Quest Magazine

By Richard Smoley

Originally printed in the MARCH-APRIL 2007 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "The Dual Nature of Reality." Quest  95.2 (MARCH-APRIL 2007): 69-72.

This issue has preoccupied philosophers for thousands of years. In the end, they seem to have come up with two radically different answers and these answers in and of themselves have shaped not only schools of thought, but entire civilizations.

The first perspective underlies most of western thought. From this point of view, there is little doubt about what is real. It is what we can see and feel and touch—in short, things. And in fact, if we leave the definition to etymology, the matter is settled. After all, the word reality is derived from the Latin res, which means "thing." If we accept this perspective, it is things that are real. This is generally how we use the term in ordinary language: the real is what is material. Only a fool buys invisible real estate.

The greatest champion of this perspective was the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who said that what underlies reality is substance. It would be hard to overestimate Aristotle's influence not only on western philosophy, but even on ordinary notions of reality. By this view, whatever does not have substance that we can see or feel has only a dubious claim to reality. The room I see before me now exists; the room I saw last night in a dream does not.

All this seems so obvious that it may look uninteresting. Of course, we may be tempted to say with impatience that the world of sensory appearances is real. How could it not be? The most famous argument in favor of this view was stated by the British philosopher G.E. Moore, who claimed he could prove the existence of external reality: "How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, 'Here is one hand,' and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, 'and here is another'" (Edwards 3:166).

In one sense, Moore was right. If I were to offer you an airtight logical argument that proved that the hand in front of you does not exist, would you believe me? Probably not. The evidence of your own senses would trump any form of reasoning, no matter how impeccable. As Moore wrote, "Which is more certain — that I know that I am holding a pencil in my hand or that the principles of the skeptic are true?' (Edwards 3:378).

And yet there is something troubling about this view, and it has bothered philosophers for about as long as there has been such a thing as philosophy. In the first place, our senses frequently deceive us. To use a metaphor common in Indian philosophy, I see a snake in front of me. But on closer inspection, I see that it is actually a rope. What kind of reality, then, did the snake have?

Such simple errors may be easy to correct, but who is to say that our cognitive misreading of the world does not go much deeper than that? Even the most rigorous materialist must admit that our senses perceive only a narrow bandwidth of reality. We have devised scientific instruments—telescopes, microscopes, and so on—to expand our horizons, but in all likelihood, this only expands the scope of our view to a tiny degree.

There is yet another problem with the common-sense view of reality. In the West, it was first stated by the Greek philosopher Parmenides in the fifth century BC. How can the world of substance—that is, of appearances—have any reality when it is constantly changing from one thing into another? As Parmenides wrote, "How could what is thereafter perish? And how could it come into being? For if it came into being, it is not, nor if it is, going to be in the future" (Kirk 273).

Parmenides' views were highly influential on later philosophers, including Plato. Building on Parmenides' argument, Plato contended that what was real (because it was unchanging and eternal) was the world of Ideas or Forms, archetypal patterns that exist in a higher, intellectual reality.

Despite Plato's tremendous stature, western philosophy as a whole has not adopted his stance. The West has generally been far more comfortable with the views of Plato's pupil Aristotle, which correspond much more closely to common sense. The philosophy of India, on the other hand, has tended to be more comfortable with views like Plato's. While most Indian schools of philosophy do not speak of anything that corresponds to the Forms, they do generally accept Plato's criterion: that only what is unchanging is real. (In all likelihood, this view was formulated in India before Plato's time.)

Hence we are left with two radically different criteria of reality: what we can see and feel and touch on the one hand, and what is eternal and unchanging on the other. It often seems that when philosophers dispute about this question, they are judging from different premises without realizing it.

Is there some way of reconciling the two? I believe there is, and it appears in the esoteric teachings of many traditions. To begin to understand it, let us return to the notion that what is ultimately real is the world of sensation. We have already seen one problem with this point of view: it is hard to distinguish what is actually going on. Our minds and our senses deceive us. The snake may be a rope; the mouse I see in a room at twilight may be nothing more than a crumpled piece of tissue that missed the wastebasket. And then there are dreams, illusions, hallucinations—what about these?

