Quest Magazine

Printed in the Winter 2019  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: McDavid, Doss, "The Human Principles in Early Theosophical Literature" Quest 107:1, pg 18-25

By Doss McDavid

While students of Theosophy will be familiar with the way of describing the levels of human consciousness and the corresponding planes of nature that is pictured in diagram 1 (Jinarajadasa, 166), they may not realize that this model was the result of a gradual evolution that took place over the course of several years.

 Diagram 1. Chart on the constitution of man, from C. Jinarajadasa, First Principles of Theosophy.

The first book of the modern Theosophical movement, Isis Unveiled by H.P. Blavatsky, published in 1877, presented a considerably simpler model, although she hinted at a more complex system (Blavatsky, Isis, 2:367, 588). It was the familiar threefold division of body (soma), soul (psyche), and spirit (pneuma) that was used in Platonic philosophy and early Christianity. In this scheme, the body (sometimes called sarx or flesh) is part of the material world and is therefore subject to all the limitations of time and space. It is unconditionally mortal. The spirit is part of Divinity itself and is therefore unconditionally immortal. Between these two, the third element, psyche or perispirit, is conditionally immortal. Those parts of the soul that can identify with the spirit join in its immortality, while those parts that have a greater affinity for the body are doomed to share its fate—dissolution into the elements and gradual remodeling into future life forms.

After the founders of the Theosophical Society moved to India in 1878–79, this simple threefold scheme was replaced by a sevenfold division of the human constitution. These teachings were transmitted orally from HPB to A.P. Sinnett and A.O. Hume during the late summer or early fall of 1881. Hume almost immediately began to summarize them in a series of articles called “Fragments of Occult Truth,” the first of which appeared in The Theosophist of October 1881. This series had eight parts, the first three from the pen of Hume and the last five by Sinnett. The first article described the seven principles as follows:

1. The physical body, composed wholly of matter in its grossest and most tangible form.
2. The vital principle (jivatma), an indestructible form of force. When disconnected from one set of atoms, it is immediately attracted by others.
3. The astral body (linga sharira), composed of highly etherealized matter. In its habitual passive state, it is the perfect but very shadowy duplicate of the body, its activity, consolidation, and form depending entirely on
4. The astral shape (kama rupa or body of desire), a principle defining the configuration of
5. The animal or physical intelligence or consciousness or Ego. This is analogous to, though higher in degree than, the reason, instinct, memory, imagination, and similar faculties in the higher animals.
6. The higher or spiritual intelligence or consciousness, or spiritual Ego, in which the sense of consciousness in the perfected man mainly resides, though the lower, dimmer animal consciousness coexists in level 5.
7. The spirit, an emanation from the Absolute, uncreated, eternal. It is a state rather than a being.

 Around the same time, a series of “cosmological notes” was given by the Master Morya (Chin and Barker, 510) in order to further clarify the sevenfold nature of man. This seems to have taken place in October 1881, after the Mahatma Koot Hoomi, the first Master to enter into correspondence with the two Europeans, had gone into a prolonged retreat. The English terms used by the Master to translate the Sanskrit and Tibetan words in this early list of human principles were as follows:

1. Body
2. Life-principle
3. Astral Body
4. Will-form
5. Animal Soul
6. Spiritual Soul
7. Spirit

This terminology was used throughout the rest of the “Fragments” articles, which elaborated on the teachings given by the Mahatmas to Sinnett and Hume. In June 1883 Sinnett published Esoteric Buddhism. Many portions of this work are virtually identical to “Fragments of Occult Truth,” most of which, as we have seen, were written by Sinnett himself.

            Esoteric Buddhism (65) gives the following list:

Esoteric Buddhism altered the nomenclature in an important way: it used the term animal soul for the fourth principle and adopted a new term, human soul, for the fifth. The sixth principle retained the designation of spiritual soul.

After its initial introduction in “Fragments of Occult Truth,” HPB and other Theosophical writers enthusiastically accepted the sevenfold classification and produced a barrage of publications promoting it. Three months after the publication of the first fragment, T. Subba Row wrote an article for The Theosophist entitled “The Aryan-Arhat Esoteric Tenets on the Sevenfold Principle in Man,” in which he showed the essential agreement between the sevenfold scheme presented in the fragments and traditional Indian philosophy (Subba Row, “Aryan-Arhat Tenets,” 93). Later on, he wrote a short article comparing the sevenfold scheme to the components of the human being in the systems of Vedanta and Taraka Raja Yoga (Subba Row, “Note to Esoteric Buddhism,” 223). In addition, a Parsi Theosophist wrote an article comparing the septenary division to the psychological analysis of the Avesta (“A Parsi FTS”). In 1886, Franz Hartmann, a medical doctor and prolific Theosophical writer, elaborated further on the septenary division and compared it to the parts of man enumerated by Paracelsus (Hartmann). Another article written during this early period was contributed by a Tibetan monk-librarian who was said to be a member of the Theosophical Society. In this article, he gives the following description of the after-death states employing the terminology used in Esoteric Buddhism:

From the dead body the other principles ooze out together. A few hours later the second principle––that of life—is totally extinct, and separates from both the human and ethereal envelopes. The third—the vital double—finally dissipates when the last particles of the body disintegrate. There now remain the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh principles: the body of will, the human soul, the spiritual soul, and pure spirit which is a facet of the Eternal. The last two, joined to, or separated from, the personal self, form the everlasting individuality and cannot perish. . . . At the first relaxation of the will . . . the spiritual self, temporarily losing its personality and all remembrance of it, ascends to higher regions. Such is the teaching. (Blavatsky, “Tibetan Teachings,” 100–01)

One article written by HPB during this period tries to reconcile the teachings of Isis Unveiled with the system explained in the fragments (Blavatsky, “Isis Unveiled and The Theosophist,” 288). When a Theosophist pointed out the seeming contradiction between the more recent teachings affirming reincarnation and the earlier denial of this teaching in Isis, HPB provided another diagram and explained that the denial of reincarnation found in Isis pertained to the “astral monad” and not to the “spiritual monad” (see diagram 2). The “astral monad” is not ordinarily reincarnated, while the “spiritual monad” is reembodied again and again on this and other planets until it attains liberation.

