Quest Magazine

VOLUME 92, NUMBER 2

Contents

What to Wear
By Betty Bland

Signs Everywhere
By Radha Burnier

The Intuition: Knowledge by Fusion
By Shirley Nicholson

The Blossom and the Serpent—The Yellow Brick Road and the Field of PoppiesThe Society's Third Object
By John Algeo

The Opportunity to Excel
By David Bland

By Shirley Nicholson

Originally printed in the March - April 2004 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Nicholson, Shirley. "The Intuition: Knowledge by Fusion." Quest  92.2 (MARCH-APRIL 2004):44-53.

Every one of us possesses the faculty, the interior sense, known as intuition, . . . the only faculty by means of which men and things are seen in their true colors. It is an instinct of the soul,which grows in us in proportion to the use we make of it . . . .[It] awakens the spiritual senses in us and the power to act.

Jean is teaching a handicapped teenager to throw a pot on the potter's wheel. She perceives that he has not grasped the idea of centering. The right words pop into her head as she demonstrates the proper technique and leads the boy to get the idea. She has intuited his problem and found just the right way to get through to him.

A potter, singer, and songwriter, Jean hits upon the "just right" way to express her ideas and emotions through her arts. Her works are original and show independent spirit. She can turn the same intuitive faculty to understanding people and their problems and communicating with them. This gift shows in the way she teaches pottery making and in her relations with her friends, who often come to her for advice and counseling.

Jean operates from intuitive vision rather than from will or planned purpose. When she gets an idea for a piece of sculpture or a song, she is convinced that her vision is valid. Her ideas rarely follow on previous ones but come afresh. She sees a vision of the whole and works out details as she goes along rather than building the whole from the parts. She is ingenious at overcoming difficulties as she proceeds. She does not think through the solutions in a step-by-step way; they come to her holistically.

Jean's mind works quickly. She jumps to conclusions without the gradual process of rational, linear thinking. She grasps significance and meaning immediately. On the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, she would be classified as intuitive because of her emphasis on wholes and extravert because she is oriented to the outer world. But artistic people are not the only intuitives. Others are found in the business world, especially among CEOs and entrepreneurs; they can also be found as teachers, counselors, research scientists, design engineers, inventors, musicians, social activists, and writers.

Though undervalued in our scientifically oriented culture, intuition is a valid way of knowing. C. G. Jung included intuition along with sensation, thinking, and feeling in his classification of ways of functioning. It is a universal human ability. Australian aborigines, who have an uncanny instinct for finding sources of liquid and food in desert areas, access intuition in a state of consciousness called the "Dream Time" (Shallcross and Sisk 46—47). As many psychotherapists including Jung recognize, there is more wisdom in the total organism than in just the conscious mind. Frances Vaughan refers to "an intuitive process that calls for accessing levels of awareness that are not available to habitual ways of thinking" (Shadows 257). In Eastern thought, intuition is considered a faculty that develops during the course of spiritual growth. One aim of yoga is the systematic cultivation of intuition, which is considered a function of higher levels of consciousness on which a wide range of knowledge is available.

There are many studies of intuition, and there was even a journal called Intuition. Businesses are hiring workshop leaders to train managers in developing intuition. In these workshops, you might see vice presidents and CEOs lost in guided fantasies, or giving a right- brain (subjective, emotional) report of an accident, or finding metaphors for the way their company works. One manager compared his company to a car with five drivers, all with steering wheels unattached to the car's wheels. Participants are encouraged to pay attention to such images and ideas, even if they seem "off the wall," as they may express a useful insight.

You have intuition. It tells you to do something or not to do it. It pulls you in a certain direction so that you are at the right place at the right time. It tells you that your idea or intention "feels right" or "feels wrong." It shows you new relationships between ideas you've been working with so that all the pieces of the puzzle fit. It comes suddenly and unexpectedly. You feel elated and want to express your insight in words or action.

Some of the changes in how we think and live have come from intuition. In the nineteenth century, Elias Howe, a first-rate machinist, tried to invent a sewing machine, but he repeatedly failed. The eye for the thread was in the middle of the needle's shaft in his models. One night he had an elaborate dream that was very real to him. He was captured by a fierce tribe and taken to their king, who commanded him to finish the sewing machine at once on pain of death.

He tried but failed. Warriors surrounded him. They were going to execute him with spears. He noticed that near the tips of the spears were eye-shaped holes. He woke up and immediately designed a model sewing machine with the eye for the thread at the tip of the needle, as on the spears and on today's sewing machines.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow refers to two types of scientists (Goldberg 20). One type resembles tiny marine animals, like corals, that build up bit by bit from facts. The other type contains the "eagles of science" who take imaginative flights and produce revolutions of thought. Maslow claimed that Einstein, an eagle, took "intuitive leaps," that his theories were "free inventions of the imagination." His "thought experiments" were visualizations, often done while he shaved. In one of his thought experiments, Einstein imagined twin brothers, one of whom stayed at home on earth, while the other rode around the universe on a beam of light. Einstein saw from this exercise in imagination that the earthling would age faster than the universal traveler. His revolutionary theory of the relativity of time came to him through this fantasy.

In a Sidney Harris cartoon, "The Creative Moment," Einstein is shown at a blackboard, baggy pants and all, writing "E=ma², E=mb²." The humor of the cartoon is its depiction of Einstein's theory as coming from a logical, linear process, whereas Einstein himself said, "The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don't know how or why."

Helen Keller did not affect the world with her intuition in the same way Einstein did, but it changed her life. Before the age of six this blind and deaf girl was wild and unsocialized, eating with her hands and unable to care for herself in any way. Then Annie Sullivan, a gifted teacher, came to the Keller home to help Helen. She tapped words into Helen's hand in Morse code, but Helen did not associate the taps with meaning. One day Annie took Helen to the pump house, and while she tapped W-A-T-E-R into one hand, she pumped water onto the other hand. Helen had a breakthrough. She got the connection. By the end of the day she had learned thirty words. She also started to become socialized and manageable. Later she wrote, "I understood that what teacher was tapping into my hand meant that cool something. That word ‘water' dropped into my mind like the sun in a frozen winter world. It woke me up" (Houston 117).

