Quest Magazine

by C. Jotin Khisty

Originally printed in the Summer 2010 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Khisty, C. Jotin. "Justice through Love: The Lessons of Vinoba Bhave." Quest  98. 3 (Summer 2010): 100-102.

 Sometime in 1951, news began reaching the outside world about a slender man of nearly sixty who walked tirelessly along the dusty village roads of India, talking about a Land Gift Mission, the likes of which very few people had ever heard of before. Walking for miles from village to village, covering every corner of the subcontinent, Vinoba Bhave collected more than five million acres of land (an area larger than that of Scotland), in the form of gifts from rich and poor alike, which he redistributed to the landless (Kumar, 13). His slogan for this redistribution was "Justice as Fairness." This extraordinary accomplishment, unprecedented anywhere in the history of the world, can only be explained by recognizing that it stemmed from the heart of a saint, scholar, sage, practical philosopher, and educator, all rolled into one.

Born in 1895 to Brahmin parents in a small village in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Vinoba Bhave took a vow of lifelong celibacy and service to others at the tender age of ten. Searching for a way of life that would embody both spiritual truth and practical action, Vinoba discovered Mahatma Gandhi in 1916 and became his ardent follower, embracing the principles of nonviolent social change.

Out of his scores of able followers, such as Jawaharlal Nehru, who became India's first prime minister in 1947, Gandhi chose Vinoba to be his spiritual successor to carry on his mission; in fact, Vinoba was the first person to offer nonviolent resistance (satyagraha) to the British Raj in the campaign of October 1940, and as a consequence was imprisoned for almost five years. Gandhi's admiration for Vinoba was limitless: "He is, next to me, the best exponent and embodiment of nonviolence" (Sitaramayya, 219). As one of the great spiritual leaders and social reformers of modern India, whose work and personal example moved the hearts of millions all over the world, from prime ministers to the poorest of the poor, Vinoba proved to be a true disciple of Gandhi.

Vinoba Bhave is best remembered for at least two major movements that he initiated and practiced. First, the principle of sarvodaya ("welfare for all"), which he advocated, refined, and put into practice. Although it was originally Gandhi's idea, Vinoba enlarged its scope. It may be recalled that while the English social philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748—1832) developed the theory of utilitarianism, which essentially stated that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be the objective of justice, sarvodaya aimed for the greatest happiness for everybody. It is for this reason that sarvodaya is considered by many philosophers as one of the most original contemporary contributions to political thought (Appadorai, 127).

Sarvodaya postulates that the good of the individual depends upon the good of all and that all work, high or low, is of equal value. The sarvodaya movement contributed to the development of self-governing village communities by educating people to settle local issues through consensus or near-unanimity, by teaching villagers to practice the optimum use of limited resources, and by developing people's capacity to run their own affairs with minimum governmental control and assistance, eventually leading to the welfare and harmony of all. Vinoba strongly emphasized the true value of basic education, good farming practices, and the expansion of handicraft industries.

Vinoba's second major contribution was embodied in the Land Gift Mission. It stemmed from his observation of the vast disparities of wealth and lifestyles among virtual neighbors in the same society. How, he would often ask, can it be just or fair that a large segment of society is barely able to meet its minimum nutritional needs, while a tiny proportion of the population spends large sums of money on luxury goods, many of which are wasted? His aim was to bring about a threefold revolution: a change in people's hearts, a change in their lives, and a change in the Indian social structure. And he tried his utmost to accomplish all three through love.

Referring to the Land Gift Mission during his prayer meetings, Vinoba would remind his audience that land belongs to God'it belongs to all or none. Nobody created the land, so why should anyone claim to possess it? Air, water, sunshine, forests, hills, rivers, and the earth are part of the planetary heritage. No one group or individual has a right to own, possess, spoil, pollute, or destroy it. We can receive the earth's fruits as God's gift and return what we do not need to God. With this message, Vinoba knocked at every door, persuading landlords, capitalists and communists to establish a new relationship with the earth and its people. Hardly anybody refused his request. Gifts of land, labor, money, agricultural tools, and knowledge all poured in from rich and poor alike (Kumar, 2).

Another significant act of Vinoba's'one that had never been achieved before'was his successful negotiation with hundreds of armed robbers in central India. In early 1950, soon after India gained independence, the state of Madhya Pradesh was desperately trying to eradicate bands of armed highway robbers called dacoits. With roots going back hundreds of years, these notorious robbers were known to waylay and murder travelers on the highways of central India. Even during the British Raj, no police force could round them up. But Vinoba performed a miracle.