Diagram 2. A table published in The Theosophist of 1882 attempting to reconcile earlier and later versions of teachings on reincarnation. Spelling and punctuation from the original.

Another significant publication was Paradoxes of the Highest Science, which was printed in Calcutta in 1883. This book is composed of previously unpublished material by the French occultist Alphonse Louis Constant, better known as Éliphas Lévi. Hume translated it from French into English and published it with notes from K.H., using the pseudonym of “Eminent Occultist” (E.O.). In these notes, K.H. refers to the seven principles and states that “the body of man is the vehicle of the three pairs of spouses, viz. the 2nd and 3rd, the 4th and 5th, and the 6th and 7th principles ”(Lévi, 123; cf. right column of table). One of K.H.’s notes contains a table providing additional information about the human principles and showing the correspondence between the principles and the planetary rulers according to the Mandaean text called the Codex Nazaraeus. It goes as follows:

The sevenfold classification was not completely free from controversy. Despite his early advocacy of it, T. Subba Row soon changed his mind, calling it “unscientific and misleading” in the first of his famous 1886 series of lectures on the Bhagavad Gita (Subba Row, Notes, 13–15). He announced that in his coming lectures he would be using a psychological model based on four principles—Atma, Karanopadhi (the reincarnating ego), Sukshmopadhi (the lower psychological nature, called the astral body in these lectures, although, confusingly, it was a completely different thing from the astral body or double described in “Fragments” and Esoteric Buddhism), and Sthulopadhi (the physical body). Atma is described as the Logos or Universal Spirit, shining its radiant light through three upadhis, or vehicles, derived from different levels of differentiated material substance.

When HPB wrote a conciliatory article trying to harmonize the two views (Blavatsky, “Classification”), Subba Row refused to take yes for an answer (Subba Row, “Constitution”), requiring a further response from HPB. Reading this series of back-and-forth polemical articles is somewhat painful but instructive for serious students.

HPB’s Secret Doctrine used the septenary division of Esoteric Buddhism. With the formation of her Esoteric School in 1888, however, she explained to her pledged students that this division was not the last word on the subject. It was, she now taught, a convenient but incomplete teaching, which she was now supplementing with additional information. In her esoteric teachings, she maintained that the first and seventh principles were not actually human principles at all. The first principle (the physical body) was completely illusory and hardly worth consideration, while the seventh principle (the spirit) was so transcendental as to be outside of “man” altogether. While the earlier teachings spoke of manas (mind) as a single principle, HPB’s esoteric papers make a distinction between its higher and lower portions. Prana was not assigned a plane of its own but was explained as the manifesting aspect of Atma as the One Life. Besides these more or less familiar constituents of the human being, HPB introduced her esoteric students to a mysterious principle called the Auric Envelope and swore them to strict secrecy about it. This mysterious principle provides the invisible pattern on which the rest of the human nature is structured—from our subtlest vestures down to the grossest. It contains our link to higher worlds and preserves the karmic seeds that prevail from life to life.

Diagram 3. Plate 1 from HPB's first Esoteric Instruction.

The human principles and the corresponding cosmic elements (tattvas) from which they arise were tabulated in the Esoteric Instructions as follows (Blavatsky and Caldwell, 439):

These seven principles are symbolically represented by diagram 3. In it, the Auric Envelope is represented by the blue egg, Buddhi by the yellow crescent, Higher Manas by the indigo upward-pointing triangle, Lower Manas by the green downward-pointing triangle, and Kama by the red inverted pentagram. Prana and the etheric double are represented by the orange and violet parts of the upright pentagram, the outline of which represents the physical body. Atma is represented by the shining white circle at the summit. Standing above and beyond the seven principles, it is referred to as threefold (Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer). Its link with the sevenfold man (the light of the Logos) completes the Sacred Four or Tetraktys.

In Blavatsky’s Esoteric Instructions, each of the seven human principles is correlated to one of the sacred planets, although the “moon” and the “sun” are symbols for unknown planets. The real moon—the parent of our earth—is a dead planet, while the real sun is our central star corresponding to the Atma or triple spirit in man.

                                         Diagram 4. Correspondences shown in HPB’s first Esoteric Instruction.

As HPB described it: “In their completeness, i.e., super-spiritually and physically, the forces are TEN: to wit, three on the subjective and inconceivable, and seven on the objective plane” (Blavatsky and Caldwell, 357). In the microcosm, the human principles correspond to parts of the physical body.

During the last years of her life, HPB continued to use the original sevenfold classification of principles in her public writings, although she hinted at the esoteric teachings. Thus, for example, in The Key to Theosophy (119–20) she hinted at the mystery of the Auric Envelope when describing the properties of buddhi:

The Spiritual Soul, Buddhi . . . conceals a mystery, which is never given to any one, with the exception of irrevocably pledged chelas, or those, at any rate, who can be safely trusted. Of course, there would be less confusion, could it only be told; but, as this is directly concerned with the power of projecting one’s double consciously and at will, and as this gift, like the “ring of Gyges,” would prove very fatal to man at large and to the possessor of that faculty in particular, it is carefully guarded.

