Quest Magazine

Printed in the Winter 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "From the Editor’s Desk" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 2

It’s dangerous to talk about a subject that you know only a little about. And I certainly am no expert on psychology. But sometimes, as Plato said in another context, “the risk is a beautiful one.”

To me it seems that psychology as a discipline has gone into a stage of arrested development. The great insights of the twentieth century, starting with Freud and Jung and going on to the humanistic and transpersonal psychologies of the ’60s and ’70s, have been pushed into the shadows by the genius of neurochemistry. We no longer need to understand our behavior. We merely need to manage it chemically.

And yet if science has gone far toward telling us about how the brain functions, it is as far as ever from telling us how the mind functions. If it had, you might think it would have stanched the epidemic of depression and mental illness, but instead this is accelerating.

Here is one reason, I suspect, that psychology is marching into this wall: it has reached the limits of what it can understand about the individual without understanding the collective. If, as we’re constantly told, we are all one, there must be a point beyond which individual psychology can’t be understood apart from that of others around us. If there is a collective mind, then this mind too is very likely subject to disorders. We may be at the stage where we must know more about mass insanity before we can cure it in individuals.

One of very few who looked into this issue was the Russian psychologist V.M. Bekhterev (1857–1927). Bekhterev was, among other things, an important neurologist, but he also attempted to understand mass behavior, including mass insanity. He became especially interested in it by witnessing the Russian Revolution, where he periodically saw spontaneous acts of crazed mob violence that no one person would have undertaken on his own. He wrote: “I happened to talk to some army officers who survived the Russian Revolution and who knew their detachments well. All of them claimed that when they would talk to an individual soldier it was easy to convince him to adopt a sensible view of things, but as soon as this soldier found himself in a crowd at a political meeting, he would accept the collective slogan . . . and would express his agreement by shouting ‘Right! Right!’”

Bekhterev did not get terribly far in advancing a theory about this type of behavior — he seems to have thought of it as the result of a kind of electrical impulse that jumped from brain to brain in a crowd — but at least he did try to investigate it. I’m not sure that much progress has been made since then.

In Bekhterev’s time, the issue was the behavior of crowds — a mob of people maddened into riot, a company of soldiers ganging up and shooting the officers. While this still seems to be poorly understood, we probably need to add another issue to the mix: the behavior of virtual crowds. After all, the period since 2010, when social media became a fact of life for most Americans, has been a time of unusual hysteria and dissociation. I’m always astonished to go on Facebook and see how many people are furiously publicizing the people and causes they most hate.

We are living in a world that is increasingly intertwined. This fact greatly heightens the possibility of the contagion of madness. Thus I don’t believe that we will be able to solve any of today’s most pressing issues—poverty, violence, injustice, environmental contamination — without understanding the collective dimension of our own minds, including its dysfunctions.

This issue’s theme is “Spirituality and Culture,” so it’s appropriate to ask if these collective psychological issues are spiritual issues as well. I believe they are. In the first place, we speak of spirituality and psychology as separate things only as a convenience. They are not so in practice, just as we speak of the respiratory and circulatory systems of the body separately, even though they are completely interdependent and each affects the other at practically every point.

In the second place, the only real solution for collective madness is a collective vision, and that must necessarily be a spiritual vision. Up to now it has been provided mostly by religion — for better or worse; often religion is a form of madness in its own right. But we are far less likely to trust religion these days, and there is no other discipline that can provide anything like the sweeping perspective that religion has been able to give. Certainly science has not, because science is, in the end, a form of analysis. It is far better at taking things apart than it is at integrating them.

I firmly believe that the Ageless Wisdom offers this collective vision, now as it has for millennia. But this is far from solving the problem. What form of the Ageless Wisdom? What is it to say, and how is it to speak? Who is to speak for it? So far the answers have been extremely vague. We are not yet at the point of finding our collective inspiration or curing our collective madness. For the time being, the best we may be able to do is to keep our sanity as individuals.

Richard Smoley

Printed in the Winter 2016 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "The Twisted History of the Swastika" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 22-23

By Richard Smoley 

If you were asked to come up with a symbol for evil, very likely you would think of the swastika. The quintessential emblem of the Third Reich, it still evokes hatred and fear seventy years after the collapse of the Nazi regime.

And yet not so long ago it was a symbol of blessings and good fortune. Even its name is derived from Sanskrit roots meaning “it is good.” (Other names given to it include the cross patteé, the gammadion, the hakenkreuz or hooked cross, and the fylfot.) Today, in a somewhat truncated form, it still occupies a place in the official symbol of the Theosophical Society.

The peculiar fate of the swastika has a great deal to teach about the nature and meaning of symbols — and about the uses to which they can be put.

