Quest Magazine

Super Mind: How to Boost Performance and Live a Richer and Happier Life through Transcendental Meditation

NORMAN E. ROSENTHAL, M.D.
New York: Tarcher Perigee, 2016. 320 pp., hardcover, $ 27.

The famous Sufi master Mullah Nasruddin was once found searching for something outside his house. People asked him, “What are you looking for?” He said, “I am looking for my key.” Again they asked, “Where did you lose it?” and he said, “In my house.” Incredulously they asked, “Why are you looking here?” and he replied,” There is more light here!” When this story was told to a Zen master, his interpretation was, “Looking is the key!”

This is the age where everyone is looking — looking for something that will help one navigate one’s way through a world of conflict, dissatisfaction, and an overall feeling of wanting and unhappiness. Technology and other advances (dare we say smartphones!) bring us more anxiety than peace, gobbling up our internal space and quiet. The search has led more and more people towards meditation.

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi learned the ancient Vedic technique of meditation in the Himalayas and brought it to the public as Transcendental Meditation (TM). He knew it had great potential to help people. His message was, “Meditate, dive within, and expand your consciousness.” You change, and the world around you follows.

Norman E. Rosenthal’s Super Mind provides a roadmap towards that goal. Indeed, TM is goal-oriented. This simple technique, practiced twenty minutes twice a day, is easy to learn and enjoyable to practice. Research studies abound on TM’s effectiveness for stress and stress-related conditions. The benefits in daily life are often documented almost like a checklist: inner calm, reduced cortisol, normalized blood pressure, improved brain function and memory, reduced insomnia. A recent study documented the positive impact of TM on stressed-out college students.

The Maharishi talked about several states of consciousness. The three basic ones are sleeping, waking, and dreaming. Four more are transcendence (experience of self in silence of meditation), cosmic consciousness (experience of the transcendent in activity), refined cosmic consciousness (maximum development of senses and emotions), and unity consciousness (experiencing the transcendental reality within yourself and within everyone and everything). Rosenthal refers to the last three collectively as the Super Mind. He chooses this term because it is a state of heightened aptitude, problem-solving ability, and also a state of emotional empathy and sensitivity, even enhancing diplomatic skills in dealing with day-to-day situations. It is a state of consistent living in peak condition.

Rosenthal’s 2012 book, Transcendence: How to Boost Performance and Live a Richer and Happier Life through Transcendental Meditation, dealt specifically with how TM could help people with problems. Super Mind is broader in its reach, asking how everyone can lead a richer and more creative life. The book is organized into a description of the new science of consciousness, with measurable data; techniques for expanding consciousness; subjective experiences; the physiological basis of Super Mind; and finally the mysterious process of how “repeated settling” in meditation can lead to “a continuum of calmness.” Reading through Rosenthal’s book is a fascinating journey.

I found one discussion particularly interesting. It addressed the difference between TM and mindfulness. We know mindfulness means moment-to-moment clarity of observation. A wandering mind is just a state to note and let go of. Researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert from Harvard University developed an application for the iPhone recording subjects’ activity at random moments and whether their thoughts were pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. They found that mind wandering was common. They also found that people were happy when their minds were on a task, less happy when minds were wandering to neutral topics, and least happy when minds were wandering to unpleasant topics. Using time sequence analysis, they found that mind wandering preceded unhappiness. The Harvard researchers describe mind wandering as the brain’s default mode of operation and the frontal portions of brain as the default mode network (DMN).

Here is the greatest difference between mindfulness and TM: mindfulness focuses on the task at hand. If the mind that does not wander is a happy one, then mindfulness will make people happier. TM, by contrast, does not involve focusing on the present. The mantra used in TM allows the mind to transcend the present. Is transcendence a state of wandering, then? If so, does it make people less happy? But TM has been shown to enhance happiness. Scientifically speaking, mindfulness is reduced DMN activity (focus and attention), while TM increases DMN activity. The great question is: can one practice both? Rosenthal says there is no reason not to. It is a compelling discussion.

Rosenthal discusses many personal experiences, his own and others’, throughout the book, and these are very helpful. The appendices include a detailed “Consciousness Integration Questionnaire”; end notes for each chapter, with sources; and a question and answer session with Bob Roth, who has been teaching TM for forty-five years. A first-time reader would find it enlightening.

Dhananjay Joshi

The reviewer, a professor of statistics, has studied Hindu, Zen, and vipassana meditation for the past forty-five years. He is a regular contributor to the Indian periodical Lokmat.

