Quest Magazine

Printed in the Spring 2017issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Lachman, Gary, "If Consciousness Is Evolving, Why Aren’t Things Getting Better?" Quest 105.2 (Spring 2017): pg. 13-17

By Gary Lachman

When people ask me what I write about, I have a few standard replies, but one answer that covers most of my work is “the evolution of consciousness.” Of course in most cases this only leads to more questions, the most common of which are “How can you say that consciousness is evolving?” or “Really? What evidence do you have for its evolution?” Or, as the title of this article has it, “If consciousness is evolving, why aren’t things getting better?”

That things aren’t getting better is taken as obvious, and if serious consideration of the idea of an evolution of consciousness depended on arguing that, to the contrary, they were, then I’d have to agree that any such speculation would be doomed from the start. By things of course we mean the state of the world, civilization, society. In multiple ways the world faces challenges today that, as the cliché goes, are unprecedented. Every day the news media reports a variety of crises. It seems that we are, and have been for some time, experiencing what the historian Arnold Toynbee called a civilization’s “time of troubles.” So it is not surprising that some people are surprised when I speak of an evolution of consciousness.

Fortunately, the evolution of consciousness does not depend on the state of things being better or worse. It does not depend on the state of things at all—quite the contrary. Consciousness, its evolution, and the world in which it finds itself, are of course linked. They are not separate, watertight realities. But I don’t believe we will find evidence for an evolution of consciousness on the news, or in the latest headlines or tweets, or on Facebook or other social media.

I believe that even if all the evidence available announced the imminent collapse of Western civilization, this would not necessarily mean that consciousness doesn’t evolve, merely that we had not grasped the meaning of its evolution. Consciousness can evolve and things can get worse—or better. The one is not a gauge of the other. Changes in consciousness may bring about changes in society that we consider beneficial. Or they can precipitate upheavals that throw everything into chaos. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead remarked that “the major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur” (Whitehead, 88). As Whitehead suggests, what is wreckage for some may be the raw material for new creation for others.

Here I want to distinguish between the evolution of consciousness and what we can call “progress” or “social change” or “world betterment.” This is aimed at making the world a better place, which most intelligent people in some way desire, even if they are often unsure about how to do it. The other is a recognizable change in the shape and character of consciousness itself. As I’ve tried to show in some of my books, this kind of change in consciousness can, I believe, be traced throughout our history. We can say that the latter is about the form or kind of consciousness prevalent at a particular time and the change from this to another dominant kind of consciousness. The other, we can say, is about what the people experiencing this consciousness did with it. The first is the way in which consciousness experiences the world. The second is made up of the ideas, thoughts, concepts, and beliefs held by this consciousness.

The idea of making the world a better place is of relatively recent origin—say from the 1700s on. This makes it a very modern idea, one predicated on the recognition of human agency as a real force at work in the world. Although we now assume this and really question it only when faced with some insurmountable obstacle, it was not always the case. With few exceptions, for centuries men and women simply accepted things-as-they-were with an unquestioning endurance, just as they accepted the weather or as an animal acquiesces in its fate. The idea that human beings were able to take action and change their circumstances rather than merely suffering them is itself, I believe, a product of a change in consciousness that took place around the seventeenth century. This shift endowed humanity with greater freedom and control over its destiny, but, precisely because of this, also confronted it with perhaps its most daunting challenge.

There are many different approaches to the idea of an evolution of consciousness. Even if we start a history of this idea with the beginning of the twentieth century—as I do in my book A Secret History of Consciousness—the number of different versions we get is considerable. I start my history at around 1900 because by this time the idea of evolution itself had taken hold of the Western imagination. (I should point out that the kind of evolution I am speaking about isn’t Darwinian, although Darwin’s version was the best-known.) It was also around this time that people began to use the term consciousness to talk about our inner, subjective worlds. What we call consciousness today would have been called “mind” or “spirit” at an earlier time. And while “mind” and “spirit” are resistant to the kind of scientific study that characterizes our time—and which has often led some scientists to consider them unreal—consciousness, as something more abstract, seems more amenable to it. At least scientists find it less awkward to say they are studying consciousness than to say they are studying spirit.

