Quest Magazine

Originally printed in the May - June 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Senior, Alan. "The Symbolic Art of Charles Rennie MacKintosh." Quest  90.3 (MAY - JUNE 2002):

By Alan Senior

While serving his apprenticeship in Glasgow, Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) attended evening classes in architecture at Glasgow School of Art. The School, under the remarkable direction of Francis(Fra) Newbery (1855-1946), was recognized as one of Europe's leading design schools, its main function being to educate industrial artists and ornamentalists.

In 1891 Mackintosh won a traveling scholarship, visiting France, Italy, and Belgium, where he produced masses of line drawings and many watercolor sketches of buildings. The artist Sir James Guthrie was much impressed by the drawings and, when told they were by an architectural student, he turned to the School's Director, saying: "Hang it, Newbery, this fellow Mackintosh ought to be an artist!"

But Guthrie echoed Newbery's feelings that Mackintosh should design the new School of Art on a steep hill in the heart of Glasgow. Mackintosh was twenty-eight when he produced the initial design and in his early forties when the second phase was completed. It was his first important commission, the most celebrated of his architectural designs, and (some would say) the beginning of modern architecture.

In 1892 Newbery introduced Mackintosh to the Macdonald sisters, Margaret and Frances, who had registered as art students in 1890. Newbery had noticed similarities in their style of work and encouraged them to collaborate and to exhibit together. With Herbert MacNair, Mackintosh's friend and fellow architectural student, they were to form a group known as the Glasgow Four, the most original and internationally influential artists that Scotland has produced.

Symbolism was crucial to their art, together with those intangible, indefinable and mystical qualities found in the group's watercolor sketches up to 1900. Indeed, Herbert MacNair, late in life, confided that in the group's early works "not a line was drawn without purpose, and rarely was a single motif employed that had not some allegorical meaning" (Howarth 19).

Like Kandinsky, Mackintosh was searching in his work for "the soul that lies beneath appearances" and, also like Kandinsky, he found that this soul was best expressed through a poetic mood of symbolic illumination. In the 1890s and early 1900s a spiritual atmosphere pervaded Scotland's cultural life, and many influential artists and writers were either group members or followers of Rosicrucian, Theosophical, or Spiritualist thought. There are many indications that the Glasgow Four's ideas and inspirations were deeply affected by such movements. As Timothy Neat (23) puts it, "There was a revival of the belief in the 'cosmic character' of art: a belief that the making of art and the viewing of art should be, above all, a spiritual quest."

Connected with Rosicrucianism was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, based in London from 1887 with the poet William Butler Yeats as its best-known member from 1893. Jack Yeats, the poet's painter-brother, was also a member and closely connected with the Glasgow Four. Their ideas and lifestyle seemed to follow the spirit of the Rosicrucians, if not those of the Order of the Golden Dawn, with its secret writings, ambiguous words, images, and acronymic names. As Neat (130) cautions, "Rosicrucian beliefs should not mechanically be sought in the work of the Four; but an awareness of Rosicrucian and Symbolist values can undoubtedly help illumine many of the objects these artists created for their fellow men and the heart of mankind."

The Glasgow Four used the rose so often as an iconic symbol that it was characteristic of them. H. P.Blavatsky ("Traces" 292) calls the rose the grandest and noblest of nature's symbols, adding: "To theRosicrucian, the 'Rose' was the symbol of Nature, of the ever prolific and virgin Earth, or Isis, the mother and nourisher of man, considered as feminine and represented as a virgin woman by the EgyptianInitiates."

There are echoes of Mondrian in the work of all four artists, particularly the Dutchman's Theosophically inspired Evolution Triptych (1910-11). And his oval-shaped compositions seem to relate to the "World Egg" discussed by H. P. Blavatsky in relation to cosmic birth and evolution. There is a high degree of feminist thinking in many of the works of the Four. The return of the goddess or the feminine principle, which has found expression over the last few decades in art and ecology, occurred much earlier in the art of the Glasgow Four. Mackintosh's interiors have a perfect unity of the feminine and the masculine (yin and yang), deriving naturally from his partnership with his wife. In 1927, he wrote her, "You must remember that in all my architectural efforts you have been half if not three-quarters of them." He believed that Margaret had genius, whereas he had only talent.

