Quest Magazine

Thinking Aloud: Nothingness

By Radha Burnier

Small children are often asked by parents, friends, or neighbors, "What do you want to become when you grow up?" The child of course does not know what the question implies. Once a child answered, "I want to be a king," and when he was told he could not become a king, he declared, "Then I want to be a Field Marshal." Those were the days of the war, when there was much news about Field Marshals and Generals. There are many such childish fancies— as wanting to be a pilot flying a jet plane.

These childish notions about becoming something are, of course, innocent. But as time passes, innocent minds get conditioned, sometimes through persuasion but often under pressure, into thinking seriously about what to become and how to achieve. Their future, they are told, would be a hopeless failure otherwise. Thus, the sensitive minds of the young are hardened, and ambition becomes a driving, if not a destructive, force in their lives— of surroundings and of finer feelings. Present-day lifestyle makes a virtue of "being somebody," or "becoming" something, and success is regarded as life's greatest purpose.

The drive to become somebody— distinguished politician, lawyer, or engineer— an obstacle to remaining whole, for specialization tends to condition and confine the mind in narrow tracks. Through repetitious, professional effort and training, habits are contracted: the teacher wants to explain everything (even the obvious), the auditor niggles, and the lawyer argues even when there is no case. The mold into which the mind is set does not permit spiritual qualities to blossom according to the innate and unique endowments of the individual.

Desire and ambition have a role in the evolutionary plan. They activate the mind, which would otherwise stagnate. But the activation entails the loss of innocence; it is the human "fall." Animals are innocent, whatever they do, because they have no conscious desire to achieve or become. They are themselves and therefore have a special charm, as do infants and small children. When motivated by personal desire, the mind becomes sharp and clever; it grows but loses that quality which makes the innocent so lovable. With increasing sophistication, desire turns from mere craving for food and basic necessities to fame, power, possessions, and ultimately what it imagines to be spiritual progress.

To "grow as the flower grows," unconsciously, is for most people a meaningless ideal; but the time must come when the mind is not merely capable and clever, but has also developed a certain clarity and thoughtfulness regarding nonpersonal questions. It then sees that ambition fathers manifold evils; while it sharpens the mind, it also makes it selfish; it teaches a person to invent and plan, without conscience, to be energetic but not compassionate. With the increase of intellect, spirituality diminishes.

Is a reversal needed? Can human advancement proceed along new lines, in a new direction? Light on the Path, a profoundly paradoxical Theosophical text, says, "That power which the disciple shall covet is that which shall make him appear as nothing in the eyes of men." This indeed is the recovery of lost innocence. Once again we must become as little children, but not childish, which we already are; we must be as innocent lambs, but with the power to understand, to learn to grow as the flower grows, unconsciously, eager to open the soul to the infinitude of life.

It is disastrous in the present era to follow a philosophy of achievement. A peak has been reached in aggressive and destructive activities, and the responsibility is largely that of the supposedly educated and clever people, who are role models for the young. The "leadership" of the mentally competent and morally poor is at the base of many grave problems facing today's world.

What must we do? We must see that the human mind passes on to a new stage of dynamism without ambition, the door to which will open for all those who ponder and realize that the power to be nothing is the source of immense energy. Free of self-interest, the pure mind reaches depths of understanding and perceives new meanings. As H. P. Blavatsky says:

The appearance which the hidden noumenon assumes for any observer depends on his power of cognition. To the untrained eye...a painting is at first an unmeaning confusion of streaks and daubs of color, while an educated eye sees instantly a face or a landscape.

Only the quiet mind without any restless longings is receptive to life's messages and knows what is truly good. It senses the beneficial presence of the one consciousness everywhere, unfolding faculties, revealing meanings, harmonizing relationships. Without achieving or becoming, by simply being, quietly surrendering to the All-consciousness, it receives and pours out beneficent energy.

A new human culture will arise when nothingness is the background philosophy of people's lives instead of compulsive becoming.

Radha Burnier, a Sanskrit scholar and in her youth an exponent of classical Indian dance, is the international President of the Theosophical Society. This article is reprinted from "On the Watch-Tower," The Theosophist, November 1998.

A New Look at the Three Objects: Part 2, The Second and Third Objects

By Robert Ellwood

To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color;
To encourage the comparative study of religion, philosophy, and science;
To investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in humanity.