The swastika occurs almost universally. The most ancient version known is on a carved tusk from the Ukraine, dated to around 10,000 BC. Other early instances were found at Hissarlik in western Asia Minor, where Heinrich Schliemann, often called the father of archaeology, unearthed the ruins of Troy in 1873. The swastika begins to appear in the city’s third stratum, dated to 2250–2100 BC. It is on spindle-whorls, a sphere, and a statue made of lead thought to be an image of the goddess Artemis. The vulva (or perhaps the mons veneris) of this figure has a swastika in the middle. One scholar interpreted it as representing “the generative power of man” (Wilson, 811–13, 829).

Schliemann himself, following orientalist scholars of his time, said that the swastika was “of the very greatest importance among the early progenitors of the Aryan races in Bactria and in the villages of the Oxus, at a time when Germans, Indians, Pelasgians, Celts, Persians, Slavonians and Iranians still formed one nation and spoke one language” (Schliemann, 102).

But the swastika is found far beyond the traditional provenance of the “Aryan races.” Thomas Wilson, who wrote a study on it for the Smithsonian Institution in the late nineteenth century, lists examples from ancient sites ranging from Japan to Europe to North and South America. It’s quite apparent that the swastika belongs to everybody and to nobody.

Before we go into the swastika’s history, it might be best to clear up one source of confusion: its orientation. You will often hear it said that the “clockwise” direction of the swastika is the “good” direction, while the “counterclockwise” direction is the “bad” one.

To begin with, consider these two images: 

	Figure 1. Left-facing or "clockwise" swastika.
	Figure 2. Right-facing or "counterclockwise" swastika.

Which of these looks clockwise to you? To me, either one could be seen as clockwise, or counterclockwise, so I will avoid these terms. Instead I will speak of “left-facing” (for diagram 1) and “right-facing” (for diagram 2) swastikas. (If you’re curious, the left-facing one is most often described as clockwise.)

You can also forget about which direction is the good one or the bad one. Traditionally there seems to be no difference, and often both types appear in the same location — for example, on the curtain of a Tibetan temple devoted to the Bönpa, the nation’s pre-Buddhist shamanistic religion (Baumer, 21). Similarly Thomas Wilson, introduced to a member of a Chinese delegation visiting Washington, found him wearing robes of state emblazoned with both versions of the swastika. “The name given to the sign was . . . wan, and the signification was ‘longevity,’ ‘long life,’ ‘many years,’” Wilson writes. “Thus was shown that in far as well as near countries, in modern as well as ancient times, this sign stood for blessing, good wishes, and, by a slight extension, for good luck” (Wilson, 800).

So how did it come to stand for the complete opposite: hatred, violence, and cruelty?

Some historical background is needed. In 1871 Germany, which for centuries had been fragmented into dozens of tiny and often overrun states, was unified into a single empire, or Reich, by the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Naturally Germans began to feel a thirst for a shared national identity. This began to form under a range of influences, from the treatise on Germany by the Roman historian Tacitus to the operas of Richard Wagner.

An identity is created out of many things, including the things you are against. Thus anti-Semitism soon became part of this German identity. Anti-Semitism had deep roots in Germany, going back at least as far back as Martin Luther, who in 1543 published a vituperative book entitled On the Jews and Their Lies. Wagner too was an anti-Semite.

Opposed to the Jews were, so the theory went, the Aryans. The word comes from the Sanskrit arya, meaning “noble,” and originally referred to the Indo-European peoples who conquered the Indian subcontinent in the second millennium BC. But soon it came to mean, above all else, the pure, white European race, which had reached the summit of perfection in the Germans.

What could serve as a symbol for this race? The cross was tainted by Christianity, which after all was founded by Jews. The fact that Schliemann had found the swastika in the ruins of Troy and Mycenae, the homes of an ancient, noble, and presumably Aryan race, spoke in its favor. It was (and is) found universally in India too, which had given the Aryans their name. And there was the verdict of the French symbologist the Count Goblet d’Alviella, who asserted that the swastika “is not met with in Egypt, Chaldea, or Assyria” — the last two being Semitic nations (Goblet d’Alviella, 40).

By the twentieth century, occult and pseudo-occult groups invoking the Aryan legacy were displaying the swastika. Hitler’s connection with these groups is suppositional at best, but it is fairly certain that he read and collected issues of the journal Ostara, founded in 1905 by the occultist Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels. The magazine’s subtitle — “Newsletter of the Blonds and Male Supremacists” — gives a good idea of its orientation. Its emblem was a knight in a hooded robe covered with swastikas.

Other extreme groups made use of the symbol as well, such as the Germanenorden, an occult lodge focused on ancient Germanic lore and of course anti-Semitism. Its founder was a self-styled aristocrat named Rudolf von Sebottendorff. As the German Reich collapsed in the fall of 1918, the order recast itself as the Thule Society (after Thule, a mythical polar land). Its symbol was a long dagger superimposed on a swastika sun wheel.

On November 9, 1918 — two days before Germany’s surrender in World War I — Sebottendorff delivered an impassioned speech to the Thule Society. Because of the imminent defeat, he declaimed, “in the place of our princes of Germanic blood rules our deadly enemy: Judah.” He urged his audience to fight “until the swastika rises victoriously out of the icy darkness” (Goodrick-Clarke, 144–45).