Nonetheless, even if I am experiencing an illusion, I am still experiencing something. In this sense we may speak of one dimension of reality as that which is experienced. Whether or not it looks that way to others, this view cuts through all the difficulties about the veracity of what I experience. To give this dimension of experience a traditional name, we can call it the world. (Of course this is not the world in the conventional sense of the planet Earth; it is the sum total of what we experience.)

If we grant that there is a reality that is experienced, we can see that it has certain characteristics. For one thing, it is eternally changing. Things mutate into other things; there is decay, death, destruction on the one hand, birth, creation, generation on the other. Even thoughts and dreams have life spans, following some mysterious cycles of their own. All of these make up the world. Viewed in this way, the world seems to be eternal, even if the individual things that appear to make it up are not. It goes on endlessly, and to all appearances it will continue to do so.

But this leaves another issue open. If we grant that there is something that is experienced, what is doing the experiencing? This is harder to pinpoint. It leads us to the question of subjective experience, another issue that has vexed philosophers for thousands of years, just as it is now perplexing psychologists and cognitive scientists. There has been endless debate about the "mind-body problem," for example, whether our subjective experience is nothing more than the firings of some neurons—or if it is not, what else might it be?

Again, however, no matter what the ultimate cause of this experience may be, it remains true that there is something that is experiencing. It is that in us which says "I." But this is not the ordinary ego, with its thoughts and desires and judgments. Why? Because we can step back and look at all these things within ourselves. When we look at internal events, what is doing the looking? It would seem that the ego is merely a kind of anteroom to a larger, higher "I" that sits at the background of all our experience, watching it through our minds and bodies as through a telescope.

Moreover, this "I," whatever it is, also seems to be eternal—at least in the context of our individual lives. Whatever I experience, good, bad, or indifferent, it always remains true that there is an "I" that is doing the experiencing.

Contemporary philosophy, at least in the English-speaking world, has grown skeptical about this "I." After all, one cannot cut up a body and find this "I" somewhere inside. Nor can one detect it in the endlessly complex series of neural processes that so fascinate contemporary investigators. But in a sense, one does not need to find it, because it is always there. It can never be seen, because it is always that which sees.

All this seems to come down to a fundamental polarity: between that which experiences, the "I," and that which is experienced, the "world." But then what about others? Am I the only sentient being in the world? If not, how do I know this? If we do not deal with this point, we are left with solipsism, the idea that we can ultimately know nothing apart from ourselves.

Here is where esoteric philosophy comes in. It tells us that ultimately this "I" is the same in all of us. While this may seem to make our view of the world not only bend but snap, it is the only conclusion that remains. And in any case, we pay lip service to it all the time. How many times have we said or heard, "We are all one"? What would this mean otherwise, what could this mean, unless it is simply an empty cliché?

This assertion that this "I" is ultimately one in all of us takes us fairly far from ordinary experience, but it is a truth that has been stated by sages and masters over and over. If it cannot be verified from the street-level point of view, it can be verified by certain spiritual practices— notably meditation in all its forms.

As I have already mentioned, these ideas appear in many different types of esoteric philosophy. In esoteric Christianity and Judaism, the "I" is sometimes called "I am." It is why, in the Kabalistic tradition, "I am that I am" is the holiest of God's names, and it is also why the Gospel of John can have Jesus say, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." Viewed from this inner dimension, it is not the personage known as the historical Jesus, but rather "I am," that is "the way, the truth, and the life," the "door," the "true vine."

What the western esoteric traditions often speak about in veiled or allusive terms, the traditions of India discuss openly. The Mandukya Upanishad says, "The Self is the lord of all; inhabitant of the hearts of all. He is the source of all; creator and dissolver of beings. There is nothing He does not know." (Yeats and Swami 60) And one master of Advaita Vedanta writes, "From the absolute viewpoint, the Self alone is true; it is felt within as the 'I' or pure consciousness and pervades the external world as creative God." (Chakravarti 166) The most common name for this Self in the Indian tradition is atman.