Sometime in 1960, when Vinoba was visiting central India on a peace campaign, Tahsildar Singh, son of the notorious robber leader "Raja" Man Singh, wrote to him from jail. Tahsildar Singh had been condemned to death and appealed to Vinoba to see him before he was hanged. He also requested Vinoba to meet the leaders of his dacoit comrades in central India who were still at large. On getting this message, Vinoba was moved to the depths of his heart and immediately contacted the gangs and their leaders to come to meet him as a friend, assuring them that they would be treated justly. After many rounds of discussions with Vinoba, something happened that was quite unexpected. These hard-hearted robbers melted. People for whom armed robbery had become a means of livelihood bowed their heads in repentance and promised to abandon their former way of life.

On May 19, 1960, scores of these robber leaders and their comrades met Vinoba, laid down their guns'costly weapons, equipped with powerful sights'and surrendered themselves. Vinoba proved through his quiet diplomacy that the combination of nonviolence and love is a spiritual force of great power. Peace and tranquility has reigned in this part of India ever since (Kalindi and Sykes, 167).

Vinoba Bhave made many other significant contributions to India's political thinking and awakening, such as mobilizing people's power through the use of nonviolent and peaceful strategies, raising spiritual consciousness, introducing handicraft education in schools, advocating inexpensive agricultural innovations, and implementing water supply and irrigation projects in rural areas.

Vinoba was truly an agent of the poor, the homeless, and the destitute, because he himself lived a life of poverty. He presented their case and fought for their rights. In one of his essays on poverty he wrote: "A psychological change cannot be brought about by war and violent revolution. Ultimately it has to be the dedication of one's all for the well-being of all. Those who have must look upon those who have not as a mother looks upon her hungry child. She feeds it before she feeds herself; she starves before she allows it to starve. Let those who have the strength, the skill, and the knowledge for producing wealth and the power of holding it, dedicate themselves to the service of the poor" (Brown, 195).

I had the privilege of witnessing Vinoba in action. I was one of the fortunate people to be inspired at an early stage of my career by his silent revolution. As a civil engineering undergraduate in 1948, I met him at Sevagram, Gandhi's headquarters, and for the next four years volunteered to help him with tasks that he entrusted me with, such as helping villagers with simple planning projects, surveying parcels of land, and preparing and checking agricultural land assessment records connected with his Land Gift Mission. In the summer of 1960, I was again briefly associated with Vinoba when his Peace Campaign led the dacoits to lay down their weapons.

Many a time, when we volunteers were bogged down with a problem and expressed our frustration, Vinoba would remind us of his philosophy: "Never take any step without first going deeply into the matter and getting at the root of it." At other times, when we approached him with a formidable situation, he would say: "Don't be afraid of any problem. No matter what it is, no matter how big it is, it will eventually seem small to you, for you are bigger than the problem. After all it is a human problem, and it can be solved by human intelligence." On many other occasions he would encourage us to use our collective intelligence by pooling our resources and know-how to tackle the problem. This inspired us to think of alternative solutions and select the best one. It was his dedication, his sincerity, and above all his utter transparency that overwhelmed us and kept our spirits high. Vinoba steered us along the right path with gentle whispers.

Vinoba would remind us that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. In his view, any theory of justice, however elegant, must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions, no matter how efficient and well-organized, must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. As first principles that underpin human activities, he would say, truth and justice cannot be compromised. For me personally, it was a great privilege to learn from this "walking saint," because his life reflected his devotion to truth and his dedication to justice.

For the last seven years of his life, Vinoba relinquished almost all activities and took a vow of silence, spending his time in prayer, meditation, and contemplation. He died peacefully on November 15, 1982, at the age of eighty-seven. Millions from all walks of life, from the president of India to humble peasants, came to his cremation ceremony (Kalindi and Sykes, 253).

These words by Hallam Tennyson, British pacifist and great-grandson of the poet, capture the essence of Vinoba's lifelong mission: "Vinoba did not promise permanent solutions, he redirected our gaze to the universal good and rekindled our faith in human capacities....He did not worry about the fruits of his action. If his actions were sound enough then their influence would work on the soggy dough of human consciousness and help it to rise up to achieve something nearer to its full potential" (in Kalindi and Sykes, 11).

References

Appadorai, A. Indian Political Thinking. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Brown, D. Mackenzie. The Nationalist Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965.

Kalindi and Sykes, M., eds. Moved by Love: The Memoirs of Vinoba Bhave. Bideford, Devon, U.K.: Resurgence, 1994

Kumar, S., ed. The Intimate and the Ultimate. Shaftesbury, Dorset, U.K.: Element, 1986.

Sitaramayya, P. The History of the Indian National Congress, vol. 2. Bombay: Padma, 1947.