The Study of Comparative Religion, Philosophy, and Science

The second object is really related to the first. If you can't get along with your brother, find out what he likes to study, what he's really interested in. It may be anything from auto mechanics to Mongolian dialects or accounting. It may be something you had never thought before that you might be interested in, and even now you are really interested in it for the sake of the brother more than of the topic itself. But if you really want to, you can find almost anything interesting, and in the process can find an interesting real human being in the shape of the brother or sister who is interested in that topic.

Think of comparative religion as such a possible interest that might have extraordinary application to the forging of brotherhood on a world scale. Consider the difficult relations of Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, or of Jews and Muslims in the Middle East, or of Theosophy to all of them. I am convinced that if any of those partisans studied the religion of the other deeply enough, they would get beyond resentments over power and land, or the gross stereotypes that so often cloud religious discourse, to find in the other's faith something very interesting, whether or not they agreed with it intellectually, and would come to a new level of respect for the other religion.

In their fullness, as presented by the best thinkers, all religions have areas of depth and beauty that help one to see into profound depths of soul in those to whom they are important. This is part---a large part---of what is contributed by the Theosophical idea that each of the religions is an expression of the Ancient Wisdom in the vocabulary of a particular time and place and culture.

I have sometimes been distressed at the negative stereotypes of Protestants and Catholics, more than of Hindus and Buddhists, that some Theosophists seem to hold even today. I often do not recognize these stereotypes in the priests, nuns, ministers, and lay people I have known and worked with over many years of activity in the American religious world. I do not deny that one can find Protestants and Catholics who are dogmatic and conservative---stubborn might be a better word---but I do not find that mentality to be the whole picture at all.

Probably some of the negative images of Protestants and Catholics, including Jesuits, held by Theosophists stem ultimately from the writings in the last century of Helena Blavatsky. But we need to remember that she was writing for Victorians who had their own issues and mindset. Whatever necessary role those strictures may have had in the nineteenth century, we must recall that twentieth-century religion is different, after the ecumenical movement and the immense changes in Roman Catholicism after Vatican II and in the wake of liberal theologians from Scheiermacher to Tillich. We need to develop empathy for religion in our own time and our own society, with its various characters and styles.

In other cases, negative stereotypes derive from unfortunate personal encounters with destructive examples of a religion. Early experiences with bad religion often resemble the difficult family situations discussed in connection with brotherhood. If one is truly going to turn the bitterness to something positive, a process as arduous as resolving sibling anger may be required. But it is important for the sake of one's own spiritual growth in love and understanding to work the difficulty through by endeavoring, whether or not one agree with the religion, to find good contemporary exemplars of it and to seek the virtue of empathetic love toward those to whom it is important. Few religions are all bad for everyone whose lives they touch.

Then let us think about the study of comparative philosophy and science. Is there such a thing as comparative science? Comparative religion and philosophy, yes---it is clear that philosophy and religion are not the same in India and Greece, Japan and Chicago. But science? There are those who would say that science, both its methods and its findings, must be the same everywhere, for it can find only one kind of truth through repeatable experiments conducted anywhere in the world.

Not being a scientist, I cannot speak to this very much. But although I am sure that the speed of light and the double helix are the same in every human culture, science may still have its cultural differences. For science is in fact a culture as well as methods and findings, that is, a language and a set of attitudes. Although the culture of scientists in India and Indiana certainly is more similar than the culture of religious professionals in the two places, say of Brahmins and Methodist ministers, scientists cannot be wholly extracted from their surroundings. For them, culture may not be so much a determinant of the results and methodologies used, as of the questions asked. Scientists may use the same methods everywhere to attack a problem, but how do they decide which problem to attack in the first place?

This cultural context of science is suggested in a remarkable passage in The Secret Doctrine (1: 326-7):

For every thinker there will be a "thus far shalt thou go and no farther," mapped out by his intellectual capacity, as clearly and as unmistakably as there is for the progress of any nation or race in its cycle by the law of Karma. Outside of initiation, the ideals of contemporary religious thought must always have their wings clipped and remain unable to soar higher; for idealistic as well as realistic thinkers, and even freethinkers, are but the outcome and the natural products of their respective environments and periods. The ideals of both are only the necessary results of their temperaments, and the outcome of that phase of intellectual progress to which a nation, in its collectivity, has attained. Hence, as already remarked, the highest flights of modern (Western) metaphysics have fallen far short of the truth. Much of current agnostic speculation on the existence of the "First Cause" is little better than veiled materialism---the terminology alone being different.