The Samkhya, perhaps the oldest of all Indian philosophical systems, points to similar insights. What in this article I have called the "I" the Samkhya calls purusha; what I have called the "world" the Samkhya calls prakriti. Suffering arises when purusha identifies with prakriti, or, as we might say, when the "I" confounds itself with the world. The spiritual path, which is a long process of detachment, is a means of gradually separating the "I" from the world, that is, separating consciousness from the contents of its own experience. At this point, supreme illumination takes place. The old world falls away, and a new one arises. Such is enlightenment.

The perspective set forth above may sound dualistic: that is, it may seem to isolate everything into two radically distinct forces that ultimately have nothing to do with each other. And it is true that the Samkhya, for example, is usually characterized as a dualistic philosophy. Many people today speak of dualism contemptuously, yet without quite knowing why it deserves such treatment, much as people used to have a superstitious aversion to two-dollar bills. But dualism is not so easily discarded. It does seem to be true that this separation of the "I" from the world is only one stage in a lengthy process and that in the end the essential unity underlying all things will recognized. But dualism, if not the final stage, is a necessary one, much as the old alchemists had to perform separatio or separation on the matter they worked with before they could raise it to a higher unity. In short, there may well be a stage at which one realizes that "the nature of phenomena is nondual," as we read in a text of the Dzogchen school of Tibetan Buddhism (Norbu 81). But we may need to pass through the phase of duality before we reach it.

Is this process of detachment and reintegration ever complete? Will we ever be able to separate ourselves from a confused perception of reality so that we may return to the world in a new and more integrated form? The evidence of innumerable masters and mystical texts suggests that it is possible. I must immediately add, however, that I have never met anyone who seemed to attain this level of full realization, which is sometimes called enlightenment. As a result, I cannot answer another question that seems to arise: is this realization of the Self, the recognition of one's absolute identity with the true Knower, itself a final goal? Or is it merely another portal to dimensions of reality that are as far above it as enlightenment is above ordinary consciousness? Personally, I incline toward the latter view. And this would mean that both consciousness and the universe are multivalent, open-ended, and open to endless exploration. There is nowhere to stop, because there is always further to go.

Richard Smoley is an editor for Quest Books and the author, most recently, of Forbidden Faith: The Gnostic Legacy from the Gospels to The Da Vinci Code. His other works include Inner Christianity and The Essential Nostradamus. A revised edition of his Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (coauthored with Jay Kinney), has been reissued by Quest Books in 2006.

by Betty Bland

Originally printed in the MARCH-APRIL 2008 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Bland, Betty. "Treasure Hunt." Quest  96.2 (MARCH-APRIL 2008): 44.

WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN WE HAD A game called a snipe hunt. The game could be played only once on the unwary victim who was stationed in a spot off the beaten path. This "victim" was then told to stay there holding a bag in order to catch the snipe that the rest would be stalking. We were supposed to chase the snipe into the waiting bag. Of course there was no snipe and finally the victim would catch on and come to look for the rest of us who were giggling and playing not too far off. As this is a very old game, it was seldom successfully carried out but was gleefully contemplated as a way of dealing with whoever was considered the neophyte at the time.

A far better variation of this game was a scavenger hunt, in which all were equally given a list of items to be found or "scavenged" in the area. There was the same opportunity to experience the joy of running around in the outdoors, but with no one being left out. All had the same challenge, but they were individual challenges with each individual or team pitted against all the others.

The next step up was the true treasure hunt, in which a map was provided for each or all to explore the territory using the map until the goal was found. Some maps were easier to read than others but "X" always marked the spot where treasure might be found. Although there are all kinds of variations, in the instance I remember, "X" marked the location where refreshments and equal treasure were shared by all. This kind of treasure hunt fits well with an analogy that I would like to draw.