C. Jotin Khisty, Ph.D., is professor emeritus in the department of civil, architectural, and environmental engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. His article "The Marriage of Buddhism and Deep Ecology" appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Quest.

Originally printed in the Summer 2010 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "From the Editor's Desk - Summer 2010." Quest 98. 3 (Summer 2010): 82.

George Orwell's Burmese Days, based on his years as a policeman for the British Empire, tells of the book wallah, a peddler who wandered through upper Burma , selling and trading books. But there was one book he would not accept. "No, sahib,' he would say plaintively, no. This book...with a black cover and gold letters"this one I cannot take. I know not how it is, but all sahibs are offering me this book, and none are taking it. What can it be that is in this black book? Some evil, undoubtedly.'"

The book wallah knew what to do with the Bible. Our civilization is not so lucky. Although this scripture remains the cornerstone of Western thought, we no longer know how much of it to accept, or how.

These problems extend far beyond the much-publicized quarrels over the creation story in Genesis. In the first place, the text of the Bible"written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek"is in many ways in bad shape. Some parts are simply missing. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947, include a missing passage from the standard text of 1 Samuel 11 that explains an otherwise baffling war between King Saul and the Ammonites. The original ending of the Gospel of Mark (dealing, probably, with the resurrection of Christ) has been lost, as you will see if you consult most versions of the New Testament, which include the various alternate endings that were written to fill the gap. Other passages of the biblical texts have been altered or corrupted, by accident or by intention.

Then there's the Bible as a historical record. A generation ago, scholars believed that the parts that recounted history from, say, the Exodus on (generally dated to the thirteenth century BC) bore at least some resemblance to factual events. But it turns out that this resemblance is extremely faint. The children of Israel , for example, could not have fled from the hands of Pharaoh to the Promised Land of Canaan as the Bible describes. Why? Because Canaan was an Egyptian province in the thirteenth century BC, complete with forts and garrisons. It would be like claiming that someone today escaped from the United States to Puerto Rico.

As for the Temple of Solomon , whose floor was allegedly "inlaid with gold, within and without" (1 Kings 6:30), there is no archaeological evidence for its existence. In fact archaeological evidence indicates that Jerusalem was practically uninhabited in Solomon's era (the tenth century BC): "not only was any sign of monumental architecture missing, but so were even simple pottery sherds," observe the Israeli archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman in their book The Bible Unearthed.

I could make similar points about the New Testament: the Jesus Seminar, for example, has pared down its list of the authentic sayings and deeds of Jesus to a skeletal minimum. While the Jesus Seminar is highly controversial, it is rarely recognized that they are doing little more than mimicking the findings of German scholars of the nineteenth century.

What I have just said is the sort of thing any student would learn today in a mainstream seminary. Herein lies the problem. These findings are rarely communicated to lay people in any clear way. Instead the facts are pushed into the background, and the result is a vague sense of something missing. This, I suspect, is a main reason for the decline of the mainstream churches: their leaders know that the historical facts are not what they seem, but they are hesitant to admit as much. The evangelical churches do not have this problem. Their clergy still believe in the literal truth of the Bible (or are supposed to). As untenable as this position is, at least they are consistent.

No one drawn to Theosophy can find this news shocking; after all, H. P. Blavatsky criticized the Bible far more vitriolically than this. But we are forced back to the question of what to do with this text. Should it be chucked out as a fabrication? Should it be read merely as literature?

There is at least one other possibility that has long been known but needs to be reemphasized: the Bible was never meant to be literally true but was written to symbolically convey higher truths. In the third century ad, the church father Origen wrote: "Who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, ‘planted a paradise eastward in Eden ,' and set in it a visible and palpable ‘tree of life,' of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life?" Rather, he said, "these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries." The same thing, he adds, is true of the Gospels as well.

Origen himself, the most learned of all the early church fathers, was one individual who appreciated these mysteries. Others include Philo of Alexandria; the Kabbalistic sages; Emanuel Swedenborg; and Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater. This tradition has gone on, very likely unbroken, since the beginning of European civilization. But it has usually been shunned by authorities who believe that historical truths are the only kind there is. Backed into a corner now by archaeology and textual evidence, they may have to open themselves to an entirely new perspective on that strange black book.

—Richard Smoley

by Edward Hoffman

Originally printed in the Summer 2010 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Hoffman,Edward. "William James: The Pragmatic Visionary." Quest  98. 3 (Summer 2010): 96-99.

William James, preeminent American philosopher and one of the founders of the field of psychology, is revered today as one of our country's greatest thinkers. Echoing the sentiments of many of his European compatriots, Sigmund Freud memorialized him as "the one authentic American genius that I have met." Virtually every standard history of science emphasizes James's key role in establishing psychology as a logical and empirical discipline, worthy to take its place as a legitimate arena of human study. From their first appearance, James's popular writings on philosophy have been praised for their beauty and clarity of expression. Indeed some of his best passages on the life of the mind glow with a poetic intensity.