Similarly she made a clear distinction between the lower and higher manas:

If we pass on to the Human Soul, Manas or mens, everyone will agree that the intelligence of man is dual to say the least: e.g., the high-minded man can hardly become low-minded; the very intellectual and spiritual-minded man is separated by an abyss from the obtuse, dull, and material, if not animal-minded man. . . . Every man has these two principles in him, one more active than the other, and in rare cases, one of these is entirely stunted in its growth, so to say, or paralysed by the strength and predominance of the other aspect, in whatever direction. These, then, are what we call the two principles or aspects of Manas, the higher and the lower; the former, the higher Manas, or the thinking, conscious Ego gravitating toward the spiritual Soul (Buddhi); and the latter, or its instinctual principle, attracted to Kama, the seat of animal desires and passions in man. (Blavatsky, Key, 120)

In the Key, HPB expressed the desire that Theosophists could agree on a simplified nomenclature, using English instead of the Sanskrit terminology:

To avoid henceforth such misapprehensions, I propose to translate literally from the Occult Eastern terms their equivalents in English, and offer these for future use.

The Higher Self is Atma, the inseparable ray of the Universal and One Self. It is the God above, more than within, us. Happy the man who succeeds in saturating his inner Ego with it!

The Spiritual divine Ego is the Spiritual soul or Buddhi, in close union with Manas, the mind-principle, without which it is no Ego at all, but only the Atmic Vehicle.

The Inner, or Higher “Ego” is Manas, the “Fifth” Principle, so called, independently of Buddhi. The Mind-Principle is only the Spiritual Ego when merged into one with Buddhi,—no materialist being supposed to have in him such an Ego, however great his intellectual capacities. It is the permanent Individuality or the “Reincarnating Ego.”

The Lower, or Personal “Ego” is the physical man in conjunction with his lower Self, i.e., animal instincts, passions, desires, etc. It is called the “false personality,” and consists of the lower Manas combined with Kama-rupa, and operating through the Physical body and its phantom or “double.”

The remaining “Principle” “Pranâ,” or “Life,” is, strictly speaking, the radiating force or Energy of Atma—as the Universal Life and the One Self,—Its lower or rather (in its effects) more physical, because manifesting, aspect. Prana or Life permeates the whole being of the objective Universe; and is called a “principle” only because it is an indispensable factor and the deus ex machina of the living man. 

She then indulged in a little wishful thinking:

Enq. This division being so much simplified in its combinations will answer better, I believe. The other is much too metaphysical.

Theo. If outsiders as well as Theosophists would agree to it, it would certainly make matters much more comprehensible. (Blavatsky, Key, 175–76)

Following HPB’s death, Theosophists continued to adjust the terminology. In some cases, they were trying to make the original teachings more accurate and understandable. In other cases, for better or worse, they were supplementing the original teachings with their own experience.

            We will now return to the diagram shown at the beginning of this article, but we will add on the right side of the diagram the principles enumerated in Mme. Blavatsky’s Esoteric Instructions to see what has happened.

               Diagram 5. HPB’s description of the human principles in relation to other Theosophical schemas.                                   

Beginning with the physical plane shown at the bottom of the chart, we will move progressively to higher and higher levels as we examine the relationship between the earlier and later nomenclature. In accordance with the hint given to the Inner Group at the meeting of September 24, 1890 (Blavatsky, Inner Group Teachings, 23), the astral and physical bodies described in Esoteric Buddhism were said by the later writers of the Adyar Society (notably Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater) to exist on the higher and lower portions of the physical plane. These writers adopted the term etheric double or vital body to describe the part of the human being that was originally called the astral body (or linga sharira) in the earlier literature. While the dense physical body is said to draw its substance from the three lower subplanes of the physical plane (solid, liquid, and gas), the etheric double is said to be composed of four “ethers,” which make up its upper subplanes.

The double is the subtle mold on which the physical body is built during the development of the embryo. It never ordinarily goes far from the physical body, except when a portion of it is pushed out during anesthesia or is exuded as ectoplasm by spiritualistic mediums. After death, it hovers close to the decaying corpse and dissolves into its own elements.

Following the precedent set by Subba Row, the later writers consistently refer to the kama rupa as the astral body. As the seat of the animal passions and desires, it is necessary to human life but should not be allowed to have the upper hand. It is a useful servant but a dangerous master. As seen by the later writers, it exists on the seven subplanes of the astral plane.

The lower manas, or lower mental body, comes next. This is the seat of concrete mind—the outwardly directed mind that makes grocery lists, balances the checkbook, and plots to achieve the objectives of everyday life. It is our conscious, everyday, thinking mind.

After the death of the physical body, the lower mind is pulled in opposite directions by kama, holding onto earthly life, and buddhi, lifting the mind up to higher levels of consciousness. This is the “struggle” in kamaloka described in the Masters’ early letters to Sinnett (Chin and Barker, 193).

When the struggle is over, those elements of the lower manas that gravitate toward the higher mind or spiritual ego are taken into the “happy land” of devachan until it is time for a new birth. Those elements of the manas that are unfit to accompany the spirit into devachan perish along with the discarded body of desire. This is the infamous “astral shell” that can appear at spiritualistic séances, impersonating the true individuality that has passed on. It gradually dissolves into its elements, although in the case of very materialistic individuals it can remain intact as a “dweller on the threshold,” harassing the ego in a new incarnation. All these things are explained in HPB’s Esoteric Instructions.

The higher manas comes next. While the lower manas exists on the four lower subplanes of the mental plane, the higher manas exists on its three higher subplanes. The higher manas is the most concrete aspect of the causal body or reincarnating Ego, the permanent individuality that persists from life to life. This higher mind is sometimes called the thinker.

Beyond the reach and range of manas or thought, we have buddhi, the seat of intuition or direct inner knowing. According to the later writers, it exists on the fourth, or buddhic, plane.