Upstate Cauldron: Eccentric Spiritual Movements in Early New York State

JOSCELYN GODWIN
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015, viii + 375 pages, paper, $29.95.

I have long been fascinated with the eruption of religious enthusiasms, new religions, and reformist movements that took place in the nineteenth century in upstate New York, in an area that has been dubbed “the burned-over district” — so called not for physical fires, but for the fiery evangelical revivals and messianic utopian schemes that burnt their way through the region. The Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, Oneida utopians, the women’s movement, and spiritualism all arose on New York soil, and that hardly exhausts the list.

Who better to provide an overview of these sects than Joscelyn Godwin, whose earlier book The Theosophical Enlightenment masterfully surveyed the origins and influences of the esoteric and occult currents in the nineteenth century English-speaking world? Despite its much tighter geographical focus, Upstate Cauldron can fairly be considered a companion volume to the earlier book, as Godwin’s thorough approach and wry bemusement are evident in both surveys.

While some figures treated here are likely familiar, such as H.P. Blavatsky, Joseph Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and possibly the self-proclaimed Rosicrucian Paschal Beverly Randolph, many others have been waiting to be rescued from obscurity by Godwin. These would include Jemima Wilkinson, the Universal Friend; Handsome Lake, the prophet of a Native American religion; Thomas Lake Harris, founder of the Brotherhood of the New Life; Robert Ingersoll, crusading freethinker and atheist; and Cyrus Reed Teed, founder of Koreshanity and exponent of the view that we are living within a hollow earth, all scientific evidence to the contrary. Some of these worthies were famous in their day, but most have fallen from present awareness.

Another in this vein is Elbert Hubbard, a pop philosopher of uplift whose prolific works were read by hundreds of thousands of readers a century ago, but who passed from view after he and his wife went down with the Lusitania when it was sunk by the Germans in 1915.

Theosophists appear several times in this history, not just HPB and Henry Steel Olcott, but others less known, notably Matilda Joslyn Gage, who coauthored the History of Woman Suffrage with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Mrs. Gage was to become the mother-in-law of L. Frank Baum, passing along her interest in Theosophy to him. Baum would go on to author the Oz series of children’s books, which Godwin notes have both Theosophical and Gnostic elements.

Godwin also reminds us that it was Josephine Cables, a Theosophist in Rochester, New York, who helped rouse the Theosophical Society in America out of the dormancy it had fallen into after the departure of HPB and Olcott for India in 1878. In 1882 she applied to the Adyar headquarters for a charter for a Rochester branch. It was the first American branch to be chartered since the TS’s founding in 1875.

As might be expected, spiritualism — perhaps the most prominent new religious movement to catch fire from the 1840s on — is a constant presence in Upstate Cauldron. Its participants overlap with nearly every reform movement of the era: abolitionism, free thought, women’s suffrage, utopian socialism, communalism, free love, and temperance. As spiritualism became more formalized, with some wings becoming quasi-Christian denominations, it also split into competing camps with ever-shifting alliances. Godwin covers some of this in passing here, but I’d love to see him devote a whole book to the spiritualist saga.

An unexpected chapter towards the end treats the Arts and Crafts movement’s manifestations in New York. This initially struck me as an incongruous addition to the book, but through his examination of participants such as Gustav Stickley, who published The Craftsman magazine, championed “simplicity” as a spiritual and aesthetic ideal, and founded a quasi-utopian company town for his furniture factory, I came to see the connection.

Upstate Cauldron’s final chapter delves into more recent manifestations of eccentric spirituality in upstate New York. These include “Father Francis” (Archbishop William Henry Francis Brothers), a latter-day “wandering bishop” who shepherded an eclectic congregation in Woodstock; Peter Lamborn Wilson, esoteric anarcho-scalliwag whose series of “poetic actions” in the region are seemingly performed with a tongue-in-cheek attitude wholly absent from the book’s other figures; Anthony Damiani, proprietor of the American Brahman bookstore in Ithaca and a disciple of author Paul Brunton who attracted his own circle of devoted followers; and Jane Roberts, channeler of Seth and author of Seth Speaks and The Seth Material.

In parting, Godwin provides maps and a gazetteer of some 150 sites in upstate New York that the reader can visit. Given that Godwin’s photos of such sites are peppered throughout the book, he clearly devoted years to visiting them himself and wishes to encourage others to do so as well. As he notes, these are a historical legacy waiting to be recognized.

