Quest Magazine

Printed in the Fall 2016issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Bull, James L., "Levels of Awakening" Quest 104.4 (Fall 2016): pg. 112-113

By James L. Bull

For many years I believed that retirement was only a sad commentary on the unpleasantness of most work. After all, if work is an unpleasant necessity and to be avoided, as it is for many, then why not seek relief at every opportunity? Weekends are to the work week as vacation is to the year, as retirement is to a life’s work. The assumption is that leisure is what’s enjoyable and work is the price one pays to get it. The solution, of course, is to have not just a job but a satisfying life’s work, thereby blurring the distinction between work and nonwork.

Now in my early eighties, I’m no longer working, but I’ve found that being active as a volunteer satisfies needs that were there all along. Energy and output may not decline much, but there may be a qualitative shift that comes with age. On a deep level a shift may occur which sends reverberations to the surface that influence the course of my life. Parallel to the natural physical changes and declines, there may be a spiritual shift which is its own developmental stage, a period of reflection and deepening.

Of this the commercial world has no clue. From that point of view, aging is some sort of malady. A recent magazine cover announces that there is a “cure for aging.” Is aging a disease? Another magazine reports on an “anti-aging’’ medication. Is aging an adversary, to be fought? Of course, it is fought in countless ways, from face lifts to sexual potency enhancers. This oppositional attitude parallels other struggles against natural phenomena to be conquered or overcome, such as the wilderness. But aging, if engaged consciously and without a disabling fear of death, may open the door to a deepening of appreciation and an enhanced capacity for reflection, made possible by having more of life to remember.

To enjoy these benefits, we first need to loosen our grip on some of the skills that served us so well earlier, including rationality, linear thinking, necessity, and precision—all those left-brain qualities. Intuitive skills may now be more important, and with this softening process, we may discover vulnerability within us. The strength required to be vulnerable is more appropriate to age, just as the strength to be tough serves the young and ambitious. The deeper, more appreciative qualities that may now emerge are not as well expressed with words; when words are used, poetry probably works best.

None of this means that we leave the world of necessity and responsibility. We still pay the bills and keep the car running. But we may be able to choose more consciously between the world of adoration and the world of necessity. I was reminded of this distinction on a recent camping trip. While fixing dinner, I paused to appreciate—and to praise and pray in thanksgiving for—the setting sun and the clouds illuminated by it. But soon I was pulled back to the ‘‘necessities”—checking a pot, adding more wood to the fire.

I’m not suggesting that the perspective of necessity is any less important than that of appreciation; they are complementary. They are the two modes of attention that we carry through this life. They are the content and context of life. Because we are normally only aware of the content of our daily lives, we may naturally overlook the context in which it all takes place. Earlier in life, it may not have been useful to spend as much time in reflection. Now we can allow ourselves to drop down, away from the necessary and toward the essential, closer to the soul. There, there may be moments of nonduality, of recognition: not everything is content; there is a surrounding meaning, or context, in which all takes place. Life has meaning; we are not here by accident; there are no accidents.

In order to give ourselves to the surrender of awe and wonder, we need to be well-grounded in the first place. To be insufficiently grounded in this life, and in our bodies, is unhealthy. I have often had the impression that some mentally ill persons are not well-grounded in their bodies—not fully located here. But once we are fully grounded —and reasonably secure —we may allow ourselves a reverential pause. How absolutely natural that we should become completely absorbed in the details of this life! We are provided with the combination of extraordinary sensory equipment and equally rich experiential potential—and a world to match. We are placed in a world of such richness, how could we not been enraptured by it all—longing, sadness, taste, laughter, beauty! It can be thought of as a sort of divine joke: we are dropped into a life so inviting that we become caught up entirely, Spirit chuckling all the while. Perhaps it is useful for us not to see this life in its full context while we are living it. This way, we are allowed to focus on our present situation without distraction.

Nevertheless, as I grow older I get more of a sense of hidden meanings. Our inner task is to stay aware, to sense the context, to be in touch with who we really are and who we were all along.

Otherwise, we might be swept away and lose the self.

Kierkegaard understood the tragedy of those who live their lives “outside of themselves.” In Either/Or he writes:

And this is the pitiful thing to one who contemplates human life, that so many live on in a quiet state of perdition; they outlive themselves, not in the sense that the content of life is successively unfolding and now is possessed in this expanded state, but they live their lives, as it were, outside of themselves, they vanish like shadows, their immortal soul is blown away.

The context of this life may be far more subtle than the immediate content; it is usually sensed intuitively; it may seem elusive and more a matter of revelation than verification. It is everything we sense that surrounds this life and makes it possible, the aura of meaning and mystery which encloses all we know. Although there are effective methods for tapping into this realm, such as meditation and prayer, the maxim seems to apply that “this thing we tell of can never be found by seeking, yet only seekers find it.”

In a recent workshop, poet Robert Bly referred to a poem by Kabir that reads in part:

We sense that there is some sort of spirit that loves
       birds and animals and the ants—
perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you
       n your mother’ s womb.
Is it logical you would be walking around entirely 
       orphaned now?

In this workshop, Bly used the poem as a point of departure to ask the question, “What did you know before you were born?” I wrote: ·

What we knew before we were born is like one of Rilke’s sealed letters, an epistle we carry through life in our bodies. Perhaps we dare to peek, tearing back the envelope at one comer, seeing a word or two. Rarely would we read the whole thing. Perhaps when we are old, the paper yellowed and brittle, we may find the courage to open, to read, to weep.