The meaning of Mackintosh's stylized abstract concepts seems to have eluded many commentators, but they are more ethereal and less eerie or melancholic than the images of the sisters and MacNair. Mackintosh said, "You must be independent, shaking off all the props tradition and authority offer you, and go on alone. The artist's motto should be, 'I care not the least for theories or for this or that dogma so far as the practice of art is concerned—but take my stand on what I consider my personal ideal.'"

That ideal may have contained a great deal of Theosophy and Rosicrucianism, and works reproduced in The Magazine (a hand-made "scrapbook" intended for circulation among the Glasgow Art students), to which Mackintosh contributed drawings, throw a little more light on these esoteric concepts.

For instance, The Harvest Moon of 1892 -3 is the earliest of a group of symbolic watercolors and is almost certainly influenced by Rosicrucian and Theosophical thought. Timothy Neat (52) proposes a symbolic interpretation: "The clouds which lie horizontally across the moon, rather like two bars, can be read as levels, as stratifications, of spiritual being. . . . The bars of cloud that cross Mackintosh's moon give symbolic expression to just those values Kandinsky believed important. The naked woman in the cloud . . . clearly exists in a lower, more physical zone than the moon-maiden above her."

In another painting by Mackintosh called Winter, certain ideas of Blavatsky's are expressed, using the analogy of a seed called "Hiranyagarbha" or the "golden egg" or "golden womb," from which a universe is born, like an oak from an acorn by self-becoming or self-unfoldment. "To the follower of the true Eastern Archaic Wisdom," Blavatsky (Secret Doctrine 2:588) asserts, "every atom of Nature . . . contains the germ from which he may raise the Tree of Knowledge, whose fruits give life eternal and not physical life alone." And Winter depicts the universe, vegetation, and humanity coming into being.

The twin females figures in this painting may represent our dual nature, spiritual and physical. In their ceaseless striving towards perfection they are flawless, their form set to become Divine Humanity, and one feels that Mackintosh is illustrating the power of human beings to transcend the limitations of changing and inconsistent matter by asserting their superiority over all perishable forms. At the top of the design is a veiled image of the sun (which will change winter into spring), and a third of the way up a plant stem is a vivid heart-shaped green leaf of life. Above it, stylized buds symbolize the "flower of art" to come. The stem terminates within a ring, an emblem of wholeness and potentiality, which then spreads out to enclose the two women, becoming their hair.

Mackintosh's attention was directed to soul-growth; what interested him was the Force that directs growth, the ever mysterious and ever unknown. As Blavatsky (Secret Doctrine 2:589) wrote, "For this vital Force, that makes the seed germinate, burst open and throw out shoots, then form the trunk and branches, which, in their turn, bend down like the boughs of the Aswattha, the holy Tree of Bodhi, throw their seed out, take root and procreate other trees—this is the only FORCE that has reality . . . as it is the never-dying breath of life."

Blavatsky's Theosophical Glossary (337) comments, "From the highest antiquity trees were connected with the gods and mystical forces in nature. Every nation had its sacred tree, with its peculiar characteristics and attributes based on natural, and also occasionally on occult properties, as expounded in the esoteric teachings." The symbol for sacred and secret knowledge in antiquity was a tree; hence dragons (symbols of wisdom) guard the Trees of Knowledge. Among the many representations of the rose, the cross, the square, and the circle, it is the tree, in various stylized forms, that dominates Mackintosh's art and architecture. In his architectural lectures, Mackintosh quoted from W. R. Lethaby's Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, which propounded a cosmic symbolism whereby a tree is both a symbol of the universe and a basic form of building construction; so the Tree of Life now becomes a symbol for inspired architecture.

From his earliest 1894 pencil and color wash drawings Mackintosh depicted the Tree of Life. The sculpted relief carving above the entrance to the Glasgow School of Art portrays two maidens guarding a central tree, which is an emblem, both of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge. Mackintosh also sets another Tree of Life within the oval glass insets on the doors of the ground floor, while the library is closely linked with the Tree of Knowledge in a series of visual puns (leaves on balusters, leaves in books). In Queen's Cross Church Hall, Mackintosh ornamented the composite trusses with a Tree of Life emblem and the church's east window with a T-shaped Tree of Knowledge or Cross; even the apple in relief on the internal doors can be associated with the Biblical Tree of knowledge of Good and Evil.

