Quest Magazine

by Arlene Gay Levine

Originally printed in the Spring 2011 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Levine, Arlene Gay. " Seasonal Poetry: A Path through the Woods." Quest  99. 2 (Spring 2011):70-71.

To everything there is a season

And a time for every purpose under heaven.

—Ecclesiastes 3:1

Poets are experts at tricking out the unconscious. The patterns of evolutionary spirals and cycles deeper than personal memory are waiting to be tapped. Like the wheel of the year, we are called to move forward, beyond old limiting stories we have lived by, to create new myths closer to our heart's desire. Creating poetry at the seasonal change, whether you are novice or veteran writer, is an ideal vehicle for the transformational journey of Self-discovery.

Our lives are filled with cycles, periods of time that repeat themselves in the same order. Night and day, the days of the week, phases of the moon, the water cycle, and of course the seasons. With each season we associate a process of actions particular to that interval, whether it be on the physical or spiritual plane.

Think of the carefree days of summer, when the sun reaches its zenith: long days and short nights brimming with the energy of outward manifestation. Fall brings a crisp colorful world with the gathering of the harvest and, at the autumnal equinox, a brief balance of yang and yin energies. When the winter solstice approaches, we prepare for inner growth. The earth rests under a blanket of white as we meditate on the dark fertile unknown in ourselves. The sun then moves from Pisces to Aries. Increasing hours of light herald the magnificent burst of growth for a world on the verge of rebirth each spring.

The seasons are seeds waiting to sprout with hidden meaning. Let the approaching season become your focus. Begin to list words and phrases that come to mind in relation to it. Allow thoughts to flow like a rushing creek at spring thaw, gliding over any boulders your mind might create. If you hit an ice block, melt it with the heat of repetitive words, written over and over again until you blast through to a new idea. Do not take your pen off the paper (or fingers off the keyboard), and keep coursing along for at least five minutes.

In this free association blitz, we enter the domain of the right brain. It takes charge by conjuring up images and comparing through metaphor rather than measurement. Here intuition reigns, so a picture is perceived complete with ambiguities and opposites. In this, a true equinox moment, we can explore our own balance, the shadow self as well as our light.

From this glorious bounty, gather the words and phrases that call out for expansion or combination. Now the left brain, recognizing parts and the cause and effect between them, kicks into high gear. Its active style of linear thinking can assess, draw conclusions, and concentrate on what is tangible: it is a trusty editor.

If we put our faith in these two distinct operations, a poem will emerge just as surely as spring follows winter. It need not be any particular form like haiku, that ancient Japanese genre so steeped in traditional categories for seasonal words. In this rigorous approach, a poet's location, as well as the climate and seasonal phase, can be indicated by the turn of a phrase. For example, the word icicles (tsurara) would indicate a late winter poem while pale red leaves (usumomiji) speak of mid-autumn. For our purposes, feel free to accept what comes without expectation or limitation.

As Aristotle suggested, "The universal exists for, and shines through, the particular." By choosing to explore a specific season, we define the content and set the scene. Hopefully, if we have dived deep enough into our rushing creek, another layer of meaning is evoked by the time the poem is finished. The poet discovers a connection with the earth's processes of birth, growth, decline, death, and rebirth. Sensing ourselves as parts of the eternal whole, interrelated in joyous harmony with all that is, we become light bearers for ourselves and our readers.

Arlene Gay Levine, author of Thirty-Nine Ways to Open Your Heart: An Illuminated Meditation (Conari Press), has had poetry appear in many venues, including The New York Times, an off-Broadway show, and on CD. Her article "Father Time's Birthday Party" appeared in Quest, Winter 2010. Finishing Line Press will publish her poetry chapbook Movie Life this June.

The Road

Here is the road: the light

comes and goes then returns again.

Be gentle with your fellow travelers

as they move through the world of stone and stars

whirling with you yet every one alone.

The road waits.

Do not ask questions but when it invites you

to dance at daybreak, say yes.

Each step is the journey; a single note the song.

—Arlene Gay Levine

From Bless the Day: Prayers and Poems to Nurture Your Soul, edited by June Cotner (Kodansha International).

by Jeff Durham

Originally printed in the Spring 2011 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Durham, Jeff. " "Effective Art": Imaginal Worlds, Fohat, and Freedom ." Quest  99. 2 (Spring 2011): 65-68.

Sacred art is a doorway from the manifest world of the senses to the unseen realm of hidden potential. This magical portal works in two directions. From one direction, artists use symbols, texts, and icons to show us the unseen realm of sacred realities. From the other, observers contemplate sacred art to move from ordinary reality into other sorts of worlds—places where the black-and-white distinctions of the linear, rational mind no longer hold true. Here is the "imaginal world," where sacred myths, images, and rites reside, where ideas becomes experience and where representation becomes reality. Under these conditions, sacred art becomes a vehicle for transporting awareness from one type of "world" to another; sacred art then becomes "effective art."

In this paper, I would like to suggest how sacred art can lift us from consensus reality into that imaginal place where facile binary distinctions between is and is-not no longer hold true, reawakening us to the fact that we live in a world mediated by symbols and permeated by metaphor—and perhaps thereby helping us to reclaim our ability to shape the course of experience.

Ambivalence toward Sacred Art

To see how the process works, note first that sacred art both reflects and shapes human experience (Geertz, 93-95). For this reason, it is both powerful and potentially problematic. Accordingly, we often feel a quite natural ambivalence towards sacred art. This has generated a biphasic historical cycle. In the first phase, a given culture celebrates sacred art, which expresses truths beyond words. In the second phase, we forget we have made these symbolic expressions (Berger, 87ff.). Consequently these images can gain an "irrational power" over human awareness, seeming to exist by themselves, independently of human action (Looper, 151). At some point, however, we wake up and recognize that we have mistaken the symbol for the thing symbolized, the map for the territory. Now an antisymbolic reaction ensues. The artistic revolution of Akhenaton in ancient Egypt, the iconoclastic movement in eighth-century Byzantium, and the Protestant Reformation all express the second, reactionary phase of this cycle.