What could it be that I carried with me always, but never knew? What I knew before I was born might literally be whatever I learned in my mother’s womb, plus whatever I brought to this life before that. But in a larger, more metaphorical sense, this question asks that I pause to consider the context of this life. As I grow older, my birth and death (the two most important events of my life) may begin to come together. (As Shakespeare wrote, “This little life is rounded with a sleep.’’) If there is a part of me that transcends my birth and death—call it the soul—I can stay in touch with it along the way.

The idea that we brought something with us to this life is not a new one. It is described excellently by James Hillman, who asserts, “Each person enters the world called.” He continues,

The soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we were born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul-companion, the daimon, guides us here; in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe that we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern. And therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.

Clearly Hillman believes we were loved before we were born:

Despite this invisible caring, we prefer to imagine ourselves thrown naked into the world, utterly vulnerable and fundamentally alone. It is easier to accept the story of heroic self-made development than the story that you may well be loved by this guiding providence, that you are needed for what you bring, and that you are sometimes fortuitously helped by it in situations of distress.

We are born into situations and families that give us opportunities to work out issues that require our attention. This may not be easy: the son of the macho father goes on to become a ballet dancer; the maternally overprotected child finds assertiveness and learns to be bold. So there may be a great deal, on a deep level, that we knew before we were born. Our lives take place on the surface of a very deep sea. As I grow older, I sense that all is not forgotten. The accidents of my life dissolve into purposes; the purposes become harder to explain, and explanation matters less and less.

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James L. Bull, Ph.D., first learned about Theosophy from his mother, Evelyn Bull, who had a number of articles and poems published in The American Theosophist. Now a retired psychologist, he remains active as a hospice volunteer.

 

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Printed in the Fall 2016  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "Levels of Awakening" Quest 104.4 (Fall 2016): pg. 107-111

By Richard Smoley

It is a more or less universal teaching that there are levels of awakening. And there are countless ways of characterizing these levels. One relatively fresh way of doing so may be through the lens of identification. With whom, or what, do we identify? What relation do we have to a larger whole, and how do we experience it?

We can begin by assuming that the wider the perspective an individual has, the more mature, and therefore the more awake, she is. Consider the accompanying diagram, which roughly depicts the stages of human cognitive growth. The child begins by becoming aware of self, then of family, community, nation, the whole of humanity, and possibly even all sentient life.

The schema here is crude and somewhat arbitrary. There are countless other collectivities that someone may identify with: for many children, the first community they are aware of is school. Nor are these categories universal; other cultures may break them down in different ways. In some primitive tribes, members are classed by an animal totem: an individual is of the deer people, the turtle people, and so on. Among the Chippewa Indians of the American Midwest and Canada, for example:

 

 

All members with the same totem regarded themselves as related even though of different villages or different tribes . . . When two strangers met and found themselves to be of the same totem they immediately began to trace their genealogy . . . and the one became the cousin, the uncle, or the grandfather of the two, although the grandfather might often be the younger of the two. (Lévi-Strauss, 167)

The bond of the totem is so strong that if a man witnesses a quarrel, he will immediately side with the individual with his own totem, even if the other person is a close relative of his.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss says that this identification with a totem animal “sometimes goes beyond the limits of humanity in a biological, and no longer a merely sociological, sense” (ibid.). Certain Australian aborigines with a dog totem, for example, will describe dogs as “sons” and “brothers”—meaning that members may consider them as more a part of their family than other humans.

In more developed cultures, a common religion can create a sense of unity beyond national or ethnic borders. One famous case was that of civil rights leader Malcolm X. Although he had been a prominent leader of the Black Muslim movement—which teaches that the white man is evil—he experienced a change of heart in 1964 on the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca. He described his experience at the Frankfurt airport, waiting for a plane with other pilgrims: “Throngs of people, obviously Muslims from everywhere, bound for the pilgrimage, were hugging and embracing. They were of all complexions, the whole atmosphere was of warmth and friendliness. The feeling hit me that there really wasn’t any color problem here. The effect was as though I had just stepped out of a prison.”

On the other hand, such perceived bonds sometimes generate confusion. When I was traveling in Egypt with my then-girlfriend in 1979, we hired a guide named Mr. Hanna to show us around the sites of Luxor. Mr. Hanna was a Coptic Christian and was much friendlier toward us than were the Muslim Egyptians. He assumed that, being from the West, we were Christians too. But my girlfriend, whose parents were atheists, was not a Christian and had never been baptized. Mr. Hanna could not understand this at all.

We might assume that this journey outward from the circle of self to the circle of universality will proceed normally and naturally. Such is not always the case. The progression can be arrested at any point.

The problem is easiest to see from extreme examples, such as sociopaths. There are not many sociopaths, but there are certainly some. Figures from the Web put them at between 1 and 3 percent of the population. Sociopaths never proceed beyond the inmost circle of the self. They are often defined as people without a conscience. They are incapable of sympathy or empathy. Nor do they feel affection.

The sociopath has no sense of connection with other people. Emotionally, he is completely isolated from everyone else. He lives for himself alone. And he does not mind. Other people are only things to be used instrumentally.

It is grim to consider that a large number of the most powerful people in the world are very likely sociopaths.

We generally see the sociopath as an individual, an isolated case, the victim of some early trauma or damage. But this progression outward can be arrested at other stages as well, and the process may go beyond the individual to the collective.