Direct connections between the Thule Society and the nascent Nazi movement are somewhat hard to trace, but there was at the very least an overlap of membership. In May 1919 a Thule member named Friedrich Krohn proposed the left-facing swastika as a symbol for the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (“German Workers’ Party,” or DAP), the precursor of the Nazi party. 

Krohn evidently preferred this direction because he considered it auspicious, whereas, he said, the right-facing version portended disaster and death. But as Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke writes in his Occult Roots of Nazism, “there was no standard usage regarding the swastika” in this movement (or, as far as I can tell, anywhere else). The Germanenorden itself had used the right-facing version. Finally Hitler, who joined the party in November 1919 and soon rose to its leadership, chose the right-facing version, for reasons that are not clear (Goodrick-Clarke, 151).

But the meaning was clear. In his autobiography, Mein Kampf, Hitler writes: “The swastika signified the mission allotted to us — the struggle for the victory of Aryan mankind and at the same time the triumph of the ideal of creative work which is in itself and always will be anti-Semitic.” He credits himself with the design: 

After innumerable trials I decided upon a final form — a flag of red material with a white disc bearing in its centre a black swastika. After many trials I obtained the correct proportions between the dimensions of the flag and of the white central disc, as well as that of the swastika . . . The new flag appeared in public in the midsummer of 1920. It suited our movement admirably, both being new and young. Not a soul had seen this flag before; its effect at that time was something akin to that of a blazing torch. (Hitler, chapter 7) 

     This, by the way, is the standard Nazi swastika:

Figure 3. Nazi swastika.

Notice one thing about this version. As figures 1 and 2 indicate, the traditional forms of the swastika appear in full vertical and horizontal orientation. But the Nazi swastika is decussated: it is cocked to a tilt of 45 degrees. This gives a greater impression of movement, possibly of a destructive kind. In this position it looks like a whirling blade. Hitler may have adopted it for this reason.

Nevertheless, the swastika did not have these meanings elsewhere in the world. In the U.S. it remained a good-luck sign, as evidenced by its use in the house organ of the Girls’ Club, called The Swastika. Up to the 1930s, the symbol appeared — with perfectly innocent intentions — on American goods ranging from poker chips and playing cards to the labels of fruit boxes. It was even the emblem of a lovable cartoon monkey named Bing-o. To this day in Asia it is still used, with auspicious connotations, on commercial signs and in religious ritual (Heller, 37, 90–101, 149).

But after Hitler came to power in 1933, the Western world came to link the swastika with hatred and violence. A synagogue in Hartford, Connecticut, had swastika patterns in its flooring, which the horrified congregation had to have paved over. When swastika flags were hoisted over three ocean liners docked in New York in 1935, a mob of 2000 people tore them down, provoking diplomatic protests from the Nazis. The swastika became so firmly equated with evil that it remains an emblem of fear for many — and for many others, it is still used for that purpose. The incarcerated cult murderer Charles Manson carved it into his forehead in 1970 (Heller, 13). It continues to surface among anti-Semites and fascists of various stripes. The present-day German republic forbids its public display.

All this gives a brief history of the use and abuse of the swastika in modern times. But what does the symbol really mean? This question is, I believe, not only difficult but unanswerable. But before I say why, let’s explore some of the meanings that have been ascribed to it.

     One interpretation is given by Schliemann, citing a scholar named Émile Bournouf: 

The  represents the two pieces of wood which were laid cross-wise upon one another before the sacrificial altars in order to produce the holy fire (Agni), and whose ends were bent round at right angles and fastened by means of four nails, so that this wooden scaffolding might not be moved. At the point where the two pieces of wood were joined, there was a small hole, in which a third piece of wood, in the form of a lance (called Pramantha) was rotated by means of a cord made of cow’s hair and hemp, till the fire was generated by friction. (Schliemann, 103–04; cf. Blavatsky, Collected Writings, 2:143–44) 

The swastika is thus associated with fire — particularly the sacred fire known as agni, which is not to be confused with the physical manifestation per se. Because this fire is caused by friction, the swastika is also associated with motion. And from its shape, it is connected with the cross. Thus the swastika can represent a cross in motion. George S. Arundale, late president of the Theosophical Society, writes: 

All that you feel in the sea you can feel infinitely more in the whirling of the Svastika [sic], for you yourselves are part and parcel of the whirling. The Svastika whirls because a God has set in motion the Wheel of the Law, and it is as if to its myriad spokes clung innumerable drops — the Men who are to become Gods. (Arundale, 225) 

This passage is taken from Arundale’s Lotus Fire, a profound work that explores a sequence of symbols (the point, the web, the line, the circle, the cross, the swastika, and the lotus) that was, he claimed, “disclosed to me by a Lord of Yoga” (Arundale, 22). Arundale also observes: 