Jay Kinney

Jay Kinney was founder and publisher of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions and is a frequent contributor to Quest.

Inside Knowledge: How to Activate the Radical New Vision of Reality of Tibetan Lama Tarthang Tulku

JACK PETRANKER, EDITOR
Berkeley, Calif.: Dharma Publishing, 2015. xxi + 225 pp., paper, $18.95

We often experience time and space as a cruel iron prison. They may be navigated, but they cannot be conquered. Knowledge can at best help us live more comfortably within them.

Or maybe not. Tarthang Tulku—one of very few Tibetan lamas in the West to try to go past the boundaries of Buddhist thought—has developed a vision, called Time, Space, and Knowledge (usually abbreviated as TSK), that enables us to see these primordial forces in fresh and revolutionary ways. His first book on the subject, Time, Space, and Knowledge: A New Vision of Reality appeared in 1977, and in the years since, he has added to his body of work with titles such as Love of Knowledge (1987) and Knowledge of Time and Space (1990). The latest offering, edited by Jack Petranker, a longtime student and teacher of TSK, is Inside Knowledge.

It’s hard to characterize the TSK vision, because, as Tarthang Tulku stresses, it is not a theory but a method of approach. In his preface to this book, Petranker writes, “the TSK Vision is not about ‘getting’ any specific result or ‘having’ any particular experience. In TSK it is the questions that matter.” It is perhaps best seen through adjectives rather than through axioms: the words “open,” “light,” “playful,” and “spontaneous” appear frequently.

“There is no solid self,” says Tarthang Tulku in an interview reprinted in this volume. “You are an open-ended expression of time, space and knowledge . . . By comparison, ordinary ‘human being,’ in which our Being is obscured, is a very mechanical process. Our reactions are practically of the ‘knee jerk’ variety, and we’re motivated by a small set of needs, predicated on insecurity and lack of fulfillment.”

The TSK vision frequently contrasts an ordinary experience of time, space, and knowledge—frozen, mechanical, and repetitive—with a fresher vision that can be explored experientially. “A zeroless dimensionality is available to us: grounded in uninterruptible openness,” Tarthang Tulku writes elsewhere in this volume.

Rather than pushing any further into the realm of concepts and definitions, it might be better to give a flavor of TSK through its exercises, a number of which appear at the back of this book. Here is one, “Space between Thoughts”: “As you observe your thoughts passing, watch very sensitively for the moment when one thought ends and another arises. This transition is very quick and subtle, but involves the momentary availability of a space which you can contact and even expand. This space has a quality of openness, free from the usual discursive and discriminative thinking.”

From my own experience, I would say that this exercise can shift and has shifted my awareness of time. Normally one thinks of time as a continuous flow: hence the common metaphors of a “stream” or “film” of consciousness. The exercise above suggests a new way of looking at time. One might call it atomistic: thoughts appear separately between the “space” that the exercise mentions, so that they are more like momentary flashes in a field of knowing than a never-ending and unstoppable stream.

I am in no way claiming that this experience, or any other, is the goal of the exercise: rather it is my observation of how things appear from a single given stance. The point is that there is an infinite number of such stances.

Here is part of another exercise: “Bring to mind the future, allowing it to be completely indeterminate. Instead of thinking about this or that coming event, let the unknown-ness of the future come to the foreground. As a gateway into this indeterminacy, reflect on the ongoing transformations through which living being evolves. Within the steady flow of linear time, there are movements we would consider favorable and others that are unfavorable. Yet if you welcome the future, you may become aware of a dynamic that unfolds naturally toward improvement.”

Again to speak from my own experience: doing this exercise, I am less aware of myself as attempting to shift an immovable future away from certain outcomes and toward others. Instead I am aware of the future as a large, dark, fluid, but dynamic presence that is to be absorbed and assimilated and transformed.

This, too, is only one response out of countless possible responses.

The TSK vision is subtle and elusive, and not easy to formulate in a language like English. But it is approachable, and of the several books in the TSK series, this is (as it is meant to be) perhaps the best and most accessible introduction to this “knowingness” of a very different kind. Someone who reads this book is likely to go away from it viewing time, space, and knowledge less as forbidding and impenetrable walls and more like an energy that is always present and available for dynamic creativity.

Richard Smoley

Insights from the Masters: A Compilation

FIONA C. ODGREN
Winchester, U.K.: Axis Mundi, 2016. 274 pp., paper, $25.95.