Enveloping the entire human being is the auric envelope or auric egg. According to the later writers, it belongs to the lower subdivisions of the fifth or “nirvanic” plane, where it serves as the seat of the spiritual will (Leadbeater, 1:225). The lowest aspect of the Triple Spirit (called the Monad by the later writers) manifests on the higher levels of this same plane. The higher two aspects of the Triple Spirit or Monad exist on the two planes beyond the nirvanic. These have been called the paranirvanic and mahaparanirvanic planes and are sometimes confusingly given names that correspond to the two highest tattvas of HPB’s scheme.

This scheme, shown in diagram 5, is now more or less universal among most of the prominent writers in the Adyar Theosophical Society. It was also used by Rudolf Steiner, Max Heindel, and Alice Bailey, who were indebted to Besant and Leadbeater for their understanding of the planes and principles.

Critics of Besant and Leadbeater have accused them of making up nonexistent planes and levels of being. This is a little unfair. Their presentations were based for the most part on indications given in the Esoteric Instructions and Inner Group teachings. It is true that they changed some of the original nomenclature, but they thought they were helping the situation. The same may be said of Gottfried de Purucker, the leader of the Point Loma Theosophical Society from 1929 to 1942, with his controversial teachings about the multiple monads within the human constitution and their correlations with planets and cosmic systems, but that is a story best left for another day.

Just as HPB came to regret performing miraculous phenomena and giving too much information about her Masters, she likewise claimed to regret popularizing the septenary classification of principles. In conversation with her students in London she said the following:

Europeans ought never to have been given the seven principles. Well, perhaps in a hundred years you will understand it. It would be a thousand times better to hold to the old methods, those that I held to in Isis Unveiled, and to speak about triple man: spirit, soul, and matter; then you would not fall into . . . such heresies as you do. (Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine Dialogues, 626)

Was the popularization of the septenary division of human principles a good idea or a mistake? As modern students, living over a hundred years later, we are free to judge for ourselves!

References

Blavatsky, H.P. “Classification of Principles.” In The Theosophist 8, no. 91 (April 1887): 448–56.

———. The Inner Group Teachings of H.P. Blavatsky. San Diego, Calif.: Point Loma Publications, 1985.

———. Isis Unveiled. Two volumes. Pasadena, Calif.: Theosophical University Press, 1960 [1877].

———. “Isis Unveiled and The Theosophist on Reincarnation.” In The Theosophist 3, no. 11 (August 1882): 288–89.

———. The Key to Theosophy. Pasadena, Calif.: Theosophical University Press, 1946.

———. The Secret Doctrine. Two volumes. Pasadena, Calif.: Theosophical University Press, 1952 [1888].

———. The Secret Doctrine Dialogues. Los Angeles: Theosophy Co., 2014.

———. “Tibetan Teachings.” In Lucifer 15, nos. 85 and 86 (September and October 1894): 9–17 and 97–104.

Blavatsky, H.P., and Daniel Caldwell. The Esoteric Papers of Madame Blavatsky. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger, 2004.

Chin, Vicente Hao, and A.T. Barker, eds. The Mahatma Letters to A.P. Sinnett: Chronological Edition. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1998.

Hartmann, Franz. Magic, White and Black. New York: John W. Lovell, 1890.

Hume, A.O. “Fragments of Occult Truth” [part 1]. In The Theosophist 3, no. 1 (October 1881): 17–22.

Jinarajadasa, C. First Principles of Theosophy. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1960.

“A Parsi FTS,” “Theosophy and the Avesta,” The Theosophist 4, no. 1 (October 1882): 20–25.

Leadbeater, C.W. The Inner Life. Two volumes. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1917.

Lévi, Éliphas. The Paradoxes of the Highest Science. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1922.

Sinnett, A.P. Esoteric Buddhism. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884.

Subba Row, T. “The Aryan-Arhat Esoteric Tenets on the Sevenfold Principle in Man,” in The Theosophist 3, no. 4 (January 1882): 93–99.

———. “The Constitution of the Microcosm.” The Theosophist 8, no. 92 (May 1887): 504–11.

———. Notes on the Bhagavad Gita. Pasadena, Calif.: Theosophical University Press, 1978.

———. “Note to Esoteric Buddhism and Hinduism.” In The Theosophist 5, no. 9 (June 1884): 223–25.

Doss McDavid was born in San Antonio, Texas. After receiving his Ph.D. in biophysics in 1976, he was employed at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He retired in 2012 as professor emeritus. He holds several patents and is one of the founders of Radworks Corporation and Dental Imaging Consultants. He has been a member of the Theosophical Society since 1969 and is a member of the San Antonio branch. He served two terms on the board of directors of the American Section. His study course, An Introduction to Esoteric Principles, is available online at the TSA website and from Quest Books.

Printed in the Winter 2019  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smith, Kendra, "Consciousness after Death" Quest 107:1, pg 14-17

By Kendra Smith

Years ago, when I was around forty, I was startled to see and converse with persons who had died. Other experiences followed. This sort of thing was taboo in my academic milieu and in a family studded with scientists (four physicists, one a Nobel Prize winner). Only lately, after a friend urged me to come out with these stories, which many people regard as deluded and weird, have I begun talking freely about these experiences.

Remembering some brief contacts with Theosophy, I called an acquaintance, Nelda Samarel, at the Krotona Institute of Theosophy in Ojai, California. I wondered what the position of Theosophy was on consciousness after death; did Theosophy accept it? She said yes, and she was interested in the content of my communications from the other side.

I had six such experiences. The first three were with strangers, the next three with family members who had passed on. With two of the three strangers, I was able to learn that the persons had actually existed, and I learned something of their life stories.

In this piece, I will relate one of the exchanges with a stranger and a brief conversation with my skeptical philosopher father after his death; then I will discuss some of the questions raised in my mind: What is mind and what are its limits? What is real, what is true? Why do some of us have these experiences while others don’t? One question I will answer immediately: do these experiences have spiritual import? They do not mean that I personally am a better person or more integrated than most, but I believe that they may suggest something about spirit or consciousness.