A quick run-through of some exponents of an idea of an evolution of consciousness gives us quite a few names. Here we find, in no particular order, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, one of the founders of Theosophy; R.M. Bucke, author of Cosmic Consciousness; the Christian palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo; the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy; the philosopher Henri Bergson; the playwright Bernard Shaw; the biologist Julian Huxley; the Egyptologist René Schwaller de Lubicz; the spiritual philosopher Ken Wilber; the existential philosopher Colin Wilson; Samuel Butler, of Erewhon fame; and the esoteric philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, among many others.

Some of the versions presented by these people are similar to each other, some are complementary, and some are radically different. These figures include scientists, philosophers, esoteric teachers, and writers; some have a religious background, some do not. Thus the idea of an evolution of consciousness is not the property of one or two thinkers, and neither science nor philosophy nor mysticism has any monopoly on it. It appeals to a variety of minds—all of whom, though, appreciate its dynamic character, the emphasis on growth, development, becoming rather than being. Two proponents of an evolution of consciousness whose ideas I have found especially fruitful are the philosopher of language Owen Barfield (1898–1997) and the cultural philosopher Jean Gebser (1905–73).

Barfield spelled out his ideas in a series of books, History in English Words, Poetic Diction, and Saving the Appearances being probably the best-known. He came to the idea of an evolution of consciousness—which he defines as “the concept of man’s self-consciousness as a process in time”— through a study of language, specifically poetry, which, strangely enough, is the same way that Gebser came to it (Barfield, Romanticism, 189). While reading his favorite poets, the Romantics, Barfield noticed something. He saw that the delight he found in reading their lyric poetry was the effect of a change in his consciousness that it produced. It somehow made his consciousness more “alive.” This was the effect of the poets’ using figurative language, that is, metaphor, especially the metaphors they used to speak of their souls, their inner worlds, their feelings and emotions. So, for example, in “Ode to the West Wind,” a favorite of Barfield’s, Percy Bysshe Shelley asks the wind to “make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.” Shelley wants the wind to blow through his soul as it does through the trees, and the inspiration it will bring is like the rustling of the leaves.

As Barfield said, there was something more to these metaphors than “merely reading and enjoying” them: “One could somehow dwell on them.” They altered the way in which he saw the world; it became “a profounder and a more meaningful place when seen through eyes that had been reading poetry.” Poetry, he found, “had the power to change one’s consciousness a little” (Barfield, Origin of Language, 3).

Barfield later came to see that a similar change in consciousness occurred when he looked at language from earlier times. This language was not intended to have a poetic effect. It just seemed to have it. Like poetry, this earlier language was much more figurative, much more metaphorical than our modern language. Barfield saw that the further we go back in history, the more figurative language seems, the more metaphorical and poetic. This was the argument of his first book, History in English Words. As we move closer to the present, language becomes less metaphorical and more literal.

For example, according to several dictionaries, our word electricity means “a form of energy,” which is rather abstract. But electricity derives from the Greek ēlektron, which to the ancient Greeks meant “amber.” This is because, when rubbed with fur, amber produces what we call static electricity. To the ancient Greeks this phenomenon had a lively, less abstract character, because their ēlektron was related to ēlektor, which meant “gleaming” or “the beaming sun.” So for our bare term denoting a form of energy, the Greeks, it seemed, used a more pictorial language (Barfield, History in English Words, 17).

We seem to have moved from what the literary philosopher Erich Heller called “the age of poetry” to “the age of prose.” Many metaphors that at an earlier time seemed fresh and vital either have become clichés or have become so worn down by use—a metaphor itself—that we no longer notice them and accept them without thinking as figures of speech.

Barfield concluded that while poetry may transform consciousness because it purposefully strives to do this—each individual poet using his imagination to create the effect—early language about the most ordinary things did the same thing, not because it went out of its way to do it, but because this consciousness was in the character of the language itself. Rather than accept that people of, say, the Middle Ages or ancient Greece were all remarkably poetic, he concluded that their language had this living quality because the world it spoke of was that way for them. It was an age of poetry not because everyone was a poet, but because, as Heller writes, it was an age in which “poetry was not merely written but, as it were, lived . . . The poetic comprehension of life,” Heller goes on, “was at that time not a matter of the poetic imagination at work in the minds of a few chosen individuals, of artists . . . but was ‘natural,’ a matter of fact, of ways of thinking and feeling shared by the whole community” (Heller, 3).