Mackintosh did not commit himself as strongly to the fairytale world as did his wife and her sister, but when he did so, his fairies are more substantial than their depictions. There are two surviving fairy paintings, so perhaps the Devas were another source of inspiration in the late 1890s. The Devic Kingdom—life from the lowest elemental to the highest archangel—was often spoken of in the faerie lore of Celticism and in the current occult literature. It might also account for some of the extreme distortion of organic forms and elongated figures by the other group members.

All these influences permeated Charles Rennie Mackintosh's watercolors, with the exception of his later flower studies and landscapes, and no one else produced such symbolist paintings while designing buildings that became milestones in the development of twentieth century architecture. Mackintosh wrote: "You ask how you are to judge architecture? Just as you judge painting or sculpture form, color, proportion, all visible qualities—and the one great invisible quality in all art, soul."

Yet another connection between the Mackintoshes and Theosophy involves their close friendship with Anna and Patrick Geddes and provides some insight into their artwork. The Geddeses, who were at the forefront of the Celtic Revival in Scotland, had personal connections with Annie Besant and Theosophy. Patrick Geddes had tutored Besant in natural science in London from 1874 to 1878, after she was refused admittance to the University because she was female.

Geddes also spent some time with Besant in India, and they often shared their vision for a better world. "A knowledge of Theosophy . . . as well as the Geddeses' utopianism might well have become part of the Mackintoshes' life," writes Janice Helland (175), who continues:

There is no evidence to suggest they actually became theosophists but considering their other interests (the Celtic Revival, Maeterlinck, symbolism) a philosophy that blended Eastern thought with Western (emphasizing the inter-connectedness of all living things) would surely have attracted their attention. Given the interest aroused in Glasgow by Max Muller's lectures during the 1890s, and the possibility that "The Four" were exposed to ideas about Eastern thought and philosophy at that time, Geddes's personal relationship with one of theosophy's most important figures would certainly have interested the Mackintoshes.

When Mackintosh left Glasgow in 1914 with his wife, he was perhaps very careful about becoming labeled a Theosophist, or a member of any other esoteric group. The Glasgow Style was never accepted or understood in Britain (though it was influential in Vienna and Germany). Perhaps Mackintosh, like Gustav Holst, was diffident about telling people that he was interested in Theosophy, as that interest might affect his career, as happened to the composer Cyril Scott.

Mackintosh never painted another symbolic watercolor after 1898, when the creative partnership of the Four was nearing its end. By 1910 he was undergoing personal problems, and artistic fashions were changing. Expressionism, Cubism, and Futurism replaced European Symbolist art, and on the approach of World War I, idealistic communism ushered out religious mysticism. In 1889 the Theosophist Edouard Schure had been firmly convinced that the world was on the threshold of a great spiritual era and that the time was ripe for a spiritual art. But "the epoch of the great spiritual" failed to arrive on schedule, and by 1914 the ideals of the Glasgow Four had disappeared from public consciousness. Mackintosh became an almost forgotten man of genius, while the other group members were relegated to near oblivion in the art world. All had to wait half a century before the true value of their art and the breadth of their achievements were finally understood.

References

Alan Senior, a native of Yorkshire, has lived in Scotland since 1971. An international lecturer for theTheosophical Society, he edited the Scottish Theosophical magazine Circles for many years. A painter, as well as a writer, he exhibits throughout Scotland and lectures at Aberdeen and St. Andrews Universities.

Originally printed in the May - June 2003 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Bakula, Joann S. "The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Tour." Quest  91.3 (MAY - JUNE 2003):

By Joann S. Bakula

THE BARDO THODROL, OR TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD, is the most famous and mysterious book of Tibet, widely known and often begun but seldom read all the way through. Like a high mountain peak, it is widely admired but hard to climb. The intention here is to make the heights more accessible. The Bardo Thodrol is one of the treasures or "termas" that Padmasambhava, the Indian teacher who introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century, hid in caves and also in the minds of future disciples. In it he taught about three of the six bardos or states of samsara, the round of life and death. All six are transitional states, one leading naturally and inevitably to the next unless an occurrence of enlightenment intervenes.

