Quest Magazine

By Radha Burnier

[From the Presidential Address to the 124th Annual Convention of the Theosophical Society, Adyar, December 26, 1999]

Much is said about the new millennium and the new century nowadays, but humanity is stubbornly persisting in its old ways. How can the millennium be new when the human mind is entrenched in old patterns? What will be new? Improved models of gadgets? Cloned monsters? Every such thing will be the product of stale minds filled with prejudices and ambitions. Human consciousness must break with the past in order to usher in a new dawn. It must obtain a new view of life, a new vision. Madame Blavatsky wrote in her article on "What Are the Theosophists?" published in the first volume of the Theosophist magazine (CW 2:98-106):

Once...a student abandons the old and trodden highway of routine, and enters upon the solitary path of independent thought—Godward—he is a Theosophist; an original thinker, a seeker after the eternal truth with "an inspiration of his own" to solve the universal problems. [102-3]

Present-day humanity has by and large lost the art of contemplation. When life was simpler and closer to Nature, people were relatively free of the restlessness and pressures which are so characteristic of the present times. No one was shy about silence or made to feel guilty because he or she spent quiet moments watching, contemplating, and learning about life. Such reflection was encouraged in several ancient cultures, but that is not the case now. Some years ago when I was sitting quietly under a tree during a summer school in Europe, someone came up to ask, "What is the matter with you? Are you sad or in trouble? Why are you sitting alone?" People are conditioned to believe that solitude is unnatural or undesirable. Everybody is expected to be busy all the time. Even in the East, contemplation is beginning to be regarded as a synonym of idleness and people are pressured to be visibly active and occupied.

The contemplative life of the Taoists gave them profound insights. Let us listen to the wisdom of Lao Tsu:

A man of the superior type resembles water,

Whose goodness lies in benefiting all things without contention.

Contemplation is a form of tapas or austerity--a purification of consciousness, cleansing it of motivation and of its many aims and objectives. Then it becomes open to the truth, to the depths in life. The modern contemplative Henry David Thoreau relates an experience of solitude:

To be alone was somewhat unpleasant. But, in the midst of a gentle rain...I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sight and sound around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once, like an atmosphere, sustaining me....Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.

Religious traditions recommend opening the heart to the one divine Reality that is everywhere. In the article referred to above, HPB declares:

For to be one [a Theosophist], one need not necessarily recognize the existence of any special God or a deity. One need but worship the spirit of living nature, and try to identify oneself with it. To revere that Presence, the invisible Cause, which is yet ever manifesting itself in its incessant results; the intangible, omnipotent, and omnipresent Proteus: indivisible in its Essence, and eluding form, yet appearing under all and every form; who is here and there, and everywhere and nowhere; is all and nothing; ubiquitous yet one; the Essence filling, binding, bounding, containing everything; contained in all. [102]

The quiet, attentive mind alone comes into touch with the Real, not the restless, distracted, busy mind. To the self-preoccupied, agitated person, the superficial appears real because the senses find objects to distract and satisfy the mind, and make it feel important. Captivated by sensory and worldly objects, many today are like the people in Plato's cave, hypnotized by shadows. In the future there might be millions so glamorized by computer and television screens that the whole earth might become a grand version of Plato's cave!

The word "holism" has become popular, but those who follow the so-called holistic philosophy are often only superficially aware of the interlinking of life forms. To be real, the wholeness of life must be experienced, and this happens through contemplation, when the mind is at peace and begins to sense the Presence which HPB mentions--the Presence which is the divine Immanence or God. Within our Society there are some persons who object to the word "God," but HPB used it! God is universal Life which embraces all, sustains all, and is the origin and end of all.

Annie Besant stated that every religion has two parts, an inner and an outer; so has Theosophy. They correspond to the higher and lesser knowledge (para and apara vidya) of Vedanta. The higher is knowledge of God; it is Brahmavidya, God-wisdom or God-science. One may belong to any religion or none and yet be truly religious by virtue of this wisdom.

The lesser Theosophy is a body of truths concerning God, humanity, and the universe which the sages and seers of all races and ages have proclaimed to guide people, to the extent they are receptive, giving them the inspiration for ethical living and religious aspiration. These truths can be communicated, at least in part, through words, while the experience of Eternal Life cannot. It is important for all of us to realize that words and explanations sound empty, dogmatic or unconvincing if we repeat them by rote. They have the power to touch people's hearts only when we have contemplated and assimilated them, and opened ourselves to some extent to the divine Presence. "I know and others do not know" is the attitude of orthodox religious people, while Theosophists encourage enquiry and search leading to direct perception. Conceptual Theosophy can become divisive, like the tenets of any other sect. Therefore, let us take to heart the warning that when the Theosophical Society becomes a sect, it will have no future.