Ironically, though, the work for which James is most acclaimed became quickly outdated, whereas his most provocative and exciting ideas remain largely unknown. For at the turn of the twentieth century, he startled and outraged many academic contemporaries by staunchly defending unorthodox forms of healing, denouncing mainstream medicine and psychology for their shortsightedness, and advocating a whole new pathway to knowledge'one that would embrace the way of both the mystic and the scientist. Often minimized as a mere eccentricity, or ignored altogether by historians, this aspect of James's legacy is especially relevant today.

Indeed, writing in an age of science when few worlds seemed to be left to conquer, James was perhaps closest to seeing its inherent flaws and limitations. While respecting the power of reason, he denied that analysis is the only valid means of understanding ourselves and the universe. Years before Einstein's equations completely overturned traditional concepts of space, time, and energy, James insisted intuitively on a sense of humility and wonder before the cosmos. "We are amazed," he wrote, "that a Universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication should ever have seemed to anyone so little and plain a thing." In this centennial year of his death in 1910, it's time for a closer look at his visionary perspective. 

A Life of Contradictions 

Born in New York City in 1842, William James was the oldest of five children raised by wealthy and progressive parents. (One of his brothers, Henry, became renowned as one of the greatest American novelists of all time.) His paternal grandfather, William, an Irish emigre, had amassed a huge fortune in Albany real estate and commerce, and been involved in building the Erie Canal. Among the ten children he sired was Henry James Sr., an intellectual drawn to mystical theology and philosophy, especially the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Suffering from alcohol dependency from the age of ten, Henry Sr. was an erratic father who unsuccessfully sought a literary career and moved his large family from one locale to another in the United States and Europe. His ponderous writings were sincere but limited in appeal, and eventually he had to publish them himself. Nonetheless, the elder James hobnobbed with important American thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the Alcotts, and with the British historian Thomas Carlyle. He also provided the best private tutors for his children and encouraged their creativity.

But when William in his late teens announced his intention of becoming a professional painter, Henry Sr. squelched the idea as financially impractical and demanded that his son embark upon the more lucrative career of physician. Faced with his family's undeniably dwindling fortune, William reluctantly agreed and was graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1869. During the nearly forty ensuing years, his career at Harvard in psychology and philosophy was the complete antithesis of professional conventionality, with investigations into mystical experience, trance mediumship, ghostly phenomena, and the scientific evidence for immortality.

William James's life overflowed with contradictions. More than a century ago, he boldly declared that we use only a fraction of the inner energy available to us. Yet he was personally plagued by long periods of lethargy and creative immobilization. He extolled the strength we may draw from ascribing to an optimistic view of the world, yet often brooded uncontrollably on the pain he saw around him. He repeatedly condemned the scientific establishment for its male-dominated, exclusionary approach to learning. Yet despite frequent misgivings and complaints, he faithfully served the academic world for nearly his entire professional life before resigning to pursue his own intellectual goals. He underwent ridicule for espousing a spiritual orientation to mind and body, health, and happiness. Yet he confessed that he had never once experienced any sensation of the divine or transcendent; a one-time experimentation with nitrous oxide gave him a feeling of cosmic unity but not of God or the divine. 

Varieties of Religious Experience 

After earning his medical degree at Harvard, James taught courses in both physiology and philosophy, and established America 's first psychology laboratory. In 1878, he gained a contract with Henry Holt Publishers to write the first major textbook for the fledgling discipline of psychology'an initially captivating offer. But chronically prone to bouts of depression and lethargy, James found himself plodding along with the project with increasing boredom and dissatisfaction. After devoting an exhausting twelve years to producing Principles of Psychology finally published as a two-volume set in 1890'he was eager to embrace broader issues of human personality and potentiality. By the mid-1890s, James had relinquished directorship of Harvard's psychology laboratory to Hugo Munsterburg and turned his attention to "Exceptional Mental States—the title of his influential series of lectures delivered in 1896-97 at Boston 's Lowell Institute. As masterfully reconstructed by the contemporary psychologist Eugene Taylor, James's presentations addressed such intriguing and still poorly understood phenomena as dreams, hypnotism, and cases of multiple personality and apparent demonic possession. His aim? To build a comprehensive psychology of the human unconscious.