Consider the family in Italian society. Author Luigi Barzini writes in his insightful book The Italians:

The Italian family is a stronghold in a hostile land: within its walls and among its members, the individual finds consolation, help, advice, provisions, loans, weapons, allies and accomplices to aid him in his pursuits . . . Scholars have always recognized the Italian family as the only fundamental institution in the country . . . In fact, the law, the State, and society function only if they do not directly interfere with the family’s supreme interests . . .

There were times in [Italy’s] past, and even in recent, almost contemporary history, when the State was at its lowest and weakest, impoverished and defeated, and yet the inhabitants were feverishly active, happy, and prosperous. (Barzini, 190)

Barzini goes on to say that in Italy, the family has been a “private lifeboat in the stormy seas of anarchy.”

All well and good, but there is a flip side to this situation. The family has been reinforced to the detriment of a larger social order:

Anarchy in Italy is not simply a way of life, a spontaneous condition of society, a natural development: it is also the deliberate product of man’s will, the fruit of his own choice; it has been assiduously cultivated and strengthened down the centuries. The strength of the family, therefore, is not only the bulwark against disorder, but, at the same time, one of its principal causes. (Barzini, 191)

Italy, fragmented for 1400 years into many little states, ruled variously by Vikings, Arabs, Spaniards, the French, the Austrians, and the Holy See, was often the plaything of larger powers. Small wonder, then, that the Italians took refuge behind the walls of their families. But at the same time the family kept them from going beyond the bounds of this refuge. In terms of the diagram, Italians collectively did not go past the second circle. Barzini is asking whether they did so because of the political storms that were always outside these walls, or whether the storms were partly caused by this isolation.

The United States presents the opposite case. The rule of law is strong here, public institutions are accountable and responsible (if imperfectly so), and there is a great sense of national identity and pride, as we see from the countless flags that are displayed at every conceivable location. The family, by contrast, is weak. To some extent this has been a self-selecting process. The vast majority of Americans either came here to get away from someplace else or are descended from people who did. Thus the population is naturally going to be skewed toward the mobile, the restless, the drifters. Americans are always on the move, and they have always been. In a nation like this, the family is comparatively insignificant, extolled between the last Thursday of November and the first day of January, but otherwise very much in the background.

Consequently, loneliness and isolation are central issues in our culture. Practically every major work of American literature is about this theme, whether you’re talking about crazy Ahab on the Pequod, Huck Finn on his raft down the Mississippi, or Jay Gatsby, friendless in his ostentatious mansion. Even when the family is in the foreground—as with the tormented Compsons in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury—it seems only to reinforce its members’ sense of isolation.

So some cast about almost arbitrarily for something greater to be part of. You live in a certain city, and that city has a sports team, so you feel part of the community by being a fan of the team.

Sports fandom is mostly innocent. People get pleasure out of watching sports, and the thrill of having your team win usually balances out the disappointment of having it lose. Even when the team doesn’t win very often, fans can commiserate about how bad it is.

Of course there is nothing wrong with being a sports fan. But it often seems as if being a fan requires not only loving your own team, but hating the rival team. Often the second part is more fun than the first.

Sometimes it can get out of hand. In the Byzantine Empire—the eastern half of the Roman Empire that lasted for a thousand years after the fall of Rome itself—chariot racing was popular. There were two teams, the blues and the greens. The fans of these teams started to band together, and they started to fight. There were riots. There were even points at which the factions nearly brought the empire down.

So you can see how this sense of belonging to something greater than yourself can turn destructive. The Byzantine chariot factions are a comparatively rare example of this happening with sports fans. (Although as I write this in June 2016, the headlines are full of tales of brawls between English and Russian soccer fans in the European championship matches.) You can find many other examples with political parties, sects, religions, nations, and so on. Human history is largely the history of such conflicts.

In these instances the sense of these widening concentric circles—family, society, humanity—comes to a halt. And it can be halted at any point. Some people consider the whole world outside their own families as enemies to be feared and fought. Others feel that way about their villages, nations, religions.

In these cases the need for connection to a larger whole is dysfunctional. It stops before it’s supposed to. It leads to hatred, violence, atrocity.

Finally, there is the universal level. This can’t possibly be dysfunctional, can it?

It can. The problem is best expressed by the line from Charles Schultz’s Peanuts: “I love humanity. It’s people I can’t stand.” In my experience, there are many people dedicated to noble and high-minded causes who thereby feel justified in treating those immediately around them casually and even despicably. It is a hazard that is in fact likely to confront someone with such high ideals. It has by no means been absent from the Theosophical Society.

To take an example from literature, there is Mrs. Jellyby in chapter 4 of Dickens’s Bleak House: a middle-aged woman “with handsome eyes, though they had a curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if . . . they could see nothing nearer than Africa!” And in fact Mrs. Jellyby is so preoccupied with educating “the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the west bank of the Niger” that her house is in a state of squalor and her children miserable. She ignores her son when he falls down the stairs. The narrator says about the boy, “I did not know which to pity most—the bruises or the dirt.” Mrs. Jellyby explains, “The African project at present employs my whole time.”

There is something to be said for Christ’s command to “love thy neighbor.” “Neighbor” implies proximity, and those who are closest to us, not only by blood but also geographically, have claims upon us that more remote people do not have. In fact the more remote the problem, the less likely we are to do any good, despite our intentions. Reporter Claire Bennett wrote about relief efforts in the aftermath of the Nepal earthquake in 2015:

Ragtag brigades of well-intentioned do-gooders flooded the country: students, church congregations, individuals who had previously vacationed in the area, all clambering over one another looking for a way to make their mark and do good, but lacking either the skills or coordination to have an impact. Indeed, many ended up slowing down the aid efforts.