The contemplative life demands refinement of body, brain, and mind. A clean life, an open mind, a pure heart, compassion towards all living beings, sensitivity to beauty, consideration for others' needs are all necessary in the quest for Wisdom. Ethics is the soul of Theosophy. In Annie Besant's words, "Members of the Theosophical Society study the truths, and Theosophists endeavour to live them."

The new dawn will begin to illumine our world when the faculty of intuition, insight, buddhi, or whatever name we like to use, awakens within us and takes charge of our lives. This faculty sees the One in the many, the Whole which is greater than the parts, the divine Music in sounds, and the meaning of the cosmic processes. If we do not work towards this awakening, who will? Awareness and action are inseparable. Our awareness of the unitary nature of life is sterile if we fail to be compassionate and care for our fellow human beings and all living creatures.

The work of the Theosophical Society will have to go on for many more centuries. At times people ask, "What has the Society done in the past 125 years?" not realizing that a century is insignificant with reference to the change in the consciousness of humanity on which the Society is engaged. For millennia, the ego sense has been developing until at present it has reached such proportions that enormous harm is being done to the planet itself, along with all its inhabitants. This trend cannot be reversed in a short period. Let us continue to work therefore with patience and faith in the ultimate destiny of humanity, knowing full well--by intuition rather than reason--that goodness must triumph and truth will conquer. Humanity will transcend its present unhappy stage and pass into the bliss and light of the worlds of perfection, and we are privileged to share in however small a measure in bringing this about.

By Betty Bland

Excitement filled the air when more than 500 members from 39 different countries attended the Ninth World Congress of the Theosophical Society, held in Sydney, Australia, January 11 -18, 2001. Long-time friends and new ones among the many cultures represented at the Congress forged the bonds of brotherhood that cross all cultural boundaries. All were struck by our similarities, interest in the same studies, and concerns over the same issues.

"The Future Role of the Theosophical Society" was the issue under consideration in the workshop series for which I was responsible. The hundred or so participants in this workshop first explored our roots, remembering our foundations in the Ancient Wisdom, the grand purposes espoused by our founders, and the pioneering spirit of our early workers. We then broke up into smaller groups to tackle our hopes for the future.

Each of the four groups considered three issues.

• What should the Theosophical Society look like in the future (in its activities and outreach)?

• What ought to be the role of the Theosophical Society in our world society (in its thrust or purpose)

• What action plan might we adopt for each of the preceding two issues, both at the personal level and the organizational level?

During one of the last sessions of the Congress, each workshop leader reported to the whole body. Below is a summary of the points made during the discussions of our groups.

What ought to be the role of the problems

As in all efforts, one must first acknowledge the problems to be dealt with as one plans for the future. The most common problems are these:

• What ought to be the role of the opposition to the Theosophical Society by some religions and cultures

• Objections to our emblem and motto by some religious groups

• Rigidity and authoritarianism among ourselves about what Theosophy is

• What ought to be the role of the concern over how much change is appropriately generated by new or young people

• Unwillingness on the part of some members to try new things

• Budgetary constraints and fearfulness to take new actions

• Quandary over whether or not to charge fees for our programs

• Great need for more professionally skilled members

Future roles

We hope that in the future the Theosophical Society will be increasingly each of these:

• A multicultural center of brotherhood

• The guardian and transmitter of the Ancient Wisdom

• A nucleus of socially and politically concerned members

• A school of philosophy and spiritual education

• A beacon of light for seekers

Four major areas of effort were identified as ways to achieve the ideal Theosophical Society of the future.

Welcoming

The reception of each new seeker who comes through our doors is so important that it was treated as the first category, with the following suggested actions:

• Appoint greeters for every meeting

• Set up mentorship or assign a big brother or sister for each new member

• Have plenty of humor, smiles, and fun (The importance of this is not to be taken lightly.)