The first instance is the way that we usually begin our spiritual pilgrimage. Everyone else seems to "get it" but we are at a loss as to what it is all about. We just know that there must be something more and so we are liable to do the bidding of some less-than-enlightened teachers. Although our search at this stage can be frustrating, it is a time of learning and growing. Once we see the fallacy of this passive approach, we realize the importance of being active participants. Someone else will not do it for us, but we have to do it ourselves. As Madame Blavatsky admonished in the Proem to The Secret Doctrine (I—17):

In other words, no purely spiritual Buddhi (divine Soul) can have an independent (conscious) existence before the spark which issued from the pure Essence of the Universal Sixth principle,—or the OVER-SOUL,—has (a) passed through every elemental form of the phenomenal world of that Manvantara, and (b) acquired individuality, first by natural impulse, and then by self-induced and self-devised efforts (checked by its Karma), thus ascending through all the degrees of intelligence, from the lowest to the highest Manas, from mineral and plant, up to the holiest archangel (Dhyani-Buddha). The pivotal doctrine of the Esoteric philosophy admits no privileges or special gifts in man, save those won by his own Ego through personal effort and merit throughout a long series of metempsychoses and reincarnations.

Now this is a pretty heavy statement for those of us who have been hoping we could just rock along with business as usual, believing in various "good things," and that this would be sufficient for the nurture of our soul. Not so, says Blavatsky. We have to determine within ourselves how to re-orient our lives toward understanding our purposes in this world and to live every day by that highest understanding.

In this initial phase, we have an idea about some of the things we are looking for, but the instructions tend to be vaguely generic. We might look in a variety of places, gathering bits of treasure here and there. Although this wide casting about may seem like a waste of time, it truly is not. We grow and deepen through every effort to discover the ultimate treasure, and either slowly or quickly we come to the realization that a search oriented to the outer world will never bring us the true treasure. And the closer we come to glimpsing the treasure, the more we are drawn to approach it as the moth is drawn to the flame.

At this point we reach a new level in our quest. It becomes an almost effortless effort. Now all the random searching has borne its fruit and some inner guidance begins to flower within our being. No matter what tradition or religion we are following, there is a universal thread of truth (often called the ancient wisdom) which will draw us onto the path of no return—the path in the pathless land. Blavatsky (CW XIII 219) refers to it this way:

I can tell you how to find those who will show you the secret gateway that opens inward only, and closes fast behind the neophyte for evermore.

We have received the map and it is written on our hearts in such a way that, though we may from time to time stray, we can never fully forget. In this treasure hunt, even more than there being no competition, there is a universal teamwork. When any one of us gains an additional insight into the treasure, we all profit from that experience. Humanity as a whole is blessed by the presence of an advancing soul. And the beauty of it is that by our alignment with this cosmic treasure hunt we are able to take part in the blessing of all humanity, no matter how humbly placed we may be. Blavatsky further explains this in The Voice of the Silence:

155. If Sun thou can'st not be, then be the humble planet. Aye, if thou art debarred from flaming like the noon-day Sun upon the snow-capped mount of purity eternal, then choose, O Neophyte, a humbler course.

156. Point out the "Way"—however dimly, and lost among the host—as does the evening star to those who tread their path in darkness.

As Theosophists we not only have the great gift of a treasure map, but also of being given the privilege of sharing with others the joy to be found in seeking the treasure. By being an evening star for our brother or sister, we discover the greatest treasure of all—that of realizing the unity of all life and forming a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity.

VOLUME 96, NUMBER 2

Treasure Hunt
By Betty Bland

A Practical Path to Theosophy: AA's Twelve Steps
By Mona Sides-Smith

Montessori and the Theosophical Society
By Winifred Wylie

Kandinsky's Thought Forms and the Occult Roots of Modern Art
By Gary Lachman

Where Has Divine Madness Gone?
By Anton Lysy

Explorations: Theosophy and Orthodoxy
By Pedro Oliveira

By Gary Lachman

Originally printed in the MARCH-APRIL 2008 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Lachman, Gary. "Kandinsky's Thought Forms and the Occult Roots of Modern Art." Quest  96.2 (MARCH-APRIL 2008): 57-61.

