Quest Magazine

Rene Schwaller de Lubicz and the Intelligence of the Heart

Originally printed in the January-February 2000 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Lachman, Gary. "Rene Schwaller de Lubicz and the Intelligence of the Heart." Quest 89.1 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2000): 4-11

By Gary Lachman

René Schwaller de Lubicz (1887–1961) is known to English readers primarily for his work in uncovering the spiritual and cosmological insights of ancient Egypt. In books like Esotericism and Symbol, The Temple in Man, Symbol and the Symbolic, The Egyptian Miracle, and the monumental The Temple of Man--whose long awaited English translation has finally appeared--Schwaller de Lubicz argued, among other things, that Egyptian civilization is much older than orthodox Egyptologists suggest, a claim receiving renewed interest through the recent work of Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval.

If his view of Egyptian antiquity wasn't enough to place him securely beyond the pale, he also argued that the core of ancient Egyptian culture was a fundamental insight into "the laws of creation." Everything about Egyptian civilization, from the construction of the pyramids to the shape of a beer mug, de Lubicz claimed to be motivated by a central metaphysical vision about the nature of cosmic harmony and an awareness of humanity's place in the evolution of consciousness. As his translator Deborah Lawlor remarks (introduction to Nature Word 47), Schwaller de Lubicz's Egyptian studies are only a part of his overall work as a metaphysician and philosopher.

Born in Alsace-Lorraine, then part of Germany, René Schwaller grew up in a polyglot atmosphere. (He was later given the title "de Lubicz" by the Lithuanian poet and diplomat O. V. de Lubicz Milosz, for his efforts on behalf of Lithuania in the aftermath of World War I.) Alsace-Lorraine has oscillated between French and German rule many times since Schwaller's birth, and this Franco-Germanic blend lends a curious characteristic to his work. As Christopher Bamford (introduction to Schwaller's Study of Numbers 1) suggests, Schwaller thought in German, but wrote in French. Added to the inherent difficulties of expressing nonlinear, "living" insights in "dead" linear language, this odd combination places many obstacles before a first-time reader. As he wrote apropos the insights into "functional consciousness," presented in his truly hermetic work, Nature Word (129): "Nature had shown me a great mountain, crowned with a peak of immaculate whiteness, but she was unable to teach me the way leading to it."

Readers wishing to grasp Schwaller's insights may feel that they, too, have found themselves at the foot of a very steep mountain. This challenging prospect would not have fazed Schwaller. He believed knowledge was the right only of those willing to make the effort to achieve it, the elite who would endure suffering in their pursuit of wisdom. This sensibility influenced his political views as well.

Early Years, Bergson, and Matisse

Schwaller's father was a chemist--apparently wealthy--and the young René grew up in a world of science, nature and art. Dreamy walks in the Alsatian forests followed hours spent painting and "experimenting." He also had two peculiar experiences. In 1894, at the age of seven, Schwaller had a kind of mystical insight into the nature of the divine. This glimpse of metaphysical reality would return seven years later when, at fourteen, he experienced another insight, this one into matter. "What is the origin of matter?" the budding metaphysician asked himself. The question occupied him the rest of his life.

In his late teens, Schwaller left home and went to Paris. He studied painting under Henri Matisse, who at that time was deeply influenced by the work of the most famous philosopher of the age, Henri Bergson. Today Bergson gets little more than a mention in books on the history of philosophy, but in the years before World War I he was world-known, immensely influential for his philosophy of intuition. Bergson argued against the static, mechanistic perception of the world, in favor of a living vital participation with its essence, the famous élan vital or life force. He was also something of a mystic. In one of his last books, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), written after his popularity had declined, Bergson made his famous remark that the universe was a machine for "making gods," a formulation Schwaller would not have found much fault with.

Science and Theosophy

Along with Matisse and Bergson, Schwaller came under the influence of the new physics of Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Like many people today, Schwaller believed that the strange world of quantum physics and relativity opened the door to a universe more in line with the cosmologies of the ancients, and less compatible with the Newtonian clockwork world of the nineteenth century. He was especially stimulated by the idea of complementarity, developed by the Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, and the uncertainty principle of Werner Heisenberg.

Bohr sought to end the debate over the nature of light--whether it was best described as a wave or as a particle--by opting for a position that would see it as both. Heisenberg's "uncertainty"--which caused Einstein to retort famously that "God does not play dice with the universe"--argued that we cannot know both the position and the speed of an elementary particle: pinpointing one obscures the other.

Schwaller would agree with Einstein about God's attitude toward gambling. But he appreciated that complementarity and uncertainty demand a stretch of our minds beyond the "either/or" of syllogistic logic, to an understanding of how reality works. Complementarity and uncertainty ask us to hold mutually exclusive ideas together--the basic idea behind a Zen koan. The result, Schwaller knew, can be an illogical but illuminating insight.

This "simultaneity of opposite states" plays a great part in Schwaller's understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics. It characterizes what he calls symbolique, a way of holding together the object of sense perception and the content of inner knowing, in a kind of creative polarity. When the Egyptians saw the hieroglyph of a bird, he argued, they knew it was a sign for the actual, individual creature, but they also knew it was a symbol of the "cosmic function" that the creature exemplified--flight--as well as all the myriad characteristics associated with it. Hieroglyphics did not merely designate; they evoked. As he wrote in Symbol and the Symbolic (40), "the observation of a simultaneity of mutually contradictory states . . . demonstrates the existence of two forms of intelligence"--an idea the early twentieth century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead would discuss, with many similarities to Schwaller's thought, in his book, Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (1927).

Our rational, scientific intelligence is of the mind and the senses. The other form of intelligence, whose most total expression Schwaller eventually located in the civilization of ancient Egypt, is of "the heart." This search for the "intelligence of the heart" became Schwaller's life work.

Schwaller believed that the appearance of the new physics indicated humanity was moving toward a massive shift in awareness, an idea he shared with his near contemporary Jean Gebser. He related this shift to the precession of the equinoxes and the coming Age of Aquarius. But he also believed that science alone couldn't provide the deepest insights into the true character of the world. For this, he argued, a new kind of consciousness is necessary.

He sought signs of this new consciousness among less mainstream thinkers. In 1913–1914, Schwaller was active in French Theosophical groups and, one suspects, in occult circles in Paris in general. He read widely in Madame Blavatsky and other occult thinkers, and published a series of articles on the philosophy of science in Le Theosophe. Soon after, in 1917, at the age of thirty, he published his first book, A Study of Numbers, a Pythagorean essay on the metaphysical meaning of mathematics.

That book's central idea is at the heart of Schwaller's thought: the inexplicable splitting--or "scission," as he called it--of the unmanifest One, the Absolute, into the many--a question that, in a less mystical manner, occupies many leading cosmologists today.

For Schwaller this "irrational" eruption of absolute unity into the world of space and time is the central mystery of existence, the primal secret that will forever elude the simplifying grasp of the purely cerebral mind. Our rational mind is unable to grasp the central mystery, he argues, because our "sensory organization clearly seems to be imperfect." This condition can only be alleviated through a "perfecting of consciousness," something, he would later argue, the ancient Egyptians knew all about. "I earnestly anticipate the time when an enlightened being will be able to bring the world proof of the mystery of the beginning," he wrote in Sacred Science.

Alchemy and Fulcanelli

Dissatisfied with the scientific prejudices of the present time, Schwaller sought kindred spirits in the past. The study of alchemy fed his appetite for spiritual knowledge. Unlike many drawn to the occult, Schwaller's interest in science gave him a hard-edged, practical mind, unsatisfied with vague talk of higher worlds. Esotericism, he believed, should include factual knowledge of how the world worked; he rejected Jung's interpretation of alchemy as a purely psychic affair. Alchemy was a spiritual practice involving the consciousness of the alchemist, but it also involved objective insights into the structure of matter. This belief in the reality of objective knowledge fueled Schwaller's later investigations into Egyptian civilization.

He was fascinated with the esoteric secrets of Gothic architecture and became acquainted with the man whose name is most associated with the "mystery of the cathedrals," the pseudonymous Fulcanelli. Sometime between 1918 and 1920 in Montparnasse, Schwaller met Fulcanelli, who had gathered a band of disciples around him, aptly called "The Brothers of Heliopolis." (Schwaller would later claim that the word alchemy meant "out of Egypt.") Alchemy had found a home in the strange world of the Parisian occult underground, and Fulcanelli and the Brothers of Heliopolis studied the works of the great alchemists, like Nicolas Flammel and Basil Valentinus.