Have you ever wondered why some possible scientific problems seem to attract considerable attention, not to mention funding, in some countries, while others are virtually ignored? Why is it that scientists in India appear to take psychical research much more seriously than most do here, and are especially good at astrophysics? Why is most of the world's medical research done, and extravagantly funded, in the US, whereas the fundamental research in nuclear physics was done mostly in western Europe?

Why, for that matter, did modern science and technology arise in renaissance Europe and not, say, in China or the Islamic world, though they seemed also to have been on the brink of that breakthrough at the same time? I suspect that in all these issues culture, and ultimately religious, attitudes were at play. Science rightly prides itself on its universality, and certainly compared to the often dismal record of religion and politics in regard to race and nationalism, science has much of which to be proud. Yet in subtle ways science too can be culturally conditioned, especially in the questions asked, the problems selected for research.

Yet cultures can often be better understood by the questions they ask than by the answers they give. Here we need to let our empathetic imagination range freely. What questions about the universe would a bright, scientific-minded Hindu of today, or of two thousand years ago, most likely ask? An Australian aboriginal? A medieval European? A student in a modern American university?

In thoughts like these, the way to comprehend what the second object may mean by comparative science can best be grasped. Here is where the Theosophical understanding of the ancient wisdom as embedded in the world's different sciences, as well as in philosophies and religions, can be useful. For it is through the questions people ask that they will break through to wisdom on a deeper level.

Theosophy can help by pushing science to be question-oriented on deeper and deeper levels. For the Ancient Wisdom too is ultimately about asking the right questions, not just getting the right answers. Religion, Helena Blavatsky said in Isis Unveiled, is ultimately the realization of God and immortal soul. All the evidence, both exoteric and esoteric, is that our ultimate ancestors knew that what those realities meant can be only experienced, not put into formulaic words. Answers too are important, but every answer opens a new question, and the process goes on and on. It is common questions, not divisive answers, that bring humankind together into universal brotherhood. By being deep-question oriented about science, as well as about philosophy and religion, Theosophy can start to become a nucleus of human brotherhood.

To Investigate Unexplained Laws and the Powers Latent in Humanity

After the earlier discussion, not much remains to be said about this object. The latent powers are, in short, those connected to the tides of involution and evolution. Often they are thought to have to do with psychic abilities---clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis, and the like---and so they may in part. Those abilities were especially prominent, we are told, in the Lemurian and Atlantian root races, when they were developed by wizards working on the dark side of the force to the point of black magic. These powers have wisely been put into relative abeyance for most people in this fifth root race, where our calling is above all to realize the full potential of matter---hence the emphasis on science and technology. In the sixth root race, no doubt the psychic will be rediscovered on a higher level and used in the service of wisdom and compassion rather than of power. It is well for a few people to explore those abilities in this present root race to keep the knowledge of them alive and to lay the groundwork for that next evolutionary step, provided that those who do so also know how to protect themselves from the dark entities and ideas that always seem drawn to psychic forces, for evil seems to comprehend how easily psychic forces can be bent to undesirable use.

For most of us, however, the most important latent powers are those of our ordinary mind and spirit raised to a higher degree---intelligence turning to wisdom and feeling to charity and compassion. This is what will most help evolution, for it is only this kind of discrimination that will give us the wisdom to see what is holding us back, namely our karmic chains of unfinished business, and what will cut us free of those chains, namely love for all beings, visible and invisible, sufficient to burn those iron links away into nothingness.

The unexplained and little-known law is the law of love, that an act of pure egoless love is free of karma and can even disentangle karma from the past. The latent power is the power we all have to create through meditation an egoless state of consciousness in which, once the blinders of our attachments have been dropped, we can see everything just as it is and find the inner strength to act on that vision. That is the power of the egoless unfallen monad, which is our deepest and truest nature. Although our present life is its ray, the monad has itself never dropped beneath the clouds. In its light, may we all help to form a nucleus of human brotherhood, to study a right comparative religion, philosophy, and science, and to discover our latent powers.