 I see . . . a very special appearance of relentlessness to the movement of the Svastika and to its effect upon the Men of the Sea [i.e., unindividuated beings] whom it frictions into ever-increasing Self-consciousness. The well-known phrase “broken on the wheel” — that horrible physical torture of earlier periods of history, perpetuated in modern days in terms of the mind, so that the inquisition of today is breaking its victims on the wheel of the mind, a terrible desecration of the Wheel of the Law . . . — occurs to me, for indeed is it ignorance which is broken upon the Wheel of the Love of God, the Wheel of His Salvation, the Svastika. (Arundale, 267–68; emphasis added) 

H.P. Blavatsky, identifying the swastika with “Thor’s hammer” or “the hammer of creation,” says: 

In the Macrocosmic work, the “Hammer of Creation,” with its four arms bent at right angles, refers to the continual motion and revolution of the invisible Kosmos of Forces. In that of the manifested Kosmos and our Earth, it points to the rotation in the circles of time of the world’s axes and their equatorial belts; the two lines forming the Svastika  meaning Spirit and Matter, the four hooks suggesting the motion in the revolving cycles. (Blavatsky, Secret Doctrine, 2:99; emphasis Blavatsky’s) 

Other authorities have also linked the swastika to cosmic cycles. The French esotericist René Guénon writes: 

The bent part of the arms of the swastika is considered . . . as representing the Great Bear seen in four different positions in the course of its revolution around the Pole Star, to which the centre of the four gammas are united naturally corresponds, and that these four positions are related to the cardinal symbol points and the four seasons. (Guénon, 85) 

Figure 4. The swastika seen as an arrangement of four Greek gammas.

Guénon is talking about the fact that the four arms of the swastika resemble four gammas (the Greek capital gamma looks like this: Γ) positioned around a center point. He connects this fact with the symbolism of the letter G — the roman equivalent of the gamma — in Masonry. Hence also the name gammadion.

Furthermore, this center point would be the pole. (The point of view would be of someone looking down at the earth from above the North Pole.) For this reason, Guénon associates the swastika with Hyperborea, a prehistoric circumpolar civilization that was said to precede Atlantis. (Note: this is not to be confused with Blavatsky’s concept of the Hyperborean Root Race.)

So, then, the swastika is, or may be, connected with the four principal directions, portrayed symbolically as a cross. If so, then the decussated Nazi swastika would symbolize directions that are askew, and hence a world out of joint, possibly evil.

Incidentally one could say the same thing about the Soviet hammer and sickle. In essence it is nothing other than the cross (in this case, a T-cross) combined with the crescent — two of the most ancient and universal sacred symbols. But again its orientation is not rectilinear. Like the Nazi swastika, it is decussated — again suggesting something that is aberrant, out of joint, or evil.  

Earlier I said that none of these associations, singly or as a whole, exhausts the meaning of the swastika. That’s because the swastika, like all other primordial symbols, has no ultimate meaning. It means itself. It speaks to a level of the mind that lies beyond the realm of meaning as we normally understand it. The same is true of other basic geometric shapes such as the six-pointed star and the crescent, the defining symbols of Judaism and Islam. These symbols will keep their living force for as long as the human mind is as it is. Meanings and movements will attach themselves to them and will try to draw power from them, often with success. Yet meanings come and go, while the symbol remains.

Figure 5. The Soviet hammer and  sickle. Conventionally it refers to  the combined power of the workers (represented by the hammer) and  the peasants (represented by  the sickle.

As theologian Paul Tillich writes, religious symbols open “the depth dimension of reality itself, the dimension of reality which is the ground of every other dimension and every depth . . . the fundamental level, the level below all other levels, the level of being itself . . . If a religious symbol has ceased to have this function, then it dies. And if new symbols are born, they are born out of a changed relationship to the ultimate ground of Being, i.e., to the Holy” (Tillich, 47, 49).

I believe that Tillich is right up to a point, but it is not so obvious to me that symbols — the primordial symbols, at any rate, of which the swastika is one — die. Or if they die, they are born again. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that they are recycled.

In recent years some have tried to cleanse the swastika of its evil connotations. In 1988–92 a Jewish artist named Edith Altman created an installation entitled Reclaiming the Symbol: The Art of Memory. In one scene, she has a gold swastika painted on a wall above a black Nazi swastika painted on the floor — a visual attempt to expunge evil from the symbol. In 2008, in a ham-handed effort to make the swastika humorous, cartoonist Sam Gross published We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons. (Sample: a Nazi dropping garbage into a swastika-shaped bin labeled “White Trash Only.”)

But as graphic artist Steven Heller comments, “For every naïve rock-and-roller who thinks the swastika can be used with irony, there is a fervent neo-Nazi who uses it with malice. For every well-meaning artist who thinks the swastika can be tamed, there is a devout racist who embraces it” (Heller, 157).

In the long run, it’s likely that the swastika will be rehabilitated. Theosophist Arthur M. Coon observes:

The memory of the use of the swastika, as an emblem of Nazism will in future ages have faded to oblivion; while its true meaning as a symbol of the hidden “fire” or “spirit” within all manifestation, from the atom to a solar universe, will become increasingly revealed to humanity. (Coon, 120)

But I suspect that these future ages will not, at least in the West, come in the lifetime of anyone who is breathing on this planet now.