Barfield saw that the change from an age of poetry to one of prose meant a change in the way people saw the world, and this meant a change in their consciousness. Earlier language is much more alive than ours because the people speaking it saw a world that was much more alive than ours, which meant for Barfield that their consciousness presented the world that way. Barfield’s term for this living character of perceiving is participation. For him, the language of an earlier time is livelier than ours because the people of that time somehow participated in the life of the world around them in a way that we now only experience occasionally. They were somehow aware of the inside of things, of the inner life of nature, in a way that our more prosaic consciousness, which concerns itself simply with the surface of things, isn’t. Our consciousness is different from that of the people who spoke this earlier language. It has changed, shifted, moved, or evolved from that state to our own.

We can, though, get flashes of this “inside.” It can happen, as it did with Barfield, through poetry—the other arts can also do it—or it can happen through certain mind-altering substances. Even something as simple as wine can do it, hence the longstanding association of poetry with the fruit of the vine.

Jean Gebser came to a similar conclusion through reading the work of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke in the early 1930s (Barfield himself began writing in the late 1920s). For Gebser, Rilke’s use of language suggested that in the twentieth century a shift had happened in Western consciousness. If Barfield and Heller recognized a shift from an age of poetry to one of prose—a shift from an age of living, metaphorical language to a more literal, matter-of-fact one—Gebser saw that this prosaic way of seeing the world was itself starting to change and that the stable, common-sense vision that it presented was beginning to break down.

In Rilke’s use of language, and in many other forms of human expression at the time, Gebser saw a movement away from the sequential, logical form of consciousness—a characteristic of plodding, prosaic thinking—and toward a kind of simultaneity. Rather than one-thing-following-another in a nice, orderly, steplike fashion, Gebser saw that in Rilke and in other writers and artists—Proust, James Joyce, Picasso—and scientists—Einstein, Max Planck—what was emerging was a kind of vision of “everythingallatonce,” a world in which past, present, and future were not as stable as they had been. Gebser spoke of this as an “irruption of time,” which he saw as the overall consequence of a new “structure of consciousness” that, he argued, was appearing in the West. Our own digital age, which prides itself on simultaneity and instant availability, may give us pause to consider Gebser’s idea.

Gebser’s magnum opus, The Ever-Present Origin—originally published in 1949 but not translated into English until 1984—charts in great detail the cultural evidence for what he calls the different “mutations of consciousness” that the human mind has gone through from prehistoric times until our own.

Like Barfield, Gebser believed that consciousness evolved, although he preferred the term “mutation” to “evolution,” to avoid the nineteenth-century notions of progress associated with evolution. I don’t have space to go through the different structures of consciousness Gebser depicts; an interested reader can find an outline of them in my book A Secret History of Consciousness. Here it is enough to say that Gebser believed that this irruption of time was both the result and the agent of what he called the “breakdown of the mental-rational structure.”

Gebser’s “mental-rational” structure of consciousness is much like the kind of consciousness that Barfield and Heller recognized in the age of prose. Barfield and Heller knew that these shifts take place over long stretches of time, and that the passing of the age of poetry into that of prose began in the distant past, perhaps during what the philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, the period around 500 BC that saw the start of Western philosophy and its peculiar focus on logical reasoning and rational explanation. Both Barfield and Gebser agreed that this trend reached an apogee in the early seventeenth century with the rise of what we have come to call science. Science, we can say, is the epitome of the age of prose. In order to succeed, it had to denude the world of its mythological, mythopoetic character. Science works because it treats the world as a dead object, not a living being, as our earlier, more metaphorical consciousness had. It sees the world as a machine, subject to rigid mechanical laws, not something in which we participate.