Robert Ellwood, Professor Emeritus of the University of Southern California, is a well-known Theosophical author and speaker. This article is based on a talk given at the 1998 convention of the Theosophical Society in America.

Viewpoint: Temites, Towers, and Nuclei

By John Algeo, National President

Termites are an odd bunch. Humans don't normally have much truck with them, or at least don't want much. But those insects are oddly interesting.

The termites of Africa and Australia build huge towers that give the landscape the appearance of another planet. But the termites build their towers only under special circumstances—when they act together.

A termite going about its business alone accomplishes very little. It digs up a little pile of dirt, barely enough to notice. But if another termite happens along and gets interested, it starts to help. And then another comes, and yet another. And soon there is a nucleus of termites, all working together to turn a miserable little pile of dirt into an engineering feat—an immense structure with tunnels and passages, hidden chambers and spanning arches. Compared to the size of the builders, these high-rising skyscrapers are the biggest buildings on this planet.

Yet if you look at a single termite going its separate way, you would never imagine the power and skill that a collective nucleus of the creatures can express. Individually, they can do almost nothing, but when they get together, they can build mountains, if not move them. Together they have abilities that the individual lacks.

But there is something else that is odd about termites, and marvelous. The termite band has no architect directing the building. All the termites just get together, respond to one another by waving antennae and scurrying past. It looks like chaos and confusion. Each just doing what is natural for it and responding to the others in the nucleus, they raise a structure that may last for years or even for centuries. With no plans to consult and no architect to direct, they build a perfect tower.

What the individual termites do is messy, undirected, apparently pointless. But what comes out of their collective effort is order, direction, and intention. As Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers extrapolate from the termites' behavior in their book A Simpler Way (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996, p. 68):

Life seeks order, but it uses messes to get there. Organizing occurs locally. Groups link up with other groups. From such small collectives, a larger system emerges. Many parallel activities, many trials and errors, are occurring everywhere in the system. Individuals determine their behavior from what they see going on around them. The result is a system so well-coordinated that it's hard to believe someone, somewhere, is not directing the activity from on high. It took entomologists a long time to realize that there were no termite construction bosses.

Termites are an odd bunch. But then, if they could see us humans get together, they might think we are too.

Synchronicity: The Gateway to Opportunity

Originally printed in the September - October 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Abdill, Ed. "Synchronicity: The Gateway to Opportunity." Quest 90.5 (SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2002):170-174.

By Edward Abdill

Theosophical Society - Ed Abdill author of The Secret Gateway, is vice-president of the Theosophical Society in America and past president of the New York Theosophical Society. His article "Desire and Spiritual Selfishness" appeared in the Winter 2011 Quest. A good friend is desperately in need of work. She has quite literally spent her last penny. Within the month she will be homeless. She has applied for a live-in housekeeper job with a wealthy family. She has told you that she used your name as a reference. There is a business phone in your hallway that is answered by answering machine. You never pick it up. You prefer to retrieve messages. One day, passing through the hall, the phone rings. For absolutely no apparent reason you break all precedent and decide to pick it up. An unfamiliar voice is calling for your opinion of a job applicant, your friend. The prospective employer wants a face-to-face interview with you about your friend. You grant it and convince them that the woman would be an excellent employee. She is hired and, within the week, has a home, food, and an income.

Is it coincidence? Karma? Dharma? Synchronicity? Why did you just happen to be in the hall when the phone rang, and why did you pick it up when you never answer that phone? Perhaps we can never know for sure. Yet, certain universal principles may help us to better understand that curious sequence of events—first, one of the most fundamental of all Theosophical ideas: that all existent reality arises out of one eternal, immutable, and boundless principle.

Unity

What we call the "real" world is different states of being within the one, ultimately indivisible whole. Every atom, every rock, every organism, and every galaxy is a temporal state. The ultimate Real is like H²O, which exists in various states as steam, liquid water, or solid ice. Yet no matter how different each state appears, each is but a temporal manifestation of H²O.

The universe is analogous to that. Everything, including human beings, is made of the same stuff. Everything is interconnected. All is an emanation of the One. If that is so, then all action at every level will have an effect on the whole. A pebble dropped into the Pacific Ocean will eventually affect every atom of that vast ocean. A human thought sent out into the vast ocean of thought will eventually affect the whole mental field. As the poet, Francis Thompson, wrote:

Thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.