By the early 1900s, James was at his creative peak in 1901—02 his lifelong interest in humanity's exalted capabilities culminated in his masterful essays on "The Varieties of Religious Experience." Delivered as the Gifford lectures at the University of Edinburgh , they represent his most cohesive work on the psychology of religion. True to character, James initially refused the invitation in the late 1890s, claiming illness and fatigue. But also true to his nature, he eventually relented and eagerly took up the project. We can be thankful that he did'for without such external prods, this gifted iconoclast often lacked the motivation for sustained intellectual activity.

In these lectures, James brought together the strands of over thirty years of thought. While some of the issues he raised can be found in other sources of his writing, James was at his most eloquent and concise in these particular talks. He focused on one crucial notion: that we as humans encompass inner capacities that we ordinarily fail to use or even recognize. Moreover, he contended:

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there. 

James conceded that disease sometimes induces strange feelings and thoughts. But he denounced what he called the "medical materialism" of the times'which dismissed all atypical perceptions of the cosmos as signs of emotional disturbance or physical illness like epilepsy. Rather, James argued, some of humanity's most revered spiritual thinkers attained their inspiration when in unusual mental states. Furthermore, he observed that a striking generality underlies the mystical experiences described by these figures. From the ancient Hebrew prophets and Buddhist lamas to medieval Sufi masters and Catholic saints, there is a commonality underlying their perception of the universe'and our place in it'that transcends time and culture.

Another of James's prescient notions in these lectures is that the mind and body constitute a unity. Long before the contemporary boom in holistic health and wellness, he stressed that moods exert a powerful effect on physical well-being. He provided a few illustrative case histories of dramatic "mind cures" (as they were then called) and urged that medicine and psychology take such phenomena seriously. He also said that a cheerful, optimistic outlook on life promotes physical health; conversely, the more cynical and negative we are toward others, the greater our likelihood of illness. This notion is now becoming a mainstay in the health care field.

In these lectures, James advocated a new pathway to understanding humanity and the cosmos. With a mature perspective absent from some of his earlier essays, James outlined his vision for a synthesis of the spiritual and scientific modes. "I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say the least, premature," he wrote. "The [mystical] experiences which we have been studying this hour plainly show the universe to be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for." Praising the insights of both the scientist and the mystic, James declared that "science and religion are both of them genuine keys for unlocking the world's treasure-house...neither is exhaustive or exclusive of the other's simultaneous use."

The Gifford lectures were published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. James doubted that the subject would be of widespread interest, but he was utterly wrong. The book was immediately popular and became his best-known work, sparking special excitement among educated religious people. Both Protestant and Catholic clergy reviewed it favorably in the United States and abroad. For the rest of James's life, he was to receive a seemingly endless stream of letters and articles from people around the globe who wished to report their own transcendent experiences or who simply shared his vision of a new age of enlightenment. The book also brought James a steady royalty income, enabling him to resign comfortably from Harvard several years later. 

The Final Years 

James was buoyed by the intense and unexpected reaction to his Gifford lectures. He felt ready to begin his magnum opus'a comprehensive work on metaphysics, to be based partly on the investigations of his British friend Frederick Myers (who had died in 1901) and other "psychic researchers." Though James never completed this ambitious effort, he was convinced that the often quirky and confusing phenomena revealed in hypnosis, mediumistic trances, severe mental illness, and mystical episodes, harbored the secrets of human existence.

Nevertheless, James insisted throughout his career that he had never experienced any of the exalted mental states discussed in Varieties or his other writings. Late in life, he responded to a survey of religious beliefs and practices. He replied that his views on the deity were mainly for "social convention" and that he felt "foolish and artificial" when trying to pray. Around the same time, he confided in a private letter, "My position is simple...I have no living sense of commerce with a God. The Divine, for my active life, is limited to impersonal and abstract concepts."

We should not take such statements as fact too readily, however, for James frequently seems to have displayed a higher acuity. For one thing, he characterized certain reports by great mystics as having "the ring of truth"?suggesting that he must have possessed some inner awareness to guide him in such matters. Moreover, from his boyhood days, and in his later adolescent involvement in painting, James retained a remarkable sensitivity to the beauties of nature. Some of his landscape descriptions from camping and hiking expeditions resonate with a sense of mystery and delight. Indeed one particular episode in 1898 had all the features of a soaring peak experience, if not a mystical one. He vividly depicted that night in the New York Adirondack wilderness: 

The temperature was perfect either inside or outside the cabin, the moon rose and hung above the scene before midnight, leaving only a few of the larger stars visible, and I got into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital [kind]...I spent a good deal of [the night]...in the woods, where the streaming moonlight lit up things in a magical checkered play, and it seemed as if the Gods of all the nature-mythologies were holding and indescribable meeting in my breast with the moral Gods of the inner life....It was one of the happiest...nights of my existence.