In a similar way, very young babies learn to connect sounds with objects, to see that a word can stand for something else. We have all had this fundamental intuitive breakthrough. The extent of this basic human ability sets us apart from animals. Language is a hallmark of being human, and it is learned by each child through an intuitive insight.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines intuition as "the act or faculty of knowing directly, without the use of rational processes." Additional meanings of the word are "innate or instinctual knowledge" and"a quick and ready apprehension." The word intuition comes from the Latin in + tuiri, "to look (directly) at." Intuition is knowing something from inside rather than outside. Dane Rudhyar, a philosopher and composer, calls it "a mode of supersensible perception, a spiritual ‘seeing'" (Shallcross and Sisk 52). It can be like a lightning flash that suddenly illuminates a dark landscape.

Intuition is associated with buddhi, a Sanskrit term for the unitive aspect of our nature. The English word intuition is an inadequate translation of that term. Buddhi, a human principle and fundamental aspect of the self, is different from the mind. As action is the function of the physical body, emotion the function of kama or the emotions, thinking the function of manas or mind, so intuition is a function of buddhi. This principle is part of the deep, interior aspect of consciousness, close to the ground of being—the One Life, God, or Brahman. It is part of the transpersonal Self. Yet intuition, on a lower octave, is also a here-and-now faculty that we can use daily.

The intuitive way of knowing is fundamentally different from that of the mind. Thinking is representational or deals with abstractions; it is the map rather than the territory. When you think, you create an inner representation of reality through symbols or words, which you manipulate. You consider the object of thought as something "out there," apart from yourself as the thinker. You think about something, by means of these interior representations.

By contrast, intuition deals intimately and directly with realities, not with their symbolic representations. Words cannot convey the essence of a sensory experience, such as the color blue. Yet you instantaneously know what blue is when you see it. This immediate apprehension is also characteristic of intuitive knowledge, by which we know something with our "whole being with total conviction," as Virginia Tower wrote in describing the magical moment of intuitive insight (20):

That instant of tranquility is like an interval when the movement of sea water on a rocky beach pauses and becomes lucid just long enough for the eye to catch the panorama of glistening shells and sea life upon the floor of the ocean. It is a strange and wonderful moment of clarity and conviction.

Thinking and intuition as contrasting modes of knowing have recently been studied in research into the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Experiments were made on patients whose connections between the hemispheres of their brains had been severed during surgery. Those experiments showed that the left side is largely responsible for analysis, logic, language, and views of the world as consisting of discrete, separate things. By contrast, the right side synthesizes and grasps phenomena with unity and fullness. It is holistic and intuitive. These characteristics are typical of buddhi or intuition.

Arthur Deikman, a psychiatrist, distinguishes two modes of consciousness that relate to the left and right brain (30—35). The "instrumental" mode of consciousness automatically perceives boundaries, discriminates between ourselves and others, and sees us as separate from everything else. You are in this mode when you deal with the practicalities of daily life, like shopping, writing checks, composing a business letter, and making a "to do" list. The "receptive" mode of consciousness, on the other hand, relaxes your sense of boundaries and gives you a sense of merging with the environment, as in a hot bath, enjoying a sunset, or meditation. In the receptive mode, your thinking slows down and verbal meanings blur. Your sense of being a distinct self softens. You are no longer controlling things but are open and receptive. Deikman calls this mode the "spiritual self" because in it one is "other-centered" and identified with the larger life process. It is characterized by service rather than gain for oneself. Intuition is more likely to occur in this receptive, right-brain mode.

The intuition, however, does not work in a vacuum. It enlightens the mind; it does not eliminate the mind. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, in his book Critique of Pure Reason, held that "thought without intuition is blind, and intuition without thought is empty." Intuition often occurs after the mind has struggled with a problem. The solution for Howe's sewing machine came in a dream after long pondering. Kekule, a Flemish chemist of the nineteenth century, had a famous dream-inspired breakthrough. He spent years wrestling with the structure of the benzene molecule. One evening, exhausted from trying to figure it out, he dozed by the fire. He had a vision of atoms swirling together. After a while, he perceived structures in the mass: the atoms twisted into snake-like shapes. Then one of the snakes grabbed its tail with its mouth. The chemist awoke startled, knowing that benzene atoms are structured in a ring. This insight was soon confirmed, and it laid the groundwork for the modern structural theory of organic chemistry.

By definition, intuition is always right. However, urges from the unconscious can suddenly pop into awareness, imitating intuition. It is not always easy to distinguish a true intuition from such an impulse motivated by desire. An impulse is apt to satisfy wishful thinking and inflate the ego, while intuition is holistic. Impulses usually pass quickly, while an intuition persists and even becomes nagging.

Intuitions, whether or not they originate in buddhi, can impress you at many levels. Lama Govinda says that "intuition may be active on all levels, from the sensuous to the highest spiritual experience" (Foundations 77). Frances Vaughan also holds that spiritual intuition "is the basic ground from which all other forms of intuition are derived" (Awakening 80). According to this view, intuition can be experienced in various ways and can reflect in or stimulate various principles.

Buddhi in itself is the "unity sense." At the higher reaches of buddhic experience, your consciousness merges with what you perceive. But intuition experienced on lower levels is not necessarily accompanied by a sense of unity, although ordinary intuition does imply some kind of unitive connection with the situation at an inner, unconscious level, as when you somehow know to be at a certain place at just the right time.

Intuition can be expressed in physical, emotional, and mental ways. At the physical level, you might experience an intuition as a gut feeling, as a tingling sensation, or even as a pull to the right or the left. If you are intuiting a tough situation ahead, you might get a headache, stomachache, or shoulder tension. Or you might just get up and do something, even though you don't know why, which turns out to be the right thing. For example, one rainy day an accountant parked his car in the usual place at work. Then, for no reason, he got back in the car and moved it. Later that day a large tree was uprooted because of unstable ground due to excessive rain, and it fell where the car was first parked.

