Quest Magazine

Originally printed in the November - December  2001 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Wilde, Dana. "How Ancient China Came to America: The I Ching as Bible." Quest  89.6 (NOVEMBER - DECEMBER  2001): 222-227

By Dana Wilde

AMERICA AND CHINA are as different as two cultures can be. America is young, just over two hundred years old; China has a five-thousand-year past. Their languages are startlingly alien to each other, the currents of their philosophies flow in nearly opposite directions, and their principal religious traditions could not be more distinct. And yet a friend of mine recently remarked, "The I Ching is my bible."

This remark is surprising, not only because the I Ching, or Book of Changes, developed millennia ago in the staggeringly foreign traditions of China, but also because it is not a religious text at all, at least not in any conventional Western sense. It's not scripture, and there's nothing like it in Western religion or literature.

In fact there's another surprising thing about the remark: It was not the first time I've heard it. Several highly intelligent Americans have said the same thing to me in the past few decades. The friend who introduced me to the I Ching in 1974 said it to me. A few years later a woman said it to me in exactly the same words. Another friend, one of the most acutely intelligent people I've ever known, said it to me in the mid 1980s, and later, so did my wife.

The I Ching is utterly unlike the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. It tells no stories, and its text is oracular, a highly metaphorical kind of poetry that is decipherable to Westerners and most Chinese only through the detailed commentaries of both Chinese sage-scholars and Western translator-interpreters. The best known translation and commentary on the I Ching by a Westerner is the one made by Richard Wilhelm, a German scholar who lived in China during the first part of the twentieth century, and it is his translation that my friends referred to, and that I am most familiar with.

The I Ching is neither scripture nor a literary work, nor even a work of rationally coherent philosophy. It is, in fact, a three-thousand-year-old book of divination—a fact even more difficult for scientifically minded Westerners to square with traditional ideas about religious texts. When my friends say, "The I Ching is my bible,"however, they are indicating that the I Ching provides them not with predictions of the future, but with religious ideas or sensibilities in a way that replaces the Bible.

How does a well-educated American come to the conclusion that an ancient Chinese book can function the way the Bible does for Jews andChristians, or the Koran does for Muslims? I'd like to give a picture of Western history that addresses this question. In a nutshell, it was cultural conditions that compelled my friends to cut their ties to traditional Western religion and seek the new in the very, very old.

The story begins two thousand years ago when Christ questioned the authority of Roman law and Middle Eastern religious leaders. But let's skip ahead about sixteen hundred years, only mentioning that during all those years most Europeans remained convinced that some sort of divine authority existed and felt compelled to recognize it. Then around AD1600, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Francis Bacon, and other Europeans began setting religious authority on its ear—often without intending to do so. That is, the methods of objective science emerged and began to reveal that when you look closely at the physical world, it's different from what traditional religions describe.

Galileo encountered serious problems with the Catholic Church when he argued that the Earth revolves around the Sun, instead of the Sun around the Earth, as the Bible indicates. The new science, or New Philosophy as it came to be known, "call'd all in doubt," to quote the English poet John Donne, and questioned the Bible's reliability and therefore the church's authority. This triggered a centuries-long moral crisis for Western culture because religious leaders were the traditional teachers of moral values. To oversimplify the situation, because of the success of science, people's confidence in religious authority diminished.

This did not happen overnight, but gradually over the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the mid 1800s, most Westerners were hanging onto their family and community habits of attending church and reading the Bible, but their attention was turning more and more to the material world and the ways science and technology could make them healthier and more comfortable. Traditional moral values taught by the church and Bible began to seem old-fashioned. Philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and writers like Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert in their own ways mounted sharp attacks on the hollowness of European morality. In America, philosophers like Emerson, Thoreau, and William James asked the same questions in gentler ways. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was clear to many people that the Western world had a serious moral crisis on its hands.

The church was losing its credibility and authority in the face of scientific findings. There was also the serious problem that the church upheld social, political, and economic values that enabled relatively small numbers of wealthy, greedy people to exploit and make profoundly miserable millions upon millions of other people. Just after the turn of the century, World War I (1914-1918) devastated Europe and other parts of the world. It became clear to many educated Westerners that a moral system that could result in such a disaster was bankrupt. The Christian church was seen as part of the bankrupt system, and its congregations and influence declined as the twentieth century wore on. Religion in general was condemned as superstition put to political use by businessmen, landowners, politicians, and scientists.