But I suspect that these future ages will not, at least in the West, come in the lifetime of anyone who is breathing on this planet now.

Sources 

Arundale, George S. The Lotus Fire: A Study in Symbolic Yoga. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1939.

Baumer, Christoph. Tibet’s Ancient Religion: Bön. Translated by Michael Kohn. Trumbull, Conn.: Weatherhill, 2002.

Blavatsky, H.P. Collected Writings. 15 vols. Edited by Boris de Zirkoff. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1966–91.

————. The Secret Doctrine. 2 vols. Wheaton: Quest, 1993.

Coon, Arthur M. The Theosophical Seal: A Study for the Student and the Non-Student. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1958.

“Edith Altman.” Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies; http://chgs.umn.edu/museum/exhibitions/witnessLeg/survivorsRefs/altman/index.html; accessed Sept. 1, 2015.

Goblet d’Alviella, Count. The Migration of Symbols. London: Archibald Constable, 1894.

Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity. New York: New York University Press, 2002.

—–—–. The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology. New York University Press, 1985.

Gross, Sam. We Have Ways of Making You Laugh: 120 Funny Swastika Cartoons. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Guénon, René. Fundamental Symbols: The Universal Language of Sacred Science. Translated by Alvin Moore, Jr. Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1995.

Heller, Steven. The Swastika: Symbol beyond Redemption? New York: Allworth, 2000.

Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Translated by James Murphy. http://www.greatwar.nl/books/meinkampf/meinkampf.pdf; accessed Aug. 27, 2015.

Jeffrey, Jason. “Hyperborea and the Quest for Mystical Enlightenment.” New Dawn (Jan.-Feb. 2000); http://www.newdawnmagazine.com/articles/hyperborea-the-quest-for-mystical-enlightenment; accessed Sept. 1, 2015.

Schliemann, Henry [Heinrich]. Troy and Its Remains: A Narrative of Researches and Discoveries Made on the Site of Ilium, and in the Trojan Plain. Edited by Philip Smith. London: John Murray, 1875.

“The Seal of the Theosophical Society.” The Seal of the Theosophical Society; accessed Aug. 28, 2015.

Tillich, Paul. The Essential Tillich. Edited by F. Forrester Church. New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Wilson, Thomas. The Swastika: The Earliest Known Symbol and Its Migrations, with Observations on the Migrations of Certain Industries in Prehistoric Times. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1896.

Richard Smoley’s latest book, The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness is available now. His next book, How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible, is due to be published by Tarcher/Penguin in June 2016.

Printed in the Winter 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Boyd, Tim. "President’s Diary" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 34-35

By Tim Boyd

This issue’s Diary will be like one of those super-size sandwiches — with Adyar in the beginning, Adyar at the end, and a host of other places, events, and people in the middle. In July my wife, Lily, and I returned from Adyar. Twice a year at Olcott, in July and in February, we have the TSA board of directors’ meeting. The meetings extend over three and a half days and involve not only the directors from around the Section, but TSA staff; John Kern, who has served as advisor to the bank for The Kern Foundation Trust since its founding in 1966; TSA treasurer Floyd Kettering; chief financial officer Augie Hirt; and national secretary David Bruce. Quite honestly, our meeting room can feel a little claustrophobic at times.

The purpose of the board meetings is multilayered. Primarily it is an opportunity for everyone to be brought up to speed on the overall functioning of the TSA. The directors share updates and ideas on what is happening in their areas; the TSA staff pass on information and impressions about the work at Olcott; John Kern and others speak about funding and possible directions; and together we engage in a process of building a vision for the work and function of the overall organization. Over the course of the three-plus days it can be tiring at times, but it is always the case that working together so intensely for the good of the TS is inspiring. We have some very good people on our board.

Immediately following the TSA board meetings, after lunch on the last day, the board meeting of the Theosophical Order of Service USA begins. It lasts for a day. Under the leadership of TOS-USA president and TOS international secretary Nancy Secrest, it is a full, informative, and work-packed day.

The very next day the 129th Summer National Convention (SNC) of the TSA began with the theme “Psychology: Science of the Soul.” Each year for me it seems that the quality of the programs and feeling within the group surely must have peaked. Last year I felt it was the best; the year before, it could not possibly get better; the year before that, the same; and so on. Well, this year was the same. Our luminary presenters included both members and friends whose work in the world magnifies the Theosophical message. Dr. Cassandra Vieten, CEO of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), with whom we have developed a close collaborative relationship over the past few years, and Dr. Fred Luskin, founder and director of Stanford University’s long-running Forgiveness Project, were two of our featured speakers. (See the interview with Cassandra.) TSA members Fernando de Torrijos, director of psychiatric mindfulness training programs at the University of Massachusetts Medical School; Quest Books author and practicing clairvoyant Kurt Leland; Peggy Heubel; and Quest author Dr. Albert Amao filled out the program.