Three of the six bardos are of states of life: the waking state, the sleep and dream state, and the meditative state (Karma-glin-pa 169). These three begin with birth and end with death. The three bardos addressed in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, however, begin with death and end with rebirth. These three bardos of death are called the bardo of clear light or luminosity, the bardo of radiant truth or realizing Reality, and the bardo of becoming.

The most likely time for spontaneous enlightenment to occur, ending the process of transition from one bardo to another, is during the "natural liberation" of death. So Padmasambhava wrote this guidebook for the recently deceased, to be read aloud to them for forty-nine days. But it is meant to instruct the reader as well. Each part begins something like, "O you of privileged birth, make good use of your opportunity and turn your educated mental powers to achieve real freedom!" The text for the first bardo is read for three to four days, the second for two weeks, and the third for thirty-one days adding up to the forty-nine days that the book should be pondered upon and read by the living to the dead. The actual length of time a person spends in each bardo differs widely, it is said, depending upon the individual.

The experience of the first bardo, the chikhai bardo, immediately at death is described as Clear Light, experiencing the primordial state that has never been born and never dies. "The nature of everything is open, empty and naked like the sky. Luminous emptiness without center or circumference . . . dawns" (Sogyal 259). This state comes as a total and unexpected surprise to most people, who pass through its light in a swoon, unconscious that the clear light is their innermost essence and the Ground of their Being and contains nothing in it that could cause it to die. The Dalai Lama, in his book Dzogchen, writes about Clear Light, Ati Yoga (Adi in the Theosophical tradition, the first or divine plane), and the Great Perfection.

Cultivating openness to this state in a meditative practice makes it much more likely that, at the moment of extreme truth and ultimate opportunity, we will be able to see and recognize the light and to identify with it, realizing that we are That. The Tibetan Book of the Dead advises us to seize the moment by thinking, "I have arrived at the time of death, so now, by means of this death, I will adopt only the attitude of the enlightened state of mind, friendliness, and compassion, and attain perfect enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings as limitless as space" (Fremantle and Trungpa 84—5).

To prepare for this once-every-lifetime opportunity, it is wise constantly to remember and reinforce the idea that the essence of spirit is as vast and empty as the night sky without stars or galaxies; it is without limit or locality, without points of light. "But this state of mind is not just blank emptiness, it is unobstructed, sparkling, pure and vibrant . . . Immortal Light" (Fremantle and Trungpa 86—7). The dramatic and traumatic stripping bare of what we think we are—all the thoughts, emotions, interests, relationships, accomplishments, likes and dislikes—leaves us with our pure, naked essence. As the Buddha achieved enlightenment, it brought nearly total recall of the thousands of lifetimes he had lived and deaths he had experienced. The sky, day or night, is a great teacher of ultimate reality, a reality in which we are gestalted in life, in which the sun lives, a perfect representation of our own inner essence. "Space is an Entity," H. P. Blavatsky said, and this is experienced first hand at death, an equal-opportunity event.

This first bardo of the Ground has two phases. The first is called the dawning of the primary clear white light, the nature of Ground Reality, also called the Mother Luminosity or Mother Reality, seen at the moment of death. The second is the Secondary Luminosity, or the Child Luminosity, seen immediately after death, which Robert Thurman (130) describes as the "semblant clear light, transparency still filtered through conceptuality." The Dalai Lama (Varela 208) has said it is quite feasible that the bright light of the near-death experience is a facsimile of the clear light.

If we do not recognize the primary or secondary clear light of our own essential mind in the first bardo, we wander down to the second bardo, the chonyid bardo, which is less abstract. It is binary: one week of visions of wonderful, beneficent deities and a second week of the same deities in their wrathful form, each occurring in five groups or families of resplendent color. This is the central mandala of Buddhist meditation, arranged as five circles appearing at the center, east, south, west, and north of the heart. Visualization of the primary circle of the heart is helpful in understanding what follows.

