was cut off from the outside world for almost three days. Trains, planes, cars could not get into or out of the city, and the electricity was gone.

Although the TS campus was not badly affected, we did get a good scare. When the tsunami hit in 2004, killing many fishermen and their families along Chennai’s coast, the TS experienced minor flooding, but none of the major buildings were affected. This time the river rose up to the foot of the headquarters building, which houses, among other things, our archives.

Although we did have minor flooding in the ground floors of some buildings, the greatest effects were felt by some of the workers who live off campus. Many of them lost everything. I discovered that the flooding was so severe that many of the people working at our campus were actually hungry. Their food and the means to prepare it had been lost to the waters. Within a day our Bhonjansala kitchen started providing a free meal each day for anyone who came. For over a month, more than one hundred workers ate there every day.

The end of December witnessed the opening of our annual international convention. Although the rains and flooding had severely cramped our preparation time, every department came together to bring off the entire affair like clockwork. This year the proceedings were again live streamed. Chris Bolger and Steve Schweitzer from the IT and AV department at the TSA came to Adyar and did all of the work. I had initially asked for the opening, closing, and main talks to go online. Chris and Steve decided to do every program — evening entertainment, all sessions of the Indian Section’s convention, panels, everything. It was long, demanding work that came out beautifully.

Also during the convention the plans for the future of the Adyar Estate were laid out in an evening program with Michiel Haas and me. A full description of the plans can be found at http://adyar-renovation.org.

Tim Boyd

Printed in the Spring 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Boyd, Tim, "Viewpoint:  Questions, Unfoldment, and Evolution" Quest 104.2 (Spring 2016): pg. 52-53

By Tim Boyd, President

Ask a difficult question and marvelous answers appear.
                                                                        —Rumi

In my late teens I moved to Chicago. It was supposed to be just a three-month visit, not the forty-plus years that it turned into. At the time I was a college student attending school on the East Coast. The move was not precipitated by my love of the city or its cultural or educational resources. As a nineteen-year-old, I found myself filled with some burning questions that I was feeling but could not articulate. Beneath the surface something was growing. For one thing, there was a frustrating sense that nothing within my academic environment seemed to touch these hidden questions. I did not come from a religious family, so I did not have the ready answers and unquestioning certainty that some of my religious acquaintances seemed to enjoy. Although outwardly everything was going well, inside of me it was becoming a difficult time. Looking back, I realize that, in an unconscious way, a subtle sense of desperation was taking root in me — despair that maybe I would never find the right questions to ask and that maybe if I did, no answer would be forthcoming.

On a visit to Chicago during a break from school, I had a chance encounter that changed everything. My cousin introduced me to a gentleman that he and a group of other young people called “the Old Man.” Over the course of two conversations — the first, interesting, but not profound; the second truly life changing for me — I found myself in the presence of someone who could clearly see and name those deep, partially acknowledged questions with which I struggled.

Fast forward one year and I, along with four or five other young people, was living in the Old Man’s house. I had come to Chicago to learn from this teacher, and, being a college student, I had a particular idea of what that meant. But the familiar structures of the university turned out to be alien to his method. In fact, in the beginning it was hard to determine exactly what was his method. There were no lectures or reading assignments, no term papers or study groups. Strangely for me, every moment could unexpectedly arise as a teaching moment. People would come to the house to see the Old Man with all kinds of personal issues, and suddenly what might have begun as a simple social visit transformed into a profound glimpse into some previously unknown corner of life. At different times we would all sit around, and the Old Man would be telling stories about events or people in his life. His stories and experiences seemed limitless, and the characters and situations that populated his tales at first seemed fantastic to me, like a modern-day fairy tale. As the years went by, I met many of the people featured in his stories and listened to them confirm the same details. Different ones among us might chime in with our own stories. He was always interested and frequently would ask questions. Often he would fill in the missing pieces of our stories, the parts we preferred to keep to ourselves out of pride, or shame, or embarrassment. His repeatedly unerring accuracy in describing these unshared experiences soon led to a sense of ease with whatever we carried inside. Good, bad, or ugly, when seen without judgment, it seemed to heal.