At the same time, some people realized that human beings' inner lives need attention. In the nineteenth century, organizations like theTheosophical Society and the Unitarian Church sought to create new, fresh forums for the nurturing of religious feeling. In the 1920s and 1930s there was a popular notion that art could replace religion. But more powerful than art in people's consciousness by this time was science itself; science began to be seen as the savior of humanity, and this view continues today. But the trouble is—and many scientists tried to warn of this—science treats the material world, not the inner life, and cannot by its nature offer any moral guidance.

A morality of economics and of politics, which manifested itself as nationalism, grew up from scientific, materialist views of human activity in order to provide a system of community values that would bind people together. Although the notion that economics and politics are the binding forces in people's lives persists today, the fact is that a morality of politics and economics does not work either. This is because economics and politics are not moral systems, even though people try to make them so. Moral systems underpin economics and politics.

The moral crisis was not confined to the Western world. In the nineteenth century, China itself, despite its enormous life independent of the West, had grown very brittle morally as well, and it has wrestled with the same general problems as the Western world. The twentieth century was a shockingly painful time in human history because practically every civilized country was struggling with old moral systems. Things came apart virtually everywhere.

But while moral systems have been torn down everywhere, the world has floundered in replacing them. No culture, country, or civilization can hold up for long without a system of shared values. Since World WarsI and II, the whole world has been in a state of marvelous material possibility but simultaneously a state of moral chaos. In the 1950s and 1960s, many Americans realized that old moral dicta by and large no longer applied in the modern world, and they rebelled. Young people of my generation refused to go to church. They became cynical about politicians, government, and much else.

So what does the I Ching have to do with all this? The breakdown of the old moral order and the necessity for a new order to replace it makes the I Ching's relation to American cultural history really not so obscure.

In the 1960s, many well-educated young Americans realized that something extremely important was missing from the materialist way of life. Some of the most influential statements of this feeling came from the Beat writers of the time: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder.They and others were searching for meaningful lives. In some ways they botched the job, but the important thing was that they were aware that their physical well-being did not mean they were living a "good life."They were keenly aware that their inner lives—the lives of their minds, emotions, psyches, and spirits—were as real as their bodies, and in someways more real. They realized that part of the bankruptcy of traditional Western morality was that it had given all its attention to the well-being of the body and to scientific rational intelligence, and had essentially ignored the inner life.

Young Americans of the 1960s did not trust the church, so they set out to find a life of the mind and spirit in other traditions. They looked energetically at Buddhism, Hinduism, and Middle Eastern religions and philosophies. Young black people became Muslims. White kids from suburban families became Zen Buddhists and Hindus, or at least they tried to. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi made trips to America, and the Beatles followed him back to India. Alan Watts wrote enormously popular books for Americans about Buddhism. I remember being influenced by a  popularization of Hindu philosophy called Be Here Now by a Westerner who had adopted the name Baba Ram Dass.

The 1960s passed. By the late 1970s, people thought of the whole endeavor as a misguided waste of energy and a joke. Most of the young spiritual rebels of the 1960s got sick of living in the uncomfortable surroundings they associated with spiritual life and returned to the comforts of middle-class food, transportation, and money. Those who continued to seek the spiritual life, whether in books or drugs or traditional religions, came to be seen by Americans in general as cranks or misfits. The period saw a resurgence of interest in contacting dead spirits and belief in the power of crystals and mental telepathy. In 1972 I took a college course in the anthropology of magic and religion,and we read books by popular mystics like P. D. materials are and so-called black magicians like Aleister Crowley. They were disturbing books. The UFO phenomenon, which is probably a manifestation of an inner condition, emerged full-blown during the 1960s. People seeking inner meaning tried different kinds of divination, including astrology, tarot cards,and—the I Ching.

I was introduced to the I Ching in this context. A friend showed me how to throw the coins to obtain the hexagrams, and we read the oracles with fascination. What we did was purely superstition, according to the dominant scientific-rational view of reality. Most well-meaning middle-class Americans believed science had long since debunked and disproved all superstitious nonsense about supernatural realities; even the Catholic church was the butt of jokes for many Americans because of its weird rituals with incense and chanting and drinking wine believed to be blood.

I admit I don't know exactly what to think of all this. I do know that, contrary to the jokes now told about "peace, love, and understanding" and deluded spaced-out hippies, and contrary to hard-core scientific cynicism about religion and the existence of an inner,spiritual, and moral life, the impulse during those years to find some kind of spiritual reality was intense and real. It was just that many people failed to find any evidence of it. Many people, but not all.