In keeping with what has become a minitradition over the past four years, my wife, Lily, again held a tea. Each year, members from around the country pitch in to make it a thoroughly enjoyable and elegant affair. Everything from setup to cleanup, food preparation to dishwashing, takes place seamlessly. The Nicholson Dining Hall was elegantly decorated with flowers and soft lights; all manner of delicacies were served; and again this year the necessary tea was prepared by Greenville, South Carolina’s finest (by way of Gujarat, India), Kishore Patel. His recipe for spiced chai has become a necessity for the occasion.

Two days after our SNC ended, IONS’ sixteenth international conference began in Oak Brook, Illinois, just a few miles away. IONS began in 1973 after astronaut Edgar Mitchell had a transformative experience during his return from walking on the moon. The organization has done major work to improve the scientific community’s understanding and appreciation of subtle energies and consciousness. Earlier in the year Cassandra Vieten had asked me to speak at their conference. So on their opening night, after hearing from Cassandra and Edgar Mitchell, I had a chance to close the evening addressing the 600-plus people attending. (To see the video of the talk: click here..)

At this point you may be getting the impression that this was a busy time. Two days after the IONS event, it was off to the airport for an August-long swing through Europe. The trip began in London, where we came for the English Section’s summer school. Briefly we visited at the TS England’s Gloucester Street national headquarters before joining with about twenty others on a charter bus to Birmingham, where the summer school was to be held. Over the course of the six-day event I spoke on a number of occasions, participated in a number of meetings of various types, and most importantly had conversations with the members about everything from fine points of Theosophy to service activity to family concerns. As has been the case since the TSE’s founding, its members are an independent-minded crew, unafraid to express themselves.

Next was Finland. Our trip began at Kreivila, the lovely summer home for the TS Finland. Kreivila is a beautiful retreat in the countryside, two hours north of Helsinki. There is a large main building with a number of bedrooms, kitchen, and dining area. They have built a first-rate meeting hall that easily accommodated the fifty or so people gathered. There are woods, a lake, and a sauna right next to the lake. Before I left the U.S. Joy Mills wrote to me about my upcoming trip. In the letter she talked about the various places I would be going and her memories of the many years and many times she had visited. She had some particularly fond memories of Kreivila. One of the things she told me was that while I was there I must be sure to “take a sauna.” I have never been one to disobey Joy.

From Kreivila it was on to Helsinki for programs that included a public talk at the Rudolf Steiner School. While we were there, a contingent of members from neighboring Sweden came, and we had a chance to meet together.

Tim and Lily Boyd with Members of  the Helsinki Lodge

From Helsinki it was a boat ride across the Baltic Sea to Tallinn, Estonia, for a one-day visit which included a public talk and a separate meeting with members. The historic Old Town of this beautiful medieval city has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site for good reason.

Then came Paris where we stayed at the TS France’s national headquarters in the seventh arrondissement, just a five-minute walk from the Eiffel Tower. The French portion of the trip was much more laid-back. Kim Dieu, former general secretary of the TS France, says that if another country ever wanted to invade France all they would have to do is come in August, because even the army would be at the beach on vacation. We did have a day of sightseeing at Monet’s Giverny garden with about twenty members. The afternoon culminated in a picnic and formal meeting with a lively give-and-take of questions and responses. All TS meetings could profit from this “très français” approach.

The final stop on our European tour was at the International Theosophical Centre in Naarden, the Netherlands. One revelation that came with being elected to the position of president of TS international was that I was ex officio head of this wonderful center. Last year, when I came for the first time, the ITC in conjunction with the Dutch Section organized “Dutch Day.” This year we had another Dutch Day. I had thought that “Double Dutch Day” might work, but little did I know that for the Dutch it does not have the same meaning as it does in the U.S. For me it refers to a game of jump rope using two ropes. In Holland it carries a meaning that derives from a time when the British and Dutch were in conflict. The Brits used the term to describe someone who talks in a tricky or unclear way. It was a minor lesson in navigating the global cultural minefield. Maybe next time we’ll do Triple Dutch. In any case the meeting was well-attended and had a quality of open conversation and a sense of ease in discussing difficult issues internationally and at our Adyar center. Already we have three members of the Dutch Section doing a variety of important volunteer work at Adyar, and more are on the way. I like this Section.

In both the Netherlands and in Finland I had separate meetings with two groups of vibrant younger members. During the general council meeting at Adyar last December, I told the various Section heads that when I visited a Section I wanted to have such meetings. So far we have done it in Italy, Finland, and the Netherlands. In February the Brazilian Section is hosting an International Young Theosophists gathering at their center outside of Brasilia. I will be attending.