This second phase has become especially important in the past half-century, which has seen a strong reaction against sacred symbolism. It has also witnessed several curious attempts to remove symbol and significance from definitions of fine art. Some thinkers have gone so far as to define art per se by excluding cultural products that might have anything at all to do with metaphysical concepts or practices. On this reading, any art that exhibits evident religious symbolism is not art but religion (Mitchell, 106). As in recent debates between religion and science, here there can be no compromise, no gray area. We find ourselves in a dualistic, digital world of yes or no, black or white, day or night; things either are or are not. Here we are "alienated" in Berger's sense from our true nature as artists of our own experience. Here is bondage—but as we shall see, it is seeming bondage only.

Imaginal Worlds and Fohat 

Ironically, the hard-edged, binding world of absolute truth or falsity is itself an abstraction, even though it pretends to be self-revealing; in that sense it is a kind of illusion. But in an even stranger twist, the land in between truth and falsity, the place that Islamicist Henry Corbin called the "imaginal," may hold the key to establishing some rapprochement between truth and illusion.

The imaginal world is a strange place; in fact, it is not a place at all, for in its ubiquity it cannot be pointed out in space as "here" or "there." In the imaginal realm all ideas, all potentials for manifestation, are held suspended "as if in a mirror" (Corbin, 7). Moreover, the imaginal realm reflects itself microcosmically in the human faculty of active imagination, our primary tool of artistic creativity. This faculty enables us to create sacred art. And such art can precipitate the infinite potential of the imaginal world into form. Conversely, it provides the finite mind with a ladder of symbols by which it may ascend back to the imaginal. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, this capacity is not abstract. It is inscribed into the very structure of the human organism as the hidden energies of the subtle body, sometimes identified as the Sanskrit prana or the Chinese chi (Freidel and Schele, 210-211). In Theosophical thought, it presents startling parallels to the crucial idea of Fohat.

Like the imaginal, Fohat is the subtle electromagnetic force that binds mind and matter. Yet it is much more than just the life force, for Fohat is also "the link to universal and individual consciousness, where abide the timeless ideas or forms of nature expressed in time" (Ellwood [2009], 21).

But how does this linkage operate? The Stanzas of Dyzan provide the crucial clue, for it is through symbolic means that we can "recover the lost language of the ancients" (Blavatsky, 1:309), in the process recovering our ability to discern and shape the course of experience. The grammar of this language is symbolism, and its power lies in its ability to give the individual access to the universal, the conscious mind access to the imaginal.

Symbolic potential becomes effective art when consciously constructed into a tableau or composite work. Its deeply encoded and interconnected semantic structures can then be recovered, and the imaginal realm accessed—if a person possesses the key to its cipher. Strangely, the key is simply this: the recognition that we are life artists who use active imagination, Fohat, to cocreate our experience.

Literalism versus Effective Art 

We are fundamentally symbol-making beings; everything we know is symbolically mediated. We can try to banish representation from our world, but to make the attempt is of course a fool's errand. We in fact continually use our symbolic capacities to cocreate our world of experience, both at the individual and the collective levels. Thus to maintain that we can directly access the world in the naevely realistic sense is to remain under the spell of what visionary artist William Blake called "Newton's sleep"—materialism, reductionism, utilitarianism, and above all literalism.

Literalism is anathema to sacred art. Sacred art always has the potential to help human beings "reach into realms beyond their normal command" (Thurman, 17) precisely because it rejects all flat literalism. It only becomes "effective," however, when its world becomes coextensive with our experience, waking us up from our perception of a mind-matter world into a perception of the imaginal world.

Effective art can transport us into imaginal worlds because the sacred symbols from which it is composed—the material of which effective art is made—have the capacity of "participating in what they symbolize" (Ellwood [1986], 39). In so doing, sacred symbols can make something that is actually absent virtually present, just as an image of the god Ptah in an ancient Egyptian temple would—under the right conditions—make him virtually present. Conditions are right for entry into imaginal worlds through effective art when reality and representation become indistinguishable from one another (Clottes and Lewis-Williams, 12-17).

Stacking Symbolism on Om

In sacred art that has become "effective," to thoroughly intuit the meaning of a symbol is to access that which it represents, to climb the ladder of symbol from concrete expression back to the imaginal world, and perhaps beyond. One clear example of how the process works comes from South Asian traditions: the sacred syllable aum or om. Understood as that one thing whereby all others are known (Hume, 240), om condenses all other sounds within itself—very important in the sound-made universe of the ancient Vedas. More than this, it encodes several levels of meaning. The three letters that comprise om—A, U, and M—are each represented on the emblem—as is the silence that comes at the end of the sound. These three letters correspond to three states of awareness—waking, sleeping, and dreaming, while the whole syllable corresponds to the fourth state that transcends them (Hume, 391-393). Moreover, the three letters' web of meaning can easily be expanded to correspond to the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva—each of whom in turn symbolically expresses the continual creation, sustenance, and destruction of the universe. And through concentration (samyama) on this syllable and all its resonances—from physical to mythic to cosmic—it becomes possible to maintain awareness in and through all the various states of consciousness it represents, eventually reaching the immortal realm where time does not reach.