There were even reports of teams of doctors who arrived to help but were unable to feed themselves. This wave of unsolicited and poorly planned shipments of untrained people and donated goods was dubbed by some humanitarians “the second disaster”.

Advising would-be relief workers, Bennett added, “Remember that it is not about you. It is not about your love for the country and its people. Your feelings of guilt and helplessness may be difficult to deal with, but you may not be what is needed right now” (emphasis hers).

From another angle, it is important to be humane to animals. But many of the people I have known who are obsessed with animal welfare show a strong streak of misanthropy.

Thus any level of identification can be misguided or pathological. This suggests a need for some balance among all these levels. Self-interest is legitimate, but it is not absolute. So are family, society, nation, religion, humanity—even beyond. You may feel compassion for all sentient beings, but if your house is overrun with vermin, you need to deal with the problem.

This kind of ethical balance has been more heavily underscored in the Eastern traditions than in the West. Hinduism has its concept of dharma—which is not only duty in our familiar sense but an understanding of one’s proper role in the universe and a willingness to take responsibility for that role. The Chinese tradition speaks of the chen jen, “true man,” who similarly exists in right relationship not only with his fellow humans, but with the cosmos.

It is a point that Christianity has rarely gotten right. Jesus, as portrayed in the Gospels, does not have a wife or children, and if he did, one suspects that, like the Buddha, he would not have paid much attention to them. (In fact this is how he acts toward his mother and his siblings.) He also says, “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37). Contrary to what some claim, Jesus cared little for family values.

At the beginning of this article, I said that diagram 1 was crude and arbitrary. Diagrams are always treacherous. They oversimplify and distort; they conceal as much as they illumine. Thus we may learn something by turning it inside out (diagram 2).

At first glance this schema looks completely counterintuitive. The collective, the unitive, as the inmost part of the self? That sounds absurd. But there may be more truth to it than one might suspect.

In the first place, it points up an extremely important but neglected fact: there are collective layers to the psyche. It’s easy to forget this in the present-day U.S., with its nearly pathological insistence on individualism. But in past times these levels were probably far more dominant than they are today. The Turkish Sufi master Refik Algan comments: “In the medieval ages, we had the type rather than the individual. In a village or a group of villages, people were almost the same as others. They felt almost the same things; they had the same songs, the same food; individual difference meant little” (Kinney and Smoley, 35). Today someone dresses to express herself as an individual. In those days people did not think of such things: they wore the clothing of their region, their village, to express themselves as part of a collective.

In a more developed stage of civilization, there was (and is) the nation. The nation is one of those concepts that evaporate the more closely you examine them. What exactly constitutes a nation? An ethnicity? A language? A history? A government? You don’t have to think very hard to realize that a nation is none of those things. As Hugh Seton-Watson, author of a highly respected text on nationalism, concedes, “I am driven to the conclusion that no ‘scientific definition’ of the nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has existed and exists” (quoted in Anderson, 3; emphasis Seton-Watson’s). Nevertheless, as poorly understood as it is, there is a stratum of the individual psyche that is attuned to the psyche of this nation.

Note also that these collective levels run deeper than the merely personal. That helps explain why people rush so madly to sacrifice themselves for their nations, their faiths, and their allegiances. They feel these as part of themselves more deeply than they do the personal ego. Theosophist Arthur E. Powell portrays this collective as the crowd: “Crowds are in the main formed, nourished on, and dominated by feeling or emotion—not by thought” (Powell, Astral Body, 216).

I am not so sure. Certainly emotion plays an enormous part in the crowd mentality. But there are certain ideas that can take hold of a population with as much or more intensity than feelings per se. In the twentieth century such ideas as the dictatorship of the proletariat and the Master Race had this power. The same may be the case for the concept of jihad among certain radical elements of Islam today.

As a remedy, the Theosophical literature focuses on the conscious work of certain more or less awakened people. C.W. Leadbeater writes: “The power of the united thought of a number of people is always far greater than the sum of their separate thoughts . . . Hence it is exceedingly beneficial for any city or community that there should be constantly meeting in its midst a number of people who are capable of generating thoughts at a high level” (quoted in Powell, Mental Body, 48).

Finally we reach the center. There is something in you that is conscious, that is aware. It is not your body, nor is it even your thoughts and feelings, because you can step back inwardly and observe all these things as if from a distance (this is the point of many meditative practices). Here are some names for it: the Atman, the Self, Buddha nature, the kingdom of God, the Tiferet of the Kabbalists, “I am that I am.” It is there, and it can never go away—in fact, it is said, this is the only part of you that is truly immortal. As these examples suggest, this truth is known to practically all religions. Of course it is—because if it is true, it must be universally true, and many people will have discovered it in their own ways. Here is a description from the Hungarian spiritual teacher Georg Kühlewind:

This experience we call the “I-am experience.” It is the universal healing medicine. It is a feeling of identity with an ever-deepening being that wills itself. It provides certainty, creativity, and solidity, and dissolves what comes from egotism. From it, the knowledge arises that nothing can happen to me (the one who is experiencing this): I am safe, completely independent of circumstances, opinions, successes, or failures. I have found my spiritual roots. (Kühlewind, 39; emphasis Kühlewind’s)