Fulcanelli and Schwaller met often and discussed the Great Work, the transmutation of matter, a possibility that the recent advances in atomic theory seemed to bring closer to reality. Then one day, Fulcanelli told Schwaller about a manuscript he had stolen from a Paris bookshop. While cataloguing an ancient book for a bookseller, Fulcanelli discovered a strange piece of writing: a six-page manuscript in fading ink, describing, Fulcanelli claimed, the importance of color in the alchemical process. But, said Schwaller, when it came to alchemy, Fulcanelli was a materialist, and so he didn't grasp the true nature of color. Schwaller enlightened him.

Tired of the distractions of Paris, Schwaller moved to Grasse, in the south of France, where he invited Fulcanelli to join him in an alchemical retreat. There, after much work, they performed a successful opus, involving the secrets of "alchemical stained glass." The peculiarly evocative reds and blues of the rose windows of cathedrals like the unearthly Chartres had eluded artisans since the Middle Ages. In Grasse, Schwaller and Fulcanelli may have cracked the formula.

But there was tension between the two, and the suspicion exists that Fulcanelli stole more than a manuscript from a bookseller. The ideas for his most famous work, The Mystery of the Cathedrals (1925), are said to have been taken from Schwaller de Lubicz. Fulcanelli returned to Paris and against Schwaller's advice, tried to perform their work again. He wasn't successful. This was, Schwaller claimed, because Fulcanelli left out essential ingredients known only to him. Ignoring Schwaller's warnings, Fulcanelli persisted in performing the work in Paris. But his strange death from gangrene, a day before he was to reveal the secret to his students, brought an end to his opus.

Esoteric Politics

Schwaller found himself moving toward more political methods of embodying esoteric wisdom. He had already met the mystical poet O. V. de Lubicz Milosz, who had bestowed a knighthood on him. Heraldry and chivalric virtue became central items in Schwaller's personal philosophy. As he wrote in Nature Word, "The proper path leads you first in search of your 'Totem,' that is to a spiritual Heraldry." This is because "you cannot step into the shoes of another person, for you are yourself a whole, a particular aspect of universal Consciousness." He had also received his mystical name, "Aor" or "intellectual light" in Hebrew. In later years, his students would address him in this way.

Esotericism demands that one not only deal with esoteric truth intellectually, but as a living practice. Around this time, Schwaller took this maxim to heart and set out to bring to post World War I French politics some of the values and ideals of esotericism.

The merger of politics and esotericism was not uncommon in the Europe devastated by World War I. Rudolf Steiner had written something of a political bestseller with his book on the restructuring of Europe, The Threefold Commonwealth (1919). But Schwaller's political views were very different from Steiner's. Les Veilleurs ("The Watchmen" or "Vigilant Ones"), the political society Schwaller and Milosz began, espoused a decidedly conservative and elitist philosophy. Aside from a few exceptions, this seems common to many occult thinkers at that time, from W. B. Yeats to the more dubious individuals making up the notorious Thule Society. (Oddly enough, Rudolf Hess, a member of the Thule Society, was also one of "The Vigilant Ones.") Isha Schwaller de Lubicz, Schwaller's wife (herself the author of a strange work of Egyptian esoterica, Her-Bak), wrote that the aims of Les Veilleurs included "the common defense of the principles of human rights . . . the supreme safeguards of . . . independence."

Yet according to André VandenBroeck, author of Al-Kemi: Hermetic, Occult, Political and Private Aspects of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1987), these sentiments mixed with less democratic views--as well as a taste for dark shirts, riding pants, and boots—a questionable fashion statement in the years leading up to Hitler. A distaste for modern society and civilization runs throughout Schwaller's writings, a dissatisfaction with "mass man," a Nietzschean disdain of "the herd" that he shares with other esoteric thinkers like Julius Evola and René Guénon. It is clear that individuals like Schwaller would find our increasingly lowest-common-denominator society revolting, and we must see his interest in the pharaonic theocracy of ancient Egypt in light of his belief in the absolute value of the individual consciousness in a time of increasing spiritual and cultural mediocrity. But Schwaller's belief that contemporary human beings are by and large degenerate and his faith in an esoteric elite preparing for a spiritual renaissance often smack unappetizingly of less philosophically informed attempts to reestablish "traditional values" in the modern world.

Schwaller soon realized that politics are an unwieldy vehicle for truth and accepted that a literal theocracy wasn't feasible in his time. From the chivalric Les Veilleurs, he moved to a more withdrawn, communal approach. In the 1920s, René and Isha moved to Switzerland and established Suhalia, a center for research in a variety of scientific and alchemical studies. Physics, chemistry, microphotography, homeopathy, astronomy, woodworking, printing, weaving, glassmaking, and theatre--all found a place in Suhalia. There Schwaller developed a motor that ran on vegetable oil, which he hoped would help France to use less gasoline, an ecological vision ahead of its time. A ship designed according to the "principle of number and proportion" showed considerable capacity for speed and balance. At the same time he studied botany, and perfected his method of producing "alchemical glass."

Also at Suhalia, Schwaller's views on the evolution of consciousness began to coalesce. In a book distributed to his students called L'Appel du feu (1926), he recorded a series of inspirations via a higher intelligence that he called "Aor." These revealed to him the true significance of time, space, measure, and harmony. The basic insight was to think simply, to abstract oneself from time and space, and to "consider only the aspect common to every thing and every living impulse." As he would later write, "To cultivate oneself to be simple and to see simply is the first task of anyone wishing to approach the sacred symbolism of Ancient Egypt." This is necessary because "the obvious blinds us," the obvious being our perception of the world via cerebral consciousness alone, which divides, analyzes, and "granulates" experience--Bergson's "static perception." Schwaller would later discover that the Egyptians associated this type of consciousness with the "evil" god Set; its opposite, the "intelligence of the heart," they associated with Horus.

Schwaller claimed that the knowledge he received at Suhalia was from a past life. Like Plato, Schwaller believed that all real knowledge is a kind of re-membering--a bringing back together what had been separated, a reparation of the "primordial scission."

Suhalia continued until 1929, when finances caused Schwaller to shut it down. The next few years were spent at Grasse and aboard his yacht. Two years of comparative solitude in Palma de Mallorca ended with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The moment seemed right to follow up an idea Isha and René had toyed with for some time--a journey to Egypt.

Luxor and Conscious Man

Ironically, it was Isha, not René, who first felt the pull of Egypt. Concerned with alchemy, matter, and the evolution of consciousness, Schwaller hadn't thought much about Egypt. But Isha knew they had to go. In 1936, on a visit to the tomb of Rameses IX in Alexandria, Schwaller had a kind of revelation. A picture represented the pharaoh as a right-angle triangle with the proportions 3:4:5, his upraised arm adding another unit. Schwaller thought it demonstrated the Pythagorean theorem, centuries before Pythagoras was born. From the picture it was clear to him that the knowledge of the medieval masons had its roots in ancient Egypt. For the next fifteen years, until 1951, Schwaller de Lubicz remained in Egypt, investigating the evidence for what he believed was an ancient system of psychological, cosmological, and spiritual knowledge.

Most of Schwaller's work was done at the temple at Luxor, his study of its remarkable architecture and design a natural outcome of his early fascination with the mystery of number. On his first visit in 1937, Schwaller was impressed with a tremendous insight. The temple, with its strange, "crooked" alignments, was, he was certain, a conscious exercise in the laws of harmony and proportion. He called it the Parthenon of Egypt—somewhat anachronistically, since he believed Luxor was concrete proof that the Egyptians understood the laws of harmony and proportion before the Greeks.

Schwaller searched Luxor for evidence of the golden section, phi. If the golden section had been used, that would prove the Egyptians had knowledge of it much earlier than the Greeks, a revelation that alone would cause an uproar in orthodox Egyptology. But as John Anthony West in The Serpent and the Sky (1978), a study of Schwaller de Lubicz, points out, phi is more than a central item in classical architecture. It is the mathematical archetype of the manifest universe, the means by which we have an "asymmetrical" "lumpy" world of galaxies and planets, and not a bland, homogenous sameness, a question that contemporary cosmologists are also concerned with. Schwaller linked phi to the orbits of the planets, the proportions of Gothic cathedrals, and the forms of plants and animals. It was a "form constant," a blueprint for reality, a law of creation. And the Egyptians knew it.