If you get an intuition emotionally or through empathy, you may be picking up another person's mood, even though you are not aware of any outward signs of it. Or something you plan "feels right" or "feels wrong." You might have an immediate like or dislike for someone, even love at first sight. However, emotional reactions can come not from intuition but from what you hope for or fear. For instance, you might be drawn to a particular car on the dealer's lot, which turns out to be a lemon. It takes discrimination to distinguish personal emotion from intuition.

When you experience intuition mentally you get words, phrases, metaphors, symbols, pictures, numbers, or ideas. These may pertain to concrete things perceived by the lower mind, such as the needle on Howe's sewing machine. Or they may be abstract such as gravity or relativity, perceived by the higher mind. Images are a common expression of the intuition. Jung said that the Self (his term for the transpersonal part of the personality) feeds images to the ego. Images may give you hints to solve practical problems or insight into your internal state and condition. Sometimes you understand the message immediately, and sometimes it needs to be interpreted.

To invoke and interpret images, Marcia Emery developed a technique called the "Mindshift Method,"consisting of six steps (26—32):

To use this technique, first you define the problem clearly and write it down. Then you center yourself by using an affirmation or focusing phrase, such as "Peace, be still" or "I am the Self." Then, you become receptive by using a relaxation technique, such as a few minutes of quiet deep breathing followed by deliberately relaxing your shoulders and other areas of your body. Next, you watch for images, which may come spontaneously or which you may elicit by visualization or fantasy—Emery suggests many such visualizations. Next, you interpret the images, and if you do not see their relevance immediately, you can use a technique such as word associations until you get an "aha!" feeling that you have hit on the right idea. Finally, when you know the solution to your problem, you implement it.

A professor of English went through the steps of this formula in a workshop. She wanted to change jobs and was looking for a sense of direction. The clues that came from her visualization were a pen and a book that fell open to the word "God." She took these to mean that she should do some kind of spiritual writing. She applied for a work-study scholarship and spent some months starting a book on mysticism in English poetry. Afterwards, she relocated, found work teaching, and continued to work on the book. The book was never finished, but she began writing spiritually oriented poetry, some of which was published.

The psychologist Philip Goldberg agrees that intuition can give a sense of direction. He says there is "untapped power and wisdom within us . . . part of ourselves that—although obscured by bad habits and ignorance—understands who we are and what we need and is programmed to move us toward the realization of our highest potential" (16).

Some authors, such as Frances Vaughan and Marcia Emery, consider extrasensory perception to be an expression of intuition. However, spiritual traditions tend to separate the two, holding that intuition is spiritual whereas supernormal powers like telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance are mundane. According to the Indian sage Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (3:38), the ordinary siddhis (supernormal powers) are obstacles that can distract a seeker from the spiritual path. H. P. Blavatsky explains that there are two kinds of siddhis: one kind uses lower psychic and mental energies, while the other is spiritual and demands the highest form of Yoga or spiritual training to develop (Voice 73).

In practice, it is often hard to draw a line between extrasensory perception and intuition. Some experiences we may call intuition—a tingling, an impulse, an emotional response of "it fits" or "it doesn't fit," images that pop into our mind—are perhaps really forms of extrasensory perception. Such perceptions are certainly different from the transcendent unitive experience of pure buddhi. But they may be distant reflections of the unlearned knowledge of buddhi, which stimulates lower principles in different ways. All forms of extrasensory perception may be variations of one basic extrasensory factor, as some theorists have proposed. Perhaps the extrasensory factor and spiritual "knowing" of intuition are different levels on a single spectrum of superphysical knowing.

Extrasensory perception does fit a definition of intuition as knowledge gained without rational processes. Physical sensations, which do not rely on rationality, have their counterparts in clairvoyance and clairaudience—seeing or hearing that is not sense-based. Telepathy and precognition often come spontaneously to the mind, without figuring things out. But extrasensory perception usually lacks the overall perspective of intuition. For example, sensing that a prospective boss is not so nice does not necessarily mean that overall the job will not work out well.

I. K. Taimni refers to intuition as "the illuminating power behind the mind" (162). He perceives it as something deeper and more spiritual than hunches or extrasensory perception. He also associates more faculties with buddhi than just intuition in the popular sense of the term—namely, intelligence and understanding, contrasted with mental intellect and rote knowledge. Using our mind as an intellectual vacuum cleaner, we can gather up voluminous facts without perceiving their relationship to one another or the significance and application of what we have learned. But when it is energized by buddhi, the higher mind sees the grand design behind the details, like finding a hidden pattern among the random pieces in a child's puzzle.

Another characteristic of buddhi or intuition, according to Taimni, is discrimination. When you distinguish between a damaging rumor and the real facts, between someone's appearance and their character, between an accidental mistake and a deliberate obstacle, you are using the intuitive faculty of discrimination. Such discrimination can sort out what is of value from a mass of irrelevant information. Today, when we are inundated with so much information available in every field, as on the Internet, we particularly need this faculty.

The emotions and the mind tend to exaggerate and to give undue importance to trivialities. Buddhi and intuition give a balanced, overall view that puts things in proper perspective. According to Taimni, "Buddhi sees things directly, truly, wholly and in their true perspective, while intellect sees them indirectly, partially and out of perspective" (157).

The quality of buddhi radiates from an enlightened person. Suppose you take a course in Buddhism ata nearby college. The professor has you memorize the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, the Three jewels, the twelve nidanas, and the five skandhas. But you do not catch the spirit of Buddhism as a living way to wisdom. Now suppose you were lucky enough to study with D. T. Suzuki, an enlightened Zen master as well as a professor. You might not remember all the items in all the lists, but you would taste the goal of spiritual practice, which is enlightenment, and be convinced that some have attained it.

Someone limited to lower learning can become complicated and stress the unimportant. An enlightened person is simple and direct and touches us. As Lao-Tzu observes in the Tao Teh Ching (chapter 48):

The man of learning gains day by day.