Those who told me that the I Ching is their bible believe they have evidence of things unseen. Tarot cards and ouija boards mainly dropped out of their lives as either unreliable or dangerous or simply fake. Some of them keep a skeptical eye on astrology. Drugs have long since left their lives as dangerous, short-lived, and largely illusory. But the I Ching remained and actually grew in importance to them. Why?

Well, the initial attraction to the I Ching involved its use as a contact with the spiritual world. You throw the coins, they symbolize lines, and you look up the arrangement of lines in the book, then read the commentary, which supposedly answers your question. Pure superstition. Except that people discovered that things were happening in the I Ching that were not happening, or happening far less satisfactorily, in other kinds of divination. One thing was, amazingly, that the answers were right. Let me tell you a story that still startles me, even years later.

The friend who originally introduced me to the I Ching decided to make a scientific test of its objective reliability. His question was, "Is some ordering force actually at work, or is this merely total random chance?" For his test, he threw the coins randomly, challenging the I Ching to make sense. On the first throw, he ended with the oracle Wilhelm translates as "Youthful Folly"; the original text is translated thus: "It is not I who seek the young fool. The young fool seeks me. If he importunes, I give him no information." This was startling because it would be just the sort of reply you might expect a real oracle to make in response to a frivolous test of its authenticity.

But a stranger thing happened. My friend continued his test, throwing the coins three more times. Three more times he drew the oracle of "Youthful Folly." This can mean only one of two things: Either an extremely improbable and truly fantastic synchronistic coincidence occurred, or the oracle actually (generously) answered a question that should not have been asked, by warning of its foolhardiness. Four times in a row.

I have never known anyone who has used the I Ching to say it was wrong or that it misguided them. In my experience, it has never beenwrong, by which I mean that although sometimes the response is very happening in understand or seems ambiguous, I have never seen a clearly unfavorable response in a favorable situation, or vice versa. And I have frequently seen responses clearly borne out. The oracle has been exact and lucid about favorable and unfavorable periods of my own life,including a troubling period that began soon after a decision to forgo along-term visit to China.

So my friends' religious confidence in the I Ching began with their experiments in occult and mystical activities, what we now call the "NewAge" movement—the interest in occultism and mysticism that grew out of the 1960s into whole ranges of popularizations of Eastern religion and philosophy, Native American mysticism, shamanism, channeling, paganism,myth enactment, psychic healing, meditation practice, past-life hypnosis, and many other similar offshoots, including the quite bizarrealien abduction phenomenon.

The I Ching is different, though. Not only does it seem to reply meaningfully to questions, but it provides two other important things:first, clear, reasonable instructions about living a good life; and second, a coherent picture of the cosmos that integrates my friends'deep sense that the outer, material world and the inner, psychic world are equally real and intimately related. This is critical. My friends say, "The I Ching is my bible," because it provides exactly whatreligion, apart from church politics, traditionally provided: guidelines for living a good life, and contact with the inner or spiritual world. A point of moral orientation is available in the I Ching, which many people believe is not available in traditional Western religions or most of the shallow New Age efforts to formulate a working spiritual life.

What's really interesting is that this point of orientation is available in a text from ancient China. It strongly suggests that themoral values we sense deep inside us are common to widely diverse people. Wisdom, justice, temperance, patience, endurance, perseverance,honesty, courage, piety—virtues taught by Plato, not to mentionJesus—are present not only in Western, but also in Chinese culture. And they are identifiable in South Asian cultures, Middle Eastern cultures,and other cultures all around the world.

If I'm right about even part of this, it means that religion is notan evil political tool. Instead, it means that religious institutionswere used as political tools by some people who did not mean well, as well as by some who did. Further, it means that the religious feeling attached to moral values and to the various kinds of health that are possible for human beings is not an illusion. It is a natural experience and need. And this implies that we share a common consciousness and a common source.

The upshot of all this, finally, would be that after a terrible couple of centuries—especially after what might be described as a collapse or dismantling of morality during the twentieth century—there is now a powerful impulse on the part of people to rebuild a coherent system of moral values: a system that will not result in world wars. To rebuild, we collect moral value wherever we recognize it. The task requires great personal clarity, and cultural clarity, and powerful,unflinching honesty.

But there it is. China is building itself, a giant country of giant possibilities that will come to ruin if no meaningful system of giant possibilities underpins it. America is transforming itself too, a powerful,inventive country of enormous resources in materials and energy. But it has to rebuild a moral system that abandons the hollowness and destructiveness of the old morality and creates a workable, meaningful moral life by doing what Americans are good at: using whatever materials are at hand—including the I Ching—to contact the divine world.