• Hold periodic open-house events

• Give new members jobs to do

• Walk the talk

• Include music and the arts

• Remember the importance of the ambience of the lodge

• Have open attitudes toward newcomers

Outreach

Although we do not view ourselves as evangelical, we recognize the importance of being visible and accessible to seekers. If we are not growing, we are dying. Here are some ideas for attracting newcomers:

• Develop a good image and personal enthusiasm for the Theosophical Society

• Use more modern terminology

• Develop good posters, fliers, ads, and brochures

• Maintain bookstores and libraries

• Place Theosophical books in public libraries

• Use technological tools, such as Websites, television, and radio

• Use interaction with related groups as a way to become better known

• Establish schools and educational programs for the young

Program focus

We should offer a variety of programs for those who attend our groups, such as these:

• Presentations focused on the Ancient Wisdom

• Applied Theosophy

• Pathways for self-education and development

• Encouragement for personal living skills and engaged living

• Meditation

• Social interaction promoting brotherhood

• Group work in small groups

• Interactive and experiential activities

• Open dialog with new ideas

Organizational charges

Tasks requiring effort at the organizational level are these:

• Produce multimedia to stimulate interest

• Publish in other languages than English

• Develop introductory courses for new members

• Create packaged formats for talks and workshops

• Share programs among groups and sections

• Have more involvement with local groups

• Publish the Theosophical classics in updated language

All of the workshop participants were amazed at the similarity among Theosophical groups everywhere, which have similar challenges and goals. We ended by challenging each other and all Theosophists to work together to achieve some of the aims listed above, asking each member to choose at least one or two items from the above lists to be their own personal project as a way of bringing about new visions of the Theosophical Society in the twenty-first century.

Betty Bland, a life member of the Theosophical Society, has served in local Study Centers, in the Mid South Federation, on the boards of several related organizations, and on the National Board for the last 14 years. She has been a teacher, employment counselor, and systems analyst. Now living in Pennsylvania, she operates a small business from her home.

By Gary Corseri

I am walking like Bugs Bunny walked when he walked behind Elmer Fudd, mimicking Fudd's hunting him. I am doing this amidst a dozen strangers outside a classroom of the Krotona Institute, high on a hill overlooking southern California's Ojai valley. I'm in my stocking feet, and one foot goes down very deliberately to a silent chord of three seconds while the other balances precariously in the air. It doesn't matter how funny I look with my Fudd-Bunny impersonation because each of my classmates is equally intent upon their own deliberate gait and posture. It's a focusing exercise; and when I don't feel like Bunny, I feel like a Cherokee, imagining my moccasins ever so gently touching the earth. I think I can feel the wobble of the earth and I seem to hear the song it sings in the hot dry breath of the cypresses undulating like waves to the Topa Topa ranges.

Jim Lassen-Willems has given us this exercise, and it follows hard and soft upon the exercise with the pretzel. It was one of those party-favor pretzels. We each got one to know with our fingertips as though we were reading Braille. We each got one to savor with our nostrils and to touch with a flick of our lizard tongues as if we were tasting for the first time the salt of the ocean, the Pesach salt of tears--whatever associations might flood the senses. And when we finally eat it, it is the torrent of the sea breaking starch, it is Lot's wife frozen in regret, it is Gandhi's Great Salt March--all in a little pretzel!

"To see the world in a grain of sand," Blake wrote, and my experience on a two-week Florence Tanner Foundation grant has been very much about that--and about what Jim and Shirley Nicholson call "incarnating the knowledge." In the class they co-teach, it's Shirley's job to lay out the logos in the am. This ranges from Bell's Theorem--"Put a spin on one atom," Shirley interpolates, "and another, at a distance, picks it up as if in sympathy"--to fundamental questions of epistemology--how we know what we think we know. Shirley reminds us that the source of "intuition" is in tuere--to look within, and she tells the story of Elias Howe and the sewing machine.

Howe had all the basic concepts, but he couldn't figure out where to put the hole. He tried it at the end, as with a regular needle, and he tried it in the middle and the thread kept getting tangled. Then he had a dream in which natives attacked him with spears with holes in their tips!

The aim is to see with our whole being, to get mind, body and spirit in synch, to experience what Helena Blavatsky called "direct beholding." Kant said thought without intuition is blind, and intuition without thought is empty. Problem is, there's so much to distract us in the hullabaloo of getting and spending, most of us don't know what's what. "If the doors of perception were cleansed," Blake tells us, "then everything would appear . . . as it is--infinite." A perfectly delightful thought. But a little scary, too. The infinite majesty of Zeus, after all, contains the Gorgon's gaze as well.

So in the afternoon Lassen-Willems helps prepare us for that mutual gazing. ("The eye through which I see the Infinite," Meister Eckhart wrote, "is also the eye through which the Infinite sees me.") The preparation may involve walking like Bugs Bunny and it may involve deep breathing exercises. In the latter, we learn how to bring the energy of the earth up through the soles of our feet. Or, we breathe deeply of the ether and let that energy swirl down to our soles. Once we're grounded, the electricity can flow. I can also make myself lightheaded by releasing energy through my crown chakra. I dance out of class. I'm shining.