The man of Tao loses day by day.

Those who have caught a glimpse of enlightenment have soul wisdom, not merely head learning, as H. P. Blavatsky noted in The Voice of the Silence (147—48). She warns the aspirant that "even ignorance is better than Head- learning with no Soul Wisdom to illuminate and guide it . . . . [The mind] needs the gentle breezes of Soul Wisdom to brush away the dust of our illusions."

The highest mode of experiencing intuition is through buddhi in itself, independent of sensations, feelings, thoughts, or extrasensory perceptions. Blavatsky describes such intuition as "that light which never shone on sea or land, that ray of divine intuition, the spark which glimmers latent in the spiritual, never-erring perceptions of man and woman" (Collected Writings 8:102). Elsewhere, she calls this ray of intuition "the voice of the silence" and says that the power to hear it means the development of perception that is intuitional and spiritual. It can give us insight into the deepest spiritual truths.

According to Theosophical teachings, developing the buddhic principle is humanity's next stepin evolution. We have been concentrating on developing our mental powers for a long time. The full flowering of the mind is still in the distant future, so its development will go on for centuries. But alongside mental development, some people even now are unfolding buddhi, and ways to speed the process of its unfoldment are emerging. However, true intuition must not be confused with imprecise or hasty thinking.

Knowledge gained from intuition, like that from the mind or extrasensory perception, can be used for either good or ill. Though it is rooted in buddhi, even genuine intuition can become tainted by personal concerns, for intuition can be used to serve the ego and turned to ends that can be harmful to oneself or others. Its overview of wholeness and balance can be lost in a desire to use it for personal power or ambition. At a lecture at the Naropa Institute in Colorado, Ram Dass said, "Ambition does to intuition what a weevil does to a granary." Though some intuition may concern personal issues, such as choosing a career or using one's money wisely, true intuition has its roots in buddhi and is beneficial overall, not just for oneself, and certainly not harmful to others.

Part of the recent upsurge of interest in intuition is based on a desire to improve profits in business. There is nothing wrong with using intuitive insights to make business decisions, so long as they do not result in unethical practices. But, as observed by Ellen Armstrong (81), "There is the question of how intuition is used. Can it be another noble impulse debased or perverted by becoming a conscienceless servant to the gods of profit and power?" It is important to look for the overall consequences of acting on what seems like intuition and to be sure that the outcome will be fair and ethical. In addition, genuine intuition is not limited to worldly interests but gives insight into spiritual matters.

You can cultivate intuition and learn to hear its "still, small voice," but whether or not you achieve that goal depends on time, place, mood, attitude, and state of mind. If you are depressed or fatigued,intuition may be blocked. For true intuition to appear, you need to rise above strong desires or fears. If you are overly busy or your time is too structured, intuition may not be able to impress your mind, for an overactive mind with no time to cultivate stillness is not receptive to subtle impressions. If you are not open to something new and are afraid to take risks, you are not likely to let intuition in. If you don't believe that you have the potential for developing intuition, you probably won't. It grows in those who encourage it.

There are many methods to develop and enhance intuition. One such exercise, said to have been developed by Sigmund Freud, is the following (Emery 107): You have to make a yes-no decision, such as whether to suggest to your boss an innovation in the procedure of another department. The suggestion could be risky, because the department is not your concern. Should you do it? You flip a coin: heads yes, tails no. But how do you feel about the decision made by the coin? Relieved? Frustrated? Anxious? At peace? Noting your feelings, you reconsider and make the decision on the basis of your reaction to the coin flip, not on the flip itself. You already knew unconsciously what to do. The coin flip only brought the knowledge to your conscious mind.

Helena Blavatsky also taught a simple but difficult method for awakening intuition(Collected Writings 12:499). Though she was eager to teach, when her students came to her with questions, she told them to think deeply about the matter in all its aspects and find an answer for themselves. Her recommendation encourages independent thinking and also stimulates the intuition.

Marcia Emery's Mindshift Method, cited above, similarly helps to develop intuition, as do various techniques in the books of Frances Vaughan and Philip Goldberg. Keeping a journal to record yourintuitive impressions encourages more intuitive impressions to come. Note whether yourimpressions proved to be valid. As you look over this record from time to time, you become sensitive to the difference between experiencing true intuition and passing impulses.

Communing with nature also helps quiet the mind and permits the play of buddhi upon it. As Virginia Tower poetically informs us, we get glimmerings through "those quiet promptings that come to us in the dead of night or in some isolated moment of acute perception inspired by the sight of a tree, a cloud, a waterfall. Instead of putting that moment regretfully aside, we encourage its meaning—as one blows on a tiny ember in order to bring a flame into being" (49—50).

Another way to evoke buddhi is to ponder and digest important parts of what you read. Try to penetrate to the core of the meaning beyond the words. Verses of poetry or challenging spiritual works are good for such contemplation. The mystic work Light on the Path has many suitable passages,such as this:

Listen to the song of life. . . . Life itself has speech and is never silent. And its utterance is not,as you that are deaf may suppose, a cry: it is a song. Learn from it that you are part of the harmony; learn from it to obey the laws of the harmony. (Collins 24—25)

Contemplating this passage may show you the universe, not as a mechanical process or system, but in its dynamic wholeness as a song, full of harmony and joy.

A Christian variation of intuitive reading is called lectio divina, or "divine reading." One version is as follows: Take some time to breathe deeply and center yourself. Then read a passage, such as an inspired bit of Scripture, over and over slowly until a phrase stands out. Then close your eyes and repeat the phrase until you have an intuitive response—an image, emotional reaction, or insight. Note the response, and then remain quiet for a time. When you feel closure, give thanks for the insight you have received.

Objectively watching your mind without judging it is another entry into buddhic consciousness.If you can observe the mind creating its picture book by imposing its patterns, prejudices, and preconceptions onto reality, you become aware that you are not that mind. You are something deeper that can stand behind and observe your mental process. This insight can open you so that you touch buddhic awareness.