Dana Wilde recently served as a Fulbright lecturer in China, having taught literature and writing in his home state of Maine and Eastern Europe, as well as China. He has published in the Quest,Alexandria, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the North American Review, and Mystics Quarterly. His forthcoming book of essays is titled Infinities: The Inner Dimensions of Outer Space.

Originally printed in the November -December 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Algeo, John. "Harry Potter and the Ancient Wisdom." Quest  90.6 (SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2002):220 - 225.

By John Algeo

The Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling are a fantastically magical phenomenon. Coming out of nowhere in the publishing world, they rapidly became the best-selling young people's books of our time, and the movies based upon them have been equally popular.

The books are examples of three literary genres. One is the bildungsroman, or novel of the moral and psychological education of the protagonist; Harry Potter is a student at a boarding school, but is also in the great school of Life. Another genre is the quest story, in which the protagonist faces a series of trials, the passing of which results in the discovery of a great treasure—in Harry's case, self-knowledge. And the third is the fairy tale, whose central character is often an orphan; Harry is an orphan and thus a fitting representative of every human being, for we are all, in the words of one of the great Theosophical teachers, members of "poor orphan humanity."

Harry comes from a family of Wizards but has been reared by Muggles, or non-Wizards, and so is ignorant of his background and latent powers. He is called, however, to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where he will spend seven years being educated in magic but also in moral and psychological maturity. At or from Hogwarts, Harry will engage in a series of quests that are all part of an encompassing great quest to discover who and what he is.

The four books in print, with three more projected for the series, appeal to the young—both in years and in heart. That appeal is founded on the author's skill as a storyteller, but also on the worldview of the stories, which—it may be suggested—is compatible with the Ancient Wisdom.

Rowling's wide-ranging familiarity with myth, legend, magic, and odd bits of recondite and esoteric information is the web-stuff from which she spins her magical tale. The books create their own world, whose integrity is an essential for good fantasy. Yet they are also interpretable in or, to use J. R. R. Tolkien's term, "applicable" to other contexts, such as Theosophy, with which Rowling has some familiarity, as is clear from her reference in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to the fictitious author "Cassandra Vablatsky" and her equally fictitious book Unfogging the Future. "Vablatsky" is a metathesis of "Blavatsky," and "Cassandra" is an appropriate substitute for Helena, because Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, King of Troy, a prophetess who always spoke the truth but was never believed and because Cassandra's story is part of the great war of the Iliad, fought over Helen. Moreover, the fictitious book title Unfogging the Future suggests Isis Unveiled, Helena Blavatsky's first major work.

Although "Cassandra Vablatsky" shows that Rowling has some knowledge of the Theosophical tradition, one cannot assume that knowledge to be either deep or extensive. And yet, interestingly, much in the Harry Potter books is parallel to Theosophical ideas. Such parallelism need not imply a detailed knowledge of those ideas by the author, but may arise quite independently out of her familiarity with the myths, legends, and symbols in which the Theosophical Ancient Wisdom is embodied or even from deep unconscious levels of the psyche, where the Wisdom is enshrined in the heart-mind of every human being.

Polarities

One of the Theosophical themes of Harry Potter is that of polarity: spirit/matter, life/form, energy/mass, yin/yang, esoteric/exoteric, inner/outer, and so on. Several notable such polarities appear in the books. One is that of Wizards versus Muggles, two kinds of people who inhabit Harry Potter's world. Wizards are wise in the ways of magic; Muggles are muddle-headed, unmagical, although clever technologically to compensate for their lack of magic powers, but also often unimaginative and philistine. Wizards and Muggles are in practice different castes, who seldom mingle and sometimes misunderstand each other:

"Are all your family wizards?" asked Harry . . . .

"Er—yes, I think so," said Ron. "I think Mum's got a second cousin who's an accountant, but we never talk about him." (Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone 74 -5; all unidentified quotations are from this first book)

These contrasting castes of the wise and the muddle-headed are parallel to the two kinds of people identified in At the Feet of the Master (one of the spiritual classics of Theosophy):

In all the world there are only two kinds of people—those who know, and those who do not know; and this knowledge is the thing which matters.

The knowledge in question is that of the reality of an orderly plan in the universe and of the place of human beings in that plan. Wizards, by etymology are wise ones who know. Muggles are the other sort.