Finally at the end of August my wife, daughter, and I returned to Olcott just in time for our biggest annual event, TheosoFest. Every year for fifteen years, on the first Saturday following Labor Day, we have held our open house event. We open the campus to the community. Vendors of all types are invited — healing arts, vegetarian food, jewelry, massage therapists, tai chi, alternative educational institutions, and more. During the day more than forty talks are presented on Theosophical and related subjects. It’s a day that people around the area look forward to. For a number of years I have been saying that I wanted to break the mythical number of 2000 attendees. Except for 1993, when our TheosoFest was linked to the hundred-year anniversary of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, we had never been able to reach that number. Something felt different this year. We had a record number of vendors — 115 — and ended up turning some away for the first time. More than 1000 cars were parked on the campus throughout the day. The bookstore had its highest-selling day ever, actually selling more books than crystals and jewelry! And yes, 2100 people came. Next year, 10,000. Just kidding.

As I write, I am once again back at Adyar. What a summer!

Tim Boyd

Printed in the Winter 2016  issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Goldsberry, Clare. "The Dangers of Staying in One Place" Quest 104.1 (Winter 2016): pg. 29-31

By Clare Goldsberry

Google is a great place to find philosophical tidbits. While this saying didn’t have an attribution, I copied it into a book I keep of great quotes:

Sometimes walking away has nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with strength. We walk away not because we want others to realize our worth and value, but because we finally realize our own.

It struck a chord with me because many times I’ve walked away from people, from situations, from relationships, and even from religions because they no longer fit or seemed right any longer. At these times I finally realize that the need to fulfill my own destiny (whatever that is), or to follow my path, steers me in another direction, because the direction I’ve been moving in no longer feels right. I have never been able to stay in one place very long — or with one person — and especially not with one religion. My Higher Self begins to stir something within me; my consciousness begins to shift, and I can feel myself beginning to pull away. It’s an odd feeling, even though I’ve felt it many times during my life. It is as if I am moving further from a particular situation or place in my life to make room for something else.

I seem to feel more comfortable in places and with people who offer me freedom from the constraints of rigid thinking or acting. I feel drawn to places in which “flow” can happen naturally and spontaneously. I love the natural world, and my connection to it grew out of the place where I grew up. As a child I was reared on a small farm that was primarily one big playground for my two brothers and me. Our father worked in the city, but our mother had been raised on a farm, so she did the gardening and the canning. We always had a couple of cows that were raised for meat, and some ponies for us to ride.

My world was one of the smell of green grass and fresh-cut clover hay, the tantalizing excitement of summer rains that came often and kept the air washed clean and invited the cry of the rain crows — which I later learned were mourning doves. My favorite spot was in my Thinking Tree — a great, noble sycamore with smooth, white-barked limbs mottled with flaking brown bits of overbark — lying out prone on a huge limb that had grown horizontally out over the creek that ran through our farm. I’d lie there for hours, listening to the music of the water flowing beneath me while I daydreamed of my life to come, even though it was always difficult to imagine being anyplace but on the farm.

It was there, in my Thinking Tree, at age ten, that I first heard my inner voice. I’d asked what I would be when I grew up. “You’re going to be a writer, Clare,” it said. It was plain and clear — a sound, yet not a sound that one would hear with one’s physical ears. Whose was that voice? I finally satisfied myself with the idea that it was God talking to me. After all, God knew me and knew my name. Surely it must have been God!

As much as I loved our little farm in Kentucky, I was always filled with a restless sense that I wanted to — needed to — move on. Being called away was the first step. Finding the path by which I could go forward was often the more difficult step.

For me, a lifelong spiritual seeker, the pursuit of religion and the spiritual path was my passion. I was always questioning everything. I’d question my Sunday School teachers until they were exasperated with me. “Just believe!” they would tell me, which certainly sounded easy enough but never really satisfied my longing to know.

When I became a teenager in high school, a new minister came to Bullittsville Christian Church who was very different from most of the ministers we’d had. He was an Old Testament scholar. He did not seem rigid in his religious thinking, but was open and seemed to enjoy my questions, which he was not at all reluctant to discuss with me. We’d spend hours in his office in the church talking about religion, the history of religion, and why people were (or weren’t) religious. When I married a Mormon man at age twenty-one, Rev. O’Neal told me that I would join the Mormon church. “No, I won’t,” I protested. “I like the Disciples of Christ church. I won’t change.”

“Oh yes, you will, Clare,” he replied. “Because you have too many questions and Mormons have all the answers.”

Not that those answers would be the truth or my truth — but they did have answers. After nearly ten years, however, their answers were no longer satisfying. I’d never really stopped searching for or pursuing the truth, and few answers the Mormons provided held any real satisfaction to my constant questioning.

And so my pursuit continued beyond Mormonism, back to the Disciples, out of the Disciples, and into the Eastern philosophies — first Buddhism, then its forerunner, Hinduism. I have often asked myself if the pursuit for knowledge, truth, and realization should ever end. Do we at some point settle into a single spiritual tradition and become content with what we find there? Or are questions an intrinsic part of our human search for the divine? And if the questions are an intrinsic part of our search, then are they more important than the answers?