There is a point at which one awakens to the true “I” within. But what relation does this transcendent “I” have to others? Many times you hear it said that “we are all one.” What could this possibly mean? In day-to-day life we are most assuredly not one. The advantage of one person is the disadvantage of the other. You get the girl, I don’t; I get the job, you don’t. We are linked only by our mutual interests and advantages. And yet the world’s traditions all teach us to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

All of this only makes sense if we realize one thing: if you follow the “I” far enough into oneself —past all the levels of personal and collective identification—you reach “a feeling of identity with an ever-deepening being,” as Kühlewind says. This is the “I” that is “we.” At the core, the “I” that is in you is the same “I” that is in me, and indeed in all creation. (This may be one meaning of the Hindu axiom “Atman is Brahman.”) That is, ultimately your self-interest and mine are identical. You are to love your neighbor as yourself because at the core, your neighbor is yourself. In the words of the German mystic Meister Eckhart, “It is when one does not belong anymore to oneself that one is most oneself” (quoted in Aubry, 47).

If you understand these facts to some degree, consciously or not, you are healthy. If you don’t, you’re not.

This health expresses itself in such things as love, compassion, and empathy. I would go further. I would say it is the source of all true love, compassion, and empathy. All other forms of human relations are merely transactions.

If I’m right about these things, it explains something else. We now know why—for a normal person at any rate—it feels good to do kind things and to help others. It feels good for the same reason that sex feels good or sleep feels good. These are all the satisfactions of real organic needs.

Now it’s a bit more clear why being a kind person is, in a very deep sense, healthy for you.

If people could function normally in this sense, with a proper orientation toward the larger Self that is the human race and indeed the universe, most of the problems of the present would vanish. They would be seen simply as technical problems. And humanity has gotten very good at solving technical problems. It’s often said that there is enough money, resources, and know-how to end the environmental crisis and provide everyone on earth with a decent standard of living. But the will is not there. The will is not there because not enough people are connected to “the I that is we.”

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SOURCES

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1983.

Aubry, Gwenaëlle. “Plato, Plotinus, and Mysticism.” In Glenn Alexander Magee, ed. The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Barzini, Luigi. The Italians: A Full-Length Portrait Featuring Their Manners and Morals. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964.

Bennett, Claire. “Don’t Rush to Nepal to Help. Read This First.” The Guardian, April 27, 2015; http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/27/earthquake-nepal-dont-rush-help-volunteers-aid; accessed June 16, 2016.

Dash, Mike. “Blue Versus Green: Rocking the Byzantine Empire,” Smithsonian.com, Mar. 2, 2012; www.smithsonianmag.com/history/blue-versus-green-rocking-the-byzantine-empire-113325928/?no-ist; accessed Nov. 3, 2015.

Kinney, Jay, and Richard Smoley. “The Goal of Oneness: The Gnosis Interview with Refik Algan.” Gnosis 41 (winter 1994), 34–39.

Kühlewind, Georg. The Light of the “I”: Guidelines for Meditation. Great Barrington, Mass.: Lindisfarne, 2008.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Moss, Richard. The I That Is We: Awakening to Higher Energies through Unconditional Love. Berkeley, Calif.: Celestial Arts, 1981.

Powell, Arthur E. The Astral Body and Other Astral Phenomena. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1996 [1927].

———. The Mental Body. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 2000.

Tristan, Pierre. “Malcolm X in Mecca,” About.com, Dec. 26, 2015; http://middleeast.about.com/od/religionsectarianism/a/me080220b.htm; accessed June 14, 2016.

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Richard Smoley’s latest book, How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible, was reviewed in Quest, summer 2016, and is available now.

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Printed in the Fall 2016 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Goldsberry, Clare, "Unbelief on the Path to Enlightenment" Quest 104.4 (Fall 2016): pg. 105-106

By Clare Goldsberry

The New Testament tells of a father who approached Jesus out of a crowd, begging him to cure his afflicted son. The young man suffered from fits that often caused him to fall on the ground, gnash his teeth, and foam at the mouth.

Jesus asked the man how long his son had suffered from them. “Since he was a child,” the man replied, begging Jesus to have compassion on him and his son.

Jesus then said to the man, “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.”

Then the father replied, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:21–24). At this point his son was cured.

The interesting thing about this comment is that the father didn’t stop with his statement of belief—“Lord, I believe . . .”—but that he went on to request help with his “unbelief.” This might indicate that a person’s unbelief might be as beneficial to the path of enlightenment as a person’s belief. Perhaps even more so!

Belief often indicates a rigid structure, such as the term “belief system,” which often designates a person’s religious affiliation. Belief is often taken to indicate whether or not one is a true member of a specific religious group. Religious organizations often require a statement of faith or profession of belief from individuals as an indicator of commitment before admitting them as full-fledged members.

People seek certainty and security in the blind acceptance of belief systems. However, from a Theosophical standpoint, belief is something that is fluid, moving, living, breathing, and can change as one moves through life, experiencing various paths that lead us on our journey. Indeed, critical to the quest for Self (the Higher Self) and for God or the Divine within is the ability to allow our beliefs to be flexible enough to lead us into new ways of being and seeing the world.