Everything in the universe is interlinked, and any disturbance at any one point will cause an effect at all other points.

Most intelligent and educated people agree that the physical world is interconnected. We accept interdependence in ecology, for example. Sociology and economics also reveal that there is an interdependence among groups of people, obviously so in cities and nations, but likely true globally as well. Poverty in one area tends eventually to impact on all surrounding areas. Economic depression in one country is likely to affect other countries.

The Theosophical view is that interdependence exists not only in objective reality but in subjective states as well. If that is so, then synchronicity is a natural and even inevitable phenomenon under certain conditions, just as H²O goes from steam to ice under certain conditions. We know that our own thoughts and feelings affect our physical bodies, but if the entire universe is interconnected at both subjective and objective levels, then our thoughts and feelings will have effects beyond the limits of our own body.

In addition to the theory of interconnectedness of subjective and objective states, several other Theosophical principles relate to synchronicity: karma, evolution, dharma, and intuition.

Karma

Karma is the most fundamental law of the universe. Simply stated, it is "action-reaction." If objective and subjective states are interconnected, then action on any level and at any point will affect the whole.Thoughts and feelings may produce ulcers and heart attacks. Physical illness has an effect on our emotions and thoughts.

But the interconnections may not be just within a single system, such as our own body. Our thoughts and feelings may be affected by distant causes, and in turn they may have undreamed of consequences in remote places and on the distant future. Two seemingly unrelated physical events may be the end result of the same emotional, mental, or spiritual forces. Karma may help us to understand how synchronicity is possible.

Evolution

The Theosophical view of evolution is that the whole of creation, including our own bodies, arose first at the inner most subjective level—at a level that might be called Divine Mind. In this view, the outer physical world is the result of inner causes, just as any conscious action on our part arises first in the mind. The whole evolutionary process can be seen as the gradual unfolding of a subjective state. The inner order asserts itself on matter much as a magnetic field orders iron filings on a paper held above it. Evolution proceeds "within-without," but unlike a static magnetic field, the inner order is more like a dynamic field that gradually molds substance according to its own nature, thereby revealing itself in visible matter. In mystical terms, it is the Word (Logos in Greek) made flesh. In synchronicity, outer events may owe their origin to inner causes.

The primacy of the inner is not an idea peculiar to Theosophical writers. Teilhard de Chardin, the paleontologist, claims that the saber-toothed tiger has the tooth of a saber-toothed tiger because it has the soul of a saber-toothed tiger. Plotinus in the Ennead 6.9 says that those who believe the world is governed by luck or chance and depends upon material causes are far removed from the divine and from the notion of the One. Jacob Boehme, in The Signature of All Things, claims that the whole outer world and its forms are a signature (or identifying characteristic) of the inner world. Shakespeare in Hamlet writes,

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.

And an old proverb holds that coming events cast their shadows before them.

Dharma

Is there something that, as Shakespeare puts it, shapes our ends? Are we destined to be born at a particular place, live the life we live, have the relationships, joys, and sorrows that we do? The concept of dharma addresses such questions.

Neither dharma nor karma are fatalistic. They are both statements of natural law. Karma is the over-all principle, and dharma is a specific case as it relates to our own inner self. The term dharma cannot be translated easily into English. It has been defined as "duty, law, righteousness, religion, doctrine, essential nature." No single word captures its full meaning. Dharma is linked to karma (action), and to morality (right action). Annie Besant (Dharma 21) defines it as our inner nature at its current stage of evolution plus the law of growth for the next stage of evolution.

Dharma is also linked to purpose. In near death experiences, people often say that they returned because they "had something to do, had a duty to fulfill." There was some purpose in their lives and it needed to be completed.

I had a good friend, Ros Wilson, who at age 11 had a near death experience in a dental chair when the mask used to give her gas was inoperative and she was nearly asphyxiated. She found herself out of her body and saw people who asked her to come with them. She replied, "I can't go now. I have things I must do." Ros was never interested in religion, and she had no knowledge of Theosophy at the age of eleven. Yet, she knew that the task she had to do in that incarnation was not over. She was unaware of just what it was she had to do, but even at eleven she knew that there was a purpose to life.