Another sort of polarity is that of good versus evil. And this polarity is quite distinct from that of Wizards versus Muggles. There are good Muggles and evil Muggles, as well as good Wizards and evil Wizards. Indeed, the two archetypal figures of good and evil in the stories are both Wizards. Albus Dumbledore is the headmaster at Hogwarts and the greatest living Wizard. His first name, Albus, is the Latin word for "white," he being a "white" or good magician. The first part of his surname, Dumb, is the English word for "silent, unspeaking," reminding us that true wisdom cannot be told but only experienced; the later meaning of dumb as "stupid" is ironically appropriate, as wisdom is often mistaken for stupidity by those who do not know, for example, in the literary figure of the Wise Fool. In addition, Dumble rimes with humble; and the truly wise are always humble people, for they know how much is still unknown. The last part of the headmaster's name, dore, is a homophone of door, and this wise headmaster is the door through which Harry will enter onto the Path of learning and serving.

On the other hand, the archetype of evil is Voldemort, Harry's shadow and nemesis. Once a student at Hogwarts, as Harry is now, Voldemort adopted that nom de mal when he launched upon his evil path. Vol suggests the German verb wollen "want, wish, desire," and mort is the Latin root for "death." So Voldemort is he who has a wish (Vol) of (de) death (mort), the opposite of wisdom.

At Hogwarts, Harry's two best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, are another polarity. Ron is from an old Wizard family; Hermione is from a Muggle family. And they balance each other in many characteristics: Ron is quiet and introverted; Hermione is talkative and outgoing. Ron is shy, with a feeling of inferiority as he is the youngest of six talented brothers; Hermione is confident and assertive, a distinguished achiever. Ron takes risks; Hermione is law-abiding. Ron is full of masculine energy; Hermione, of feminine energy. With Harry, these three form a triangle of energies and personality types.

The Quest

The ultimate quest in the Harry Potter books is that of self-discovery. In that respect, these books share a common theme with the great spiritual guidebooks of humanity. Enlightenment is the ability to answer correctly the question "Who am I?" A Zen student once came to the Zen master and asked what he must do to achieve enlightenment. The Zen master replied, "Who's asking?" The student who can answer that question is enlightened. The same question is the principal subject of all the Upanishads and, indeed, of spiritual treatises in all the great traditions.

Harry is on a great quest to discover who he is—in the simplest, most literal sense of learning about his parents—but also in the deeper sense of discovering his own nature and his mission in life. That great quest is mirrored in a different quest theme in each book of the series. In the first book, it is to find the Philosopher's Stone. "Philosopher" is a traditional term for an alchemist, and the Philosopher's Stone is a magical product of the alchemist's art that turns base metals into gold and produces a drink, the Elixir of Life, that gives immortality. (Apparently the American publishers thought "philosopher" sounded too dry and dusty, so adopted instead the term "Sorcerer's Stone.")

Harry's quest for the Philosopher's Stone takes him and his two friends into the underground cellars of Hogwarts school, where the Stone has been hidden. Their journey into those depths mirrors the ancient theme of a descent into the underworld, which is the unconscious part of our psyche, where we discover hidden truths about ourselves. Harry's underground exploration has seven stages (reduced to five in the movie):

1. He and his friends must pass a three-headed dog guarding a trapdoor entrance to the cellars. The dog, though called "Fluffy" in the story, is Cerberus, the watchdog of the underworld or Hades in Greek mythology. The dog can be put to sleep with music played by Harry and Hermione on a flute that Harry was given as a present. Similarly, Orpheus gained entry to Hades to rescue his dead wife by playing on a lyre. The flute that Harry and Hermione play is an analog of the instrument in Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, which Tamino and Pamina play during their co-initiation at the end of the opera.

2. When the companions have tumbled through the trapdoor (like Alice down the rabbit hole), their fall is cushioned by their landing on a lushly growing plant, called the Devil's Snare. The tendrils of this plant entrap anything that touches it and grow tighter as its victim struggles to escape. Hermione, however, remembers from her ceaseless study that the plant retreats from light, so she uses a magic spell to produce a bright illumination from her wand. The Devil's Snare suggests that what is soft and easy is sometimes a trap and that evil and oppression can be overcome by the Light of Knowledge.

3. Next the companions come to a chamber at whose far end is a door that can be unlocked only by one particular key out of a flock of winged keys flying wildly around the room. Harry, who is an expert at catching things while flying on a broom, finds it. The symbolism is obvious: we need the key of knowledge to open the door to inner reality, but that key is illusive and can be captured only by one who has trained to accomplish the task.