The appearance of the deities, the Dhyani Buddhas, in their positive aspects in seven days, is especially interesting to students of The Secret Doctrine and the theory of the seven rays. H. P. Blavatsky writes that the "Dhyani-Buddhas, or Dhyan-Chohans" are the same as the "Elohim or Sons of God, the Planetary Spirits of all nations" (8) and the Archangels (23). These are correlated to the "septenary hierarchy of conscious Divine Powers . . . the framers, shapers, and ultimately the creators of all the manifested Universe; . . . they inform and guide it; they are the intelligent Beings who adjust and control evolution. . . . Generically, they are known as the Dhyan Chohans" (15—6). They refer to the Biblical seven "Days" of creation, the "Seven Creations" of the Puranas, and the seven stanzas of the Book of Dzyan, which describe the "seven great stages of the evolutionary process" (15). Each family brings its entourage of bodhisattvas, whom H. P. Blavatsky defines as "the human correspondents of the Dhyani-Buddhas." The Dhyani Buddhas and their bodhisattvas all appear in both male and female forms, with their wisdom teachings and their divine attributes. Blavatsky also writes, "Esoterically, however, the Dhyani-Buddhas are seven, of whom five only have . . . manifested, . . . two are to come in the Sixth and Seventh Root Races" (55).

Sogyal Rinpoche's book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and his tradition are indispensable for a deeper study of this bardo, also called the dharmata or "Intrinsic Radiance" and defined as "the intrinsic nature of everything, the essence of things as they are . . . the naked, unconditioned truth, the nature of reality, or the true nature of phenomenal existence" (274). The Rinpoche writes that this bardo can "simply flash by like a bolt of lightning; you will not even know what has occurred," unless you are prepared. If you are, then luminosity appears as a "flowing vibrant world of sound, light, and color" like a mirage; this is the "spontaneous display of Rigpa, the simple rays and colors then begin to integrate and coalesce into points or balls of light" that unfurl from the heart, called tickles or bindus. From these points of light come the visions of unity with divinity, joining your heart with theirs. Countless luminous spheres appear in their rays, which increase and then "roll up," as the deities all dissolve into you. Then comes the display of the four wisdom teachings in a show of carpets, balls, and canopies of colored lights. Every possibility is presented, from wisdom and liberation, to confusion and rebirth. "The entire vision then dissolves back into its original essence, like a tent collapsing once its ropes are cut" (276—8).

As an example of the language used in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the first day of grand visions dawns with "the light-ray of Blessed Vairochana's compassion" emanating from the center of the heart, the Central Realm, the original manifestation from which all else arose. "The whole of space will shine with a blue light . . . luminous, brilliant, very sharp and clear blue light of supreme wisdom. . . . take refuge in it" (Fremantle and Trungpa 96—7).

The fivefold aggregate of which a human is composed, the skandas (five heaps), also has its roots here. Each of the skandas is associated with the appearance of one of the Dhyani Buddha families and wisdom teachings, and each contains a "poison," resulting from identification with separated existence. These poisons cause a human to run away from, instead of toward, each archetypal divinity, running again and again into rebirth instead of liberation. The five wisdoms and the five poisons, or obstructing human qualities, combine to reveal the relationship between the spark of divinity and the human animal in all of its pristine and terrible beauty—from animal to living God, as Blavatsky said.

The seven days of the heart may be summarized (Fremantle and Trungpa 92—133) briefly as follows:

Day 1: Central Seed Realm, limitless wisdom, poison of limitless ignorance, skanda or aggregate of consciousness, blue.

Day 2: Eastern Realm of Complete Joy, mirror-like wisdom, poison of aggression and hatred, skanda of form, white.

Day 3: Southern Glorious Realm, wisdom of equality (equalizing wisdom), poison of pride, skanda of feeling, yellow.

Day 4: Western Blissful Realm, discriminating wisdom (knowing real from unreal), poison of desire or lust, skanda of perception, red.

Day 5: Northern Accumulated-actions Realm, action-accomplishing wisdom, poison of intense envy, skanda of concept, green.

Day 6: All five families together, with their wisdoms, aggregates and poisons, plus the gate guardians, such as Yamantaka, the Destroyer of Death, forty-two deities in all.