It is critical to our spiritual progress to be able to ask the questions—to put our beliefs in suspended animation long enough to look at something in a different light—in the light of our learning or a new experience. Enlightenment can never become a reality if we are trapped in the darkness of a rigid belief system, unable or unwilling to ask the questions that can lead us forward into the light. Even the Buddha encouraged his sangha (community) not to believe something “just because I, the Buddha, said it.” He encouraged the quest and questioning. He recognized that belief adopted from the words of a supposed authority can often lead down a path of attachment. Therefore he told his disciples to put his teachings into practice, to try them and experience the results; only then, if they proved beneficial, should they adopt them.

Many religious belief systems discourage the quest, telling their followers that questioning can destroy belief. Yet often just the opposite happens. Questioning can open up new doors, new avenues to self-discovery. Of course, it may also lead one out of the particular organization to which one belongs, which religious leaders fear might happen if they encourage questioning and questing. It might lead one to a different organization or to no organization.

In his book The Soul’s Religion, Thomas Moore notes that people often use their belief systems as a basis for their faith. Yet, he says, “what they call faith looks like its opposite. Like those who whistle in the dark, some seem to parade their beliefs precisely so they don’t have to face the anxiety of not knowing the answers to the basic issues in life.”

Moore agrees that belief should be fluid and flexible. When it is rigid and inflexible, he writes, “there is no room for movement and no motive for reflection. When belief is rigid, it is infinitely more dangerous than unbelief.”

As my own journey led me beyond the belief system of my childhood religious upbringing, I found tremendous resistance from my family. In one outburst of rage, my brother accused me of not knowing what I believed. My brother can recite his beliefs word for word, as if out of a book. His chosen path lies in an organized religion that provides him with structure and certainty, but discourages members from asking questions or taking on a quest of their own. Perhaps his anger grows out of a fear that outside the structure of the organization, one becomes lost in a sea of unbelief. Protective walls come down, and one is left standing alone in the darkness.

In actuality the opposite often happens. When the walls of rigid belief systems come down, the light begins pouring in, and one becomes free to seek enlightenment by asking the questions and embracing the answers—answers which, by the way, might be in the form of more questions that propel one still further along the path. Becoming comfortable with this process takes confidence in one’s path, rather than in the belief system, in order to gain an understanding of one’s personal truth. Within the shadows of unbelief lies the openness to receive the light of spiritual possibilities; within the fertile soil of unbelief lies the seeds of new faith that can grow into knowledge and enlightenment. It led ultimately to the healing of the son of the man who asked Jesus to “help” his “unbelief.”

On the other hand, many in the esoteric community distain belief and all that it implies as being dogmatic strictures of the church. They think that somehow belief precludes one’s ability to be a seeker of truth. That is not the case. As Larry Witham says in his book By Design: Science and the Search for God, “One must believe in something in order to proceed to the next thing.”

Belief is indeed only the beginning. Christianity has long acknowledged that it is the first step toward understanding, as the father of the sick child knew. As St. Anselm, the medieval logician, said, “I believe so that I may understand.” As one moves from belief through the twilight of unbelief, one is ultimately led to the light of knowing, to enlightenment. Unbelief is not something to be avoided, but embraced as one seeks enlightenment and Self-knowledge.

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Clare Goldsberry is a professional freelance writer and volunteer teacher with RISE, a continuing education program for older adults, on Eastern philosophies, the Ageless Wisdom, Gnosticism, and Kabbalah. Her latest book, The Teacher Within: Finding and Living Your Personal Truth, can be found on Amazon. She is a member of the Theosophical Society’s Phoenix Study Center.

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Printed in the Fall 2016 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Hebert, Barbara, "The Stages of Spiritual Development" Quest 104.4 (Fall 2016): pg. 102-104, 128-101

By Barbara Hebert

In order to help us understand ourselves as human beings, a number of theories regarding growth and development have been formulated. Many of these are called stage theories because they discuss the development of individuals as they pass through various stages. Some of the better-known stage theories include Jean Piaget’s stages of cognitive development; Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development; and Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. These theorists imply that the stages are linear—passed through once and left behind forever—but this is not necessarily accurate. Individuals may vacillate between stages, given different circumstances in life. Some may skip a stage altogether.

In 1981, James Fowler published Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. Fowler’s work, often considered to be groundbreaking, describes six stages of faith. Basing his model on the theories of Piaget and Kohlberg, Fowler describes the stages through which individuals pass as their faith matures.

In his 1987 book The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace, M. Scott Peck discusses four stages of spiritual development. He bases his stages on the work of Fowler. As travelers on the spiritual path, we may find it helpful to use the stages described by both Fowler and Peck to reflect on ourselves and our relationship to the Ancient Wisdom as represented by the Theosophical Society.

Fowler differentiates between religion and faith, indicating that faith is part of humanity’s effort to find meaning and purpose in life. Unlike religion, which is essentially part of a social structure[r1] , faith, according to Fowler, is universal. The preliminary stage (pre-stage) of Fowler’s theory focuses on the earliest portion of life, including the time spent in utero and infancy (from before birth approximately through age two). He describes it as a time of faith development based on trust in the environment and in the initial steps of separation from primary caregivers. If the infant’s needs are met by its caregivers, and it experiences trust and security, especially in regard to differentiation and separation, then it successfully negotiates this stage, providing a stable base from which faith will continue to develop.

The first of Fowler’s stages of faith development focuses on the beliefs of pre-school-age children (approximately from ages two to six or seven). He calls this the Intuitive-Projective stage, and it is based on the child’s ordering of his or her experiences through both emotion and perceptions. Children at this age are very egocentric, creating meaning from their experiences based on their own perceptions, regardless of the reality of the situation. For example, a child may get scratched by her cat and become angry with it. If the cat dies shortly afterward, the child may believe that she caused its death through her own anger.