Encoding Buddhist Wisdom in Texts 

If individual syllables can encode vast amounts of symbolic information, literature further expands the potential of art to function as a bridge from the explicit to the implicit. In the Buddhist tradition, there is a fundamental wisdom called prajna—the knowledge that what seems solid is in fact empty (shunya) of any essence (svabhava). Mahayana texts called Perfection of Wisdom (prajna-paramita) condense prajna into their pages as a secret. (Cowell, 118)

Prajna texts progressively reduce from a 100,000-line tome into a one-letter teaching—the Sanskrit syllable for "not" (A)—through the elimination of repetition. Similarly, the teaching of the Perfection of Wisdom can be reconstituted from the letter A by adding detail and clarity regarding the nature and realization of negation. At each level of expansion and contraction, however, from the one-letter Perfection of Wisdom, through the Perfections of Wisdom in eight and eighteen thousand lines, and up to the great hundred thousand–line version, the message remains the same: all phenomena are empty (shunya) of inherent existence (svabhava). Accordingly, the Perfection of Wisdom becomes a "narrative fractal": a teaching that exhibits self-similarity at any level of analysis or synthesis, thus becoming an example of what it discusses. And by exploring these carefully constructed microcosms of emptiness, we can envision how shunyata might, contrary to all ordinary appearances, actually pervade our world of experience.

 Entering Virtual Worlds in Three Dimensions

 Sacred literature's ability to metaphorically become our entire experience, a whole world, can take some very concrete forms. Some sacred texts might even be said to "emanate" architectural versions of the symbolic worlds they contain. At Mogao in northwestern China, for example, Buddhists created elaborate caves that mimicked the virtual realms described in the popular Lotus Sutra. These cave shrines are obviously not the "real" worlds discussed in the sutra, but to insist on this would be to miss the point. For these are symbolic worlds whose intent is "the creation of an imaginary topography to situate and immerse the beholder" (Wang, 74). Here we find a symbol complex created to collapse the meditator's experience into the world depicted in the cave. Under these conditions, the cave becomes a means of virtual transportation "into" the world of the Lotus Sutra—a metaphorical space-time vehicle precisely engineered for effective travel into an imaginal realm experienced as fully actual.

Afterlife Maps and Vehicles

The Egyptians were similarly adept at creating three-dimensional effective art. In the Old Kingdom, the pharaoh Unas (whose reign is dated to 4375–4345 bce) built an entire funerary complex intended to function as effective art. To do so, Unas carved the so-called "Pyramid Texts" on the walls of his funerary monument. These hieroglyphic books have a dual function: they both describe the Egyptian afterlife and enable anyone with these texts to travel through it successfully. They occur in specific locations within the pyramid which are themselves symbolically linked to stars that never sink below the horizon and are thus "imperishable" (Stadelmann, 57). A set of rituals activates the metaphorical wormhole between these two locations. And since in Egyptian thought a virtual model of an actuality is not different from the thing it pictures, virtual rituals keep the wormhole eternally open (again metaphorically). Under these conditions, the pyramid is certainly something magnificent, "a book we walk into that encompasses us on all sides" (Naydler, 151), but something more as well: a means of interworld travel enabling the deceased to transcend the earthly and ascend to the undecaying realm of the stars.

Shaping Experience through Art

The ancient Maya possessed a very sophisticated understanding of effective art. For the Maya, all the levels of symbol, from the individual hieroglyph to the text to sculpture to the religious complex as a whole, "had the effect of a magical formula, making the inscribed event happen, regardless of whether it was seen by human eyes" (Looper, 23). That images could work automatically in this way is perhaps the key concept of Mayan sacred art. For the Maya, art was intimately connected with life itself, and this identity was expressed on the linguistic level. The term itz, similar in meaning to the Sanskrit word prana or the Taoist chi, is the life force that carries organisms through time. It is also the subtle substance that all artists manipulate in creating their work. Thus, for the Maya, to create sacred art was to work with the sacred essence of the world in its most concentrated form. This understanding of art as itz is unique and has profound consequences: by creating works of art of any kind, Mayan itz specialists were giving manifest form to the protean potentiality of cosmic itz, thus shaping the flow of experience, fixing and altering it to adapt to present circumstances (Gillette, 27).

Effective Art and Everyday Life

The methods of comparative religion can help us understand how effective art facilitates entry into imaginal worlds. This special kind of understanding may seem abstract, but like a comprehension of Fohat, it can exert powerful phenomenal effects. In particular, it can help us recover our remarkable capacity to shape the course of experience. Indeed, when we clearly see how artistic images both reflect and shape experience, we will never again be deceived by the literalist tendency to assume that we have direct access to unmediated reality. Instead, we will see clearly how all experience is symbolically mediated, and that this same symbolic capacity is our own. The literary critic W. J. T. Mitchell observed in this connection that "if we see how images got power over us, we can re-possess imagination that produced them" (Mitchell, 31). In so doing, we break a metaphorical code whose symbolic elements we can then consciously use to "participate in ultimate reality" (Ellwood, 39)—that realm that defies even the most magnificent artistic figuration, and in which lies our ultimate freedom.

Works Cited

 Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religions. New York: Doubleday, 1967.

Blavatsky, H. P. The Secret Doctrine. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1938.

Clottes, Jean, and Lewis-Williams, David. The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves. New York: Abrams, 1996.

Corbin, Henry. "Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal," Cahiers internationaux de symbolisme 6 (1964).

Cowell, E. B., ed. Buddhist Mahayana Texts. New York: Dover, 1969.

Ellwood, Robert. Theosophy: A Modern Expression of the Wisdom of the Ages. Wheaton: Quest, 1986.

–––. "The Ethics and Sociology of Fohat," Quest 97.1 (2009), 21-25.

Freidel, David, and Schele, Linda. Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path. New York: Morrow, 1993.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic, 1973.

Gillette, Douglas. The Shaman's Secret: The Lost Resurrection Teachings of the Ancient Maya. New York: Bantam, 1997.

Hume, Robert. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921.