The Egyptians knew much else: the precession of the equinoxes, the circumference of the globe, and the secrets of pi. The knowledge of the Egyptians indeed made the Greeks seem like children. Their forgotten mathematical wisdom led Schwaller increasingly to realize that Egyptian civilization must be far older than we suspect--the clear evidence of water erosion on the Sphinx also suggests that. He concluded that their knowledge may have been inherited from vanished Atlantis. But more important than any of those conclusions, was his growing conviction that the Egyptians had a radically different consciousness from ours. They viewed the world symbolically, seeing in nature a "writing" conveying truths about the metaphysical forces behind creation—"the Neters," as Egyptian gods are called. It was a vision Schwaller believed we desperately need to regain.

At the center of this vision was Conscious Man, the King. For the ancient Egyptians, Conscious Man was the crown and aim of the universe, a perception many nature-centered mystics would dispute. But Conscious Man was not "man as we know him." He was the individual in whom the "intelligence of the heart" has awakened, one who has had the experience of "functional consciousness."

Functional Consciousness

Schwaller believed Luxor was a kind of living organism, a colossal compendium of esoteric truth, whose every detail, from its total design down to its very materials, voiced one central revelation: that Conscious Man was the goal of cosmic evolution. "Each individual type in Nature is a stage in the cosmic embryology which culminates in man," he wrote. Different species, Schwaller believed, developed various "functions"—what the Egyptians called "Neters" and we translate as "gods"--which have their apotheosis and integration in Conscious Man.

The essence of Schwaller's evolutionism has to do with what he calls "functional consciousness," an idea we can benefit from understanding, regardless of our opinions of elites or theocracies. And although Schwaller developed his ideas about functional consciousness in an Egyptian context, that context is ultimately not necessary. The essence of those ideas goes back to Bergson and intuition. Needless to say, Schwaller took this basic insight and, with his Egyptian revelations, developed an original, powerful, and imaginatively thrilling symbolic system.

"Functional consciousness" is a way of knowing reality from the inside. Schwaller believed ancient Egypt was based on this inner knowing, very unlike our own outer-oriented one. The ancient Egyptians, he argued, were aware of the limitations of purely cerebral consciousness, the Set mind that "granulates" experience into fragments of time and space and is behind our increasing abuse of nature and of each other. Granulated experience produces our familiar world of disconnected things, each a kind of "island reality." From this perspective, when I look at the world, I see a foreign, alien landscape, which I can know only by taking it apart and analyzing it. As the poet Wordsworth wrote, "We murder to dissect."

But as Schwaller wrote in Nature Word (134), "The Universe is wholly activity." There is another way of knowing, one very similar to Taoist forms of perception, which can heal the ruptures of cerebral consciousness, without recourse to dubious ideas of elites or theocracies. In a section called "The Way" (135), Schwaller advises us to "leave all dialectic behind and follow the path of the Powers." Poetically, he continues by calling on us to

Tumble with the rock which falls from the mountain.

Seek light and rejoice with the rosebud about to open:

. . .

labor with the parsimonious ant;

gather honey with the bee;

expand in space with the ripening fruit.

All of those injunctions are classic examples of the kind of "knowing from the inside" that Bergson had in mind in his talk on intuition. In this way, we participate with the world, rather than hold it at arm's length, objectifying it, as modern science is prone to do. With recent developments in genetics, this "objectification" is now dangerously focused on ourselves.

My aim is not to reduce Schwaller's remarkable achievement to a simple variation on Bergson. Understanding what "functional consciousness" is and developing methods of achieving it are two different things. Schwaller's immense work on an entire civilization devoted to "inner knowing" entails ways of reaching this deeper perception, and we would be wrong to ignore it. But I think it's important to bring the essence of Schwaller's thought to an audience possibly put off by his talk of elites. The "intelligence of the heart" may be difficult to acquire, but it is something we and the whole world—not only a select group of enlightened theocrats— can benefit from by experiencing. In the long run, Schwaller himself understood this. "To be of the Elite," he wrote (Nature Word 102), "is to want to give and to be able to give . . . to draw on the inexhaustible source and give this food to those who are hungry and thirsty." With his study of ancient Egypt, this is a truth Schwaller de Lubicz took to heart.

References

Bauval, Robert, and Graham Hancock. Keeper of Genesis: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind. London: Heinemann, 1996.
Bergson, Henri. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton. New York: Holt, 1935. Orig. pub. 1932.
Fulcanelli (pseud.). The Mystery of the Cathedrals. (Le Mystere des cathédrales et l'interprétation ésotérique des symboles hermétiques du grand oeuvre.) 3rd ed. Paris: Pauvert, 1964. Orig. pub. 1925.
Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin. Trans. of Ursprung und Gegenwart by Noel Barstad and Algis Mickunas. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1982.
Hancock, Graham, and Robert Bauval. The Message of the Sphinx: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind. New York: Crown, 1996.
Schwaller de Lubicz, Isha. Her-Bak. 2 vols. Cairo, 1950. Trans. as Her-Bak "Chick-pea": The Living Face of Egypt and Her-Bak: Egyptian Initiate. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1954, 1967.
Schwaller de Lubicz, René. L'Appel du feu. Saint-Moritz, Switerland: Montalia, 1926.
Schwaller de Lubicz, René. The Egyptian Miracle: An Introduction to the Wisdom of the Temple. New York: Inner Traditions, 1985.
Schwaller de Lubicz, René. Esotericism and Symbol. New York: Inner Traditions, 1985.
Schwaller de Lubicz, René. Nature Word. West Stockbridge, MA: Lindisfarne, 1982.
Schwaller de Lubicz, René. Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy. New York: Inner Traditions, 1988.
Schwaller de Lubicz, René. A Study of Numbers: A Guide to the Constant Creation of the Universe. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1986.
Schwaller de Lubicz, René. Symbol and the Symbolic: Egypt, Science, and the Evolution of Consciousness. Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1978.
Schwaller de Lubicz, René. The Temple in Man. Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1977.
Schwaller de Lubicz, René. The Temple of Man: Apet of the South at Luxor. 2 vols. Trans. Deborah Lawlor and Robert Lawlor. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1998.
Steiner, Rudolf. The Threefold Commonwealth. New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1943. Also pub. as The Threefold Social Order. Orig. pub. 1919.
VandenBroeck, André, Al-Kemi: Hermetic, Occult, Political and Private Aspects of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. 1987.
West, John Anthony, Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1993.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1927. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect: Barbour-Page Lectures, University of Virginia, 1927. New York: Fordham University Press, 1985.

Gary Lachman is an American writer living in London. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Mojo, Gnosis, and Lapis, as well as the Quest. Currently he is writing a book on the occult revival of the 1960s, to be published by Macmillan.

Green Karma

By Aidan Rankin

Originally printed in the JANUARY- FEBRUARY 2008 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Rankin, Aidan. "Green Karma." Quest 96.1 (JANUARY- FEBRUARY 2008): 17-20.

Theosophical Society - Aidan Rankin is on the National Council of the Theosophical Society in England. His book, The Jain Path: Ancient Wisdom for the West is published by O Books (Winchester/Washington, DC) Aidan is currently working on a book about many-sidedness, karma, and ecology One of the most potent images associated with the ancient Jain tradition of India is that of the monk dressed in white who covers his mouth with a band of cloth, and as he moves, sweeps the ground before him with a delicate brush. These devices are simple precautions against injuring any form of life, however minuscule, in the course of breathing or walking. They reflect the Jain principle of iryasamiti, which means "careful action" or "care in movement." Jain ascetics are required to take that principle to its logical conclusion. This will help them develop the higher consciousness that can point towards enlightenment, or moksha: release from the cosmic drama of material attachment and the repetitive cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Lay men and women also practice careful action, but even in a modified form, the practice might still seem radical when viewed from a mainstream Western perspective. Jains will avoid killing wasps or swatting flies, for instance, adopt a vegetarian diet, and refrain from occupations and activities that involve exploitation of or harm towards fellow humans, fellow creatures, or the earth.