At this stage children gain their perspectives on God, the afterlife, and similar matters from their caregivers and the world around them. Many children at this age tend to perceive God as somewhat ambiguous and hazily “magical.” (We are not taking into account here the children who remain in touch with the unseen world and have a more accurate understanding of Reality.)

School-age and preteen children typically move into the second of Fowler’s stages: the Mythic-Literal. During these years, children begin to understand causality, to distinguish between reality and fantasy, and to become wonderful storytellers. Furthermore, according to Piaget, at these ages children perceive the world in a very concrete and literal manner. From a moral point of view, according to Kohlberg, they focus on a strict sense of fairness, of right versus wrong. Egocentricity continues to characterize children at this age. Because of these parameters, children in the Mythic-Literal Stage are predisposed to believing the stories told to them by their faith communities in a very literal manner. They tend to see God as an anthropomorphic deity: strict, strong, and just. According to Fowler, some individuals remain in this stage throughout their lives.

As children develop into adolescents, they move into the Synthetic-Conventional stage. Egocentricity continues, but it is now coupled with the ability to think abstractly as well as concretely and to evaluate various concepts that are presented to them. At the same time interest focuses on others. The adolescent adopts a social stance, realizing that others have their own perspectives—feelings, thoughts, desires, motivations, and intentions. Teenagers begin to develop their individuality, especially in relation to values, relationships, and commitments. They develop a faith based on beliefs and values, but they have not actively reflected on the meaning of this faith. An individual may even proclaim a faith based on her beliefs and values as opposed to those of the family (even if her faith is essentially the same as that of the family), but has not really analyzed those beliefs.

One important aspect of this stage, according to Fowler, is the need for a religious authority figure. For younger adolescents, that authority may be a parent or some other important adult, while for older adolescents and adults, this figure may be a friend or someone from the religious community. In any event, this figure exists outside of the individual, and the individual looks to that figure for guidance. Again, Fowler contends that many adults never move out of this stage of faith development.

The next stage is that of the Individuative-Reflective stage. As young adults begin to undergo a variety of experiences, they may begin to reflect on their faith, seriously examining their beliefs, including their dependence on authority figures for guidance. This reflection typically happens when dissonance occurs within the person. His faith is no longer able to provide meaning for his life experience, and thus he begins to question and analyze. Although this reflection generally happens in young adulthood (the twenties), it can happen at any point in life.

The fifth stage, as identified by Fowler, is that of Conjunctive Faith stage. During this stage (which usually occurs in middle age), individuals are capable of analyzing other belief systems and using that analysis to either amend or support their own beliefs. Individuals are now able to merge seemingly disparate concepts, as well as to recognize and accept that paradoxes exist, without feeling that their own belief systems are in jeopardy. They also recognize that there are a number of different pathways to truth. Indeed they may realize that learning about the belief systems of others may deepen their own.

Fowler contends that few people reach the final stage of faith development, Universalizing Faith. At this point, individuals focus on serving others with little doubt or concern for self. Individuals at this stage “sacrifice the self to risk the partial justice of the present order for the sake of a more inclusive justice and the realization of love” (Fowler, 1981, 200). Fowler identifies individuals such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. as persons who have reached this final stage.

Thus Fowler identifies one pre-stage and six stages of faith development ranging from prebirth through middle age. He suggests that at each stage, faith development is based both on cognitive abilities (as theorized by Piaget) and moral development (as theorized by Kohlberg).

Fowler’s work provides the basis upon which M. Scott Peck set forth his perspectives on spiritual development in The Different Drum. Peck identifies four stages of spiritual development as opposed to Fowler’s six (see table).

Peck calls the first of his stages the Chaotic-Antisocial. Individuals in this stage are typically egocentric. While they may espouse loving and caring for others, they are primarily concerned about themselves—their own wants and needs—and can be manipulative and self-serving in acquiring what they want. They essentially have no principles strong enough to override their own selfish desires and thus have no integrity.

In an effort to move away from the chaos of the first stage, Peck speculates that some individuals move on to a second, Formal-Institutional stage. Here they become affiliated with some type of institution that provides security and stability. This stage is marked by a focus on rules, which also provide security and stability; thus individuals at this level may be perceived as dogmatic and legalistic in their beliefs. Because security and stability within the institution are of paramount importance, any change in the form of or any challenge to the beliefs can cause tremendous upset and feelings of threat. According to Peck, the majority of churchgoers and believers can be found in this stage. They are likely to perceive God as an external, transcendent being who is both loving and punitive. Peck points out that stage two individuals can be found in every ideology.

STAGES OF FAITH DEVELOPMENT

Fowler	Peck	Hebert
Pre-stage (before birth up to age 2)
Intuitive-Profective (ages 2 through 7)	Chaotic-Antisocial	Egocentric and Concrete
Mythic-Literal (ages 6 or 7 to puberty)	Chaotic-Antisocial	Egocentric and Concrete
Synthetic-Conventional (adolescence)	Formal-Institutional	Hang On to My Security
Individuative-Refective (young adulthood)	Skeptic-Individual	Questioning
Conjunctive (middle age)	Skeptic-Individual	Unity
Universalizing (late adulthood)	Mystical-Communal	Unity

 

Individuals in Peck’s third stage, the Skeptic-Individual, tend to be perceived or identify as nonbelievers, atheists, agnostics, or as scientifically minded individuals who want researched and logical explanations for the meaning of life. These individuals do not need the structure of an institution and thus feel free to question their beliefs. Many people in this stage are actively seeking answers to the meaning of life. They also focus on social justice and work for social reform.