4. In the chamber beyond the door, the companions find a giant chessboard on which they must become pieces in a game of Wizard Chess, in which captured pieces are smashed to bits by the capturing piece. Ron, who is the chess master of the group, directs their moves and finally sacrifices himself so that Harry can checkmate the opposing king. The chess game echoes that in Alice through the Looking Glass and is a common metaphor for the game of life. Ron's heroic self-sacrifice for the welfare of others puts him in the class of future bodhisattvas, who sacrifice their own welfare for the good of all.

5. Leaving the unconscious Ron behind, in the next chamber Harry and Hermione find a huge and hideous troll that must be overcome. However, the troll has already been vanquished—in fact by the three companions, who had knocked it unconscious in an earlier encounter above ground when it had invaded the school halls. Overcoming the monster is gaining control of our own shadow or Dweller on the Threshold, the embodiment of our faults, sins, and bestial nature. Once that control has been established, however, the shadowy troll is no longer a challenge, but can be dealt with as necessary.

6. In the penultimate chamber, Harry and Hermione are trapped between walls of fire that can be passed only by solving a riddle. Hermione, the brainy one of the threesome, solves it. Harry sends her back to tend to Ron as he goes on alone. The fires of passion can be quenched only by knowing the answer to the riddle of life. That knowledge is gained by the truly intelligent and is, in fact, what intelligence means. We must use our intelligence to pass to the inmost chamber of our quest, and that final passage must be made by each person alone, for the final initiation in the quest is a solitary one, experienced without any aid except that which each of us has within ourselves.

7. In the final chamber, Harry finds both Voldemort, who has corrupted one of the teachers at Hogwarts and occupied his body, and also the Mirror of Erised, which must be used to find the Stone. The Mirror of Erised shows those who look into it, not a reflection of reality, but rather an image of what they most desire. It is the great illusion, and one must know its secret not to be trapped by it. To find the Philosopher's Stone in the Mirror, one must want to find it, but not to use it for oneself. Harry finds the Stone, not to use it for himself, but to save it from evil use by Voldemort. Through Harry's act of selfless courage, the Philosopher's Stone, like Tolkien's One Ring, is destroyed so that it can never fall into Voldemort's hands. True wealth and true immortality are achieved only by those who are motivated by selfless desire. And that is the great secret of the quest.

Hogwarts Lessons of Life

In the course of discovering the great secret, Harry learns a good many lessons, as do the readers with him. Although this is fantastic fiction, its messages are realistic fact. We can identify seven lessons, three of which are preliminary:

1. There is another level of truth than everyday Muggle reality. We are all orphans in this world and Harry Potters in the School of Wisdom, learning the truths of that level.

2. Master teachers, like Dumbledore, are available in the school of life to guide us in our learning.

3. From those teachers, we learn to face Truth, but not foolishly:

   [Harry:] "Sir, there are some other things I'd like to know, if you can tell me . . . things I want to know the truth about . . . ."

   "The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution." (216)

   When he starts to ask about Voldemort, Harry calls him by the euphemism "You-Know-Who," which most people use for him, because they are afraid even to name the great evil Wizard, but Dumbledore corrects him:

   Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself. (216)

Following those three preliminary lessons are four principal lessons:

1. Discrimination. We must choose our own way on the Path of life: Dumbledore tells Harry: "It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities" (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 245). The Mahatma Letters tell us: "We have one word for all aspirants: TRY." And in the spiritual guidebook, At the Feet of the Master, the first of four qualifications for entering on the Path is "Discrimination." Moreover, the third Truth of the White Lotus (from another spiritual guidebook, Light on the Path) tells us: "We are each our own absolute lawgiver, the dispenser of glory or gloom to ourselves; the decreer of our life, our reward, our punishment." This lesson is therefore that of making an effort—of trying—to distinguish between the real and the unreal, between the less good and the better, between the transitory and the eternal.

2. Desirelessness. The second principle lesson is that the world is mayavic or illusory, and therefore we must pass through it free from selfish desire. The Mirror of Erised is a symbol of mayavic desire. The word "Erised" is "Desire" spelled backwards, hence wrong desire. The Mirror has an inscription carved around its top: "Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi," which is a backward spelling for "I show not your face but your heart's desire." Those who look into this Mirror do not see themselves as they are, but rather the illusion of what they want to be and do and have. Dumbledore explains the Mirror:

   The happiest man on earth would be able to use the mirror of Erised like a normal mirror, that is,he would look into it and see himself exactly as he is. . . . It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. . . . However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge nor truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible. (157)

   The Mirror is a symbol of Maya, the Great Illusion, this desire-governed and motivated world.In At the Feet of the Master, the second qualification for entering the Path is"Desirelessness," that is, freedom from personal desire or, as the Bhagavad Gita puts it, acting without desire for the fruit of the action.