Careful action is more than merely abstaining from abusive and harmful behavior. It involves considering the consequences of—and crucially, the intention behind—all forms of action. In Jainism, the concept of action encompasses thought. Thoughts and ideas can harm or uplift the thinker as they are the starting point for all acts of himsa or injury, as well as all beautiful, creative, loving actions. Iryasamiti is closely associated with the spiritual ideal of ahimsa: non-violence or non-injury to life. This, too, is far more than simple abstinence. It is about cultivating an attitude of calm and a state of equanimity through the practice of maitri (friendship with all beings) and recognizing that worldly entanglements, including material gain, political power, or academic success are but transient trifles of no ultimate significance.

Careful action is based on recognition of the four following ideas:

Each life—and this includes all forms of life—is individual, unique, and precious.
All life is interconnected and interdependent.
Human beings and their concerns are but one small part of the earth and the cosmos; therefore, we should approach the rest of existence with humility and modesty.
Human intelligence has evolved to give men and women the capacity for spiritual development and the possibility of liberation. However, this intelligence is a double-edged sword for it confers the possibility of choosing destructive over creative power, gross materialism over spiritual insight, himsa over ahimsa.

Careful action is therefore a form of conscious choice to minimize harm and act in ways that benefit others, both human and non-human.

The brushes and mouth coverings of Jain ascetics apply the principle of iryasamiti in as exact a manner as is humanly possible. They also dramatize for laymen and women the importance of respect for life in all its variety and the knowledge, discovered millennia before microscopes, that the tiniest life forms although invisible to the human eye could have the most profound significance. Iryasamiti stems from the understanding that human beings are not separate from, above, or beyond the rest of nature; that the earth does not exist for us to exploit; that resources are finite and that the web of life is as fragile as it is intricate. In other words, the practice of careful action corresponds well with a principle at the heart of the emerging green consciousness: the reduction of our ecological footprint.

The idea that humans have the responsibility to conserve and protect life and that we should use our intelligence to work with the grain of nature, is derived from spiritual awareness at least as much as political consciousness. Reason underpins and science confirms our sense of ourselves as part of the natural world, a world that is beyond monetary value because it sustains all of life. The Jains call this Jiva Daya—identification with all living beings. Familiar to Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, this oldest and most powerful form of spiritual sensibility is being slowly rediscovered by an urban civilization that has reached the limits of its possibilities. The realization that we should consume less, individually and collectively, combines rational self-interest with an ethic of environmental and social justice. All but the most obdurate now realize that our present patterns of consumption have already eroded the quality of human life, and if continued, could destroy life on earth. Consumer culture destroys the ecology of human relationships as well. The breakdown of communities, the "bowling alone" society of narrow, cheerless individualism, violent crime at home, aggression and brutality overseas all stem from the notion of unlimited human entitlement—the idea that we can, and must have more. For the Jains, this demand for more is a sign of limited human awareness rather than progress, as we in the West have long assumed. For millennia, Jains have realized that living as simply as possible is the key to a balanced and fulfilled life. When we discriminate between genuine needs and passing desire, we are acting in our own interests as well as connecting with something larger than ourselves.

That sense of connectedness at the heart of Jainism arises from the awareness that every life is unique and the individual is supreme. To those used to the Western "either/or" reasoning, this might seem paradoxical. We associate individualism, after all, with "bowling alone," with rugged self-reliance, or even Ayn Rand's "virtue of selfishness." Western thought associates connectedness with subordination and we believe that we must continuously choose between the two principles. Jainism, based on "both/and" rather than "either/or" sees the issue in more complex terms. It promotes a more rounded view of individualism and individual liberty in which individual fulfillment is identified with social responsibility and restraint, while greed and hedonism destroy the true self. Furthermore, the concepts of "social" and "society" extend to animals and ecosystems as well as humans. The Jain idea of self differs radically from that of the West. Rather than simply being an individual in his or her present existence, the self in Jain teachings is a strand of continuity between existences, which was shaped by past lives that span the whole evolutionary spectrum, and now makes decisions and choices that will affect future lives. Therefore, self-awareness involves an understanding of genetic and spiritual evolution along with a sense of unity in diversity. Each self is equal in that each is part of the same process and is on the same journey towards higher consciousness.

Jains have always been aware that the universe is teeming with life. Each individual—human, animal, plant, or micro-organism—contains a jiva, which in Jain terms is a unit of life energy, a life monad; somewhat similar to the Western idea of a soul. Every jiva is on the same journey of the spirit, whether it is conscious of this or not. Unlike most Buddhist and Vedantic traditions, the Jain path does not lead to the extinction or transcendence of the self. Moksha is the fullest realization of the self, its return to its point of origin as pure consciousness, where it retains its individual identity. All the identities it assumes along the path to enlightenment are karmic embodiments, part of the process of self-discovery that is spiritual evolution. Material preoccupations are a confusion of jiva, the life force with ajiva, which is all that is not alive and contains no soul. Human destructiveness, including environmental despoliation, arises from attachment to ajiva and with this comes a false sense of supremacy over nature, closely akin to delusions of racial superiority. By contrast, Jiva Daya is recognition of the life force that is contained in each of our fellow beings. Although unique, each jiva has the same essential characteristics as our own and is in the same situation of working through samsara, the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth.

It was this understanding of shared characteristics and common interests that led Mahavira, the Great Hero of the Jains and contemporary of Gautama Buddha, to the insight that "kindness to all beings is kindness to oneself" and that conversely "you are that which you intend to hit, injure, insult, torment, persecute, torture, enslave, or kill." This is surely an ecological message for our time, transcending mere conservation or protection to include a repudiation of all bigotry and violence in human relationships, as well as relationships between humans and fellow creatures. Just as they emphasize the relationship between hateful thoughts and violent acts, Jain teachings recognize that violent, exploitative relationships among humans —including vast disparities of income and access to education or health care—create the psychological conditions for violence against the earth. On the other hand, respect for the earth and its variety of life is linked intimately to cooperation between human beings and the pursuit of economic and social justice.

For twenty-first century men and women, the first step towards more harmonious relations with the planet is to adopt an attitude of non-violence and to question the false priorities associated with materialism, a shift of priorities from ajiva back to the source of life. Awareness that jiva is present in everything that lives, breathes, and moves points towards a spiritual democracy of all beings, in which each life form has its own place, its own indispensable role and its own legitimate viewpoint. The human concepts of rights and responsibilities extend to all of life, just as they cross the boundaries of race, caste or class, gender, and faith. Jains recognize the principle of biodiversity and give it a spiritual dimension.
Jainism's view of karma distinguishes it from other Indic traditions. For the Jains, karma is, as to Buddhists and Hindus, the cosmic law of cause and effect. All actions in the universe connect with each other and our own deeds influence our future as much as our present lives. But the principal meaning of karma in Jainism is a substance, made up of particles of subtle matter that adhere to the jiva and imprison it in the material world. Karma is a material bond as much as a spiritual process. When moksha is achieved, it is seen as a physical liberation, a release from the karmic bondage that weighs down the soul and entraps it in material concerns. The Christian image of shedding the "mortal coil" has resonance here. Karmic particles also have a muddying effect on the jiva. They reduce its clarity of vision and obscure its knowledge of itself.

In Jainism, as in modern physics, everything in the universe is cyclical. There is no creator god or First Cause. Instead the cosmos—and with it, life—arose spontaneously and passes continuously through upward and downward cycles, utsarpini and avasarpini, which last for many millions of years, and are divided into ages which are likened to the spokes on a wheel. Each jiva also spontaneously arises as a unit of pure consciousness. But its movements or vibrations bring it into contact with karma. The encasement of the jiva by karmic particles enmeshes it in the samsaric cycle, where it is reborn until it achieves enlightenment and returns to its point of origin as an unsullied, all-knowing jiva. Living simply and avoiding unnecessary luxuries brings spiritually aware men and women closer to that ideal, helping them to understand the austerities of Jain ascetics and the restraint displayed by even the wealthiest laypeople. The latter are obliged to use their wealth for the benefit of others, animals as much as humans. They are keenly aware that privilege, like human intelligence, brings with it material dangers, and that the most auspicious rebirth is as an ascetic, who is closest to freedom from karmic bonds.