I'm a bright star driving my red, rented Ford Taurus through downtown Ojai. A few days before, Joy Mills and I drove to the Happy Valley School in the upper valley. I'm honored, of course, to have the illustrious Ms Mills as my tour guide. On a high bluff overlooking the valley, we pause at a scenic overpass. We stand in the spot--oh sacred temenos of movie lore!--the very spot where Ronald Coleman stood when he first beheld the mystical valley of "Shangri-la" in Lost Horizons.

Playing the jaded scholar-adventurer Robert Conway, the great actor gave the performance of a lifetime as a man who stumbles upon Paradise, loses it, then claws his way back. James Hilton's novel described a secret Tibetan valley, accessible by a single, narrow pass. It is a place of beauty and tranquility where the wearing stresses of life have been eliminated by Thoreau-like simplification. A place where covetousness is dispelled through the elixir of inner harmony in balance with nature and the rankling disparities of power and wealth are compressed so that each citizen has his and her place and work, and all may live in dignity, passing, at last, through the veil of life as gently as a summer zephyr parting a muslin curtain. In this Hesse-like Shambhala, the best men and women are the scholar-leaders, blessed with the time to study, teach, and uphold. Blessed with the time to dream and to be.

I am driving my red Taurus now and I am shining. I am shining because Krotona and Ojai are much like the imaginary Shangri-la. Twenty five minutes to the West I can watch the sun go down over the Channel Islands, off the Pacific coast of Ventura. Twenty five minutes towards the Topa Topas (Gopher Gophers!) and I'm driving past Krishnamurti's home to watch the sun's soft decrescendo from Meditation Mount.

In the parking area, a half dozen cars betoken other sunset-pilgrims. I run my palms up the skin-smooth eucalyptus trunks, my way of farewell. I'll be leaving soon, back to Atlanta's chockablock suburbs and parking-lot interstates. I need to review what I've learned.

I make my way past the meditation room and the assembly room, down the short trail. Like Lear, I can sniff my way in the fading light. My hand may smell of mortality, but there's immortality in the cascade of desert fragrances.

Every morning when I open my curtains at Krotona, the Topa Topas seem to unfold like an accordion playing the song of light. But the view from Meditation Mount is a different prospect. It's not an accordion I think of here, but Hokusai's prints: for the peaks rise hillock on hillock, swept to rocky gray crests by the soft winds of eons. Orange and avocado groves stretch like green algae in the valley below. The hot wind caresses the face; the patchwork vineyards shudder and a thousand scattered petals loose their blending scents. One feels a whisper may be heard for miles.

I am standing in the palace of splendor where Yin and Yang come together for a moment and I must nourish the memory like hearth fire.

"Fall in love with Creation," Sister Gabrielle Uhlein has advised. "Our very living is a pedagogy. We live our lives a certain way--we teach." I can still hear the chanting from the Greek Orthodox service which she played for us that morning at Krotona.

"Western civilization is predicated upon the notion of 'being right,' " she said, "that we can come to a place where there is no more tension. But the place of tension is where creativity takes place. . . . Change takes place most dramatically at the edge, along the shoreline. That's where the possibility for the new world occurs.

"We are always participating in the story of heaven and earth. Participation is not an option--our choice is in how we relate."

"All real living is meeting," Martin Buber wrote. And here, in this magic place--oh, not the sterile "magical kingdom" of a manufactured Disneyland!--here I've met kindred questers on a hill above a valley and had a chance to think and integrate, to countenance confusion and make peace with it.

If I stand in the palace where Yin and Yang conjoin it is because beyond me great spokes of Kali's wheel sweep over the planet like scythes. Each belongs to each: consolidation, disintegration, life, death, and rebirth.

And I know I must wander and leave this place of peace. Participation is not an option. "The struggle draws out the beauty of the eagle," as the good Sister has said.

The fireball sinks, a pink moment flares across the sky. I bow to a cactus blossom and imbibe its scent. Then kneel to the scent of another species alongside it. Each is good, subtle, different. Then I kneel to another blossom on the same cactus and I am just a little surprised to find that it, too, is good, subtle, and different from its contiguous neighbor.

And why not?

Gary Corseri has published two collections of poetry: Random Descent (Anhinga) and Too Soon, As Always (Georgia Poetry Society Press). He wrote the libretto for Reverend Everyman, an opera staged by Florida State and Portland State universities and broadcast over Atlanta PBS. His articles, poems, and fiction have appeared in Quest, New York Times, Village Voice, Sky, Georgia Review, Redbook, and elsewhere. His most recent work is another novel, A Fine Excess: An Australian Odyssey (Xlibris Corporation, www.Xlibris.com, Orders@Xlibris.com), described by its cover blurb as "like Kerouac's On the Road--with a global beat" and ending with "a transcendental vision."