In 1907, James finally resigned from Harvard. He had submitted his resignation several years before but had agreed to withdraw it after strong persuasion by university officials. This time he was adamant, for he had come to view the whole academic system as antithetical to real discovery and regretted that the United States had ever modeled its higher educational system on the ponderous and pedantic German approach. Now he felt exhilarated by his new sense of freedom after more than thirty-five years of college teaching. Reflecting these creative bursts within, that same year he published a remarkable essay, "The Energies of Men." This provocative article'first delivered as the presidential address before the American Philosophical Association'was widely reprinted at the time but lapsed into obscurity until recently.

Most of us, James observed, go through life using only a tiny part of our innate abilities. Some days we feel we are roaring with inner energy and drive and are able to accomplish a great deal; all too commonly, though, we are tired and bored, barely able to finish our workday, and collapse home exhausted. In short, we typically feel "as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us...we are making use of only a smallest part of our possible mental and physical resources." But for all we know, James suggested, we may have mental "second winds" hiding inside us'just as we do physically'which swing into action only when we push ourselves beyond our ordinary limits. Consequently, he praised yoga and other ancient disciplines as sophisticated tools for training and developing our latent mental capacities.

In this visionary address, James also mapped out his exciting vision of a psychology'and a science'of the future. Strongly influencing psychologist Abraham Maslow a half-century later, and anticipating current explorations, James insisted that what we need most are careful studies of the most successful, creative men and women in every walk of life. "We ought somehow to get a topographic survey made of the limits of human power in every conceivable direction . . . and we ought to then construct a methodical inventory on the paths of access, or keys" to awaken these powers within us. This notion is now central to the growing edge of many fields of human endeavor today.

In this regard, James initially viewed Freud's then-obscure work in Vienna as valuable, but later came to reject it as overemphasizing sexuality. In 1909 he met Freud at a conference at Clark University . James was taken by Freud's obvious brilliance and noted that he and his band of disciples "can't fail to throw light on human nature." But James also commented, "I confess that he [Freud] made on me personally the impression of a man with fixed ideas."

In the following summer of 1910, James died after suffering from protracted heart complications. He was sixty-eight years old. Several of his last papers dealt with the nature of mystical experience and his continuing struggle to make sense out of such elusive events. A few months before his death, James issued a popular article entitled "The Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher." While conceding the baffling nature of much of what he had witnessed over the past quarter-century, he asserted, "I wish to go on record for . . . the presence, in the midst of all the humbug, of really supernormal knowledge. By this, I mean knowledge that cannot be traced to the ordinary sources of information?senses, namely."

In this lucid piece, James came no closer than before to unraveling the mystery of our full capabilities. But perhaps he was never more poetic than when summing up his lifetime of searching for our deepest nature. "Out of my experience, such as it is," he wrote, "one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The trees commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom....It is through following these facts, I am persuaded, that the greatest scientific conquests of the coming generation will be achieved."

References

 Fisher, Paul. House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family. New York : Henry Holt, 2008.

Gunter, Susan E. Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James. Lincoln: University of Nebraska , 2009.

Hoffman, Edward. The Right to Be Human: A Biography of Abraham Maslow. 2d ed. New York : McGraw-Hill, 1999.

James, William. Principles of Psychology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981 [1890].

''. Varieties of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985 [1902].

Richardson, Robert D. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Taylor, Eugene . William James on Exceptional Mental States. Amherst: University of Massachussetts Press , 1984.

''. William James on Consciousness beyond the Margin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.

Edward Hoffman, Ph.D., is an adjunct associate psychology professor at Yeshiva University . He has authored many books on psychology and spirituality, including most recently The Kabbalah Reader: A Sourcebook of Visionary Judaism (Shambhala).

by David Spangler

Originally printed in the Summer 2010 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Spangler, David. "A Call to Subtle Activism." Quest  98. 3 (Summer 2010): 103-105.

The subtle realms adjacent to the physical world generally mirror thoughts and feelings that are present and active within the collective energy field of humanity. As such, these realms always contain elements of pain, suffering, fear, anger, and hatred, for unfortunately these emotions and energies are still part of the human condition. Anyone learning to access the deeper spiritual realms learns to recognize and deal with this material while still radiating compassionate energies in response.

During times of stress in the human community, such as wars or economic upheavals, the amount of negative thought and emotion can certainly rise. Given what humanity is currently going through, I would have expected to find such negative energies in these adjacent realms. What I didn't expect to find was the level of intentionality that was at work behind them. The deliberate use of fear and anger to manipulate people is an ancient technique that has become highly refined in modern political and economic arenas; we almost come to expect it, especially during heated political campaigns. But this intentionality and the feel of desperation behind it felt unusual to me, reflecting a depth of animosity and resistance to change extending beyond humanity itself. And it appeared to me that both physical and nonphysical beings were behind it, each struggling in its own way to preserve its way of being.