Looper, Matt. Lightning Warrior: Maya Art and Kingship at Quirgua. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Naydler, Jeremy. The Shamanic Wisdom of the Pyramid Texts. Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2005.

Stadelmann, Rainer. "Royal Tombs from the Age of the Pyramids," in R. Schulz and M. Seidel, eds., Egypt: The World of the Pharaohs. Cologne: Konemann, 1998.

Thurman, Robert. Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet. New York: Abrams, 1996.

Wang, Eugene. Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005.

Jeff Durham is former professor of comparative religion at the University of North Carolina and New York's St. Thomas Aquinas College. He currently directs the Comparative Religion Center and Yoga Sciences Center in San Francisco, lecturing and delivering workshops throughout California. His mission is to unite the wisdom traditions of East and West through the approaches and methods of comparative religion. His new book, Immortality Project: A History of Magical Art and Text, is currently under editorial review.

by Kurt Leland

Originally printed in the Spring 2011 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Leland, Kurt. "Theosophical Music." Quest  99. 2 (Spring 2011): 61-64.

Music may be the most Theosophical art. Even without knowing the Three Objects of the Theosophical Society, composers and performers often promote them, and listeners experience their effects.

The First Object of universal brotherhood comes forward in the very nature of music itself. Most music requires the involvement of at least two players, who must coordinate their parts with each other and interact as one.

The Second Object comes forward when we perform or listen to the vast repertoire of sacred and ceremonial music produced by all cultures from prehistoric times to the present—from the throat singing of Siberian shamans and Tibetan lamas to the ethereal chants of Hildegard von Bingen, the choral masterworks of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the jazz-inspired meditations on God of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. The study of music also incites people to a deeper understanding of science (through acoustics, music theory, and the harmonic ratios of Pythagoras) and philosophy (through aesthetics and the notion of cosmic harmony—the music of the spheres).

The Third Object comes forward in the intention of many composers and performers to move an audience heart and soul, thus suggesting the spiritual powers latent in humanity by lifting people into higher states of consciousness. Almost everyone has had what I call transcendent musical experiences—peak or mystical experiences produced by listening to music. The symptoms run the gamut from chills along the spine to spontaneous weeping, from near-paralytic fascination to feelings of exaltation in which the boundaries of self dissolve.

Some people venerate the great masterpieces of Western classical music—those capable of producing transcendent musical experiences—as if they were sacred scripture. Often such pieces reflect all three Objects of the Theosophical Society.

Think of the Finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with its "Ode to Joy." We get a passage of musical chaos to represent the political disorder of Europe during the Napoleonic Wars. "Not these sounds!" the baritone sings. Then he leads the chorus to consider the possibility that under the guidance of joy, we become brothers through friendship and the love of a partner. All of nature experiences that joy, and the heavenly bodies in their serene and orderly course should become the model for how we run our own races through life. "Be embracéd, all ye millions / Here's a kiss for all the world!"

Hundreds of people may be involved in the performance: an orchestra of string, woodwind, brass, and percussion players; soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists; a large chorus; and the conductor, who ensures they all play as one. That process of becoming one for the sake of the music is the essence of brotherhood—giving up the self and its desires to blend into a harmoniously functioning whole.

Meanwhile the audience comes under the spell of beautiful music divinely played. The rapt attention in the hall is palpable. We feel moved and uplifted. During the applause, we often rise as one to salute the musicians. Our consciousness has been transformed. We have momentarily become brothers.

Musical study is another prime incentive for the development of brotherhood. Asian musicians come to Europe or America to learn the art of performing Western classical music. American popular musicians travel to West Africa to study under indigenous master drummers, or to India to learn how to perform the sitar or tablas under the guidance of classical Indian musicians.

In the 1960s, a genre called World Music began to evolve through collaborations of musicians from different cultures. One pioneer was American jazz clarinetist Tony Scott, who worked with traditional Japanese koto (table harp) and shakuhachi (bamboo flute) players to create Music for Zen Meditation and Other Joys (1964). Another famous early contribution to the genre was the collaboration of classical violinist Yehudi Menuhin and Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar in West Meets East (1967).

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, World Music groups abound. As celebrations of universal brotherhood, they often employ musicians from several continents in a multicultural synthesis of styles, modes, rhythms, and timbres.

One branch of World Music of especial interest to Theosophists is kirtan: Indian devotional singing of passages in Sanskrit considered to have great spiritual power. A leader chants each phrase and a chorus sings it back. The constant repetition of the phrase drives its spiritual meaning ever deeper into the mind, while the music subtly transports us into higher states of consciousness.

As reinvented by musicians in the West, kirtan retains its devotional element, but the traditional sitar, tablas, and bamboo flute are often combined with acoustic guitar, bass, and electronic keyboards. An especially fine example of the genre is The Love Window by Shantala (husband-and-wife team Heather and Benjy Wertheimer). The album moves from quiet meditation to mysterious invocations, from soaring melodies whose soulful beauty opens the heart to ecstatic dances of praise. It closes with a Sanskrit prayer H.P. Blavatsky would have loved: "When the perfect is taken from the perfect, only the perfect remains."

Another recent sign of the trend toward celebrating brotherhood in the art of music is La Pasión según Marcos ("St. Mark Passion"), by Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov (born 1960). Commissioned in 2000 in honor of the 250th anniversary of Bach's death, Golijov's Passion is an expression of World Music in the classical concert hall. Golijov is of Eastern European Jewish descent, classically trained, yet comfortable with the sounds of contemporary tango and other Latin American popular music.

Golijov set St. Mark's story of the crucifixion in the tradition of Easter festivities, often including passion plays, in South American villages. The result is a musical drama by turns raw, ecstatic, and sublime, welding together classical strings, hot jazz brass, Afro-Cuban percussion, flamenco guitar, operatic and salsa-influenced vocal soloists, a semi-choreographed gospel chorus, and even capoeira dancers (a Brazilian martial art imported from Africa).