From time to time in the middle of one of his stories, he would turn to one of us and ask, “Do you understand?” When it was me he was asking, this could be an uncomfortable moment. While the story line he was sharing seemed straightforward enough, often there seemed to be something more, something elusive that was not fully apparent. For lack of a better answer I would say, “Yes, I get it,” which was mostly true. I could describe what it was that I saw, and as far as I could tell that was all there was. Sometimes he would respond, “No, you don’t get it.” I might insist that I did understand and give an explanation of why. He would patiently listen, then say, “No, you don’t understand, but you will.” That future possibility, “You will,” has proven to be perhaps his most profound prophecy.

As the years rolled by, the subjects of many of those story sessions faded into the background. Although not actually forgotten, they were far from active in my memory. Like a seed slowly growing beneath the earth, ten or twenty years later, for no apparent reason, or in response to some random incident, suddenly a completely new understanding would burst to the surface. It is no great achievement to predict that a teenager’s understanding will grow into something more mature, but the highly specific eruptions of those forgotten “lessons” have been exceptional. If the Ageless Wisdom teachings are correct, each of us has latent powers and potentials within us — some ripe in this moment, others ripening, still others sleeping seeds awaiting a far distant future to begin awakening. Like good farmers, the wise teachers see the fullness of the fruit dormant within the seed, and nurture it into life.

In the teachings of Theosophy the concept of spiritual evolution figures strongly. Much like its counterpart, Darwinian evolution, it describes a lengthy process of continual change. Classical evolutionary theory, such as the Darwinian model, presents a view of gradual change over vast periods of time. However, in our personal experience, in addition to gradual unfoldment over a lifetime, we also have moments of profound and sudden breakthroughs — the “aha” moments spoken of in popular contemporary spiritual talk. At more profound levels this idea finds expression in the Theosophical concept of initiation — those ritualized moments of sudden and permanent expansion of consciousness.

These inner experiences are mirrored in the world of outer phenomena. They have been observed and accounted for in the theoretical structures of biological evolution as well as of quantum mechanics. In biology an additional theory called punctuated equilibrium has been made to account for the observation in the fossil record of sudden, nongradual shifts in life forms. In quantum physics the classic quantum leap, whereby electrons circling the nucleus of an atom move suddenly to a new orbit, is another example of nature’s unwillingness to conform to our models.

Although the two processes of spiritual and Darwinian evolution are similar, they are also fundamentally different. The Darwinian model describes a linear and progressive development of living forms. Small changes over long periods of time result in life forms that are more suited to ever-changing environmental pressures. Examples of the process are the appearance of human beings from their supposed simian ancestors, which to this day awaits a “missing link” in the chain of development, and the development of whales from an ancestral land mammal, which the fossil record does demonstrate. In Darwinian evolution the engine of change is “survival of the fittest” through the process of natural selection — the idea that the pressures and demands of the natural environment favor some changes over others. At its root this evolutionary approach is biological and concerned solely with physical forms.

Spiritual evolution focuses on consciousness and its process of unfoldment. While physical evolutionary theory is linear, the evolution of consciousness is cyclic. In a sense it ends where it begins. Spirit “descends,” associating itself with all degrees of material existence — mineral, plant, animal, human — ultimately returning to a condition of undivided Oneness, but enriched by its association with matter. As Patanjali says in the Yoga Sutras, “the purpose of the coming together of Spirit (purusha) and Matter (prakriti) is the gaining of the awareness by Spirit of its true nature and the unfoldment of the powers inherent in Spirit and in Matter.” Hidden in Patanjali’s words is the understanding that the evolutionary process is solely related neither to form nor to consciousness. Both sides of the process are necessarily linked and continually influencing each other. The unfoldment of consciousness has two engines driving the process, described in The Secret Doctrine as (1) “natural impulse” and (2) “self-induced and self-devised efforts.”

The Ageless Wisdom makes the point that at a certain stage in our unfoldment, the balance shifts. No longer is consciousness strictly subject to the impulses of nature. The responsibility for further growth falls on us. In the words from the Three Truths in The Idyll of the White Lotus, each person becomes his or her own “Absolute Lawgiver. The dispenser of glory or gloom to himself. The decreer of his life, his reward, his punishment.” It is a liberating thought.