Emptying the mind and dropping preconceptions and expectations is another way to invite buddhi.Blavatsky taught that higher truth cannot be absorbed by a mind filled with preconceptions, prejudice, or suspicion (Collected Writings 10:128). In a newspaper article (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Dec. 22, 1997), Mrs. Norman Vincent Peale confides,

If I have a problem and I want to get God's guidance, the first thing I do is empty my mind. Then when your mind is empty you're ready to completely relax, and you say: Dear God, give me a direction. Tell me what I should do.

It's amazing how many times you'll get an answer that you didn't think of yourself. As you analyze the idea and start following it, new things will come.

Mrs. Peale's practice is very like Marcia Emery's Mindshift Method, already cited several times: define the problem, center and become receptive, look for a clue such as an image, interpret it, and put it into action. This process can also be applied for spiritual insight.

I. K. Taimni holds that one of the best ways to invoke buddhic consciousness is through devotion, since buddhi can feed directly into the emotions (151). In intense devotion to Jesus, the Buddha, God, or a saint, we lose ourselves in higher consciousness. Taimni especially recommended the Gayatri, a Hindu prayer to God as Solar Logos, a powerful center of universal life in our solar system. Repeating a phrase in a state of deep devotion can propel one into buddhic union with the object of devotion. The ancient Jesus prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me") or a simple statement like "Jesus, I trust in thee" can unite one with Christ consciousness. Psalm 42:1, "As the deer longs for running water, so my soul longs for you, O God," can have a similar effect.

The Buddha taught a meditation that does not require a religious orientation. He said to let the mind "pervade one quarter of the world with thoughts of pity, with thoughts of sympathy and equanimity,and so the second quarter, and so the third, and so the fourth. And thus the whole wide world, above, below, around, and everywhere, he continues to pervade with heart of pity, heart of sympathy, and heart of equanimity, far-reaching, grown great and beyond measure, all embracing" (Goddard 71). The expansion of consciousness evoked by such a meditation helps to break the confines of the individual principles. In such a state, love and compassion flood one's consciousness.

Quieting your mind by the regular practice of meditation opens a track through which insight can reach your conscious mind. It is good to start learning to meditate with a group or else to read a good book on meditation. There are many ways to get started, such as being aware of your breath without interfering with it, visualizing a meaningful symbol such as the cross or an image of theChrist or the Buddha, a beautiful scene or natural object, such as a rose, or just white light.Reciting a mantra quiets and focuses the mind, as does reciting or chanting a prayer or affirmation.

When your mind has settled into quiet, rest a while in the stillness. Buddhi can play on a quiet mind and give insight. Even if you do not seek guidance on a specific problem at the moment, a passageway to intuition opens so that insights may come at another time.

Once you establish an opening for it, intuitive awareness can become a familiar state. In its worldly applications, it can help you to make good decisions in everyday life. In its highest reaches, it can lead you to buddhi and the perception of essential unity with all beings. The ancient verses on whichBlavatsky's masterwork, The Secret Doctrine, is based state that humanity has been given "a mind to embrace the universe" (2:17). Intuition can bring us closer to that transpersonal mind, to"the intuitive experience of the infinity and the all-embracing oneness of all that is"(Govinda, Foundations 77).

---

Reference's 

 

Armstrong, Ellen. "Bottom Line Intuition." New Age Journal 61 (December 1985): 32-37.

Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna. The Collected Writings. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1977-91.

———. The Secret Doctrine. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1993.

———. The Voice of the Silence. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1992.

Collins, Mabel. Light on the Path. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1980.

Deikman, Arthur. "The Spiritual Heart of Service." Noetic Science Review (Winter 1997).

Emery, Marcia. Intuition Workbook. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994.

Goddard, Dwight. A Buddhist Bible. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970.

Goldberg, Philip. The Intuitive Edge. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1983.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika. Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism. New York: Dutton, 1960.

Houston, Jean. A Mythic Life. San Francisco: Harper, 1996.

Shallcross, J. and Dorothy A. Sisk. Intuition: An Inner Way of Knowing. Buffalo, NY: Bearly Limited, 1989.

Taimni, I. K. A Way of Self-Discovery. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1970.

Tower, Virginia. The Process of Intuition. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1987.

Vaughn, Frances. Awakening Intuition. New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1979.

———. Shadows of the Sacred. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1995.

 

By John Algeo

Originally printed in the March - April 2005 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Algeo, John. "The Dark Side of Light." Quest  93.2 (MARCH - APRIL 2005):65-69.

An old kabbalistic motto holds that Demon est Deus inversus, "The devil is God upside down," or "The devil is God's complement." The Irish poet William Butler Yeats took, as his mystical name in the kabbalistic Order of the Golden Dawn, the initials of that Latin motto, D.E.D.I. Those letters, however, also spell the Latin verb dedi, which means "I have given" and thus punningly suggests that the diabolic is a divine gift.

Yeats probably learned the motto from Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who had been his teacher and had used it as the subject of one section in her great book, The Secret Doctrine. So what is the secret doctrine about this motto and the dark angel of whom it speaks? Blavatsky says of it:

This symbolical sentence, in its many sided forms, is certainly most dangerous and iconoclastic in the face of all the dualistic later religions or rather theologies—and especially so in the light of Christianity. (SD 1:411)

She adds that Christianity certainly did not invent the figure of Satan, for such a concept has always existed. The name Satan in Hebrew means "adversary"; he is consequently a personification of the inevitable balancing forces that must exist in nature: the shadow by which we recognize light, the night that separates the days, the cold without which we have no sense of heat.

To say that the Devil is the inverse, the complement, of God is dangerous, however, because it invites misunderstanding, especially by those whose thinking is molded by dualism, who see spirit and matter, soul and body, the righteous and the reprobate, the saved and the damned as eternal opposites. Those who think in simple dichotomies have great difficulty seeing the underlying unity beneath all diversities. They find it hard to conceive that Demon and Deus, the dark and bright angels, are equally messengers of the Absolute One. They find it hard to give the devil his due.