IN RECENT YEARS, the contribution that occult or mystical ideas have made to the evolution of art—or to culture in general—has been increasingly recognized. But this was not always the case. For a long time, the notion that belief systems like Theosophy, founded in 1875 by Madame Blavatsky and her companion Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, were anything more than a disreputable side-show to the mainstream of cultural development was scandalous. Critics and biographers hemmed and hawed over the attention eminent figures like W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and others paid to a variety of "charlatans" and "mountebanks"—in Yeats' case it was Blavatsky herself; for Eliot, it was the Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky. Thankfully, those days are over and much credit is due to a group of historians, critics, and researchers for uncovering what in my subtitle I call "the occult roots of modern art."

I have even made a small contribution to this effort myself. In The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse, I sketch an overview of how a collection of occult ideas and insights fed the European and American post-Enlightenment literary imagination. I remark that, although I focused on writers and poets, another book could easily be written about the occult interests of composers and painters. In music, seminal figures like Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Debussy all have dipped, at one time or another, into the magical grab bag. (For a brief account of this history, see my article "Concerto for Magic and Mysticism: Esotericism and Western Music" in The Quest magazine's online archives.)

The best book I know for making clear exactly how much modern art owes the occult is The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890—1985 by Maurice Tuchman, a massive catalogue from an exhaustive exhibition I had the good fortune to see many years ago. While recently re-reading some of the catalogue's articles, I came upon a few names with considerable frequency. Certainly, the history of the occult's influence on art is filled with many illustrious figures, including Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg, Paracelsus, and Eliphas Levi, for example. The roll call of artists so influenced reads like a who's who of the cutting edge: Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, Frantisek Kupka, and Joseph Beuys, to name a few. However, as I said, certain names kept turning up, especially in the period preceding the birth of abstract art. These were the Theosophists Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, and Rudolf Steiner.

The artist upon whom these leading Theosophists made the strongest imprint was the one most associated with creating non-representational art, Wassily Kandinsky. Just when the first abstract painting was made is still a matter of debate. Some say it was Kandinsky's First Abstract Water Colour in 1910; others give the honor to the Czech Frantisek Kupka. But Kandinsky is the name most associated with the new approach to painting.

As Sixten Ringbom made clear in his seminal study, "The Sounding Cosmos," Kandinsky was deeply interested in a number of occult, mystical, and paranormal pursuits and, at times, was a practitioner of various spiritual disciplines, specifically some forms of meditation and visualization. His interest was wide and his reading eclectic; one form of paranormal phenomena that particularly intrigued him was "thought photography," the idea that thoughts could be captured on sensitive plates.

Kandinsky's interest in the occult, and Theosophy in particular, was most evident during the years 1904—1912, which roughly coincide with the attempts of various psychic investigators to use scientific methods to prove the reality of the spiritual world. Sadly, most of these efforts proved fruitless and later examples, like the Cottingley Fairies, did little more than reinforce the suspicions of an already skeptical public. These were the famous fairy photographs of 1920 that earned Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who expressed belief in their veracity, much criticism, including suspicion of senility. Kandinsky's interest in thought photography, however, had a deeper impetus than to prove that the wee folk existed. Thought photography was, for Kandinsky, linked to a more important issue: the advent of a new age in human evolution, which he called "the Epoch of the Great Spiritual."

Along with many other artists and thinkers of the time, Kandinsky believed that by the beginning of the twentieth century, western civilization had reached a crisis and was sinking under a crushing materialism. It was the artist's task to lead society out of this impasse and to open new avenues of meaning and significance. One vehicle for achieving this was Theosophy. The influence Kandinsky's occult reading had on his ideas of the coming "Epoch of the Great Spiritual" is clear in his influential manifesto Über das Geistige in der Kunst, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912), one of the most important theoretical works in the history of modern art.

Kandinsky's occult library was considerable, but certain books in particular fueled his speculation. Three key works were Man, Visible and Invisible  (1902) by C. W. Leadbeater, Thought-Forms  (1905) by Annie Besant and Leadbeater, and Rudolf Steiner's Theosophy (1904). Kandinsky was very interested in Steiner, and attended some of his lectures in Munich and Berlin. He was also a keen reader of Steiner's theosophical journal, Luzifer-Gnosis, and in his notebooks Kandinsky copied out several passages from a series of articles Steiner had written entitled "Von der Aura des Menschen" (On Man's Aura). Kandinsky was interested in a great deal of Steiner's thought. The interested reader might look to Ringbom's study or the internet for material about Kandinsky's interest in the occult, as well as information on his friend Arnold Schoenberg, who combined an interest in Steiner with one in the Swedish religious thinker Emanuel Swedenborg.