One experience in particular really shook me up. It happened at a five-day meditation retreat led by Larry LeShan, a clinical psychologist. His daily work was as a psychotherapist, often with cancer patients facing mortality. On the side, he experimented with psychic healing, the cultivation of a state of consciousness that facilitates the healing of others. I’d heard Larry talk about his research at a transpersonal psychology conference in Iceland, and I asked to join his experimental group.

There were ten or twelve of us, all Larry’s friends from New York, except for me, from Boston. Everyone looked to be around my age, forty, except for one man with white hair, Max. Larry’s assistant, who introduced us, told me Max was a lawyer from Manhattan. From the time of our introduction before Friday dinner to our goodbye the next Tuesday, Max and I never talked. We did, however, end up sitting next to each other as we meditated. Hour after hour after hour.

It was intensive one-pointed meditation. From Friday evening through Saturday until around 9 p.m., we tried hard to keep our minds steadily on a single object. Then bed. As I lay in bed, I visualized all the persons in our group, saying their names to myself. It’s something I do to help me remember names. It was a very cold February night, and wind blew in my window curtains. I knew I would have to get up and close the window before I settled down to sleep. I began saying the names to myself: Larry, Mickey, Joyce, John, Maria, and so on, until I got to Max. And then I saw a woman between Max and me that I had not seen in the group.

Silently, in my head, I said, “I don’t remember you. You must have been very quiet.”

“I’m Max’s wife,” she said.

She didn’t look exactly solid—she was sort of transparent, but distinct. She and I had a nice little get-acquainted chat, with her doing most of the talking. This was all in my head, silent. She told me that this part of Connecticut was a great place for birders, and she began naming all the different kinds of birds. I’m not a birder, but I was entertained by the names she reeled off. One stuck in my mind—tufted titmouse. We then said goodnight. I closed my window and slept soundly.

Next morning I saw Max as we waited for the breakfast bell, and I thought of telling him that I had dreamed about his wife. But it wasn’t a dream, and I didn’t know if he had a wife. Larry’s assistant told me that Max had had a wife. She had died three months earlier, and Max had been in deep grief, refusing to leave his apartment until he had been persuaded to come to this retreat. This unsettled me, and yet the conversation with Max’s wife had seemed so ordinary and real. I wondered if I was losing my marbles. Larry was a psychotherapist. I asked to speak with him alone. He asked me what Max’s wife looked like.

“A short, dumpy, old woman,” I said, “with short, iron-gray hair.” I couldn’t think of any distinguishing moles or features. Larry laughed. How many women in Manhattan would fit this description? He also laughed at the fact that I’d said to her, “You must have been very quiet.” In life, he said, she was not at all quiet. Larry also mentioned that Max was a member of the Ethical Culture Society. This meant to me that he was a humanist. I have read the Humanist Manifesto, which says there is no consciousness after death. I figured that if Max’s wife had appeared to him, he would have thought he was hallucinating.

Larry added casually that I had just had a mediumistic experience and needn’t worry about it. I breathed a sigh of relief.

The next “mediumistic” experience was with my father, Henry Nelson Wieman, a philosopher who taught his “empirical naturalism” at the University of Chicago. He dismissed anything that could not be tested by scientific method. Any religious philosophy must, in his view, accommodate science.

While my father was still very much alive, I told him about my communication with Max’s wife. He listened to my account with bright-eyed interest and no sign of the contempt I feared. Then he walked away, saying, “Wishful thinking. Wishful thinking.”

I called after him, “Well, you’re eighty-five and I’m forty-five. Chances are you will know before I do. You rap seven times or something.” He laughed.

Six years later my father died, and this conversation came to mind. Nothing happened. Another three months went by. I woke one September morning, just lying in bed in a deliciously relaxed state, not thinking about anything at all, when my father appeared, looking like a shimmery version of the football player he had once been.

Excitedly, in my head, I asked, “What’s it like? What’s it like?”

He groped for words. This was uncharacteristic of a Harvard Ph.D. who had written many books and lectured his whole life. Slowly and carefully he then replied, “I cannot will. I can only assess.”

Many hours later I saw my husband, the scholar of religions Huston Smith, and told him about this. Thoughtfully, he said, “That’s what St. Augustine said. After death you cannot effect any material changes. But you can evaluate.”

I am still a bit disturbed when I think about this—as if there is nothing to hold on to. I can’t explain it in terms of anything I know. But neither can I explain or understand the reports I get from physicists about action at a distance, or string theory, or how subatomic stuff is altered by the act of the physicist measuring it. I asked one of my nephews, who is a nuclear physicist, to explain to me the experiment he has been conducting for years.

“If you don’t know mathematics,” he said, “you can’t understand physics.”

I don’t know mathematics, so that lets me off the hook so far as physics goes. I can abandon trying to understand it. But these experiences of mine? I can’t abandon an attempt to understand them. I don’t know of any key to understanding them the way mathematics is the key to physics.

The teasing, teasing questions! I began to think about studies: how our collective view of what is true and real has been changed by culture; how it is influenced by language, by studies of intelligence and intuition.

Studies of the human brain began in a small way around the time I was born, with the work of neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield. Now studies of consciousness are burgeoning. There are a few undergraduate courses on the subject, and there are professional journals.

We used to assume that our human brains, while not omniscient, were an accurate mirror of objective reality. Now it is believed that our brains are not so much like mirrors as like a waffle iron. A waffle looks the way it does because of the way a waffle iron is shaped. What we see as reality depends on the shape of our waffle-iron minds. Our waffle-iron brains, yours and mine, are similar enough for us to have enough shared meaning for us to have discussions. And they differ enough for us to have differing views.