Earlier I remarked that the change in consciousness in the seventeenth century gave humanity greater freedom and control of its destiny, but also confronted it with perhaps its greatest challenge. The rise of science marks this change precisely. Certainly the world has changed more in the four centuries following this revolution than in the millennia that preceded it. To enumerate all the benefits that have come from the development of science and its offshoot, technology, would be tedious. We see them all around us, from space probes voyaging beyond our solar system to the latest breakthroughs in medicine. We live today in ways that kings of old could not imagine. So the change in Western consciousness at the beginning of the seventeenth century did, it seems, make things better.

Yet this change also led to many of the challenges facing us in our “time of troubles.” The loss of our sense of participation in the world allows us to detach from it and observe it impersonally—the essence of science—but it has also left us, as the novelist Walker Percy said, “lost in the cosmos.”

Gebser believes something similar. The mental-rational consciousness structure is the furthest removed from what he calls “Origin,” the ever-present source of consciousness itself. Our radical break with it began in the early fourteenth century; one sign of this, he argues, is the discovery of perspective in art, which marks a change from the flat, tapestrylike perception of the Middle Ages to what became our own “space age,” a vision of infinity extending in all directions. This shift enabled man to stand on his own, to confront the world with his own intelligence and will. The computer I am using to write this essay is one result of this shift. But Gebser would agree with Walker Percy that it also led to our existential angst in the face of a mute universe that seems oblivious to us.

Blaise Pascal, one of the great mathematical minds of the seventeenth century, and also a deeply religious one, recognized this early on. In his Pensées, a collection of notes found after his death, Pascal had written about the new model of the universe arising from the nascent science: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” But today Pascal’s terror has dwindled to a numb acquiescence in the notion that the universe is meaningless. The respected astrophysicist Steven Weinberg dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s when he announced in his book The First Three Minutes that “the more the universe seems comprehensible the more it also seems pointless.”

So we have a change in consciousness that resulted in many things getting better, but which has also landed us with the greatest challenge humanity has faced: overcoming the passive nihilism that has become our accepted way of understanding ourselves and the world.

Barfield and Gebser believed that consciousness continues to evolve or mutate and that we today are involved in this process. Both believe that the meaninglessness behind our cultural and social malaise can be overcome, and that there are signs of another change in consciousness—one that will somehow allow us to reconnect with our source while at the same time maintaining the independent, free, creative consciousness that was the reason we lost touch with it in the first place. The loss of what Barfield calls “original participation,” resulting in our modern, alienated consciousness, can be seen as a fall, but Barfield would say it was a necessary one. Human consciousness needed that separation in order to individuate into its own independent “I.” Now the aim is to achieve final participation, a conscious grasp and understanding of participation instead of our earlier, unconscious immersion in it. This can be achieved, Barfield believes, through a certain effort of the imagination, akin to the change in consciousness he felt when reading poetry. In essence it is a way of seeing the world figuratively, as alive, as a kind of metaphor to be grasped rather than an object to be used. Unlike original participation, this is something we must bring our will and attention to; it requires effort on our part. It is an evolution we bring about, not one that happens to us. Barfield himself found the deepest insight into this process in the work of Rudolf Steiner, but we may read Barfield with profit without having to agree.

Gebser believed that the breakdown of the mental-rational structure was necessary for the next structure of consciousness to appear. He called it the integral structure, because it integrated all the previous structures and completed the unfolding of Origin. Gebser’s vocabulary is difficult, and his descriptions of the integral structure of consciousness require much effort to grasp; but as Barfield recognized while reading poetry, the attention directed at this kind of consciousness can itself induce a glimpse of it. Gebser speaks of a fundamental change from our current “perspectival” consciousness to an “aperspectival” one, a shift from a linear, utilitarian, ego-based view to a holistic, contemplative, ego-free one. What Gebser meant by “ego-free” was not that we lose our egos, as some forms of mysticism suggest, but that we are no longer limited to them. Our perspective is broadened to include much wider horizons. We achieve a bird’s-eye view; we see from above, and not just what is smack in front of us. We get the big picture, not just the close-up.