Day 7: Pure Realm of Space, dawning of the five families of the Adept Knowledge-holding Deities now moving to the throat center, with the lords and dakinis of the dance and many others, appearing as not quite peaceful, not quite horrific, leading to the first day of the dawning of the wrathful deities.

The second week of visions, those appearing in negative images, are described with severe and frightening adjectives. They appear not from the heart but from the brain. These deities are described frequently as "blood-drinking," a symbol of the thirst for life in samsara, the world of phenomena. Padmasambhava constantly reminds us that the Buddha Herukas (or wrathful forms) are the same energies we saw before, only in their negative states. This aspect of the enlightened families—giving a new meaning to the five families of Godfather fame—is well suited for overcoming all obstacles to bliss and enlightenment, whether ignorance, desire, obscurations, distortions, "veils," or any other thing opposing enlightenment. They are armed with "wisdom weapons" for defeating suffering, such as nooses, swords, and axes. There is, Samuel Johnson reminds us, nothing like a noose to concentrate the mind.

Evans-Wentz (133n) likens the wrathful figures to the "Dweller on the Threshold." One example will suffice: "Now on the eighth day the blood-drinking wrathful deities will appear. Recognize them without being distracted." The "Glorious Great Buddha-Heruka will emerge from within your own brain," the central part, "his nine eyes gaze into yours with a wrathful expression, his eyebrows are like flashes of lightning." He sends out "loud whistling noises. . . . his heads are crowned with dried skulls and the sun and the moon." His six hands hold a wheel, an axe, a sword, a bell, a ploughshare, and a skull-cup (Fremantle and Trungpa 140). After the two weeks of Buddhas and Buddha Herukas, the world of samsara is entered once again in the bardo of becoming.

The experience of death for most people means simply passing into a state of oblivion during the first two bardos, and awakening again when "sky and earth are separating" and all of our habitual tendencies are activated and reawakened. We are now in the full complexity of phenomena, and encounter a myriad of solid-seeming forms and events. The third bardo spans the time between the reawakening of self-awareness and entering the womb of the next life. It arises as a result of our failure to recognize the two previous bardos of reality as the essential nature of mind. This third and longest bardo is called the sipa bardo, the bardo of becoming and existence—the existence of a mental or bardo body and the inner existence of the mind. It is in this bardo that the difference in emphasis between the Tibetan teaching and the Theosophical teachings becomes most evident; the first discourages comfort anywhere as part of its enlightenment message, and the second emphasizes the continuity of usefulness, discipleship growth, and service.

The outstanding characteristic of the third bardo is that mind plays the predominant role; it once again has a body, a mental body, with much greater clarity than in life and unlimited mobility determined solely by past habitual tendencies. This stage is the opposite of dissolution. Here everything mental that had dissolved at death begins to reappear, such as the thought states of ignorance, desire, and anger. Memory of past karma is still fresh in mind, and a mental or bardo body emerges. This is your Brigette Bardot body, as it were.

"We meet and converse for fleeting moments with many other travelers in the bardo world, those who have died before us," Sogyal writes (289). We have extrasensory powers like ghosts, and are said to retain the gender and cultural identity of our previous life. What was thought and done before continues. We are advised to give up attachment to people and possessions, to abandon yearning for a body, not to give in to desire, anger, hostility, or fear, but to cultivate kindness and compassion. After all, the bardo body cannot be killed. No matter what frightening things occur, the mental body has no physical brain and cannot be slain. As in a dream, you can experience terror and fear, but they soon dissolve, and you are as you were, the dreamer and creator of your own world. "All of these are nothing more than our own deluded projections, by nature empty and unsubstantial," like the bardo body itself. "Emptiness cannot harm emptiness" (Sogyal 294).