Yet in our relative world of mayavic reality, all things have their opposites. To know anything is to know it by contrast with something that it is not. Knowledge implies opposition. Without low, there is no high. Without far, there is no near. Without pain, there is no pleasure. Without death, there is no life. Without the dark angels, there are no bright ones. Without Demon, there is no Deus. In eternity, none of those exist. In time, none can exist without its complement. So for the Elohim to be, Satan must also be.

"Homogeneity," says Blavatsky, "is one and indivisible," and "heterogeneity in its dualistic aspect, is its offspring—its bifurcous shadow or reflection," so "that divine Homogeneity must contain in itself the essence of both good and evil" (SD 1:411—12). There are two aspects of this doctrine that are equally important and indeed are complementary, without either of which the doctrine "is certainly most dangerous" because subject to misunderstanding and perversion.

The first aspect is that what we call evil and good are both derived from the divine absolute:

One cannot claim God as the synthesis of the whole Universe, as Omnipresent and Omniscient and Infinite, and then divorce him from evil. As there is far more evil than good in the world, it follows on logical grounds that either God must include evil, or stand as the direct cause of it, or else surrender his claims to absoluteness Everywhere the speculations of the Kabalists treat of Evil as a force, which is antagonistic, but at the same time essential, to Good, as giving it vitality and existence, which it could never have otherwise. (SD 1:413)

This first aspect of the Wisdom teaching about good and evil holds that both of those qualities are equally present in the divine source of all things. That teaching is also found in the great religious documents of all ages and cultures. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna identifies himself with everything in the universe, bad and good: "I am the gambling of the cheat, and the splendor of splendid things" And in the prophesy of Isaiah (45:7), the Almighty is quoted as saying: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things." The God of our good is likewise the God of our evil.

The second aspect of the doctrine is that evil is not an independent reality but merely the complement, the shadow, of good:

There is no malum in se [self existent evil, anything inherently evil of its own nature]: only the shadow of light, without which light could have no existence, even in our perceptions. If evil disappeared, good would disappear along with it from Earth. (SD 1:413)

So evil is a reality, derived from the source of all reality, but also evil has no independent existence, being simply the complement by which we recognize good. Those who accept the first aspect but deny the second are dualists or atheists or cursers of God. Those who deny the first aspect but accept the second reject the evidence of their own senses and maintain against all reason that pain and sorrow do not exist.

But the Occultists . . . who recognize in every pain and suffering but the necessary pangs of incessant procreation: a series of stages toward an ever growing perfectibility . . . view the great Mother [Nature] otherwise. Woe to those who live without suffering. Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without a change. And how can there be any change for the better without proportionate suffering during the preceding stage? (SD 2:475)

To solve "the great problems of life, pain, and death," we must experience them. To use the idiom of those today who pump iron: "No pain, no gain."

The doctrine of the wisdom tradition thus holds that there is but one inexhaustible source of reality from which all things come and apart from which nothing is. And it further holds that intelligent forces derived from that source bring into existence the universe we know, and in so doing they necessarily operate with dualities of many kinds, including those we call good and evil. The process of achieving good involves the strain of suffering evil.

The Dark Creative Forces

Some of the intelligent forces or angels, as we also call the creative agents in the cosmos, work to make the substance of the universe dense, to immerse consciousness in matter, and to isolate separate individual existences. These forces devoted to density, unconsciousness, and separateness are the dark angels whose goal is the emergence of the many from the One, the involution of matter, life, and spirit. They are the centrifugal, creative forces that bring forth the many from the One.

Other forces work to refine substance into subtler states of existence, to increase consciousness, and to connect separate selves into a network of cooperation and sympathy. The forces dedicated to subtlety, consciousness, and reunion are the bright angels whose goal is the conscious, voluntary reintegration of the many into the One, the evolution of the universe to its omega point. They are the centripetal, regenerative forces that return the many to the One.

Blavatsky describes the world process as proceeding on three parallel lines: physical, intellectual, and monadic or spiritual. Those three lines lead respectively to the development of substance, consciousness, and unitary awareness.

On the physical or substantial line of development, matter at first becomes increasingly dense until it reaches some nadir of density, some singular state of inconceivable compaction, as in one of the black holes of the universe where physical law, as we know it, does not hold. From that point of maximum density, matter evolves into complex but also more rarefied states—the matter we know being more empty space than substance and therefore already very subtle. The future of matter is an increasing etherealization.

On the intellectual or conscious line of development, awareness is progressively restricted as it moves through the elemental kingdoms, until it reaches its nadir in the mineral state, where its responses are limited to those restricted ones we call chemical reactions and the like. Thereafter it evolves through the vegetable and animal kingdoms, in which responsiveness to the environment and to other beings becomes increasingly acute, as plants respond quickly to the physical conditions around them and animals to other beings. When awareness reaches the human kingdom, interior reflection and self consciousness flourish. Humanity is well along the road to increased awareness of the universe, but before us still lie vistas of perception and knowledge that we can yet scarcely imagine.

On the monadic or spiritual line of development, the Oneness of the source is progressively divided into smaller and smaller, more and more restricted and limited units. Ultimately, to be sure, there is only one Monad (from the Greek, meaning "unity"). But as that Monad is reflected in evolved matter and the developed kingdoms of life, it is continually refracted, so that it seems to itself to become increasingly limited and fragmented. Thus the One apparently divides into the many.

This process has also been described as one of "group souls" that individualize. In the mineral kingdom, vast areas and types of substance are ensouled by one aspect of the Monad. In the vegetable kingdom, the domain of each ray of the Monad is much restricted but still encompasses whole species of plants. In the animal kingdom, the Monad is even more restricted, expressing itself through an ever- decreasing range of physical forms. Among the higher animals, a single group soul (which is one separate ray of the Monad) may express itself through only a few separate bodies at a time. Finally, in the human kingdom, the monadic line of development reaches its nadir, for each human being is a distinct individuality, a persisting bit of separateness from the primal unity of existence.