Karmic bondage need not be a permanent condition and should not serve as an excuse for fatalism or pessimism. On the contrary, it gives us the opportunity to take control of our own lives, present and future, break with negative patterns, and rethink our priorities. At personal and political levels, these goals are identical with those of the ecology movement. Green philosophy, unlike deterministic doctrines such as neo-liberalism and Marxism, has the individual consciousness as its starting point. In the Jain worldview, the reduction of karmic influence is identified with the reduction of material consumption and the abandonment of the attachments. The widespread human addiction to materialism destroys our sense of true self and damages the planet. The attachments to which materialism gives rise restrict our thinking and lead us into one-sided positions, such as greed and fanaticism. Reduction of karma is achieved through careful action, and through the principle of aprigraha, or non-possessiveness. This means carefully evaluating our material requirements, but it also involves a new attitude of mind, by which the people, creatures, and natural formations around us are valued in their own right, rather than seen as objects to be controlled, dominated or suppressed.

Aparigraha means still more than this, for it requires us to clear our minds of clutter as well. Mental attachments are as karmic as material bonds. One of the most destructive forms of karma is known as mohaniya, the karma of delusion. It is associated with a conviction of absolute truth and the desire to impose that truth on others. The restrictive claim that "either you are with us or against us" is an explicit example of mohaniya, as are the actions of terrorists and the bigoted proclamations of fundamentalists, whatever faith they claim to represent. Mohaniya leads to mittyatva, a one-sided or distorted world view, which affects spiritual progress within this life and influences the prospects of an auspicious rebirth. Mittyatva is human arrogance, which spans the spectrum from self-righteous forms of political correctness, which more often hurt those they are meant to help, to the illusion of our dominance over nature. Measured conduct, friendship with all beings, and the cultivation of a quiet, calm mind all serve to lighten the karmic burden, so that it eventually falls away as illusory attachments are relinquished.

Clearing the mind of grasping impulses and controlling the desire to exercise gratuitous power are both part of the practice of ahimsa. Karmic influence is reduced through non-violence of the mind, which is achieved through contemplation and simple living, recognition that truth is multi-faceted and that all beings are working towards it, and that only at the moment of enlightenment can it be fully grasped. The starting point for green or ecological consciousness is similar, for it grows from a primal awareness of the complexity of living systems and the subtle interactions between them.

Jainism also shares with the Theosophical movement a perception that no single human idea can encapsulate the truth, and that our common search for enlightenment transcends all artificial barriers of faith. Jains call this approach anekantavada, or many-sidedness. They recognize that a diamond's clear light can be glimpsed through many facets. The summit of a mountain can be reached by many paths, some straight, some winding, but all pointing towards the same place. Many-sidedness celebrates the diversity of life and thought, but reaches beyond that diversity to the common source of life. What more suitable path could there be for the interesting times in which we find ourselves today?

Aidan Rankin is on the National Council of the Theosophical Society in England. His book, The Jain Path: Ancient Wisdom for the West is published by O Books (Winchester/Washington, DC), www.o-books.com . Aidan is currently working on a book about many-sidedness, karma, and ecology. Email: aidan.rankin@tiscali.co.uk

Alaya's Self

by Sue Prescott

Originally printed in the JANUARY- FEBRUARY 2008 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Prescott, Sue. "Alaya's Self." Quest 96.1 (JANUARY- FEBRUARY 2008): 13-15, 21.

O Hidden Life, vibrant in every atom;
O Hidden Light, shining in every creature;
O Hidden Love, embracing all in Oneness;
May all who feel themselves at one with Thee,
Know they are therefore one with every other.

—Annie Besant

Theosophical Society - Sue Prescott, MSW, is a social worker, theosophist, and frequent lecturer at the Seattle lodge and surrounding area. She is author of Realizing the Self Within—an overview of the concepts of spirituality that can be applied to relationships and self-improvement. Annie Besant's inspiring poem "O Hidden Life," beautifully expresses the unity of all life. It utilizes the image of light shining from every living thing to represent our connection with the Divine, and with everything in our world. We are all of the same Light.

Throughout the world, there are numerous cultural expressions of unity. Chief Seattle of the Suquamish Native American tribe (from whom the city of Seattle got its name) refers to the interconnectedness of everything in our world as the Web of Life. He says that each person is a delicate strand within this web (Gifford 47). He also speaks about the links we have with nature as he refers to the rivers as being "our brothers" (35).
The Australian Aboriginal culture recognizes the Unity of all through the attitude that there are no barriers or separations between one person and another. Their belief that "I am a part of every other and every other is a part of me," incorporates the idea of an all-encompassing "us" (Rose 232). Each person being given the same respect reflects their principle that "everyone is equal around the fire."

In Africa, the Zulu and Xhosa tribes have a word that represents unity—ubuntu. It was taught at the Parliament of the World—s Religions in South Africa in 1998. Ubuntu refers to the view of the world that says we exist only by the help of others. We are alive only because we were born from our mothers. We survive through the help of our families and communities. Our communities exist because of the work of those who came before us—our ancestors. Ubuntu refers to the support and caring that people give to one another.

Ubuntu is the concept of giving to others what we would want for ourselves. It incorporates the Golden Rule and recognizes that everyone has merit and is deserving of love. Ubuntu values people for just being the way they are. It regards everyone as being a part of one human family and acknowledges that the blood in all of us is the same.

The unity of ubuntu can be seen in friendship. The Chinese philosopher Mencius (372—289 BCE) poetically described friendship as being "one mind in two bodies." The Greek philosopher Zeno (340-265 BCE) expressed the same notion in the saying, "What is a friend? Another I" (Bartlett 81). The unity experienced between friends is not obvious to a superficial glance. On the surface, friendship looks as if there are just two people interacting—nothing more. But when we experience the oneness of friendship ourselves, we know this deeper truth to be so.

Jalalludin Rumi, the Sufi poet, wrote of the same sense of unity in, "I, you, he, she, we. In the garden of mystic lovers, these are not true distinctions" (Barks 133). He explores this further in, "Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They are in each other all along" (163).

In theosophical terminology, the essence of unity is defined as the Atman or the divine Monad. From the Atman comes the manifestation of all forms in our world. From the One comes the many. Inherent in the unity of the Atman is diversity, just like white light contains all the colors of the spectrum. The same is true in the human body. All the different organs and cells work together as one.

The unity of the Atman is not always apparent. Each person seems to be a self-contained entity independent from all others. We can clearly see where one body ends and another body begins. But the divine nature within each person transcends the individual differences and unifies us, just like five separate fingers are united in one hand. The personal, everyday self represents the individual—s body, emotions, and thinking mind, while the inner, spiritual Self is the unifying, divine aspect within each of us. We all are of the same spiritual essence--for at the level of the spiritual Self, we are all one. The holy writing of Judaism, the Talmud, Zevachim E: 3b, depicts this truth in the teaching, "A partition does not destroy the unity of an oven" (Kantrowitz 10).

Perceiving the inner Divinity of everything in our world is metaphorically described in Islamic Holy Scripture. In the Koran, 2:115, we find, "Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah." The Islamic mystic and poet, ibn ale Arabi, illustrates the same point: "When my Beloved appears, with what eye do I see Him? With His eye, not with mine, for none sees Him except Himself" (Nicholson 117). Describing the God within each one of us as being the one who recognizes the God in another is also a way of speaking about this unity at the level of the inner, spiritual Self.

Another Persian mystic, Bayazid of Bistam, wrote of the inner divine nature when he said, "I went from God to God, until they cried from me in me, —O Thou I!—" (Nicholson 12). Abu —l-Hasan Khurqani spoke of the same experience, "Do not seek until thou art sought, for when thou findest that which thou seekest, it will resemble thee" (99). Both mystics found peace within—the peace of the Self—by following the Sufi practice of fana, which is consciously dissolving the personality in order to accomplish baqa, or living solely as one with the Divine. The waning and the eventual disappearance of the personal self are poetically described by Abu —l-Hasan Khurqani when he says, "All things are contained in me, but there is no room for myself in me" (99).