3. Points of Conduct. The third lesson is that we must live our lives according to Right Principles, rather than arbitrary rules. Harry often violates school rules, but never moral principles. The third qualification in At the Feet of the Master is "Six Points of Conduct": Self-control as to the mind, Self-control in action, Tolerance, Cheerfulness, One-pointedness, and Confidence—especially confidence in the Plan, which is what those who know, know. And those who know, know that death is part of the Plan. When Harry worries about the effect of the loss of the Philosopher's Stone on the good philosopher-alchemist who achieved it and who must die without it, Dumbledore explains:

   After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure. You know, the Stone was not really such a wonderful thing. As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all—the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things which are worst for them. (215)

4. Love. Harry was saved from the assaults of Evil, both in his infancy and on his quest, by the great love his mother had for him. Dumbledore tells Harry:

   Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand it is love. He didn't realize that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign . . . to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection for ever. . . . Voldemort, could not touch you for this reason. It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good. (216)

The fourth qualification in At the Feet of the Master for entering the Path is Love.

These are the lessons that Harry Potter learns in his first year at Hogwarts, and in the first stage of his education in life: to discriminate in making his choices; to do the right thing without personal desire; to be guided by intelligent principles in life, rather than arbitrary rules; and to have confidence in what Dante in The Divine Comedy called "The Love that moves the sun and the other stars." They are Discrimination, Desirelessness, Good Conduct, and Love.

Those are not bad lessons for any of us to learn at the beginning, or at any time, of life.

John Algeo is Alumni Foundation Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Georgia, where he taught Fantasy Literature in addition to his academic field of the history and structure of the English language. He edited the sixth volume of the Cambridge History of the English Language (2001) and is Vice President of the international Theosophical Society.

Originally printed in the November - December  2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Algeo, John. "Theosophy and Christianity." Quest  90.5 (NOVEMBER - DECEMBER  2002): 203.

Christianity-Theosophy Conference

By John Algeo

[This is a final summary report of the November 2000 invitational Christianity-Theosophy Conference. John Algeo was National President of the Theosophical Society in America at the time and the convener of the conference.]

ON NOVEMBER 10-12, 2000, an invitational conference on Theosophy and Christianity was held at Olcott, the national center of the Theosophical Society in America. The conferees in attendance were John Algeo, David Bland, Richard Brooks, Ruben Cabigting, John De Hoff, Gracia Fay Ellwood, Robert Ellwood, Jenny Gresko, Stephan Hoeller, Brant Jackson, John Kern, Anton Lysy, and Jay Williams, with Edward James, Leslie Price, and Joseph Tisch as corresponding participants. The Christian denominations with which the conferees were affiliated included Baptist, Episcopalian, Gnostic, Greek Orthodox, Liberal Catholic, Mennonite, and Presbyterian. Although those seven do not represent the whole of the Christian community, they are certainly a diverse sample. Seven conferees were ordained ministers, and seven were or had been teachers in higher education.

The purpose of the conference was to consider ways of presenting the principles of Theosophy to Americans reared in a primarily Judeo-Christian culture. As the invitation put it:

It is often said that Theosophy is Eastern in focus (particularly emphasizing Buddhism and Hinduism), and that remark is often a criticism, implying that we neglect the spiritual tradition most dominant in Western culture around us. Historically within or alongside or outside the Society there have been attempts to Westernize/Christianize the presentation of the Wisdom Tradition (Anna Kingsford's Hermetic Society, Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, Wedgwood and Leadbeater's Liberal Catholic Church, G. R. S. Mead's Quest Society, etc.), but they do not necessarily speak to the concerns of persons at the beginning of the new millennium who come out of the Judeo-Christian tradition and who are not comfortable in the Eastern traditions that we are pretty good at presenting in a Theosophical light.

We are currently making efforts in such presentation in the Quest magazine and in Quest Books. . . . But it would be useful to have a group of knowledgeable people review the options and brainstorm on how to present Theosophy in other ways that seem relevant to our Western contemporaries and on how to reach those persons.