Besant, Leadbeater, and Steiner's writings concern the human aura. In the theosophical view, we possess four different kinds of bodies. There is the physical body we all know, but we also possess an astral body, a mental body, and a buddhic body. In fact, we really possess seven bodies, but the three higher bodies—nirvanic, para-nirvanic, and mahaparanirvanic—are beyond our present level of comprehension and discussion of them now is not relevant. In his early writings, Steiner used this theosophical concept; in later years, he retained the notion of seven bodies, but his terminology changed.

The astral body reflects our emotions and desires; the mental body is concerned with our thoughts; and the buddhic body with our spirituality. There is also an etheric body, which is a kind of life force animating our physical shells. I should point out that the aura that Besant, Leadbeater, and Steiner speak of is not the same as that revealed in Kirlian photography or in Harold Burr's "life fields," from Blueprint for Immortality, which are much more of a physical phenomenon. In Theosophy, Steiner, a profound critic of materialism, made clear that the aura referred to by him and other theosophical writers was purely spiritual; that is, it was an inner phenomenon. It was not seen with the eyes but with the soul. For all his interest in thought photography, it was precisely this distinction of Steiner's that appealed to Kandinsky.

Kandinsky believed that by the beginning of the twentieth century, whatever artistic and spiritual meaning the external world had possessed had been hollowed out and emptied. He was not alone in this; the "artist's journey into the interior," as the literary critic Erich Heller called it in the title of one of his books, had been set in motion at least a century before with the Romantic Movement. Contemporary with Kandinsky, in his Duino Elegies, the poet Rilke had declared that "No-where will the world exist but within." The novelist Hermann Hesse had mapped out der Weg nach innen, the Way within. Many poets and writers suffered the "crisis of the word," acknowledging that a language based on describing the external world was inadequate to convey the depth and subtlety of their insights and perceptions. And painters like Kandinsky's fellow Russian Kasimir Malevich contemplated a blank canvas as the purest portrait of the real.

Like the "primitives" of earlier times described in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky believed the artist sought to portray "only internal truths, renouncing in consequence all consideration of external form" (1). Like many artists of the time, Kandinsky saw in music the non-material art par excellence, and he wanted to achieve in painting what he felt composers had already accomplished: liberation from the material world. In this need to map out the cartography of the inner realms, Kandinsky found a parallel in Theosophy.

Although the aura was a spiritual phenomenon, Besant, Leadbeater, and Steiner believed it could be approximated. To the sensitive soul, a person's aura appeared as a kind of cloud or egg, enveloping their physical body. This appeared in different colors, depending upon the character and thoughts of the person. In both Thought-Forms and Man Visible and Invisible the authors provide a "Key to the Meanings of Colors." This informs us that, for example, pure religious feeling appears as a deep blue, while anger is a fiery red. Bright yellow corresponds with highest intellect and malice with black. An attentive reader of Kandinsky's manifesto will note that on the subject of yellow, he differs from Besant and Leadbeater, linking it with feelings of aggression. although he drew on theosophical ideas, Kandinsky, like any person of genius, inevitably thought for himself.

Whatever we think of the aura, it is clear that in our everyday speech we associate certain colors with certain moods or feelings. We are green with envy. If we are sad, we are blue. We speak of being red with rage, and if we are healthy, we are in the pink. Yellow is associated with cowardice, white with innocence. We all have black moods. These and other examples show that synaesthesia—the substitution or coincidence of one sense with another, as in the phenomenon of "hearing colors" or "seeing sounds"—is much more common than we think. Synesthesia was one of the central concerns of the Romantic and Symbolist movements, and was most concisely expressed in Arthur Rimbaud's poem "Vowels," which links specific colors to the vowels: A-black, E-white, I-red, O-blue, U-green. Kandinsky emerged from the latter days of these aesthetic movements, and students of Rudolf Steiner's teachings will remember that synesthesia is one of the signs of advance on the spiritual path. Steiner's Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment explains more on this topic.