Gebser and Barfield knew that such a change in consciousness is not passive and that the people in whom it stirs must make the effort to bring it about. Neither of the two believed in any millenarian singularity—some event that will trigger the shift and change things overnight. Gebser believed that such notions were illusions. “Let us not deceive ourselves,” he wrote. “The world will not become much better, merely a little different, and perhaps more appreciative of the things that really matter” (quoted in Feuerstein, 166). The work of actualizing consciousness remains, whether things get better or not.

My own belief is that any new consciousness will emerge first in individuals, and for them it may be as much a burden as a blessing. They will have glimpses of what others do not, and will be driven by needs others find absurd. They will be what Colin Wilson calls Outsiders, people who see too deep and too much, where most others are near-sighted. Until they understand who they are, they will be misfits, but if consciousness has a future, it depends on them.

Space will not allow me to say more. I encourage readers to go to Barfield and Gebser themselves or, for an overview of their work, my own books, where you will find their ideas discussed along with those of other thinkers who are confronting the same problems. I can say with some assurance that if you do, you will find more evidence for an evolution of consciousness there than you will on the evening news.

Sources

Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. West Stockbridge, Mass.: Lindisfarne, 1985.
———. Owen Barfield and the Origin of Language. Spring Valley, N.Y.: St. George Publications, 1976. Lecture.
———. Romanticism Comes of Age. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986.
Feuerstein, Georg. Structures of Consciousness. Lower Lake, Calif.: Integral Publishing, 1987.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1959.

Gary Lachman, a longtime Quest contributor, is the author of twenty books on the links between consciousness, culture, and the Western esoteric tradition, most recently Beyond the Robot: The Life and World of Colin Wilson. He can be reached at www.garylachman.co.uk.

VOLUME 105, NUMBER 2

CONTENTS

If Consciousness Is Evolving, Why Aren't Things Getting Better?
Gary Lachman

The Mysterious Disappearance of the World Out There
Steve Hagen

The First Aspect of Realization: Who We Really Are
Orgyen Chowang

The Mystery of the Seven Seals
Richard Smoley

Rainbow Body: How the Western Chakra System Came to Be 
Kurt Leland

Viewpoint: Our Lineage
Tim Boyd

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

President's Diary
Tim Boyd

Printed in the Winter 2017 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Boyd, Tim, "President’s Diary" Quest 105.1 (Winter 2017): pg. 34-35

After we returned from Adyar at the beginning of July, it was time for our semiannual board of directors meetings. All eight members of the board were present for the three-day meeting. As usual, the board had a chance to review reports from the various departments and meet with department heads. From time to time the suggestion arises that it might be more efficient to conduct these meetings by Skype or some other conferencing software. I have always resisted this idea. Almost 60 percent of our members are “members at large,” meaning that they are not affiliated with a group. For most, this condition is unavoidable, as so many people live at a distance from any TS group, but it does have some consequences. The study of Theosophy necessarily involves more than reading and thinking. At its core, it is about relationship. For the leaders of the TSA, the interaction with each other and immersion in the mission and functioning of the organization is vital.

	Stephan hoeller chats with Trân-Thi-Kim-Diêu of the French Section at the Summer National Convention in July 2016.

Immediately following on the board meeting was our 130th annual Summer National Convention, this year celebrating the 125th anniversary of HPB’s passing. The theme for the conference was “The Legacy of H.P. Blavatsky: Inspiration, Influence, Implications.” As has become the custom, our members filled every seat in the place. Our presenters were a stellar group of international speakers. After an absence of several years, we had invited Stephan Hoeller, author and Gnostic bishop, to address the conference. In addition to his two talks, he conducted a special ceremony of blessing at the shrine to Mother Mary on the Olcott grounds. In that ceremony, Stephan presented a figurine of the divine feminine to my wife, Lily, in recognition of her work in restoring the shrine.

Other speakers at the convention were author and lecturer Ed Abdill; Trân-Thi-Kim-Diêu, past president of the French TS; Doss McDavid, professor of medical physics; and Michael Gomes, Theosophical historian par excellence. Mitch Horowitz, vice-president and executive editor at Tarcher Perigee books, made his first appearance at one of our conventions and was truly impressive. Mitch is also the author of Occult America and One Simple Idea, two excellent books that give an historical perspective on esoteric and New Age movements in the U.S. He contributed an exciting, inspiring, and thought-provoking examination of HPB’s monumental contributions. We look forward to having him back again.