Background papers circulated in advance or distributed at the conference included several by conferees: "Jesus in Isis Unveiled" by Robert Ellwood, "Theosis: The Eastern Christian Vision of the Homeward Journey" by Edward James, "Theosophy and Esoteric Christianity" by Joseph Tisch, and "Translating the Ancient Wisdom into a Christian Perspective: A Recall to the Theosophical Society's Original Purpose" by Brant Jackson. A bibliography was compiled of some 50 works, older and recent, Theosophical and ecumenical, ranging from H. P. Blavatsky's "The Esoteric Character of the Gospels" to C. V. Agarwal's The Buddhist and the Theosophical Movements 1873-1992 (a second edition of which brings its story up to 2001), as an example of bridging the gap between Theosophy and an Eastern religion.

Reflections on issues raised by the conference were published in each issue of the Quest during 2001 and in the issue of 2002 just before this one. They covered such topics as "Compatible Worldviews?" by Robert Ellwood, "Christian Exclusiveness and Theosophical Truth" by Jay Williams, "The Imperative of Love" by David Bland, "What Is a Christian" and "What Is a Christian Scripture" by Stephan Hoeller, "Christmas" by Ruben Cabigting, and "The Turning Point within Christianity" by Brant Jackson.

The Christianity-Theosophy Conference of 2000 pointed the way to meeting two needs. One is the development of practical means of communication between the Wisdom Tradition of Theosophy and the Christian frame of thought. The other, highlighted by recent events, is for attention to be paid to increased understanding between Theosophy and all religious traditions. The former is an ongoing effort on many fronts. The latter will be particularly addressed by Robert Ellwood's new study for the National Lodge, "Theosophy in the World Religions."

Originally printed in the November - December 2002 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Bland, Betty. "A Morning Walk." Quest  90.6 (NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2002): 202.

viewpoint

By Betty Bland, National President

WHERE DOES ONE START when facing a new and difficult problem? We have heard, "one step at a time." I would modify that to "many steps," in the form of a morning walk. Now, I admit that most folks would not want to walk as fast as is my practice, but everyone would profit from participating in the grand awakening of nature that occurs every morning. The returning sun brings fresh energy and sparkle to green and growing things, rain or shine, just as our returning consciousness, after a night of rest or a moment of meditation, glistens with renewal from other realms.

For me, moving into the role of president-administrator of the Theosophical Society in America presents an exciting and multifaceted challenge. Issues concerning publishing, programs, personnel, finances, library, membership, public outreach, facility management, educational effort, and community living swirl around as an ever-productive, many-headed hydra, beneficial, but complex in nature. The real task, however, is to view all of this with morning-fresh eyes to assure that the swirl is ever new and creative in accomplishing its valuable purposes.

The swirl of concerns and responsibilities that everyone has, sometimes a rapid whirlpool, sometimes a gentle eddy, needs to be viewed with fresh understanding daily. It is all too easy to lose sight of the garden, for being focused on the weeds. And what is a weed, but a plant out of place? There is a solution embedded within every problem; there is an opportunity within every crisis. The operative advice here is, "TRY."

Several years ago when I was talking about my approaching presidency with Radha Burnier, our international president, she acknowledged the responsibility one bears as designated guardian and guide for the Society. There are always difficulties, compromising situations, and less than perfect people. (Surely not!) "Yet," she said, "if one does one's best both in action and in maintaining the inner focus, then help will come if needed and asked for." None of us is alone; our higher selves and all the forces for good—the power that many call God—are available to magnify our own feeble efforts. Help will come; we just have to do our part.

On a morning walk recently after a rain shower, there was, wiggling frantically on the pavement in front of me, a fat, slimy earthworm trying to make its way to higher, dryer ground, but stuck and getting nowhere fast. Its activity caught my eye and generated pity for its plight. There was no doubt that this was a lively worm, full of spunk, and well deserving of a rescue pause. Putting on my brakes and wrinkling up my nose, I gingerly scooped up this slippery denizen of the earth and deposited it in the grass. As it slipped gratefully into its natural abode, I was struck by the comparison. If it had "thrown up its little hands," and given up all effort, then it would never have experienced the miracle of being lifted up over the insurmountable barrier of the sidewalk. The secret is to keep wiggling.

How to solve any problem involves taking that first step, but it also means taking innumerable steps, becoming a walk, as the footprint becomes the path. And our life pathway that runs through the "pathless land" of existence requires a dewdrop-like freshness of vision if the way is to be found and a patiently enduring effort if we would have help along the way.