The central maxim of Thought-Forms is that "thoughts are things" (16). In addition to the aura, the seer can detect emanations proceeding from it. These appear as "radiating vibrations" and "floating forms." The idea of floating forms raises the link between thought forms and hypnagogic phenomena, the various shapes, forms, faces, and landscapes, etc. seen on the point of sleep. Hypnagogia and synaesthesia are often linked; the interested reader may want to consult the chapter "Hypnagogia" in my Secret History of Consciousness.

These radiations and forms are the spiritual reflection of the person's thoughts, and they are things, not only in the sense of having a real effect on the world (in the sense that bad thoughts can actually, and not only meta-phorically, hurt someone), but even more so in the sense that to the seer, thoughts appear as definite shapes. Again, space does not allow me to pursue this, but in his Arcana Coelestia, Swedenborg spoke of "seeing thought." And in Emanuel Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision by Robin Larsen, he is quoted as saying, "I could see solid concepts of thought as though they were surrounded by a kind of wave, and I noticed that this wave was nothing other than the kinds of things associated with the matter in my memory, and that in this way spirits could see the full thought" (447).

Besant and Leadbeater point out that the character of our thought forms is linked to our astral (desire) and mental (thought) bodies, and that the more refined our desires and thoughts, the more radiant and beautiful are the thought forms we create. Given, however, that the desire body "is the most prominent part of the aura of an undeveloped man" (19), what the seer most often detects are forms of a crude nature. It may be a blessing, then, that we all are not yet able to perceive the subtle shapes of our thoughts.

The character of a thought form depends on two things: what the thought is about, and the quality of the thought itself. Vague, indefinite thoughts appear as a kind of mist or cloud. Clear, definite thoughts take on more robust shapes, sharp triangles, cones, tentacles, and starbursts, for example. Thoughts of a greedy, lustful, or malicious character appear differently from those of a noble, selfless, loving nature. So, for instance, figure 28 in Thought-Forms, "Selfish Greed " appears like muddy green tentacles. This thought form emanates from someone "ready to employ deceit to obtain her desire," and is associated with "people gathered in front of a shop window" (56—57). "Sudden Fright ," figure 27, appears as a series of grey and red crescent shapes bursting out of the aura. "Explosive Anger ," figure 24, is a red and orange starburst. The "Upward Rush of Devotion," figure 15, is seen as a blue cone, and "Vague Pure Affection," figure 8, is a pinkish cloud, which "frequently surrounds a gently purring cat" (41). "Intellectual Aspiration," figure 43, is a fine spearhead of yellow, with a greyish centre, and implies "much advanced development of the part of the thinker" (72).

Besant and Leadbeater suggest that these thought forms are analogous to those of the " Chladni figures" formed by vibrating a brass or glass plate on which fine sand has been spread. Bowing the plate, the vibrations arrange the sand into remarkably beautiful geometric designs. They also see an analogy with the intricate designs formed by a pendulum on which a pen has been attached, and the illustrations they provide from Frederick Bligh Bond's book Vibration Figures, have, like the Chladni figures, a beauty not unlike that found in fractals. (Frederick Bligh Bond, we might remember, was an archaeologist involved in early excavations at Glastonbury Abbey, but was sacked after it was discovered that his methods included channeling medieval monks who had lived there.) The common element is vibrations: just as vibrations in fine matter form the Chladni figures, so too, do vibrations create thought forms. In this case, the fine matter is the aura, and the vibrations are our thoughts.

Besant and Leadbeater were assiduous collectors of thought forms and to the unknowing eye, the illustrations of these by John Varley, a Mr. Prince, and a Miss Macfarlane are very reminiscent of much abstract and surrealistic painting. Some of the most striking are the illustrations for the synaesthetic forms created by music: a mountain range of reds, blues, greens, and yellows rises above a church in which Wagner is being played. My own favorite is figure 32, "The Gamblers," whose eerie red and black eye and strange crescent shape figures remind me of Miro's weird dreamscapes.