To further emphasize the notion of brotherhood and the universality of the Gospel story, the roles of Mark, Judas, and Jesus are circulated among the soloists without regard to gender—at times sung by a man, at others a woman. The text is mostly in Spanish, with some Latin. The piece ends with a gorgeous kaddish (Jewish prayer of lamentation for the dead) in Aramaic, the language that Jesus is believed to have spoken.

Widely considered one of the first musical masterpieces of the twenty-first century, Golijov's Passion has recently been released in a fine recording by Deutsche Grammophon, which includes a DVD of a recent festival performance so the listener can appreciate the equally stunning visual impact of this amazing work of art.

Like Golijov, some musicians may be unconscious Theosophists, creating brotherhood, setting sacred texts, and producing spiritual uplift. Yet a few have actively studied Theosophy. The Russian composer Alexandr Scriabin (1872-1915), for example, was directly influenced by the writings of Mme. Blavatsky.

Among Scriabin's mystically inclined works for orchestra are the Poem of Ecstasy, which depicts the union of male and female principles that continually recreates the universe; and Prometheus, or the Poem of Fire, which was inspired by The Secret Doctrine. In Blavatsky's retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus, divine beings grant to human consciousness the gift of sacred fire—self-awareness, intelligence, and culture. Scriabin attempted to portray these beings not only in music but also in light, through the projection of colors coded to the changes of harmony throughout the performance hall.

Scriabin also composed ten piano sonatas, several of which have Theosophical subtexts. The Fourth Sonata is about flight toward a star, as in the experience of astral projection. The Seventh, subtitled White Mass, is about the mystical forces unleashed in a magical ceremony, and the Ninth (Black Mass) is about purging the corresponding dark forces. The Eighth Sonata uses five musical fragments to represent the constant interplay of the elements earth, water, air, fire, and, as he called it, "the mystical ether."

Scriabin's Tenth Sonata portrays solar insects "born from the sun," "the sun's kisses." The radiant halo of trills with which the piece closes is one of the most effective depictions in music of the inner light associated with high meditative states, such as samadhi.

Scriabin wanted to write a piece of music that would end the world and usher in a new age. He spent the last years of his life planning this work, which he called Mysterium. It was to take place in India, with the Himalayas in the background. A special amphitheater would be built, as well as a templelike training institute for the musicians. All the arts would be employed, including that of scent in the form of incense. The performance was to last for several days.

At the time of his premature death at the age of forty-three, Scriabin was working on a prelude to the Mysterium, which he called "Prefatory Action." His friends jokingly called it the "safe Mysterium," since it was not intended to end the world. The work was left unfinished.

Oddly, a Soviet composer by the name of Alexander Nemtin (1936-99) became obsessed with Scriabin's unfinished work. He spent twenty-six years trying to complete it from the disorganized pile of sketches Scriabin left behind. When a recording of part of this completion was released in the 1970s, the album cover showed a photograph of the clean-shaven Nemtin next to one of the bearded Scriabin. The resemblance in the facial structure was remarkable—implying that Nemtin was perhaps the reincarnation of Scriabin. In 1999, a recording of Nemtin's three-hour-long completion of Scriabin's Prefatory Action was released as Preparation for the Final Mystery.

Unlike Scriabin, British composer Cyril Scott (1879-1970) was actively involved in the Theosophical Society. Scott believed not only that many facets of politics and culture are expressed through music, but also that changes in musical style often mysteriously precede and influence changes in politics and culture.

In his book Music: Its Secret Influence throughout the Ages, Scott cited famous passages from Plato's Republic about the effect of music on people's moods and the value and dangers to society of certain musical scales. He also introduced the notions of deva-inspired music (written under the influence of devas, Sanskrit for "shining ones"—something like the muses or angels of the West) and buddhic music (which expresses unity and bliss, having originated in what Theosophists call the plane of buddhi, Sanskrit for "faculty of wisdom").

Scott claimed that buddhic music attempts "to portray that Love which is God, the Divine Love." One of the best examples of buddhic music is the Prelude to Wagner's opera Lohengrin, a musical depiction of a vision of the Holy Grail, which acts as a sublimely aching call to higher service.

Scott's music was long neglected, but has undergone a recent revival by British record labels. All of his solo piano music has been recorded, and several of his major orchestral works, including piano concertos and symphonies. Early One Morning, for piano and orchestra, perfectly embodies the four qualities Scott ascribed to deva music that was inspired by nature spirits (a lower form of deva, equivalent to elves and fairies): (1) it depicts nature; (2) it includes elements of folk song; (3) it seems to be improvised; and (4) it sounds "enchantingly indefinite" and "charmingly monotonous." The remarkable thing is how much the piece resembles the best New Age music, although it was composed decades before that genre developed.

A lesser known British composer of Theosophical bent is John Herbert Foulds (1880-1939). Long fascinated by Theosophy's "light from the East," Foulds met Theosophist and fellow musician Maud MacCarthy in 1915. She had been a traveling companion of Annie Besant in India and was one of the first Western authorities on Indian classical music. Under MacCarthy's influence, Foulds experimented with developing musical clairaudience through fasting, meditation, and trance states. He hoped to take dictation from the musical devas Cyril Scott had written about.

Together, Foulds and MacCarthy collaborated on the magnificent World Requiem, first performed in 1923. The piece was intended to honor those who died in the First World War. The text was drawn from Latin and English masses for the dead, Psalms, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and even the poetry of Kabir, a Sufi mystic. One section brought together the Eastern Om (Aum) and the Western Amen—a musical first.