An intense life review occurs. Experiences are relived. Minute details long lost to memory are reviewed and places where life events occurred are revisited (Sogyal 290). Then a judgment takes place. "Your good conscience, a white guardian angel, acts as your defense counsel . . . while your bad conscience, a black demon, submits the case for the prosecution. The "Lord of Death," who presides, then consults the mirror of karma and makes his judgment. . . . Ultimately all judgment takes place within our own mind. We are the judge and the judged" (Sogyal 292). Sogyal quotes Raymond Moody and Kenneth Ring, two pioneers in near-death studies, in regard to this process. "The "ife-review" seems to suggest that, after death, we can experience all the suffering for which we were both directly and indirectly responsible" (Sogyal 291). Near-death experiencers have reported that the ultimate question in that state is "Can we forgive ourselves?" The review process requires that we experience the effects on others of our every thought, word, and deed.

As the time for rebirth gets closer, craving for a material body increases. Addiction to past cravings reappears. Because the mental body has the presence of the five elements in it, it can hunger for food and pleasure, and goes where these are present. Once again there is longing for a physical body and the search for an opportunity to be reborn. The future life gradually begins to have more influence than the past life.

At this point, instructions for closing the entrance to the womb are given. "Think resistance," we are advised. "At this time projections of men and women making love will appear. When you see them do not enter between them, but remember, and meditate on the man and woman as the guru and his consort." Another method is turning away "passion and aggression." "If you are going to be born as a male, you will experience yourself as a male, and feel violent aggression toward the father and jealousy and desire for the mother. If you are going to be born as a female the opposite occurs. This will cause you to enter the path leading to the womb, and you will experience self-existing bliss in the midst of the meeting of sperm and ovum" (Fremantle and Trungpa 201—2). This similarity to the fate of King Oedipus is one of several correspondences with classical Greek thought.

What follows is anathema to most Westerners: "You will open your eyes, and you have turned into a puppy," an example of the Buddhist belief in the lokas, or six types of existence possible at this point: a god, a demigod, a human, an animal, a hungry ghost, or a hell-being. The widespread belief in such transmigration among Hinduists and Buddhists is not shared by most Westerners today, who, following the Theosophical tradition, combine the theory of karma and rebirth with evolution as their worldview.

If the instructions for closing the entrance to the womb were tried with no success, then the time has come to accept birth, to "choose a human womb," on one of four continents, in only one of which the dharma flourishes. The Tibetan Book of the Dead concludes by advising us to "read the book aloud oneself and contemplate it," for it is a "profound instruction which liberates by being seen and heard and read."Carl Jung (in Evans-Wentz) suggests that we should read it in reverse order, which is how we return in consciousness to our source.

References

Joann S. Bakula is the author of Esoteric Psychology: A Model for the Development of Human Consciousness and many articles. She teaches philosophy and the Tibetan Book of the Dead at Southern Oregon University and transpersonal psychology for the on-line graduate program of Greenwich University.

Originally printed in the May - June 2003 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Bland, Betty. "The Game of Life." Quest  91.3 (MAY - JUNE 2003):82- 83.

viewpoint

By Betty Bland, National President

UNCERTAINTY IS ONE OF THE GREATEST OBSTACLES with which we human beings have to contend. Indeed, as I write this, war is raging in Iraq, with no certainty of out come and with pain on every side. Such imminent danger increases the difficulty of dealing with the unpredictable. So perhaps it is useful to explore how we might cope with uncertainty.

For those who enjoy sports contests and even for those who enjoy playing games of various sorts, part of the enjoyment is the edge of not knowing who will win. The contest keeps us fascinated just like a good mystery story in which we try to out guess the creative genius of the author. In these cases we consider the excitement pleasurable because the stakes are not so high although some sports fans seem to lose sight of that fact.

But if the outcome of the game affects us personally, then our anxiety level rises.This is one of the reasons that Tiger Woods has become such a folk hero. When his income and his reputation are riding on a single golf swing, he can often achieve a meditative calmness that allows him to perform to perfection. And even at those times when he is off his game, he still seems to maintain a degree of coolness envied by most golfers. He has a certain assurance, as if he realizes that indeed it is only a game.

The stakes grow even higher when our own safety is at risk, or the safety of loved ones,or of our country, or even our way of life. And yet, if we believe the Theosophical ideas of karma and the Divine Plan, then all of life is a kind of game, as our inner essence (or higher self) wends its way on the pilgrim journey of return to our source.