Printed in the Spring 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor's Desk" Quest 104.2 (Spring 2016): pg. 42

It’s always exciting when local news goes national.

In sedate Wheaton, Illinois, this happened in December and January, when Wheaton College suspended Professor Larycia Hawkins for making this statement on Facebook: “I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.” It didn’t help that Hawkins had started wearing the Muslim woman’s headscarf, known as a hijab, in solidarity with Muslims worldwide.

Wheaton College, one of the leading evangelical Christian colleges in the U.S., is best known as the alma mater of the late Billy Graham. Its administration did not agree with the claim that Christians and Muslims worship the same God. The fact that Pope Francis appears to feel the same way was not an argument in its favor at the rigidly Protestant institution.

The administration first suspended Hawkins and then initiated termination proceedings against her. On February 6, the college announced that it and Hawkins" have reached a confidential agreement under which they will part ways."

As an issue of intellectual freedom and (not least) of Hawkins’s job, this is a grave matter. As a theological issue, it is a bit harder to take seriously. You might well ask whether any two people worship the same God.

Nonetheless, the controversy highlights the excruciating difficulties that pit the West (which is in many ways Christian at its core, no matter how post-Christian it may look) against the Muslim world. The many similarities between Islam and Christianity don’t solve this problem. Indeed the history of religions illustrates this sad fact: two people can agree about ninety-nine things and come to blows over the one thing they disagree about.

Our intention in putting out an issue of Quest on Islam was, at the very least, to improve the general understanding of this faith. (Thanks to TS member Dave Christensen, by the way, for suggesting this idea to Tim Boyd.) Although our readers are, I believe, far more sophisticated and well-read on religious issues than most people are, there is still a great deal of ignorance about Islam in the U.S.

Unfortunately there are many basic facts about the subject that we don’t have the space to explain in this issue. It becomes that much more daunting if you want to offer any historical perspective on current events. For example, why are the Israelis and Palestinians fighting so bitterly? Partly because a hundred years ago, the British promised the same piece of land to two completely different groups of people.

This was easy to do at the time, because World War I was raging, and the Ottoman empire (the ancestor of today’s Turkey) ruled Palestine. The Ottomans sided with Germany, so they were Britain’s enemies. While the war was on and it was by no means clear who would win, the British were quite happy to make any number of promises to help their cause. T.E. Lawrence, best known as Lawrence of Arabia, promised the land to the Arabs if they would rise up against the Turks. At about the same time, in 1917, the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, issued the Balfour Declaration. It said in part, “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Exactly how this was all to be done was never quite settled. It still isn’t.

To say that the Middle Eastern problem is all the fault of the British is not my intention. The meddling of many other powers, including of course the U.S., must be taken into account, not to mention good old human ill will. My point is simpler: no matter whose side you’re on, it’s easy to become outraged at the Middle East situation without having the faintest idea of what is going on or why. As for me, I only know one thing certainly and infallibly about it: I have absolutely no idea of what should be done there. I defy you to prove me wrong.

Probably the most useful thing to remember in all this is that Muslims number around 1.6 billion worldwide (an estimate from 2010). That means that just about anything you could say about Islam and Muslims will be partly true and partly false.

A look at this issue proves my point. In it you will encounter Robert Frager’s sophisticated transpersonal Sufism, along with a portrait of the head of an Afghani Sufi order who dictates the lengths of his followers’ beards. You will find out about S.H. Nasr, the Iranian scholar who has influenced Prince Charles, and read Pyarvin Abbasova’s “Women in the Shadows.” Her memoir of growing up as a Muslim woman in Azerbaijan tells us that the tradition of hanging out bloody sheets on the wedding night — to prove that the bride is a virgin — remains alive in many parts of the world.

Thus, among 1.6 billion Muslims, you will find every kind of person: ecstatic saints and murderous fanatics; wild tribesmen and thoughtful, civilized professionals. Certainly the majority of Muslims are ordinary people, some corrupt, some kind and decent, who are making their way as best they can along the path of life, for which the roadmaps all end up seeming incomplete and defective.

I’m reminded of that line from the Roman playwright Terence: Homo sum; humani nil humanum alienum a me puto: “I am human; I regard nothing that is human as alien to me.”

Richard Smoley