Rather than sticking to single-thoughts such as love, hate, sadness, etc., the authors sought out the forms created by a number of experiences. Figure 33 "At a Street Accident," figure 34 "At a Funeral," figure 35 "On Meeting a Friend," and others give us some idea of the kinds of unseen thought forms hovering about us in the astral. The bright colors against the black void are particularly striking, and readers may be interested to compare these to the remarkable blackboard chalk drawings that Rudolf Steiner used in his lectures, a collection of which can be seen in Rudolf Steiner: Blackboard Drawings 1919—1924. Steiner's blackboard drawings have been recognized as works of art themselves, and they, coupled with Besant and Leadbeater's thought forms, give us some idea of what we may one day be able to see, given there is, as both Steiner and the Theosophists believe, an evolution of consciousness.
But until then, another glimpse of these astral shapes is available through Kandinsky's art. Although compared to Kandinsky's floating amoebas and other amorphous forms, the actual shapes of, say, figures 37 and 38, "Sympathy and Love for All," and "An Aspiration to Enfold All" respectively, are simple and unsophisticated, we can yet see their influence in his canvases. Space does not allow more than a mention, but one work in which the influence of Thought-Forms is quite visible is, I think, Kandinsky's enigmatic Woman in Moscow (1912), a representational work in which the non-representational begins to appear.

Kandinsky was particularly interested in this figure, as he did three versions of the work. An attractive oversized woman in her thirties stands in the foreground and behind her stretches a multi-colored Moscow. Her right hand rests on a table, and is wrapped around a small dog; in her left hand she holds a red, cloud-like rose. A bluish-green aura seems to surround her and to her left appears a glowing reddish ball with a heart-shaped center. Above this, a black cloud shape, seemingly very dense, threatens to obscure the sun, while to her lower right, a sharp spike of dark blue juts into a yellow street. Several figures float around her: a horse and carriage with a coachman and passenger, and a quasi-oriental character who seems to balance on the edge of the table. The red ball and black shape seem to suggest a struggle between malice and the heart, but as there is so much here, the interested reader should really see for him or herself.

Clearly, the black spot held much meaning for Kandinsky, as it appears center-stage in Black Spot I (1912), in which the representational figures of people, houses, and a cart are beginning to dissolve, perhaps into the astral forms that lie behind our sensory perceptions. Kandinsky's "Epoch of the Great Spiritual" may have been put on hold—at least that is the impression I get, judging by most post-modern art today. But to the open eye, his work, I believe, can still introduce us to the soul.

References

Besant, Annie and C. W. Leadbeater. Thought-Forms. London and Benares: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1901.
Burr, Harold Saxton. Blueprint for Immortality. London: Neville Spearman, 1972.
Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. New York: Dover Books, 1977.
Lachman, Gary. "Concerto for Magic and Mysticism: Esotericism and Western Music"
———. The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse. London: Dedalus, 2003.
———. In Search of P. D. Ouspensky. Wheaton: Quest Books, 2004.
———. Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2007.
Larsen, Robin, ed. Emanuel Swedenborg: A Continuing Vision. New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1988.
Ringbom, Sixten. "The Sounding Cosmos." Acta Academiae Aboensis, Ser. A. Vol.38 No.2. Abo Akademi, 1970.
Steiner, Rudolf. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1947.
———. Rudolf Steiner: Blackboard Drawings 1919—1924. New York: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2003.
Tuchman, Maurice. The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890—1985. New York: LA County Museum of Art and the Abbeville Press, 1986.

Gary Lachman is the author of several books on the link between consciousness, culture and the western esoteric tradition, including Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work (Penguin 2007). Other books include Into the Interior: Discovering Swedenborg (2006), In Search of P. D. Ouspensky (Quest, 2004), and Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (2001). A founding member of the rock group Blondie, Lachman was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. He is a regular contributor to the Independent on Sunday and Fortean Times, and Quest magazine. He lives in London where he is currently working on Politics and The Occult: Unknown Superiors and the Retreat from the Modern World , to be published in 2008.