For many years, Foulds planned to compose an opera called Avatara, based on the life of Sri Krishna, an incarnation (avatar) of the Indian god Vishnu. He only completed three orchestral preludes, one for each act of the opera. These preludes are now performed under the title Three Mantras.

Foulds was fascinated with the concept in Indian music that certain musical scales called ragas could create heightened states of consciousness. Sanskrit phrases recited outwardly or inwardly as mantras ("words of power") during meditation have a similar effect—as in kirtan singing.

In Three Mantras, Foulds combined these ideas, using Indian scales and short repeated melodic fragments to create potent musical pictures of three states of consciousness. The first movement, "Mantra of Activity," depicts the state of consciousness Theosophists call manas (mind). The second movement, "Mantra of Bliss," depicts the state called buddhi, and the third, "Mantra of the Will," the state called atma (spirit).

The second movement, with its wordless chorus, is especially effective as a musical depiction of buddhi. It resembles the mysterious " Neptune" movement from The Planets by Gustav Holst (1874-1934). The third, representing atma, surprises with its apocalyptic fury, reminding us that one function of the godhead is unmaking the old to bring in the new.

Though Maud MacCarthy had been a child prodigy violinist and had dabbled in composition, there seem to be few other women composers who were students of Theosophy. One notable example is Ruth Crawford-Seeger (1901-53). Like her husband, Charles Seeger, she collected and arranged American folk music. Her stepson, Pete Seeger, became famous as a singer, songwriter, and musical folklorist.

As a student (and before marriage), Ruth Crawford came to Theosophy through a composition teacher in Chicago who had known Scriabin personally. Chicago was a Theosophical hotspot in the late 1920s when Crawford studied there. The national headquarters of the American Section of the Theosophical Society had recently moved from Los Angeles to the nearby suburb of Wheaton .

Though considered one of the most important women composers of the first half of the twentieth century, Crawford-Seeger composed only a few dozen works. The best-known is her progressive String Quartet.

Scriabin once said, "Music is the path of revelation. You can't imagine what a potent method of knowledge it is!" When music embodies the Three Objects of the Theosophical Society—even unconsciously—it often becomes a path of revelation.

One of the great masterpieces of twentieth-century classical music is the Quartet for the End of Time, by Olivier Messiaen (1908-92). Many listeners have found it to be such a path.

Though not a Theosophist, Messiaen was a devout Catholic with mystical tendencies, an avid bird watcher who sought to transcribe the songs of birds and weave them into his music. He considered birds to be the choristers of God. Like Scriabin, he also experienced synesthesia, the ability to see sound as color. Messiaen tried to capture these sonic colors in his music.

The Quartet for the End of Time had a dramatic birth. It was composed and first performed at a Nazi concentration camp in 1941, a time when some people believed the end of the world had come, with Hitler as the Antichrist whose arrival was predicted in the Revelation of St. John. Messiaen wrote the piece for the players and instruments available, including a clarinet, a violin, a cello with only three strings (instead of the usual four), and an upright piano whose keys stuck. The premiere occurred on a cold winter night in the insufficiently heated barracks with an audience of hundreds.

Messiaen dedicated his Quartet to the rainbow-crowned angel in Revelation who stands with one foot on the sea and the other on land and calls for the end of time, which is to occur when the seventh angel blows his trumpet. Messiaen experimented with several ways of "ending" musical time in this piece. In some sections, he eliminated the bar lines normally used to organize and regulate the rhythmic flow. He often required notes to be held for unusually long periods, and used extremely slow tempos with little harmonic change. He was attempting to represent eternity in music.

The composer tells us in a program note that the piece begins on earth with the dawn chorus of birdsong. The angel announces its presence. Then we have an "Abyss of the Birds" for solo clarinet, representing the human soul plunged down into the abyss of time, but yearning for light.

The first response to this yearning is a movement entitled "Praise to the Eternity of Jesus," for cello and piano, a remarkably beautiful and uplifting meditation on timelessness and divine love.

Next comes an apocalyptic "Dance of Fury, for the Seven Trumpets." There is only one melodic line, played simultaneously by all four instruments, and no harmony. A single wrong note is immediately obvious. In live performance, the concentration required to play this difficult music is so great that the performers must approach the yogic meditative state called "one-pointed mind." Their efforts to achieve oneness carry us with them, as if they could transmit that state to us through the music. We become brothers by virtue of passing through a hair-raising experience—a musical interpretation of the end of the world.

We then hear "A Tangle of Rainbows, for the Angel Who Announces the End of Time." Here the music is at its most colorful, even if we cannot literally see the rainbows of sonic colors Messiaen was attempting to reproduce from his synesthetic vision.

The fifty-minute piece closes with another evocation of eternity in response to our yearning for light, this time for violin and piano: "Praise to the Immortality of Jesus." If ever a piece of music could teach us how the high state of consciousness called grace might feel, this is it.

In Quartet for the End of Time, Messiaen may have produced the ideal piece of Theosophical music. It promotes brotherhood and oneness, arises from the study of sacred scripture, explores philosophical notions such as timelessness, and transforms the consciousness of listeners. It demonstrates how music may become a path of revelation.

Kurt Leland is an award-winning composer, clarinetist, and author. He has published several books, including Music and the Soul: A Listener's Guide to Transcendent Musical Experiences (Hampton Roads). His Web site is www.kurtleland.com.

References 

Foulds, John. Music To-day: Its Heritage from the Past, and Its Legacy to the Future. London : Nicholson & Watson, 1934.MacDonald, Malcolm. John Foulds and His Music: An Introduction. London : Kahn & Averill, 1989.

Rishin, Rebecca. For the End of Time: The Story of the Messiaen Quartet. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Schloezer, Boris de. Scriabin: Artist and Mystic. Translated by Nicolas Slonimsky. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1987. First published in Russian in 1923. Schloezer was Scriabin's brother-in-law.