For years now, there has been a gathering of energies within the spiritual realms in order to stimulate humanity's evolution towards a state of greater planetary awareness and wholeness. I have felt the transmission of this energy and inspiration in various ways all my life; my personal response to it was to leave college and my training in molecular biology when I was twenty and become a freelance spiritual teacher. The purpose of this energy is not to make change happen but to enable humanity to find within itself the power to partner with spirit and with Gaia to respond positively and effectively to the changes that are already unfolding. If a wave of change is upon us, this spiritual force enables us to surf that wave and channel its force in ways that bless ourselves and all life upon our world. Failure to do this will leave us tumbling in the force of the wave, victims of a civilizational wipeout of potentially catastrophic proportions. The world will not end, but we can be left bruised and gasping upon the beach of the future amidst the wreckage of our hopes and expectations.

We have not wiped out yet, but we need to make course corrections if we hope to ride and channel the wave. These corrections, along with the new world that can emerge from them, will not favor many of the ways of consolidating and expressing power that humanity has used over the past millennia. In some cases, it is simply a matter of needing to overcome habits and inertia, but for those who live in these deeply entrenched grooves of thought and behavior here and in the subtle worlds (and in one way or another, this includes all of us), such change can be wrenching. For those who derive power and sustenance from these old patterns, whether in politics, economics, religion, or society—as well as for those inner beings whose energy is maintained by the negative emotions generated by these older patterns—change can be life-threatening.

The outpouring of Light from the spiritual worlds cannot be blocked, at least not at this point in humanity's evolution; too many people are responding to it all over the world in a multiplicity of ways. But it can be delayed and distorted. It is not enough that individuals alone receive this Light, even though that is of incalculable importance; it needs to be received and accepted by our national, ethnic, religious, and racial consciousnesses as well. It needs to be received by humanity as a collective field of energy.

And it is this field that is being roiled so that the incoming energies have a hard time anchoring and grounding themselves effectively. Think of a young person covering his ears and singing nonsense sounds in order to prevent hearing what a parent is saying. Or think of trying to sink the support pylons of a bridge into land that is being turned to soft, slurpy, liquid mud, giving very little that is solid for the pylons to rest on. The subtle energetic realms adjacent to the earth are relatively fluid in the best of times; in the worst of times, they can become churned up.

And they are being deliberately churned up now. We have to be careful to avoid playing a blame game or saying the problems in the world are all the cause of dark forces or evil overlords at work behind the scenes. Fear is abroad in the land, and fearful people are quite capable of generating negative energies. In various ways, any of us may contribute through our fears and angers. But one does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to realize that there are men and women of power, as well as their counterparts within the subtle realms adjacent to the earth, who will lose that power if humanity rises beyond its selfishness to promote the well-being of the earth as a whole. My impression is that they are feeling desperate, pulling out the stops energetically to maintain the status quo. This is not even necessarily for evil motives, for there are those on both the physical and nonphysical levels who honestly believe it's in humanity's interest to stay as we are. They are like parents who refuse to accept that their children have grown up and wish to keep them at home and under control "for their own good," even though the children are well into the time of accepting the challenges, responsibilities, and freedoms of adulthood.

In saying all this, I risk inspiring fear, particularly in those whose imaginations are populated with images of evil forces at work in the world. But that is precisely what we cannot indulge in, for it is fear that is the tool of those forces seeking to delay or divert the inevitable. Evil is spread on the wings of fear; it is those wings that we must clip.

There are clear things we can do. For one, we can be aware that we really are in the midst of an epic struggle. For another, we can avoid characterizing it as a battle between light and dark; to do so is to trivialize and distort it; it is more complex than that. It is not a battle but a metamorphosis, a growing up and leaving behind of childish ways. It is an organic process involving humanity, Gaia, the spiritual and subtle realms, and the sacred in a wondrous alchemy of transformation and emergence.

The third thing to do is to bring to our personal and global situations our love, compassion, and forgiveness as well as the courage to stand in our sovereignty and refuse to be shaped by fear, anger, or hatred. We need to stand our ground and not let those who are shaped in the moment by fear and anger advance. We embrace them as lovingly as we can, but we do not give ground.

A battle implies adversaries, winners and losers, conquerors and victims. Humanity has lived with these categories for millennia, and they are more than outworn now. They are dangerous. Instead we need to think the way a caterpillar thinks as it transforms into a butterfly. The cells that formed the old structure of its body are not enemies to be defeated and cast out by the new shape; they contain the very life force and substance from which the new will be built once they surrender to the alchemical miracle of metamorphosis. At this time, we may and do have opponents, but we do not have enemies. Everyone potentially has something vital to contribute to the new body that seeks emergence.