In this sense, we humans, far from being the crown of evolution, as we are vaingloriously wont to imagine ourselves, are actually the nadir of spiritual development. As the most individual of all beings, we are the most separate from the divine Unity and thus the farthest of all beings from our common source. In us the monadic development reaches its lowest point. Our future is to reestablish connections, to forge the links that will bind us back to the Unity, to become One—consciously, deliberately, of our own free will. At the omega point of evolution, we are to merge without losing our identities, to recreate the Unity, but then a Unity that knows itself and has chosen its state. Through the outgoing phases of these three lines of development—the densification of matter, the limitation of consciousness, and the individualization of spirit—the dark angels are the governing forces. They guide the involution of the universe. They make it solid, unresponsive, and fragmented. They bring the world into being. They are the creators.

But once the nadir on each line of development has been reached and the forces turn backward to evolve out of those limitations, the bright angels become the guides of evolution, and the work of the dark angels becomes evil in the sight of those who are evolving. The work of the dark angels continues, however: Black holes are still compacting matter throughout the cosmos; consciousness still flows into the mineral forms and so is restricted; living creatures still move toward the spiritual separation of individuality. The impulse of the dark angels—the involution of matter, consciousness, and spirit—is all around us. But the human path now lies in a different direction, and so for us their work has become evil—not evil in itself, not malum in se, but evil relative to our direction.

As human beings, we value the work of the bright angels, because we are well along the paths of refined substance and increased consciousness, and we have turned the bend on the path of spiritual unity—although we have just made the turn, so the old forces of separateness are still strong within us. But however much we sympathize with the upward path of evolution and the work of the bright angels, we should not scorn the other. The work of the dark angels—to solidify matter, to funnel consciousness into it, and to make separate, distinct centers of identity—must come first. The work of the dark angels is necessary to the total ecology of the universe. Without them there would be nothing to evolve, and the bright angels would have no role to play.

The Dark Angel Within

However, while we respect the work of the dark angels, we must take care not to become a part of it. Our destiny, our dharma, is elsewhere. Yet there is still a temptation within us to follow the dark path. That temptation does not concern the densification of matter, for black holes are far from our condition in time and space. Neither does it much concern the limitation of consciousness, for we evolved from mineral unresponsiveness eons ago. Only exceptionally and pathologically do human beings sink back to animal or vegetative states of unconsciousness, and then it is no more than a temporary regression, not lasting beyond the bounds of a lifetime, and seldom as long as that.

Spiritual regression, however, is another matter. We have only just made the upward turn in monadic evolution; we are newly emerged from the nadir of spiritual isolation and separateness. Before our individualization, the dark angels were our friends and guides. We have old ties with them that are not easily unknotted. We sympathize still with their forces; we resonate still with their discordant melodies. They are still within us.

One of the teachings of the wisdom tradition is that we are composite beings—not simply souls with bodies but compounds of principles evolved separately over the eons and brought together to make up our natures. The elements that compose us are like distinct rays of light of various colors and intensities that are focused together to illuminate a scene in a play. The lights become one illumination, but they are projected from several lamps and reflect the nature of those lamps.

The creation myth of Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine has an episode in which the progenitors of humanity are discussing our making and what must go into us to produce a complete humanity (Anthropogenesis stanza 17; SD 2:105). The Earth gives our gross physical body, the Solar Spirits give our life energy, the Lunar Ancestors give the model of our personality, the Heat of the Sun gives our desires; but humanity needs also "a mind to embrace the Universe," and none can give humanity that intellect, until the Sons of Wisdom add their light to the others. This creation myth has various interpretations, but one of its significant meanings is that we are composites of evolutionary impulses that are historically independent of each other, though they have combined in us.

Our prehuman development was directed toward making us spiritually independent, to bring us to the unique isolation which is the human state—the condition of individualization. The dark angels made us human by building up the individual ego. We are the creatures who are alone. As we evolve from the human to the superhuman kingdoms, we will move from spiritual isolation to spiritual connectedness, integration, interdependence. However, our natures have been molded by the dark angels of spiritual isolation and separateness. And the effects of their labors remain strong within us.

The biblical myth of the Fall can be seen as alluding to this human individualization and its consequences. In that myth, Adam and Eve, who are proto-humanity, are led by the serpent (the dark angel) to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The knowledge that the fruit imparts is of their own separate identities. In their disobedience to the divine prohibition against eating, they assert their separate wills—they become choosing individuals. That is the Original Sin, whose punishment is expulsion from the unity of the Garden of Eden into the diversity of the fallen world. And the first man and woman retain and pass on to their descendants the consequences of their separation—a fallen nature and a susceptibility to the wiles and temptations of Satan, the adversary, the personification of spiritual separateness.

Within the stark simplicity of the myth of the Fall and original sin lies a great truth. We inherit the effects of our past, and an action that may have been necessary—a quest for knowledge, a coming of age, an attainment of independence—can have consequences that, if unchecked, are inappropriate for our further development. Good things of the past may become bad things of the future.

The dark angels guided us to human independence and still have a place in our lives, for they are the impulse to self-survival. They are ego exalting. They are self-assertive. Human society has not yet reached a stage at which we can do without such motives to action. And indeed, although in mature humans those motives must become transformed into something less violent and more considerate of others than they have been in the adolescence of our species, we will never be able to do without them altogether. For the world can progress only when all of us in it are pulled between the twin poles of good and evil—of unity and separateness. As Blavatsky put it:

In human nature, evil denotes only the polarity of matter and Spirit, a struggle for life between the two manifested Principles in Space and Time, which principles are one per se, inasmuch as they are rooted in the Absolute. In Kosmos, the equilibrium must be preserved. The operations of the two contraries produce harmony, like the centripetal and centrifugal forces, which are necessary to each other—mutually interdependent— "in order that both should live." (SD 1: 4161)

To preserve the equilibrium and produce the harmony within the human constitution, all forces need to be balanced—including those of the dark angels. Their forces have been called collectively the Dweller on the Threshold, and Jungian psychology personifies them as the Shadow. In Christianity they are spoken of as one's personal devil.