As is the norm, at this year’s SNC we also had an evening of music, but not just any music. Five years ago, when I first came into the role of TSA president, my first major activity was hosting the Dalai Lama’s TSA-sponsored visit to Chicago. At that time a number of people were reaching out to contact me about becoming involved in the occasion. One of them was a man named Michael Fitzpatrick. He had played cello for His Holiness to open his presentations at a number of venues worldwide. By the time Michael had gotten in touch with me, our event was already tightly scheduled. He flew in from Los Angeles anyway to support the Dalai Lama and our efforts in hosting him. He introduced himself to me at the event, and I invited him to come out to Olcott and play for our members. He accepted, and his performance was spellbinding.

This year, when I was thinking about whom to invite for our musical evening, I reached out to Michael. He is a world-class musician, and as might be expected, he is a very busy man. His schedule was booked. In talking with him, I told him that this would be my last convention as TSA president, that he had played me into office, and I wanted for him to play me out. He said he would try to arrange his schedule. Long story short, coming directly from a private engagement for Pope Francis, he arranged to perform at our convention and treated us to another magical evening.

Tim with the Chennai Trekkers Club, which has been cleaning up teh trash on the riverbanks of the TS's Adyar headquarters.

In mid-August Lily, my daughter, Angelique, and I left for Italy for a much-needed holiday. While in Rome we had an opportunity to spend an afternoon with Antonio Girardi, president of the TS Italy, and Patrizia Calvi, his right hand. They had taken the train down from Vicenza in the north so that we could have some time together. It was a very good meeting done in true “dolce vita” style.

After a truly relaxing several days in Italy, it was on to Naarden in the Netherlands for a weeklong series of meetings. Four events coincided with our visit: (1) a meeting of the council of the European Federation of Theosophical Societies, composed of the general secretaries (presidents) and presidential representatives of the various nations in Europe; (2) Europe Day, hosted by the International Theosophical Centre (ITC) in Naarden; (3) a meeting of the council of the ITC; and (4) a brainstorming and planning meeting with the European leaders. Obviously, it was a high-energy time.

One of my discoveries upon being elected as TS international president was that I was the head of the ITC in Naarden. Since that time I have been traveling to the center annually for a variety of meetings. The first year the Dutch section organized a “Dutch Day” with the president that drew about 100 members. The next year they resisted the urge to call it “Double Dutch Day,” which has negative connotations, going back to some differences with the British. Instead it was called “Another Dutch Day.” This year, with the presence of so many representatives from across Europe, they went for “Europe Day.” It was another well-attended event, with members coming from England, France, Italy, Belgium, Slovenia, Finland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Ireland.

			Dr. A. Chandrashekar Poses with Tim Boyd at the Adyar Libary photo exibition.

When I returned from Europe, it was time for Olcott’s biggest single event of the year—TheosoFest. TheosoFest is our annual open house for the local community. We have been doing the event each year for the last eighteen years. Many families and individuals look forward to it. We invite vendors with a variety of products and services related to health of body, mind, and spirit—artists, massage therapists, spiritual movements, books, crystals, etc. During the course of the day we present more than forty Theosophical and related talks and meditation sessions. Last year, we finally broke the mythical attendance number of 2000. Because of our growing success, it was clear that this time around we would certainly exceed all previous numbers, and we did. Attendance was almost 3000; more members joined in a single day that ever before (forty, in addition to numerous membership renewals); bookstore sales hit an all-time record; we had 140 vendors (up from last year’s 100) and had to turn away another twenty; the talks had a higher attendance that ever before; and our staff and volunteers parked over 1300 cars (up from 1000). Next year we will have to decide just how big we want it to be—a nice position to be in.

Next up was a visit to our Besant Branch in Cleveland, Ohio. The Besant Branch is one of our most solid longtime groups in the Midwest. They are a wonderful example of the possibility for strong people with diverse opinions to work together for a common cause. I had not visited the group for about twenty years. Since my last visit, they have expanded their space to include the neighboring quarters in the mall location that they occupy. It is a lovely spot, with an ample library, meeting room, reading and meditation room, kitchen, and small bookstore. As guests, we were well-hosted for the three days that I presented programs.