Those who continue to seek may find themselves in the final stage of Peck’s theory, the Mystical-Communal. Here individuals focus on community rather than individualism. They remain aware of the value inherent in the previous two stages and are nonjudgmental in their perspective about those stages. They focus on unity rather than on separateness. They accept the lack of definitive answers and look to the mystery of the universe as part of the spiritual process, willing to live in the unknown, searching for the unknowable.

Peck’s stages of spiritual development thus move from a chaotic and egocentric stage through conformity, questioning, and into a focus on community and unity within the beauty of the universe.

Using the theories of both Peck and Fowler, we can reflect upon our own spiritual development in light of the Ancient Wisdom as embodied by the Theosophical Society. Some of us may quickly review these stages and determine that we are definitely in the final stage of both theories. After all, we serve others (Fowler’s sixth stage) and we believe in community and unity (Peck’s fourth stage). But as seekers on the Path, it is essential that we critically examine our beliefs without attachment or bias. Self-awareness through continuous self-reflection (questioning ourselves, our beliefs, our thoughts, our actions) is essential if we are to continue this journey.

In reviewing Fowler’s first and second stages, equivalent to Peck’s first stage, we may call this the Egocentric and Concrete period of spiritual development. To determine if we remain in or briefly return to this period, we can ask ourselves: Is my belief system literal? Am I primarily focused on my own needs and wants? Do I pretend to care about others but only to get what I want? We can also ask more specifically about the body of beliefs that exist within the Theosophical Society. We may wish to reflect on the following beliefs: If someone hits me in this lifetime, then in the next lifetime he or she will get hit. Without a doubt, the Mahatmas live in the Himalaya mountains. If I’m good enough, maybe one day the Mahatma will visit me or send me a message.

Whether or not these thoughts accurately reflect reality, how immersed are we in believing them to be the absolute truth? While there may be times when many of us might answer “yes” to some of these questions, it is probable that overall we are not primarily centered in this stage.

Fowler’s stage three and Peck’s stage two may be called the “Hang On to My Security” period. This level provides us with more information for analysis and self-reflection. At this point, individuals attach themselves more to institutional thinking, finding safety and security not only in the institution, but also in the beliefs it holds. This stage makes one think of the statement, “I’m not attached to anything in the physical world, but don’t interfere with my beliefs!” Are we attached to our beliefs? Are we attached to the form of the Theosophical Society? If so, we may find ourselves in the “Hang On to My Security” period.

The following questions may help determine whether we reside primarily in this stage: How do I respond when someone questions my beliefs: With defensiveness? With understanding? With annoyance? How do I feel when I think about the structure of the Theosophical Society and any changes that might be made? What is my gut response when I have the thought that one day the Theosophical Society might not exist? Does that response change if I think it may happen within my current lifetime? How do I feel when someone says something negative about one of the Society’s leaders, for example by dismissing the writings of Leadbeater or Besant or focusing on the more human aspects of Blavatsky’s personality?

It quickly becomes clear that the more attached we are, the more we hang on, to the security of Theosophical beliefs and the Theosophical Society, the more likely we are to find ourselves in this stage.

The fourth and fifth stages as delineated by Fowler, and the third stage as described by Peck, may be termed the “Questioning” period. In order to grow, we must question. We must question our beliefs, looking at them analytically and reflectively. We must determine what is true for us at this particular point in our lives. If our belief systems remain the same now as they were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago, then perhaps we have not reexamined those beliefs. But as Theosophists, we are encouraged in the Second Object of the Theosophical Society to study and in the Third Object to explore. If our beliefs have not expanded, grown, matured, then perhaps it is time to study and explore.

Some self-reflective questions here might include: How have my beliefs changed since I first came into contact with the Theosophical Society? What caused that change? If nothing has changed, am I holding on to my beliefs because I need the security?

The last of Fowler’s and Peck’s stages might be called the Unity period. As we allow ourselves to grow spiritually and to deepen our faith through questioning in the previous stage, we may move into a recognition of the unity of all beings and find ourselves comfortable with the paradox of separation of individuals within the unity of the All. We find ourselves actively working to achieve the First Object of the Theosophical Society: the oneness of all life. We work for social reform and social justice in the physical world, recognizing that what happens to one individual happens to all.

The knowledge incorporated into Fowler’s and Peck’s stages provide a groundwork from which we, as seekers on the path of Divine Wisdom, can assess ourselves. Using this information, we can actively reflect on our beliefs, our attachment to our beliefs, and our willingness to question them and the structure through which they emanate. Most importantly, we can use this information to move forward on the Path so that we may truly recognize the unity of all life and work for the good of humanity as a whole.

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SOURCES

McDevitt, T.M., and J.E. Ormrod. Child Development: Educating and Working with Children and Adolescents. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall, 2004.

Fowler, J.W. Faith Development and Pastoral Care. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987.

———. Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. New York: Harper Collins, 1981.

Peck, M. Scott. The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace. New York: Touchstone, 1987.

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Barbara Hebert, Ph.D., is director of the University Counseling Center at Southeastern Louisiana University and a licensed professional counselor. A third-generation Theosophist, Barbara currently serves as vice-president of the Theosophical Society in America.

 

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