This process is a soul-size challenge worthy of everything we can bring to it. We have tools that we can use on its behalf. We have the rich traditions of compassion, forgiveness, loving, and communion found in all the world's spiritual traditions, and we also have new methods, such as nonviolent communication and conflict resolution techniques, new insights into self and sovereignty, and the tools of subtle activism or intentional work on the energies of the adjacent subtle realms. We need to reach for these first before grabbing the more familiar responses of anger and fear.

When we do this, even if only in the context of our personal lives, we nourish a calming field of collaboration with spiritual forces that can spread out into the subtle worlds, becoming part of humanity's overall response.

The simple fact is that we do not act alone; even in the power of our individual sovereignty—indeed, especially in that power—we are in resonance and connection with the whole of humanity. Refusing fear, hatred, or anger towards those different from ourselves and refusing to participate in spreading hurtful thoughts and emotions make a similar response easier for everyone else. We support each other energetically, pulling each other towards the Light. If there is intentionality in the world that furthers resistance and promotes darker uses of energy, then we can just as powerfully provide intentionality to move in more loving directions, towards peace and compassion, listening and respect. We can intentionally promote the Light, and when we do, we find we have powerful allies, for that puts us, as they say, on the side of the angels.

Working with Your Grail Field

The key to all subtle activism is to find and stand in an inner presence of calm, peace, sovereignty, spaciousness, and love. The power underlying subtle activism lies in our ability to feel connected through this presence to the sacred, to the well-being of humanity, to spiritual allies, and to Gaia—the spirit and life force of the earth. From this presence and this connectedness comes a power of blessing, what I think of as a "Grail field." Just as the mythic Holy Grail held sacredness in a way that was healing and transformative, so our personal Grail field holds our sacredness on behalf of humanity and the world.

So the first step is to enter your own Grail field. How you do this is up to you, but here is a simple suggestion.

•  Find a place in your heart and mind in which you feel stable, calm, peaceful, and loving. Use whatever spiritual, psychological, energetic, and physical tools or technique to help you accomplish this.
•   Imagine (contemplate or reflect on), as clearly and lovingly as you can, your connections to the rest of humanity, to the world of nature and the land, and to whatever spiritual forces and images of sacredness are meaningful to you. Feel those connections enhance your presence by enabling you to be part of a larger wholeness, one graced with compassion, love, and an intelligent, wise awareness.
•  Hold your sense of yourself within that enhanced presence and feel its energy go out to your immediate environment, connecting in loving ways with the specific world around you. Once you have a sense of your own Grail field, focus on a quality of constructive and peaceful collaboration. Imagine people who otherwise are split apart by differences of race, politics, ethnicity, religion, geography, and who may experience those differences in fearful ways, now held in the spirit of this collaboration. Feel and see them held in the grace of a loving, peaceful spirit in which nonviolent communication is possible. See them as able to overcome the emotions of fear, anger, hatred, and suspicion and able to listen to one another. Your task is not to get them to agree, but to enable them to listen without fear and with mutual respect.

Use this visualization with any situation of conflict that you've seen, heard, or read about in the media.

Finally, imagine that you are a lighthouse. You radiate all around you a light of stability, peace, calm, forgiveness, love, and compassion. Imagine the subtle fields surrounding you calming and becoming clear and stable, able to receive and hold an outpouring of Light from spiritual levels. Visualize this clarity and stability spreading far and wide, linking up with the light of other similar lighthouses, other people who are reaching to express peace, compassion and love. As these beams connect, a web of light is woven over the land that empowers all of us everywhere and makes the fear less fearful, the anger and hatred less persuasive.

Do this as long as it feels comfortable. Then give thanks for any and all help you may feel you received in doing this bit of inner work. Carrying this presence of Light in your heart and mind, go about your day. As you do, when you encounter the presence of fear and its offshoots of anger and hate, reaffirm that you are a beacon of courage, strength, calm, love—the creator of a space in which clear communication may take place. Like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings when confronting the Balrog, stand in your sovereignty and say to the spirit and energy of fear, "You shall not pass!" And let it be so!

David Spangler has been a teacher and practitioner of spirituality since 1964. A former codirector of the  Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, he is founder of the Lorian Association, a nonprofit spiritual education foundation. His most recent book is Subtle Worlds: An Explorer's Field Notes. His other works include Emergence; The Call; Everyday Miracles; Parent as Mystic, Mystic as Parent; Blessing: The Art and the Practice; The Story Tree;  Manifestation; Creating the Life You Love; and The Incarnation Card Deck. 

His Web site is http://www.Lorian.org.