Studies of animal intelligence brought home to us how our perceptual organs frame and limit what we see and sense. We don’t see what an eagle sees; we don’t know the rich world of smells lived by a dog. But our human perceptual organs, yours and mine—eyes, ears, and so forth— are quite similar. We can agree on what is blue and on what is softer or harder. In that way, our waffle-iron brains are alike.

Culture shapes our waffle-iron brains. Different cultures shape them differently, influencing what we are open to believing and thinking. In cultures where people believe in consciousness after death—in Finland and among the Australian aborigines, for example—reports of experiences like mine are far more common than in the U.S.

Our understanding of intelligence has changed greatly in my lifetime. In the early 1920s, a scientist named Terman selected a bunch of kids with very high IQs. It was then thought that having a high IQ was like being endowed with a fortune in gold. Terman’s kids were followed throughout their lifetimes. On average Terman’s high-IQ people did quite well in life, but none in the group turned out to be Mozarts or Einsteins or history makers.

The conclusion was that creativity and intuition needed to be better understood. So far as I know, they are still mysterious. People who have bursts of creativity report that it feels quite unlike ordinary thinking. It seems to come out of the blue, or it is as if something is flowing into and through one. Einstein is said to have had an intuitive flash—things falling into place in a new way—that led to relativity theory. To quote him: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is its servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

There seem to be inborn differences—different types of waffle-iron brains. C.G. Jung described the differences in terms of four types: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. They are not differences in intelligence, but in what we notice and how we process input. I am an N, or intuition type. Does intuition have anything to do with my conversation with Max’s wife? I don’t know.

Language, too, influences how one understands the world. Language shapes the waffle-iron brain. Not every subtle insight can be translated from one language to another. Let me give one example that has some relevance to the topic. On my wall, I have some Japanese calligraphy painted by a Zen monk. My husband and I listened in as two scholars, one Japanese and one German, discussed how to translate the characters into English. Both of them were fluent in English, German, and Japanese. The first three characters were easy: “Heaven and earth”—meaning everything—have . . . Everything has . . .” Here they paused, stumped. The last character, they agreed, could not be expressed in English but might be translated, although imperfectly, into German. The best approximation in English was “Everything has sentience,” but, they insisted, sentience is misleading. For us English speakers, dead and alive are opposites. The Japanese word the scholars were working to translate also implies something like relationships and affection. (The two scholars agreed that the German word Gefühl, feeling, was a close approximation.) The Zen Buddhist insight is a universe that is not impersonal, not devoid of feeling or caring or intelligence, nor yet is it some deity outside of creation. Imagine, if you can, how it would be if that permeated your worldview. Basic trust!

Individual influences affect our waffle-iron brains, accounting for the way we individuals see things differently. Children in the same family don’t even have the same experience of their parents. In my family, my older siblings remember a mother who was strict but lots of fun. I never knew a mother who was healthy and free of pain. Strict she was, but not at all fun. I was afraid of her. Siblings influence too. All siblings say or do hurtful things. I am so nervous speaking to groups because, I think, the most scathing thing hissed by my siblings was, “You’re showing off! You are just trying to get attention!”

For most of my life, any interest or belief in consciousness after death was regarded as disgraceful, just a cut above child pornography in respectability. Researchers in these subjects were shunned by their colleagues. Although it was more accepted in the U.K., in the U.S. it used to be the consensual conviction that anyone who was rational and understood science would scoff at the idea of the survival of any consciousness after the heartbeat quits. William James, in the early twentieth century, was an exception: he was interested in mediums and reports of communication with the dead. But when his collected works were published after his death, this part of his research was omitted. It was an embarrassment to what was then the scientific community.

Here is a quote from James: “Our normal consciousness, our rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special kind of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”

Creeping into our culture is an increasing openness. In this century, a group of scientists and philosophers met annually for a few years at California’s Esalen Institute to discuss consciousness after death. Henry Stapp, one of our most respected theoretical physicists, was in the group. I don’t know what went on, but I’m guessing that they concluded there is no way to prove either the truth or the falsity of consciousness after death, or any way to explain it. The group disbanded.

What about the waffle-iron brains of those of us who see and hear people who have died? I think of four possible predisposing factors. One, a growing acceptance in our culture. Two, being an intuitive type. Three, meditation practice. Most of my experiences occurred during or soon after a meditation retreat. Four, the early death of one’s mother. It has been found that both ESP (extrasensory perception) and mediumistic experiences—I lump the two together—seem to happen more often to persons whose mothers died when they were young. I was seven when I lost mine.

I may have had a visitation from my mother when I was eleven and deeply unhappy, but I didn’t believe in such things then. I knew my father’s conviction that bodily death is the end. I attended some of his lectures and debates, and I also proofread his manuscripts, so I knew his thought pretty well. I didn’t begin to doubt his authority until I was in my teens.

Some scientists studying consciousness say we seem to be no closer to understanding it than ever, that it is a receding horizon. The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of what is unknown.

Now the really big questions. I think of what Zen Buddhists call Big Mind. It’s a mistake to think that each of us possesses a piece of Big Mind; we exist in Big Mind as a fish lives in water.

Is consciousness fundamental? Is consciousness primary and matter secondary? Is it the same as spirit, or the spiritual?

These questions have personal meaning for me. My feeling about death is different now. I think of my friendly death. Not only will I be released from a body that gives me more pain and less pleasure, but I will not be wholly cut off from those I love most. I will be aware and somewhat connected. And—maybe—curiosity and learning will continue. That would be nice.

Because Max’s wife appeared to me, a stranger, Max could accept it as real when Larry told him of her appearance to me. Did his wife know of his grief and figure out how to convince him that her death was not annihilation or the end of their relationship? I think she did know, and she reached out to comfort him in the only way she knew. The import for me is that the cosmology expressed in the Zen calligraphy is right. The universe is not devoid of feeling or caring.