Dharma may be thought of as an inner pressure that prods us toward self-fulfillment, toward inner growth and the development of our potential. It is always at work in human beings, but we can choose to move with it or to resist it.

When we do not heed the inner pressure, life gets more and more difficult because the inner pressure (dharma) is an expression of natural law and our essential nature. Try as we may, we cannot violate the laws of nature or the law of our own being. We may try to be something that we are not, but we can no more succeed than we can digest food for someone else. Not only is the dharma of another dangerous, it is impossible to fulfill. By analogy we might consider an acorn. It strives to become an oak tree. It can never become a rose bush, however hard it might try. Dharma is unique to the individual. We cannot fulfill another's dharma because in one sense our dharma is what we essentially are. It is the inner self unfolding, developing, and expressing itself.

Synchronicity

Carl Jung spoke of the principle of synchronicity as an explanation for how the Chinese book of oracles, the I Ching, works. He suggested that, at any given moment, the coins (or yarrow sticks) can fall in one way only and that the sticks, the book, the inquirer, and the question are all linked together. Interpretation of the I Ching, or of the tarot, or of astrological charts, is quite another matter. Interpreters run the gamut from con artists to sensitive and highly intelligent people; hence interpretations can be anything from insipid to insightful.

How do synchronistic events occur? We really do not know. All we can say is that given the likelihood that the universal principles we have considered are real, then there is at least a reasonable probability that synchronicity is a natural phenomenon. If there is indeed an interconnectedness of everything, especially of the subjective states with the objective world, then what we think, feel, and long for may bring about action in the external world because, in fact, the external world is not separate from our internal world. There is only one world.

The principles themselves are not so hard to define or even to understand in theory. But to see how each works out in detail would require the ability of an adept. We are ignorant of far more than we know. Nevertheless, whether or not we understand how it operates, synchronicity is an observable fact.

This is not to say that every seemingly synchronistic event has profound meaning. Synchronicities range from apparently insignificant ones to those charged with life-changing significance. The following cases are real examples.

My wife and I were going to see Dana Ivey in a show one Saturday. That same day the New York Times had an article about the life of an actor, written by Dana Ivey. That is the only article I have ever read by Dana Ivey, and it appeared on the day we were going to see her for the very first time in an off-Broadway play. The coincidence was fascinating, but it did not change our plans or our lives in any way.

As a woman was walking on a street in Washington, DC, she was trying to decide whether she should go on with her study of homeopathy. As she turned a corner, she came upon a statue of the founder of homeopathy, the only one she had ever seen. She continued with homeopathic studies and found them of practical value. This was an event that helped her decide to continue her studies. Yet her continued studies did not seem to be radically life altering.

Occasionally synchronistic events are potentially life saving. A woman was leaving work and began to take her usual route walking home. She met a friend she had not seen for years who was going in the same direction, but by a different street, so the woman walked with her. Later she discovered that a Mafia shoot out occurred on the street she usually walked, at just about the time she would have been there. Had she not unexpectedly met that friend, she might well have been caught in the crossfire.

Synchronistic events with life-changing significance do not occur daily. Yet, when we arrive at a point in life where the next choice may profoundly affect our future, synchronicity may precede or surround that point, or a single synchronistic event may, if we pay attention, influence us to choose wisely. After graduating from high school, I took a two-year course in Spanish, in which a conversation examination was based on a paper I had written in high school about comparative religion. The instructor of the five-student class was a Peruvian woman who happened to be a member of the Spanish-language branch of the Theosophical Society. That branch had fewer than thirty members in a city of about eight million. The day after the exam, the instructor gave me a pamphlet on Theosophy. Nothing else has ever changed my life so completely. Could it have been chance that I was in that small class taught by a woman from a tiny group of Theosophists?

Intuition

Whether or not we call such events chance, coincidence, or synchronicity, nearly everyone is aware that at least occasionally two meaningful yet seemingly unrelated events come together in time. If we are convinced that such occurrences must be chance, that will end it. On the other hand, if we clear our mind of preconceived ideas and quietly reflect on the situation, we may get an intuition that will lead us toward new and more fulfilling directions in life.

Intuition of this kind is not a psychic hunch. Rather, it is a flash of understanding. It is an insight that comes from the unknown. One moment we are hopelessly trapped. There is no possibility of escape from our dilemma. The next minute we know exactly how to free ourselves. There is no time between not knowing and knowing. It comes in a flash. It is a valid intuition that the mind comprehends.