In verse 219 of Voice of the Silence, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky presents the teachings of the ancient wisdom that call for us to "merge the Ocean in the drop and the drop within the Ocean." Human beings are mere individual drops in the ocean of life. The verse bids us to mute our distinct individual consciousness rooted in the personality to fuse with the larger "ocean" of collective consciousness. Transcending the identification with our individual, separated selves allows us to live as an expression of the inner, spiritual Self. This is true spirituality, for the word "spirituality," comes from the Latin root meaning "breath." This refers to the One Breath of which we all are a part.

Verse 217 of Voice of the Silence guides us to "Live and breathe in all . . . feel thyself abiding in all things, all things in Self." We are to unite with others at the level of our inner Self. This is where the promptings for Unity originate. The Self is Annie Besant—s shining light, emanating from each creature.

To "live and breathe in all" suggests that we should strive to interact in the world with concern and kindness toward others. These qualities are manifestations of compassion. Inverse 300 of Voice of the Silence, this powerful principle is emphasized: "Compassion is no attribute. It is the Law of laws—eternal harmony, Alaya's Self; . . . the fitness of all things, the law of love eternal." Compassion is the ultimate expression of Unity—Alaya's Self, which is the essence of the Universal Soul that is the root or basis of everything in our world. Alaya is the womb of the universe, the plenum or the fullness that is the source of life.

Stressing compassion as the Law of laws implies that, ultimately, there can be no other way to live. It is the fundamental principle upon which our world is based, for compassion arises out of the sense of oneness. Compassion in action is seen through forgiveness, helpfulness, and understanding—all of which exemplify the truth that there are no barriers between ourselves and others.

Compassion expressed in forgiveness shows the futility of holding on to resentment or anger because it not only hurts others but it also hurts us. The Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim 9:4, says, "Who takes vengeance or bears a grudge acts like one who, having cut one hand while handling a knife, avenges himself by stabbing the other hand." There is an African proverb about the power of forgiveness: "He who forgives ends the quarrel." It is a message that echoes in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr.

We are taught to treat people with sympathy and understanding—to give others the same care we would give ourselves. The unity expressed here is illustrated by the argument that a person would not let the left hand remain dirty without using the right hand to clean it. We care about the cleanliness of the whole body. Likewise we are instructed to care about the well-being of all.

In sixteenth-century Spain, St. Teresa of Avila wrote of her mystical revelations by using the metaphor of an interior castle to represent the inner Self. She said that the castle must be built on a strong foundation of selflessness through acts of compassion and humility. She stressed that living an honorable life filled with good deeds will allow us to grow spiritually. "You must remember not to build on prayer and contemplation alone. Unless you strive to live the virtues, you will never grow beyond the stature of spiritual dwarves" (Starr 290).

St. Teresa emphasized that compassion involves service to others, which is necessary to make for a solid underpinning for the soul. "Offer yourself as a slave to God and try to find ways to serve and sooth your companions. This will be of more value to you than to them, the stones that support you will be firmly laid and your castle will not fall." (Starr 290). Helping to ameliorate the pain and suffering of others, whether physical suffering or spiritual emptiness, will help make our interior castle strong. Service to others mutes the voice of self-centeredness coming from the personality and allows us to act from the influence of the inner Self.

Similarly, verse 290 of Voice of the Silence bids us to "sweeter make the Ocean's bitter waves—that mighty sea of sorrow formed of the tears of men." To sweeten the salty ocean of human tears means to work for others and curtail our own self-interests. This allows for the loosening of the identification with personality so we can live more in alignment with the Self—a process the Sufi's call fana.

Serge King writes that the Hawaiian and Polynesian traditions speak of union with the Higher Self, or aumakua, as being called Kanaloa— the companion of God (157). This represents the person who is fully present in the three worlds of ku—the instinctive, subconscious mind, lono—the conscious, thinking mind, and aumakua—the Source Self or the God within. Kanaloa describes the person who has merged the drop into the Ocean and become one with all, thereby living from the basis of having a strong interior castle within.

Living our lives conscious of the underlying unity of all or contemplating it through meditation subtly affects those around us. Again, it is due to the unity of the Self. It is illustrated by the exercise where a group of people hold on to a long piece of string tied in a circle. When one person tugs on the string, everyone feels the tension it creates. When several people pull on the string, it creates even more pull. This shows how one part of a system is linked to every other part. It illustrates how we can influence the expansion of the higher levels of consciousness by our own spiritual practice. Because we are all connected at the higher realms, we subtly affect the entire field when we meditate or hold the intention of leading a pure life.

Striving to do this is a daunting task. It involves effort, but each act of selflessness brings us closer to being a divine manifestation of unity on the physical plane. H. P. Blavatsky spoke about it in this way, "Very few are the strong swimmers who reach the Beacon. He who would get there must cease to be a number, and become all numbers. He must have forgotten the illusion of separation, and accept only the truth of collective individuality" (Collected 248). Becoming "all numbers" reflects living one's life based on the unity of Alaya's Self.

Bibliography
Barks, Coleman. A Year with Rumi. San Francisco: Harper, 2006.
Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. Collected Writings, XI. Wheaton, Illinois: Theosophical Publishing House, 1973.
——. The Voice of the Silence. Chennai, India: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1968.
Gifford, Eli and R. Michael Cook, eds. How Can One Sell the Air?: Chief Seattle—s Vision. Summertown, Tennessee: The Book Publishing Company, 1992.
Kantrowitz, David. Judaic Classics Library CD. Brooklyn, New York: Judiaca Press, Inc., 2001.
Kaplan, Justin, ed. John Bartlett. Bartlett—s Familiar Quotations. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1992.
King, Serge. Mastering Your Hidden Self. Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books, 1985.
Mills, Joy. "O Hidden Life." The Theosophist. June 1976.
Nicholson, Reynold A., trans.. The Mystics of Islam. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914.
Rose, Deborah. Dingo Makes Us Human. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Starr, Mirabai, trans. St. Teresa of Avila. The Interior Castle. New York: Riverhead Books, 2003.
Stockton, Eugene. The Aboriginal Gift. Alexandria, Australia: Millennium Books, 1995.

Sue Prescott, MSW, is a social worker, theosophist, and frequent lecturer at the Seattle lodge and surrounding area. She is author of Realizing the Self Within—an overview of the concepts of spirituality that can be applied to relationships and self-improvement.

Explorations: Beyond the Mask

by Arlene Gay Levine

Originally printed in the JANUARY- FEBRUARY 2008 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Levine, Arlene Gay. "Beyond the Mask." Quest 96.1 (JANUARY- FEBRUARY 2008): 26-27.

Some twenty years ago, hurtling toward an appointment, my mood was typical of that turbulent period of my life: angry. A red traffic light gave me another reason to fume. Waves of people crossed in front of me; at first, I surveyed them critically: this one was obese, another bedraggled, that one pushing through the crowd. As I focused on the ocean of humanity, a sensation of expansion took hold of my heart. My thoughts spun around 180 degrees. I was suddenly possessed by an almost physical sensation of overwhelming compassion for these people making their way across the busy intersection, trying to live their lives under difficult circumstances, just like me.

The moment this new thought entered my mind, everything went ablaze. Here was something I had never even imagined: an all encompassing, fiery light that embodied everyone and everything in the environment, including me. There was no voice, but I knew the Light as Love. The building block of all things—the cars, the stores, the birds, the trees, and me—all was Love.

This Light that was Love continued to radiate. The sheer ecstasy of it made me weep. I could not say how long the experience lasted, though it felt timeless; then, without warning, a symphony of car horns and a green light greeted my return to the present. Picture having to drive after such a revelation! Yet drive I did, tears of joy still running down my face.

The most amazing event of my life had occurred and I was afraid to speak of it for fear people would think me mad. Seasons changed before I found the courage to share the experience: a very rare glimpse into an invisible world, perhaps more real than the one we walk in. Yet, it can be seen only for a brief moment, when the veil is lifted, and the privileged viewer experiences the truth beyond that which mundane sense reports.

Perhaps you are wondering how drastically my life must have transformed after that event; it did not. There was no forgetting or doubting what happened. It is simply that we are so attached to things the way they are that even the blinding flash of God waking us from our dream can be ignored in order to go back to the status quo.

As John Donne described it, "I throw my selfe down in my Chamber, and I invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a file, for the rattling of a Coach, for the whining of a door."