What I feel most powerfully is the vastness of the mystery in which we are born, live, and die.

Kendra Smith, age ninety-five, is a retired psychotherapist living in Berkeley, California. At age fifteen, she was drawn to Buddhism and remains committed to its practice. Her first intensive meditation experiences, along with her husband, Huston Smith, were in Burma and Japan in 1957.

Printed in the  Winter 2019 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation:  Boyd, Tim, "The Mission of the Theosophical Society" Quest 107:1, pg 3-5

Tim Boyd
International President

At our most recent General Council meeting, a mission statement for the Theosophical Society (TS) was finalized. In the 143-year history of the TS, although many statements have been made related to the mission and purpose of the TS, there has never been a formal mission statement.

In The Key to Theosophy, in a short section titled “The Abstract and the Concrete,” HPB addresses the subject of the relationship between Theosophy and the Theosophical Society. One of the things she says is that “Theosophy is divine nature, visible and invisible, and its Society human nature trying to ascend to its divine parent.”

In that same section, she also says that “Theosophy is the shoreless ocean of universal truth, love, and wisdom, reflecting its radiance on the earth, while the Theosophical Society is only a visible bubble on that reflection.” She tries to help us understand the relationship between Theosophy, which is divine, and our work within this organization, which has a form. She closes by saying that the TS “was formed to assist in showing to men that such a thing as Theosophy exists, and to help them to ascend towards it by studying and assimilating its eternal verities.”

In a sense, the idea of a Society whose purpose is to show the existence of an ever-undefined Theosophy is a statement of mission. However, for someone not yet fully grounded in a studied awareness of Theosophy, it is an unsatisfying statement.

For a little more than a year, the General Council of the TS, with input from other members, has been engaged in the process of trying to refine a concise and comprehensible statement of the mission of the TS. Much like a sutra in the scriptures of the world, the attempt has been made to make the expression of mission so brief, compact, and easy to remember that it can be quickly communicated, but so conceptually rich that dwelling on it reveals ever-deepening layers of meaning.

The Mission Statement which has been adopted for the Theosophical Society is a total of twenty-four words: “To serve humanity by cultivating an ever-deepening understanding and realization of the Ageless Wisdom, spiritual self-transformation, and the unity of all life.” In the remainder of this article, we will try to unpack this one sentence. Much like a sutra, every one of those twenty-four words adds something meaningful.

Service

To serve is the primary function of the TS. Service is often interpreted in different ways, but for our purposes it involves a conscious participation, a conscious, compassionate activity that connects us with others in ways which relieve suffering. Of course, our service is often unconscious. For example, the simple act of breathing gives plants the carbon dioxide they require to live. Plants breathe out the oxygen that humans and other life forms require. So it could be said that just breathing is service. However, part of the role of the Theosophical work is to become fully conscious, fully aware, so that our service is not just random activity, but charged with awareness and compassion.

Humanity

In what direction is that service focused? The mission is “to serve humanity.” The normal conception of humanity is as the seven billion individual human beings which populate the Earth. The collectivity of all these human beings is what we tend to call “humanity.” From the perspective of the Ageless Wisdom, there is the idea of the divine human. What we think of as humanity is not merely an amalgamation of seven billion different people; it is a single entity in much the same way that we as individuals are composed of many tiny lives, but think of ourselves as a unit. When we think of our bodies or “I” myself as a human being, if we are a little more precise about it, what we call “I” is a combination of the activity of trillions of human cells, more trillions of bacteria living on and within the body, and the unseen participation of every range of consciousness from the lowest mineral to the highest spiritual beings. The cooperative activity of all of these units and streams results in what we call “I.”

So there is this humanity that we serve in our limited ways. Conscious service begins with a recognition of our unity with this greater Whole, and with a deepening understanding of the ways we participate within it. Humanity in another sense is an as-yet-unrealized ideal. In our behaviors and present level of development, we are not yet fully human. On numerous occasions HPB compared so-called “human” behavior with that of animals. To the degree that the focus of our consciousness lies in the realm of desire, selfishness, separation, humans become “the most consciously and intelligently bestial of all animals” (HPB).

Genuine, or realized humanity, is what we strive toward. The realized human, it is said in the Stanzas of Dzyan, has within themselves the “mind to embrace the universe,” a holistic, all-embracing mind. This is still a distant goal for us. When we speak of service to humanity, it is twofold. We give service to the collective whole by serving the individuals and groups which form its body; and we are servants of the divine ideal planted within us in our efforts to root ourselves in its all-embracing consciousness.

Cultivating

How do we serve humanity? There are many organizations in the world that focus on service to humanity: the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and so on. What is particular to the service that the TS envisions? In the Mission Statement it says, “to serve humanity by cultivating an ever-deepening understanding and realization.” Let us examine what might be meant by “cultivating.” It is a very particular term that normally relates to gardeners, or people who focus on growing or caring for plants. It is directly linked to the natural world and to the processes of life and consciousness.

Just planting a seed in the ground does not make someone a gardener. A person who takes on the role of caring for plants must engage in an intensive study of the cycles of Nature and the potentials of the seeds. They have to be aware of the needs and requirements for the growth of these living things, and be prepared to provide for these needs at the proper moments. All of this is involved in the process of cultivation.

The TS exists to bring about a flowering of a deeply hidden human potential—a Divine Seed. What is the seed that is planted within humanity that the TS exists to nurture? The next portion of the Mission Statement gives an indication.

Ever-Deepening

We are here “to serve humanity by cultivating an ever-deepening understanding and realization.” “Ever-deepening” speaks to not only the direction but the nature of this process.