Without a quiet and open mind, we may stare meaningful synchronistic events in the face and not see their significance, or we may assume all kinds of significance in events that have very little to do with us. To understand, the mind must be free of disturbance. It must be momentarily free of active thought. It must be as still as a mountain lake, crystal clear, and unmoved by the waves of thought. It must be a meditative mind.

Although there are no shortcuts or fool proof methods to develop our mind and intuitive faculty,meditation is a major factor in such development. Through focused intention and effort we can develop a quiet mind, an open mind, and an inquiring mind. We can bring about the conditions within ourselves that allow the light of intuition to flash into our mind and reveal the truth of any situation. Such remarkable ability does not come instantly or without concentrated effort over time. Yet the great teachers of humanity have assured us that it is possible. We can do it if we do not expect miracles. We can do it if we realize that perfecting the ability may take lifetimes. We can do it if we don't give up. We can do it if we TRY.

Edward Abdill is a former member of the national Board of Directors and past president of the New York Theosophical Society. He is a national and international lecturer for the Society. He and his wife teach and perform Scottish country dancing and play the hammered dulcimer.

Viewpoint: Change and Growth

Originally printed in the September - October 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Bland, Betty. "Change and Growth." Quest 90.5 (SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2002): 162.

By Betty Bland, National President

Theosophical Society - Betty Bland served as President of the Theosophical Society in America and made many important and lasting contributions to the growth and legacy of the TSA. IT HAS BEEN SAID that the only two things one can count on are death and taxes, but I would say that the two inevitable occurrences are change and growth.

When we consider the fundamental principles for understanding our universe that Madame Blavatsky gave to us in The Secret Doctrine, the unitive principle is always the first one mentioned. There is one immutable, all-encompassing, all-pervading principle, within which all of manifestation has its being. This principle is the cornerstone of the Society's first Object—that of forming a nucleus of the human brotherhood without distinctions.

Unity, however, does not mean homogeneity. Following closely on the heels of the oneness principle, the second fundamental principle is cyclicity, that is, fluctuation or ebb and flow. This second principle underlying our universe implies differentiation, differences in manifestation, and a certain tension within the system that keeps all of creation in constant motion. Change is inevitable; it is the nature of the universe.

The third fundamental principle, that of a pilgrimage for each individual, implies outgoing or seeming separation from the one and the consequent need for us to progress on a return journey. All the force of evolution is driving us forward; yet until we begin a conscious cooperation with it, our progress is slow and unintelligible.

In harmony with these principles, our predecessors wisely established term limits for the officers of the Theosophical Society in America. By building change into the system, we can have orderly growth with fresh ideas building upon the foundation previously laid. Without this mandate, we might complacently allow ourselves to become static until the inevitable crisis would catapult us into creative chaos as a precursor to growth.

We may understand this very well, but we are creatures of comfort and habit. When things are going well, we don't want to embrace change. Yet time ripens all things until it is indeed time to break free from a former skin in order to let new growth begin.

John Algeo has served us extremely well as President of the American Section these last nine years, bringing a high degree of professionalism to our classes and publications. John is a master of words, in his professional life, in his work for the Society, and in his puns at the dinner table. There have been many instances in which his words expressed what many of us felt, but could not quite define. We all thank him for that clarity and inspiration, and for his tireless service.

In his new life in Athens, Georgia, and as international Vice President, he will continue to provide a legacy for many who will follow after, who will find insight and encouragement through his wisdom as well as in his written words and research into Theosophy, its history and its contemporary applications. He and Adele will be continuing their important work along those lines.

Change and growth are certainly more appealing than death and taxes, but still they can be painful. We are sorry to say farewell to John and Adele here at Olcott, and wish them Godspeed. Meanwhile, I will find comfort in the ultimate outcome of growth as I work with you to build on the foundations so lovingly laid down by all of our predecessors. Let us turn to the new day with vision and enthusiasm. The new cycle begins.

Quest Magazine

Thinking Aloud: Nothingness

A New Look at the Three Objects: Part 2, The Second and Third Objects

Viewpoint: Temites, Towers, and Nuclei

Synchronicity: The Gateway to Opportunity

Viewpoint: Change and Growth

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