Then it was time to head back to Adyar. When I arrived, the first order of business was an early morning get-together with the young crew from the Chennai Trekkers Club, who have been diligently working to clean up the accumulated trash along the riverbank from last year’s flooding. About sixty of them gathered at 6:30 a.m. for some snacks and tea, which we served at our Leadbeater Chambers kitchen. I had a chance to talk to the group.

Later in the week I inaugurated a photo exhibition at our Adyar Library and Research Centre. For the past twenty years, Dr. A. Chandrashekar has been coming to our campus almost daily, photographing the flora and fauna of the place. Over that time he has accumulated some incredible nature photos. One of our members arranged to frame 233 of them for the exhibition. They will be on display through the International Convention in January.

Next we traveled to the city of Alleppey in the state of Kerala for the Kerala Federation’s annual meeting, a one-hour flight south and west from Chennai. It was a good series of meetings in a city that has been described as the “Venice of the East” because of its many natural canals.

From Alleppey we drove to Kochi to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Shree Sankara Lodge. They had arranged a big event with an outdoor tent to accommodate around 100 people. The first night there was live music with a group of musicians trained by one of India’s great musical gurus. The next day was the formal celebration, with greetings, gifts, and speeches. All in all a joyous and productive trip.

Tim Boyd

Printed in the Winter 2017issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Boyd, Tim, "The Human Project" Quest 105.1 (Winter 2017): pg. 8-9

By Tim Boyd, President

At this point in my life I have done a significant amount of travel, yet there are still certain things that never cease to amaze me. Often I find myself waking early in the morning to go to the airport. Within a few hours I am getting off of a plane in a place whose flora and fauna, geography, climate, language, and customs have shifted dramatically from those of “home.” The outfits people wear, the ways they recognize and celebrate divinity, the foods they eat, even the way they eat their foods can seem so different. While visiting with my wife’s family in the multicultural and cosmopolitan city of Singapore, more than once I have had the experience of eating breakfast with my fingers, lunch with a spoon and fork, and dinner with chopsticks, depending on whether I found myself in an Indian, Eurasian, or Chinese community.

One side effect of travel is that you find yourself exposed to a host of differences, but also to similarities. Just scratch the surface, and shared, even universal, qualities appear. The costumes we wear are made of different materials and have different styles and colors, but we all wear clothing. The foods and the instruments we use to feed ourselves differ, but we all eat. The names, symbols, and imagery for the local concepts of divinity vary widely, but everywhere people attempt to reach out to something beyond their limited selves.

One of America’s dubious gifts to the world is the modern shopping mall. Beginning in the 1960s, this phenomenon swept across the U.S. and Europe and now has taken root in the rest of the world. It may be surprising to some, but originally the shopping mall was conceived as a community center where people would converge not only for shopping, but also for cultural activity and social interaction. In Chennai, India, where I spend a good deal of time these days, the phenomenon is relatively new. On those occasions when I have found myself at one of Chennai’s glittering new Western-style malls, I have been impressed, not with the products or shops, which closely mirror those of the rest of the world, but with the people and the vitality. Except for the oldest and the poorest, all types of people find their way there.

For someone like me, the vision of humanity on display is both fascinating and awe-inspiring. Thousands of people stream through the place on weekends and holidays. From one of the upper levels, looking down at the movement of people, their collective motion literally resembles a river—a flow of humanity. Although each person and family has their separate thoughts and particular destination, collectively all are moving as one body. Like a river, the human flow has its eddies where families break away from the motion and the children play their games or dance alone, oblivious to the surrounding crowd; or where young couples sit simply talking and enjoying a “private” moment together before rejoining the flow.

As much as we cling to the idea of ourselves as separate, self-determining individuals, when we actually look, it becomes apparent that we are subsumed in some larger life. What is so impressive is the solidarity of the human experience. However much we may cherish a sense of independence and individualism, our participation in a greater whole is undeniable and at times breaks through to our normal awareness.