The fact that this cultivation we engage in is without limits means that it is continually deepening. Often in spiritual dialogues we talk about “depths” and “heights.” In a way, “depth” and “height” are synonymous terms for a certain expansion of consciousness. As a word, “ever-deepening” is perhaps more appropriate, because the idea of depth tends to draw our awareness inward, whereas height seems to move awareness up and out. The intention of the language is to turn our vision inward.

Understanding

We make a mistake in our appreciation of the meaning of “understanding” if we confuse it with “knowledge.” The two are different in nature and quality. Knowledge can exist in the complete absence of genuine understanding. It is very common for people of profound knowledge to have no sense of its relationship with all other things, which is the basis of understanding. This condition of mind is so evident that we should not require any additional proof beyond our daily observation. All we need to do is to look at recent history, at any major scientific invention or discovery that has come into the world—whether it is electricity, atomic energy, or biological substances. To the understanding mind each revelation of Nature’s powers deepens one’s recognition of relationship with the world around us, with others, and with invisible realms.

A sense of connection is a necessary component of the understanding mind. But, to take the example of electricity, driven by the mind that is focused only on knowledge, one of its early uses was in capital punishment—electrocution of prisoners. Rather than to behead, hang, or shoot someone, the knowledge-bound human genius, which made creative use of electricity possible, used it to kill other human beings. The discovery of atomic energy had the same result, but worse. Instead of killing single individuals, its very first use was in war and the massive annihilation of human life. Knowledge can be used in ways that deny connection and relationship with all life. Understanding, on the other hand, is the perception of relationship; it is an expression of the intuition, of buddhi. It is a recognition of unity.

Realization

We are here to “serve humanity by cultivating an ever-deepening understanding and realization.” Realization means a full awareness, whether it is of an aspect of the Divine Wisdom or, in the case of a realized person, the total awareness of an undivided state of being. In a sense, realization is the necessary outcome of a deepening understanding.

The Ageless Wisdom

The Mission Statement specifies an understanding and realization of three things. First, the Ageless Wisdom, sometimes referred to as Sanatana Dharma, the Eternal Wisdom. Within Theosophical circles we sometimes find “Ageless Wisdom” and “Ancient Wisdom” being used synonymously. Although the two terms are closely related, they express different ideas.

“Ancient Wisdom” refers to a specific expression of the Ageless Wisdom tradition, something that has already come into existence, that has a history. The Greek and Egyptian Mystery schools, with their specific deities and ritual, and Vedic practice in India are some examples of Ancient Wisdom—specific expressions of the Ageless Wisdom, appropriate for a certain time, place, and people. “Ageless,” by definition, applies to the past, present, and whatever traditions develop in the future. It is the “rootless root” from which all else springs. At the commencement of our current cycle of growing global interconnection, the most recent expression of the Ageless Wisdom was introduced with the founding of the TS in 1875. At some point in a distant future, Theosophy, as we have come to know it, will also fall into the category of an Ancient Wisdom: completely true, eternal in its nature, but very specific and time-bound in terms of its form of expression. This is the ever-renewing nature of Theosophy—the Ageless Wisdom.

Spiritual Self-Transformation

The Theosophical work we do as individuals we describe as “spiritual self-transformation.” It is rooted in the idea that the self, the norm of separative, personality-based living, can be transformed, acted upon by the indwelling spirit in ways that make it transparent to what Annie Besant described as the “Hidden Light shining in every creature.”

What is involved in transformation? Probably the process is simpler than the way we generally approach it. It is not a matter of adding more ideas or knowledge. The purpose of the knowledge that we accumulate is to assist in stripping away the many obstacles that we have created within ourselves to the natural and ever-present flow of spirit.

The Unity of All Life

The final words of the Mission Statement of the TS are “the unity of all life”: “an ever-deepening understanding and realization of the Ageless Wisdom, spiritual self-transformation, and the unity of all life.” The Mission Statement ends where the work of the Theosophical Society begins. The First Object of the TS is brotherhood, which could also be expressed as unity. There is no spirituality in the absence of the realization of unity or oneness. Unity is the basis of all understanding, spirituality, and even physical well-being. Even at the level of our personality, there is no strength where unity is absent. When we look at a small child in its first efforts to walk, the child fails time after time. The reason for the failure is that the newborn body has yet to become united with its various parts. The muscles of the arms and legs are not fully under the control of the person. In human relations the absence of unity expresses itself as fragmentation, weakness, and illness.

The basis of everything that we call Theosophical comes back to the unity of all life. Life is omnipresent and is necessarily intelligent, intelligence expressed in movement. All is in motion—not randomly, but in a patterned manner. Life’s underlying intelligence impresses itself on matter. Whether it is gravity, electromagnetism, or karma and reincarnation, we can speak about the Laws of Nature or the Laws of the Universe, because there is an intelligent patterning to life that we can perceive.

This brief article has been an attempt to highlight a few of the thoughts and insights that arise in dwelling on the Mission Statement. In order for it to come to life for us, we must each make our own exploration, in thought and in quiet reflection, allowing its depths to unfold for us. Like anything that is truly Theosophical in nature, the depths that are possible for us to uncover are without limit.
So, once again, the Mission of the Theosophical Society is:

To serve humanity by cultivating an ever-deepening understanding and realization of the Ageless Wisdom, spiritual self-transformation, and the unity of all life.

VOLUME 107, NUMBER 1

CONTENTS

The Mission of the Theosophical Society
Tim Boyd

Consciousness after Death
Kendra Smith

The Human Principles in Early Theosophical Literature
Doss McDavid

Preparing for Death and After
Nelda Samarel

Suicide and the Ageless Wisdom
Amber LeFevour

Spirit Life in Cemeteries
Charles Shahar

From the Editor's Desk

Viewpoint: Questions for a Lifetime
Barbara Hebert

Members' Forum: An Energetic Journey of the Soul
Desiree Holmes Scherni