The Masters behind H.P. Blavatsky—Morya and Koot Hoomi—are the most enigmatic figures in Theosophical history. Much has been written about them; still more has been imagined. But after more than a century, they remain unapproachable.

To gain some understanding of them, it is necessary to examine the collection of writings known as the Mahatma Letters, allegedly written, mostly, by Morya and K.H., and addressed, again mostly, to the British Theosophists A.P. Sinnett and A.O Hume. It is hard to imagine that these letters were ever intended for publication. But in the 1920s, Maud Hoffman, who had been left the letters by Sinnett after his death, worked with A.T. Barker to produce an edited version, first published in 1924. The letters were arranged thematically rather than chronologically, which made sense up to a point, since they were almost entirely undated. In 1993, Vicente Hao Chin, using a chronology of the letters written by Margaret Cosgrove, published the letters in chronological order. Chin’s edition at this point is the one most widely used by Theosophists.

The letters remain hard to approach. They contain a great deal of fascinating information, but it is presented in a rather ad hoc fashion, interlaced with remarks about individuals and ephemeral details that most readers will probably not want to bother to sort out.

Thus this anthology is a welcome addition to the literature. It culls quotes from the Mahatma Letters (using the second edition of Barker’s version) and groups them under fifty subject headings, such as “Adepts and Masters,” “Discipline and the Spiritual Path,” “The Occult Brotherhood and Their Mission,” and “Tibet.” The selections are concise, readable, and intelligent, and will make a much more accessible introduction to this material than either of the complete editions. At this point Insights from the Masters is no doubt the best entrance point to the letters. I believe that it will be useful for students at all levels.

The book could be improved. It includes a number of photos and images of individuals mentioned in the letters, but without captions, so one is often left guessing about these people’s identities. And while citations are given to Barker’s second edition of The Mahatma Letters, they do not indicate which Master is speaking. Furthermore, the glossary, based on HPB’s Theosophical Glossary and Gottfried de Purucker’s Occult Glossary, is sometimes unreliable. Contrary to what it says here, for example, “Poseidon” was not the name of the chief city in Atlantis. Plato, the original source of the Atlantis myth, leaves it unnamed, and the Masters themselves, as quoted in this volume, speak of it as “Poseidonis.” The magus Éliphas Lévi was not “unfrocked” as a priest “due to his kabalistic interests,” but dropped out of seminary before ordination because he had fallen in love. The eighteenth-century British astronomer was not “John Flamsted,” but John Flamsteed. The Hebrew word Adonai, literally meaning “my Lord” and applied to God, is not “the same as Adonis,” a mythical figure whose death was lamented annually by the ancient Semites, although the two names come from the same root.

Although this collection is useful and engaging, it still remains to provide some kind of adequate and balanced portrait of the Masters. Conventional scholars take it as a given that the Masters were a hoax cooked up by Blavatsky, while Theosophical writers often speak of them as quasi-divine (a danger the Masters themselves warned against). Thus there has been no really deep inquiry into who they actually may have been and what they were saying. Were they Buddhists? They say they are. Morya speaks of the Buddhist text Khudikka Patha as “my family Bible.” On the other hand, K.H. speaks of “‘the divine Self perceived or seen by Self,’ the Atman,” when every Buddhist I have ever known or read denies the existence of any such Atman. (All emphasis in quotations is from the original.) Indeed anatman, or anatta, the doctrine of “no-self,” is one of the main points on which Buddhism diverges from Hinduism. While K.H. insists, “We are not Adwaitees [sic],” the Mahatmas sound more like adherents of the Advanta Vedanta.

In addition, rather than the quasi-divine beings imagined by many Theosophists, the Masters come across as all too human. They are not above making snide comments to Hume about Sinnett, and vice versa. At one point K.H. tells Hume, “You have now more chances [for the attainment of paranormal powers] before you than my zoophagous friend Mr. Sinnett.” At another point K.H. writes to Sinnett saying, “There’s one thing, at any rate, we can never be accused of inventing: and that is Mr. Hume himself. To invent his like transcends the highest Siddhi powers we know of.” Often the Masters sound irritable and contemptuous of their correspondents. Admittedly, they were writing to Victorian Englishmen, who were often pompous and self-congratulatory in their own right. All the same, the Mahatma Letters do not read like sacred or quasi-infallible texts. Rather they are a glimpse into the ideas and characters of fascinating but quite fallible figures whose identities we are likely never to know.

The proceeds from the sales of this book will be donated to projects supported by the Theosophical Order of Service of Canada.

Richard Smoley