Oh, just let me live quietly behind this familiar mask. Yes, I know it is not who I am and that I am suffocating here. Life is sorely lacking and somewhere deep down I know that is not the way it is meant to be or could be, but do not make me take off this comfortable disguise.

Then I would have to be willing to look past the known and confront an enigma I may not be able to handle. This little life behind the mask may not be much, but at least I know what to expect. One can go on like this for years. It is like wandering through a desert and knowing that you have seen water, a resplendent oasis tempting beyond words, yet being afraid to explore far enough to find it again.

There will be days when your thirst forces you to journey. Maybe, despite all the obstacles, you may even catch a flash of that glorious spot and imagine what it would be like to arrive there once more. Before long, the sandstorm of your ego will rise up around you or voices from the wilderness, of those you left behind, will call you back, their siren song of familiar woe so painfully comforting. You turn back. Still you will not cease from venturing out anew, now that you know it exists.

We enter this world free of camouflage. As we grow up, like actors in a great drama, we find a mask to help us survive despite the pain of the many difficult conditions in our childhood. We can become the family clown, the good girl, the martyr, the scapegoat, the black sheep or any number of roles that are not really us. However, because we felt safe hiding for so long, we tend to keep living out these parts long after the need is gone.
Sometimes these masks are so much a part of us we do not realize we are wearing them. Mine was The Rebel, a smooth fit for all the unexamined rage I liked to project on the world at large; it brought me no peace. We know we are unhappy at finding ourselves in situations that seem like replays of other unacceptable moments, yet we cannot for the life of us understand how we have managed to trap ourselves again.

But I was tired of the game and now I knew something entirely different was possible. If I was willing to look in the mirror, past the reflection of who I thought I was, I would see what needed to be loved: that fragile little kid who never got the support or acceptance from her folks that she craved.

Moving from childhood to adolescence and young adulthood, we often resent our parents, teachers, religious leaders and the restrictions of society for having made us who we think we are. Yet behind the parts of ourselves, and others, that we find unlovable is the same beautiful face: Love, temporarily disguised by illusions we have chosen to believe are genuine.

Just like the person who knows he has a safe refuge waiting for him at the end of the day, I knew I could discover my calm center. The key was to base every thought, word and deed on the understanding that the phenomenon I had experienced truly existed, not only somewhere beyond the everyday world, but also within. It required me to acknowledge this kingdom of Light, of Love in everyone I met, beginning with me.

In the quiet of my heart, I began to find communion with all that is true. Here I learned to remove my mask by bringing my fears as bait, becoming a patient fisherman in these tranquil waters. Over the years, as I learned to focus gently on the problem I needed help with, an answer would arise and swallow my lure whole. Love provides what we need, if we ask.

I see a woman walking a path toward home. She, and every fellow traveler along the way, is like the terrain: blistered highway, sweet green meadow, lush snake river, winding passes, sculpted rock reaching heavenward. This road also lives inside them; it spirals into the clarity of a conscious mind willing to embrace the mystery: hunchback or halfback, star or stone, beggar or beloved, man or woman - dreaming itself many from the One.

Homuncli, Golems, and Artificial Life

By Gary Lachman

Originally printed in the JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2006 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Lachman, Gary. "Homunculi, Golems, and Artificial Life." Quest 94.1 (JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2006):7-10.

The notion of "man-made humans," or other living creatures fashioned by human hands, has a long history in mythology and folklore. In recent years, with the development of genetic engineering, virtual reality, and artificial life of various sorts, it has gained a new significance. But our current fascination with—not to mention dread over—the increasing likelihood of genetically modified and artificial humans is not, in essence, a particularly new development. It touches on some of the central themes of religion and the occult and magical practices that emerged from a once-powerful but now submerged spiritual belief

The Kabbalah, for example, includes legends and stories about the alchemical homunculus, or "little man," and the golem, a kind of proto–Frankenstein's monster. In both cases the idea is that through certain secret magical practices, human beings can share in the creative power of God. To the orthodox believers of both Judaism and Christianity such a notion is considered blasphemous and betrays either the hubris of humanity or the work of the devil. How much the orthodox misunderstanding and rejection of these ideas helped to distort them is unclear, and space and time prevent me from exploring this question. Although ostensibly concerned with very similar objectives—the creation of an "artificial man"—the alchemical homunculus and the kabbalistic golem are quite different. The popular understanding of these esoteric themes has for the most part focused on a literal interpretation, and their resurgence in our contemporary consciousness threatens to take that literalism seriously.

Prior to the rise of science and the mechanical vision of human life and the universe, the idea of creating human simulacra had a strong organic foundation. The homunculus was something one grew; the popular belief was that homunculi could be grown from the mandrake root, whose shape lent itself to anthropomorphic speculation. The golem, too, although not quite as organic as the homunculus, was nevertheless not pieced together bit by bit, as Mary Shelley's monster would be; it was fashioned, molded from clay or soil and then miraculously brought to life.

To be sure, the prescientific age had mechanical marvels as well. Hero of Alexandria in the second century wrote manuals on how to construct moving god images and other automated devices. Using steam and sand, Hero was able to animate singing mechanical birds, to rotate statues, and to power a miniature puppet theater. There is evidence that such mechanical wonders were used as much for entertainment as for religious purposes. And we also know that animated statues played an important part in the religious rites of the NeoPlatonic schools of late antiquity, a practice that resurfaced in the folk traditions of the Middle Ages. Pope Sylvester II was said to have consulted a mechanical "talking head," and the same was said of the monk Roger Bacon and the Dominican friar and natural philosopher Albertus Magnus.

As Victoria Nelson shows in her fascinating book The Secret Life of Puppets, this tradition of animated god images carried on in the popular fascination with puppets. The ancients, however, didn't view their animated images as human simulacra but more as a kind of magical magnet used to attract divine energies. To animate a god image was to perform theurgy, to create the god, to bring the god to physical manifestation. For ancients like the philosophers Plotinus, Proclus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus, this meant drawing down the god-force that resided in the stars and embodying it in the image of the god. Although this was a form of "giving life" to inanimate objects, it was concerned not with creating humans but with making the divine present.

The question arises then: What is the homunculus and what is the golem? Franz Hartmann's 1896 Life of Paracelsus defines homunculi as "artificially made human beings, generated from the sperm without the assistance of the female organism (black magic.)" The Swiss alchemist Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim, otherwise known as Paracelsus (1493–1541), is recognized by many as an early master of holistic medicine and natural healing. It was from Paracelsus that Goethe, a great reader of alchemical and occult literature, got the idea of the homunculus which he used in the second part of Faust. Paracelsus offered a complete recipe for creating a homunculus:

If the sperma, enclosed in a hermetically sealed glass, is buried in horse manure for forty days, and properly magnetized, it begins to live and move. After such a time it bears the form and resemblance of a human being, but it will be transparent and without a body. If it is now artificially fed with the Arcanum sanguinis hominis until it is about forty weeks old, and if allowed to remain during that time in horse manure in a continually equal temperature, it will grow into a human child, with all its members developed like any other child, such as could be born by a woman; only it will be much smaller. We call such a being a homunculus, and it may be raised and educated like any other child, until it grows older and obtains reason and intellect, and is able to take care of itself.

Hartmann notes that Paracelsus has been taken to task for believing in the literal creation of such a being, but in Paracelsus's defense, he offers a story purporting to give evidence for the reality of such things. It's easy to assume that Paracelsus was taken in by the common, literal understanding of what the homunculus is. But there's also the possibility that Paracelsus was aware of this understanding and used the superstition to communicate secret teachings. References to the need to bury the sperm in horse manure, to keep it there for forty days, and to feed it with the Arcanum sanguinis hominis, the "secret blood of man," suggest that Paracelsus may have been making reference to mythic rather than literal ideas.

Ronald D. Gray, in his book Goethe the Alchemist, argues that there's a great deal of evidence showing that the homunculus was one of many names used by the alchemists to designate the secret aim of the alchemical Great Work. To most of us, alchemy is a primitive forerunner of chemistry, and if we know anything about alchemy it's that it was concerned with turning lead into gold. Many calling themselves alchemists convinced themselves and many others that this was indeed the aim of the Royal Art and that it was possible. Many sought the secrets of alchemy out of sheer greed, and many would-be alchemists found a comfortable niche or, perhaps more often, an undesirable end, in the employ of a king or queen.