Scott, Cyril. Music: Its Secret Influence throughout the Ages. York Beach, Maine : Weiser, 1986 (1933).

Tick, Judith. Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

by Kathryn Gann

Originally printed in the Spring 2011 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Kathryn, Gann. "Beauty Is Not Optional." Quest  99. 2 (Spring 2011): 58-60.

We would like to think that if we were dying of thirst and were surrounded by water, we'd have the good sense to drink. Strangely, though, patients suffering from dehydration often do not experience thirst. Thirst is not always a reliable gauge of the body's need for water (www.mayoclinic.com).

Too often we become starved for beauty in the same way—we simply do not think of it as a necessity. We mistakenly believe that drenching ourselves in beauty is a luxury, something that would be nice to experience someday when we have the time. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Beauty is as essential to the human soul as water is to the human body. When the tiring dissonance of modern life throws us off balance and seems to drain our very life force, beauty is the antidote with the power to restore us. Indeed, it has been described as the manifestation of love and harmony. To the extent that we are in a state of love and harmony, our life force and vitality flow unimpeded to the same degree, allowing a fuller expression of what it is to be human.

In the 1992 movie FernGully: The Last Rainforest, a nature spirit named Magi advises her protege, "There are worlds within worlds, Krista. Everything in our world is connected by the delicate strands of the Web of Life, which is balanced between forces of destruction and the magic forces of creation....Everyone can call on the magic powers of the Web of Life. You have to find it in yourself."

Among the many "magic powers of the Web of Life" to be wielded by human beings, the experience of beauty stands out as one of the most pleasurable. The transformation that occurs deep within us as we enjoy genuine beauty is nothing short of magical. We are free to find beauty in the mundane as well as the extraordinary, in the highs and lows of life, and in doing so we cannot fail to expand and enrich our experience of the world. Unlike many things we enjoy, we simply cannot overdose on beauty! 

Treasure in the Garbage

The experience of beauty, like inner growth and "aha" moments, comes spontaneously and unpredictably, then vanishes as quickly. We might spend an afternoon at an art museum and leave quite uninspired, yet be mesmerized on the way home by the beauty of falling raindrops reverberating in puddles. We cannot predict when and where we will experience beauty, but we stand a better chance of fully appreciating those spontaneous moments when we maintain a state of mindfulness attuned to beauty in our everyday surroundings.

There is an eccentric elderly woman, writes Italian transpersonal psychologist Piero Ferrucci, who cannot bear to throw away what others might deem garbage. She sees beauty in the fine skin of an onion, the celery stalk, the smooth, round avocado pit, and in vegetable peels in gorgeous shades of red, purple, orange, and yellow. Unable to part with them, she places them in a transparent jar of water on her windowsill. Gradually, her "bouquet" forms itself into interesting spires, floating clouds, pleasant lines, amazing colors and abstract shapes. At sunset, the light shining through the jar produces an incandescent effect (Ferrucci, 16-17).

What a lovely gift this woman shared—the ability to see beauty in the most mundane of forms. Perhaps part of our task as human beings is to see beauty everywhere, even in mundane objects, and elevate it to an art form. Theosophical teacher Joy Mills has said that "unless we find the beauty of the Spirit in the very midst of the most material forms and convey it pure and unsullied as a gift to Divine Love, we shall really not be able to find it anywhere" (Mills, 49).

In her diary, Anne Frank described the beauty she saw in the graceful curves formed by her hair in the bathroom sink and lamented that the others in hiding with her did not share her appreciation of this artistry. Her experience illustrates the unpredictable nature of beauty—we never quite know when it's coming, and we cannot seem to produce it on demand. Had Anne gone to the sink looking for beauty as an assigned task, she might well have missed it; yet because she was open to the experience, she enjoyed this little respite from the fear and tension of her circumstances.

The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi celebrates the beauty of the mundane, the austere, the transient, the imperfect. Japanese tea ceremonies are often performed with simple rustic pottery as an embodiment of the wabi-sabi aesthetic. Looking to the processes of nature, we might find a poignant beauty in the wilting red autumn leaves and accept them as reminders of the transient nature of our world as the yang of summer gradually yields to the yin of winter. This is the wabi-sabi way of seeing.

Nature's cycles are so much a part of our daily experience that it is easy to overlook the miracle of constant change taking place around us. Every twenty-four hours the yang of daytime gives way to the yin of dark night. As this transition unfolds, we are treated to a spectacular light show—a sunset. Each moment of a sunset is perfectly unique and perfectly fleeting. We gaze at it and realize that never before has there been exactly this combination of light, colors, and clouds; and the brilliant combination changes from moment to moment. In appreciating the uniqueness and fleetingness that makes each moment of a sunset exquisitely precious, we are restored to a state of awe, the hallmark of the experience of beauty. As we watch the shifting colors of a sunset, we embody Kahlil Gibran's description of beauty as "a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted" (Gibran, 75).

When we attune ourselves to the beauty in our everyday world, we are changed from within. We become "beauty receptors," and life takes on lovelier colors and a zestier flavor than it had before. Happily, it's as simple as seeing and appreciating the artistry of our commonplace surroundings.

 The Riace Warriors

Having accustomed ourselves to finding beauty in the mundane, we are in an ideal position to be transported entirely beyond ourselves when confronted with extraordinary beauty. In 1972, two bronze statues of warriors from ancient Greece were retrieved from an ancient shipwreck at the bottom of the sea off the coast of Riace, Italy. The statues became known as I Bronzi di Riace, "the Riace Bronzes" or "the Riace Warriors." By the early 1980s, they were on display in Florence, Italy, at the Archaeological Museum in Piazza Santissima Annunziata, described by Ferrucci as "one of the most beautiful squares in the world," the "greatest splendor" of the Florentine Renaissance. Yet a friend of Ferruci's who had seen the Riace Warrior statues inside the museum remarked that they were of such a transcendent beauty that when he emerged from the exhibit, the piazza itself had lost its luster and was no longer beautiful to him.