The devil within may not, like C. S. Lewis's Wormwood, get letters from his uncle Screwtape, or have quite as distinctly human a personality, or be as fully committed to the Christian variety of dualism; but the personal devil is more than a literary convention. Each of us has impulses, habits, and proclivities that cluster and can be imbued with a personality something like Wormwood's. The dark angels are cosmic powers that guide the involution of the universe, but they are also psychological forces from our past that shape our responses to the present.

The dark angel is a part of ourselves with which we must come to terms. As the impulse to separate ourselves from others, it is the mirror image of the bright impulse to unite with all life. Our omega point is to realize both impulses harmoniously—as separate individuals, to unite with all other separate individuals in a single pattern of compassion and benevolence. Thus the bright angels and the dark angels are both necessary to us. And what is most necessary is that we learn how to deal with both in their proper times and places and according to their proper powers.

At the end of her discussion of the kabbalistic motto, Blavatsky describes an image of:

the "Magic Head" in the Zohar, the double Face on the double Pyramid: the black pyramid rising against a pure white ground, with a white head and face within its black triangle; the white pyramid, inverted—the reflection of the first in the dark waters, showing the black reflection of the white face...Demon est Deus Inversus (SD 1:424)

John Algeo is professor emeritus University of Georgia and international vice-president of the Theosophical Society. This article is reprinted from Maria Parisen's book, Angels and Mortals: Their Co-Creative Power.

By Betty Bland

Originally printed in the March - April 2005 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Bland, Betty. "For Others." Quest  93.2 (MARCH - APRIL 2005):6

As my friend explained the complicated ins and outs of his current minor difficulties, I lightly said, "I believe I had better start praying for you." Immediately my friend became agitated and insisted on not being the recipient of any prayers. To my incredulous questions he replied that in his experience, whenever people prayed for him, the intention was to direct or control him in some way—to impose their will on him.

After my first moments of shock, I realized the truth of this in many instances—especially in the context of praying so that someone "will see the light." The "light" is always defined as seeing the prescribed truths according to the one doing the praying.H. P. Blavatsky writes in The Key to Theosophy that this is not prayer at all, but a kind of black magic:

But woe unto those Occultists and Theosophists, who, instead of crushing out the desires of the lower personal ego or physical man, and saying, addressing their Higher Spiritual EGO immersed in Atma-Buddhic light, "Thy will be done, not mine," etc., send up waves of will-power for selfish or unholy purposes! For this is black magic, abomination, and spiritual sorcery. (67-69)

In other words, we cannot call on that universal power unless we first search our own hearts and fill them with a humble spirit, recognizing that we have no idea how to define the greater good even for ourselves, much less another. With this attitude we can align with highest spirit and truly pray a prayer of power.

Like the center of a walnut, there is within each person a strength of purpose which will unfold when the conditions are right. The outer husk may be tough and prickly and the center surrounded by bitter sheaths, but deep within is a soft, sweet core with the power to produce a mighty tree.

When we truly pray unselfishly for the good of another person, we support this center and call forth its power. We are not accomplishing something because of our own will, but when we tune in to the will of the infinite deific presence accessible in the still, secret chambers of our hearts, we can indeed move mountains. Continuing her discourse in The Key to Theosophy, HPB speaks of this God-Power within in the following way:

Please say "God" and not a God. In our sense, the inner man is the only God we can have cognizance of. And how can this be otherwise? Grant us our postulate that God is a universally diffused, infinite principle, and how can man alone escape from being soaked through by, and in, the Deity? We call our "Father in heaven" that deific essence of which we are cognizant within us, in our heart and spiritual consciousness, and which has nothing to do with the anthropomorphic conception we may form of it in our physical brain or its fancy: "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of (the absolute) God dwelleth in you?"

In other words, this God essence is so all-pervading that it cannot be escaped. It is always present in ourselves and others but hiding under the crust of our day-to-day anxieties. Yet it is there, waiting in silence to be summoned forth. It is a transformational power that we can trust to be a steady force in our lives.

When I was visiting our daughter in Germany some years ago, I was struck by a political poster for the Green party. It depicted a patch of cracked asphalt with a triumphant blade of spring-green grass pushing its way through into the sunlight. The slogan proclaimed "Gruen bricht durch," or "Green breaks through." This powerful image has always stuck with me as a metaphor for the spiritual power trapped beneath the surface of our minds, waiting for the moment to break forth. It is a mystery rather than something to be understood intellectually. Committed intensity and pure intention, aligned with the universal good, bring the waters of unfoldment into the cracks of our consciousness, allowing the spiritual power to blossom forth against all odds. HPB refers to this as a transformational, alchemical process:

Nor, as just remarked, that a prayer is a petition. It is a mystery rather; an occult process by which finite and conditioned thoughts and desires, unable to be assimilated by the absolute spirit which is unconditioned, are translated into spiritual wills and the will; such process being called "spiritual transmutation." The intensity of our ardent aspirations changes prayer into the "philosopher's stone," or that which transmutes lead into pure gold. The only homogeneous essence, our "will-prayer" becomes the active or creative force, producing effects according to our desire.

One of the greatest gifts given to us struggling human beings is the gift of being able to access this philosopher's stone for the good of all. Even if we don't say the right words, or know the most helpful hopes for the person for whom we are praying, we send a caring vibration through the universe that is carried on the wings of intentionality to help. The power of energy and support gently envelops the targeted recipient with the strength to reassert the natural impulse to wholeness and order.

So don't hesitate to participate. Tune in to an open, caring concern for your friends, neighbors, enemies, and strangers all over the world, and nourish those little blades of hope springing up and penetrating the darkness. Just as my friend finally concluded that he did indeed want to be included in my prayers, no one will want to hide from this kind of prayer. Its strength has the power to break the ravening darkness of the struggles of life and convert it to the greening pastures of hope.