There is something certain, reassuring, and comfortable in being dedicated to a strict dogma or to absolute doctrine. I’ve often thought that people like the Mormons, who believe absolutely and undoubtedly that their church is the only true church, that their belief system is the only true belief system and provides the one way to get to heaven, are perhaps more content and satisfied in their absolutes than we who are seekers. From time to time, I’ve felt envious of people who could find perfect contentment in one place for their entire life. But that wasn’t me. That’s not who I am, and so I must always continue on, listening to the call that it is time to leave.

There are dangers in staying in one place. One can get stuck in that place, and stuck in a way that becomes an obstacle. Belief systems can become our greatest obstacle to our spiritual growth because we begin to invest everything into the belief system, which can be rigid, unyielding, and unbending and fail to invest in the fluid and dynamic experiences which life can give us.

I’ve discovered over the years that I do not take being called away lightly. My first response is to resist that call, to tell myself that it’s just my own feelings of restlessness arising again and that if I just stick it out the feeling will go away. That tends to work for a while. But that nagging feeling of being called away stays with me, no matter how forcefully I try to tamp it down or push it to the back of my mind.

At these times I have a feeling that my work or my learning in this place is complete, and there is nothing more I can do here. The purpose for which I was called to this particular job or spiritual calling has been fulfilled, and it’s time for me to walk away from it and await my next calling.

Often I’ve received the call to move on at times when I believed very much that I had found my place and was doing exactly what I needed to be doing in my spiritual life. This shift in consciousness, which seems to come as my experiences change, leaves me feeling that I no longer need to hold on to past ideas. Although they seemed to fit perfectly then, they no longer feel like a part of my path. It’s not an abandonment of past ideas — I’ve stayed rooted primarily in Eastern philosophies — but it is more of a moving beyond what was “true” for me yesterday to a deeper understanding of what it means to be on path that is being created one step at a time as I experience it.

Buddhism was that path for me — and remains so. After many years of study, contemplation, and meditation on my own, I found (quite by accident — or maybe not!), and joined, Sangha, community. Nonetheless, with groups— particularly religious groups — it doesn’t take long for groupthink to set in. Even in Buddhism there are those who create a rigid, dogmatic system out of this tradition that, if one adheres to the Buddha’s teachings, is as open, spacious, and expansive as the mind. I once read this comment online: “There have been too many worthy attempts at pursuing the Dharma that have become bogged down in dogma, so the vitality is lost. We can’t live life without structure. But being bound by it is not living nor can it truly be practice.”

Of course seeking is a good thing as long as one does not get addicted to the search. I read an essay recently by Charles McAlpine, owner of Storm Wisdom, a center for intentional living in Phoenix that offers healing services and practices, crystals, and other tools for one’s path. He noted that at one time he’d become “addicted to the pursuit” shortly after he’d started “participating in retreats, workshops, classes and experiences that were designed to connect us with the deeper relationship with Self.” He said that it finally got to the point that all he could think of was “wanting more! Being someone who loves to learn, the pursuit was intoxicating.” He acknowledged how “the focus of pursuit would or could take over.”

Those words really touched me, not only because I’d often wondered about that for my own search, but because of a few friends who also seemed to be addicted to the pursuit. For myself, my search narrowed into the Eastern philosophies, but even those teachings can be found to various degrees in many other ancient and esoteric traditions, as if the ideas knew no human bounds, but everyone, everywhere at some point could meet up with them amidst their own search. I began to understand that in a way, the Eastern philosophies were the end of my pursuit. The more I saw those ideas embedded in the ideas and thoughts of other spiritually attuned persons, the more I realized that I could stay with Eastern traditions as the basis for the development of my personal truth.

But even that requires a winnowing and sifting.

Stephen Sohettni, in an article in Tricycle magazine, writes, “I began to see the path as a state of mind, an attitude that, when maintained, is itself Buddhahood — not an achievement but a process. Far from being a concrete, predictable, and infallible road map, the path is empty . . . Like everything, it’s uniquely related to one’s own mental formations. We find our path, I thought, by probing our own creativity.

“I prefer words of common sense and humor to the flowery epithets of wisdom and compassion,” he goes on to say. “I think less about awakening than simply staying awake to the enlightening moments that are everywhere for anyone who pays attention. Staying awake means continually reevaluating the ground on which we walk. It’s not about belonging at all, but letting go.”

Perhaps the search takes us along a path of knowing and ultimately to that which is beyond knowing to not-knowing, and that is where letting go is of importance. The idea of going beyond has a rich tradition in Buddhism. This beyond knowing is called “excellent wisdom” or “highest wisdom” in ancient Buddhist traditions; it is going beyond the wisdom of the world. “O wisdom which has gone beyond, gone beyond the beyond, to Thee homage.” (Om gate, gate, paramgate, parasamgate bodhi swaha.)

The apostle Paul too taught the idea of going beyond worldly wisdom to the enlightened state of spiritual wisdom. When we think we know everything we need to know and the search seems to be at an end, we must then move beyond knowing to not-knowing. It is in this space of not-knowing that we reach the enlightened mind, where the illusory phenomenal world falls away and the wisdom of ultimate reality becomes our true home.

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