Not believing that an art exhibit could somehow cause the piazza to "lose" its beauty, Ferrucci attended the exhibit himself. The statues were a study in complementary energies. One warrior embodied a youthful, fierce quality; the other portrayed a calm, mature strength. Ferrucci was "transported into another world, to a plane belonging to all men and women, all times and all cultures." His previously held ideas about what was beautiful and what was not seemed to fall away; he was "purified and taken to the essence." He left that exhibit in an altered state and was astounded to find that, just as his friend had described, the Piazza Santissima Annunziata now "seemed old and decadent" (Ferrucci, 58?61). Ferrucci's experience seems to affirm Michelangelo's statement that "beauty is the purgation of superfluities."

The Song within All Songs

Recalling Magi's counsel to find within ourselves "the magic powers of the Web of Life," we instinctively turn to music to restore ourselves to harmony when we've become fragmented by the turmoil and dissonance of daily life. As with all experiences of beauty, musical taste is a deeply individual matter; music that strikes one person as beautiful may leave another cold. But whatever our preferences, we choose music that uplifts when we're discouraged, energizes when we're fatigued, or soothes when nerves are raw. Simply put, we appreciate the power of music to restore ourselves to a state of harmony.

 Wisdom teachings from many traditions, as well as science, tell us that the entire universe in which we live was created by sound vibration. After pioneering the science of "cymatics" (from the Greek kyma, "wave"), Swiss scientist and artist Hans Jenny wrote that vibrational effects "may be said to exemplify the principle of wholeness. They can be regarded as models of the doctrine of holism: each single element is a whole and exhibits unitariness whatever the mutations and changes to which it is subjected. And always it is the underlying vibrational processes that sustain this unity in diversity. In every part, the whole is present or at least suggested" (quoted in Hodson, Music Forms, 14).

Like a fish that does not perceive that it lives in water, could we be living within a song but not hearing it? Perhaps the vibration that created and sustains the universe is a continuous song, as suggested by Sir James Jeans when he wrote, "To my mind, the laws which nature obeys are less suggestive of those which a machine obeys in its motion than those which a musician obeys in writing a fugue, or a poet in composing a sonnet" (quoted in Hodson, Kingdom, 19). Theosophical teachings agree that "Life itself has speech and is never silent. And its utterance is not . . . a cry; it is a song. Learn from it that you are part of the harmony" (Collins, 26). Songwriter Michael Stillwater similarly wrote, "There is a cosmic music underlying everything, vibrating throughout the universe, personally accessible through the specific individual filters of language, culture, and individual attunement. When we listen with awareness from a silent place, we can hear and uniquely express this cosmic music, the Great Song within all songs" (St. Vincent, 142).

Little wonder, then, that beautiful music has the power to restore us to a state of harmony. Music resonates with heart and head, power and passivity, the male and female in us, and weaves all aspects of our being back into harmony. It moves us to feel that all possibility lies within us. Our focus changes from things outside us to that which is deep within, and we move just a little closer to "becoming what we have always been," as Carl Jung advised. Pianist and composer Kevin Asbjörnson teaches that "music is the medium which creates a bridge between the "doing" and the "being" in life" (St. Vincent, 17). Submerged in our favorite music, we feel that we've come home to our true Self. Singer and songwriter Dennis Merritt Jones sums it up: "Music calls us home. It reminds us that beyond all the apparent differences we seem to have, we all come from the same place—our unity in Spirit" (St. Vincent, 97).

Leaving the Light On

 When a person is away from home at night, the family often leaves a light on near the door, so the loved one will easily find his or her way back home. It's a loving act that we can perform for ourselves too—we can always "leave the light on" to find our way by focusing on that which is beautiful. Our internal perception of beauty serves as both a stable foundation and a guiding light that's always shining, ever present to show us the way home.

Going further, an anonymous author known as "The Dreamer" assures us that beauty guides us to our true home, that place in human evolution where saints and sages stand:

Looking for Beauty, which is the manifestation of Love and Harmony, sustained by an ever-growing love and devotion, he is no longer confined even to a Name of the Divine Love and Beauty, and as Plato says of Beauty, he "may no longer be as the slave or bondsman of one beauty or Law but setting sail into the ocean of Beauty . . . . which albeit all other fair things partake thereof and grow and perish Itself without change or increase or diminution endless for everlasting. ("The Dreamer," 104, quoting Plato, Symposium, 192–202)

The character Magi spoke truly: If we wish to maintain harmony between the forces of creation and those of destruction, we must look deep within ourselves to find and draw upon the magic powers of the Web of Life. Beauty is among the most magical of such powers, and for the evolving life within us it is a true necessity.

SOURCES

Collins, Mabel. Light on the Path. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1989.
"The Dreamer." Studies in the Bhagavad Gita: The Path of Initiation. Chicago: Theosophical Book Concern, 1904.
Ferrucci, Piero. Beauty and the Soul. New York: Penguin, 2009.
Gibran, Kahlil. The Prophet. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969.
Hodson, Geoffrey. The Kingdom of the Gods. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1952.
—. Music Forms. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1976.
Mills, Joy. The One True Adventure: Theosophy and the Quest for Meaning. Wheaton: Quest, 2008.
St. Vincent, Justin. The Spiritual Significance of Music. N.p.: Xtreme Music, 2009.

Kathryn Gann has been a student of Theosophy since 1994, and currently serves as president of The Denver Theosophical Society. She enjoys nature photography and appreciates the Rocky Mountains' abundant photo opportunities.