Whenever we find ourselves in trying circumstances, we can realize that we have been presented with an opportunity. We are being tested and trained to strengthen our resolve and to focus solely on our spiritual essence our one true Self. In her small book Practical Occultism, Madam Blavatsky wrote:

The "God" in us—that is to say, the Spirit of Love and Truth, Justice and Wisdom, Goodness and Power—should be our only true and permanent Love, our only reliance in everything, our only Faith, which, standing firm as a rock, can for ever be trusted;our only Hope, which will never fail us if all other things perish.

For most of us, this spiritual essence may seem impossible to reach, but it is attainable and worth all the effort it takes. To seek it, we have to begin where we are. All life is our classroom; our friends and enemies alike are our teachers; books and fellow student pilgrims support our study. Seeking this inner knowing with an open heart will bring us into contact with the mentors we need.

Perhaps a good beginning, in addition to daily meditation, would be to try regularly to remember who we truly are. When we are so reminded, we can better play the game of life and walk with certainty in the face of uncertainty. A helpful practice is to use bells assignals to recall us to our origins and reason for being. Whenever a bell sounds a distant chime, a clock, or even an inner ringing, repeat quietly the saying from the Buddhist contemplative tradition: "Listen, listen, listen to the wondrous sound of the bell. It calls me back to my one true Self."

Whatever troubles axe in the outer world, within that Self in each of us is a calm assurance. Whenever we access that center of certainty, endurance, and peace, we make it more available to both ourselves and others. May we all find that peace and may it abide in all beings. Shanti.

The View from Adyar

By Radha Burnier

Originally printed in the May - June 2003 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Burnier, Radha. "Maturity of the Mind." Quest  91.3 (MAY - JUNE 2003):

There is a world of difference between a mind which is mature and one which is not. In the fragment entitled "The Seven Portals" in The Voice of the Silence, the following words occur:

Thy Soul has to become as the ripe
mango fruit: as soft and sweet as its
bright golden pulp for others' woes, as
hard as that fruit's stone for thine own
throes and sorrows

The ripening takes place slowly through the experience of many incarnations, or quickly at a certain stage by discovering in what maturity consists.

From the spiritual point of view, maturity is not ability of a worldly kind. Just as the fully ripe mango has no raw portion in it, the mature mind is free of every element of rawness. The word "raw" means, among other things, "untrained." A raw recruit is, for example, an untrained person. The word also means "unhealed," "sore" or "inflamed," as is a wounded area which has not been restored to health. These words help to understand the state of immaturity.

Thoughts and emotions constantly well up in the mind, many or most of them being disorderly reactions to people and circumstances. These reactions are symptoms of the subconscious condition. The insecurity of to people is displayed in numerous ways: Emotions which are easily inflamed, sensitivity to the opinions of others, vainglorious thought, and so on. People who appear strong may in fact be hardening themselves, because they are uncertain and feel the need to protect themselves. Wanting to become hard, strong or clever is a symptom of hidden weakness.

Among the seven virtues described as the keys to "The Seven Portals" in The Voice of the Silence is of others, 'patience sweet, that nought can ruffle.' In the absence of egoism, there is nothing to be offended or disturbed. The mind is like a light which burns steadily, unaffected by outer conditions.

Steadiness, and a real sense of peace, and freedom from wants and fears, are all characteristic of maturity. The true happiness described by Plotinus is also that state of maturity. He says:

The sign that this state has been achieved is that the man seeks nothing else. Once the man is adept, the means of happiness, the way to good, are within, for nothing is good that lies outside him. Anything he desires further than this, he seeks as a necessity, and not for himself but for a subordinate, for the body bound to him, to which since it has life he must minister the needs of life, not needs, however, to the true man.

One who grows in maturity is not quick to offer opinions and come to conclusions. His mind is perceptive and intelligent, but the intelligence itself makes him pause and wait. He does not take it for granted that his opinions are of value and therefore there is obstinacy, assertiveness or pride in him. The first sign of maturity is to recognize one's own limitations, and be humble and simple.

Radha Burnier, President of the international Theosophical Society, is also international head of the Theosophical Order of Service and the author of several books, including Human Regeneration. This column was adapted from The Theosophist 117 (December 1995): 85-86