But there's another way to read the alchemical project, and that is that the transformation had more to do with the alchemists themselves than with a lump of metal. Turning lead into gold was a symbolic way of describing the true aim of alchemy: the spiritual transformation of the alchemist. If one takes the time to read the alchemical literature, it's easy to come away feeling absolutely muddled. Strange creatures, impossible landscapes, paradoxes, and downright illogic seem to dominate; the closest thing to any modern is the writings and art of the surrealists, who, ironically, looked to the alchemists for inspiration or interpretation of dreams.

It is in the psychological literature of the last half century, especially in the Jungian school, that we find great correspondence with alchemical thought. The true goal of the alchemists, the real aim of all the preparation and cumbersome apparatus, was to unite their earthly, mortal soul with that of the Creator, to participate in the divine, to reawaken their spiritual consciousness, and to grasp the secret forces at work behind the natural world. In this the alchemists carried on the same work as their Neoplatonic forebears.

Success in this work depended on following the proper procedures, which included astrological concerns, exemplifying the alchemist's belief that the cosmos was a unified whole and that each part of it embodied the divine force animating everything. For the alchemist, matter was not the dead, inert stuff it is for us: it was a living body, one that could respond to a person's attention. As the alchemists transformed the matter in their alembic through the alchemical process, their own inner world experienced similar changes. The entire process centered on the idea of rebirth. The alchemists were to "die" in a sense—to lose their earthly, mortal being—and, if the procedure was successful, would be reborn.

Death was an essential aspect of the alchemical process; it was out of death that new life could emerge, as it did in the Frankenstein's monster. In Paracelsus's recipe for the homunculus, the horse manure represents the putrefaction needed to begin the process of rebirth. This is the first step in the alchemical work. The old self, the old Adam, must be broken down until we arrive at the prima materia, the primordial stuff, the unformed matter out of which any future creation can take place. The forty days in which the sperma is buried in the horse manure parallel Christ's forty days in the desert, when he is tempted by Satan. This means that the alchemist must undergo trials, must endure some suffering, and that the alchemical process is not something going on outside of oneself but is something that must be lived through. This is also suggested in the idea that the homunculus, the little man who is the alchemist reborn, must be fed by the alchemist's own secret blood. The alchemist's attention, concentration, mind, or soul must be completely focused on the task variously known as the creation or discovery of the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, potable gold, the universal solvent, and, very often, the creation of the homunculus depicted in numerous alchemical illustrations, often as the god Mercury encased in the alchemical vessel.

That the alchemists would speak of this in parable, allegory, and obscure language shouldn't be surprising. It's difficult enough for us, who have the advantage of familiarity with self-help and psychotherapeutic literature, to grasp the meaning of rebirth. For the literal-minded of the Middle Ages, who were taught that all magic and occult knowledge was the work of the devil, this would be a subtle notion indeed. The idea that by going through the alchemical rebirth, one would become as Christ—regenerated—would strike them as blasphemous. What was left was the literal idea of making an actual man or woman, just like the idea of making actual gold from lead or finding an actual stone. Yet a famous alchemical maxim reads: "Our gold is not the vulgar gold." Clearly, making material gold was not what they were after. Creating an actual tiny human being was always recognized as a display of power that went beyond nature. This is a dim and distorted echo of the alchemists' belief that their art was against nature in the sense that it both sped up a natural process and redeemed its practitioners from a life lived solely at the natural, Adamic, unregenerate level.

The legend of the golem has also suffered from a too-literal interpretation. Probably the most well known version of the golem story is Gustav Meyrink's classic expressionistic novel The Golem, published in 1915. Several film versions of the golem story have been made; the best-known is probably Paul Wegener's 1920 version. In the first film to deal with the theme, Otto Rippert's 1916 Homunculus, a scientist creates an artificial man and endows him with more than human powers. When this superman discovers his true origin—that he is not human at all and can never feel love—he reacts violently and inaugurates a reign of terror that leads to his destruction. This notion of a lack, of something missing, also haunts homunculi in future storytelling.

The popular idea of the golem had its start in the 1890s, when the creature became associated with the legends surrounding the famous Rabbi Loew of Prague, an almost mythic figure of the sixteenth century. In one version, Rabbi Loew creates the golem to protect the Jewish population of Prague from one of Emperor Rudolph II's pogroms. Prague is perhaps the most occult and alchemical city in Europe; aside from the golem legends, it has a long tradition of puppets, dolls, and magic shows of various kinds.

Although the popular idea of the golem is associated with the magical powers of Rabbi Loew—and there is no evidence that the rabbi himself ever attempted to make a golem—the term has a long. if obscure history in Talmudic literature. The word golem is mentioned once in the Bible, in Psalm 139; today it's often translated as "embryo." Golem itself means "unformed"; it's the hyle of the ancients, the chaotic, inchoate state of matter before it is given form by the Creator. The similarity between this and the alchemical prima materia seems clear. In the Talmudic Aggadah, Adam is referred to as "golem." In a midrash from the second and third centuries, Adam is described as a kind of cosmic golem, an immense being whose body is as large as the universe and who can see the entire history of the world, its past and future—an echo of Madame Blavatsky's akashic record.

This description relates to the kabbalistic idea, also shared by hermetic, alchemical, and Gnostic beliefs, that the universe itself is a kind of man, Adam Kadmon, and that each of us is a microcosm, a universe in miniature: the universe is a Great Man, and we are all little universes. There is a story that when God was creating the world, he made Adam first but left him unfinished, in a golem state, fearing that if he completed him and then went on to create the universe, Adam himself might get the credit for the work (which implies something about the character of the Creator). So God left Adam unfinished, and only after creating the world did he breathe life into him. One symbolic interpretation of this story, which relates to the alchemical "little man," is that we all are golems until the breath of the divine enters us. We are all unfinished, incomplete, until regenerated.

The kabbalist scholar Gershom Scholem tells us that "the golem is a creature, particularly a human being, made in an artificial way by virtue of a magic act, through the use of holy names." In kabbalistic tradition, the golem, like Adam, is made of clay or soil. He is molded into human form, and then the mystical name of God, the Tetragrammaton, JHVH, is written on a piece of paper and placed on his mouth. The motif of a magical word or name shows the importance of writing and language in the Jewish mystical tradition. Kabbalah itself is a mystical interpretation of the Bible, and the interplay of words, their rearrangement into other words, and their numerical values all play an important role in understanding the secret laws behind creation. Whereas in the alchemical idea of the homunculus the alchemist himself is re-created, here the kabbalist echoes God's creative power and creates a kind of life himself.

There is some practical value in this, in that the golem is often used as a kind of slave or worker who, takes care of many otherwise onerous tasks, similar to the modern robot or android. The golem, however, is a kind of sorcerer's apprentice, and, as in the Frankenstein tale, the monster gets out of hand. In many versions, the golem continues to grow and grow and soon becomes too big for the magician to handle.

There are different versions about how the golem is stopped. In the most popular one, the word emeth, "truth," is written on the golem's forehead, and this gives it life. In order to stop it from destroying the ghetto, the magician rubs out the first letter of the word, leaving meth, which means "death." The man of clay then tumbles to the ground and shatters. In Gustav Meyrink's novel the golem, a metaphor of the novelist's true self, is brought to light through the act of writing. In one of the many film versions, the golem falls in love with the magician's daughter and, like the homunculus, turns violent and has to be destroyed. Gershom Scholem points out that, in keeping with kabbalistic tradition, the golem always lacks some essential quality. In some versions it lacks the power to speak, emphasizing that the magical power of words is reserved for God and his devout believers. In others it lacks intelligence or some other positive human quality. All golem stories, however, portray the golem, no matter how strong, as less than fully human. The imperfection of their creature shows that the magicians, no matter how knowledgeable, are still far short of God, a point that contemporary advocates of "man-made humans" may wish to ponder.

Gary Lachman is the author of In Search of P.D. Ouspensky: The Genius in the Shadow of Gurdjieff (Quest Books, 2004). His most recent book is A Dark Muse (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005). He is currently writing a book about Rudolf Steiner, to be published in 2007.

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