Since its founding, the Theosophical Society has espoused a worldview that embraces the unity of the human family. Its First Object, “to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity,” has been emphasized again and again from the Society’s early days until now. Like anything that is profound, this unity of the human family, expressed as “universal brotherhood” in the language of the late 1800s, must be understood on many levels.

In our times it is easy to lose sight of how radical the idea of a universal brotherhood “without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color” was in 1875, when the Objects were first formulated. In the U.S., the Civil War had ended in 1865, so, just ten years prior to the TS’s founding, laws in the U.S. permitted slavery. At least in the southern part of the country, any person who could afford it could purchase another human being of African descent and own him or her as his personal property. In his inaugural address for the TS delivered on November 17, 1875 in Mott Memorial Hall in New York City, Henry Steel Olcott referred to this condition, saying that thirty years from that time, Americans would be “ashamed . . . of ever having owned a slave or countenanced human slavery.” It would take another forty-five years before it would be legal for women to vote in the U.S.

After the holocaust of World War II, and the genocidal struggles preceding it, the newly formed United Nations adopted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This declaration expanded on the language of the TS’s First Object in stating that human rights were unaffected by “race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”

This level of understanding of the human fraternity has since been accepted and encoded in law worldwide. This rapid evolution in the collective worldview should be considered remarkable progress. Yet from the perspective of the First Object, it is superficial. The changes of the last century and a half relate merely to rights and legislation. The universal brotherhood of the First Object relates to being. In Buddhism, and in H.P. Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence, there is the concept of paramitas, or “perfections.” The last of these perfections is Wisdom—the direct perception of reality or truth. One component of this elevated state of seeing is the recognition of “dependent arising,” which is to say that there is nothing that exists that is not composed of countless other things and conditions. Everything arises (comes into being) dependent on other things.

One example that is sometimes given is a simple thing like a chair. The question is asked, “What is a chair?” Whether it is a three-legged stool, an elaborate throne, or some interpretive modern art rendition, we all can recognize a chair when we see one. But what makes it a chair? Is it the wood? The glue or nails used to construct it? Is it the rain and sunshine that made the wood grow? Is it the carpenter? The idea in his mind? Carried to its logical extreme, the existence of a chair, or anything else, ultimately depends on everything there is. At a fundamental level all things are interdependent. Buddhist monk and noted international teacher Thich Nhat Hanh coined the term interbeing to further stress this idea.

The Theosophical perspective on human interdependence adds some specificity to this idea. In The Secret Doctrine, HPB makes the point that our habit of regarding ourselves as independent units needs rethinking. HPB depicts the human condition from the point of view of consciousness—that humanity as a whole and its component units (us) are composed of gradations of intelligence. The human being “arises” dependent upon the interblending of three evolutionary streams (spiritual, intellectual, and physical) and upon the hierarchies of intelligent beings that guide and direct those streams. She writes, “Each of these three systems has its own laws, and is ruled and guided by different sets of the highest Dhyanis or ‘Logoi.’ Each is represented in the constitution of man . . . and it is the union of these three streams in him which makes him the complex being he now is” (The Secret Doctrine, 1.181).

From the perspective of the Ageless Wisdom, humanity, and we human beings, are more like a cooperative project than independent entities.

While this way of looking at ourselves may seem challenging, it is not as unfamiliar as we may think. At the most basic level, we are all aware that our physical bodies are composed of literally trillions of individual cells, each with its own needs, direction of growth, and expression of consciousness. Within the body, these individual cells join together to form the organs, the heart, brain, liver, kidneys, etc., each organ having its own needs, function, and consciousness that is significantly more expansive than are those of the participating cells. With the addition of the “soul,” or spiritual consciousness, this combination of diverse lives and functions becomes that greater life described as “me” or “I.”

The universal brotherhood at the heart of the Theosophical movement is rooted in oneness. There is no road to a genuine spirituality that does not lead us toward a deepening awareness of our shared experience. The Bible describes the human condition in this way: “In him we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28).That Divine Consciousness is everywhere present, expressing itself in us and as us. Our role is to know it, not as a mere idea or concept, but as the essential truth of our being. The motto of the Theosophical Society is “There is no religion higher than Truth”—and there is no truth higher than oneness.